Examples

Examples
Examples are normally just a simple illustration of some supposed truth and don't have a great deal of significance. However, the right example can have enormous importance in shedding light on an issue and I've recently come across a few instances of this. I'll try to substantiate my assertion with the following cases (examples).


Argument On Principle
I've mentioned before in this blog that I distrust people who insist on principles. I think I stated something along the lines that principles were in many cases simply bludgeons with which to beat opposing arguments over the head. An instance of this came when my son referred me to a series of comments around the John Terry trial on Facebook. Reading through the comments I was struck by two discrete trains of thought. One was pragmatic, offering various suggestions; the other was based on principle: if he uttered the words........then in principle.......which led to some apparently silly conclusions.

Given my stated position, I tried to think of an example against arguing on principle. It is this. Suppose you find a 10p piece on the ground; what do you do? You could pick it up and put in your pocket, which would be a practical solution, although against principles of honesty and legality. Or, you could ignore it, which would be to dodge the issue. The solution according to principles of honesty and legality would be to hand it in at the nearest police station, have the transaction recorded and the 10p piece kept somewhere safe to await a claimant. Common sense would suggest that was an unnecessary waste of time and resources but not what principles would dictate. Now suppose the money found was not 10p but a bundle of notes to the tune of £10, 000. Both principle and common sense would propose that this find should be handed in. The point of this example is that common sense can easily distinguish between these two cases but argument on principle never can.

The Year 2000 Problem
I spent years working, lecturing and consulting on the date problem affecting computers as the year 2000 approached and became probably the foremost commentator on it in Europe ( I was often called that). Yet during all that time I never came up with a single, simple, clinching example as to why the problem was not only real but had widespread implications. It is only recently that I have been able to formulate it, as follows.

One item of data that is used in countless transactions but never recorded in a computer system is a person's age. It is used frequently and widely in financial, medical and social applications. It is not recorded because it changes every day and would therefore need updating every day. When it is needed it is always calculated and it is calculated by subtracting the person's date of birth, which is recorded, from the current date, which the computer knows(?). Moreover, the result of this calculation is never signed (+ or -) because that is unnecessary; a person can't have a negative age if he/she already exists. So....let's take the situation of a woman born in 1980 in 2001. Her age would be calculated as 01 minus 80, giving -79 (but there would be no minus sign). This woman might be pregnant and looking for a mortgage to buy a house, at a calculated age of 79. It's not difficult to understand the implications of that, financial, medical and social. Why couldn't I have thought of that example in the 1990s?

The UK Postcode
I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to figure out what goes wrong in the use of UK postcodes on websites but I have finally got there. The Post Office created postcodes and so also, I reasonably infer, the code for generating possible addresses from a given postcode. I infer also that this has been made available to websites. The problem is that it has a logical flaw for any organisation that has contact outside the UK. This is an unnecessary consideration for the Post Office, since it is concerned with delivery only to buildings within the UK, so it has been omitted. Organisations that may require to recognise contact outside the UK (after all, the first two “w”s of www stand for worldwide) have slavishly incorporated the code without realising the logical flaw, which requires an escape (or “else”) clause.

It's taken me too long to realise how this has happened but it's clearly taken many UK organisations longer, as the flaw is still prevalent on many UK organisations' websites (government, utilities, hotels, you name it). And they should bloody well wake up and do something about it. In code, it's a simple IF, THEN, ELSE statement. IF UK, THEN Postcode; ELSE ignore Postcode. Please, please copy.