Monthly Archives: July 2006

Business is Religion

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on July 25, 2006 – 10:31 am
Filed under Politics, Sci/Tech, Work and Business

I usually refuse to get drawn into debates about religion and, even more so, despise to tell people my views. I’m not ashamed of my religion, it’s just I feel that people may think I’m trying to convert them – I don’t want to come across as ‘preachy’. People should make up their own mind regarding their beliefs… who am I to question them? Today, I’m going to make an exception.

I recently learnt that someone who I know believes in Creationism: they believe that Carbon Dating is unsound and that Darwin was incorrect about the Origin of Species. Evolution is not how humans have come to be, and the Earth is between 6 and 10 thousand years old – not 4.5 billion as some claim. To believe otherwise is heresy. (N.B. A 2006 poll in this country showed that only 48% of respondents believed the origin of life to be evolutionary – 22% chose Creationism, 17% Intelligent Design and the remaining 13% ‘did not know’. [Ref: 1 | 2])

This person I know is a Christian – not strictly devout, but still committed to the religion and its teachings. Does Creationism really have to go hand-in-hand with a serious belief in religion?

To me the Bible is a non-factual text – to be taken with a pinch of salt. It is a series of teachings collected together in one book. Not represented as fact, but rather as a series of moral stories to mull over; to consider and live your life according to their teachings. After all, the Bible was written by humans – fallible humans. It surely can’t be taken as fact for that reason alone?

In IT, Creationism is the belief that a large, new project can be completely specified and then successfully developed by a team… in one go. As anyone who has worked in application development will know, this is unfounded and not based in reality – developing a successful application arises through evolutionary methods. Constant interaction is required between analyst, developer and user in order to fulfil a requirement. Multiple versions are required to create a successful, working application as desired by the end-user. The first attempt will almost always be incorrect.

The analyst’s Use Case document is not to be taken as fact. Developer input is required so that their specialist skills and technical knowledge is applied during development. The user’s requirements may change and the document must reflect this. The document develops – evolves – just as the application does.

Although, this doesn’t fit with management’s view of how a project must be completed: it must be created perfectly, first time round – further versions are uneconomic and costly. So, the facts are ignored in order to appease those who we perceive as above us.

Religion is Politics? Business is Religion.

Forgotten Postcards

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on July 23, 2006 – 5:38 pm
Filed under Everything Else

This weekend I’ve been packing-up and clearing-out all of my belongings from my home in Abergavenny. As a quick bit of background, this house - Hen Siop - is a few hundred years old and is in the middle of the countryside surrounded by farms. It was, at one point, a shop for the village.

Today I came across a little suprise though: 47 postcards all sent between 1906 and mid1914, stopping on the brink of World War One. All but two of them are still legible. I am hoping to catalogue all of these here at some point and maybe find out some more reagarding the person they were all sent to.

My favourite three are:

BlackpoolNatal DayFlower Language

You can click on any of the above images to see a bigger version.

Did you know it cost 1c to send a postcard from America to Britain in 1910?

Enron: The Brief Explanation

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on July 21, 2006 – 11:18 am
Filed under Politics, Work and Business

With the news of the NatWest Three’s extradition and the conviction and death of the ex-CEO, the Enron scandal is hitting the headlines again. Most people know that Enron has had its troubles, although not many of them actually understand the problem. I would like to take this opportunity to concisely explain, in simple terms, the Enron scandal so that you can understand it better. So, without further delay I give you: ‘The Enron Scandal in Under 500 Words’

In addition to that linked article, here are some other news-worthy pieces of information:

The former Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Andrew Fastow, who was the mastermind behind the huge fraud, was found guilty on 78 counts. He accepted a plea agreement and will serve 10 years in prison and pay $24m; in return providing testimony against other Enron corporate officers. Kenneth Lay died after suffering a massive heart attack only months before his sentencing. The US SEC was seeking more than $90 million from him at the time.

Arthur Andersen – the accounting firm responsible for the fraud – were investigated and exposed for another serious fraud at WorldCom. This huge telecommunications firm then went bankrupt and soon became the new biggest bankruptcy in history. Many more companies filed bankruptcy after this, exposing high-level corruption, accounting errors, and insider trading. Arthur Anderson still trades as a bona-fide accounting firm due to “flaws in the jury instructions” at their trial. Although, they now have around 200 staff – down from over 110,000 worldwide - almost exclusively handling the numerous lawsuits against the company.

The NatWest Three? These men used to work for Greenwich NatWest - part of the NatWest group of financial institutions owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. The three instigated the selling of the company’s stake in an investment company (at much less than market value) to a small company controlled by Fastow (Enron’s CFO). The three then left their jobs, bought shares in Fastow’s company which was later sold on to Enron for more than ten times what NatWest had received. The three gained around $2.3m each.

Their case, and particularly that relating to their extradition to the US, has been in the media a lot recently. They have received almost unanimous sympathy from most media outlets, politicians and the public - most arguing against their extradition. No matter what your opinion on this matter, you should know that they have received the unpaid support of two London-based public relations firms to change the law and appeal against their extradition. Spin is all around us.