Quiz XIV – Why?

What is going on here?

As usual, no prizes, except glory if you can identify what is going on with all this measuring.

Land of Woke and Tawdry

It seems that the BBC has decided that at the Last Night of the Proms this year Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory should be played, but not sung.

What puzzles me is how they think they are going to prevent the audience from singing.

So. The singers are going to put on their face nappies, get down on one knee and raise their right fist in a salute to black power. But I don’t think that is going to prevent the audience from singing.

What is more, and without wishing to denigrate the musical abilities of the audience at the Last Night of the Proms, they are probably going to sing somewhat out of time. What is the conductress going to do? Is she going to turn round, face the audience and beat time for them? Or is she going to keep her stern Scandinavian face fixed on the voiceless orchestra, and let the audience do their worst?

I’m not at all sure that the Beeb has thought this through.

PS I made up the stuff about the singers getting down on one knee and doing the black power salute. That was just in my imagination. At least, I hope so.

Cole Plates

I have made a set of cole plates aka cole jaws. So, I can hold bigger things in my wood lathe…

Or smaller things…

This is more fun that you might expect.

Raking Up a Scandal

If you have been watching Rake (on Netflix now) you might well be wondering if those who ordered Steve Bannon’s arrest will themselves be behind bars in the next episode.

Dumb, Dumber And Dumbest

It is well established that school teachers tend to exaggerate when asked to predict what grades their little darlings will achieve at their A-level exams. There is nothing particularly scandalous about that. On the contrary, it might be thought somewhat churlish of them if they were otherwise. And, among professionals, there are far from unique in overvaluing their own efforts.

This year, the little darlings have not been at school very much in the UK, and they have not sat their A-level exams. Never mind, for the moment, about the wisdom of this. It is what it is. And so the little darlings need to be allocated some grades, to stand in the stead of the exam results that have been cancelled.

In a poor field of options, pretty much the only place to start is the predictions of teachers as to what their students would probably have achieved. As usual, obviously, the teachers exaggerated. They predicted that more of their students would have achieved A* or A grades than their students had ever achieved before in previous years. That, obviously, is wholly implausible. Far from working harder than ever, this year’s crop have missed much of their school year. Some, doubtless, worked diligently at home. Equally doubtless is that others spent a lot of their time playing computer games.

So what the authorities have done is to make adjustments to the teachers predictions, to bring them more into line with the results that have been seen in recent years.

But not nearly enough. Even after their adjustments, the number of A-level candidates getting A/A* grades is significantly more than it has ever been before, at 27.9%. This significantly prejudices candidates from previous years and future years.

If it hadn’t been for those adjustments, it would have been even worse. Much worse. They would have given A/A* grades to an absurd 38%.[1]

Where absurdity reigns, the Poison Pixie is not far behind. She says that, in Scotland, they are going to undo the adjustment so that hundreds or perhaps thousands of not very bright Scottish children are made to look as if they are really quite clever.

The English are, for the time being, resisting this nonsense. Instead proposing an equally absurd notion, that every one of the little brats who would like money for jam can appeal. I suppose it will bring employment, of sorts, to otherwise unemployed lawyers. But only at the expense of yet more spending of borrowed money by the government.

Even before this scandal, grade inflation has been rampant. When I obtained my A grades at A-level, which was really quite a long time ago, and through till the mid-1980s, A grades were only handed out to around 8%.

That has risen steadily to over about 25% these days. It doesn’t matter to me, of course; it is a very long time since it is matter to me personally. But this march towards dumbing down – such that not very bright students are given top marks – inevitably devalues academic achievement. Of course it is lovely when my friends report that their children have obtained A grades at A-level, or got a first class degree. But these things no longer signify what they should. And when a young person tells you that they got A grades at A-level, or a first class degree, we no longer know whether they are truly bright, or simply beneficiaries of Tony Blair’s legacy that “All have won and all must have prizes”.

In Australia, they have a more robust system – the ATAR system.[2] Students are given a ranking between 0 and 99.95. Students with an ATAR of 99 or more are in the top 1% of their age group. Students with an ATAR of 50 are average. It is as though all the students are put in a line, in order of achievement. The ATAR system measures where they are in that line.  A bit brutal perhaps. But no grade inflation on that analysis.

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[1] Per the BBC:

In England, 36% of entries had grades lower than their teachers predicted and 3% were down two grades.

There are now calls to switch away from this system and to use teachers’ predictions, in the way that the government U-turned in Scotland.

But England’s exam watchdog Ofqual has warned that using teachers’ predictions would have artificially inflated results – and would have seen about 38% of entries getting A*s and As.

[2] Per the Universities Admission Centre:

What is the ATAR?

The ATAR is a rank, not a mark.

The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is a number between 0.00 and 99.95 that indicates a student’s position relative to all the students in their age group (ie all 16 to 20 year olds in NSW). So, an ATAR of 80.00 means that you are 20 per cent from the top of your age group (not your Year 12 group).

Universities use the ATAR to help them select students for their courses and admission to most tertiary courses is based on your selection rank (your ATAR + any applicable adjustments). Most universities also use other criteria when selecting students (eg a personal statement, a questionnaire, a portfolio of work, an audition, an interview or a test).

Devastated

Jess Philips

 

It is now a few days since an unnamed female parliamentary researcher has complained that her former lover – a Tory MP – should be punished by having the whip withdrawn. She is apparently “devastated” that the Tory party has not suspended him on the strength of her allegation.

It seems that the lady in question had been in a relationship with the Tory MP for quite some time, and has since complained about what happened on four occasions between July 2019 in January 2020.  The matter is now in the hands of the police.

It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that the Tory party take the view that the MP in question should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. We do not, of course, know anything at all about the facts of what went on in those four occasions.  Is this a case of hell having no fury like a woman scorned? We don’t know. But it does seem curious that if the Tory MP had been raping her and sexually assaulting her, that she apparently continued with the relationship for some considerable time.  And so when

A Question

This is a question, not a complaint, let alone any criticism.

Why does it appear, from pretty much all the photographs in the media, that pretty much all nurses dealing with coronavirus are plump?

Part of it might be that the protective gear they wear is hardly flattering to the figure. But unless they are

A Bit of Proportion

For all those people in Australia worried about Covid, and who are stressing out too much, bear in mind that your odds of dying of Covid are roughly represented by the following (stick a pin in this list somewhere):

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

Something other than Covid

On Hysteria

I was invited to put an opinion piece up in The Telegraph in London the other day, and did so.[1] Blogs that I put up on this website get maybe a hundred hits or so. My Telegraph piece has had, I believe, about 20,000 hits. That makes this site, I guess, very special, with its select readership.

The general drift of the piece was evident from its headline: Australia’s hysterical response to this pandemic is downright bonkers. But it is not just the Australian government which has overreacted.

It is now a few months since Covid 19 became apparent, which is enough time for at least some dust to settle. It seems to me that the key features of the landscape are as follows

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

I have just finished Matt Ridley’s book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. The reviews of it have been pretty much universally positive, and rightly so.

Lord Ridley is a scientist, and an empiricist. And so, logically enough, he does not start by theorising, but rather by charting the history of innovation over the last century or so: Who does it? Why do they do it? What are the helpful factors? What are the unhelpful factors? Only once he has laid out the evidence does he advance the proposition advertised in the book’s title.

Indeed, the evidence seems to be that governments are almost always unhelpful in the area of technological advance, and it would be much better if they did not interfere at all. Governments are perfectly capable of spinning a good line in terms of priming the pumps, and stoking the fires of the white heat of revolution in science. But in fact, they have historically been complete crap at