Month: July 2006

I've been cutting back our military spending, reducing our air pollution and increasing car taxes recently. No, thankfully I've not been elected to any position of power – I've been trying out Democracy, an incredible simulation that lets you run a country, or try to.

Call it “Edutainment” or a strategy game, Democracy is a really sophisticated and rich simulation which uses a neural net to perform its calculations. You play the Prime Minister (or President depending on the country you pick) and have to balance the budget, introduce or cancel policies and respond to events outside your control while keeping the diverse populace content enough to vote for you at the next election. Easy, right? Wrong.

The game is packed with pithy quotes from politicans. Like this erm… soundbite from Tony.

It's fun and very difficult, even on the easy setting! It's a superb learning tool which helps us all realise the hard choices and less than ideal compromises politicians are forced to make. It's a fantastic tool for all those aspiring politicians out there.

I boldly slashed defence spending only to be rocked by a terrorist attack in our capital. Cutting back on road building won me the fervent support of the greenies, but with 3 times as many motorists out there I was bleeding popularity points. Plus my renewable energy subsidies pollution controls were unbalancing the national budget. Yikes.

I decided against an Internet Tax in the end – thank goodness

The range of policies available is already good but even so the game developer has released instructions on how to modify the game to add new policies and other tweaks. The game also auto-updates with new policies and events direct from the developer.

Is this e-democracy? Perhaps not as it's just a simulation, though budget simulator games have been used in the UK e-democracy pilots to educate voters about the challenges their councils face. Either way I think it's a fantastic piece of software and wonderfully engaging for the political junkie in me. What's more the clear and approachable way in which policies, budgets and voters groups are presented should be inspirational for many future e-democracy applications.

Democracy, by Positech Games is available for Windows and Mac at a cost of £12.49 or $22.95. A free demo is available online for both platforms.

Ella got her first passport yesterday – a British one with new-fangled biometric data and RFID chip to boot. Some observations:

* The new process involves printing a scan of the holder’s photo directly onto the page. The resulting quality is rather poor.

* The whole information page is now like a giant inflexible smart card due to the ultra-heavy-duty lamination and chip. Which begs the question, why not just use proven smart card technology which is more secure than RFID?

* The chip and aerial are visible and look vulnerable. I wonder what happens if they break? Does the passport fail to be valid in places like the USA?

* There doesn’t appear to be any shielding in the cover to prevent skimming of the RFID chip. I’m not going to count on some unspecified encryption so I’m definitely in the market for some kind of shielding passport holder. Probably more than one as the Home Office lost both my wife’s and my passport so we’ll end up chipped soon enough.

I was in the bank the other day when a women in front of me went up to the counter and asked to take out £2,500 from her account. She couldn’t have her money though as she hadn’t brought her driving license or passport. We’ve heard this one before but it gets better… Her passport had expired a year ago and she only had an old driving license at home (without photo etc). This perplexed the rather rude young lady behind the counter who had to speak to a supervisor who called a manager.

I never saw the conclusion to this little saga though I was offered a savings account at an abominably poor interest rate because I paid a few hundred quid into my account. Harrumph.

I love the fact that, for now, identity is distributed so that you can use a wide variety of documents to prove yourself. I’m sure the bank would have gone back to the actual rules and accepted something other than a passport or driving license because of course nobody has to have either of those. In fact you should probably get a tax break for being without both as you must be a particularly environmentally friendly soul.

We are all doomed to go to hell in a handbasket when the new national ID programme comes into force. Thankfully our civil service is doing their best to undermine the programme before it gets going – excellent work chaps.

These uber-passport and ID card projects remind me ever so much of electronic voting. The basic chronology is something like:

1. Politician hears about some new-fangled technology and decides it’s a good idea.
2. Raises idea with colleagues who all think technology is “good” and tell him to go for it.
3. Politician tells civil servants to get cracking on it.
4. Civil servants have no knowledge or expertise about this technology but do their best.
5. Either the project never gets completed because it’s not feasible or something is made at huge expense which is insecure and a white elephant.
6. Politician quietly moves on to another pet project.

For the sake of my taxes I sincerely hope ID cards croak before we get much further.