John Hudson

Computers to marks essays… if only.

Another of those internet surveys…

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

Well, I guess it could be true: the ‘existentialist’ in me certainly thinks that it’s down to humanity to tackle its social problems… and the ‘postmodernist’ in me brings so many doubts as to the best policies! But the cultural creative… does that mean I do it all with nice PowerPoint slides?

The Forbes magazine list of the world’s super-rich has increased to a record 691 people with a combined fortune of $2.2 trillion (£1.14 trillion).

Microsoft’s boss Bill Gates is top of the billionaires’ list for the 11th year in a row [...] Mr Gates nevertheless saw his net worth decline slightly to $46.5bn from $46.6bn.

From: BBC News.

The government are flagging claims that they’ve saved £0.5 billion via a crackdown on benefit fraud.

A central plank of their new strategy has been increased data sharing within government, though it seems that the Inland Revenue were initially reluctant to participate:

The dramatic turnaround follows a decision pushed through four years ago by the former social security minister, Angela Eagle, to persuade the Inland Revenue to share its data with benefit offices to track down fraudsters. The policy was initially resisted by the Inland Revenue but after what Ms Eagle calls a “Whitehall kerfuffle” the tax officers backed down.

Now officials are able to trace immediately whether a claimant is both paying tax and claiming benefit at the same time. This has led to 80,914 people caught in the last year. The number of cases of people working and claiming at the same time has nearly halved in the last five years.

The ministry is also targeting what it calls “at risk” groups of people, thought to be likely to be claiming benefit while holding down self-employed jobs. Altogether 133,277 cases have been identified.

Mr Pond is adamant that the department is not picking on particular ethnic groups as part of the exercise.

Officials are also having more success in cooperating with local councils to curb housing benefit and council tax fraud. Checks on claimants revealed that some 44,000 people had made incorrect claims which did not match their income.

We await news of an equally vigorous and technologically sophisticated ‘crackdown’ on non-take up of benefit entitlements…

Came across an interesting piece on the global money markets today. I’d already seen the estimates of somewhere between US$1 and US$1.5 trillion being traded on the foreign exchange markets each day, but have to admit I had no idea that the UK’s share of this trade was (a) bigger than that of any other single nation and (b) accounted for a third of all trading globally.

(Source: http://www.ny.frb.org/education/fx/foreign.html)