Category Archives: political

Deadly curse of health and safety culture

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Yesterday’s Times front page story “death by red tape” described the sheriff’s report on a woman who had fallen down a 45 foot (less than 15 metre) mine shaft in Ayreshire, and died after 6 hours while emergency services argued on the surface about health and safety issues. I was reminded of a similar case a while ago when an ambulance crew had to wait for police backup while again a patient died.

Neither report mentioned the Fire Chief who was charged with manslaughter after the warehouse blaze in the south of England a few years ago. In this case he did allow teams into the building, allowing them to do their job. In this case it was the fire crew who died and their manager held responsible.

With those responsible in these situations having to be constantly aware that they may face criminal
prosecution if they make the wrong decision, no wonder they delay.

Those on the front line in these circumstances have to make difficult decisions. While these decisions certainly should be reviewed analysed and used to improve training and advice, we need to end the blame culture and accept that these decisions will occasionally turn out in the light of time to have been wrong.

Our belief we can create a risk free world is hubris, and while we maintain this myth, those who are faced with the real decisions have their already difficult job made harder, and incidents like the preventable death of this woman in Scotland will continue.

The Great Apple Apartheid

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In days gone by boarding houses and shops had notices saying “Irish and Blacks not welcome“.  These days are happily long past, but today Apple effectively says “poor and rural users not welcome“.

This is a story about Apple and the way its delivery policies exacerbate the digital divide and make the poor poorer.  To be fair, similar stories can be told about other software vendors, and it is hardly news that success in business is often at the expense of the weak and vulnerable.  However, Apple’s decision to deliver Lion predominantly via App store is an iconic example of a growing problem.

I had been using Lion for a little over a week, not downloaded from App Store, but pre-installed on a brand new MacBook Air.  However, whenever I plugged in my iPhone and tried to sync a message appeared saying the iTunes library was created with a newer version of iTunes and so iTunes needed to be updated.  Each time I tried to initiate the update as requested, it started  a long slow download dialogue, but some time later told me that the update had failed.

This at first seemed all a little odd on a brand new machine, but I think the reason is as follows:

  1. When I first initialised the new Air I chose to have it sync data with a Time Machine backup from my previous machine.
  2. The iTunes on the old machine was totally up-to-date due to regular updates.
  3. Apple dealers do not bother to update machines before they are delivered.
  4. The hotel WiFi connection did not have sufficient throughput for a successful update.

From an engineering point of view, the fragility of the iTunes library format is worrying; many will recall the way HyperCard was able to transfer stacks back and forth between versions without loss.  Anyway the paucity of engineering in recent software is a different story!

It is the fact that the hotel WiFi was in sufficient for the update that concerns me here.  It was fast enough to browse the web, without apparent delay, to check email etc.  Part of the problem was that the hotel did offer two levels of service, one (more expensive!) aimed more at heavy multimedia use, so maybe that would have been sufficient.  The essential update for the brand new machine consisted of 1.46 gigabytes of data, so perhaps not surprising the poor connection faltered.

I have been concerned for several years at the ever increasing size of regular software updates, which have increased from 100 Mbytes to now often several Gbytes1.  Usually these happen in the background and I have reasonable broadband at home, so they don’t cause me any problems personally, but I wonder about those with less good broadband, or those whose telephone exchanges do not support broadband at all.  In the UK, this is mainly those outside major urban areas, who are out of reach of cable and fibre super-broadband and reliant on old BT copper lines.  Thinking more broadly across the world, how many in less developed countries or regions will be able to regularly update software?

Of course old versions may well run better on old computers, but without updates it is not just that users cannot benefit from new features, but more critically they are missing essential security updates leaving the vulnerable to attack.

And this is not just a problem for those directly affected, but for us all, as it creates a fertile ground for bot armies to launch denial of service attacks and other forms of cybercrime or cyberterrorism.   Each compromised machine is a future cyberwarrior or cybergangster.

However, the decision of Apple to launch Lion predominantly via App Store has significantly upped the stakes.   Those with slower broadband connections may be able to manage updates, but the full operating system is an order of magnitude larger.  Of course those with slower connections tend to be the poorer, more vulnerable, more marginalised; those without jobs, in rural areas, the elderly.  It is as if Apple has put up a big notice:

“To the poor and weak
we don’t want you“

To be fair, Lion is (one feels grudgingly) also made available on USB drives, but at more than twice the price of the direct download2.  So this is not entirely shutting the door on the poor, but only letting them in if they pay extra.  A tax on poverty.

Of course, this is not a deliberate act of aggression against the weak, just the normal course of business.  The cheapest and easiest way to deliver software, and one that incidentally ensures that all revenue goes to Apple, is through direct online sales.  The USB option adds complexity and cost to the distribution systems and Apple seem to be pricing to discourage use.  This, like so many other ways in which the poor pay more, is just an ‘accident’ of the market economy.

But for a company that prides itself in design, surely things could be done more creatively?

One way would be to split software into two parts.  One small part would be the ‘key’, essential to run it, but very small,  The second part would constitute the bulk of the software, but be unusable without the ‘key’.   The ‘key’ would then be sold solely on the App store, but would be small enough for anyone to download.  The rest would be also made available online, but for free download and with a licence that allows third party distribution (and of course be suitably signed/encrypted to prevent tampering).  Institutions or cybercafes could download it to local networks, entrepreneurs could sell copies on DVD or USB, but competition would mean this would be likely to end up far cheaper than Apple’s USB premium, close to the cost of the medium, with a small margin.

Of course the same method could be used for any software, not just Lion, and indeed even for software updates.

I’m sure Apple could think of alternative, maybe better, solutions.  The problem is just that Apple’s designers, despite inordinate consideration for the appearance and appeal of their products, have simply not thought beyond the kind of users they meet in the malls of Cupertino.

  1. Note, this is not an inevitable consequence of increasing complexity and (itself lamentable) code bloat.  In the past software updates were often delivered as ‘deltas’, the changes between old and new.  It seems that now an ‘update’ is in fact complete copies of entire major components.[back]
  2. At the tiem of wrting tjis Mac OSX LIon is available for  app store for $29.99, but USB thumb drive version is $69.99[back]

trouble in the City – wise as serpents

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It is wonderful to see the conflict over the St Paul’s protest camp resolved at last, but I am left with the sad image of many in the City gloating over this dispute.

I usually find that incompetence and coincidence are better explanations than intrigue and conspiracy, but one wonders here whether there has not been some careful PR management in the background.  Certainly, the effect of the last weeks has been to divert the attention of media and public away from the real issues of the protest: the contrast between growing poverty in the country and increasing wealth in the finance industry, so that even the news of obscene corporate pay rises during the period was sidelined.

Perhaps more significant in the long term has been the weakening of the position of St Paul’s staff who have often been a gentle but persistent critic of the City, long before the protesters camped and will continue to be long after the camp is dissolved and they return to their normal lives or the next cause.

Jesus said “be as wise as serpents, yet harmless as the dove“, but it seems this time the real serpents have won on wisdom.  I just hope that during the coming months the spotlight can shift to where it belongs, and public and press focus on the increasing injustice and disparity not just in the City of London, but across the country and world.

roots – how do we see ourselves spatially

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I was just reading the chapter on Benedict Anderson in “Key Thinkers on Space and Place”1.  Anderson forged the concept of a national imagination, the way nations are as much, or more, a construct of socio-cultural imaginings than physical topography or legal/political sovereignty.

However, this made me wonder whether this conception itself was very culturally specific, to what extent do people relate to nation as opposed to other areas.

I was reminded particularly of a conversation with, the much missed, Pierro Mussio. He explained to me the distinct nature of Italian cultural identity, which tends to focus on regional and local identity before national identity, partly because Italy itself is quite young as a nation state (a mere 150 years in a country which sees itself in terms of millennia). There is even a word “campanilismo”, which is literally relating to the “bell tower” (campanile) in a town, meaning one’s primary loyalties lie to that bell tower, that town, that community.

How do you see yourself?  Are you British or Geordie, French or Parisian, American or New Yorker?

I know I see myself as ‘Welsh’.  Wales is part of Britain, but my Britishness is secondary to Welshness.  I was born and brought up in Bangor Street, Roath Park, Cardiff, but again while the street, area and city are foci of nostalgia, it is the Welshness which seems central.  For Fiona she is Cumbrian (rather than Wetheral, English or British), Steve who is visiting is British, but says his brother would say Scottish, despite both having spent equal amounts of time in Scotland whilst growing up and since.

I asked people on Twitter and got a variety of answers2, most quite broad:

“I always think English rather than British but I don’t have a more specific area to identify with.”

“I think I primarily think of myself as both “Brit” & “northerner”. Lancastrian when differentiating myself from Yorkshire lot!”

“in decreasing granularity I’m a Devoner (south, of course!), west country-er, English, British, European, World-ean.”

Some less clear:

“I’m confused specially. I am Coloradan and American by birth, but feel more at home in England, and miss Scotland.”

“ooh, complicated. I’m British but not English. that’s as specific as I get.”

The last perhaps particularly interesting in its focus on what he is not!

Obviously the way we see ourselves varies.

The choice of a ‘level of granularity’ for location reminds me a little of the way in which we have some sort of typical level in a classification hierarchy (I think Lakoff writes about this); for example you can say “look at that bird”, but not “look at that mammal”, you have to say “look at that dog” or “look at that cat”.  This also varies culturally including subcultures such as dog breeders – saying “look at that dog” in Crufts would hardy sound natural.

Some cities have specific words to refer to their natives: Glaswegian, Geordie, Londoner; others do not – I was brought up in Cardiff, but Cardiffian sounds odd.  Does the presence of a word (Cumbrian, Welsh) make you more likely to see yourselves in those terms, or is it more that it is that, where cities have forged a strong sense of belonging, words naturally emerge … I sense a Sapir-Whorf moment!

Now-a-days this is even more contested as loyalties and identities can be part of networked communities that cut across national and topographical boundaries.  In some way these new patterns of connection reinforce those focusing on human relations rather than physical space as defining countries and communities, but of course in far newer ways.

However, it also made me think of those parts of the world where there are large numbers of people with problematic statehood.  There is how we see ourselves and how states see us.  We tend to define democracy in terms of citizenship, and laud attempts, such as the Arab Spring, that give power to the people … but where ‘people’ means citizens.  In Bahrain the Shite majority are citizens and therefore their views should be considered in terms of democracy, whereas the migrant workers in Libya fleeing the rebels in the early days of the recent Libyan war, or the Palestinians in Kuwait during the first Gulf War were not citizens and therefore marginalised.

Defining citizenship then becomes one of the most powerful methods of control.  This has been used to powerful effect in Estonia leaving some who had lived the country for fifty years effectively stateless, and, while not leaving people stateless, in the UK new rules for electoral registration could leave up to 10 million, principally the young and the poor, voteless.

In the days of the nation state those with loyalties not tied to geography have always been problematic: Gypsies, Jews before the establishment of Israel, the various Saharan nomad trades.  Many of these have been persecuted and continue to suffer across the world, and yet paradoxically in a networked world it seems possible that pan-national identity may one day become the norm.

  1. I’ve got 1st edition, but 2nd edition recently come out.[back]
  2. Many thanks for those who Tweeted responses.[back]

Private schools and open data

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Just read short article “Private schools aren’t doing as well right-wingers like to think” by Rob Cowen @bobbiecowman1.  Rob analyses the data on recent GCSE results and finds that independent schools have been falling behind comprehensive schools in the last couple of years.  He uses this to refute the belief that GCSE standards are dropping, although equally it calls into question David Cameron’s recent suggestion that independent schools such as Eton should be given public money to start ‘Free Schools’2.

However, this is also a wonderful example of the way open data can be used to challenge unsupported views including official ones or ‘common knowledge’.  Of course, during the recent voting reform referendum, David Cameron expressed his disinterest in data and statistics compared with gut feelings, so the availability of data is only half the battle!

Graph shwoing comprehensive vs independent school performance

  1. Thanks to Laura Cowen @lauracowen for re-tweeting this.[back]
  2. See BBC News: Cameron: ‘Eton should set up a state school’[back]

Do teachers need a 2:2

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Those in the UK will have seen recent news1 that the Education Secretary Michael Grove is planning to remove remove funding for teacher training from those who do not achieve a 2:2 or better. A report on the proposals suggests this will reduce numbers of trainee science teachers by 25% and language teachers by a third.

An Independent article on this lists various high profile figures who got third class degrees (albeit all from prestigious universities), who would therefore not be eligible – including Carol Vorderman, who is the Conservative Party’s ‘maths guru’2.

The proposed policy and the reporting of it raise three questions for me.

First is the perennial problem that the reporting only tells half the story.  Who are these one third of language trainees and one quarter of science trainees who currently do not have 2:2 degrees? Are they recent graduates who have simply not done well in their courses and treating teaching as an easy option? Are they those that maybe made poor choices in their selected courses, but nonetheless have broader talents after careful assessment by the teaching course admissions teams? Or are they mature students who did not do well in university, or maybe never went, but have been admitted based on their experience and achievements since (as we would do for any advanced degree, such as an MSc)?  If it were the first of these, then I think most parents and educators would agree with the government line, but I very much doubt this is the case.  However, with only part of the story how are we to know?  I guess I could read the full report, or maybe the THES has a more complete story, but how many parents reading about this are likely to do so?

Second is the implicit assumption that degree level study in a particular subject is likely to make you a good teacher in that subject.  Certainly in my own first subject, mathematics, many of the brightest mathematicians are unlikely to be good school teachers. In general in the sciences, I would far prefer a teacher who has a really deep understanding of GCSE and A level Physics to one who has a hazy (albeit sufficient to get 2:2 or even 2:1 degree) knowledge at degree-level. I certainly want teachers who have the interest and excitement in their topic to keep up-to-date beyond the minimum needed for their courses, but a broad ‘James Gleik’ style popular science, is probably more useful than third year courses in a Physics degree.

Finally the focus on degree classification, suggests that Michael Gove has a belief in a cross-discipline, cross-department, and cross-institutional absolute grading that appears risible to anyone working in Higher Education. Does he really believe that a 2:2 from Oxford is the same as a 2:2 at every UK institution? If so then I seriously doubt his ability to be hold the education portfolio in government.

To be fair this is a real problem in the Higher Education system as it is hard for those not ‘in the know’ to judge the meaning of grades, especially as it is not simply a matter of institution, often particular parts of an institution (notably music, arts and design schools) have a different profile to the institution as a whole. Indeed we have the same problem within the university system when judging grades from other countries. This has not been helped by gradual ‘grade inflation’ across the education sector from GCSE to degrees, driven in no small part by government targets and independent ‘league tables’ that use crude measures largely unrelated to real educational success. Institutions feel under constant pressure to create rules that meet various metrics to the detriment of real academic judgement3.

If the government is seriously worried about the standard of teachers entering the profession, then shift funding of courses towards measures of real success and motivation – perhaps percentage of students who subsequently obtain public-sector teaching jobs. If the funding moves the selection will follow suit!

… and maybe at the same time this should apply across the sector.  A few weeks ago I was at the graduation at LIPA, which is still managing near 100% graduate employment despite the recession and severe cuts across the arts.  Not that employment is the only measure of success, but if metrics are to be used, then at least make them real ones. Or better still drop the metrics, targets and league tables and let students both at school and university simply learn.

  1. Hit headlines about a week ago in the UK, just catching up after holiday![back]
  2. “Reforms of teacher training will bring mass shortages, report finds“, Richard Garner, The Independent, Thursday, 11 August 2011, p14-15.[back]
  3. In fact, I came very close to resigning earlier in the summer over this issue.[back]

Osama Bin Laden – if only we had let him go to court 10 years ago

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Just hearing the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death and thinking what a waste of 10 years and numerous lives. Straight after 9/11 the Taliban put Osama bin Laden under house arrest and offered to hand him over to an international Islamic court. Just imagine the world today of we had taken up this offer. Instead of a Robin Hood figure and now a martyr, he would have been a criminal tried and convicted.

Osama bin Laden had few friends in the governments of the Mulsim world, even the Taliban, which had been secretly trying to get rid of him to the US for some years before 9/11. Maybe the Islamic court would have had him imprisoned or executed itself. Maybe it would have extradited him to the US to stand trial there. Either way it would have been under an Islamic aegis, rather than perceived as an act against Islam.

Just imagine the world now with no Afghan war, no perceived invasion of Muslim countries (although maybe the Iraq war would have happened earlier without Afghanistan to take attention). So many thousands of lives. Possibly no Bali, Madrid or London bombings.

One of the reason there was no public pressure at the time for this legal rather than military route was the lack of reporting. I was perhaps fortunate to be flying on 9/11 and spent the three weeks after in South Africa where the detention was well reported. When I returned home, it was mentioned just a few times in interviews and discussions and in each case the interviewer ignored it and moved on to a fresh questions as if it were too embarrassing to be discussed. I heard later that, in the early days after 9/11, the BBC was more open in its reporting, but got its ‘wrists slapped’ by government, and so, by the time I was back, was avoiding difficult issues; something that sadly seems to be the case since in many conflicts.

If 10 years ago we had cared more for justice than revenge, then Osama bin Laden could have been a symbol of unity between Islamic and Western worlds, jointly prosecuted and condemned for the killing of innocents. Instead he has become a cause of division, that is unlikely to end with his death,

the real tragedy of the commons

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I’ve just been reviewing a paper that mentions the “tragedy of the commons”1  and whenever I read or hear the phrase I feel the hackles on the back of my neck rise.

Of course the real tragedy of the commons was not free-riding and depletion by common use, but the rape of the land under mass eviction or enclosure movements when they ceased to be commons.  The real tragedy of “the tragedy of the commons” as a catch phrase is that it is often used to promote the very same practices of centralisation.  Where common land has survived today, just as in the time before enclosures and clearances, it is still managed in a collaborative way both for the people now and the for the sake of future generations.  Indeed on Tiree, where I live, there are large tracts of common grazing land managed in just such a way.

It is good to see that the Wikipedia article of “Tragedy of the Commons” does give a rounded view on the topic including reference to an historical and political critique by “Ian Angus”2

The paper I was reading was not alone in uncritically using the phrase.  Indeed in “A Framework for Web Science”3 we read:

In a decentralised and growing Web, where there are no “owners” as such, can we be sure that decisions that make sense for an individual do not damage the interests of users as a whole? Such a situation, known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, happens in many social systems that eschew property rights and centralised institutions once the number of users becomes too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles.

In fact I do have some sympathy with this as the web involves a vast number of physically dispersed users who are perhaps “too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles”.  However, what is strange is that the web has raised so many modern counter examples to the tragedy of the commons, not least Wikipedia itself.  In many open source projects people work as effectively a form of gift economy, where, if there is any reward, it is in the form of community or individual respect.

Clearly, there are examples in the world today where many individual decisions (often for short term gain) lead to larger scale collective loss.  This is most clearly evident in the environment, but also the recent banking crisis, which was fuelled by the desire for large mortgages and general debt-led lives.  However, these are exactly the opposite of the values surrounding traditional common goods.

It may be that the problem is not so much that large numbers of people dilute social and moral pressure, but that the impact of our actions becomes too diffuse to be able to appreciate when we make our individual life choices.  The counter-culture of many parts of the web may reflect, in part, the way in which aspects of the web can make the impact of small individual actions more clear to the individual and more accountable to others.

  1. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248. … and here is the danger of citation counting as a quality metric, I am citing it because I disagree with it![back]
  2. Ian Angus. The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons. Socialist Voice, August 24, 2008[back]
  3. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N. and Weitzner, D. J. (2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (1). pp. 1-130.  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13347/[back]

Qualification vs unlimited education

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In “Adrift in Caledonia“, Nick Thorpe is in the Shetland Isles speaking to Stuart Hill (aka ‘Captain Calamity’).  Stuart says:

“What does qualification mean? … Grammatically, a qualification limits the meaning of a sentence. And that’s what qualifications seem to do to people. When you become a lawyer it becomes impossible to think of yourself outside that definition. The whole of the education system is designed to fit people into employment, into the system. It’s not designed to realise their full creativity.”

Now Stuart may be being slightly cynical and maybe the ‘whole of education system’ is not like that, but sadly the general thrust often seems so.

Indeed I recently tweeted a link to @fmeawad‘s post “Don’t be Shy to #fail” as it echoed my own long standing worries (see “abject failures“) that we have a system that encourages students to make early, virtually unchangeable, choices about academic or career choices, and then systematically tell them how badly they do at it. Instead the whole purpose of education should be to enable people to discover their strengths and their purposes and help them to excel in those things, which are close to their heart and build on their abilities.  And this may involve ‘failures’ along the way and may mean shifting areas and directions.

At a university level the very idea behind the name ‘university’ was the bringing together of disparate scholars.  In “The Rise and Progress of  Universities” (Chapter 2. What is a University?, 1854) John Henry Newman (Cardinal Newman, recently beatified) wrote:

“IF I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or “School of Universal Learning.” This description implies the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot;—from all parts; else, how will you find professors and students for every department of knowledge? and in one spot; else, how can there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this description; but such as this a University seems to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.”

Note the emphasis on having representatives of many fields of knowledge ‘in one spot’: the meeting and exchange, the flow across disciplines, and yet is this the experience of many students?  In the Scottish university system, students are encouraged to study a range of subjects early on, and then specialise later; however, this is as part of a four year undergraduate programme that starts at 17.  At Lancaster there is an element of this with students studying three subjects in their first year, but the three year degree programmes (normally starting at 18) means that for computing courses we now encourage students to take 2/3 of that first year in computing in order to lay sufficient ground to cover material in the rest of their course.  In most UK Universities there is less choice.

However, to be fair, the fault here is not simply that of university teaching and curricula; students seem less and less willing to take a wider view of their studies, indeed unwilling to consider anything that is not going to be marked for final assessment.  A five year old is not like this, and I assume this student resistance is the result of so many years in school, assessed and assessed since they are tiny; one of the reasons Fiona and I opted to home educate our own children (a right that seems often under threat, see “home education – let parents alone!“).  In fact, in the past there was greater degree of cross-curricula activity in British schools, but this was made far more difficult by the combination of the National Curriculum prescribing content,  SATs used for ‘ranking’ schools, and increasingly intrusive ‘quality’ and targets bureaucracy introduced from the 1980s onwards.

Paradoxically, once a student has chosen a particular discipline, we often then force a particular form of breadth within it.  Sometimes this is driven by external bodies, such as the BPA, which largely determines the curriculum in psychology courses across the UK.  However, we also do it within university departments as we determine what for us is considered a suitable spread of studies, and then forcing students into it no matter what their leanings and inclinations, and despite the fact that similar institutions may have completely different curricula.  So, when a student ‘fails’ a module they must retake the topic on which they are clearly struggling in order to scrape a pass or else ‘fail’ the entire course.  Instead surely we should use this this as an indication of aptitude and maybe instead allow students to take alternative modules in areas of strength.

Several colleagues at Talis are very interested in the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), which is attempting to create a much more student-led experience. I would guess that Stuart Hill might have greater sympathy with this endeavour, than with the traditional education system.  Personally, I have my doubts as to whether being virtually / digitally ‘in one spot‘ is the same as actually being co-present (but the OU manage), and whether being totally student-led looses the essence of scholarship, teaching1 and mentoring, which seems the essence of what a university should be. However, P2PU and similar forms of open education (such as the Khan Academy)  pose a serious intellectual challenge to the current academic system: Can we switch the balance back from assessment to education?  Can we enable students to find their true potential wherever it lies?

  1. Although ‘teaching’ is almost a dirty word now-a-days, perhaps I should write ‘facilitating learning’![back]

UK internet far from ubiquitous

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On the last page of the Guardian on Saturday (13th Oct) in a sort of ‘interesting numbers’ section, they say that:

“30% of the UK population have no internet access at home”

I couldn’t find the exact source of this, however, another  guardian article “UK internet audience rises by 1.9 million over last year” dated Wednesday 30 June 2010 has a similar figure.  This says that Internet use  has grown to 38.8 million. The National Statistics office say the overall UK population is 61,792,000 with 1/5 under 16, so call that 2 in 16 under 10 or around 8 million. That gives an overall population of a little under 54 million over 10 years old, that is still only 70% actually using the web at all.

My guess is that some of the people with internet at home do not use it, and some of the ones without home connections use it using other means (mobile, use at school, cyber cafe’s), but by both measures we are hardly a society where the web is as ubiquitous as one might have imagined.