MSE News: Only one third of pupils understand the new tuition fees system

gadgetmind

melancholly wrote: »

does your new company offer any scheme to loan you the money for an annual travelcard?

Or do they take part in the Ride To Work scheme? If you can get a bicycle on the cheap, you can ditch the travelcard, parking costs, and all the huge bills associated with owning/running a car.

Oldernotwiser

gadgetmind wrote: »

Or do they take part in the Ride To Work scheme? If you can get a bicycle on the cheap, you can ditch the travelcard, parking costs, and all the huge bills associated with owning/running a car.

Cycling from High Wycombe into central London? Ye gods!

gadgetmind

Oldernotwiser wrote: »

Cycling from High Wycombe into central London? Ye gods!

OK, maybe not for everyone, but a chap at work does just over 25 miles each way, every day.

However, the joy of a bicycle, particularly a folding one, is that you can take it on the train, or even have one at either end. OK, you still have PT costs, but these can maybe be reduced by not going all the way into central London and cycling the last leg.

I ditched the company car and parking space about a decade ago, took the cash option instead, and bought a bike. I have no idea how I put up with shuffling along in traffic for as long as I did.

2sides2everystory

Taiko wrote: »

It isn't possible to manufacture personal data. You can't psychically determine someone's bank details, or medical history, or so on and so forth. Either you have it, or you don't.

I presume you do not know much about how to exploit databases? I asked earlier if you played chess. How about minesweeper on the computer or your phone? When you successfully label blank but dangerous squares as mines correctly are you simply reading from a list of data already in your possession? How many levels of deduction are you capable of? How many moves ahead can you think in a game of chess? Because you can't deduce fact beyond a certain degree of difficulty, do you imagine that no-one can?

You can make guesses about some data around salary levels, media preferences and so on (e.g. if you know (x), (y) and (z) about someone, you might be able to assume what (a) and (b) are by looking at other people where you know (x), (y), (z), (a) and (b) for certain), but that comes down to trend analysis - Experian's segmentation work is based on correlating trends to identify groups of people with similar and broadly predictable characteristics.

You can guess, my friend, and that might be adequate for your purposes as you come along for the ride, but if you can deduce what is what exactly then you can be in the driving seat.

And how exactly does that relate to the issue of tuition fees...

Check out this tremendously insightful thread that has been running for sometime on Citywire but which I only stumbled upon this morning: http://www.citywire.co.uk/money/money-v-making-stuff-should-britain-bid-farewell-to-the-golden-egg-of-banking/b498036

In there you will find references to education education education, and the main contributors clearly know in very practical terms what that means to the health of a nation.

Our nation is infested by financial services, is sick and floundering, and this tuition fees fiasco arises out of mindless tinkering with what is left.

wozearly

gadgetmind wrote: »

But isn't the whole MSE spirit about individuals taking control of their spending, minimising unnecessary expense, and striving to be debt free? And this isn't just a "higher earner" thing, it applies to anyone who's prepared to dig a bit deeper, forgo a few luxuries, and so reduce their debt burden.

Totally agree...unfortunately, its not Martin Lewis calling the shots on how the fees system should work - and sometimes politicians let politics get in the way of good, sound economics and financial management. :cool:

gadgetmind

2sides2everystory wrote: »

This nation is sick and floundering.

What's annoying is that we have huge numbers of bright youngsters, but far too many end up doing soft A-levels followed by pretty much pointless degrees from a future employer's POV.

Don't get me wrong, we do get a reasonable number of really smart people through the door, who have a good base of skills and knowledge coupled to a real enthusiasm for our industry, and meeting them and working with them really does make the heart sing. But given the vast swathes of the population who are now taking degrees, we really should be seeing more of these stars, and we simply aren't.

gadgetmind

wozearly wrote: »

Totally agree...unfortunately, its not Martin Lewis calling the shots on how the fees system should work - and sometimes politicians let politics get in the way of good, sound economics and financial management. :cool:

Sometimes? Always! :mad:

gadgetmind

2sides2everystory wrote: »

I presume you do not know much about how to exploit databases?

Sir! Sir! I do! I do!

http://xkcd.com/327/

wozearly

2sides2everystory wrote: »

I presume you do not know much about how to exploit databases? I asked earlier if you played chess. How about minesweeper on the computer or your phone? When you successfully label blank but dangerous squares as mines correctly are you simply reading from a list of data already in your possession? How many levels of deduction are you capable of? How many moves ahead can you think in a game of chess? Because you can't deduce fact beyond a certain degree of difficulty, do you imagine that no-one can?

You can guess, my friend, and that might be adequate for your purposes as you come along for the ride, but if you can deduce what is what exactly then you can be in the driving seat.

Even in chess, you're guessing the moves that will be made by your opponent. Your success is as good as your deduction and guesswork, but not everything can be deduced, forcing you to guess - and not everything can be guessed accurately.

There's a world of difference between deducing things like transactional preferences from data, as supermarkets do, where past behaviour is a good yardstick for future behaviour and judging things like risk criteria, where there is an inherant string of unknowns, which is what banks and other financial services companies do.

Knowing that someone who buys rice, chilli powder and beef mince might probably also be interested in kidney beans and enchiladas is a fairly obvious deduction.

On a more hypothetical level, observing that at a group of people who earn >£40k, read the Daily Mail and vote UKIP are 20% more likely to never default on loans but also 50% more likely to have higher cholesterol moves into the realms of trend analysis and educated guesswork because correlation doesn't necessarily indicate causality.

The more likely anything is to vary at an individual level, the more factors that could potentially be involved and the less certainty you have that past data is a reliable indicator of what will happen in the future, the less confidence you can have in accurately predicting missing information.

Let me put it another way - when I never receive any junk mail because the segmentation data by Experian (et al) is so amazing that companies can accurately predict exactly what I will and won't buy, and what offers are required, then I'll be scared. At the moment, a really successful response rate for direct mailings is around the 2% mark from memory, and it'd be considered good if you get sales from 20% or more of those who actually respond in some way - and that's *with* the use of segmentation information.

If it was as straightforward as you claim for the CRAs and other data gatherers to predict behaviour, intuitively those two numbers would be a heck of a lot higher...

2sides2everystory

I just removed my motoring analogy because it wasn't a good one, and besides, I got the car fixed for even less than I had deduced :money:.

I can't promise this will be a better post, but my intention hasn't been to monopolise the thread - I am just a bit het up by this subject. I do seem to overdo it on occasion by being too off the wall for the other main posters. I apologise.


My fear of linking individual names to any debt in any database is a real one. Some types of CRA and other central computer record are fairly healthy - they show you are alive and ticking nicely. Other types of record can really spoil your day.

And CRAs are particularly 'big brother' enjoying enormous privileges which I would argue are as ineffectively regulated as the banks.

Banking is as we all know a massively complex business understood only by insiders and thoroughly exploit their position developing even more complex models and instruments to defeat outside understanding and to wrongfoot everyone on the outside who has not "bought in". The FSA are years behind the curve.

I would argue that CRA businesses are equally ineffectively regulated. The Information Commissioner and the latest iteration of the Data Protection Act are really a soft touch to all big business.

You can say what you think is the extent of CRA held data, but don't be naive about what data they actually do possess/discuss/source/trade and have "compiled" for future initiatives of their own.

Every time a corporate or government new IT or database initiative is in development, do you think that the data sets they test with are always completely anonymised sample data? Why do you think we constantly hear about huge lost data sets? It is because everyday all manner of developers are working on ideas for exploiting our data, some for reasons that are directly for our own benefit (or so they say) and some which are profit driven (a lot).

I have worked on live student personal data - masses of it. Was it official? Yes. Did I manipulate the data further than was initially expected? Yes. I like to go the extra mile if I can. Did that surprise my employer and my employers' data suppliers? Yes. Pleasantly if not with a slight concern about whether the scope of the newly compled datasets still remained within our remit.

How was I vetted? Am I an oddball (some might say so - but no I was just doing what database developers and analysts do every day to please their bosses and make my mark with a difference).

This thread is about a tax which the government insist is a debt. Debt is not a throwaway word. It is a concept that every wise man in every civilisation the world has ever known understands perfectly. We haven't changed it lately. We have just become a bit blase about it in some quarters. It is merely a phase and by no means is it universally accepted as a phase we are all signed up to or should be - to think so would probably be a trap for the unwary.

When you arrive home at the Border Agency's desk with your UK passport at an airport, after scanning in your chip or code the process of electronic vetting takes up to 10 seconds per person.

Some of you have ultra-fast broadband. You are already amazed by the data flows you personally can achieve down the line at home. You can download an HD movie at speeds 10x or even 20x faster than you can watch it.

Why does it take 10 seconds to electronically vet your passport?

How many government computers, outsourced government computers, private sector databases, secret databases are being accessed in that 10 seconds? Think about it.

Now then, that flight you just took, or the one you took when you left UK last week - could that possibly have been construed as a flight from debt? But you are back now to face the music? That's ok then.

Paranoid or what?