I know we've been having a bit of banter around JRM Esq.'s little dictat on his staff's literary style. However, this does raise a serious inconsistency in the new Johnson cabinet. We have our new PM spouting off in Parliament, the Manchester Science and Industry Museum (worth a visit when he's not there) and who knows elsewhere about relaxing regulations so we can develop and advance world leading scientific technologies. At thee same time JRM is setting very strict guidelines restricting his staff's language and grammar, and even stipulating the use of archaic units of measurements. Now, as someone with a maths/physics education and who has made a career in the fast developing IT industry during the last forty years, I'd hate to stand in the way of innovation or entrepreneurs. What annoys me is the introduction of petty rules which are easy for those ignorant of what they're doing to enforce and monitor - or don't have the time and resource to do it properly - while failing to set proper regulatory guidelines to ensure the companies developing and producing products have adequate safety, design, build and testing standards and governance. Companies' procedures and products must be overseen, reviewed and challenged by regulators with the appropriate knowledge to be confidant that the manufacturer is producing as products that are as safe as possible. The software anomalies in the Boeing 737 Max is something those of us in IT have feared happening for a while. Obviously controls have to be proportionate to the damage a product do but a phrase I used a while ago that my colleagues at the time liked was "rigour without bureaucracy" - not knowingly nicked from anyone and easier said than done; perhaps an aspiration?https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/business/boeing-737-max-faa.html?smid=nytcore-ios-shareI can live with a few grammatical errors and inconsistent punctuation in a memo (and not everyone has the advantages of an Eton & Oxbridge education) provided it's understandable and unambiguous, but I'd prefer to be sure the regulator signing off the permission to use the plane I'm flying in understood what they were authorising - and all suppliers involved had agreed to build to unambiguous specification using the internationally agreed metric standards. I note in the NY Times article attachged above the initials "F.A.A" comply with JRM's standards but "MCAS" doesn't - ok, inconsistent but irrelevant as it does affect the understanding - but perhaps somewhere there's a message in that?
Michael Ixer ● 2664d