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I can’t pretend I had read Rebecca Thomson’s article “Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods – postmasters tell their story” in May 2009 in Computer Weekly, but certainly through journalism such as Private Eye I was aware well before the ITV drama screened in 2024.

Therefore, I’m most surprised by the evidence presented by Paula Vennells at the Statuary Inquiry on May 22nd. I don’t want to …

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I’ve been reading a lot about how Differential Privacy is the answer to all our privacy concerns. However, having probed the methodology in detail, I’m not so sure. Indeed, I think we have a silo problem. Differential Privacy has been developed in a Computer Science framework as a means of balancing the need for altering data to meet privacy requirements with the need to maintain data close enough to their raw state to yield …

I believe that data makes little sense without context. Often, we are lacking adequate information on context. When researching disease, knowing the age and sex of the patients is almost always important. When considering road injury research, it is harder to arrive at such an understanding because firstly there are both drivers and casualties to consider, and secondly there may be more than one driver. One of the most substantial weaknesses in the official road safety …

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In 1960, Eugene Wigner published “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Many commentators have indeed agreed it is surprising how relatively simple maths can indeed model so much of the natural world. Wigner argued that modelling a given scientific theory can lead to further advances in the theory. He also claimed success in that a mathematical model can make predictions which allow the …