It'll be all Rite on the night

I'm just back from two weeks in the USA where the current box office number one film is a horror movie called The Rite starring Anthony Hopkins who's been given the job of training a sceptical young priest in the casting out of demons, a role which US Airway's in-flight magazine says is based on a Californian priest called Father Gary Thomas.

Reproducing a Catholic World interview with the "Official Exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose", we get to know that there are about 500,000 exorcisms annually in Italy (yes, you read that right: 10, 000 a week ! ), that there's been an increase in demonic possessions lately and it's all the fault of the Internet, and the utterly bizarre claim that the Catholic Church has "a rite that’s recognized, even by the demons, as legitimate", with no explanation as to why (or how) they'd agree to any sort of framework.

Now I don't know about you, but I just love the idea of Beelzebub's hordes examining the rites of the Catholic Church, assessing them, and agreeing that: yes, those are indeed legitimate.

Got me wondering whether these nasty old demons are supposed to have appointed representatives, simply taken a majority vote, or if the Church got feedback as part of some iterative process until the final version was sanctioned as binding?

Text, Replies and Videotape

I'm currently sat in Piccadilly station waiting for my train home after running a critical thinking workshop for history lecturers and watching dozens of would-be Cathy Marrero impersonators, oblivious to the world around them, stepping out onto roads, colliding in the street, and obstructing the path of other commuters.

Cathy Marrero? She's the soon-to-be very famous shopper described in this morning's free paper as "taking a tumble" into a mall fountain while texting on her mobile, and is now taking the shopping complex in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania to court because nobody went to see if she was ok until after she'd left.

Ms Marrero claims she was texting a friend from church who wanted to know her birthday, but didn't elaborate on why she had the urge to read/respond at once.
Was this friend doing a quiz?
Was it a secret question password prompt?
Complaining about the security staff's laughter on the Youtube footage, the text-walker said ‘What if it was a senior citizen, would it be so funny then?’

Watch here and decide for yourself...

The tooth (the old tooth), and nothing...

While looking for pictures of today's partial eclipse to use with tomorrow's critical thinking workshop, I found a news story on the BBC website that "Humankind's oldest known ancestor probably lived in fear of several large sabretooth cats".
Since these "cats" had only a minimal resemblance to next door's tabby sparrow chaser, and were actually about half a tonne of solid muscle with razor-sharp incisors the size of bread knives, "probably lived in fear" is the early winner of PWL's New Year Award for Stating the Obvious ...

What about the Sanity Clause?

Having spent most of yesterday waiting in King's Cross station for some semblance of information as to when a train was going to travel North, I was struck by how little anybody seemed to care about the cold, the lack of anything to sit on or even how much of a wasted afternoon hundreds of people were having. What seemed to be the most irksome aspect of the experience was generally agreed to be the lack of information: the horrible waiting without knowing when it would end, certain only that when it did, there would be some sort of mad priority scramble where the winners got to be packed like erect sardines for the next 2 hours sweating & exchanging viruses, while the losers waited on the concourse for the next melee to take place.

Deep down, we were all aware that the next service wasn't going to sneak off without any of us noticing, but information, any kind of information, would've given us the illusion of control without having any effect at all on how long we were going to be stuck there. Is too much to ask that "damage to overhead lines at Huntington" had been accompanied by some sort of estimated repair time, even one possibly met ahead of schedule? This would not only have made those inconvenienced by the delays feel a little better, but the subsequent dispersal of the expectant throng (for what turned out to be 5 hours) would have made the station far less crowded, and therefore more comfortable for the non-East Coast Main Line travellers.
Or is that just madness on my part?

With a reverential nod to 1935's "A Night at the Opera"
Groucho: It's all right. That's, that's in every contract. That's, that's what they call a sanity clause.
Chico: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause!

Figuratively speaking...

The Home Office has just (yesterday) launched what it laughably claims to be a "consultation exercise" (the quote marks are there to emphasise how inaccurate the term actually is) on its plans to tighten up visa requirements for foreign students.

The questionnaire on which this "consultation" is based invites the public and interested parties to "Contribute your views to our consultation into how we can best reduce the number of students who can come to the UK". However, it's either been very badly put together (rather ironically for something do with education as it highlights that somebody somewhere needs educating about questionnaire design), or it's been deliberately formulated to preclude dissenting opinions. I'll leave you to decide....

Example:
Q2. Do you think that only Highly Trusted Sponsors (HTS) should be permitted to offer study below degree level (at NQF levels 3, 4 and 5 / SCQF levels 6, 7 and 8) in the Tier 4 (General) category?

• Yes – only HTS should be able to offer these sub-degree level courses
• No – all sub-degree level study should be prohibited under Tier 4 (General)
• No – study at NQF level 3 should be prohibited, even where the sponsor is a HTS
• Don't know

So if you happen to think that sub-degree level courses should be available from a wider range of providers you have no box to tick, nor can you tick a box to show that you think that the system as it is ought to be maintained. Only if you believe that the Home Office proposals are insufficiently draconian can you enter an alternative.

Now regardless of whether or not these proposals are desirable, proportionate or in the interests of our educational system, highly biased "consultations" like this not only have no statistical credibility, they're a disgraceful way of canvassing public opinion.

The tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but...

Now travelling back from two days on the South Coast, I've just read Martin Robbin's Lay Scientist blog at the Guardian, where there's the story of a Brazilian evangelical cult leader called Welder Saldanha banning his followers from using USB connections on their computers. This, says the story, is because the universal symbol for the technology "is a trident, which is used to torture souls".

Although the writer does wonder whether the story could be a spoof, and it's hard to tell when you consider the kind of pronouncement Stephen Green made last month, the bit about how the members of the Paz do Senhor Amado cult can connect devices in lieu of USB is undeniably very funny. Apparently, Bluetooth is fine because "Blue was the colour of the eyes of our saviour Jesus Christ"....

Bonfire (night) on the Insanities...

For the elite upper quartile of the country's universities, those likely to set their tuition fees close to the Government's £9,000 cap, this week's announcement is close to what they've been long been arguing for, since if students are prepared to pay, then those institutions will be better off. However, the remainder face an uncertain future as cuts in block grants means that they will lose the equivalent of over £7,000 a year for each undergraduate, so even setting fees at £6,000 equates to a large loss of income.

Ministers have claimed that universities could compensate by reducing costs and deliver two-year degrees, but assuming that the credit value required for certification stays the same, then the number of course weeks will need to be increased from their present level by around 50% each year. This leads to the inevitable questions (well they are to me as I've spent many years writing, running and delivering HE programmes) :

• When are lecturers working within this educational model supposed to prepare for their teaching (and escalating student expenditure will surely be accompanied by an attendant growths in expectations of quality)?
• When are they supposed to engage with any form of scholarly activity?
• When are they supposed to set and mark assessments?

Unless I'm missing something, in this scenario, either staffing numbers and the attendant costs must go up, or quality inevitably goes down. Have they just not thought this through, or have the lunatics finally taken over the asylum?