Blogging about

The Bottom Line

Evan Davis gets to the heart of the big finance stories at The Bottom Line.

‘The power of technology’ and ‘How long is long in years of service in the same organisation’ are the twin themes of the latest BBC/Open University The Bottom Line programme. Evan Davis's three guests are drawn from General Electric International, SES Global, which brought us the Astra broadcasting satellite system, and Ford Europe. The central thrust of their argument about the power of technology is that partnerships with the state are crucial in enabling technological change and innovation. The guest from SES Global, echoing the Open University‘s new Vice Chancellor, suggested that technology is not enough in itself: it is about the role of processes and people engaging in entrepreneurial and innovative activity. The rider should have been added to all three guest contributions that the love of the “new” does not preclude the “old”. That is, many of the technologies their companies deal in are based on “old” technologies, including the internal combustion engine and the aero engine. Indeed, the inspiration for Astra came from the first Soviet Union satellite, Sputnik, launched in the late 1950s.

BBC Micro in Broadcasting House window.
Picture © copyright Rain Rabbit, used under Creative Commons licence.

The fixation with the new informs every society as the art historian and critic, Robert Hughes, wrote and narrated in his 1980 television series entitled The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. In the accompanying book, Hughes examined the development of art and culture from the late 19th to the late 20th century: the period of what is known as modernism. Essentially, modernism is a view of the world that posits the progress of science and technology and its underlying culture as the organising principle of rational modern society. The early proponents of modernism proclaimed that it had dramatically changed the world in a very short period.

The late architectural writer, Reyner Banham, was the author of the book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. For Banham, the First Machine Age was ushered in by the invention of electricity which created the conditions for innovations like the telephone, the gramophone, the washing machine, etc. The Second Machine Age, starting around the 1960s, is characterised by mass production techniques producing electronic devices, which are consumed universally and symbolised by a single source of mass communication – the television. The Third Machine Age can be said to have started with the invention of the personal computer and the mobile. Whether the Internet represents a fourth age or a fifth Kondratieff wave (named after the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff, who developed the idea of 50 year cycles of technological innovation) is open to question. But, despite the recent febrile claims that we live in a weightless economy, it is the mass of human interaction with technology that appears to be the central condition of our species.

This truism leads us to the question of employment longevity. There have always been claims that how we organise our economy is a break with the past. Labour market flexibility, portfolio and virtual workers are part of the heady stuff reported by journalists every day as though it was the global reality of the contemporary work environment. Unfortunately, journalists too frequently psychologically externalise their own experience onto everyone else. My grandfather was a flexible worker: he was part of the casual labour system at Southampton Docks at the start of the 20th century – he worked when he was chosen from the queue of men similarly seeking a day’s pay. My father worked for 30 years for a nationalised industry that, in the 1950s, threatened to sack all the staff at the engineering base on a Friday night and re-employ them on inferior contracts on the following Monday morning: flexibility is nothing new.

The average length of employment in the same company is 5.6 years in the UK, yet there appears to be a cultural aversion to long service in this country as though it was antediluvian. It was heartening to hear that the three guests on The Bottom Line had been with their companies for a long time and that a third of Ford workers had spent twenty-five years there. In a society in which there are more 60 year olds than 16 year olds, it is doubly curious. Moreover, the loss of corporate and policy memory was shown to almost devastating effect at the onset of the financial crisis. In many important sectors of the economy, experience is at a premium. Yet discrimination in the workplace and too strong an emphasis on the beauties and beatitudes of new technology, sui generis, and every associated ‘nouvellle vague’ blights all our lives. Ageism like any form of short or long discrimination is not rational. More importantly, it is not right.

Find out more

Over 50 and in their prime

Radical innovation

The long view on innovation

Courses

Technology Strategy

Creativity Innovation and Change

Strategic Human Resource Management

About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

Subscribe to Leslie Budd's posts

 

The idea of gait recognition has been around for a long time. In G.K. Chesterton’s short story The Queer Feet, Father Brown prevents a crime by “merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage.” Gait analysis has been widely deployed in professional sports and medicine, enabling sports stars to improve their golf swing, running stance or cycling position and helping in the design of prosthetic limbs for example.

As a means of identifying someone at a distance, without any need to inconvenience the people being analysed, it would appear to be a useful proposition. It is important to note, however, that identifying someone in a crowded city square and verifying that someone is one of 200 people who have walked down a colourful corridor with clear contrast under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, are two entirely different problems.

Technically speaking, checking the gait of one person, in a psychedelic corridor with perfect lighting conditions, to find a match in a database of 200 recorded gaits, is relatively straightforward.

Detecting individual gaits in a dynamic, crowded city square, under less than ideal lighting conditions and pinpointing a baddie by attempting to match those (potentially) millions of readings against a database of millions of recorded gaits, is a much more difficult problem.

And we haven’t even thought about how we would get accurate measurements of millions of people’s (or indeed the baddie’s) walking styles on our benchmark database in the first place yet. Then if the baddie puts a stone in his shoe to change his walk to deliberately fool the software, as Dallas did with his funny walk on the first programme in the Bang Goes The Theory series, it becomes even more difficult.

From a security perspective, the notion that mass surveillance with advanced technology will magically detect the baddie, turns out to be fundamentally flawed. (It should be noted that mass surveillance is widely and wrongly promoted as an effective anti-terror tool but it is not advocated by the team at Southampton.)

Because terrorists are relatively rare, finding one is a needle in a haystack problem. You don’t make it easier to find the terrorist by throwing more hay (say the biometric data of millions of innocent people) on your data haystack. The technology doesn’t simply home in on the criminal as it does in Hollywood movies.

The police and security services end up spending so much time dealing with innocent people and false leads that their limited resources get swamped.

If each of the UK’s population of around 60 million were monitored once a day and our system was 99% accurate (e.g. flags 1 in a 100 innocents as terrorists and detects 99 out of every 100 terrorists), the police will have to process 600,000 false leads per day.

Given those of us who traverse public places are monitored multiple times a day you can see how that could quickly become unmanageable. It’s also unacceptable from a social, legal and economic point of view.

So it is probable that the use of gait recognition and other biometrics will prove to be more useful for small scale authentication - e.g. employee access to the workplace, rather than large scale surveillance e.g. picking a terrorist out of a crowd.

On small-scale authentication

Technically speaking authentication or verification is an easier thing to do than identification. Authentication (assuming we’re not trying to do it remotely) with biometrics merely asks whether a biometric belongs to the person presenting themselves for authentication. It compares their proffered biometric with the one on file under their name and determines whether there is a match.

Identification is much harder to do and is what security systems at airports or busy shopping areas or sports stadiums attempt to do – measure the biometrics of everyone passing through and attempt to check whether there is a match with a large (and not necessarily particularly reliable) database of biometrics.

The difference appears pedantic but is very important. In the authentication case one biometric is checked against one specific biometric on the database. In the identification case, millions of biometrics are checked against millions (potentially) of biometrics on the database.

Even with highly reliable technologies – say 99.9% accurate and none of the modern systems approach that yet – these millions of checks searching for matching pairs generate huge numbers of false positives (innocents flagged as malcontents) and dangerous levels of false negatives (real bad guys flagged as innocents and it only takes one to get through to cause serious security problems).

The police and security services then spend so much time, energy and resources dealing with innocent people they don’t have the time to deal with the real criminals.

Find out more

Floyd Rudmin, Professor of Social & Community Psychology at the University of Tromsø in Norway, explains why, statistically speaking, mass surveillance cannot work in this article:
The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation: Why does the NSA engage in mass surveillance of Americans when it's statistically impossible for such spying to detect terrorists?
Counterpunch magazine, May 24, 2006

For those interested in the use of biometrics and security more generally I’d recommend:
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World
Bruce Schneier, Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Freedom to Tinker blog - hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Jerry Fishenden Blog - New Technology Observations from a UK Perspective.

UK High Court Judge, Hon Sir Jack Beatson explains the legal issues with the use of biometrics in crime detection in Forensic Science and Human Rights: The Challenges [pdf], his valedictory address as President of the British Academy of Forensic Science, 16 June 2009.

Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, The forensic use of bioinformation: ethical issues [pdf], published in September 2007.

Human Genetics Commission Citizens Report, July 2008.

Biometrics: Enabling Guilty Men to Go Free? Further Adventures from the Law of Unintended Consequences - Jerry Fishenden blog post

Digital Decision Making: Back to the Future - chapters five and six
Ray Corrigan, Springer-Verlag

Study information and communications technologies with The Open University

As mentioned in the programme, many organisations are turning to automated call-handling systems, on-line self service systems and other forms of technology to interact with their customers. Customers can find these approaches off-putting at best – and absolutely maddening at worst, particularly when things go wrong. I am sure most of us have had occasions when we are trying to tell our bank, mobile phone operator, utility company or other service provider about a difficulty we are facing – and getting stuck in what seems like an endless loop of recorded messages, menus of options and requests to key in 16 digit customer passcodes!

However, in addition to providing a source of frustration, these systems also have other side-effects that may be even more detrimental for all of us. The increased use of technology, particularly information technology, to automate the customer interface means that increasing amounts of data about our use of services, our movements and our tastes and preferences are stored on databases of both private and public sector organisations.

For example, my local railway station has recently "retired" the gentleman that worked in the car park pay-station for many years. Rather than handing over coins and notes to pay for parking, while receiving a ticket and a cheery greeting from another human being, users of the car park now have the option of going online or sending a message via their mobile phone.

Rather than displaying a printed ticket on the windscreen, the online or phone booking and payment is recorded in the database of the car parking provider, and all cars in the car park are checked against this database. So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database. Replicate this over all the customer interactions that are now based on the use of IT and it is easy to see why many people are concerned about the amount of personal data that is held about all of us and hence the increased potential for misuse of that data. UK citizens are already viewed as the most surveyed in the world; data capture as a by-product of de-personalising the customer interface will simply add to this.

The subject of the collection and use of personal data both from consumers and from people in the workplace has formed a basis of ongoing research at the Open University Business School, see for instance Ball, Daniel, Dibb and Meadows (2009). This team of researchers, which have backgrounds in surveillance, information management and marketing, has recently won funding from the Leverhulme Trust to explore what they have termed “new uses of customer data”; that is, uses of data that customers may not be aware of or that firms are being required to undertake, for example, by regulators and law enforcement agencies.

"So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database."

 The focus of the work will be firms in the financial services and travel sectors, which is particularly relevant when two of the three guests on the programme are from the travel sector. Both the financial services and travel sectors espouse the benefits of customer relationship management and the related activities of customer profiling and segmentation. For these activities they collect and store considerable amounts of information on their customers, including personal details and a record of all their transactions and purchases. However, as the focus of the research suggests, this data may be used for purposes that are not obvious to those that are providing it and may have unforeseen side-effects or consequences, both for the individual customers involved and for society at large.

As more and more organisations make use of technology to automate their interfaces with their customers, this collection of data will increase. Indeed, as in the case of the use of my station car park, customers may not even be aware of the information about them that is being stored, let alone how it might one day be used.

Find out more

Open University Business School research project Taking Liberties: New Uses of Consumer Data in the UK

Who's watching you work? Surveillance in business

A Report on the Surveillance Society
by KS Ball, D Lyon, D. Murakami Wood, C Norris and C Raab, Surveillance Studies Network.

Democracy, surveillance and 'knowing what's good for you': the private sector origins of profiling and the birth of 'citizen relationship management
by KS Ball, E M Daniel, S Dibb and M Meadows
from Surveillance and Democracy
edited by M Samatas and K Haggerty

Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organisational Surveillance
by G Sewell and J Barker
from the Academy of Management Review, Volume 31, Number 4, pages 934-961

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

Subscribe to Elizabeth Daniel's posts