Interesting Links for 01-04-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Alarms, overdoses and saving lives: 48 hours in UK's first drug injection room

(tags:uk drugs safety scotland )

2. "What Trans Day of Visibility means to me"

(tags:LGBT transgender )

3. Labour congratulated on class April Fool's ruse after announcing plan to implement genuinely left-wing policy

(tags:Labour AprilFool satire politics UK )

4. Buses in Wales to be brought under public control

(tags:buses wales )

5. The 1 bedroom Edinburgh flat with over a thousand businesses registered at it.

(tags:business fraud scotland edinburgh )

6. The Style Returns: Some legal notes on ChatGPT and Studio Ghibli

(tags:law copyright ghibli art ai )

7. "At 52, I learned the truth about my confident Oxbridge colleagues - they're bluffing"

(tags:Education confidence advice )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Ha-ha, regarding Oxbridge. I observed the same about Stanford people, at Google. They scream loudly, interrupting each other, never giving a chance to interject. Being 100% sure they are the smartest. Eventually I found a trick how to say something. When the meeting ends, and they shut up, ready to go have a coffee, I pretty quietly asked: "is anybody here interested in my opinion?" - and these fucking assholes have to waste a couple of their precious minutes to listen (it's "equity time", after all). Although I was trying to explain it clearly for them to understand, it rarely worked, though. They, eventually, just didn't care.

[andrewducker]

It is very hard to deal with people who fundamentally don't care.

[cmcmck]

2. I'm visible every day of my life but I don't make a huge fuss about it!

[greenwoodside]

4. I'll report on whether there's any improvement. Honestly, the buses I've used have been pretty reliable -- more so than the trains. The buses may turn up late, but I do generally trust them to turn up at some point. I still remember getting a service down to Brecon when the windscreen wiper broke, and every few minutes the driver stopped the bus, hopped out, and manually pulled the wiper up and down to clear the glass.

The bus problems are a) them not serving enough locations b) very limited services to some places -- if you want to go somewhere at 6am and return at 6pm, you're sorted; if not, you're stuffed c) lack of evening services d) lack of Sunday services.

Plus the general shortage of North/South Wales public transport connections, especially in the west coast and centre. The TrawsCymru bus services are something, but there needs to be more.

7. Based on that article, I'd never ever want to work with Oxbridge graduates. They sound horrible!

[andrewducker]

I hope they can make it work more effectively than it currently does. Finding the right balance between providing a good service, covering all the areas, and not making too much of a loss is tricky.

[beckyc]

Re bluffing: oh yes, absolutely. You don’t need to be good at the subject to get a 2:1, you just need to be better at exam technique (eg memorising standard proofs, stretching what you do know out, thinking on the spot, and coming up with plausible content and, yes, bluffing) than enough other people. It’s like not needing to be able to outrun a bear, you just need to outrun the other people. Pretty messed up.

I learned a lot of things as an undergraduate at Oxford, but in terms of actually learning any physics (the subject of my first degree) I didn’t learn very much at all!

[andrewducker]

That's a shame. You'd hope that they'd also teach you about physics!

[beckyc]

While there are some exceptions (yay for certain supportive tutors), I rather suspect that teaching goes against centuries of tradition, as do such things as syllabuses and setting exams based on the contents of lectures or reading material.

It was a real shock when I did an OU degree that the exams were based on the textbooks and VHS content provided. Such a novelty!

[bens_dad]

syllabuses and setting exams based on the contents of lectures or reading material.
You may have this the wrong way round.

As a member of the support staff with a relevant PhD in a Cambridge dept., my observations were that the whole department (or in more than one case, a group of departments) wrote a syllabus with specified topics and what was to be covered in each topic, then the exams were set to that.
Lecturers then gave lectures on a topic (some topics had two complete sets of lectures by different lecturers*).
If the lectures and the exams did not match, the fault was in the lectures (not that that helps the students - unless they read the syllabus and it had sufficient detail).

Unusually there was not an exam for each topic, but something more like a question on each topic on each paper.

*Strictly speaking, one set was on about 80% of a topic, making the course easier but incomplete.

The students also had tutorials or supervisions, but those were run by the colleges so I know almost nothing about them. They may have been based on homework given by the lecturers, but tutors may have had a free hand ...

[beckyc]

Thank you for the informative reply to a silly and flippant comment ! It’s good to hear about the processes and the similarities and differences (alas if I’d been better at paying attention to those as a student I may have done better, especially around cause and effect :).)