Why would anyone complain about the government's announcement of £140m funding for science and maths teaching in schools? It seems like a good move all round, right?

Employers’ group the CBI is full of praise, with the body’s director of human resources policy, Susan Anderson, saying, “This is very welcome investment which should lead to more specialist science teachers who can be inspirational, confident and enthusiastic about their subject. That is crucial if we are to raise young people's interest and attainment in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects and if the UK is to stay a leading world economy, able to compete with the emerging economic powerhouses of China and India.”

I’d be enthusiastic too, had I not been collared at the weekend by an apoplectic particle physicist. Rather than probing the inner workings of the universe, my academic friend is currently staring into a financial black hole. Tearing at his remaining hair he railed against the kind of blinkered central-government budgeting that advances funds to build a research centre one year and then denies the funds to run it the next. More than 10,000 scientists have signed petitions complaining about this year's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) spending plans, and an £80m shortfall that will see lots of researchers looking for new posts. And with the funding crisis affecting the whole of the UK, a lot of good people will naturally be forced to look overseas.

So while I applaud moves to encourage our most intelligent young people to pursue a career in science and technology, it would be helpful if the money were made available to hang on to the brainboxes we already have.

A while ago I decided I ought to become more like the queen. I haven’t yet got a corgi, or a headscarf, but I have given myself two birthdays: an official and an unofficial one.

My official birthday is the day I was born, as recorded on my birth certificate, passport and driving licence. My unofficial birthday is April Fools’ day in the same year. It’s recorded, by contrast, on a host of web sites, marketing lists and dodgy databases.

The reason is simple enough: I’m trying to insulate myself from identity thieves.

As we all know, lots of organisations will ask for personal details when they really don’t need the actual data. They may put date of birth as a required field when you register for a service, say, but they may simply plan to use this to send you birthday discount vouchers designed to make you spend more, or to categorise you by age group. There’s no harm, in these cases, to give data that’s economical with the truth. If the data is then stolen and used for fraudulent purposes, it won’t actually match any official records or existing bank account details, so will hopefully prove worthless. 

Of course your date of birth may be used to check that you are still who you said you were at some later date. That’s why it’s vital to pick a memorable but not personal date - hence April Fools’ day. It’s easy enough, then, to know what to say at any point in the future. You just ask yourself, again, is this the kind of organisation that needs the real data?

If I’m being asked by the police, say, I know that they will need the real deal. But if I’m asked for my personal details by an internet retailer, by contrast, I’d know that I would have originally given them April 1st, so that’s what I tell them every time they ask subsequently. 

If you’re not sure which date you gave, say to an organisation like BT (which you might not be able to consistently classify in your mind as official or unofficial) then I’ve found you can usually get away with giving the wrong answer if it’s followed by the right one and an excuse. And everyone is happy, and I’m a little bit safer from ID theft than I otherwise would be.

You can use the same sort of substitutions with other personal details. I won’t give my mother’s real maiden name to just anybody, for example - if I don’t trust you you’ll consistently find me providing what is actually my dad’s middle name. Again, it’s easy to remember both and to give the right answer only to organisations that really need it, and the wrong answer consistently to everyone else.

Of course none of these little tricks make a blind bit of difference when thieves get their info from a government department running loose with all the real data, which is why the HMRC breach is such a serious and unforgivable error. When data is leaked from an official source, there’s nothing any self-protection measure can ever do to reduce the risk.

My walk from the Tube to my desk every morning takes me through Trafalgar Square, past the infamous “fourth plinth”. This morning the covers had been removed from the latest piece of art to grace the empty space (after a brief visit from a waxwork of Jonny Wilkinson). I stopped to have a good look but I can’t say I’m a fan of Thomas Schütte’s Model for a Hotel 2007.

I’m all for art - I was once in the unusual position of trying to decide between starting a degree in engineering and going to art college. Early 20th Century paintings, influenced by Japanese woodcuts and the then-new art of photography, are my kind of thing. I’m interested in architecture too - everything from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water to the ecological benefits of middle-eastern courtyard townhouses. But I’m left completely unmoved by the new occupant of the plinth. Maybe if the assemblage of coloured glass planes had been unveiled in the spring I’d have felt differently, but on a grey November day, in the grey surroundings of the square, its boiled-sweet colours looked garish, childish and out of place.

I know it’s not fashionable these days to think it, but Trafalgar Square was built to commemorate military matters - which is why the three other plinths are occupied by bronzes of top brass, and the big column in the middle is topped off with a sailor. Even the lions are made of melted-down captured cannons. Sculptures that celebrate London’s diversity or play with colour and light are fine, but surely this is the wrong pedestal to put them on.

My vote would be for sculptures that encourage the viewer to think differently about war - to underscore the modern sensibility that there is no glory in combat, but that it’s still important to remember why our local government is free to erect an ugly pile of junk, rather than a figure of a dictator.

So I’d suggest a statue of Alan Turing. Not only was he instrumental in winning World War II, he was also gay. His image would be in keeping with the place but would also remind us that it takes a lot more than stiff-upper-lipped generals to safeguard the peace.

As everyone in the UK is well aware, this month saw the first run on a UK bank for 150 years. This frantic dash to withdraw cash came despite the soothing reassurances of senior figures from the bank, the Bank of England and subsequently the government.

It was not surprising that many customers ignored these calming words. In order to be reassured you need to have some level of trust in the person or institution doing the reassuring. Nobody trusts politicians or the BoE bods that put up interest rates, so their words obviously counted for nought. And trust in the banks themselves is certainly not what it was.

For example, my own bank - the HSBC, which I know for a fact has spent fortunes on CRM - rarely seems able to make up its mind what to say to me. Its representatives appear to say whatever comes into their heads.

On holiday in Italy last week, I found I could no longer use my debit card. The call centre worker I called at my own considerable expense said I should have informed the bank before using the card abroad, that the card had been flagged as a fraud risk as a result, that it would have to be cancelled as soon as I returned to the UK, and that if I wanted to have hassle-free use of my new card abroad in future I would have to upgrade to Bank Account Plus. Which involves a monthly fee, of course.

I was told I could withdraw £100 (about €140) in cash but after that no more. So, given the spiralling price of pasta, everything had to go on my credit card for the rest of the trip. 

On my return I called the bank to arrange delivery of a new debit card. However, another representative in the same anti-fraud team I spoke to previously informed me that my card didn’t need to be cancelled, that the fraud alert was nothing to do with me having used it abroad and was instead due to “intelligence gathering” that indicated my card had been cloned. He told me to change my PIN and carry on with the old card. Which I have done. 

All in all a very confusing, annoying and not in the least bit reassuring experience. It has left me wondering whether the HSBC knows its APR from its elbow.

Talking of APR, I also recently emailed the bank to point out that new customers were being offered a much higher interest rate on their savings than loyal old customers like me. I wondered if I could possibly benefit from the higher rate.

No prizes for guessing whether it said, yes certainly sir, or bugger off and be grateful for what you’ve got.

I think I’ll withdraw the lot and put it into Zopa...

Update, December 2007:

My debit card expires at the end of the month, so I called HSBC to find out when the replacement would arrive. It had already been dispatched, apparently, long enough ago to be considered lost or stolen. The bank's representative said she would cancel the errant card, and issue a replacement - which I asked to collect from my branch. It would take five working days (a week, in short) to arrive.

The next day I tried to pay for groceries with my debit card. The card was declined, and a security guard arrived rather promptly to ask if I could prove that my name matched the name on the card. Fortunately I could. A subsequent exploratory attempt to get cash from an ATM resulted in a swallowed card and confirmed suspicions. HSBC had marked the card in my wallet lost or stolen, not its missing replacement. A further call to HSBC about this incompetent mistake resulted in plenty of apologies but no actual action. No, I couldn't have upfront interest waived on any cash withdrawals on my HSBC credit card, the replacement card could not be hurried up, and no, I could not have any financial compensation.

I picked up the replacement card on schedule after the week's wait with a rather empty feeling in my wallet.

Another week later I found a note on the doormat, from the bank's delivery agent, asking me to call about the card that they hadn't been able to deliver...

I'm delighted to learn that IT Week's web site has been shortlisted for an award by the UK Association of Online Publishers, for achievement in design and usability.

It's even more gratifying that the award category cuts across all web sites in the UK, large and small, business and consumer. We are shortlisted alongside The Sun, The Telegraph and the BBC.

Even if we don't carry off the silverware on the night of the awards, I'm very happy that we've got this far.

We revamped the IT Week web site in November 2006 and usability was very high on our list of priorities, so it seems we've done a decent job.

You may have heard the news that the UK leads the world in the export of “ideas and knowledge”. I saw it covered on the TV news, and in The Guardian, and the story comes from a paper produced by The Work Foundation, a not-for-profit campaigning body that aims to “find the best ways of improving both economic performance and quality of working life”. Man.

It’s easy to assume that this kind of transition is all to the good, because removing pesky manufacturing and abolishing the need to ship actual physical goods offshore will somehow insulate the UK from harsh economic upheavals.

That’s not true, of course. Because things are Complicated.

Take IT Week, for example. It is a publication written, published and printed in the UK for a UK audience, and even online is intended for UK consumption (as the .co.uk address suggests). So you may be surprised to learn that the real business model for IT Week is actually, basically, to export to the US.

That’s because IT Week is all ideas and knowledge, but is funded by advertising. Most of the UK IT industry’s ads are placed by IT vendors based in the US, hoping to sell to European customers. And even if that advertising is booked by UK agencies, or UK subsidiaries, or European operations, eventually the bills and the budgets will be recorded on somebody’s balance sheet in US dollars and cents. Eventually, through the chain of budgeting and billing, we are exporting advertising space to the US.

When the dollar is weak, advertising in a UK paper starts to look expensive. It might not be obvious, or instant, but the dollar-sterling exchange rate hits home eventually in the knowledge economy just as it does in the export of Dyson vacuum cleaners. Bills that lead back to the UK will currently look expensive when converted to dollars whatever you spend them on.

So while the UK’s conversion to the export of knowledge rather than, say, cars and motorbikes may or may not be a good thing, there is a certain level on which it changes nothing at all.

Yesterday I was asked to act as pundit on the BBC World TV news programme World Business Report. The programme was doing a spot about Microsoft’s attack on Google over copyrights, specifically over Google’s Book Search service and its infamous acquired YouTube arm.

As is always the case with the TV news, this meant an hour travelling there and back for a 2.5 minute on-air interview. I have to say yes to these things when asked because certain individuals from rival publications will otherwise hog the airwaves whenever IT is mentioned. And we can’t have that.

It’s a shame the actual interview is over so quickly. I didn’t reach on it in the alloted 150 seconds, but I had wanted to talk about what an enviable publishing model Google has managed to secure: it earned $3bn in profit last year, mostly from content-led advertising, without ever creating any actual content. As a content creator I find this a bit, well, annoying.

This puts me in the unfamiliar situation of actually siding with Microsoft. Which makes a very welcome change.

Like 1.8 million other people, I think the government’s mooted plans for road pricing are unlikely to solve congestion. Looking at the example on my doorstep, London’s congestion charge, it seems that the biggest beneficiaries from such a scheme will likely be: a) the company that builds and runs the system, followed by b) the government that collects the revenues, followed a long way behind by c) public transport users. Car drivers won’t benefit at all, as far as I can see. Traffic in London still progresses at the pace of a mortally wounded snail, the peripheries of the charging zone are now fuller than Jon Prescott’s suits, and all the extra giant bendy buses just block junctions, wreck pavements and create waves of congestion wherever they go. Plus I object on moral grounds to pricing poorer people off the roads.

Any national scheme would of course have slightly different benefits and slightly different drawbacks, but I still think it would suck. After all, it’s a huge stick with nails in the end, and no carrot.

To my mind, the best way to reduce congestion is to reduce the need for journeys, and a good way of doing that is to provide incentives not to commute. Why not use the taxation system more creatively to encourage rather than punish? How about an income tax rebate for home workers, applicable to both the employee and employer, to encourage change while cutting costs for all? Yes, it would need monitoring to prevent cheating, but then so does road pricing.

A bit too radical perhaps, but tax breaks for teleworking hardware would be much easier to police and yet still don’t seem to be on the agenda.

Having signed up for the anti-travel-tax petition, I of course got an email ostensibly from Tony Blair. I was particularly un-reassured by the following: “Of course it would be ten years or more before any national scheme was technologically, never mind politically, feasible.” This is quite simply wrong.

Re-election might be an issue - as might cost - but technology presents no barrier whatsoever to introducing national road-pricing tomorrow. All the required pieces are already in place: a choice of wireless networks for backhaul, a GPS system to track movement, plus more payment options than you can shake a wad of fivers at. You don’t need 100 percent radio coverage because a black box can store and squirt data opportunistically. You don’t need blanket GPS coverage because the black box can fill in gaps with a least-cost estimate of the route from its last-known-good position, and in any case you can gesstimate position by triangulating signals from the all-pervading mobile phone networks. Yes, such a system would be susceptible to radio-frequency jamming, but a government would tackle that with laws, fines and police.

Pay-as-you-drive insurer Norwich Union has already proven that GPS black-box tracking is technically and economically feasible.

Personally, I think the “ten years” claptrap is the government stalling on road pricing until after it brings in ID cards. Two reasons: one, it can’t introduce too many Big Brother measures at once without looking like, well, Big Brother. And two, I fully expect the road pricing black box to include a slot for your biometric ID card and a thumbprint reader, without which the car will refuse to start.

After all, if you’re going to track which car goes where, why stop there - why not track who’s behind the wheel as well?

IT Week has a new owner - today we were bought, along with the rest of VNU in the UK, by Incisive Media.

I don’t know a lot about Incisive but Tim Weller, the firm’s chief executive, made a very good impression in his initial chat with VNU’s managers and team leaders.

This is of course the second time IT Week has been acquired. We were launched back in 1998 by Ziff-Davis, but were brought into the VNU fold in 2000 when all of Ziff’s UK print publications were acquired.

As anyone who has been through a merger will readily attest, it can take longer than you might expect for the amalgamated company to regain a proper sense of identity. No doubt there will be some changes of emphasis in the future as the new management makes its priorities felt, but for the moment I’m feeling very positive about the future.

Besides, as anyone who knows me well will attest, I like frogs.

An article in the current edition of US publication the Columbia Journalism Review makes interesting reading for anyone involved in print or online news. The story, “Beyond News”, argues that print publications must focus on making sense of the news - and on giving opinions - rather than simply reporting the facts and gathering the opinions of others.

I think the author, Professor Mitchell Stephens of New York University, makes a very good case for his viewpoint. If he’s right (and I think he is) then IT Week is well positioned. It has given prominence to opinion pieces from day one, back in May 1998, when it was already evident that the web would scupper a “just the facts” approach to newsgathering.

Stephens notes that The Independent is virtually alone among serious newspapers, in the UK and the US, in having taken this idea truly to heart - and putting it onto its front page. As most of us in the UK are aware, the Indy trumpets an editorial viewpoint from its cover every day, rather than simply headlining the biggest events of the previous day.

Stephens doesn’t mention it, but The Guardian is practically the polar opposite. Its pages seem to very closely reflect the contents of its web site, all the way down to verbose and ugly headlines.

It will be interesting to see how the two papers shift their stance as they try to maintain their dead-tree readership. My bet is that The Guardian - counter-intuitively, because it's the most web-savvy - will have to give.