Tonight it’s the final of The Apprentice, the ‘job interview from hell’. After weeks of bitching, back-stabbing, and making (usually very small amounts of) money doing things they’ve never done before, one of the candidates will finally hear the words “You’re hired”. They’ll then get a hefty salary and a chance to learn how to manage a business at the feet of Sir Alan Sugar.

Clearly the programme is more about entertainment than recruitment, but let’s take it at face value for a moment. The interview process is supposed to be Sir Alan’s way of finding the best of Britain’s emerging entrepreneurs. But is success on the tasks likely to indicate that a candidate has the skills needed for success in business?

The tasks certainly test some relevant skills. If you’re a good salesperson, then you’re likely to do better on many of the tasks than if you’re a bad one. If you present well, then that will help on some tasks too. And if you have some basic business acumen then you’re less likely to end up trying to flog a Ferrari to people shopping for cheap groceries and cut-price clothing than if you don’t.

However, there are a number of reasons for thinking that the process is less than ideal.

For a start, the tasks are too hands-on. In the real world, you won’t find many managers identifying fish or staying up all night pressing hotel laundry, but being unable (or unwilling) to do these kinds of things is exactly what gets some candidates fired. Watching the candidates outsource work to people who can do it better and more efficiently than they can wouldn’t make for great television, but it would give us more insight into their business skills.

Then there’s the problem that the process tests for the wrong kind of people skills. Most businesses have a clear management structure, and everyone knows their place in it. If you’re in charge, then everyone knows you’re in charge, and attempts to usurp your authority will be relatively rare. As a Project Manager in The Apprentice, your team members will all think of themselves as Managers temporarily ‘acting down’; it’s understood that there’s no particular reason why you’re the boss this time, and that you won’t be the boss for long, and your team will consequently be more difficult to manage and more liable to revolt. As Helene, who has plenty of real-world management experience put it, “I’m not used to having to work with fifteen gob-shites”.

Even more worrying is the fact that the tasks actively encourage unsustainable business practices. In most businesses, it pays to build a good relationship with a customer; selling to an existing customer tends to be much cheaper and easier than finding a new one. In The Apprentice, however, long-term business relationships are worthless. The tasks are never about which team comes back with the most credibility and contacts, and always about who comes back with the biggest pile of cash. Candidates who rip off their customers will do much better in the tasks than those who provide the kind of value that will make customers want to come back for more.

All of this shows that the candidate that’s most successful in the tasks isn’t necessarily the candidate that’s demonstrated the best business skills.

It’s been a long battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the next US Presidential race.

The process for choosing the nominee is complicated. The final decision will be reached by delegates at Democratic National Convention in August. Most of these delegates will have been sent by their States with instructions on who to vote for, and different States will send different numbers of delegates. How the States decide who their delegates will vote for varies; some States let people vote, others hold caucuses.

At the end of the selection process, though, it’s simple: whoever gets the backing of a majority of delegates at the National Convention wins.

For most of the selection process, Obama has been the clear favourite. In fact, for months there have been calls for Clinton to concede defeat, but she’s hung in there. Today, as Obama closed in on number of delegates needed to win the race, Clinton came out with a strangely positive statement: “We’re winning the popular vote.”

Winning the popular vote? She’s as good as lost!

This is one of those sneaky stats that dresses up a defeat as a victory. Here’s how it works:

Clinton isn’t claiming to have the most delegates (she doesn’t, Obama does); she’s claiming have the most votes, and she’s right.

By focusing on votes, Clinton gets to ignore several States that are sending delegates to vote for Obama. In States that held caucuses no votes were cast. In Colorado and Minnesota, for example, zero votes were cast for Obama and zero votes were cast for Clinton, but at their caucuses there was strong backing for Obama and the majority of their delegates will vote for him at the conference. In the caucus states, Obama has done much better than Clinton but without getting any more votes than her.

By focusing on votes, Clinton also gets to include some States that aren’t sending any delegates to the party conference at all. In an attempt to grab centre-stage, Michigan and Florida brought their votes forward so that they would be among the first to choose a nominee. In doing so, they broke party rules, and as a punishment were stripped of their delegates. They held their votes anyway, and both States backed Clinton. In California Clinton beat Obama by over 420,000 votes, and in Michigan (where Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot paper) by 328,000 votes, but none of these extra votes translates into extra delegates at the National Convention.

So that’s how Clinton was able to say that she’s winning the vote even as she loses the nomination. It just goes to show that you can put a positive spin on any set of data if you have enough ingenuity.

There are many different arguments against abortion, but most of them have a similar structure.

Generally, they start with the nature of the unborn. The claim is made that the unborn is a particular kind of thing (e.g. a living human being, or a living human being that can feel pain, or a living human being that could survive outside its mother).

Pro-life arguments then assert that things of this kind have a right to life. It is stated that it’s morally wrong to kill a living human being, or a living human being that can feel pain, or whatever kind of thing the unborn has just been claimed to be. An intermediate conclusion can now be drawn: The unborn has a right to life.

Abortion, of course, kills the unborn, so it’s a small step from there to another intermediate conclusion: Abortion involves the violation of a right to life.

That isn’t quite it though. To be complete, pro-life arguments have to weigh the unborn’s right to life against whatever women’s rights might be violated by prohibiting abortion (e.g. the right to decide what happens to one’s body, or the right to reproductive freedom), and assert that the right to life takes precedence.

If you have to choose between killing someone (on the one hand) and denying someone reproductive freedom (on the other), then the right thing to do is to deny someone reproductive freedom (or so goes the argument).

Only then can the conclusion be drawn: Abortion is immoral.

So a rough summary of the pro-life argument could go like this:

(R) The unborn is a being of type x.
(R) Everything that’s a being of type x has a right to life.
Therefore: (IC) The unborn has a right to life.
(R) Abortion kills the unborn.
Therefore: (IC) Abortion violates a right to life.
(R) The right to life takes precedence over any rights violated by prohibiting abortion.
Therefore: (C) Abortion is immoral.

There was a documentary about religious fundamentalists on Channel 4 last night. It included two clips of pro-choice protesters chanting. In both cases, the chants completely misrepresented the pro-life position.

I know that expecting tight logic from a demo chant is probably a bit optimistic, but it irritated me anyway.

The first chant, coming from pro-choice campaigners trying to disrupt the pro-life March for Life rally, was “March for life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die.”

This is, presumably, a condensed version of the argument that if abortion is prohibited then some women will go to illegal abortion providers, putting their safety at risk (and that abortion should therefore be legal so that we can make it as safe as possible).

Accusing those who believe that abortion should be prohibited of not caring if women die seems a bit strong, though.

A pro-life campaigner may well care if women die, but think that protecting the lives of unborn children is more important than protecting the lives of mothers trying to kill them. I strongly suspect that this point of view is far more common than the view that it doesn’t matter at all if a woman having a back-street abortion dies, that the chant misrepresents pro-lifers, that it’s attacking a straw man.

The second chant, “Women’s rights are human rights”, seems just as unfair to the pro-life point of view.

The accusation here is that the pro-life position doesn’t take women’s rights seriously, that it treats them as less than human.

The pro-choice argument doesn’t work by denying women rights, though; it works by attributing to the unborn a right even more fundamental than those women’s rights that are broken by prohibiting abortion. Again, then, the chant attacks a straw man.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the pro-life argument is sound, just that these chants are no good as responses to it.

So what should pro-choice protesters chant?

“It’s just a bunch of cells” (to the tune of the football chant “You don’t know what you’re doing”, presumably) would be to the point, denying that the unborn is the kind of thing that has rights that we ought to protect.

“Women’s rights come first” would also work, challenging the idea that it’s more important to protect the unborn’s life than it is to protect its mother’s freedom.

I’m sure that a pro-choice protester (who would have much more motivation to do this than me) could come up with something catchy that makes these kinds of point.

Logical chants are clearly possible; are they really too much to ask for?