pumpkinstrokemarrow

A administrative oddity to report today. A couple of months ago I was moved to give some money to a charity. The form being that you wrote your credit card details on a form, ticked a few boxes and sent it in, second class prepaid. The transaction turned up on my credit card account around 11 March. Then a thank you letter dated 18 March arrived with the right name and address but entirely the wrong salutation. Leaving aside the length of time taken to process the donation, hopefully the result of the charity concerned being overwhelmed with them, how do they manage to make mailmerge or whatever comparable function they use to generate the thank you letters attach a salutation for one person and a name and address for another to one and the same letter. Perhaps the answer is that they actually generate the things more or less by hand, rather than whooshing them off their donors' file at the push of a button. Hopefully their charitable skills are of a higher order than their IT skills.

Or are all these things actually processed by a sub-contractor who specialises in handling donations for charities, in the same way that many charities outsource their street collections to sub-contractors? In which case I hope there are performance indicators built into the contract which encourage them to push transactions through at a good clip. The street collections I do not care for. Charity is supposed to be just that, not scruffy looking young people being paid to pester you in the street. I have a similar difficulty with charities paying their chief officers commercial rates - although they make the reasonable point that if you don't want monkeys it is better not to pay peanuts. Maybe yet another sign of age: I do not care for the way that the charity business is going corporate. Apart from being NFP, not much to choose between them and MacDonalds.

Wondered about the possibility of fraud if the form had fallen into the wrong hands. Presumably, anyone able to extract money from my account on the basis of the details of the form would have to be fully paid up members of some banking club. And so traceable. So provided I check my bank statement to make sure that the payment is made just once to the right people, I am OK. And the person with the wrong hands would be taking quite a risk. OK perhaps, if he managed to collect details from few thousand people like me, collect dosh and then promptly skip out or drop out. Not happened yet.

Got around, over the last couple of days, to connecting properly with the article on sexual abuse in prisons in the US mentioned on 27 March. In the course of which I decided that my knowledge of probability and statistics so expensively acquired forty years ago had faded into the background. It took me ages to grapple with formerly elementary questions like 'if something happens on average once a month, what is the chance of it happening in a year'? This particular question arising from a sample of prisoners. If 4% percent of prisoners interviewed on any one day reported having been abused, what percentage of prisoners will be abused during their stay? What is the total number of abused prisoners?

That apart, the numbers look unpleasant, with an estimated 90,000 prisoners reporting having been abused in either federal or state facilities, around 4% of the total, this estimate being based on a snapshot sample. I came away thinking that while one might quibble with the methods and the estimates, the problem looks real enough. I just hope that those who try and sort it out take the time to read 'The secrets of Bryn Estyn' (see January 17 2009) so that they get to know how not do it. Do not encourage often disturbed and unpleasant inmates to make allegations and then pay them by results. I was also reminded of how many people get locked up in the US. In a population maybe six times ours they appear to lock up maybe twenty times as many as we do, Wikipedia reporting a very rapid increase in the last 30 years. Bureau of Justice Statistics no doubt has it all, but seems a lot harder to get into than the comparable UK statistics.

My other foray into the net today was trying to find out what our esteemed leader, Gordon Brown, studied at university. The No. 10 website makes it clear that he was a very clever chap, running to a first class degree and a PhD and who was also very keen on sport, but is oddly coy about the subject of study. As were most of the other sites that Mr G. turned up. Eventually, the Economist tells me that his subject was history. I didn't get to find out what the PhD was on but I would not mind betting that it is on some former illumination of the Scottish labour movement, Gordon B. having been very keen on the labour movement and politics from a very early age. So at least he is not a lawyer, even if he has not had all that much exposure to the real world.

Another variation on the chicken soup theme today. Boil down one organic & vegetarian chicken carcase to around three pints of stock. Drain and leave to cool. An hour out, add six ounces of red lentils and bring back up to simmer. Fifteen minutes out, add seven carrots, sliced coarsely crosswise. Five minutes out, add three ounces of cold boiled white rice. Two minutes out, add two ounces of cold roast chicken, chopped, with the stalks of ten mushrooms. One minute out, add ten mushroom lids, each sliced into three pieces. Serve with fresh white bread. Just the ticket for a wet March luncheon hour.