Evaluation, statistics and OR

Learning - a life long sentence

I had intended to make this week's post about flooding and the issues of one in fifty events - I'll come back to that next week I think!  The reason being that I was reminded of the importance of lifelong learning today by my cheese merchant!

Once a week I go to the biggest local market around for the basics to see us through the week - vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, yoghurts, and most importantly, cheese.  I am not a fan of supermarket cheese - as I was reminded at the beginning of the month when Jean-Marc went on holiday, and I had to buy prepackaged supermarket cheeses.  Even well treated and at the expensive end of the market, they just weren't up to scratch.

Jean-Marc is brilliant (he won't mind me saying so either!).  If a cheese that I normally buy isn't quite to my taste, he will advise against buying it or even refuse to sell it to me.  Last week I needed a balanced cheese board for a dinner party I was doing for my mother and her friends, and he came up with a brilliant mix and just the right quantities so that there wasn't a huge amount left over.

I once took him a piece of well kept Stinking Bishop as a present, and didn't tell him what it was.  It was like watching a real wine expert - he looked at the cheese from all angles, smelt it, felt the texture, all the time giving a running commentary on his thoughts - cow's milk, washed in alcohol, fruit alcohol, probably pear.  He was highly impressed with the flavour too, when he eventually got round to tasting it - and was horrified but impressed to hear it was an English cheese as it was so well made and well done.

Today we were talking cheese - he said that he was one of the panel of expert tasters used to give out the awards for Pont l'Eveque cheeses, doing blind tastings just as the wine chaps do.  He said he felt that you couldn't be a cheese expert if you hadn't trained hard for at least 10 to 15 years, understanding things like the effect of forage on milk quality, the different ways of refining cheeses, the influence of soil and weather on a producer.

The reason he should be an advertisement for lifelong learning strategies?  With all his skills and knowledge thus far, he said he still had even more to learn and was learning every day.  If he wasn't learning, he would be dead.  Bravo Jean-Marc!  Those are my sentiments entirely.

When is a skill vocational?

Yesterday afternoon the new Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills announced the Government response to the Leitch report (see previous blogs!) in the Commons.  He announced an adult careers service, individual skills accounts, called on colleges to be more responsive to learners and employers, and called for a "skills revolution", with training for what local people or businesses wanted.

The cynic in me says that a lot of this has been spoken about before and my views on the practicability of the skills accounts are generally unprintable currently - having lived through the ILA (individual learning account) fiasco a few years ago.  The responses reported by the BBC are also fairly mimsy for the moment - though it was the responses from the National Union of Students and the University and College Union that prompted this blog, as both questioned the balance between employer demands and individual development.

Someone somewhere seems to think that vocational qualifications and skills are very easily defined - well one could argue that the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) covers this I guess.  So why are people pushed to non-vocational qualifications and the plethora of A levels and GCSEs in the academic route?  Unless they are also vocational in that you need a relevant A level if you want to follow a particular occupation?  But we don't have particularly strict vocational entry requirements, so I am confident that there are accountants out there without Maths A level (sorry to pick on accountants but it seemed a good example).

Then there are the leisure courses that are so derided - yoga, basket weaving, pottery, country crafts.  Should they be pushed down the priority list as they don't have any employment or vocation attached to them?  Well, how do you know you want to teach yoga if you don't start learning yoga somewhere yourself?  I have a friend who was an accountant, did a series of evening pottery classes, decided she loved it so did an arts foundation course and last heard of, was running community arts projects in the Midlands.  Basket weaving and country crafts - how do you know whether you are good at them until you try a course.  How many farmers' wives are now running successful micro businesses to diversify the farm income? 

Similarly a number of years ago I was working with Warwickshire CVS, and foolishly mentioned sewing classes as perhaps being leisure oriented, only to be told that half of the sewing circle that was running in Nuneaton had found jobs in the clothing industry as a result of their involvement in the sewing circle!

The vision that is lacking in all of this therefore is the ability to unlock the hidden potential and desires within the individual.  Fine, let an employer pay for CNC setting training for today/tomorrow among their workforce, but will those same skills be relevant a year or more down the line and will the employer still have that worker and need the same skills? 

We are told that there is no job for life any longer and my household is a prime example of that, but will an adult careers service have the time, funding, vision and skills to help an individual find the niche where they will be happy and will have the aptitude and skills to succeed?  At my grammar school in the seventies, the options were university or the banks - anything else was considered a waste of talent.  The personal assessments and the labour market and economic information were missing then - will they be there now for adults?

Getting a forecast wrong

As we get nearer the weekend, our fascination with the weather forecast grows.  Last week, we were promised a fine Friday and Saturday with rain and storms on the Sunday.  The promise of sunshine was a boost to the system - finally some nice weather!  Friday was a pleasant enough day - some long sunny intervals and slightly warmer temperatures, so when Saturday dawned uniformly grey and cold, we were devastated.  Seasonal Affected Disorder wasn't in it - we were downright depressed.

There is the potential for a similar scenario this week as well.  Meteo France are predicting a hot sunny Friday and Saturday and a hot Sunday though with the potential for some storms - the fact we were so badly let down last weekend makes this a cruel forecast.  Will they be right and we will have some summer at last, or will the clouds crawl in/down from the Channel/Atlantic and another depression (meteorological and mood-wise) sweep our household?

In hypothesis testing, there are type I and type II errors - the one being the chance of rejecting a hypothesis when it is in fact right, and the other being the chance of accepting a hypothesis when it is in fact wrong.  Last week, we believed the forecasters, thinking they had enough information to get it right, but they got it wrong (type II in my book).  This week we are suspicious and won't believe in nice weather until we have got just a little bit sun burnt, and have gone back to summer clothes from winter jumpers and long trousers (could this be a type I error on our part?).

In this instance, which error type is worse?  The disappointment last weekend at poor weather was immense and seemed to be almost physically painful, as we had set our hearts on one weather pattern as predicted by the weather boffins.  If we have the same disappointment this weekend, I will have to avoid the "contact us" bit of their website, or I could be in serious trouble.  But would it have been worse if they had predicted bad weather all along, giving gloom in anticipation, and they had been right?  Would I have felt so bad?  I don't think so.  If they had predicted poor weather and we had had a nice weekend, I would have been pleasantly surprised and felt happier about the world.

The nature of the forecast is therefore a factor in our feelings about whether type I or type II errors are more acceptable as far as the weather is concerned.  Of course this assumes that there is no cash or danger attached to getting the answer wrong.  In my days with British Gas, not having a reliable weather forecast to ensure enough gas in the system for diurnal requirements could cost money and even lives (and jobs for those who got the forecast wrong), and forecasting for the electricity grid system was even more sensitive than that, as it needed to respond to changes in demand within the hour.

Weather forecasting for the masses doesn't need that level of detail or accuracy and the weather is a chaotic and unpredictable system, so why do I get so upset about it?  Because in a year like 2007, the promise of sunshine and warmth is more than just a weather forecast, it is a promise of good things and normality and fun and enjoyment.  When someone promises you that, and it doesn't happen, you tend to take it personally, and that is when it hurts! 

Milk Market Failures

Is it me?  To quote a Terry Wogan/TOG catchphrase, but there is something weird going on in the European milk market and it seems farcical to me.

Today the French papers are reporting that milk product prices are due to rise between now and the end of the year, not because of the weather (perhaps the only part of the farming market not to be complaining about the weather at the moment) but due to a huge shortfall in production of milk in Europe.  It appears there is a Europe wide shortfall of a billion litres of milk, but in France, they are not using all the quota allocated for production.  In France the farmers are apparently turning away from milk production to cereal production which has a better profit margin.

This is not far off the situation in the UK where milk producers are going out of business as the price paid for milk at the farm gate is I gather a penny per litre below the cost of production.  Britain now imports milk from Ireland and Poland, where the costs of production are less or at least the farmers get paid the money owed to them by the relevant Department with responsibility for agriculture.

So now the relentless consumer race for the cheapest possible food from the supermarkets is going to turn round and bite the consumer on the bum.  By not being willing to pay a fair price for milk (and the culprit are: consumers, supermarkets, food producers), milk is now in short supply and the price will go up.

The list of culprits there is an interesting one, and to a certain extent is being investigated in the UK by the Office of Fair Trading.  The supermarkets are those with the overwhelming buying power that determines to a greater extent what is paid for products - while a litre of milk is about 50p in the supermarket, they only pay 17p to the farmer.  Those lovely buy one get one free offers, when applied to apples, mean that actually the farmer gets paid for only half of what he or she supplies, but has the cost of production of the total, so don't thank Tesco for your BOGOF offer, go out and thank a farmer directly.

Supermarket profits are going up, numbers of farmers are going down.  In the end the consumer pays, so make sure that you put the money you save on your supermarket bill now in a high interest savings account so that you can pay the extra for your milk products come Christmas.  Personally, I will keep buying my milk, cream and yoghurts directly from the farmer - it's about the same price, but the quality is better, the products are fresher and I know where they came from.