Fine. This is bad and very sloppy on the part of the paper setters Edexcel. And, no, it should never have happened.

However, protestations from students that this will somehow have  a significant effect on their results is just cobblers. And yes, at least one has already made this protest.

One of the pupils who sat the biology exam, on 16 May, has e-mailed the BBC News website to complain the disruption caused by trying to make sense of the error could affect his university application.

“This was a re-take for me, so the time I lost spent on that question could possibly have cost me a university place, right before the fees go up,” he wrote.

From the BBC article

The initial protest that the question could not be answered is correct, but irrelevant. With the paper marking system using standardised results the only result is that the paper effectively has one less question on it. All students lose one mark and the standardisation smooths out any minor differential (there were after all 425 questions on the paper so any skew will be so small as to be irrelevant and, as I say, standardisation takes care of that anyway).

The second protest is that encountering the unanswerable question somehow disturbed students so badly, as they spent time puzzling over how to answer the question, that it significantly affected their result is also bogus. Firstly, exam technique 101 says, ‘if you come across a question you cannot answer immediately, skip it and come back to it later’. If you’re too dumb to do this I guess your results won’t be up to much anyway. Secondly, this is a multiple choice AS-level exam for further education students (looking to go to university in many cases); life is seldom so good to you that it provides the answer along with the questions – and you’re really gonna get a shock when you go to university where you’ll be expected to actually know (or even have the think out the answer from first principles) for yourself without having it provided on the exam paper.

It’s a really sad indictment of our society and the education system when a student, at this level of study, feels that one out of 425 questions being unanswerable due to human error will have such a significant effect on their results.

I can see it now, there will be students (hopefully not many as I’m sure most are smart enough to realise this is ridiculous) who will protest that ‘but for that one question I would have achieved a better result. The exam board are responsible for my failure, not me’.

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 costly to compensate. Fact. Simple fact. If you’re less of a risk then your insurance is less. It’s a simple, uncomplicated system. Sure, it’s not perfect but saying it is an issue of sexual discrimination is just fucking stupid.

To make matters worse, what the insurance companies will do is raise women’s insurance without lowering men’s. This is what they will do, but it’s not what makes sense. Insurance costs are amortised over the group insured. Given that the new group includes both men and women, the average risk across the whole group falls somewhere between the previous two groups. Put another way, while the risk of a man having an accident remains the same, the risk of a person (man or woman) having an accident is actually slightly lower—similarly, while the risk of a woman having an accident is comparatively low, the risk of a person having an accident is markedly higher.

The losers here are everyone but the insurance companies. After all, most women are not going to stop carrying insurance (a few will stop driving admittedly, but experience shows most people will compensate in other areas rather than give up their personal transport). So, insurance companies will be in for a bumper harvest if this sticks. (Note to self, buy shares in motor insurance companies.)

Some jerk will now point out that insurance is also ageist. If you’re young your insurance is very high and as you get older it goes down until you reach a certain age where it goes up again because statistically young people are more likely to have an accident than older people and very old people are more likely to have accidents than those in their 50s and 60s. But, according to the logic just applied by Europe this is age discrimination and age discrimination is a big no-no in the workplace so…

If this one stuck then insurance would go up even higher to compensate for young male drivers (oops, sorry, young drivers—can’t discriminate on sex EVEN THOUGH IT’S A STATISTICALLY JUSTIFIABLE ACTUARIAL WEIGHTING GARGH!).

After ageism the next thing will be fucking careless jerks. Hey, you can’t charge me more for insurance just ‘cos I’m careless. That’s discrimination and as we know in this PC ‘everyone’s a winner’ world, we can’t discriminate on the basis of ability. Everyone should pay the same insurance, even if they have had one or twelve accidents in their driving career.

On the whole I think the European exercise is both beneficial and historically inevitable but sometimes I despair, I really do…

• 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 projected to grow at nearly 10% per year, while the UK economy is stagnating.
• India spends £750m a year on a space program.
• India gives £295m in aid to other countries.

It is these last three that seem to me to make the UK giving aid to India a nonsense.

Aid worker protest that India’s tax structure is in no position to replace the aid (redistributing the wealth from those who have to those who are starving) and they point to the massive poverty in the country. Both of these may be true. But India spends £750m on a space program and they send £295m in aid to other countries! In other words they have at least ONE BILLION POUNDS that could be usefully redirected to helping the poverty stricken citizens of their own country.

Okay, that’s somewhat simplistic as the space program will in part be helping to keep their billionaires in pocket change and I am sure there are some good arguments about how the Space industry helps pay many people’s wages. But if you have a poverty problem in your country why the hell are you giving away £295m to other countries?

The answer, of course, is political cachet. Well, I’m sure all those starving people in India feel better knowing their politicians can claim to be helping out. Well, from where I’m standing it looks like the UK is basically underwriting this political gesture and not benefiting India one bit—UK £300m in, India take that £300m and give £295m to someone else, okay somewhere £5m get’s lost in the post so the people for whom the aid is intended benefit by, at best, £5m. (And yes, I do realise that more countries that just the UK give aid to India, but you see my point about the stupidity of this situation?)

Look, India, why not tell the UK who you give the £295m to, we’ll stop giving you cash and redirect it to those who, by your own actions, need it more than you do? Better yet, scale back your space program and start feeding your own people! Oh, and while we’re at it; you now have a growing economy, sort your bloody tax system out and start feeding your own people!

1 Source, WolframAlpha taken 1 Mar 2011

I’ve worked with public sector workers and there are many who genuinely do a sterling job for piss poor pay (though it has to be said their retirement plans are the envy of many in the private sector – not least me). However, I have also encountered more than my fair share of feckless wankers who are not fit to shine shoes in a society that eschews footwear.

And the public sector is not the only place such people hide (though it has to be said that, in an effort to disguise unemployment the last government seemed more willing than previous administrations to be ‘flexible’ about employing the initiative challenged).

I am not unsympathetic to the Sword of Damocles suspended over the heads of honest, hard working people in the public sector but let’s be honest, how many of hard working people, in any organisation, could not nominate at least one fellow worker as a drain on the organisational purse.

As for the unions. Oh dear Lord, don’t get me started on the unions. Back in the first half of the 20th century the unions performed an immensely important function. There is no doubt that we would not enjoy the working conditions we have now without unions. But. But, there is a distinct difference between unions fighting for the rights of workers and the self serving politicos and media whores that preen themselves before the camera and microphone today. Be not fooled, today’s unions are nothing more than hollow ideological shell. A shadow of glories past. Grasping to exert political power that they should never be permitted.
</rant>

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 you are visiting as an article (as against, for example, a home page filled with links). Click on the Reader button and an overlay appears, the page is dimmed, and the article’s content is presented without all the page decoration. Things like headers, menus and, of course, advertisements are all removed from the Reader view. It is this last, adverts, that has people squealing.

[Yes, I know this functionality is available through FireFox and Chrome add-ons (like Readability) too. And yes, I know Apple 'stole' the idea.]

It is absurd to suggest that Reader is bad for the internet. We have had Ad Blocker and its ilk removing adverts from pages for a long time now and somehow the internet advertising model seems to lumber on (any site that fails to make money from advertising immediately blames ad blockers, although more likely they are simply not supplying good content or appropriately targeted advertising).

Perhaps a more pertinent question that sites should address is ‘why are people using Reader in the first place?’ I seldom use Ad Blocker software and I have seldom used Reader (it is useful for one thing though, it chains together multiple page articles, saving me the trouble of clicking through several pages). Most websites I visit are designed reasonably and the advertising seldom impinges on the reading experience (besides, after many years of reading online I think my brain pretty effectively filters adverts from pages anyway, I seldom notice them). If your site is so bad, if the adverts are so intrusive, that I use Reader then that’s your problem. Design your site with adverts by all means, but if people use ad blockers or Reader to avoid them then you should probably think about redesigning your site, not blaming Reader.

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 used the iPad for extended viewing I think it’s about as small as I would want to go with a device for reading/surfing for any length of time. In truth I would have preferred an A4 sized screen, sacrificing a little in portability for a better viewing experience. It’s a close call though as I can view the iPad’s screen for many hours without fatigue and it feels comfortable to hold in one hand (which a large A4 form might not). For viewing video I could comfortably go down to 3.5 inch screens, but much detail is lost at this size and watching a full length film (as against a few YouTube videos) is a less than compelling proposition.

Dell have claimed that their Mini 5 is, with a 5 inch screen, the largest size that will fit into a shirt pocket. Hmm. Somewhat questionable reasoning there, but okay I’ll run with it. First, I have very few pocketed shirts, but of course that’s not really the reason for Dell’s boast. What they really intend (I suspect) is that the device is small enough to be considered truly ‘pocketable’ (not something anyone would claim for the iPad).

Samsung’s effort, the Galaxy, runs to a 7 inch screen (slap bang centre between Apple’s 9 inches and Dell’s 5 inches — is anyone else snickering at the double entendre potential of that last statement?). This, to me, seems too small for comfort and too large to be pocketable. What were Samsung aiming for?

It will be interesting to see how the marketplace judges these devices. Will people prefer Dell’s ‘fits in a pocket’ approach (which begs the question, why not just use a smartphone rather than carry around an additional device – iPhone 4G anyone?), or will they go with more iPad sized offerings, or possibly something in between like the Galaxy?

As someone who works in a technical field, but deals with non-technical people, I have a huge amount of sympathy for BP at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, there must be an investigation, and if BP are culpable through negligence, cost cutting, or any other cause, for the original problem then they must be held to account. But, on the matter of how they have approached controlling the spill it is difficult to see what more they could have done.

A quick side note, the American media seem to be suggesting that the US administration, and particularly Obama himself, should have done more. What? What could they possibly have done? Suppose they had taken over the situation. The media would now be attacking them for not solving the problem rather than BP. The chances are they would have needed BP’s resources (expertise, equipment, etc.) to solve the problem anyway, so why not let the experts get on with sorting the mess out. The last thing this situation needs is politicians running things.

I can almost imagine the situation.

Politician: “Okay. Cap the well”

Engineer: “Thank heavens you’re here. We hadn’t thought of that. Any suggestions on HOW?”

Politician: “I was rather expecting you to come up with the solution. I’m more an ideas and strategy person.”

Engineer, under breath: “more like a waste of fucking skin problem. Asshole.”

… outside the meeting…

Politician to Press: “I have given clear instructions to the engineering team and they will have capped the well by tomorrow.”

Engineer, watching the Press conference on TV: “What. The. Fuck? Which orifice did he pull that from?”

.. next day, and the well still leaks…

Politician to Press: “despite my clear instruction the engineers have let us all down and failed to cap the well as instructed. I am therefore calling in new engineers…”

Argh! It’s all so familiar.

Okay, back to the main theme.

BP have no interest in prolonging this incident, so to suggest that they could do more is stupid. Believe me, they’re doing everything that they think is best and most expedient to stop the problem and clean up the mess. They have already said they will cover all costs and compensate people for incidental losses. I don’t doubt that once the furore dies down their financial and legal teams will have something to say on that matter, but for now, to all intents and purposes they seem to be doing the best that can in a bad situation.

On a more personal note, I know from experience that apparently simple problems can have very deep and problematic issues when you actually get down to implementing solutions (those pesky technical details so easily brushed aside WHEN DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!. It’s all well and good the non-technical commentators standing on the side line chanting “fix it. fix it”, or “oh look, they failed again”, but the technical barriers to capping a well one mile below the sea are (I guess) huge and almost none of the commentators I have seen have any experience or expertise in such an endeavour and even less knowledge of the specific problems on this particular project.

Without basic expertise in the field nor knowledge of the specific situation, journalist, politicians and assorted pundits feel qualified to comment on BP’s failure to cap the well as if they actually knew shit from sugar when it comes to capping ruptured oil pipes one mile under the sea.

Of course it all makes for such a dramatic story, such good TV, and is a risk free opportunity for politicians to appear to do something (run around screaming about how the sky is falling) that I am unsurprised by the whole affair, just pissed off at the inanity of most of the coverage and comment.

A Newsnight episode back at the start of December 2009 invited an ex-scientific advisor to the UK government to present the case for global warming to the great unwashed public. Almost the first words out of his mouth were, ‘if all land ice melted the sea level would rise by 100 metres’. Now, this may be true but it is nothing, nothing, to do with the current debate. The IPCC present a worst case scenario for the next hundred years, in which it predicts… Prepare yourself… A rise in sea level of… 0.58 meters.

Now, call me a cynic but 100m is just a little different in its impact that less than 60cm.

Yes. The world is warming.

This warming may even be a direct consequence of human activity (the case for this is less than overwhelming). But even if it is the case that current warming trends are wholly attributable to human activity this in no way implies that the solution lies in some form of self flagellation, hand wringing, or even self denial.

The problem is that current climate models are akin to Ptolemaic models of the cosmos. Somewhat shaky in the ability to make predictions and subject to constant revisions in the light of new data (and there is nothing wrong with this providing we do not pretend any degree of certitude where none exists).

I say, continue the research, continue improving our understanding of the immensely complex relationships that affect the climate, but for heaven’s sake do not pretend that by cutting carbon emissions we will fix things or even make them substantially better in the future. Even the IPCC‘s own report makes fairly conservative estimates of the difference such measures would make and even worst case predictions place almost all of human enterprise in a better position in 100 years than they are now, even if we do nothing.

Apart from the current inability to accurately forecast climate change, there is the more general problem of how we deal with the change when it comes (and the one thing of which we can be certain is that the climate will change in one way or another, it always has, and it always will).

So, do we succumb to the political promise of a globally concerted effort to change the climate, or do we unilaterally prepare for the worst while hoping for the best?

Let’s consider the global option first. This option assumes that all countries will agree to reducing carbon emissions for the greater good. Even if we assume such action will actually make a difference to the climate the chances of actually getting all countries of the world to agree and actually act on that agreement is so close to zero it might as well be zero.

The governments of the world cannot even agree on how best to control an entirely artificial system like the world banking system so what are the odds they will control something like the climate? What do you suppose the motivation is for rising industrial countries to curb their carbon emissions at the request of countries that have already accrued all the benefits from burning fossil fuels? And if countries like China and India do nothing, what will the response from the West be? Just sit back and lose competitive advantage? I doubt it.

So, there’s pretty much no chance of curbing the current carbon emissions in any serious way. Certainly not enough to actually change the climate significantly.

The alternative approach is to shovel money into dealing with the, pretty well inevitable, consequences of climate change. Figure out how to grow crops in arid conditions and obtaining greater crop yields, using genetic modification if necessary. Work on engineering projects to protect against flood or drought (according to need). Work on better utilisation of land for living to deal with denser populations. This is the approach mankind has always taken; use tools, make fire and clothing, in other words modify your immediate environment to suit yourself and protect against the vagaries of climate, weather and the external environment over which you have little control. It’s has been our evolutionary advantage for over 60,ooo years and I suspect it will continue to be into the foreseeable future.

In the meanwhile, work on alternative sources of energy. After all fossil fuels will eventually run out, even if they are not abandoned. Solar, wind, water are all eco-appealing and all of them are more or less uselessly inadequate to sustain the growing energy demands of the human race. Nuclear is the only realistic source of energy at the moment.

Although nuclear fission has done well, it is not very efficient and has that nasty tendency to produce byproducts that kill people. It is puzzling why governments are not investing more heavily in nuclear fusion research. (Well, actually it’s not puzzling when you look at tax revenue generated from fossil fuels and all the lobbying interests that accompany them.)

Nuclear fusion is safe (sustaining a reaction is so difficult that any accident at a fusion plant would almost instantly result in a failure of the reaction releasing little more than a bang and a cloud of water, hydrogen and helium) and the byproduct of, for example, hydrogen fusion is helium; neither of which pose a great risk in the small quantities required in a fusion reactor. Sadly, producing a sustained fusion reaction is still a few years away.

The really sad thing is that governments are not seriously finding fusion research, the one energy source that holds the promise of fulfilling the worlds energy requirements cleanly and cheaply. It’s more politic to keep talking about measures like carbon capture and carbon reduction. Measures that are easy to promise and almost impossible to deliver. Measures for which an easy promise will garner great headlines today, but with the promised (and far from certain) rewards decades away, politicians today will never be held accountable for their failure.

Sure I could simply stop watching all news, stop reading all newspapers and websites, mask my eyes at the supermarket to avoid the blaring headlines of insipid magazines arrayed across the checkouts. But, like my mother leaving the house to escape my loud music, this is not a practical solution and seems to me an imposition on the victim of the lack of consideration while effectively rewarding the perpetrator with more freedom and space in which to declare loudly their ill considered and hysterical opinion.

This is a constant source of irritation to me and has been particularly brought to a head by the recent snow in the UK. There is undoubtedly an issue with snow in the UK at the moment but to attend to the media you would think the apocalypse was upon us. Every news report has some hapless reporter buried in clothing more suited to an Antarctic expedition  standing in what most countries who actually have proper snow would consider a mild snowfall reporting that devastation and death surrounds them as the ‘country grinds to a halt’.

The country is not grinding to a halt. Only yesterday I drove from the West Midlands over to East Anglia with nary a problem. Clear roads and a relatively light dusting of snow where all I saw on the whole journey. The motorways are open and clear. I crossed several and in each instance traffic was flowing freely, North and South. I drove to and from London over the Christmas and New Year period only a day or two after the media had warned everyone to make only necessary journeys (who the hell makes unnecessary journeys? Oh, I think I’ll just pop out for an unnecessary drive around the country) ,no snow of consequence in evidence. I drove along the South of the country three days after the snow-pocalypse had been declared in that region by the media, no snow to speak of. There is some minor icing on less used side roads but even driving on seldom trafficked roads in the fens the roads were virtually clear of snow and ice.

Yes, the snow is bad in the north. Yes, the south west has had more than its share of snow this year. But the ‘country grinding to a halt’? Really? Seriously?

And the snow is only one minor and current case in point. Almost every story on the news (and for the most part they are stories rather than reportage) is inflated and injected with an unwarranted sense of urgency. It is no longer acceptable to simply report the news, it must be embellished to make it entertainment and what could be more entertaining the impending disaster.

SARS, H1N1, video piracy, the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s, banking collapse, recession, unemployment. Yes, all serious and important issues that should be reported. But. All of them have been inflated by the media into the next apocalypse to befall mankind or business.

The problem of this is summed up in the fable of the little boy who cried wolf. As soon as media started to tell stories rather than report news they were caught in a vicious cycle. Each turn of the cycle required the story to be further embellished in order to attract attention. If the news were simply reported this cycle could never happen, but dry facts are not considered newsworthy. Now we must be entertained by our news.

Then there are those who claim that by presenting the news in this dramatic way it ‘gets through to people’. After all, SARS, AIDS (in the west at least) and H1N1 have failed to become the apocalyptic plagues that the media presented on the news so it must have worked. People must have paid attention and the disaster was averted. Hurrah for the media!

The problem with this logic is illustrated in the following anecdote.

I watched each morning as my elderly neighbour walked to the end of this driveway and carefully administered a nauseous unction to the hinges of his gates. Each day, without fail, he repeated this process. The substance was foul smelling and the smell was apparent as soon as I walked from my front door.

One day I could take it no more. I confronted my neighbour and asked, “why do you put that foul smelling substance on your gate each morning?”

“Why, to keep away elephants”, came his cryptic reply.

“But there are no elephants in London”, I protested.

“See how effective the stuff is!” He proudly declared.

Ordnance Survey maps to go online

Ordnance Survey mapping data should be free from April 2010.

Ordnance Survey map data will be freely available online to everybody from 2010, the Government has announced.

The move will allow people to interpret public statistics about crime, health and education by postcode, local authority or electoral boundary.

Currently, the geographical data is only available free of charge to small scale developers.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Ordnance Survey maps to go online.