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Complexity In Charitable Funding - A tale from the front line

Forwarded Verbatim from my brother, a mental health recovery volunteer based on The Isle of Wight... Between 2016 and 2017 a group of mental health service users and volunteers from Quay House, a mental health recovery centre in Newport on the Isle of Wight, got together to try and solve a problem. The problem they were trying to solve was that people with disabilities were having their benefits stopped, and being put on JobSeeker’s Allowance, not because they’d suddenly become well, but because the government was making cut-backs, and part of those cut-backs involved tightening up the criteria regarding which medical conditions qualified for financial support, leaving thousands of people in a very precarious place. By precarious, we’re talking about people with serious health conditions, who may have been out of work for many years, that are having their sole source of income reduced from £106 to just £73 per week, while having pressure put upon them to take the first job they se
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The Google Self-Driving Car - too awesome to contemplate?

Google's Self-Driving Car will be a reality very soon.  From a consumer perspective, there are many positive aspects to winning back this free time in your day, and arriving at your destination safely and in a relaxed state. The surface questions have already been asked, but perhaps the impact (if you'll pardon the pun) of having an information behemoth like Google influencing your decisions, while being in control of your geospacial location, bears some investigation and thought... Caveat Emptor:   I am not a good - or reliable - blogger; any thoughts and notions expressed below do not reflect current or future reality, except in my own mind.. So, imagine, you're heading home after a long day at the coalface. the car has welcomed you by opening its consumer portal (door) and you step in and make yourself extremely comfortable into a seat that has already adjusted itself to the most appropriate settings for your physical condition at the time.  You are tired, and fe
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Information Harvesting and Interpretation

My Company, Kofax, has recently acquired some interesting capabilities through the purchase of several companies in the last few years.  One of these, Kapow Software, is of especial interest through it's capabilities to automate the collection of data from the web.  Harvested, this data can be manipulated, transformed, delivered and interpreted. these automated sequences are packaged into a set of routines called "Robots", which can be converted into Web Services that can be used by users and processes globally. Examples include: Brand Protection - big name brands are fiercely protective of their reputation: they need to ensure that their products are presented and positioned by online retailers appropriately, that no "grey" distribution channels exist to create unfair competition to retailers who follow the brand guidelines.   Channels for the selling of fakes and counterfeit goods need to be assiduously monitored for infringement of copyright and damage
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Recording Life for Human Rights and workers health in developing economies

This picture, taken by a commentor on my daughters flickr site, caused me to pause and reflect upon the person framed and on his rights and future prospects for support if he becomes ill in the future. http://flic.kr/s/aHsjvxkFpQ It struck me that the reason why there is no recourse for this man or hundreds and thousands of workers in developing economies where health and safety laws, sick pay and benefits and pensions and invalidity rights don't exist, is because there is no verifiable history of employment for this person. NGO's like Greenpeace, Amnesty, Red Cross et al should track these people and log their activities on a personal and current/ongoing basis.  The ideal way is to make available a cloud-based diary (comprising a record of that person), which can be regularly updated. Key features are that the system should be: Free; no cost to access the site.  There should be no fee for time spent, or facilities used while updating the persons' record Intuit
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Connected systems

I saw a presentation given by an HP colleague, working at HP's Office of Technologists, discussing the information explosion and the challenges in deriving timely business value from the explosion of data.  One thing he mentioned especially got me thinking:   He suggested that there was more than a fighting chance that the requirements of cloud computing could be served by mobile devices working on a peer-to-peer basis.  Given the ever increasing processing power of the devices and the sophistication of the software running, this is more than a likely scenario (in my opinion). Imagine your entire existence (memories in all six senses, plus any equivalents downloaded - either from friends, work colleagues, or just vicariously from myexperience.com tm)  being held on an infinitensimally small device - for example the size of a dust mote.... The biggest stumbling block in my mind is the limited real estate available on the device for input/output - ie keyboard and screen. Whil
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retentive

I met a person today who had to try to peel every bit of the label off the nescafe lid before he felt he could make the coffee... In one go, or his day was ruined...
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Record Managament and International Security post Abdul Mudallad

So here we are with information management on the back of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound Delta Airline Flight a hot topic. We just heard that full body scanners capable of capturing video or images of you as if you were naked are to be installed within three weeks of this posting at Heathrow airport (although not at the other UK international airports yet, according to Alan Johnson, bizarrely). I just listened to the US ex-head of homeland security saying the problem with the Nigerian / Yemen-sourced bomb plot on a Delta Airline flight was not with the intelligence that was gathered, but with the (in)ability to synthesise it at the right time and place. This makes sense when you consider that the US - watch list contains approaching 1,000,000 names, while the "No-fly" list is maintained separately. Apparently the bomber - Abdul Mudallad - appeared in the Watch list, but not the no fly list, so his movements were effectively only limited by his inability to trav
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