Weigh to go

Many of us who prefer to quote scientific data instead of diet or exercise to feel fitter have yet another reason to rejoice today as we've now got a much healthier body mass index without doing anything at all.

This is due to the formula we've been using to calculate body fat getting declared faulty by a University of Oxford Professor of Numerical Analysis. Nick Trefethen says that the original formula devised by Adolphe Quetelet in the 1830s underestimates how much broader tall people are on average. Trefethen's adjustment means that tall people (e.g six footers like me) who were previously misled into thinking they were fatter than they were are now thinner, but conversely what were up to yesterday short, normal people now count as overweight.

As Newton said, for every action, there's an an equal and opposite reaction.
Science eh?
Much better than exercise...

Parrot Fashion Disaster

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that teenagers will now be encouraged to learn, by heart, some of the 130 poems in a new anthology for a nationwide competition. Parrot fashion we called it at school. Not an enlightening way for a young mind to learn anything because they end up with as much understanding of Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hardy as, well, parrots.

Gove claims that this "policy" is intended to help "pass our cultural legacy on to the next generation", but in reality it'll only mean that our literature education regressing to the days of fold-up desks, ink wells, chalk boards and clips around the ear; but as most of our older generation remain utterly clueless when it comes to Shakespearean language or the works of Shelley, it obviously didn't work back then either. Does he not have any advisors who care (know?) about education enough to tell him that this is an ill-considered substitute for teaching, and that learning poetry, or pretty much any subject worth studying, is more to do with developing an understanding, not memorising by rote?

What next for the self-interested point scorers who want to take us back to some mythical golden age of education? Returning imperial measurements to the classroom alongside metric because that’s the way it was when everybody had rickets?

Oh dear.
Apparently that's already another "policy" with no obvious benefit to future of the nation....

Post-Christmas Post

Today's BBC website carries the news that scientists have discovered that the original kilogram, the standard by which all weight is measured, has become slightly heavier since it was cast from platinum-iridium in France 137 years ago. This is apparently due to small amounts of pollution collecting on its surface, and as a result, everything else has become lighter, including us.

As Peter Cumpson, professor of MicroElectroMechanical systems at Newcastle University, puts it "It is a really tiny effect, but strictly speaking we are all slightly lighter than we were in the late 1800s."
This means that I'm now sat in a Belfast hotel room weighing less than I thought I did when I left home, even though my weight has stayed exactly the same.

Not only that, but as the distance in kilometres between here and home is based on the speed of light, which is derived from how fast light might travel between two fixed points even though Albert Einstein declared that there were no fixed points, I'm now convincing myself that post-Christmas gym exertions aren't worth the effort. After all, if each walk down the drive is actually a slightly further distance travelled, but in the same amount of time as before, surely I must have got faster as well as lighter?

Just need someone to sort Time out and I can convince myself that I'm getting younger as well...

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.