flynn002

© www.CartoonStock.com Big companies exist to make profits. They don't like paying tax and they don't like paying employees. They've learned that in the modern world, they can outsource many of their customer services to countries with cheaper labour, but they are even happier when they can dispense with people altogether to move on to automated systems.  These can be really efficient for dealing with routine enquiries. Problem is, when it comes to non-routine enquiries, they really suck. I discovered this when I got a new mobile and a contract with TMobile. I signed up for monthly payments by direct debit and was happy when I received my first bill and it all seemed in order.  But I then got a mysterious text message that purported to come from 150, which is the number for Tmobile enquiries. It read: " We recently contacted you regarding your unpaid T-Mobile bill. Just to remind you that payment can be made simply by dialling 360 from your handset. " This was odd...

©CartoonStock.com During February, there was widespread media coverage of a forthcoming book by Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko called The Dyslexia Debate . I've seen an advance copy of the book, whose central message is to argue that the construct of dyslexia lacks coherence. Quite simply, dyslexia does not constitute a natural category, in terms of cognitive profile, neurobiology or genetics. The authors' arguments are backed by a large body of research: people have tried over many years to find something distinctive about dyslexia, without success. Some children are good at reading and others are not, but it's arbitrary where you place a cutoff to specify that a child has a problem. There's a popular belief that you can identify dyslexics in terms of a particular ability profile, and that affected children have a particular kind of brain organisation that makes them do things like reverse letters (b vs d) or have left-right confusion. In fact, those types of prob...