Interesting Links for 07-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• Iran Mounts New Web Crackdown, aims for a Halal Internet
  Looking at the context, it seems that the government is scared of the amount of dissent out there. One wonders whether they're heading for a revolution too.
  (tags: iran internet censorship )
• Brain function can start declining as early as age 45. Yay, something to look forward to.
  Ok, something to be somewhat terrified of. They'd better find a cure for this soon...
  (tags: brain memory age )
• Who is actually responsible for the NDAA's appalling civil rights amendments?
  (tags: politics barackobama usa )
• Steam has 40 million registered users. And looks to be the standard for PC gaming
  (tags: steam valve Technology computer_games )
• Oxford Must Be Destroyed!
  (tags: oxford academia education uk )
• Microsoft gives customer extra XBox by mistake, tells him to donate it to charity.
  (tags: microsoft )
• Russian woman sneaks into rocket facility, takes amazing photos. (I think, it's all in Russian)
  (tags: russia technology photographs )
• China’s deserted fake Disneyland
  (tags: china disneyland )

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The second XBox is unsolicited goods; in the US it's pretty clear that Microsoft can't demand the goods back or payment. So the chap can donate it to charity or eBay it.

In the UK, there's a reasonableness test in the unsolicited goods act. This means that in theory a company could argue that they acted reasonably in sending, and demanding payment, for two items, and that therefore the customer should return the second one. In practice, I would be interested to see any case law for cases post 2000 where a company sent duplicates, the customer kept both, and the company successfully sued for both payments. The decent thing to do is to let the company know you have a duplicate and invite them to collect it at a mutually convenient time -- but that has not been required for unsolicited goods since 2000.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

True story. Years ago when the Nintendo Cube came out I asked my dad for it for my birthday. He ordered it from Amazon and over a two day period two different ones arrived.

So I called Amazon to ask them what to do and they said do nothing because they had no way to accept it back unless it was broken and a returned item.

I said, "Ok." Two days later another Cube arrived. I called up and Amazon said "well our system says you called to report you were returning a cube because it was broken." Again they said there was no way for them to accept a return.

Two days later a fourth Cube arrived. At this point I realized that calling them was what was resulting in getting more Cubes so I gave up and sold the three Cubes to the store that bought and sold new and used game stuff.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I imagine (or possibly hope?) that the brain decline thing is linked quite heavily to diet and lifestyle patterns.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

That would track with similar decline in other areas.

Also, keeping the damn thing active, almost certainly. The stats on how much weight-lifting can help prevent physical deterioration, for example, are as I recall pretty startling.

(Startling enough that if I'm not already, I'm planning to start pumping iron when I hit 40.)

It'd be interesting to find out how many of the men and women in the study had lifestyles involving active learning and brain development.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yes, that old saying about 'use it or lose it' seems to hold true for all sorts of things.

And that would have been interesting information for the study to include, I can see no reason why brains can't remain active and sharp for as long as the user keeps polishing it, unless what this study is saying is that there are unavoidable physical handicaps.

[nameandnature]

Oxford Must Be Destroyed!

I agree, Cambridge is much better.

But seriously, Christ what an arsehole! "I was a sad drunk, therefore Chris Patten is wrong, the fat bastard, and Oxford should be burnt down". I see some current Merton students have set her straight in the comments. That article is carefully undoing the work of people trying to improve access for state school pupils: half the battle is persuading people it's even worth them applying.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Agreed.


(Except for the Cambridge thing, which is clearly nonsense...)

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

While it's a shame she had a bad experience, one person who had a bad experience 20 years ago doesn't prove the entire system is broke and should be dismantled. Is there are long way to go with Oxbridge admissions? Certainly. But I think the only way to improve things will be a joint effort between the universities, to get more state school pupils to apply and make sure the admissions system isn't biased against them, and for the state schools to encourage applications and make sure their students have a good enough education to put the top students on a par with the privately-educated kids. I don't know if I would have applied to Oxbridge if I didn't go to a school that was solidly behind their Oxbridge applicants and encouraged them to give it a go even if the competition was fierce.

[andrewducker]

The main reason that lots of state students don't go to Oxbridge*, so far as I can tell, is that they have no idea that applying is different from other universities, and don't go off and do research into what's necessary. Without parents/teachers who support this process, it seems likely to remove an awful lot of people from the pool of candidates.



*Other than not being good enough, obviously.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

A disproportionate number of my state school friends went to Oxbridge largely because my school was physically in Oxford, so they knew what it took.

The article doesn't jibe with the experiences of the people I know who went, but I think in part because I'm bitter at myself for not being able to get in, and in part because that upper class plum smugness is something I genuinely hate (it being everywhere in Oxford), every word delighted me. I think that was the article's function, and I'm not sure that's a positive thing.

However, I'm pretty sure the assumption that admission is entirely merit-based is flat wrong. The odds are stacked against state school kids for all kinds of reasons, and the people in the comments over there who assert that state students are illiterate can go jump in a lake.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. See my comment below.

[naath.livejournal.com]

My experience is of Cambridge (not Oxford) but similar...

My understand is that the admissions process at the point of INTERVIEW is trying really really hard to be merit-based; and possible largely succeeding. Certainly not flat-out failing. But the admissions process at the point of GETTING PEOPLE TO APPLY is really failing to encourage state-school applicants. (That is - state school pupils don't apply much, but those who do get in about as much as private school pupils who apply do).

My experience of being there is nothing like anything she says in her nasty article. I went a lonely, ignored nerd girl and found my people while learning so much fun stuff (and I don't give a fig I only have a 2.2 and I never expected or wanted a high-flying career); I don't think that's Cambridge specific though really.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

True, at least to some extent. See below for further elucidation.

[fearmeforiampink]

One thing that a lot of people forget/don't know is that a lot of private schools have entrance exams, and a lot of them do scholarships for the highest achievers; whilst in most cases the education still wouldn't be free under those scholarships, they'd be much more affordable. Both of those will raise the number of higher performers in those schools.

I do wonder what proportion of the people who go to private schools then Oxbridge are those who went to private school on a scholarship. Obviously, some of those would've still gone private without the scholarship, but others wouldn't.

As well as the specific Oxbridge preparations (which my (private) sixth form college had), there's also just a greater general culture of support from parents and cross-support beyond that; one of my friends at sixth form went to study medicine, because my mother had used to be someone who had reviewed the forms and done interviews for medical students at a couple of London universities, she gave him some advice, which eventually turned into her offering advice to all the potential medical students at the college, doing so for at least five years after I'd left for uni myself.

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

I want my own deserted fake disneyland.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The NDAA's civil rights amendment is a good thing in my view...

...because of the faint hope it might make some more people in the US realise that since now American citizens can be detained without trial just like foreigners can, maybe they shouldn't be doing it to foreigners either.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Lol, essentially. Sadly.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

it has long struck me as absurd that so many American laws *only* apply to non-US citizens.

so yes, laws actually applying to the people may encourage them to think real hard about why US foreign policy is so abjectly reviled by the rest of the world.

Brains...

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Or does it simply prove that as we get older and more senior we are less and less engaged by psychology tests?

Re: Brains...

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I was fascinated by IQ tests as a child, partially due to scoring 179 in one I took at school. I later learned that this score is effectively meaningless.
I still wanted to sit more, just to see if I could get 180.

the last test I took, a few years back, scored 146. I got bored half-way through and stopped concentrating.
Given my less than glittering academic record, I can attest that it really doesn't matter much.

[I passed almost all my 2nd semester Civil HNC tests with 100%, but have seriously struggled to keep up with Degree level Mech Eng]

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The state schools / Oxford thing:


The journalist writing that article (a 2008 article incidentally - Andrew was there something that prompted the link today?) went to a private school herself, but clearly she felt that it wasn't posh enough for her to fit in. That I'm afraid to say, says rather more about her than it does about her university.

I was at Oxford at much the same time as she was and I just don't recognise the environment she describes. I went to a comprehensive school in North Wales, but I did one of the more prestigious Oxford degree courses and I went to one of the grander colleges. (Incidentally, she's wrong when she says that Merton is "the richest, most academic, most beautiful college in Oxford". St John's is generally regarded to be the richest, Merton did come top of the academic rankings (the Norrington Table) in 2008 and 2011, but it was St John's in 2009 and Magdalen in 2010, and Magdalen is probably the college most often described as Oxford's most beautiful.)

The You're Hired! competition I help to run (www.youarehiredplymouth.co.uk) gets me into most Plymouth schools every year. That includes one independent, three state selective grammars (Plymouth still has grammar schools unlike most parts of the UK), two single-sex catholic schools, some secondary-modern equivalents (i.e. the schools that take the non-grammar school pupils in Plymouth) and a couple of mixed ability comprehensives just over the border in Cornwall (where they don't have grammars). You know how many people from the whole of Plymouth got into Oxford this year?

None. Not one. In a city of a quarter of a million people.

Which brings me back to reasons why state schools don't send as many people to Oxford as they should. Like a couple of other posters have said, there are a number of reasons why fewer state school pupils get to Oxford than the simple numbers game would suggest. andlosers is exactly right in saying that many state schools just don't know what it takes to get in. I think it's a bit more than that though:

1. They don't really care. And when I say 'they', I mean 'teachers in state schools'. I have a friend who is a teacher in a public school in Newcastle and his school puts a lot of effort into helping students apply. Down here, I've gone into schools running You're Hired! and I've offered to give up my own time to help Oxford applicants prepare for interviews, choose which colleges to apply to and generally offer advice. And none of these schools have ever got back to me.

2. Too many state schools push their students to take crap / easy A-level subjects or even lesser qualifications that they like to pretend are "equivalent to an A-level". (They aren't, at least not as far as Oxford is concerned. Or graduate recruiters for that matter.) I've met academically bright 17-year-olds who are expected to get "at least AAB at A-level". However, when you probe more deeply you discover that only one of those A-levels is a proper academic subject, and that the other two are nonsense subjects. Often these nonsense subjects are easy to get good grades in - which helps the schools' league table results. Independent schools don't pay as much attention to the league tables.

3. State school pupils are put off applying to Oxford because they don't know anyone who got in and they believe articles like this one. That perpetuates the myth that being a student in Oxford is completely different to being a student at 'normal' universities. There are differences - the work is harder and there's more of it, the terms are shorter, the college system makes it feel like lots of small universities, lectures aren't that important (for arts subjects at least) and 1:1 tutorials are where you'll really be challenged. But the student life probably isn't all that different.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

2:

I am unaware of any institution in which 'league tables' have helped in any way. They are, in every situation I have encountered, massively destructive. The Police force, for example, have openly stated that the target culture has caused incalculable and probably irreversible damage to the ability of Officers to do their jobs effectively.
The blame for this, of course, lies squarely at the feet of Blair's New Labour.

it's one of those catastrophic administrative ideals that have no place at all in the real world, and need to die five years ago.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

In economics, there is a law called Goodhart's Law which basically suggests that if you pick a particular measure to control in an attempt to control the economy (e.g. a particular measure of money supply or inflation) then that measure becomes uncontrollable.

I've always thought that this principle applies in other fields. Your police example is I'm sure a good one.

I also see the principle in the global accountancy firm for which I work. One year we* might be asked to focus on improving our recovery rates (recovery is sort of** gross profit on each job). So what happens? Everyone under-reports the time they have spent working on each job so that the recovery rates look better. But that means that utilisation (the percentage of time spent on work for clients as opposed to training, admin etc) looks worse. So in the following year, we are told to improve utilisation. And so people's timesheets suddenly show all the time actually worked on client jobs. Of course this means that recovery rates are worse than in the previous year, so in the next year we go back to having to improve recovery rates.

Rinse and repeat.






* Well, the client-facing people at any rate. I'm internal quality control so am largely insulated from this madness.
** Except that costs are based on a theoretical 'charge-out rate' rather than the actual cost to the business. I'm sure it makes sense at some level.

[andrewducker]

I've not heard it referenced as Goodhart's Law before, but I've bumped into the idea that using a particular measure to reward/punish people distorts that measure instantly as people focus on it to the detriment of other things.

People keep trying to find nice measurements they can use to reward programmers, and every one causes more problems than it solves (my favourite being when they paid testers to find bugs and developers to fix them. There was a nice internal market in bugs in _that_ company.)

[fearmeforiampink]

It's a diseconomy of scale. Essentially, at the bottom level, a single person, self employed person knows whether or not they're working enough, and has at least some idea if they're working effectively. A company of five people know each other well enough that the boss can keep an eye on what the workers are doing in an overall sense, and change priorities based on that.

A company of fifty, or five thousand people needs other means to keep track of how well and effectively people are working. And at that level, it can get very expensive, or result in too much information to practically analyse, to monitor things in detail, or in a way that gives you the overall view of how an individual or department is doing. Thus, they judge you by specific, easier to measure things that they hope are a good enough reflection of your overall performance, but which cause people to game the system and aim to fulfil the targets, rather than doing the job effectively.

Having been one, I can say with some weight that one of the reasons why traffic wardens are bastards, or at least seen that way by the public, is because it is easy for their employers to judge their performance based on how many tickets they give out, and difficult to judge it on other means — if you're actually rude, break the rules or do something else bad then sure, people will complain to the counci;, but if you're helpful, even to a high or repeated level, people are unlikely to contact the council and say nice things about you.

Thus, the incentives are to give lots of tickets whilst avoiding really pissing people off, but not to go out of your way to help people, or explain to them how not to get tickets or other useful things like that.

[andrewducker]

I was prompted by someone else on my flist posting it yesterday. Not sure why they just saw it.

I was amused by it, didn't take it terribly seriously, and assumed that it would cause discussion from people that went to both Oxford and Cambridge (as I know a few of you did).

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

Russian thing:
I'll post a link to the Lady, see what she thinks [being Russian]

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the getting state school pupils in thing, Gold has divided the Oxford population into three types (who probably do exist) without noticing the bloody enormous fourth group of students who go up to Oxford and find "their thing", whether that's role playing games, amateur dramatics, rowing, music, goth culture, or, heaven forbid, their actual academic study. In Oxford or any university, that's the ideal thing to get out of your undergraduate career - it's sad that Gold didn't manage to achieve it herself but it's staggering that she didn't even notice the thousands of students around her who did.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes, this too. (And for me at Oxford, it was a combination of RPGs, the Tolkien Society and the Doctor Who Society.)

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Well she's managed to make a career as a journalist out of it by the looks of things. As in if she had gone to Oxford Brookes the Guardian wouldn't have wanted her to write an article.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

What does Halal have to do with the internet? If it was Israel would the article have referred to a Kosher internet? Or is it just lazy catchphrase journalism?

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

Halal and kosher don't just apply to food, but the permitted status of lots of things (including objects and actions). Marriages can be halal or non-halal. Clothes can be kosher or non-kosher. So referring to an Islamic(-as-interpreted-by-certain-people) internet as "halal" is, so to speak, totally kosher.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Thanks for clarifying. I guess it's seeing shops indicating that they have Halal meat, but not Halal mobile phone packages.

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming it's not a widespread terminology (in halacha, for example, the question might be whether mobile phones are inherently kosher, so by the time you're buying packages it wouldn't really apply. Unless they are mobile phone packages that automatically switch off and don't allow you to make and take calls on Shabbat, which TBH sounds like a business opportunity waiting to happen), but it's certainly not used incorrectly in the article headline.