Category: Education

Posted on

It Doesn’t Say That

Here we go again. Another BBC News Headline and Fooyah goes off on one to deride the state of news. But first let me tell you where my biases lie.

I have recently decided to stop scanning my general Twitter feed. I follow about a thousand feeds on that account and a lot of them revolve around my interests of religion, airplanes aeroplanes, science and politics. Given what Donald Trump says and could possibly do after the 20th along with how that affects my interests you can imagine that my twitter feed is filled with horror. Even last year during the post-Brexit week I found that twitter was feeding the news I wanted while the traditional BBC site and radio news wasn’t giving me the detail I wanted. I felt I wanted to know everything that happened when it happened.

I have started to recognise that this was becoming an obsession. Constantly wanting to check Twitter. Missing parts of TV shows programmes because I was looking at my feed. I was starting to miss out on peace, on enjoying concentrating. I have now stopped looking at that particular feed. I use my normal account highlighted down the right hand side of this site because that feed has only friends and twitter is one of the methods I stay in touch with some friends. I don’t officially do Faceshit so that doesn’t really matter.

From now on I am going to get my news in manageable chunks by listening to the radio and occasionally browsing the BBC website. I gave up TV news a long time ago as I couldn’t cope with the forced human interest narrative they assigned to every story. The human interest of news didn’t affect me, I want to know the news behind the story, not the “this made Chloe from Bakersfield miss her train”.

I watched this video after my decision, it was sent to me by a friend and while I have some criticisms of the things said in the video I felt some of it applied to me and I am far from a millennial.

I do have some issues with some of the things he says and I am definitely not convinced he is right about everything but it is very interesting. I could see some of these behaviours in myself and so decided to change my behaviour to be more positive to my life. One of my current issues was feeling anger at all the Trump tweets or news items and being powerless to affect them in any way. By ignoring them I hope to gain some sense of control and happiness over those parts of my life. I can get on with my life largely as it is and just calmly wait for the end-times.

I have become largely convinced that mobile devices need to be banned in schools. Not because I am a nasty bastard but because we have a SOCIAL DUTY to teach children to concentrate on tasks that last longer than a few minutes. The young need to learn to be able to delay reward. They are in a system where I want them to learn during all my lessons in a week and the pay off is years away in their examination results, in their choice on university and in the pay of their future careers. I don’t have a science study to back this up but I do think we are doing a disservice to the young because they expect reward constantly.

Oh, but they can play computer games and concentrate for hours.

Yes and no. They are constantly rewarded while playing computer games. The tasks are short term and the rewards are built in regularly to make the kids feel good. This is the equivalent of checking an answer in the back of a maths text book and seeing that you got it right. That little hit of success. One of these is “fun” and the other takes place in a structured lesson where the ultimate pay off is years away.

A student I taught a few years ago who, in the run up to his exams, took his phone, turned it off and placed it in a plastic bag which he kept on him for emergency purposes. He did this for three months. He recognised the distraction that his phone is. It doesn’t matter if you find out something has happened 2 minutes after the event or 5 hours after the event. It’s the same thing that has happened. That kid got As and A* at A Level and now studies at a top university.

Look, I love my phone and I like my console and this computer where I am currently typing. I don’t want to throw them away. But I do think there are serious sociological problems that need to be faced. We are failing the youth by not preparing them to concentrate persistently at a task with a delayed reward.

This was the headline on the BBC News website, I heard about the article from listening to the radio 4 article. I also found the same “news” item in the Daily Fucking Piece Of Shit Mail.

Now, I’m not very good at reading science papers. I have tried and find the language very dense and deliberately obscure. Given my interest in REAL THINGS learning how to read science papers is probably a good thing. I found the original paper from where these headlines derive. It is linked here. The PDF can be found here, or below.

A cached copy from this website

I just want to cover some of my observations from reading the paper before writing about the news articles.

A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents

This paper was a test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis [bullshit name making it seem acceptable or a good thing even though it’s a happy story about a fucking thief]. This paper is to test the happiness-screen time hypothesis. It doesn’t set out to find out if screen time makes teenagers happier than not having screen time. It doesn’t have a control group. All it does is see whether the youngsters have an ideal happiness-screen time relationship. It could have found out that 20 hours a a day was the ultimate happiness value.

Most of the paper talks about the regression curve they decided would fit and how they tested that. Essentially they found an upper limit in the curve.

The number of students used in the study was large. All the data was self-reported and that can cause issues of under-reporting of negative trends. This paper didn’t seek to find out how much happier students were before and after. All they looked into was the happiness of students compared to how much screen time they have. There’s no before and after. There’s no analysis of how increasing or decreasing screen time affects individuals. It could be imagined that deliberately affecting the well being of teenagers negatively would be immoral.

This study sought to confirm a previous hypothesis that a quadratic curve could be used to fit to the data and that from that there would be a maximum [inflexion in the paper]. It didn’t seek to find out anything else.

This study seeks to inform future studies and has nothing to do with optimum time to get students the most well-being. It just modelled that. There were no controls. We do NOT know from this study what happens if a student stops using their phone and does other stuff. This study wasn’t about that. It’s not a before and after study. It’s a study about now.

Interesting, but also obvious, was that different digital activities had different effects on well-being. Being on a phone has a lower time than watching TV. They are very different activities.

The study also says that they did not look into whether academic work was affected or what the possible outcomes are with high or low digital device usage. This study JUST looked at modelling the Goldilocks Hypothesis. My instinct is that the Goldilocks Hypothesis probably exists for most things. Want to eat chocolate? Have a certain amount to get most well-being feeling. Want to exercise? A certain amount will maximise your well-being score, and so on.

So, now a few quotes from the BBC article.

Moderate screen use ‘boosts teen wellbeing’

NOT what the paper says. The paper did NOT compare before and after, just what exists now. They are very different things.

They found a “Goldilocks effect” where a few hours of device-use seemed to boost mental wellbeing.

They were testing for the Goldilocks effect. They didn’t discover it. Their aim was to model it mathematically. Again, BOOST, no it doesn’t say that. Boost implies a before and after effect which was not measured by this study.

In addition, the first hour or two of screen time was actually associated with an increase in mental wellbeing for those using computers, smartphones, video games and watching TV or films.

FFS, not an increase just what is. IF I HAVE THIS WRONG PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I am not expert in reading science papers. Have a look yourself and tell me.

The BBC article is pretty bad but there are redeeming features to the article and even they explain that this paper confirms the hypothesis. It’s good to have some science about these things but the NEWS can’t report it very well. And we wonder why there are issues with fake-news and this being a post-truth world.

I need a few deep breaths now as I take some quotes from the Daily Shit article. I can’t read the whole thing without encountering a rage so I will rely on the bullet points at the top of the article.

Researchers found there is little evidence screen time damages teenagers

NOT what they were looking for. The study was to confirm the Goldilocks Effect. We would need a CONTROL group to decide if damage is done.

The found that, in fact, 257 minutes on a computer is beneficial for them

No, it didn’t. See above.

It is the ‘sweet spot’ when teens have had enough time to develop online skills

No, it doesn’t say that. For fucks sake. If we trained teenagers in developing internet skills properly they would soon realise that the DM website is full of shit.

 I’m done. If I tried I expect I could take the whole DM article and pull nearly every sentence apart. The main problem is I don’t want to. I don’t want to read that shit. It’s misleading. The BBC article was misleading but not as bad. It was still misleading.

No wonder we have problems with people trusting the news and sources. No wonder they want to listen to “news” that agrees with their own narrative about how the world works rather than challenge their own understanding. I try to be unbiased in my understanding of the world. I try to give weight to things that disagree with my perception of the world because it challenges me and because, as a human, I am incredibly unable to decide what it correct or true. That’s why science developed. It’s why there are true investigative reporters. The world should be able to cope with REALITY even if they fundamentally oppose what that reality is. We should be accepting of things that challenge us and make us think but ultimately make us more aware of what is really going on.

After all, isn’t the truth what we seek?

Addendum

Let’s have another look at that graph:

I don’t know about you but a peak happiness going from 47 to 48.5 or so doesn’t seem impressive. Also, we don’t know how many students were at each level, so we don’t know how many students were at the zero hours per day level [I was sure I read this in the paper but can’t now see it].

Also, 20% of students reported more than 12 hours a day engagement.

it was clear that many participants had reported
simultaneous screen use; approximately 20% of the sample
reported a sum of more than 12 hr of engagement on
weekdays, and 35% of the sample reported a total of
more than 12 hr on weekend days

Fuck! These poor kids. We need some serious intervention so we are able to help these people in society as a whole, so they can develop friendships, so they can function.

Posted on

Beat Them Up

I need to vent some anger and rage. I’ve been so annoyed recently at what politics and society has become that it has to come out. Normally I can get away with a rant with friends at work or friends elsewhere, definitely not the family though, there are some relationships that probably would cope with that level of anger potentially aimed towards their actions.

Now I’m picking on a soft target for my anger. Education news. And I hate talking about education. I’ve been involved in education since I was 4. I don’t have the answers but there are times when there’s plenty of bollocks and bullshit messing with kids learning things.

So, the BBC headline is:

schoolsbrexit

You can go ahead and read the story if you wish, I’ll be here, waiting.

This is a classic case of “shit goes wrong therefore blame education”. This country’s education system gets blamed for an awful lot. If there’s a need to tweek the way people feel about things then why not introduce that into schools? The government has always done one of two things:

  • Blame the education system for not influencing pupils enough the right way.
  • Blame the education system for influencing pupils enough the wrong way.

You see, the government thinks that all teachers are lefties, pinkos, commies, or liberal. The government doesn’t like teachers having power over pupils because all teachers are, by definition, caring about the future and society as a whole. The government sees schools as hot beds of resistance to the progress of society. That’s why teacher are called upon to include more and more social manoeuvring in all that they do. The government recognises that we have influence and while we influence lots the wrong way we can influence almost nothing the correct way.

What you should do is have a look over headlines and see how often “we will get schools to deal with this” crops up. It’s almost as if it’s a way for governments to say “we are dealing with that at an early age so it’ll be ok”.

Right, Brexit. In my opinion what caused Brexit? fucking austerity and a political class that shows little regard for the common man. A political class out to promote itself and not actually work for society and the progress of all. A political class whipping up notions of acceptable fascism and racism and a political class who consistently use an “us and them” rhetoric.

So there’s a correlation with social deprivation and the Brexit vote. Which means there’s a correlation with schools. THAT’S NOT CAUSATION YOU FUCKING TWAT.

So, here’s some of my views [no, they aren’t social science or proper investigations, therefore they are anecdote, but I don’t care].

  • Society has no control over what influences kids these days, social media is what influences them. They don’t watch TV like I used to or chat to their mates.
  • In the old days music was a concern because teenagers were obsessed with it. Now it is social media. Music didn’t try and sell them fake news and bullshit.
  • I might have a particular class for four hours a week. There are about 25 kids in that class. I am meant to be able influence each of these kids?
  • Kids spend 5 hours a day in lessons. Maybe another 90 minutes in school. The school enforces some of society’s rules and expectations. But that’s not a major influence on them.
  • Education, in this country, is not prized or treated as a good thing. If you have a keen, educated society you are less religious, more socially aware and more understanding. You might even pay attention to politics and things.
  • Knowing things (the correct things) should be prized. YES there are things that are correct. There is a right way to find out these things.
  • Learning to critically think and appraise news sources needs to be a skill ALL people have before being allowed to vote.

Possibly a little controversial here, but let’s face it, this communication has wandered a great deal. We have UK citizens [sorry, but really it’s fucking SUBJECTS] voting about shit they don’t understand, BREXIT, the general populous voting on a subject that the media has consistently FAILED to educate the public about what the EU does. A public that has taken all the information un-critically and voted correspondingly.

We also have the next PRESIDENT of the world’s most powerful country telling the world that you should let people make up their own minds about what is true! Utter bullshit. People have to be informed and have the facts as best determined by fucking experts. You very much don’t let the people determine what is true. You have experts, people who understand things explain WHY things are true to people.

I despair.

 

Posted on

Desktop

Sometimes you work with or know people who don’t use the correct terminology. It can occasionally be a minor irritation but also is a problem because using specific language is important to be able to communicate or understand a particular topic. So, in the past, people I have worked with have used the term “screen saver” when they meant “desktop background”. It’s a minor problem but they are wrong. Screen savers are quite specific and no longer necessary although possibly fun.

Below are the pictures I use as my desktop background at home. All were taken by me and so I own the copyright on them. Yes, I am rather proud of all the pictures. Yes, I like aircraft.

I will probably change these over time, but I do want to see many more flying machines. It’s a fascination and passion. Somewhere in these erstwhile communications there are pictures of my iPhone backgrounds, somewhere. Use the search box.

My phone background is currently an obsession with the M’Era Luna festival in Hildesheim.

Posted on

Brooklands

This particular communication is very delayed. I went to Brooklands in between christmas and new year 2015. It was great. There are plenty of wonderful aircraft, some lovely cars and also motorbikes.

I didn’t take any photos of the planes, which is weird for me, but I did have my kids and so that probably stopped me being as free with a camera as I would have liked to be. I did take some shots of them in cockpits, but they don’t get published here.

I really want to talk about the stratospheric chamber!

The chamber is a “room” that will simulated the conditions at high altitude. This type of research was really important just after the Second World War. Fighters and jet planes were being designed to fly higher and fast and they needed to be tested safely under these conditions.

The Stratospheric Chamber looking like a Star Destroyer
The Stratospheric Chamber looking like a Star Destroyer

It’s the largest in the world and quite fantastic to visit if you know what you are looking at. Just the idea and audacity of building something so large that can simulate those conditions. It is quite a remarkable piece of engineering and well worth seeing. I have a feeling it was only recently declassified and that makes it that much more interesting.

I would love to write loads of stuff here giving details and very interesting things but, unfortunately I don’t have the time at the moment. Also, as this is only eleven months late, I can’t remember the plaques around the design!!

Posted on

Micro Viewing

About a year ago a microscope came to be in my possession [legally] I might add. It needed a little work to make the light focusing platform to work properly but that was completed in July.

Microscope
Microscope

I also ordered some prepared slides with your standard introduction to looking at little things samples. It was pretty good looking through the microscope at these. What I want to do soon is get some blank slides and then cut stuff open to get my own samples for viewing. Here’s a photograph, taken through the view piece by placing the camera lens on top of the eye piece. I think it’s a photograph of a housefly leg.

Fly Legs
Fly Legs

I’m looking forward to seeing more of less of the world.

Posted on

Anthems

A NFL backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, has been shat on by the country of the USA because he failed to stand up while the national anthem was played before a game. He was protesting something, here’s a link. It would appear that you can say things but refuse to stand for a song and everyone hates you.

I don’t stand for the national anthem. I’ve been to sports events, NFL, at Wembley Stadium and I have remained seated during the national anthems. This is mostly a recent decision and by recent I mean over the last ten years. We stand to show respect I think. But I don’t know what I am respecting. I certainly don’t love this country, I don’t know what I would be loving. I don’t see why standing is a protocol.

On certain events at work we will sing the national anthem. I don’t. We also have a song associated with work. That I do sing. I can see that community in a more tangible sense, I know what it stands for, I know the history. I feel it’s a community I am a part of and can be involved in. I don’t really see that with the country.

I don’t see why I should have to stand. I don’t do it as a protest, I do it because I don’t understand patriotism and I don’t understand the values of a country.

Posted on

I Don’t Understand

BBC NewsI am fully aware that I am going to come across as an asshole in this piece but this sort of thing really annoys me. This is a special allowance given to a group of people who “sincerely believe” that they must fast during a particular time of the year. Now, it’s not just Islam that is catered for. Christianity gets Easter breaks for schools moved around every year just because they “sincerely believe” that something special happened two thousand years ago not on that date.

Here’s my thought process.

Clearly god does not exist. If god did exist then how come all the books written for him by messengers are different and contain different messages. This is not my only argument against god but it is clearly a human invention. Show me your proof and I promise I will believe, I’m happy to wait.

As god does not exist all religions are bullshit. They are just codified ways of treating each other (or hating women, foreigners, gays, the disabled etc if you have really read them).

Therefore all “sincerely held beliefs” are bullshit. No state should tolerate them being used as excuses for special treatment.

Now that seems extreme but in reality it means everyone gets treated the same. The same rules apply to one and all. I utterly fail to understand how you can tell what a “sincerely held belief” is. How do you know someone has that? If I want every Wednesday off work because the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster deems that necessary everyone would laugh at me.

That’s not a real religion.

They would say.

How the fuck can you tell?

Would be my response.

It’s a bit like Donald Trump claiming he’ll stop all muslims entering the USA. How the fuck can you tell who is a muslim? Do you ask them? How do you know they aren’t lying. What do you have to do to be a true muslim? How can you prove you are a true jew? How do you tell someone that you are a devoted christian? This is the “no true scotsman” fallacy. You can’t tell this stuff.

Let’s stop asking for changes for groups of people because of “special pleading” or “sincerely held beliefs”. I don’t like the idea that once one group gets special treatment then all the others should get it too. Let’s just treat everyone the same and call this treatment out for what it truly is: bullshit.

Posted on

Terrorism Datamining

I’m going to try and explain my position on data mining and data collection and profiling. The government wants to collect lots of data on all of us to help fight terrorism. This won’t work. The amount of data they want to collect is immense. They want to find terrorists using sophisticated computer programs and mining this data for connections.

Problem 1
If I was a terrorist I wouldn’t use social media for communication. I would use face to face meetings, dead letter drops and PAYG mobiles using them for a week and then dumping them. I would never directly contact anyone in charge and all organisation would be off the internet. It’s no use searching these data for patterns. Terrorists don’t use communication methods we can tap into.

Problem 2
The laws of probability. Let us suppose that the software can recognise a terrorist, by using their behaviour traits, 99% of the time and it incorrectly states an innocent person is a terrorist 1% of the time. Let’s suppose we are monitoring a million people and that there are 100 terrorists in that population. This would extrapolate to around 7000 terrorists in the UK. It would seem likely/reasonable that there are that many people within our borders willing to cause damage to the state.

The Sums

Of the 100 terrorists the software finds 99% of them so 99 terrorists are taken into custody. 1 terrorist remains at large.

The software also falsely accuses 1% of the population as it is only correct 99% of the time. This means that 9999 honest members of the public are wrongly accused of being terrorists.

So we have taken 10098 people into custody. The chances of you being accused but innocent is 9999/10098 which is about 99%.

The chance of you being guilty if taken into custody is 99/10098 or about 1%

This is a bad situation.

Data mining isn’t going to work. Neither is profiling or algorithms about people’s behaviour. The numbers don’t make sense. This measure won’t work.

To give you an idea of the scope of this problem I will now expand this to those people who enter this country each year. Let’s assume that the domestic population of the UK is perfectly happy with the State and not partaking in naughty behaviour (a false assumption). According to this BBC report there are 200 million people who enter and leave the country each year. So that means 100 million coming into the country each year. This profiling method assumes we have access to all of the data about every person who enters the country. Let’s look at the numbers and just for niceness let’s increase our software detection accuracy to 99.9%.

99.9% at selecting a terrorist correctly.
0.1% at selecting an innocent person.

Let’s also increase the number of terrorists to 10,000 (although this seems remarkably high to me).

9990 terrorists will be correctly detained. This means that 10 will go free.

99990 innocent people will be detained.

The probability of a detained person being guilty is: 9%. This is slightly better but not a system I want to be a part of.

 

Enjoy your winter break.

 

Posted on

Disaster Area 10 Oct 2014

Shredder

Disaster Area played a couple of songs at the MGS Arena on the 10 October 2014. This should really be a page under the DA section on MyMusic but I am moving those pages to communications to tidy up my menu etc.

Set List:

  • Symphony of Destruction
  • Highway To Hell

Disaster Area is:

  • Shredder Shillito
  • Destroyer Martin
  • Punisher Parish
  • The Anvil Gymer

Here’s some pictures, if I can get a video I’ll embed it on this page too.

A little later in the gig most of Disaster Area joined Iron Maidstonian to play a couple of Maiden songs:

  • The Number Of The Beast
  • 2 Minutes To Midnight
Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress