Not Barking (mad) up the Wrong Tree

Nice to read in this morning's paper that the House of Lords has at last voted to remove a law criminalising the use of insulting language in Britain.

Although it'll be early next year before MPs are asked to finally decide on the Lord's amendment, the decision is long overdue as it follows a long series of headline-grabbing arrests and prosecutions ranging from an Oxford student asking a police officer if his horse was gay (Thames Valley police described it as homophobic and "offensive to people passing by"), to a Newcastle teenager getting fined £50 with £150 costs for saying "woof" to two labradors.

Not only does this mean that atheist pensioner John Richards will be able to put up a sign in his window saying "religions are fairy stories for adults" without the threat of arrest by the local Lincolnshire constabulary for "causing alarm and distress", I can now go out and say boo to next door's goose and keep my CRB status intact ..

Food for thought

Sat on the train home from today's HN Examiner meeting, I've just read in the free paper handed to me at King's Cross this little gem from a recently published collection of the Queen Mother's letters about some South Sea Island:

"The natives are very diseased and are rapidly dying out.  Instead of being strong, healthy cannibals with strange religions and no clothes, they are now half-hearted Roman Catholics, with European clothes.  It seems all wrong but that is what happens."

David Icke probably takes this as confirmation that the QM was indeed a blood-drinking lizard keen on human flesh, but is it an example of anti-Catholic prejudice or an indication that the royal family have a progressive appreciation of cultural diversity just as long as the natives aren't eating anybody you might know?

Siege Mentality

I'm currently sat in the bar at the Institute of Directors after a rather long awards ceremony; just round the corner from where Julian Assange is claiming asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy besiege with deluded supporters and news crews.

Although he might claim that this is some sort of freedom, I'd personally be thinking of ways to extricate myself from what looks like a nondescript prison building with better-than-the-norm views from some of the windows.

Some here have suggested that he might be smuggled out in an overly-large diplomatic bag, but as the drinks have flowed some more creative options have been put forward....

• Simulate death by self hypnosis like James Coburn's Flint and be taken from the embassy in a coffin and flown to Quito for a hero's funeral. (Kevin)
• Wear a prosthetic mask and disguise himself as the Ecuadorian ambassador so leave Britain on a diplomatic passport. (Bob D)
• Publicly arrange for Madame Tussuad's to make a waxwork of the Wikileaks founder, and then after one its top modellers has "recreated" his features take the completed "waxwork" out of the embassy in full view of press, police and demonstrators. (Dermot)
• Disguise himself as a washerwoman in the style of Mr Toad and slip boldly past the oblivious police, steal an aeroplane and then fly out of the reach of British justice. (Pippa)
• Simply walk out of the front door with his hands in the air and see if anybody actually cares...

Alphabet Soup, Acronym Crackers

Once upon a time, when I was way too young to know anything about education policies, principles & pass rates, every school child took either 'O' levels if you had some sort of demonstrable academic ability, or CSEs if you didn't (or possibly a mixture, but that's digressing..). The system approximately expressed the division between grammar schools and secondary moderns, but tended to make less sense as more schools went comprehensives, so the introduction of GCSEs in the late 1980s was long overdue.

However, this soon translated to GCSEs effectively becoming CSEs for everyone to the extent that the proportion of students obtaining top grades is now three times what it was when they were introduced (and looking through old papers from my sister's year to my own 10 years previously shows how dumbed down they were to begin with).

This means that Michael Gove's desire to ditch GCSEs in favour of a restored 'O' level-type qualification is somewhat idealistic, but its also unlikely that the latest scheme would survive the inevitable avalanche of criticism from the educational establishment even if his coalition partners weren't dead set against it.

It raises the conundrum that any exam possessing sufficient rigour to be worthwhile, will by definition be too difficult for a minority of pupils to pass, regardless of any improvements that are made in teaching, and so requires some sort of different provision for those less able.

So if we take the position that GCSEs are now discredited with their grades inflated into meaninglessness, is the best solution to replace them with a new examination system that would, in a few years' time, fall victim to exactly the same process of grade inflation and declining confidence?

Far better then to just get rid of them, particularly as post-16 qualifications make no sense when the normal school leaving age will be 18 from 2015 and it is surely logical for the main assessment of academic achievement to coincide with the final year of school? Taking GCSEs out of the picture would then leave a convenient opening for AS levels to be introduced to slightly younger students with minimum disruption and cost as teachers are familiar with them and they integrate with 'A'-levels in a way that GCSEs never have.

Malpractice making perfect sense

On the way to deliver another Scholarly Activity workshop in Manchester, I've found in today's papers yet another victory for reason and common sense dressed up as some sort of attack on Christianity by sections of our more reactionary press.

Happily for those of us who believe that only evidence based treatments have any credibility, Lesley Pilkington has lost her appeal against getting struck off by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy for professional malpractice, or in other words trying to "cure" homosexuality with a combination of counselling and prayer.

This so-called reparative therapy considers the sin of homosexuality to be an illness which can be put right by supernatural implorations, and even apparently asked a patient if any of his relatives were Freemasons, although how this could be connected wasn't explained in court or in Mrs Pilkington's post hearing interview.

She did however say that "counsellors with traditional views are being closed down": a statement I hope is a refection of our legislators' efforts nationwide . She's entitled to her views, no matter how irrational they are, but they have no place in a professional, scientific arena, and certainly should never be foisted on what might be very vulnerable individuals.

Newsflash: 30 pieces of silver replaced by a pen

Idly flicking through the television channels while the cricket's rained off, I've come across what appears to a be loop of adverts aimed the elderly, the infirm, the very poor, the unemployed and in this case: me.

In amongst this heavy rotation of lawyers, loan sharks (do some people really think 1750% loans are a good idea?) and bingo there's good old Sir Michael Parkinson telling the over 50s how to cover their funeral costs and get a free pen. Apparently over 790,000 people have agreed to partake in a scheme that promises a limited lump sum on death, even though contributions are not.

This static nest egg won't rise even when you've covered it, but your payments continue until your last breath, so suppose you pay £20 every month and live to 94? It's not hard to see that you'll pay out over double what you'd get back, but if you unfortunately died at 93, neither you nor your dependents would get anything.

Not exactly a good deal, and one that any reputable insurance company could easily improve on, but perhaps Sir Michael doesn’t see it that way.
Maybe he really believes in this "investment".
Maybe he even has one himself.
Maybe he really is so in need of whatever AXA are paying him that misleading the elderly doesn't bother him in the slightest ...

A shroud and its sillier aligning

I've just finished another Scholarly Activity workshop (the third in a series of seven) in Manchester and would like to thank Adele Turner for bringing me a copy of Saturday's Telegraph which contains a wonderful example of how not to conduct evidence based research.

In it, a Cambridge-based art historian called Thomas de Wesselow describes his feelings upon finally seeing the Turin Shroud "face to face", and puts forward a "theory" as what it is. His "theory" is that the Shroud is indeed two thousand years old and the image on it is that of Jesus, but not necessarily created in a burst of divine energy during the resurrection. Although De Wesselow's "research" "was largely done at his desk or in libraries, save for one episode ... when the connection between the Shroud and Resurrection came to him in a kind of eureka moment", he's concluded that the first disciples didn't see the Risen Christ; they saw a soiled cloth with a miraculously-produced image on it and knew at that moment Jesus must have risen from the dead.

Neat idea, but unfortunately for his credibility as a historian, there's absolutely no evidence to support it. Nothing. No historical, material, scientific, archaeological or palaeographical evidence, and not even anything in the Bible as far as I can tell; where if memory serves correctly, Thomas is described as putting his hand into Jesus' pierced but resurrected flesh.

So logically, not only did the gospel writers, Paul, the early church fathers and everybody else writing things down during the development of Christianity keep the "facts" of the Easter (up)rising secret; everybody who saw it for the next millennium-and-a-half or so also neglected to mention the existence of the Shroud until it was exhibited in northern France around 1355. It was soon withdrawn from view on the orders of the local Bishop (Henri de Poitiers) who doubted its authenticity at the time "after diligent inquiry and examination, ... the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed."

The real mystery of the Turin Shroud, is unfortunately not just limited to why this undoubted fake continues to exert any fascination over believers, researchers, writers and documentary-makers, but that it also gets used to disparage 1988's carbon dating which gave the Shroud's date of manufacture as sometime in the 13th or 14th century. It would after all, be truly miraculous if the normal rules of carbon 14 decomposition were actually unreliable just this once. So not only is there good 14th century evidence that the Turin Shroud was known (or at least very strongly suspected) at the time to be a forgery, there is excellent scientific evidence to confirm it.

To paraphrase an old saying about ducks: if looks logically a fake, looks historically like a fake, and tests scientifically like a fake, then it's a ....

Money Talks

I've just arrived in Crawley to deliver a day full of assessment workshops and am happy to discover that not only is there apparently no recession here, the local authority has such a cash surplus that it must surely be reducing the business rates and community charges for the coming year. Not convinced? Well the local paper is carrying the headline that West Sussex county council has spent over £100,000 making information videos on such important subjects as "how to wash your hands", and "how to use a mobile phone". Therefore, simple logic suggests a surfeit of cash, as they surely can't think that this kind of thing is in anyway necessary. Can they?
For example, any user of the national rail service could have told them that 90% of the population already know how to "get on train/switch on phone/call someone/use loud voice to tell that someone you're on a train .....".

Disreputable Behaviour

I'm currently watching Sky News in a London hotel prior to tomorrow's assessment conference and wondering how exactly Fred Goodwin has "brought the honours system into disrepute"? He didn't award himself the knighthood that the queen has just withdrawn; all he did was accept it. You could probably argue that he brought himself into disrepute by graceless behaviour and reckless management of the Royal Bank of Scotland. And you could also make a case that he brought the banking industry into disrepute (admittedly in conjunction with many other supposedly leading lights). But the honours system? That charge really ought to be levelled at those who recommended and confirmed the award for "services to banking" for someone who was effectively just gambling with someone else's money.

Now, it's not that I'm particularly advocating that (the now) Mr Goodwin deserves to keep his knighthood, but unlike previously dispossessed knights, he is not a criminal or a traitor, just someone who didn't turn out to have been quite so brilliant a banker as they thought him to be when bestowing the award in the first place. So it occurs to me that if you consider the many still-knighted leading bankers who must be grateful to Fred Goodwin for effectively taking the public flak on their behalf, you might conceivably say that he's performed his fellow money men a great service. And doesn't great service eventually lead to honours? A knighthood perhaps?....

Troweller in Error

Much as I agree that gardening is important, after all the Office for National Statistics has declared it to be one of the few activities which make people of all income levels and national origins happier, but television gardener Alan Titchmarsh has told this week's Radio Times that "Gardening is more important than politics [because] it has a consistent point of view".

No explanation is supplied as to how he considers domestic agriculture on any scale able to hold a viewpoint, consistent or otherwise, or why political variability is apparently undesirable (surely the point of democracy is that change can, and does, happen?), but those of us who thought the appeal of gardening to be creative joy, useful solitude or a connection to nature, are now aware that in addition to the pruning, planting and potting: there's philosophy!