Friday 14th August 2020

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Brrrr ! Closed the door, it's down to 18 outside .
Plague of field mice --

"" But environmentalists say that endangered species, such as hamsters, hares, birch mice and migratory birds, risk being killed off as a result.

Some animal welfare groups are calling instead, for a ban on fox hunting because the animals, which each consume between 3,000 and 5,000 mice a year, could help control the population. “Hobby” hunters kill an estimated 400,000 foxes in Germany every year. ""

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... an-farmers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
As we saw with wolves in the Yellowstone Park, reintroducing one keystone species can change an entire ecosystem, in this example it may well be the fox .

[frog222]

Scotland may offer a way forward. The Scottish parliament held its own long recess this summer, from 27 June to 9 August. Yet Scotland’s legal obligation to review and renew its Covid regulations meant that, on many Thursdays throughout the recess period, the parliament sat anyway. Something like that should have happened in Westminster too. It would have meant that Mr Johnson’s approach to lifting lockdown was scrutinised. It would have ensured Gavin Williamson would have had to answer for the English exam shambles in the way that John Swinney had to for the Scottish one.

Westminster recesses are needlessly long anyway. They are set to suit the government not parliament.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-back-now" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Not to worrry about an absentee parliament, Cummings is streamlining Government Communications !
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ss-offices" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[citizenJA]

I like Scotland providing a template for how to do things better.

[citizenJA]

Good morning, everyone.

[citizenJA]

Jo Gideon MP
@jogideon
More good news on easing lockdown:

Quote Tweet
UK Prime Minister
@10DowningStreet
United Kingdom government account
· 16m
[THREAD] From 15 August, we’re making changes to the lockdown restrictions in England.
Show this thread

9:27 am · 14 Aug 2020
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A retweet from our constituency's Tory MP
I remain unreconciled with the December 2019 GE result

[citizenJA]

I'm angry a lot.

[citizenJA]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGggg!

[gilsey]

To briefly return to the discussion yesterday about education and GDP, sky said

This is crazy, I can't believe anyone would take whatever figure is squeezed out at the end of this ridiculous process remotely seriously. The data they are using is so dodgy and the variables so many it's akin to being given a few of the dots of a pointillist painting, smudging them, then trying to decide what the painting is actually of. They're statistics for the sake of statistics, which is fine if that's what you're into but to claim they have any real world significance is laughable.

IMO the figures coming out of this process are no better in normal times, CV has just highlighted how daft it is to attempt to measure productivity in the education sector.

Statistics for statistics sake, indeed.


On the subject of the pandemic pointing up our general uselessness, we probably had this the other day but just in case.

Why did England have Europe's worst Covid figures? The answer starts with austerity

"The pestilence is at once blight and revelation,” wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, “it brings the hidden truth of a corrupt world to the surface.”

[AnatolyKasparov]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGggg!

You sound like "The Male Online"

[citizenJA]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGggg!

You sound like "The Male Online"

Thank you! That was my intention. Also, an homage to HindleA.

[gilsey]

I don't often read Toynbee but this is a subject close to my heart, not least because North Yorkshire is first up.

Why does No 10 want to ‘devolve’ local councils just as they are needed most?

This is all a deliberate distraction from the one great problem: councils are crippled by cuts and an inability to raise finance, rendering them powerless.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Its the old trick - "let" them have responsibility without power.

[RogerOThornhill]

Morning all. back from my swim...

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sam Freedman
@Samfr
·
12h
It is literally impossible for individual teachers and schools to anticipate exam results and moderate accordingly so it's really wrong to try and somehow indicate they are to blame for this.

[Willow904]

Yes, I'm getting really wound up by the amount of people who can't get their heads around a simple truth - fate, luck, whatever you want to call it, causes a significant minority of students to fail to achieve their true potential every single year. It's just that this year, instead of random life events it's random computer algorithm that has arbitrarily decided which unlucky students end up with grades that don't really reflect their true ability.

Of course, if people started to get their heads around this they might start to question the whole flawed and oh so riggable exam system and demand something better for their perfectly capable but not so privileged kids, so.....

[citizenJA]

Yes, I'm getting really wound up by the amount of people who can't get their heads around a simple truth - fate, luck, whatever you want to call it, causes a significant minority of students to fail to achieve their true potential every single year. It's just that this year, instead of random life events it's random computer algorithm that has arbitrarily decided which unlucky students end up with grades that don't really reflect their true ability.

Of course, if people started to get their heads around this they might start to question the whole flawed and oh so riggable exam system and demand something better for their perfectly capable but not so privileged kids, so.....

I understand existing structural injustices better now.

[citizenJA]

I think the Labour government returned in 1945 was the result of many people understanding they needed to vote as one, they'd been standing together having common cause with everyone else.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Not understanding structural injustices has always been one of the main failings of most liberals.

[frog222]

In 1968 there was also no written exam for the Bac, and Oral tests gave a higher number of passes than was usual .
An exceptional time, like 2020 !!!
More passes this year too, as based on the first two terms" class work . 15 out of 25 in one of my daughter's classes did very well working online, but their marks were not counted as being potentially unfair to those without good computers and/or a favourable home environment .
Class results were compared to the previous three years, and it was possible to UP all the grades, but it was not permitted to reduce them, unlike ENGLAND.
So there were more passes, and some may go on to further education who are not really ready for it, but anyhow....
there's no widespread dissatisfaction !

[AnatolyKasparov]

Christine Berry piece on Medium about the post-Corbyn left - essential reading.

[frog222]

Christine Berry piece on Medium about the post-Corbyn left - essential reading.

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[citizenJA]

thank you both

[frog222]

Christine Berry piece on Medium about the post-Corbyn left - essential reading.

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here's a taste of it --

Losing the rose tinted glasses: an honest assessment of the Corbyn years
It’s easy to fixate on the actions of saboteurs in Labour HQ, on the few thousand votes that lost Labour the 2017 election. It’s tempting to dwell on the alternate universe where we could have had a radical Labour government, where the pandemic wasn’t being murderously mismanaged by Johnson and Cummings. But here’s the thing: this alternate universe never really existed.
Yes, you can tell this version of history, and it has some truth to it. But it’s also true that there were deep weaknesses in the Corbynite movement which contributed to its inability to take power, and which meant that had it done so, it would still have faced an uphill struggle to deliver radical change. Joe Guinan and I documented many of these issues in our book People Get Ready!
The Corbyn project was an attempt to build the car whilst driving it. It was trying to back-fill a generational deficit in left thinking and left organising. These efforts focused largely — perhaps too much — on the need to flesh out a policy agenda; there was not time to lay the deep roots in communities that would have been needed for these ideas to flourish. This generational deficit extended to leadership, too: this is why the movement ended up being represented by an unlikely septuagenarian survivor of the Blair years, carrying a lifetime’s political baggage — someone who had never expected or aspired to high office. Last but not least, it extended to basic institutional knowledge of how to run stuff effectively: the internal operation was frequently shambolic. When we take a sober look at the last five years, it’s hardly surprising that Labour didn’t make it into government: what’s surprising, astonishing even, is that it got as close as it did

xx !

[citizenJA]

I like Berry's work.

[adam]

Do the maths: why England's A-level grading system is unfair

Long quote to make sense of it. TLDR? The system forced marks down but not up.

It wouldn’t be out of place in a maths A-level: suppose a class of 27 pupils is predicted to achieve 2.3% A* grades and 2.3% U grades; how many pupils should be given each grade? Show your working.

There are a few ways you could solve the problem. Each of the 27 pupils is 3.7% of the class, so maybe you give no one an A* or a U at all. After all, your class was effectively predicted to get less than one of each of those grades, and the only number of pupils less than one is zero. Or you go the other way: 2.3% is more than “half” a pupil in that class, after all, and everyone knows you should round up in that case. So perhaps you should give one A* and one U. Or you could pick the system that the exam regulator applied to calculate results on Thursday – now decried as shockingly unfair – and declare that no one should get the A* but someone should still get the U. U means unclassified, or in lay terms, a fail.

And not merely should they get a U, under the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation system – but they must get a U, even if their teacher recommended a much higher grade, and even if the system predicted that less than one pupil at that school would get a U according to the algorithm.

That choice, forcing grades down across the board, was at the heart of much of the dismay felt across England on Thursday. It meant that if Ofqual’s mysterious algorithm predicted any chance at all of a U grade in a class – even if its prediction was less than one single pupil getting that grade – then one pupil had to be given that grade, no matter how well they had performed up until that point. The unfairness was exactly flipped at the other end of the scale: no matter how good a pupil you were, you could only achieve an A* if the Ofqual algorithm had predicted that at least one pupil would get that grade. A class predicted just less than one A* and just more than zero U grades would be given zero A*s and one U.

[Willow904]

Sounds about right.

And if it was by accident why not do a Scotland, acknowledge it's not worked fairly and allow teacher grades stand?

I guess because then you wouldn't end up with this:

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Lewis Goodall@lewis_goodall
One university vice-chancellor told me that if the appeals system isn't sorted, quickly and robustly "we'll end up with the poshest cohort [at the top universities] for years"

Much more on Newsnight right now. Tune in.