Archive for the ‘ Comment ’ Category
Okay, there’s been a mistake on (so far) three exam papers administered this year. The latest is a multiple choice question on a biology paper for which no correct answer was supplied. Fine. This is bad and very sloppy on the part of the paper setters Edexcel. And, no, it should never have happened. However, [ READ MORE ]
This is another stupid thing that’s got me mad today. So, according to our European overlords insurance companies can no longer use gender as an actuarial factor. Why the hell not? Look, this is not a sex discrimination issue. It’s a statistics issue. Women crash less and when they do crash the results are less [ READ MORE ]
The UK government is considering stopping £300m a year in aid to India. This sounds appalling doesn’t it? Until you take into account a couple of other facts. India has more billionaires than the UK. India has a thriving middle class. India’s GDP at Parity is £3.8trillions while the UK’s is $2.16[1] India’s economy is [ READ MORE ]
<rant> So, the UK government has written to all public sector workers asking them to suggest ways to meet the necessary cuts in public spending, a self serving effort to spread responsibility to be sure, but cuts are necessary so why not ask those closest to the coal face (the same people who demand to [ READ MORE ]
So Safari Reader is the end of the internet, or so you would think from some of the hysterical reactions to it. For those who don’t know (where have you been), Safari Reader is simple mechanism built into Safari 5 that presents a ‘Reader’ button in the address bar if the browser recognises the page [ READ MORE ]
With more and more tablet computers making an appearance, the thing that strikes me is the size of their screens. There seems to be a trend to the small, positioning themselves between the iPad’s 9.5 inch display and the typical smartphone 3.5-4 inches. So what is the market? Why choose a particular screen size? Having [ READ MORE ]
Today BP capped the well head (well, we’re waiting for the final ‘yay, it worked’ as I write), but a few things are notable from the coverage I have seen in the media so far. As someone who works in a technical field, but deals with non-technical people, I have a huge amount of sympathy [ READ MORE ]
There is much to hate about the Global Warming movement, especially the politics involved. Any query is met with, ‘denialist!’, irrespective of the merit of the question. There is also a tendency to overstate the case. A Newsnight episode back at the start of December 2009 invited an ex-scientific advisor to the UK government to [ READ MORE ]
When I was a youth I would occasionally be importuned by my mother to “turn down that damned music!” I am fairly sure that she simply found the loud music an irritation, an imposition that she could not freely escape without leaving the house. In the same way I cry, “Turn down that damned hysteria!” [ READ MORE ]
And not a moment too soon. Given that we pay for this data to be collected and for the maps to be produced, it seems right that we should have free access to them. Ordnance Survey maps to go online Ordnance Survey mapping data should be free from April 2010. Ordnance Survey map data will [ READ MORE ]
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