Yesterday's Guardian

I share some snippets from yesterday's Guardian.

First a computer program called Cepheus, from Canada, which plays good poker. Cepheus caught my eye, having previously read about a program called Watson which plays good Jeopardy! (see reference 1). It not being clear to me at all why playing poker should be such a hard problem, I got google to send me to reference 2, from which it is at least clear that serious people have been working long and hard at poker playing computers. One glimmer of light is the possibility that the program takes account of what the other players might be thinking, what they might be up to. Takes account of the fact that different players play in different ways. All that sounds as if it could get complicated. But as far as I can see this program cannot see; it does not come with a camera which can look at the other players - which I believe to be a feature of big poker tournaments if not of online poker. How much difference does that make? At this level? Does it matter, given that the computer seems to be winning already?

Second, a rather odd case involving a teaching assistant somewhere up north, convicted of charges arising from sustained bullying of a child at the school at which she worked. Bullying which appeared to have involved verbal assault, taunting and restraint by sticky tape, but not physical assault. There is nothing in the report about the prior behaviour of the child in question. Apart from telling us that a teacher in the case was acquitted, there is nothing in the report about the failures of management by the teacher and by senior staff at the school. Has a not very attractive teaching assistant taken a rap which should have been shared? Perhaps I am being unfair and the others involved, while let off by the criminal justice people, are being gone over by the administrative justice people. By the HR people. Perhaps, as ever, there is rather more to the whole sorry business than can be culled from the twelve column inches of report (about the same amount of space as has been given to a picture of the teaching assistant).

Third, more stuff about A&E, first mentioned here on 7th January. As I think I have said here before, we need to do a better job at allocating resources between hospitals, GPs and the social services, these last provided by local authorities, rather than by health authorities. As things stand, it seems inevitable that pressures in one area will be translated to pressures in the other; we need some way to manage our health which does not wind up passing it around these three players. My own magic bullet, would be to unify management, so that the same people and the same money look after all three. Or put another way, to put the responsibility and the money for health in the hands of local authorities, resurrecting, in effect, the brain-child of some previous bunch of management consultants, the primary care trusts. No doubt the magic bullet from the chaps from Eton, presently in the chair, is market forces. Hand it all over to the big corporations from over the pond and let them get on with it. Get it off the government books altogether. Perhaps they will be able to auction off franchises to supply health, rather as they have already sold off franchises to supply railways, to make the thing an earner rather than a drainer.

I notice in passing that the contracting out of care workers to agencies does not seem to work all that well either. Apart from the depressing & relentless downward pressure on quality & costs, we seem to have lost flexibility, and agencies appear to be able to decline to take work which does not suit them, or cannot be done at the block rates lovingly crafted by teams of purchasing people (these last being one of my bêtes noires from the world of civil service work).

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/watson.html.

Reference 2: http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/.