This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Friday 9th September 2011 at 4.22pm
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011
There are some amazing photos here.
Here's one of my favourites:
1 comment
Posted Thursday 8th September 2011 at 7.34pm
Comments!
That was a bit trickier than I anticipated after how easily I managed things yesterday, but hopefully you should now be able to comment on my posts. Whoop!
3 comments
Posted Wednesday 7th September 2011 at 11.43pm
A new system for blog posts
I'm trying to get my blog running on something a bit closer to modern technology. Previously I would write a post directly onto personal.html, manually change the rss file, then ssh into my account via WinSCP and upload the two files. This is a bit annoying, so I was thinking about starting to use wordpress or tumblr or something like that. But I played around a bit and decided it was too much like hard work getting them to fit in exactly with my site, and besides, all the rest of my site is hand-coded by me so surely I could get something up and running myself? Well, here it is... I now type the date/time, title, GUID, RSS description and the post itself directly into a web form, hit submit, and hey presto - a new file is created containing the post, the rss file is updated, and personal.php gets the last 10 posts from a database and displays them in chronological order, with links at the bottom of the page to go back and forward in time...
Next up: I need to create some kind of comments thing in the next few days, before I forget all the php I've learnt.
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.
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