I, Science

Student science magazine with some interesting layout etc...

Might be useful if anyone's still needing that sort of thing.

Cars, the DVLA, MID and more about Cars

As an example of a regulatory authority for Jan10 unit 1, the DVLA and it's associated organisations is worth a look if you haven't already got all your content sorted.

Directgov - how to tax your vehicle is where I started

From there I found out how to tax my vehicle online from where I found out:

Insurance, MOT and entitlement to disability exemption are checked electronically during the application. A tax disc and receipt for payment is posted to you within five working days.

Valid insurance on the date you want the tax disc to come into force (or the date you apply, if this is later) is checked on the Motor Insurance Database (MID) run by the Motor Insurers Bureau. If your vehicle tax and insurance are due at the same time or if you’ve recently changed your insurance company, there may be problems checking insurance while waiting for the MID to update.

Before you tax, you can make an online check to see if the MID has updated. The result will apply only to the day you make your check.

...which goes someway to telling me how they use ICT.

I then looked at the DVLA site where I actually do the registering for car tax. The Apply for a tax disc page tells me:

The Motor Insurance Database (MID) holds insurance details of vehicles. You can check if your vehicle is on the database today by visiting their website at www.askmid.com. Please note, to complete a relicensing transaction valid insurance needs to be on the database on the day the new tax disc comes into force.

...which shows me that there are clearly a number of databases which are linked up and hold an awful lot of information about cars and their drivers. You'll learn more about databases in Unit 3, but for now just accept that you can hold a lot of data in databases and that different databases in different agencies can "talk" to each other to do this sort of thing. But that that requires skill in using computers.

I also checked the DVLA FAQ. Question 4 tells me:

How do you check Insurance, MoT Certificates and GVT Certificates?

When you apply for a tax disc online or by using our telephone service, the vehicle's insurance will be electronically checked with the Motor Insurance Database (MID), run by the Motor Insurers' Bureau (MIB)

MoT Certificates and GVT Certificates will also be checked electronically with the MoT Database. Only customers with an electronic MoT Certificate or GVT Certificate are eligible to use this service.

From all this stuff I got to various other places:

• askMID, where I can check if my vehicle is insured (if I could remember the number plate anyway...)
• the VOSN MOTinfo page, where I can check if I have a valid MOT
• the Directgov page where I can report a vehicle which I believe isn't registered in an anonymous way. This is an interesting idea - I imagine it means they get more reports made and that they can quickly check the data against their databases?
• and the VOSA main page, which links to a little you tube video about how they're helping to save lives on the road - which is probably how you can link all of this to the Jan10 paper. You might find some of the linked videos useful as well.

Links to safety: keeps uninsured drivers off the road who are more likely to cause accidents and who push up insurance costs for all other drivers (you could probably find figures on this); allows police to check details of vehicles quickly and pull drivers without insurance/tax etc...; if vehicles are not taxed the DVLA knows where they were last held and can send people to check on them - untaxed vehicles more likely to be used dangerously perhaps?; details can be checked if you're going to buy a car - including mileage - which might reduce the possibility of criminals "clocking" a vehicle or selling one which is dangerous having been in an accident and written off etc..

Pros: quick, links up databases, stops people without insurance getting vehicles taxed, allows increased reporting of taxed vehicles, saves money as it doesn't need people to do this any more, saves time as I don't have to queue in the post office

Cons: if the database is wrong then I can't tax my car, the system's only as good as the data in it, data has to be checked, which takes time and costs money, cost to set up, problems with data getting lost - all my personal details could be on their databases, privacy issues, data protection issues

Criminal tagging

Some BBC articles:

How tracking of offenders works

Electronic tagging investigated

The FSA and data protection

Just taking a look at how the FSA (Financial Services Authority to you guv) uses ICT threw up an article about them fining someone or other for Data Protection Act breaches.

This might be quite an interesting article for jan10 - it would cover the DPA aspect and allow you to cover a regulatory authority, although the pros and cons aren't awfully clear. Might be worth a starting point though.

Tattoo me...

On the news this morning - the potential use of infra-red digital photography to capture images of tattoos which might be useful in capturing villans.

There's a handy BBC article (Camera filter reveals tattoo clue) as a starting point and an article in the Derby Telegraph. That led me to the press release on the University of Derby's site:

"Identifying individuals using tattoos has been an established part of forensic science practice for some time, but there can be cover-ups of tattoos with lasers, more tattoos or surgery."

It is now possible to take a control photograph and a separate photograph with an infra-red filter to take images of the tattoo, and determine if it is indeed the original or is a cover-up, or altered tattoo on the surface.

Digital photography means that moments after the images have been taken, they can be viewed on a laptop or computer screen - making this interesting approach now more feasible for use in everyday forensic work, compared to more traditional processes."

David Bryson, quoted from link above

From there I got to the Forensic sciences faculty pages at Derby. Now I wonder if this has any other potentially useful ICT sorts of applications you might be able to use? I'm thinking we can get CSI, Spooks andWaking the Dead into this newsletter you know...

Then I got to David Bryson's bio on the Derby website and from there to his own site called Cladonia Resources which might possibly have something vaguely useful on it. It was quite interesting following the path to get there though... . A prize to the first person who can tell me (withoug using google) who or what Cladonia is. My money's on Mr Heald...

Ooh, really obscure cultural reference in the title to this post btw...

Beanie gives you some links

Beanie says "are you frustrated that the filtering systems won't let you look at useful articles about facial recgnition"?

Try these then:

Facial recognition - how stuff works

Biometrics - a review thing?

You might also want to look at the post on Police legal and regultory authorities. It's quite useful.

Spammers in the can

Well...

Police shut down 1,200 scam shopping websites anyway. So, I presume, the police need computer experts to help them with this sort of thing? Might fit Jan 10 content, at least as a bit of an aside perhaps.

The 1,219 websites purported to sell items ranging from Ugg boots and Tiffany & Co jewellery to GHD hair straighteners.

Well, that'll be all my pressies then...

Apparently the Met has a specialist e-crime unit - the PCeU (Police Central e-crime Unit). Might be worth looking and seeing if you can find anything about them (e2a: here's their website - use the left hand menu to find stuff). The Met also has a Fraud Alert! webpage which may have useful bits and bobs on it. Perhaps.

Interetsingly some regulatory organisations are name checked in the article as well - Consumer Direct, Trading Standards and the Office of Fair Trading. I guess these guys must use computer people as well.

12 Newsletter design mistakes

I originally got this list from One Page Newsletters. I'm not sure, the content there seems to have to be paid for now (and it sucks as a webpage fwiw - look at the length of that!).

There's a copy of the detail on this on the school system. It may be on the Learning Platform as well, I don't remember (e2a: yes, it's in the Newsletter production folder that you'll find in the AS Unit 1 section).

But here's the base list if the 12 most common newsletter design mistakes:

1. Nameplate clutter - too much info in the newsletter name
2. Lack of white space
3. Unnecessary graphic accents - borders, lines etc...
4. Text wraps
5. Overuse of upper case type
6. Underlining - just don't
7. Long subheads - short and sweet, like me
8. Inappropriate typeface choices - use serif fonts already
9. Inappropriate type sizes - 12 is often too large for body copy you know!
10. Insufficient line spacing - always think about increasing it a little
11. Failure to hyphenate - arguments both ways on this, but it might well be a good idea
12. Excessive colour - 2 colours plus B&W is recommended

Yes, you can ignore all of this. But it might be a good idea to think about it at least.

Stars of CCTV - streamed on the web

Odd story.

There's a proposal to put CCTV streams live on the web as streaming video.

Yeah, so I could be viewing a stream and see someone I know doing something they shouldn't. Perhaps?

The proposal is that there would be a prize for the best "crime spotter" each month - £1000 I think.

Aside from all the civil liberties issues associated with this, there's some useful factoids about CCTV in the article and some evaluation of it's effectiveness (or not).

Open Sesame

Sesame is the Open University students magazine.

Yes, it's the OU so it's aimed perhaps at slightly older people than you might want. But all the copies of the magazine are downloadable (often large!) pdfs.

You can find Sesame at the OU website.

Police, legal and regultory organisations

Did some talking when I was in London yesterday to other teachers dealing with this stuff - as well as one of the chief examiner blokes for the specification. This is January 2010 content btw.

We came up with a few ideas.

The key point to remember is this is the caveat that the uses of ICT need to be ways "to combat threats to individuals and society". That actually takes out some possible uses.

Stuff that you might want to consider:

Police:

• HOLMES is an obvious one
• CCTV
• Number plate recognition -wiki page
  
• Speed cameras perhaps
• Facial recognition stuff (from biometric data - they started using this at airports last summer) - a lot of odd biometric stuff is covered in this Guardian article. This is the wikipedia page on Facial recognition systems. How Stuff Works also has a page on this.
  
• Things like swabs for explosive residue maybe?

Legal:

• Databases used by people like the probation service would, presumably, make it easier to track where people are and not to lose them
• Offender tags?
• Maybe stuff connected to courts?
• Law Technology News is almost certainly worth a look. You'll need to dig out the useful stuff, but there's probably something here if you're struggling for interesting legal stuff.
  

Regulatory:

• Certainly stuff like the Financial Services Authority is OK - the potential for insider trading, for example, could destabilise the financial system and therefore be a threat to society
• The DVLA maybe - although how you'd link this to a threat I'm less sure: perhaps through keeping a record of which cars have tax - are untaxed cars more likely to be driven by people who are a risk (e.g. disqualified or untrained?) and less likely to be uninsured, which pushes up everyone else's insurance? Tricky though.
• Maybe things like the TV licence people - but I'm not sure how this comes down to a threat.
• The Nuclear Inspectorate people

Ideas? Post a comment - use this as a place to share ideas. Perhaps?

Not forgetting that they can't be control systems.

Oooh, Spooks...

Just watching Spooks now - about 20 minutes or so into this episode (episode 5 - it won't be on iPlayer just yet), some interesting IT which, although it may or may not be pure fantasy, would make a really quite cool hook for a newsletter article imo.

MI5 - Careers for you?

There's a job going in Business intelligence in MI5. Have a look - you might find some stuff out about their use of IT. £45k as well...

There's a whole range of Day in the Lifes that you might want to take a look at. For example:

MI5 - Day in the life of Sara in the Language Unit - shows you how they might use IT skills on a basic level

MI5 - Adam from the UNIX team - lots of geekyness here

You should check the general Day in the Life link above - you'll get all of the possibilities. Well worth five minutes of your time.

Oh, don't forget - you're not writing a careers magazine. It needs to be a newsletter about how organisations like this might be using ICT...

Digital Economy Bill

This is starting to get more and more controversial.

It's an attempt by the British government to exert more control over the interwebz - specifically, at first glance, things like file sharing. Quite the extent of the controls which might be applied, however, is interesting - and left rather open by the bill before parliament.

I wonder whether this might be worth looking at from the point of view of regulatory organisations for the Jan 10 exam? It might be pushing things, but it's the sort of topical story that would be worth throwing in as a way of showing that you're nice and up to date (if it will fit in the newsletter that is - don't just throw it in for no apparent reason.

Tweeting Police

Looks like the cops are now using Twitter (and maybe other stuff) to try to do the whole community policing thing in a more 21st Century sort of way.

There's a BBC article that explains all this and focuses on a jolly nice police person called Ed. He is not, as far as I am aware, a duck. Which is good.

"Posting a message on Twitter warning about a spate of burglaries in an area is a similar concept to pinning up a poster on the local parish council noticeboard."

"Doing either in isolation might be fine, but by doing both we can spread that warning even further."

Almost certainly useful for Jan10 exam.

And...

Greater Manchester police have been signing up users to get Facebook updates on crime in their area. More than 25,000 people seem to have signed up. Sign up! Get the updates!

Some of the links from these articles might be handy to take a look at as well.

Two held in global PC fraud probe

Two held in global PC fraud probe - might be worth a look for jan10 exam

Cyber war

No, not whatever the name of that game which was released last week: this is proper war.

Article from the BBC website:

Cyber war has moved from fiction to fact, says a report.
Compiled by security firm McAfee, it bases its conclusion on analysis of recent net-based attacks.

Would seem to fit quite well for the Jan 10 exam for Unit 1...

Designing - detail, detail, detail...

The key test for designs (and this is true for exams and portfolios) is:

could I (a skilled user) implement your design exactly as you have presented it working only from your designs and without having to make decisions myself?

In other words: does it tell me everything I need to know?

Everything.

Size, font, location, colours, macros, formulae. The whole banana. In enough detail.

It's fine to use more than one sheet of paper for each page. You might want one for the GUI and one for formulas for a spreadsheet. You might need another form macros. For a newsletter you may need one for layout and one for style.

The key is: is there enough detail (through annotations) for me to be able to produce it.

Here's one that someone, let's call her "Grace", made earlier.

Yeah, click it: it gets bigger...

It's *just* for the GUI - the layout of the sheet. The detail's OK - but she now needs to go on and get the details of the size for the boxes (by right clicking on her sheet she's designed and getting properties and the size tab), the width of the lines, the colour of the lines and the colour (a bright yellow) of the button.

To define the colour it'd be best to use a quantitative method - like using the RGB. You should be able to find a way of doing this (ask if you can't). In this case you can go to the lines/colors tab and go to more colors and you should be able to get the RGB from there:

ICT Systems - what?

Good question:how do we define precisely what an ICT system is?

Here's one definition of a system:

A set of related component parts brought together to form an inter-connected unified whole to perform some function.

Hmm - so it's a bunch of stuff that comes together to do a job of some kind. The "stuff" can be people, ideas, computers, buildings or anything else - anything can be a component of the system.

So, here's an example of a computerised booking system for a health centre.

You can see the components within the system (the ovals), the boundary of the system (the line) and the idea of a subsystem.

Connectedness:
One of the key ideas about systems is that they're connected. The components need to be linked together to perform the function of the network.

So, in the health centre booking example, the patient needs to be connected to the receptionist (via a telephone perhaps) who needs to be able to connect to a computer (via it's interface to access specific software I imagine).

Without connectedness systems aren't systems.

ICT Systems:
ICT systems basically do 3 things in some form:

1. convey data - move it from one place to another
2. manipulate data - change it from one form to another
3. store data - so that it can be used at some other point

Here's a system map of a system for sending SMS messages from one user to another.

Another way of drawing this is as a flow diagram:

In this diagram User 1 keys the SMS message into their handset. The handset stores the message and manipulates it into a form which can be sent electronically (i.e. into binary code). The handset then connects to the SMS network and conveys the message to the message server where it is stored. The server then conveys the message to the receiving unit (perhaps via other parts of it's network) which stores and manipulates the data before alerting the user that they have a new text message.

The information will also be manipulated (and then stored) to work out how much to charge the users of the system - and data held on the server will be updated to reflect all of this.

Summary Bit:
There's the ICT system: components working together to convey, manipulate and store data to achieve an aim.

Spooks!

OK, so Spooks, the BBC take on MI5 (not 9 to 5...) might be total tosh in reality terms (and the political subtexts in it are 'interesting' in themselves), but for a newsletter aimed at final year students it might prove an interesting hook for a story or two.

I'm not suggesting you take anything in it all that seriously, but it does strike me as a way to grab a readers attention (look at how the OU article I linked to in Killer Instinct uses popular culture as well).

From a audience needs point of view I think I'd like articles which grab my attention and make me want to read them. Lucas or Ros from Spooks would do that I think...

Available on series catchup on the BBC iPlayer at the moment (and it really isn't *that* scary you know...)