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This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body. Posted Wednesday 7th September 2011 at 11.33am A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 15 of 19 Gah. On Sunday it turned out that I could barely walk, let alone run. The giant blister on my right foot had burst and gone a bit horrible, and hurt when anything touched it. And my left ankle was sore. Now the blister is a lot better, but I just tried a gentle little run and the ankle is not really working. I can't push off it, so I ended up sort of half-limping and couldn't get any decent pace up. I did 2 miles in about 15 minutes, which is faster than I will do in the race overall but it was over a very flat route and felt like a real effort. Oh well - I guess I'll just have to rest it and hope for the best now, so my 19 days of training have really only been about 12! The new Girls album is available to stream here. Posted Saturday 3rd September 2011 at 3.30pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 11 of 19 A comedy of errors. I had a rest day yesterday, then set off today to run 11 miles. Unfortunately I took the wrong turning in Burton Joyce (actually I took about three wrong turnings) and ended up taking an unintentional short cut. It was a bit bizarre - I was just psyching myself up for the hardest bit of the run when I realised that I was almost home. Anyway, the upshot was that I did something like 10 miles in 82 minutes. I usually end up with one or two lines from a song going round in my head along to the rhythm of my jogging, often Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne" because I run past Arnold Lane on my way. Today I started mind-chanting "it's all men-tal" instead, which seemed to help to silence the "walkie time!" voice, at least for a while before my brain decided to reinterpret the word mental to mean something more like "you're bloody mental", which is perhaps appropriate. Posted Friday 2nd September 2011 at 6.49pm Just keep on painting My mum got an email this morning from an old friend of hers, Diane, whom she got to know on her year abroad in Grenoble. Diane lives in Boston, so my mum had emailed yesterday to check her and her family were ok after hurricane Irene. Diane replied saying that Irene hadn't been a problem, but that her daughter Michele died in April in an accident in the chemistry lab at university. It turns out that this story was covered in the UK press - perhaps I read it and didn't register who it was. I can't say I really knew Michele, but my family and I spent about two weeks at the Dufault house near Boston when I was 17, and Diane and Michele were really great, welcoming us into their home like they'd known us for ages. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I'm watching the news and I think - not everyone who dies can be a fantastic person who loved their family and was so talented they were going to make a great impression on the world until they were cut off in their prime. But with Michele I can certainly believe it. It makes you think. Jens Lekman has a song called "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song to the Blind Girl" from his Rocky Dennis EP (for a while, apparently, the people of Sweden thought Jens Lekman's name was Rocky Dennis - imagine that, you're at a party and someone asks your name, and you say your name, and they say no! I know you, you're Rocky Dennis! - what do you say to that? Maybe you could carry around a picture of Rocky Dennis and say no, that's Rocky Dennis, does that look like me? And then they'd say, but then why are you carrying around a picture of Rocky Dennis in your wallet?) which I like. It's a bit overly sentimental, but how do you write something about Rocky Dennis that's not overly sentimental? I think back upon summer camp On New Year's eve, when we danced And I could sit and watch my life go by Or I could take a tiny chance, Because Someday I'll be stuffed in some museum Scaring little kids With the inscription "Carpe diem - something I never did." There's a guy called Robb who, in the last couple of years, has decorated pretty much the whole of my parents' house. He's a little man with a huge car (what?), and he's sort of friends with my parents now in an odd kind of way - it's not like they ever go out for a drink together or anything, and they've never met his family, but he comes round randomly for a chat and a cup of tea (or two... and about 5 chocolate bars per visit). He's also done a lot of work for a company that has recently gone into liquidation, and that company owes him about £5,400. He brought round a letter from the liquidators today and asked my mum if she understood what it was on about. At first he kept saying that it was fine because the head of the company had promised he would pay Robb whatever happened. But the letter mentioned that the guy was £4,000 in arrears on his rent for the business premises, a property which he had explicitly told Robb that he owned, so it sounds like he's not the most trustworthy man in the world. I don't think Robb was very impressed with this discovery, but he did his best not to show it. "Oh well, I'll just have to keep on painting," he laughed. "What else can I do?" Posted Thursday 1st September 2011 at 2.32pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 9 of 19 Happy September! A short run today - I went back to my original 4.4 mile hilly route (I need to start doing hills again, as there's at least one quite big hill on the half marathon route) and managed it in just over 32 minutes. I was completely dead at the end. Today's performance goes to show two things: a) looking at the time, I am fitter than I was a week ago, and b) after how I felt at the end, I am still unfit! Tomorrow I might go for 10 miles with hills, but obviously at a slower pace than today! Posted Wednesday 31st August 2011 at 1.23pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 8 of 19 9 miles in 71 minutes. I struggled a bit at the start, felt a bit tired - presumably because I ran 8 miles yesterday! But I got back into the groove about 2/3 of the way in and got a bit of a shift on towards the end. I should point out that, for once, conditions were pretty much ideal - I chose my route to avoid basically all hills, and the weather has been dry but overcast and quite cold for the last couple of days. Posted Tuesday 30th August 2011 at 5.42pm Value not added Beware: stats post! School league tables. Enough to send a shiver down any teacher's neck. There are a number of measures used to track how schools are performing, and though one might argue that teachers should be free to educate rather than having to teach to the test, it is difficult in practicality to imagine a decent system in which GCSE results (and similar) are not used to measure whether a school is doing everything it should be to improve its students' prospects. The trouble comes with the targets that the government, and other bodies, set schools. The standard measure was for quite a while "five A* to C grades": a certain percentage of your year 11 kids passed five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, and you were judged on that percentage. But schools got wise to this: they spent a disproportionate amount of time coaching their students for relatively easy subjects and didn't bother wasting too much time teaching them "hard" things like maths and English, where they were unlikely to get a C. (Actually this is probably an exaggeration; I think almost all schools do care about their pupils more than this description suggests, but to some extent it happened.) The government noticed this, and introduced instead the "five A* to C grades including maths and English" measure. If a child doesn't get C or better in both maths and English, they don't count towards your target. And some people go further: in the "E-bacc" measure, only traditional subjects count - so as far as the league tables go there's no point in teaching GCSEs in modern "soft" subjects. Now in some ways this is an example of good government. The schools were set targets, but in trying to achieve those targets they didn't have their students' best interests at heart. So the government changed the targets to force the schools to do what schools should be doing (according to the government): teaching kids maths and English, and some other stuff as well. But they missed a key point. At the moment only grade Cs count for anything, and anything above a grade C is worth no more than a grade C to the school. As I said above, almost all schools are not quite as ruthless as all that - they want all their students to get the best grades possible. But still a disproportionate amount of time and money is spent in getting grade D pupils up to grade C, especially, now, in maths and English. What's that, David? You're a brilliant artist and want to become a graphic designer, but you're only getting Es in maths? Sorry, no point in us spending too much time on you. Anne, you show a real flair for science, but you really struggle with English. Sorry, you're just not worth it. I know you're dyslexic - but the league tables don't.  (As usual I'm exaggerating in order to prove a point. I need to come up with a better persuasive device.) Actually, the government does have one quite sensible measure. It's called "value added", and you can read a technical description here. It gives students a score depending on all their GCSEs, with more points for an A* than an A than a B than a C than a D and so on. There doesn't seem to be any reason why those scores have to be fixed, so if a government decides that it wants exactly the scenario seen above, then it can give 1 point for an A*, A, B or C and 0 points for a D or lower - or they could improve things a little by giving, say, 20 points for an A*, 19 for an A, 18 for a B, 17 for a C, 10 for a D, 8 for an E, 6 for an F, 4 for a G. Or something. The point is it's flexible and can be fitted to the whims of the day. And the value added measure does something else cool (this is where it gets its name from) - it takes the total score that the student achieves in their final exams and subtracts the score they should have obtained (which is worked out using results from exams in previous years), so that we can see how a school did relative to its intake. Schools with disadvantaged catchment areas are judged on how much their students have improved, not on their raw grades. Now, you may ask, why is the value added measure not more highly... er... valued? I'm not entirely sure, and perhaps one difficulty is that it's a bit, for want of a better word, "semi-statsy" - it starts to apply some basic statistical methods, but why should simply subtracting one score from the other be the best way to do things? Really we should get some proper statisticians to do a full investigation into the best ways of comparing schools. (Perhaps we already have?) On the other hand, it's quite easy to understand, in case you don't think the argument that you don't need to understand how a fridge works to use it applies here. Either way there's one clear problem with the value added score: just like the earlier "five A* to C" measure, it doesn't discriminate between subjects. Schools can pile students into classes on (whatever they think are) soft subjects and forget about harder, more traditional courses. But that's easily fixed. As I said earlier, value added assigns a number of points to each grade. It could also assign a number of points to each subject, and multiply the two together. So let's say I'm the government, and I think maths and English are the most important subjects - so I give them 10 points. Sciences and IT get 8 points, languages, history and geography 7, and all others 5. Now if a C is worth 17 points, then a C in maths is worth 170 points, whereas a C in textiles is worth only 85 points. And a D in maths is worth 100 points - so it might be worth my school investing time and money in getting David up to a D in maths rather than just entering him for something that he can probably scrape a C in but won't be of much use to him in later life. I should stress again that these numbers are just examples of what might be done - I don't think they're sensible examples, but the point is that the government can set the measure however it likes, and even adapt it year on year to take account of changes in their own desires, schools' clever results-boosting tactics, the needs of the economy (yuck), and so on. This system allows for hard cut-offs like the old methods, just by assigning 0 points to certain grades or subjects, but it also allows for subtler combinations, meaning that it is in a school's direct interest to improve all of its students. And it's not particularly complicated; it could easily be explained to teachers. If you see Michael Gove, can you tell him I want a word? Posted Tuesday 30th August 2011 at 2.01pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 7 of 19 8 miles today very comfortably. I forgot to take my watch, though, so I'm not sure how long it took me - it was fairly steady but didn't feel too slow. My right ankle was fine. Posted Monday 29th August 2011 at 4.37pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 6 of 19 Setbacks: yesterday was the second anniversary of my Grandad's death, and we had a fun family day out at Anderby Creek, on the east coast, where my mum's family (all 10 of them) used to go every year when she was young. We didn't get back till late and so I didn't get a chance to run. Then today I set off to run another 7 miles, but about 1.8 miles in my right leg went dead. I stopped and discovered that my right ankle was very tight and didn't feel right, so after trying to stretch/walk/jog it better without any luck, I ran straight back rather than risk doing any real damage. I did at least run back quickly - 2 slightly uphill miles in 14 minutes. Some had crawled their way into your heart To rend your ventricles apart Posted Saturday 27th August 2011 at 2.33pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 4 of 19 7 miles in 59 minutes, including a couple of bits where I had a little walk. There's this voice in my head permanently going "go on, have a little walk... go on... walkie time... have a little walk..." and it's always disappointing when I give in. But still, if - if! - I can keep that average pace up for 13.1 miles, it'll take me about an hour and 50. I tried listening to music on the way today, but it didn't really work - as soon as I got tired it just annoyed me. Until then, though, I think I made a good choice - the Go! Team's latest album. Good running music. Here's a sample: Posted Friday 26th August 2011 at 5.40pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 3 of 19 Today's route was much flatter, but along a busy road. Much nicer on the legs, not so nice on the eyes. 34 minutes for 4.4 miles. Felt really good at the end - like I could do a fair bit more at the same pace. Tomorrow I will (hopefully). Posted Thursday 25th August 2011 at 2.42pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 2 of 19 My hips hurt! I'm an old man. I think it's from running downhill. Unfortunately I live in a very hilly area in Nottingham, which makes it difficult to find flat running routes. Anyway, I did the same 4.4 mile course as yesterday, this time in 36 minutes. Given the aches and pains from yesterday I'll take that! I felt much better along the flat and was able to push myself along more. For the last quarter, which is uphill, I felt like death warmed up but I suppose there'd be something wrong if I didn't! You can sponsor me by donating money to WaterAid via my JustGiving page at http://www.justgiving.com/mattiroberts. Posted Wednesday 24th August 2011 at 5.25pm A poor man's Eddie Izzard: Day 1 of 19 I decided last Thursday that it might be a good idea to do this year's Robin Hood half marathon. I've been meaning to do a half marathon for quite a few years, but always had the excuse that I was never in one place for long enough. Then on Thursday I noticed that registration for this year's Robin Hood marathon in Nottingham is still open, and that the race is on 11th September, about a week before I fly out to Montreal. So, after a weekend of fun, I started training today. This morning I didn't eat enough for breakfast, set off too fast, and took the wrong path around the golf course. And it was really warm. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Excuses. I did about 2.4 miles, I think, in about 20 minutes. Pretty poor. Then just now (2.5 hours after a much bigger lunch of rice and beans, and once the weather had cooled down a bit) I managed 4.4 miles in 38 minutes. Much more like it and I'm fairly happy with that for the first day. Update, 7.36pm: I'm tired now! Posted Wednesday 24th August 2011 at 1.40pm T'other side of the coin Here is an article looking at forcing the unemployed into work. Of course we shouldn't be making people work for less than the minimum wage - isn't that illegal? - and I agree that one should be able to volunteer for such schemes. Moreover, as I pointed out in my own rant of a while back, it's not big multi-national companies that should be taking on free labour: they can afford to employ people properly. But other than that the article seems rather one-sided. It quotes one woman who worked 6 hour days (for 3 days a week) at Primark and didn't get a job at the end of her time there... well, that's going to happen quite a lot of the time, isn't it? It's interesting to read the opposite view, but essentially the complaint seems to boil down to the fact (if it is a fact) that people are being underpaid for the work they're doing. Clearly that needs to be changed. The article highlights some other potential problems, but is far from being a fair and balanced look at what's going on. Posted Tuesday 23rd August 2011 at 10.36pm Fun Running full pelt through London to get to the pub first (and losing the race). Teaching people to play Commander Bimböller (sp?). Learning the Turkish word for 14. Someone I didn't know putting a bottle of vodka in his back pocket and then falling on his bottom. (He was ok, but the bottle wasn't.) Finishing last in the UK maths postgrad football tournament, but seeing the team finally score a goal - two goals! - in our final game. Chasing meatballs. Singing happy birthday to a Latvian in Russian. Pushing someone up a hill in a trolley. Bruce walking past randomly at 4am with a ladies' wig clutched in his hand. Playing cricket in a graveyard with a Swiss, a Latvian, a Russian, a Turk, and two Germans. Sunday lunch. Animatronic dinosaurs. A mini golf hole where it helps to hit the ball into the water. Blockbusters. Guacamole all over the place. A pub playing the whole of Castaways and Cutouts. Bowling (in the loser lane). Cake! Double Maths. Seeing a lot of old friends again. I'm tired now. Posted Tuesday 16th August 2011 at 11.53pm Dig in Two good articles about the riots. Another about taxing the rich too little (in America, where things are different from here. But still George Osborne talks about cutting the 50p tax rate for top earners because it's only raising a bit more money than the old lower rate. Erm, that's still a bit more money than the old rate! I thought we needed every penny we can get to cut the deficit?) Posted Monday 8th August 2011 at 9.58pm Gosh The riots in London don't seem real. Posted Wednesday 3rd August 2011 at 1.15pm One down You know those sachets of shampoo you get through the door, stuck to a leaflet telling you why this shampoo is better than all other shampoos? Someone had to stick that sachet to that leaflet. Or the little string bag with a couple of washing tablets inside? Someone had to put those tablets in that bag. I spent two summers doing those tasks and more. I had blisters all over my hands for two weeks from sticking double-sided tape to calendars at high speed (we got paid per completed task, so there was no hanging about). I stank of washing powder for several days. And I saw people who did that job every day for their whole lives. I had one of the sachets of shampoo framed, and hung it on my wall when I was a student, to remind me that I had to keep working hard and trying my best. This interview with Graeme Swann reminded me of that. It's good to hear a cricketer complaining about people who complain about going on cricket tours for England. I could be waiting tables; I could well be pumping gas. But I get paid much finer for sending emails and doing maths. Posted Sunday 31st July 2011 at 10.48am Habeas corpus and lawns Or, Beware of commas! I have read two books this week. (Actually I have read three and a half books this week, but only two are worth talking about.) When I was in Germany, I would often be asked difficult questions about the English language. (The French asked me questions too, but usually not nearly so difficult.) Pity the mathematician transformed from fool to sage by virtue of moving countries. One of the favourites was "when should I use a comma?" - to which I would grimace and say that I have difficulties myself, and that there aren't really any rules, and that one has to listen to the sentence. At this point my interrogator would inform me that in German there are hard and fast rules for using commas. Once someone said "You aren't very worried about your language, are you?", which was quite the opposite of what I meant, but that person is perhaps the most stereotypically German person I know. "The Elegance of the Hedgehog", by Muriel Barbery, is a translation of the French book "L'élégance du hérisson". I haven't read the French version - I think it would be too difficult for me. It must have been a very difficult book to translate, and overall (as far as one can tell without reading the original) I think the translator did a very good job. It's a book about art that tries to be art itself. Perhaps if I knew more of the literary references, I would have found it heavy-handed, like Dan Brown with pretensions of grandeur; instead I thought it more like Ali Smith with something to say, although that sounds like damning with faint praise. I enjoyed it very much. The second book was "Persuasion" by Jane Austen. Less surprizing than Sense and Sensibility, and not as funny as Emma; but more effortlessly written than either, with prose so delightful at times that one wonders whether her earlier novels were over-edited (or whether she simply improved with age). And now I am back in England, and the smell of the grass is intoxicating; I want to play cricket again. Posted Saturday 23rd July 2011 at 10.23am A bigger crime than phone hacking? See this post. The answer to my question is a big fat no. But it's a crime nonetheless. Any new independent press-watching body should contain a few statisticians and have the power to fine newspapers for deliberately misleading statistics. Posted Thursday 21st July 2011 at 3.32pm Please stay, Mr Cameron I guess there was always going to be a day when Rupert Murdoch's power waned. I'm glad he was there to see it. Perhaps his incompetence in front of the select committee was an act designed to engender sympathy, but regardless, it was embarrassing to watch. It has also been embarrassing to see quite how direct an influence his company had over the police. Everyone knew he had a worryingly large indirect influence over the government, and Cameron's employment of Andy Coulson is an extension of that. The calls for Cameron to resign, though, seem premature - as Dave himself has pointed out, Coulson is still innocent, and moreover even if he is found guilty eventually, he was innocent when he was employed by the Tories. It was a misjudgement to employ him, not a crime. Besides, if Dave resigned, who would take over? Clegg would be in temporarily of course but the Tories wouldn't stand for that in the long term - we'd probably end up with someone a whole lot worse. Song of the week: Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes Posted Wednesday 13th July 2011 at 10.12am Lifes Rich Pageant Lifes Rich Pageant - which has recently been remastered and rereleased - is one of my favourite two REM albums (along with Murmur). For me, this is where the gradual move (not linear, but there nonetheless) from mystery and shade to politics and pop hit its sweet spot: "tiger run around the tree, follow the leader, run and turn into butter"; "I had a hat I put it down and it sunk, reached down, yanked it up, slapped it on my head"; "night wings, her hair chains, here's your wooden greenback, sing"; "I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract". The harmonies in Fall on Me; the energy of Just a Touch; the anger behind Cuyahoga. It's a weird album, no doubt, but it makes sense in a haphazard kind of way, even the last two tracks, "Swan Swan H" and "Superman". And it rattles along at a furious pace, song after song and never a dud. Weird, yes, but wonderful. Unfortunately (for me and you) EMI have blocked all the LRP songs I could find online. So here's a cornier song of the week... Song of the week: Take me home, country road by John Denver Eurostar, take me home, To the place I belong: Westdale Lane, Mapp'ley, Nottn'm, Take me home, Eurostar. Posted Friday 1st July 2011 at 10.33am Roundabouts The BBC website contains a lot of rubbish. This "story" is a good example. But it's the first time I've ever heard anyone who agrees with my views on roundabouts. Maybe I've been bringing it up with the wrong people... but as Tony the tiger would say, roundabouts are grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!
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