My mum teaches sociology (among other things) to adults. She has been told she can no longer let spelling and grammar influence grades. Which is basically saying, "write whatever the hell you like."
Now, missing the odd comma or misusing a semicolon is one thing, and English is a living language. Its style and vocabulary have evolved over more than a thousand years and if you go back to Shakespeare's time it verges on the incomprehensible to modern ears. Unfortunately, the errors that students make are not merely misplaced apostrophes or splitting infinitives. I don't have that many examples saved for posterity, but here are two of the lesser and funnier variety :
"The purpose of this essay is to establish whether or not criminals should in fact be incinerated, whether incineration works, and indeed, whether criminals who have previously been incinerated should be re-incinerated upon their re-offence."
""Nowadays people are eating unspoiled and preserved food, pastoralised milk, sterilised medical instruments and well developed antibiotics and vaccines." [Yum! That stethoscope went well with the blessed milk]."
There are many other far worse examples where it's not even clear what the student was trying to mean.
Yes, English changes, but that's not supposed to mean you can get away with linguistic murder. These people are supposed to be going to university and in many cases (horrifyingly) into nursing and social work. If you can't string a sentence together what hope have you for understanding and communicating with those who are most venerable, I mean, vulnerable ? And what's the point in being a teacher if you can't give people poor marks when they get things wrong ?
Sunday, 14 February 2016
Saturday, 13 February 2016
Academia isn't that bad
I don't think it's impossible to get another Einstein in today's scientific environment, but it is difficult.
It's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, there is definitely too much pressure to publish. This results in relatively minor results being put on the same peer-reviewed pedestal as breakthrough discoveries, and a huge amount of time can be spend quibbling over minutia. The grant-based system of funding is even more dangerous since it reduces the amount of time doing useful science as much as possible. Postdoctoral fellowships (where you can do more or less whatever you want without worrying about funding) are not extinct, but they are far too rare. They should be the norm, not the exception.
On the other hand, science has become more complicated. We have access to a wealth of observational and theoretical data that we just didn't have access to before. So perhaps this rather more incremental approach is inevitable - there are many cases where the data leads naturally to contradictory conclusions. Resolving the paradoxes is not easy.
It's not a simple situation of either "academia is bad" or "academia is awful". It's more complicated than that.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/11/when-worlds-collide-science-in-society.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/einstein-gravitational-waves-physics
It's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, there is definitely too much pressure to publish. This results in relatively minor results being put on the same peer-reviewed pedestal as breakthrough discoveries, and a huge amount of time can be spend quibbling over minutia. The grant-based system of funding is even more dangerous since it reduces the amount of time doing useful science as much as possible. Postdoctoral fellowships (where you can do more or less whatever you want without worrying about funding) are not extinct, but they are far too rare. They should be the norm, not the exception.
On the other hand, science has become more complicated. We have access to a wealth of observational and theoretical data that we just didn't have access to before. So perhaps this rather more incremental approach is inevitable - there are many cases where the data leads naturally to contradictory conclusions. Resolving the paradoxes is not easy.
It's not a simple situation of either "academia is bad" or "academia is awful". It's more complicated than that.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/11/when-worlds-collide-science-in-society.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/einstein-gravitational-waves-physics
Friday, 12 February 2016
The weirdest helicopter
"The Fairey Rotodyne was an odd sight, appearing to blur the boundaries of aviation. Taking off vertically using helicopter rotors with jets at their tips but powered forward by turboprops on the wing, it was to allow quick travel between cities and towns in the UK and around Europe. But the project died through a combination of lack of funding and concerns over noise."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35521040
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35521040
Spin-offs from theoretical physics
Some people will always question why they should care about scientific advances that have no apparent impact on their daily life – and why we spend millions funding them. Sure, it's amazing that we can study black holes thousands of light years away and that Einstein really was as much of a genius as we thought, but that won't change the way most people live or work.
Yet the reality is that purely theoretical studies in physics can sometimes lead to amazing changes in our society. In fact, several key pillars on which our modern society rests, from satellite communication to computers, were made possible by investigations that had no obvious application at the time.
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-02-theoretical-physics.html
Yet the reality is that purely theoretical studies in physics can sometimes lead to amazing changes in our society. In fact, several key pillars on which our modern society rests, from satellite communication to computers, were made possible by investigations that had no obvious application at the time.
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-02-theoretical-physics.html
Trolley problems are not important
Sorry ClearerThinking, but this one is a fail. Train problems (I refuse to call them "trolleys" because that's something you wheel around a supermarket not send down a railway) are just far too black and white for the real world.
The "fat man" example. Come on. How many people are fat enough to stop a frickin' train with their sheer body mass ? None, that's how many. It's a useless example. An elephant might do it, but no-one's strong enough to push an elephant off a bridge anyway. Ridonculous.
The tunnel problem is more interesting. Why not both slow down and swerve into the wall, possibly injuring the driver but not killing anyone ? If there's time to swerve, there's time to brake. There's probably only an incredibly narrow window of time in which you face this driver/pedestrian kill choice, the rest of the time it will be about injuries.
Or, better yet, just program the car to automatically slow down to a safe speed inside tunnels. And for crying out loud make it difficult for pedestrians to walk right outside the entrance to a vehicular tunnel. There comes a point where it's just their own dang fault.
The infinite train problem is patently absurd. Yes, I would stop the train even if everyone else in the entire world was on board except for one unfortunate individual somehow tied to the tracks. So it's going to inconvenience a lot of people ? Well, boo hoo, sucks to be them. It doesn't take that long to stop the train and get the person off the rails. And probably >>99% of train journeys never encounter a single person on the rails anyway, so it makes perfect sense to always stop in this event because it's so rare.
There isn't any way to make anything 100% safe. I agree with the conclusion that waiting for self-driving cars to be perfect is unnecessary because they just have to be better than humans, but this is not a good way to convince people. Rather, I would say that because self-driving cars are likely to be more cautious than human drivers, they're less likely to have to face the awkward choices in the first place.
http://www.clearerthinking.org/#!This-comic-shows-how-selfdriving-cars-may-face-complicated-moral-issues/c1toj/56b9185e0cf2dc1600ea461e
The "fat man" example. Come on. How many people are fat enough to stop a frickin' train with their sheer body mass ? None, that's how many. It's a useless example. An elephant might do it, but no-one's strong enough to push an elephant off a bridge anyway. Ridonculous.
The tunnel problem is more interesting. Why not both slow down and swerve into the wall, possibly injuring the driver but not killing anyone ? If there's time to swerve, there's time to brake. There's probably only an incredibly narrow window of time in which you face this driver/pedestrian kill choice, the rest of the time it will be about injuries.
Or, better yet, just program the car to automatically slow down to a safe speed inside tunnels. And for crying out loud make it difficult for pedestrians to walk right outside the entrance to a vehicular tunnel. There comes a point where it's just their own dang fault.
The infinite train problem is patently absurd. Yes, I would stop the train even if everyone else in the entire world was on board except for one unfortunate individual somehow tied to the tracks. So it's going to inconvenience a lot of people ? Well, boo hoo, sucks to be them. It doesn't take that long to stop the train and get the person off the rails. And probably >>99% of train journeys never encounter a single person on the rails anyway, so it makes perfect sense to always stop in this event because it's so rare.
There isn't any way to make anything 100% safe. I agree with the conclusion that waiting for self-driving cars to be perfect is unnecessary because they just have to be better than humans, but this is not a good way to convince people. Rather, I would say that because self-driving cars are likely to be more cautious than human drivers, they're less likely to have to face the awkward choices in the first place.
http://www.clearerthinking.org/#!This-comic-shows-how-selfdriving-cars-may-face-complicated-moral-issues/c1toj/56b9185e0cf2dc1600ea461e
Bringing back the Quagga
The article is interesting. However, it makes a fatal mistake by referring to "zonkey" at the end. Zonkeys turn out to be absolutely adorable.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zonkey&safe=off&biw=1443&bih=920&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimnbaq9PHKAhXEzRQKHRd7D0UQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=_
Originally shared by Omar Loisel
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-south-africa-revives-extinct-zebra.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=zonkey&safe=off&biw=1443&bih=920&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimnbaq9PHKAhXEzRQKHRd7D0UQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=_
Originally shared by Omar Loisel
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-south-africa-revives-extinct-zebra.html
Thursday, 11 February 2016
Britain is in the EU for economics, for other countries it's different
Extremely interesting and fairly detailed article on why Britain has a completely different expectation from the EU than most other member states.
"This is what the EU has meant to Britain over the decades - trade. It is why the prime minister we associate most strongly with Euro-scepticism, Margaret Thatcher, was in fact the prime minister who took the UK deeper into the European embrace than any other British leader.
In 1986, when she signed the treaty that created the Single European Market, she did so because she saw it as a triumph for trade unhindered by government - as Thatcherism on a European scale. Yet within a few months she was also warning that an emerging European superstate, unaccountable and unelected, now posed a threat to the sovereignty of elected national parliaments.
Portugal, Spain and Greece - Europe's “southern tier” - joined the European Economic Community as part of their transition from right-wing or military dictatorships and highly insular and state-controlled economies. For them, joining the “European family of nations” was not just about trade, it was about emerging from the darkness of oppression and dictatorship. They saw it as a way of entrenching democratic practice, freedom of speech, the rule of law, parliamentary government and a free press.
Economic integration was, for them, not the end in itself. It was the means to an end. And the end was not economic but political."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-95a417ab-0982-4512-b550-20d68fd53f87
"This is what the EU has meant to Britain over the decades - trade. It is why the prime minister we associate most strongly with Euro-scepticism, Margaret Thatcher, was in fact the prime minister who took the UK deeper into the European embrace than any other British leader.
In 1986, when she signed the treaty that created the Single European Market, she did so because she saw it as a triumph for trade unhindered by government - as Thatcherism on a European scale. Yet within a few months she was also warning that an emerging European superstate, unaccountable and unelected, now posed a threat to the sovereignty of elected national parliaments.
Portugal, Spain and Greece - Europe's “southern tier” - joined the European Economic Community as part of their transition from right-wing or military dictatorships and highly insular and state-controlled economies. For them, joining the “European family of nations” was not just about trade, it was about emerging from the darkness of oppression and dictatorship. They saw it as a way of entrenching democratic practice, freedom of speech, the rule of law, parliamentary government and a free press.
Economic integration was, for them, not the end in itself. It was the means to an end. And the end was not economic but political."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-95a417ab-0982-4512-b550-20d68fd53f87
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
We should know if our MPs have been arrested FFS
"Mr Walker, the Tory MP for Broxbourne, in Hertfordshire, told the Commons that MPs should have the same rights to privacy as any other citizen, and in future their names should not be put in the public domain if they were arrested, unless this was directly connected to their role as an MP."
These are the people running the country. I think we have a right to know if they've been accused of a criminal offence.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35540433
These are the people running the country. I think we have a right to know if they've been accused of a criminal offence.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35540433
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