Brian Clegg's Blog, page 114

Is it time to downgrade witness evidence?

I was listening to the radio the other day when former newspaper proprietor Eddie Shah was describing the trauma of being put in the dock for something he didn't do, based solely on the evidence of another person. Even if the witness is not the alleged victim, time and again we see cases that are far too dependent on witness evidence. In science there's a saying 'data is not the plural of anecdote.' We don't accept something as scientific evidence just because someone claims to have seen it. And yet witness evidence in court is nothing more than anecdote. And there are very good demonstrations that people are hopeless at providing accurate accounts. Witness evidence stinks. I give a very strong example of this in my book Extra Sensory :

On December 4, 1901 there was as a horrendous incident during a seminar on criminology at the University of Berlin. As Professor Franz von Liszt gave his lecture, one of the students interrupted to give an alternative viewpoint to the professor’s “from Christian morality.” A second student jumped up and disagreed profoundly. He said that he was fed up of with these Christian morality arguments. The first student was incensed. He pushed the desk over and strode over to his opponent, pulling a gun from under his coat. There was fight, the two students wrestling for control until the gun went off. The second student fell to the floor, apparently dead. 

Not surprisingly, the rest of the class was in shock. Von Liszt picked up the gun and asked for attention. He apologized, telling them that he had staged the event in order to perform an experiment. He now wanted everyone present to write down exactly what they had seen. Still shaken, they all obediently wrote out witness statements. And here’s where it gets interesting. The versions that the students gave differed wildly. This was no distant memory and featured no ordinary everyday event. They were giving their recollection of something amazing that had been seared on their memories just minutes before. 

When the different reports were compared there were, for example, eight different names given for the person who started the fight. Across the observers there were wildly differing accounts for the duration of the event, the order in which things happening and how the whole scene finished with von Liszt’s explanation. Some were convinced that the gunman had run from the lecture room – which he hadn’t. He had remained standing over the body. 

The point von Liszt hoped to make – and in which he was successful far beyond even his own expectations – was to show just how unreliable witnesses are when giving evidence in court. And it is totally bizarre that we still place so much faith in witness evidence in trials today, given the clear example of this and many other similar psychology experiments since. Witnesses are terrible at getting the facts right. They really aren’t good enough to rely on in court. Interestingly von Liszt found that the inaccuracies were worst when describing the events that were most dramatic – those, for example, involving the gun. It’s as if the unexpected nature of the event makes us particularly bad at recalling exactly what happened.

There is inevitably an unfortunate outcome of deciding that witness statements unsupported by other evidence is unreliable, which is that it is pretty well impossible to progress any trial based solely on the account of the victim. Yet surely we shouldn't allow innocent people to go through the whole traumatic trial process and potentially be found guilty merely to make it easier for those who don't have corroborative evidence?
When I first heard about the Eddie Shah case I thought he should have the right to sue his accuser for damaging his reputation. After all, if he is innocent, then his accuser is lying. And maybe that still is the case. But a more important outcome should be that this kind of trial is prevented from happening in the first place. Witness evidence alone is simply not good enough. Anecdotes, however forcefully put, will never be data.

Image from Wikipedia

Awash on the Dirac sea

I've written two books about infinity, most recently the fun illustrated title Introducing Infinity , and it's a subject I enjoy writing and thinking about. But for physicists, infinity often means a problem. While we can conceive that the universe might be infinite, because we only ever deal with a part of it, when infinity rears its head in calculations, it usually means trouble. This most famously arises in quantum electrodynamics, the science of the interaction of light and matter on the quantum scale. The solution there has been renormalisation - in effect, putting in the real observed values of some quantities to make the infinities go away. And this works, but it's a bit uncomfortable. Elsewhere, such as at the moment of the big bang or in the heart of a black hole, the infinities are taken to mean that our current theories break down at that point and we need to find new ways to look at what's happening.

However, there is another class of infinite entities that is tolerated by some, because they produce useful results, but that others find a little uncomfortable. Two examples spring to mind, both from the quantum world - the Dirac sea and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. I'd like to take a look at the less frequently covered of these, that unusual infinite ocean.

Paul Dirac was a superb (if rather strange) British physicist who was one of the leading lights in quantum theory, though he tends to be less well known in the outside world than the likes of Heisenberg or Schrödinger. One of his crowning achievements was to extend Schrödinger's wave equation for some types of quantum particle, which describes the behaviour of those particles, so that it matches the real world. The original version was not relativistic - like Newton's laws it was an approximation that assumed particles moved fairly slowly. But an electron, for example, is often no slouch and it's Dirac's equation you need to keep track of it, not Schrödinger's.

However, something interesting emerged from Dirac's work. The equation has a kind of symmetry of solution that makes it equally possible to have positive and negative energy particles. Sometimes the negative parts of such equations have just been ignored. This happened most famously with 'advanced waves' - Maxwell's equations, describing electromagnetism and light, suggest there should be photons that travel backwards in time from destination to source as well as the usual forwards ones. These were simply ignored until Richard Feynman and John Wheeler realised they could be used to explain another oddity of physics. Dirac, though, did not simply cast his negative energy electrons away. But that led to a problem.

Light is typically produced when an electron drops an energy level. The electron loses energy and this is emitted as a photon of light. Eventually the electron gets to a 'ground state' below which it can't drop any more. But if negative energy levels were allowed, as Dirac's equation suggested, electrons should continue dropping in energy for ever, blasting out vast quantities of light. They don't. So Dirac came up with a the idea that the vacuum - empty space, if you like - contained an infinite sea of negative energy electrons, filling up all the negative energy levels, so your ordinary, everyday electron could never drop into negative energy.

This seems a very unlikely and highly wasteful proposition, requiring as it does this infinitely deep and wide sea of inaccessible particles. However it proved a very productive idea. The model predicts that there will sometimes be holes in the sea - gaps where a negative energy electron is missing. As it happens, a missing negative energy electron is identical to a present positive energy, positively charged equivalent of an electron. Dirac predicted these should exist, and a couple of years later, the positron was discovered. This hypothetical infinite negative energy sea enabled Dirac to predict there was antimatter.

Does the sea have a 'real' existence? That's a difficult one. Some physicists would say yes, while others would hedge their bets with philosophical waffle about the nature of reality. The fact remains that Dirac's infinite sea of negative energy particles has played a fundamental role in the development of physics.

That's what I call a big idea.

Life of Pi-ty

I watched the movie of Life of Pi the on Saturday night, and I wish I hadn't. I had avoided it for a long time because the story sounded so ludicrous, but we wanted to watch a movie, it was there on iTunes, and we hadn't seen it.

Now admittedly the story makes a bit more sense when you know it's an allegory on the nature of religion - which none of the people enthusing at me to read/watch it had bothered to mention, but that doesn't justify it. I can't see the point of having a long, laboured, silly story to put across the message 'religion might be fiction, but it is a better story than the alternative.' Just write down that sentence and move on. Don't make me waste over two hours to get that rather limp, cod psychology message. 
As for the film itself, I enjoyed the first bit about Pi's background a lot, but as soon as they got to the shipwreck I hated it. In part because it is just such a silly story, but also because the CGI, which everyone says is wonderful, really let it down by being far too obvious. Three examples: the sinking ship looked all wrong, the water surfaces were far too mirrored and/or oily and the tiger moved incorrectly and had irritating anthropomorphic facial expressions.
Now someone is bound to say that it actually should look not quite right to make it more dream-like. This is wanting to have your cake and eat it. If the CGI is great, it's good because it's great CGI, and if the CGI is bad it's good because it conveys the unreal nature of the storyline. Apart from being cheating logic, this is rubbish, because dreams don't look unreal. You might, in a dream think 'Ooh, that doesn't usually happen,' (though usually you accept the weird stuff til you wake), but you will never think 'Hmm, this world looks like bad, poorly textured CGI.' It's not dream-like, it is just poor special effects.
Overall, then, Pi might be a transcendental number, but this film was anything but transcendental, bringing me down to earth with a bump.

Image from Wikipedia

Got the exoplanetary blues

That imageThere has been a lot of news coverage in the last day or two of the discovery of a blue exoplanet - a planet orbiting another star. It is quite a feat to detect colour at this distance, but I feel that the news coverage is tainted by a combination of misapprehension and downright naughtiness.

To begin with, why should we care that the planet is blue (and hence splash it across the media)? After all, it has to be some colour. So what if it's blue? The only reason I can think for getting excited is that traditionally this colour has been associated with life. We know that Earth is primarily blue when seen from space because of its oceans and so link this with a friendly environment. What this misses is that Earth isn't the only planet in the solar system that is blue. Both Uranus and Neptune are blue too.

This blue coloration is not because these gas giants distant from the Sun are ideal for life. Quite the reverse. It is because that's the right sort of colour for a methane atmosphere. So we shouldn't get too excited, given two out of the three blue planets we know well aren't anywhere near inhabitable. In fact, to give the news media their due, they have all reported that HD 189733b, located around 63 light years away, is probably blue because of liquid or fragmentary silica in the atmosphere. And most have pointed out that it is a gas giant. But given that, it's not quite clear why they have got so excited about it. There is something worse, though.

Pretty well every bit of coverage I've seen has carried this stunning image from NASA/ESA. And why wouldn't they? It puts some of the pictures of planets in our own system to shame, let alone a planet 63 light years away. Of course, the reason it is so good is that it is an artist's impression. It's not a photograph. The colour detection has been through changes in the colour spectrum when the planet passes behind its star, not through direct observation, and certainly not through stunning photographs. And yet almost all the coverage I've seen has not mentioned that this picture is a fake.

Take, for instance, the write-up in the usually excellent i newspaper. They have given it a quarter page. Of that, maybe two thirds is the picture and the rest is a small text box. The closest it comes to saying the image isn't genuine is saying the planet is 'a deep cobalt blue, data gathered by the Hubble space telescope shows.' I'm sorry, I can guarantee you that a fair percentage of even the excellently educated readers of the i will come away convinced that they have seen a picture of this planet. It wouldn't be hard to put in an 'artist's impression' caption.

If you think I am being over concerned, it is because I think this demonstrates a widespread attitude in the media that you can loose and free with science reporting. Just imagine this was a story about a celebrity committing an offence and the paper mocked up a 'photograph' of it happening without labelling it as an artist's impression. It would cause on uproar. Just because this is science doesn't mean that such deception is acceptable.

Why I hate company suggestion schemes

When I'm helping companies be more creative, one of the first things I recommend is that they get rid of any suggestion scheme. These are usually in the form of  a prize competition. You send in your ideas and if they company likes them and implements them you get a reward. It might seem these are a good idea - but they are poison. Here's my analysis from my book Creativity and Innovation for Managers :


There was a time when the staff suggestion scheme was the beginning and the end of an innovation agenda in most companies. The theory seemed good. Anyone in the company could contribute a suggestion. When they had a bright idea (or brainwave, or whatever glossy term was chosen for the scheme), they filled in a form, popped it in the post and before long the best ideas would be implemented, with the idea merchant awarded a nice, fat cash bonus.

It has been recognised for a long time that suggestion schemes aren't very effective, given the resource available and the meagre results they generally produce. What is now being suspected is that suggestion schemes in their traditional format are actually disadvantageous. It's not just that they are harmless but useful, they can be destructive.

The suggestion scheme problem has many causes. The administration of such schemes is a thankless task. Generally it is given a low administrative priority. So it can take a long time for an idea to be processed - sometimes so long that the idea is no longer current. When the idea comes to be assessed, there is often a natural reluctance from the assessor to accept it. A classic reaction is 'we've tried it/thought of it before and it didn't/won't work'. The trouble is, this kind of assessment totally overlooks the point that most new ideas are easy to shoot down. They need to be nurtured, not assessed into an early grave.

The negatives don't end there. Many schemes set the level of award on a proportion of the cost saving the idea generates. At a stroke this disenfranchises any ideas that involve revenue enhancement rather than cost cutting. In fact, it generates a mindset that cost cutting is more important than revenue generation - a fatal position if a company is to survive and grow. To add insult to injury, many schemes distinguish between manager and worker, or between areas of the company. Managers aren't allowed to take part because 'it's their job to have ideas'. Yet an engineer who thinks of a way of reusing a flange sprocket instead of buying a new one (surely his job too) gets a fat cheque.

The outcome is a system that is divisive, generates negative feeling and stresses costs over revenue. This does not mean that is impossible to get creative input from the entire company. Quite the reverse. Just that the suggestion scheme is not an appropriate vehicle. This chapter looks at a number of ways of making innovation a part of the company culture. To support that, ideas from the staff need to be encouraged. But they should be able to work outside of a formal scheme, sending them directly to those who can make it happen, or to their manager if they don't know who to send it to. Effective use of e-mail within the company is probably the strongest vehicle for making this happen. If there is a culture that it is okay to send an e-mail to anyone - the chief executive included - with an idea or suggestion, ideas will flow from the most unexpected sources.

There then follows the usual painful process of suggestion scheme mechanics. It is interesting that there is a creativity technique called 'Reversal' where, in order to solve a problem, you first try hard to make the opposite happen. For example, when trying to improve communications in a company, you first say what would positively discourage communications, then turn round the ideas that arise to stimulate positive communication. This scheme shows every sign of reversal being used without ever turning things back round. For example, could you think of a better way to make sure that contractors and other non-permanent staff did not think of themselves as part of the company, and did not have buy-in to what the company was trying to do?

Reward should not be through a separate scheme, implying that creativity is something special you do once in a lifetime, but through the regular company reward scheme. It shouldn't be a case of 'we can give you a cash bonus because having this idea isn't your job'. Instead, having an idea has to be everyone's job, and those who do it well need to be rewarded appropriately, just as they are rewarded for other aspects of their job.

If you want to see how really not to do it, here is a real example I found:


While researching this book, I contacted a number of large companies, asking what they did to further creativity and innovation in the company. One multinational gave a good example of why suggestion schemes don't work. To avoid embarrassment, the company is referred to below as X.

The company's PR department, on a second contact said 'I found this on the intranet - I didn't even know we had anything like this.' What she referred to was a document explaining the suggestion scheme. Now the document had all the right buzzwords, but it managed to make innovation about as exciting as filling in an expenses form. For example: "To gain and sustain competitive advantage, X must stay ahead of the field in innovation as well as cost reduction and efficiency. All employees have a part to play in identifying new practices etc. to enhance revenue generation, improve the way the company operates and maximise continuous improvement.' Just in case the wrong people got hold of the document: 'The arrangements explained in this document are for all employees of X plc. Non-X people may offer suggestions: they will not receive awards if their suggestions are used, but their contribution will be recognised.'

Science, girls, statistics - what could go wrong?

The use of statistics by the media is something that constantly drives me round the bend. (At least, it does 90% of the time.) Now the BBC has wound me up by combining science, gender issues and, yes, statistics.

To be fair these are not blatant errors, but rather that hoary old standard, not being scrupulous about separating correlation and causality. As we saw with the infamous high heels and schizophrenia study, even academics can be prone to this, but the media does it every day. One very common example is where they tell us on the news that the stock market went up or down as a result of some event. Rubbish. In most circumstances the stock market is far too chaotic a system to attribute a change to an event that happened around the same time. It's guesswork and worthless.
Here, the misuse is slightly more subtle. 'Girls who take certain skills-based science and technology qualifications outperform boys in the UK, suggest figures' says the relatively mild headline. But is this really what the figures say, and if so what should we deduce?
According to exam publisher Pearson, girls who take BTECs in science and technology are more likely than boys to get top grades. Now here's a key sentence. According to the BBC 'Despite this success, girls are vastly outnumbered by boys on these courses.' The implication here is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and with many more girls we would have lots of better grades. The suggested correlation is of gender with good grades. However it could equally well be that this is self-selection, a regular plague on the houses of those attempting to interpret statistics. If there are large numbers of boys on the courses, many of them could be there because 'that's what boys do' not because they have any talent for the subject. By contrast, if there are a small number of girls (in this case between 5 and 38% depending on topic), then they are likely at the very least to have greater than average enthusiasm, and quite possibly greater talent. If this is the case, all this is saying is that 'better than average female candidates do well compared with average male candidates.' Not quite such a strong story - in fact not a story at all.
The article then goes on to quote someone saying too few girls take STEM subjects. Now, I think this is true. We still have an artificial cultural bias about girls going in for science and it is wrong. However, what we mustn't do is to try to support the belief that this is wrong with data that doesn't contribute anything to the argument. By putting the 'girls are better at it' supposed statistic alongside the desire to have more girls in the subject implies that there is something inherent in the gender that makes girls better at it, so we want more of them. No, no, no. We want more because girls should have the same opportunities, because they shouldn't be put off science/tech because their peers think it's inappropriate. Not because a dubious interpretation of stats implies we could improve the quality of our STEM stock of students because girls are better at it. Without effective evidence this is just as sexist as saying girls shouldn't do science because it's too difficult for their little brains.
A girl and a science building. See, they can go together! *One last example from the article. We have a quote from Helen Wollaston of Women into Science and Engineering saying the results prove "that girls can do science, IT and engineering." That's a silly thing to say. Firstly there is nothing to prove. Why would they not be able to? But also, as we've seen, all these results seem to show is that the most motivated girls are better than the average boys. There should be no need to use dubious statistics to 'prove' that girls can do STEM. I don't think anyone has doubted this since we stopped thinking (as they genuinely once did) that these subjects would overheat delicate female brains. What we need to prove is that far more girls can be interested in STEM and that we can change the culture so that it is cool for them to do so. That is a totally different issue - but it is the real one we face.

* In the interest of openness and scientific honesty, I ought to point out that the woman portrayed was a music student.

How to build a Star Trek transporter

Randomness and probability are at the heart of my book Dice World and they are also fundamental to quantum theory, which is why I spend some time on the subject in the book. One of my favourite aspects of quantum theory is quantum entanglement (I wrote The God Effect on the subject), which is responsible for a number of interesting technical developments including a small-scale version of the Star Trek transporter.

Think for a moment of what’s involved in such a technology. On Star Trek, the transporter appears to scan an object or person, then transfers them to a different location. This was done on the TV show to avoid the cost of the expensive model work that was required at the time, before the existence of CGI, to show a shuttle landing on a planet’s surface. But it bears a striking resemblance to something that is possible using entanglement.
To make a transporter work, we would have to scan every particle in a person, then to recreate those particles at a different location. There are two levels of problem with this. One is an engineering problem. There are huge numbers of atoms in a human body – around 7 × 1027 (where 1027 is 1 with 27 zeros following it). Imagine you could process a trillion atoms a second. That’s pretty nippy. But it would still take you 7 × 1015 seconds to scan a whole person. Or to put it another way, around 2 × 108 years. 200 million years to scan a single person. Enough to try the patience even of Mr Spock.
Assuming, though, we could get over that hurdle – or only wanted to transport something very small like a virus – there is a more fundamental barrier. What you need to do to make a perfect copy of something is to discover the exact state of each particle in it. But when you examine a quantum particle, the very act of making a measurement changes it so that you can't make a copy. It isn’t possible to simply measure up the properties of a particle and reproduce it. However, quantum teleportation gives us a get-out clause.
There is a slightly fiddly process using entanglement that means we can take the quantum state of one particle and apply it to another particle at a different location. The second particle becomes exactly what the first particle had been in terms of its quantum properties. But we never discover what the values are. The entanglement transfers them without us ever making a measurement. Entanglement makes the impossible possible. This has been demonstrated many times in experiments that range from simple measurements in a laboratory to a demonstration that used entanglement to carry encrypted data across the city of Vienna.
Even if we were able to get around the scanning scale problem, though, it’s hard to imagine many people would decide to abandon cars or planes and use a quantum teleporter for commuting. Bear in mind exactly what is happening here. The scanner will transfer the exact quantum state of each particle in your body to other particles at the receiving station. The result will be an absolutely perfect copy of your body. It will be physically indistinguishable, down to the chemical and electrical states of every atom inside it. It will have your memories and will be thinking the same thoughts. But in the process of stripping those quantum properties, every atom of your body will have been scrambled. You will be entirely destroyed in the process. As far as the world is concerned you will still exist at the remote location – but the original ‘you’ will be disintegrated.

I think I'll stick with the train.

In memoriam

I know a couple of (fairly elderly) people who are terribly worried about the format of their own funerals. One, particularly, has about half a dozen sheets of paper scattered around friends and relations, giving precise instructions over which hymns will be sung, what organ music played, what readings read, burial or cremation and all the rest. She has gone for such redundancy because she is very worried that someone will lose the instructions and the funeral won't be as she wants it to be. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. And I don't know why anyone else does either.

In the end, a funeral is for those left behind, not for the deceased. Whether you believe the individual concerned has gone to heaven or is simply dead and gone, either way, they aren't there to appreciate the  finer points of the service, or get irritated if the organist uses the wrong tune for 'Guide me O Thou Great Redeemer.' (It should be Cwm Rhondda, of course.)

I similarly have no understanding of why families get so upset when, say, an internal organ of a loved one has been retained in a lab by accident and they go to all the trouble of having it interred in the grave. It's not the person. Why worry? A bit of a body isn't a person. (Taken to the extreme, we would collect hair and shed skin and nail clippings too.)

I can only assume my attitude, which clearly is not the norm, comes from a combination of being very mildly on the autistic spectrum, combined with family tradition. Neither of my parents have a grave. Nor do my father's parents. If I wanted to commune with them after death, I would want to go somewhere that meant something to them, somewhere special - or to touch something they were very fond of. As far as I am aware, neither of my parents had an affection for cemeteries, nor for gravestones, so why should I go to such a place, or talk to such to a piece of stone they never saw?

It's not for me to say that other people should be the same as me, especially on such a strongly felt topic, but I really, genuinely don't understand what all the fuss is about. It's not that I don't understand how traumatic it is to lose a loved one - of course I know why that is a big deal, and with both my parents dead, I have experienced the pain of loss firsthand. But I don't understand the obsession with laying down details of your own funeral, or worrying about where a loved one's body or ashes are interred.

We say to children when preparing them to face a coffin, 'It's not the person, it is just what is left behind.' But we don't seem to believe the message ourselves.

Spaceflight epiphany

We need more of thisWhile 'Spaceflight Epiphany' sounds like it should be a NASA project, it is actually an account of my personal experience. I've had a big change of heart on the value of getting people into space.

For many years I have subscribed to the view, supported by many scientists, that putting people in space is a painful waste of money. A manned mission costs vastly more than automated probes, which means there is much less money available to do the science. We have got most of our valuable scientific knowledge about the universe from the likes of Hubble, WMAP and Planck, not from Space Shuttle and the ISS.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg points out the way that a major science project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), was abandoned because the funds went instead to the International Space Station (ISS). The SSC would have been significantly more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would have achieved results a good ten years earlier. This would have been a major step in major science research.

By comparison, ten times as much money has been spent on the ISS as was due to go to the SSC, but it has yielded nothing of scientific value. All the useful space science, Weinberg points out, has been done using unmanned satellites. “In the days of the cold war,” Weinberg commented, “perhaps it really was important to America to be the first country to put a man on the Moon and not let it be Russia, but today I think that really is irrelevant. The United States is not now in competition with any country resembling the Soviet Union and we do not need to show we are technically just as competent as they are. Any argument of national prestige that could have been valid in the 1960s is certainly not valid 50 years later."

At the moment I am writing my next book, which is about space exploration, and in doing so I have recaptured some of the excitement I felt during the Apollo mission - the same excitement that provides part of the reason for loving science fiction like Star Trek or James Blish's Cities in Flight series. The 'epiphany' word reflects my belief that Weinberg is wrong.

It's true that with a few exceptions, like the Shuttle mission that fixed the problems with the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror that initially rendered it useless, humans have contributed a negligible amount of the scientific value of space missions. But, much though I love science, life (and specifically space exploration) is not all about the science. Scientists inevitably overvalue the scientific component of any activity, but in reality there is more to life – and in the case of manned space exploration, more to making life worth living.

The fact is that manned space exploration - and I mean going back to the Moon, to Mars, to the asteroids... even one day to the stars, not messing about in the ISS, as far away from Earth as Boston is from Philadelphia - is one of humanity's greatest achievements and really is worth doing for its own sake. It may be corny, but all that final frontier stuff really is true. We should be out there, exploring, pioneering, indulging our curiosity. Because it's what we do best.

And if we stop, we lose a part of our humanity.

Image from NASA via Wikipedia

Government, meet real business

The logo of my company, Creativity Unleashed.
How about it, government? Unleash a bit of creativity...Every now and then I get really irritated with the government. I know this is not exactly news, nor uncommon. I can never remember a time when everyone was saying 'Isn't this government wonderful, aren't we lucky to have these excellent people in charge?' I think the time we've come closest in the UK in recent years was in the honeymoon period of the Blair government, and even then there were some whinges (not to mention, no doubt, moans from the likes of my friend Henry Gee, who believes that the world will one day recognize that Boris Johnson is the greatest statesman who has ever lived). But the thing of which I am complaining today is not a feature of any particular government. They all do it.

I think I have moaned about this before, but it requires regular revisiting. I just get absolutely furious when the government tells us that the only way to get more people in employment is for companies to create more jobs - and tries to use the tax system and other blunt instruments to encourage this.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with companies creating jobs, I'm all for it. But what gets me angry is that there is no recognition of the millions of people who aren't a burden on the taxpayer, in fact contribute to taxes, and yet don't have an employer. Yes, I'm talking about the army of the forgotten, the self-employed. For me this is by far the best way to work and many more people should do it. Admittedly it's not for everyone, I accept that. Some need the psychological and financial safety net of a 'real job' - though many have found over the years that this 'safety net' is anything but secure. However, I do wish that the government would stop ignoring what a significant part of the economy we self employed are.

I don't employ anyone - and I don't want to employ anyone. Ever. If I need extra resources I will subcontract the work to someone, but in all my experience (and at BA I managed some big teams), having employees is a nightmare, both in terms of red tape and in all the responsibilities you take on by employing someone. But all the incentives the government keeps pumping out to get us to employ people seem to miss out on the fact that we should be encouraging and helping people to start up for themselves. Because then everyone benefits. I have not had an employer since I left BA in 1994, but I have contributed to the economy in plenty of ways, as do most of the self-employed.

Everything the government does seems to be focussed on big business and against self-employment. Even their statistics are biassed this way. A lot of what I do - probably about half of my income - is a kind of export. But because I'm not shipping boxes of widgits through customs, I suspect it never shows up on the government statistics. Because I'm a nonentity in their eyes.

Come on governments. Get wise to the hidden sector of the economy. Instead of more and more incentives to employ people, how about making it more beneficial to be self-employed? I pay you taxes - I even collect taxes for you in the form of VAT. Now give a little back. You know it makes sense.