More Zonkyness

Education Standards: Don’t Throw Rocks At The Swots

Feb 222013

There has been a lot of discussion on how top maths students in schools in the UK, don’t keep up with students in schools in Asia. Funnily enough the difference is much smaller for British Asian kids. Which is an interesting thing given that people are concentrating on what the schools should be doing.

Now it’s not wrong to say that schools could do with improvement; no matter how well the school system is doing, it could always do with improvement. In particular for this particular report, looking at the top performers in a class is worth doing – it is natural, but unfortunate that the top performers in a class are often left just to get on with it. They are after all performing well enough even if they could do better if pushed.

But as can be seen from the performance of British Asians, it’s more than just the schools. Things may well have changed since I was at school, but back then there was this weird cultural thing.

Those of us who were seen as being good at maths were always thought of as a little odd — geeks, nerds, swots, and the like. Of course if you were good at other subjects you got it too, but it wasn’t as bad as being good at maths. Not really as bad as genuine bullying, but it generates an atmosphere where it’s ok not to try too hard at maths.

Does this still go on? If so, it would explain these results.

Raspberry PI Alternatives

Computing, Linux No Responses »

Feb 222013

The Raspberry PI is a pretty cool device, but it is not the only small cheap computer around, and given that the PI is more hardware hacking orientated I thought I’d dig up some links for some of those other devices. Especially as I’ve got two Arduino projects on the go.

There’s actually a surprising number of devices out there; some running Linux and some running Android. And in a surprising variety of form factors; I’ve avoided looking at the simple boards – the point here is to look at devices that are different :-

The Trim-Slice looks quite an interesting device, but all seems to have gone quiet since March 2012.
The Giada Q11 is a similar device which is about the size of a VCR … or a 3.5″ external hard disk enclosure.
The Cloud Client mini PC is a touch smaller being roughly the size of a double-CD case.
The CuBox is more square than the rest and is roughly the same size as a mains plug.
The Cotton Candy is an ARM in a USB stick; a cheaper option but possibly via Ebay is the U2, although most cheaper options don’t have quite the same features as the Cotton Candy.

This is not to imply that there are not others out there, nor that these are “better” in any way. I’ve not used any of them.

Iceland: “It’s All The Fault Of The Councils”

General, Politics No Responses »

Feb 182013

The boss of Iceland has come up with this.

To which the only appropriate response is “horseshit”.

His argument is that councils (or local authorities) award contracts based solely on price. Now I am not directly involved in the tendering process, and indeed not directly involved in the council tendering process, but I do have some familiarity with the process – sometimes I am one of the “quality gates” to get past in an area which works to many of the same rules as local authorities.

And nobody awards contracts based solely on price. At least not if they want to keep their jobs for longer than 10 minutes.

It is true that the public sector will award a contract based on price with all other things being equal. But if you want to supply burgers to all of the schools in the county of Rutland, you’ll probably have a huge pile of paperwork to complete which includes specifying the size of the burgers, and what’s in them.

Once all that paperwork had been sent back to the council, some poor unfortunate has to go through all the paperwork whittling down the responses to those who meet the criteria – strange as it may seem an invitation to tender for supplying 10,000 beef burgers will solicit responses from people willing to supply 50 chickens! Once the responses have been whittled down, the cheapest response is selected – if there’s no good reason to reject it.

Does this result in a downward pressure on price? Of course it does – and councils would be criticised if they did not exert downward pressure on prices. But it doesn’t encourage corrupt practices.

The Earth Is Pebble-Dashed …

General, Politics, Science 1 Response »

Feb 162013

So today in addition to being subject to a near miss – the cosmic equivalent of being given a close shave by a Samurai with his (or her) Katana – we also had an unannounced visitation by an asteroid that crash-landed in Russia causing a considerable amount of property damage, and more seriously some injuries.

Now this doesn’t happen every day, but in the lifetime of the Earth it does happen pretty frequently. As is evident from our nearest neighbour which looks as though it has been bombarded in some sort of celestial war. And indeed, the evidence can be seen on Earth if you look close enough; and that list just includes the largest impacts – events such as Russia today simply don’t show up.

Now there is not a great deal we can do about this as individuals, so as individuals we may as well forget about it – the chances of being killed by a meteorite are pretty remote but as it turns out only slightly less likely than being killed by a terrorist!

As a species however, we have reached the point where we can start doing something about it. If that is, we want to invest the resources into doing so. Admittedly we have started looking but simply knowing we’re all going to be killed by a dinosaur-killer isn’t enough – we should be able to do something about it. Perhaps there isn’t much we can do about a dinosaur-killer.

But we should be able to do something about smaller dangers. If we want to.

If we told the military that they will have to change the kinds of really expensive toys they get, we can probably start some form of meteor defence programme without having a dramatic effect on the economy. After all, ultimately a large meteor is as dangerous as an all-out nuclear war.

The Horse Meat Saga & Government Regulation

Politics No Responses »

Feb 132013

One of the humorous coincidences arising from the ever increasing horse meat saga, is that this would happen during the Tories reign of mis-rule. You see we often get treated to the Tories bang on about excessive government regulation and red tape, and how business could be far more effective without it.

And of course with a special venomous attack on the European bureaucrats.

Which is all very well, but the biggest lesson that can be learnt from the whole sorry saga of how horse meat got passed off as meat of another kind, is that we need government regulation to protect us from crooks pretending to be businesscritters. And honest businesscritters need that protection even more than the rest of us.

We have learnt how crooks have infiltrated horse meat into the market for cheap processed meat because it is so much cheaper than beef. This has two effects :-

The crooks make money … lots of money.
Honest businesscritters lose out. If it goes on long enough there won’t be any honest ones left!

There are those who say “well horse isn’t too bad … it seems to taste pretty good”, which is missing the problem(s). Not only should we be able to see what is in a product by looking at the ingredients list, but if crooks get away with putting safe horse meat into burgers, will cheaper crooks get the idea to put unsafe horse meat in ? Or rat? Or worse?

It is worth remembering this current saga when the Tories start banging on about government regulation – regulation is usually there for a reason, and the reason far too often is due to an event like this where unscrupulous crooks abused the public in order to make a bit more cash.

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