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Artist: Little Miss Ruse, aged nine.

What is the NHS?

Close to where I live sits a cottage hospital. I have no idea what services it provides, how many people use it or how much it costs. Nor I suspect does anyone else. Regardless, I am quite sure that were an attempt made to close it the whole community would be ‘up in arms’, and before asking any of these questions. Similarly, it reminds me of a discussion I had many years ago with a friend who opined that nurses deserved ‘far more’ than they were getting paid, without even knowing how much they were getting paid. I didn’t either, but you’d have thought one statement would be predicated by the other.

That’s the thing about the National Health Service, it seems to exist in a logic-free vacuum; our relation to the institution is entirely emotional and our love measured in how many hospitals we build to house the 1.7 million people in its service. As the NHS website tells us:

Only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain and the Indian Railways directly employ more people.

They’re so proud of this it’s stated before the rather more relevant figure of how many patients they treat. It does at least explain the reaction of various Guardianistas to GP commissioning, where one concern would seem to be that GPs may on occasion choose private service providers because they’re… er… cheaper. This is apparently a bad thing; why, the next thing you know they’ll be closing state-funded hospitals in favour of privately run alternatives, and then how will we show our love?

I’m not for one instant suggesting the NHS should morph into a commission only service, we need an element of state provision to keep the private sector honest, but regardless of the provider, to the patient the service remains free - albeit paid for through tax. What kind of hospital he or she ends up in is irrelevant, all we should really care about is the cost. The cheaper it is, the more we can treat; now remind me, just who is the NHS for?

The best time of all

Not bad for three days. On the first I saw Black Swan, the next Atonement followed by Waterland, and on day three I finished with The Green Mile and The Road. Planning to watch Casablanca on Saturday evening, I commented to a friend how it was interesting that the film likely to have the most upbeat ending was one set against a backdrop of Nazi occupation and collaboration.

But I didn’t get to see Casablanca, my daughter took control of the television and I was banished to the PC upstairs, where I had to decrypt a region 1 DVD of American Beauty before I was able to play it. Together in the evening we watched Batman Begins; she loved every moment – a film not entirely suitable for a nine year old and shown well past her bedtime. Well... I won’t tell.

Why vegetarians are bad for AV

Fairness is often subjective, at least when it comes to electoral systems, so I am taken aback at the unquestioning ease with which the more ‘enthusiastic’ proponents of the alternative vote (AV) have appropriated the term. Ever contrary, I adapted an earlier example of how AV can lead to an unfair result, by using the dinner analogy popular with such support.

Imagine you are in a party of 21 and there are four restaurants within reach for a work-time lunch; in alphabetical order: Lentil Heaven, Liver Lounge, Pizza Palace and Thai Temptation.

One strange individual plumps for Liver Lounge and puts down Thai Temptation as his second preference. Nine people vote for Thai Temptation as their first choice; it subsequently turns out their second choice isn’t relevant - likewise for the seven people who choose Pizza Palace. The four people who remain are vegetarians, they’re cool; they don’t really care where they eat so long as they can avoid the liver.

That’s fair enough, and the best way to achieve this is a feature of AV that isn’t afforded by our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system; the ability to vote against one option – by voting for all the others. In our example the vegetarians do exactly this, and since they don’t have a preference with the other options they rank them according to the order in which they are listed. This is called a donkey vote and whilst it is most common where full preferential voting is required, it applies equally here.

With the vote in, the count begins, and after the first round Liver Lounge, having the fewest votes, is eliminated. The next preference of that singular person is now added to the vote to give us the following: just over 47% of you would like a Thai, with around 33% opting for Pizza. It’s still not quite a majority so Lentil Heaven is eliminated… and something interesting happens. The ‘second preferences’ of the vegetarians are added to the count; those would be the people whose only real preference was to avoid the liver and who consequently voted for the other options in the order that they appeared - despite having significantly less of the ‘positive’ vote, Pizza Palace wins through having a superior position in the alphabet.

What this illustration and others show is how AV can work; the result - fair or otherwise - depends on how the example is framed. What this particular example shows is that under AV it's possible to have a result that many people would consider unfair; it's a system not quite as simple as some would have us believe.

More about Jane

Another of those odd moments last night, I was unable to sleep, something prompted by a recent conversation. Not entirely sure why it should keep me awake as it was about Jane Eyre, how having finally read the book after seeing so many adaptations I still had the same problem; Rochester’s betrayal of Jane and Jane’s subsequent forgiveness of Rochester. Why?

It was always the least satisfactory part, a moment where my commitment to the story would falter. I understood that she loved him but, again, why? Only by the narrowest of margins is he prevented from being the cause of her ruin. And I suppose I had a light bulb moment, though when I write it down I feel silly because it seems obvious; she forgives him because that’s what love is. Something I vaguely remember being taught as a child, but long since forgotten.

Hail, Zuckerberg!

From Augustus, first emperor of Rome, to Zuckerberg, first emperor of the social network. Is it coincidence that Mark Zuckerberg skipped studying for “Art in the time of Augustus” in order to build Facebook? Yes, of course it is, and a Google search reveals that Kari O’Brien (to name one) has already noticed the similarity in an earlier version of her blog, goddammit!

AV tombola

The Alternative Vote tombola (AVt) is a refinement of the Alternative Vote (AV) voting system proposed in a referendum for later this year. It too is a form of preferential voting where voters mark the candidates in order of preference; the first choice is marked “1”, the second choice “2” and so on.

To quote one proponent of AV when addressing the issue of complexity: “The electorate will not need to know how to count the votes”, but should you be interested the winner in an AVt system is decided as follows:

1. Each candidate is allocated a colour.
2. For every 1st preference vote a candidate is given ten tokens of their allocated colour, every 2nd preference vote receives eight tokens, 3rd preference receives six - all other preferences are assigned one token each.
3. When every vote has been counted, the accumulated tokens of each candidate are placed in a large tombola and a winner is chosen by a local celebrity.

Hence the alternative view that when evaluating a voting system, understanding how to vote is meaningless without an understanding of how your vote is counted.