Interesting Links for 07-01-2012
Jan. 7th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
- 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...
- Who is actually responsible for the NDAA's appalling civil rights amendments?
- Steam has 40 million registered users. And looks to be the standard for PC gaming
- Oxford Must Be Destroyed!
- Microsoft gives customer extra XBox by mistake, tells him to donate it to charity.
- Russian woman sneaks into rocket facility, takes amazing photos. (I think, it's all in Russian)
- China’s deserted fake Disneyland
Tags:
- academia,
- age,
- barackobama,
- brain,
- censorship,
- china,
- computer_games,
- disneyland,
- education,
- internet,
- iran,
- links,
- memory,
- microsoft,
- oxford,
- photographs,
- politics,
- russia,
- steam,
- technology,
- uk,
- usa,
- valve
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 11:17 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 11:19 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 12:29 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 12:44 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 12:54 pm (UTC)*Other than not being good enough, obviously.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 01:43 pm (UTC)...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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 03:09 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 03:10 pm (UTC)Brains...
Date: 2012-01-07 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:45 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:47 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:49 pm (UTC)(Except for the Cambridge thing, which is clearly nonsense...)
Re: Brains...
Date: 2012-01-07 06:52 pm (UTC)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]
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:55 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 07:07 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 07:08 pm (UTC)I'll post a link to the Lady, see what she thinks [being Russian]
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 08:32 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 12:08 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 12:11 am (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 11:58 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 03:50 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 04:14 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 01:14 pm (UTC)