The Weekly Round-Up: 26.01.07

Buckle your seatbelts! The charged issue of drivers using their mobile phones has been making headlines again this week.

It seems Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander, in common with everybody else with the gift of sight, has realised the UK's mobile phone legislation is not working. Yep, thousands of drivers on UK roads are flouting the rules with total abandon.

In fact the Round-Up regularly finds itself stuck behind another driver who has stalled on a roundabout or is veering uncontrollably towards a bus queue of school children while steering one-handedly and conducting a conversation into their phone.

It's a disgrace.

The Round-Up finds it hard enough to drive while balancing a plate of hot food and a can of beer, without other drivers further complicating matters during the morning rush hour.

But now anybody caught breaking the law will be hit with a £60 fine - that's right, a whole SIXTY of your Earth pounds - and three points on their licence.

It's hoped - some might say 'vainly' - that these stricter penalties will discourage the transgressors.

Alexander added: "Worryingly, while 92 per cent of people agree with the law, 21 per cent of drivers admit to breaking it."

Which means at least 13 per cent of drivers on the roads know using their mobile is dangerous but continue to do so.

However, with fears persisting that all these laws are well and good but largely worthless without enforcement, one reader had a better solution.

"Virtually every mobile phone has a camera and virtually every pedestrian has a mobile phone," began Karen Challinor…

Now, you may be able to guess where Karen is going with this... but let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

"Why not offer a reward for the first set of two pictures the police receive of a person driving a car showing their face, the hand holding the phone and the number plate of the vehicle."

Why two photos? You might ask. "Two photos to show the vehicle is moving," confirms Karen, which makes sense, we think.

"Time of incident would be noted from the time of sending the MMS and the location could be supplied by the phone companies triangulating the phone."

"Sending them via MMS would cheer up the phone companies too," she adds, pointing out that this is very much a win-win situation for all involved.

"I could make a comfortable living doing this," she adds, before warning that we would have to watch out for people with PhotoShop, presumably trying to defraud the system - not to mention, in her own words "a sharp increase in the number of hit and run incidents on pedestrians who are using mobile phones".

Indeed. So apart from the huge overheads, the likely road rage incidents and the difficulty of managing this process effectively it sounds very much the way to go. Power to the people.

(For the record, shopping just one person per day every day of the year would net you nearly £11,000, presumably tax free under such a system.)

Although this sounds like the kind of suggestion you make only around the time somebody else has just said "can you start drinking up now please ladies and gentlemen" there is the seed of a good idea here.

Interestingly New York has recently started enabling callers to its 911 emergency lines to send MMS messages in the shape of video and pictures. The idea is that it will allow people reporting crimes to include a great deal more detail or in a time of panic to communicate silently. So while it may be tricky to remember a car number plate while in a panic, say, victims or witnesses will be able to snap away with their cameraphones.

And initial reports suggest it's working well for the Big Apple.

At this point it is becoming customary to 'big up' the Round-Up's very own podcast which is lovingly put together each week by some of the team behind silicon.com.

Highlights - which you won't find covered in the newsletter version of the Round-Up - include a man who is selling his entire life on eBay. So check out this week's episode here… though don't worry, there's another link at the bottom of the email, should you quite understandably decide to finish reading this newsletter first… (You can also download and subscribe to the Weekly Round-Up podcast via iTunes - just follow this link.)

Another story which tends to come around every six months or so and gets everybody a little heated is the issue of the lack of women in the IT workplace.

One theory explaining this shortfall is that IT is an inherently sexist industry where women are still treated poorly and major obstacles are put between them and promotions and equal pay.

And that's a pretty good theory.

Another theory is that women don't want to work in IT - in fact they don't even want to choose the kinds of subjects at school or university which might inadvertently lead them into a career in IT. And if they don't want to work in IT then nobody else has the right to force them.

And that's a crazy theory, right?

However, neither theory sits well with some people and we are continually seeing new initiatives launched to press-gang women into the IT industry. (Question: When forcing somebody to do work against their will, why if it's in IT is it called equal opportunities but when it's in fields or mines it's considered a breach of human rights?)

Of course if men are making IT such an abhorrent place to work that women feel it's not even a career option for them then that is, naturally, a major worry.

Discussion is still a good thing.

Currently 16 per cent of tech workers are women, although that number has dipped a couple of percentage points over the last two years.

One reason for this may be that women are being too effective in their use of exfoliation and moisturisers.

"Having a thick skin is an absolute requirement for a female looking to enter the IT arena," wrote one reader.

And being able to deal with long working hours and a lack of flexibility is another, according to other readers who say system downtime, overnight maintenance and weekend shifts care little for family life.

Another reader simply couldn't keep his frustrations bottled up any longer.

"Let's get this straight," he began. "Women are bitching about the lack of working schedule flexibility and the long hours that are required for their jobs within the IT sector. And then the femi-nazi analysts wonder why women aren't moving up the IT management food chain," he continued, possibly to cries of 'thank God somebody said it' from some corners of the IT industry.

"How about some balance in your 'journalism'," he suggested, to us, the good people at silicon.com, presumably branding us all a bunch of pinko liberals, "instead of jumping on the 'poor oppressed women' bandwagon?"

We're betting he's a virgin.

Another male reader chipped in: "I have absolutely no sympathy for whiners who don't 'make management' when they can't perform the job that's required of them. MEN have been doing it for years."

Meanwhile female readers pointed out the sad 'macho culture' and offensive behaviour of male colleagues was a major turn-off and a reason why many women who get into IT don't stick around to make a career of it.

We suspect the battle of the sexes will run. And, if it ended, wouldn't we all miss it?

One reason men may be going further in the IT world (putting aside the crazy notion that women may simply not want to work in IT) is because they've been 'giving it all that' for years.

That's right, men are full of it.

… according to no less a reliable source than, wait for it, you guessed it, women.

Now the Round-Up isn't foolish enough to take sides but this looks like another manifestation of the old battle of the sexes.

IT skills company The Training Camp asked 270 female IT contractors about life in the modern workplace and found that 54 per cent of them are required to prove their qualifications before being given a job, while their male counterparts probably, in their opinion, simply walk into a job without having to prove anything.

At this point it's worth saying there is absolutely no evidence presented to back any of this up. These women are second-guessing about what goes on behind closed doors when their male counterparts turn up looking for a job.

Although your enlightened Round-Up suspects there may be an ounce of truth in all of this, all the research really tells us is that 54 per cent of women blame some form of inherent sexism for missing out on jobs.

And they are missing out, because 59 per cent of those surveyed admitted they lacked formal qualifications and therefore fall down when asked to prove they have necessary skills.

Rob Chapman, CEO of The Training Camp, said: "Despite numerous initiatives to attract women into the sector, those that are already a part of it feel that they are having a hard time."

"Men aren't shy in coming forward when it comes to selling their skills. And, whilst women may have exactly the same industry experience they feel they often lose out when applying for new jobs or projects as they don't have the paper to prove it."

So less a case of sexism and more a case of men being better prepared.

Men are such pigs!

(If you do want to sort the wheat from the IT chaff in your office, send around this quick quiz - and see if you can beat the Round-Up's score of 142)

And finally, the silicon.com team suffered a bout of déjà vu this week upon receiving a press release from the lovely people at Lewis PR on behalf of directory service 192.com.

The idea was simple. Interview people and ask them what features about other people's general appearance and physiognomy they find least trustworthy.

The result - ginger-haired men with stubble cannot be trusted under any circumstances... or words to that effect.

The flimsy premise here has something to do with undermining the snap judgements we all may make about first impressions (you see, ginger people are actually no worse than other people) as a plug for 192.com's ID check service.

Fair enough - we've seen worse releases. But we just couldn't shake the notion we'd seen all this somewhere before.

In fact, it only took us about a second to remember we'd seen almost exactly the same release peddled by Lewis PR all the way back in February 2004.

Perhaps the assumption was that the average journo won't remember what they were doing yesterday, let alone three years ago, so this release might easily get past them.

A spokesman for 192.com said the results of the survey were "surprising".

"Familiar" would probably have been a more accurate description.

So the moral of the story? If you're a ginger woman working in IT, forget about it.

And finally, finally it's competition time once more and for this week's eagerly anticipated caption competition, what else could we use but the picture of the world's least trustworthy individual, courtesy of our good friends at Lewis PR.

Check it out here and submit your best caption to be in with a chance of winning a bottle of bubbly.

And if you want to know who won last week's competition and fancy having a chuckle at the best entries, have a look at this.

And - and! - don't forget to listen to this week's podcast here.