Special Needs Children (in Education)

 General, Media  No Responses »
Jan 092007
 

Recently a government minister caused a fuss in the press (they’re very excitable) by taking her child out of a state school and putting the child into a public school (a fee paying school for any US readers) because the child was dyslexic. The fuss of course is all about whether the needs of dyslexic children are adequately met in the state sector.

This is not about that at all.

Of course we should try to meet the needs of “special needs children” in state schools, but don’t all children have ‘special needs’ ? I don’t know how things are today, but when I was at school teachers would often concentrate on the poorest students and ignore the brightest students. Probably the thinking was that the brightest students could pick up the education they needed on their own, which is true to an extent. However I know a number of bright children (myself included) who were not pushed to study as hard as they should have been.

What often happened is that bright children found some or many lessons boring when they were stuck in a lesson proceeding at the speed of the slowest child in the lesson. Boredom as is well known is the enemy of learning. You could frequently find bright children obtaining poorer results at exams than they should be capable of doing well at.

Obviously I’m prejudiced towards brighter children, but the same applies to all children … all children are ‘special needs children’ in that they all should have individual attention in their education.

IT: Comparing A New PC with an old SGI Workstation

 Computing  No Responses »
Jan 072007
 

I recently replaced an elderly SGI Octane2 workstation which had 2 CPUs (400MHz MIPS-based), 1.5Gbytes of memory, and 3 elderly SCSI disks with a nice new Sun Ultra40 … 2 AMD Opteron 248s, 2Gbytes memory, and 2 mirrored SATA drives. It is interesting to compare the difference between an old-fashioned workstation originally designed in the middle to late 1990s with a 21st century PC. Not that I’m going to produce hard numbers from useful benchmarks … that is just too much work, and in some ways it is the feel of the differences that are important.

Of course this is not really a fair comparison. Whilst the SGI Octane is now very elderly and due to SGI managerial incompetence has not kept pace with PC performance as it should have done, it is after all a machine that originally cost 10-20 times the cost of the PC I am comparing it to. In car terms, I’m comparing a 20-year old Mercedes with a new and cheap Ford. I should point out that much of the software I am using is very much the same on both machines … the Enlightenment window manager, Sylpheed Claws as the mail client, Firefox as the browser, LyX as the word processor, and a text terminal for much of the remainder.

The PC is considerably quicker than the SGI of course. The graphic user interface is a good deal snappier, and most of the applications offer very welcome improvements in performance. With the exception of GIMP however, none of this performance increase is really essential; my old SGI ran pretty much everything my PC does, fast enough to get the job done. GIMP performance is the reason I upgraded, and here the difference is quite dramatic … filters that previous required patience now run almost instantly; when you are repeatedly trying things out in GIMP on quite large images this performance increase makes some things feasible that simply were not before.

There is one area where the SGI does offer some advantage over the PC; something I was expecting. The PCs disks are overall somewhat faster the the disks in the SGI (and of course I don’t have to pay to mirror my disks!), but the SGI tends to work more smoothly under high load. I’ve noticed before with the ‘low end’ on disks in PCs, that if you start to drive your disks very hard, the computer will sometimes stutter. Essentially the SGI was slower, but smoother under high disk load than the PC.

If was not for the need to run GIMP extensively (and the appeal of more standard add-on hardware like USB hard disks), there is no reason why I could not continue with the SGI. The tendency we have in the computing arena of replacing computers every few years is not a healthy one.

IT: New Version Of Popspeaker

 Computing  No Responses »
Jan 062007
 

I have just released a new version of Popspeaker, a trivial little Python script to make announcement sounds when it spots new messages from selected people in your POP3 mailbox. The big change is that it now loads a configuration file rather than rely on global variables in the script itself; but some other minor improvements have been made to make this more like a product and less than a scrofulous script knocked up for one person’s use.

The advantage of running this script for me, is that I can be sitting down reading a book and my workstation will announce “You have mail from your parents” if that happens. I can see mails from interesting people quickly, and let all the spam and other cruft wait until I am in the mood to trawl through my mail.

CO2 Emissions By Airlines/European Trains

 General  No Responses »
Jan 052007
 

The Uk government this morning laid into the airline industry for being environmentally irresponsible. I don’t know whether this is fair or not (although I lean towards it being fair given how airlines campaign against air fuel taxes and other such things that might affect their bottom line), but there is something daft about how we all travel on our holidays using airplanes.

Of course they are very convenient and for some distant destinations there is no real alternative. But certainly for short-haul flights, it does seem rather peculiar that we insist on travelling by shoving an immense amount of weight upwards using fossil fuels when it would seem that it should be possible to travel along the ground far more efficiently (and with the possibility of using less environmentally damaging fuels).

The obvious alternative for short-haul flights is the train, so why don’t we ? Well, it is quite possibly convenience. For my own travels in Europe (rather limited) I have looked at the possibility of going via train, but ended up in the air for convenience. Not that air travel is that convenient, but it does seem so compared with train travel.

For instance, travelling from my home town to Pamplona in Spain involves 4 trains including a trip on the Paris metro. Hardly convenient when carrying large amounts of luggage! Changing trains in the same station is bad enough, but changing stations is a nightmare! Especially if you are worried about missing your connection.

Ideally it wouldn’t be necessary to change at all, but I can’t see being able to catch a direct train from my home town to Pamplona even if there was just one a week! However I think that train companies could invest in making more direct trains possible, or even ensuring that someone making a difficult transfer is guided on their way (imagine carrying a sign saying “Here For Guide to Station X”).

The train companies could also try a little harder for online information. Finding information on European train journeys is not always easy, and when you do you can often find that you can’t book online, or you have to book different legs of the journey in different places. Make it easier please!

More generally we need to consider ways of making our transport needs more environmentally friendly. Not just by punishing bad choices (taxing air travel), but by using the carrot as well … making train travel cheaper and easier. For longer journeys, why not try re-introduce airships ? At the very least these would be a good option for replacing air-freight … not quite as fast, but a good deal quicker than by sea. And as someone who has experience of tracking packages shipped internationally, I can say that the actual time in the air is usually a small percentage of the total travel time.

Honours For Cash ? Why Not ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Dec 142006
 

We have a long running issue in the UK with honours allegedly being exchanged for cash contributions to certain political parties. This is hardly a new thing, and has been regularly repeated throughout history. And the original “Lords” certainly needed plenty of cash to maintain their position … it is rarely mentioned, but honours have been removed when a Lord lost too much money.

Personally I suspect that it has always been the case that if you were careful and ‘helpful’ to the party in power, it has always been possible to exchange your surplus cash for an honour.

So why not make it official ? Making honours something you can buy will stop all the backdoor deals that probably go on in exchange for honours.

Make someone who wants to sit in the House of Lords, pay up £5 million. Of that, £3 million goes either to the political party of their choice, or into the general tax funds; £1 million goes towards the cost of maintaining the Lords.

The final £1 million goes to a random person selected from the electoral register, gets a title, and must sit in the House of Lords. They could probably do with a salary as well (which is where the ‘maintenance’ comes in).

This kills two birds with one stone … takes the sleaze out of the honours system, and helps counter-balance the tendency of the Lords to be weighed down with establishment cronies. It tastes better to me than the idea of making the House of Lords just another house full of politicians … whilst the old Lords packed full of establishment cronies is a pretty bad thing, one thing that is good about it, is the relative freedom from party politics. And adding some good old common sense from the common people to keep the excesses of the politicians in check is worth trying.

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