Risk and asymmetric metrics

Why should schools have high fences, security cameras and biometric pass cards? Why should employment contracts be conditional on the supply of fingerprints and retina scans checked against a central database? Why should DNA samples of every citizen be held by the state? Why should sharp-nibbed pens be banned in hand luggage on planes?

Given any of these questions, it’s easy to think of plausible answers. To prevent identity theft or hijackings or deter illegal immigration; to stop sex offenders or mad gunmen or kidnappers from getting into schools. We can come up with these ‘security narratives’ regardless of how high the level of risk of the things we wish to prevent, because it’s so easy for us to measure the benefits of the interventions we are considering. If we know that mad gunmen typically get into schools because of lax physical security, it’s obvious that tightening up physical security will directly reduce the number of man gunmen getting into schools. This is, our thought processes tell us, a Good Thing. Up go the fences, on goes the CCTV. It doesn’t matter how many or few mad gunmen get into schools, because fewer is always better, so anything that will reduce the risk automatically gets the nod.

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Why Seth Godin is wrong (and why he isn’t)

Seth Godin’s blog post of a few days back, in which he accuses non-profits of hating change, has caused a lot of stir in some sections of the non-profit advisory sector (a sector which barely existed a few years ago) and the charities sector more generally.

Some of the best responses have challenged Godin’s metrics for ambition and responsiveness to change. For sure these are controversial. He uses in support of his argument the fact that none of the 100 most followed users on Twitter are charities. This rather fatally equates ambition with scale, and assumes that free-to-use social media platforms really do provide a level playing field, completely ignoring the level of sophistication and the investment of time (and money to buy expertise) needed to build sustained social media presences. Unsurprisingly, charities which are often stretched for time and resources often feel they have better things to be doing.

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The way brands talk

I’m looking for examples of brands that have a really distinctive tone of voice. Good examples are Innocent (which has spawned lots of imitators with its friendly tone) and Marks and Spencer (which has spawned lots of parodies and come to typify the speaking voice of ‘food porn’). Do you know of any brands that sound a bit unusual in their marketing communications?

I’m trying to find examples to do some detailed analysis of the constituents of register (linguist-speak for ‘tone of voice’) in branding. In particular, I’d like to find examples of tone that used to sound distinctive but now don’t, in the hope of modelling the life-cycle of tone a bit more clearly.

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Public knowledge about things you don’t know

A month ago the Guardian reported on Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plan to create an online library of past school examination papers going back ‘to Victorian times’. The article included a quote from Michael Gove, saying:

It is vital that we restore public confidence in our exam system. Universities, businesses and academics say the system has been devalued.

This may be true (and in some cases it is demonstrably true), but publishing an archive of exam papers is more a way of stirring up fears of dumbing down than it is a way of restoring public confidence in the exam system.

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