The frustrated engineer inside me loves this

Deaths in the world

This was an extraordinary graph, not least because of the great way they described the data. You will need to click on it and download and zoom and gape and wonder. If you do want to get upset, there is much blame to go around. Some of them really surprised me, Aurangzeb was responsible for 4.6 million deaths? Or the British Famines in India killed 27 million or that the fall of the Ming Dynasty killed off 25 million. What was horrific was the sheer scale of the deaths due to the slave trade (curious how much we know about the Atlantic trade versus the middle east trade).

So who is to blame for us being 26th out of 34 countries?

So we are good in education, eh? Specially the Maths side? Erm no.

The report found that just 1.7% of England's 15-year-olds reached the highest level, Level 6, in maths, compared with an OECD average of 3.1%.

In Switzerland and Korea, 7.8% of pupils reached this level.

Overall, England ranked 26th out of 34 OECD countries for the proportion of pupils reaching the top level in maths, behind other nations like Slovenia (3.9%), the Slovak Republic (3.6%) France (3.3%) and the Czech Republic (3.2%), which were among those scoring around the OECD average.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

These figures show that few bright non-privileged students reach their academic potential - which is unfair and a tragedy ”

Sir Peter LamplSutton Trust

The report adds that the situation looks worse for England when a wider global comparison is used.

Singapore, which is not part of the OECD table analysed, saw 15.6% of its students score the top level, while in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which were also not part of the OECD table, 10.8% and 26.6% respectively got the top level.

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said: "This is a deeply troubling picture for any us who care about our brightest pupils from non-privileged backgrounds."

The study also suggests that comparing the maths results of 18-year-olds would be even more stark because 90% of English pupils drop the subject after GCSE.

Whereas in many other countries, maths is compulsory up to the age of 18.

The report argues that England is falling down international tables because of successive failures to help the most able pupils.

So assuming that it takes 5 years to fix something like this, who were the ministers at the head of the education ministry going back to 2002 or so?

Ruth Kelly, she has now left politics and is working as an economist.

Alan Johnson is now an MP

Ed Balls is currently the Shadow Chancellor.

Michael Gove is the current Minister.

sighs. Good heavens. So what have the 2 respective parties saying?

Education Secretary Michael Gove added: "We already knew that under Labour we plummeted down the international league tables in maths. "Now we see further evidence that they betrayed bright children from poor backgrounds and - worst of all - that their policies drove talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds away from the subjects that employers and universities value most."

Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg said: "Results for all pupils, including the brightest, improved under Labour. "While there are always improvements that could be made, gifted and talented pupils were stretched through a National Academy, targeted scholarships and a new A* grade at A-level. "While we want to see bright pupils stretched, this can't be at the expense of leaving some behind. Michael Gove's plans will create a two tier exam system, which will do nothing to help all pupils make the most of their potential."

What the hell? Whose head has rolled because of several years of under performance? Look at what the moronic Stephen Twigg says, listen, you muppet, the point was to stretch the top guys. He totally missed the point, but then the Labour government has screwed it up anyway, so one cannot just trust these buggers with anything. But to be so intellectually stupid? And he is supposed to be the chap who is supposed to look after what the government is doing? God save our kids. So what is our Government’s plans? Oh! good, its to blame the previous government. /facepalm. I like your strategy, Mr. Gove. I don't want you to blame others, I want you to fix the bloody thing. What are you doing about it?

so what are the teachers saying about the diabolical performance?

Commenting on the Sutton Trust’s analysis of the performance of highly able pupils in international league tables, Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers’ union, said:
“No one would wish highly able children to achieve anything less than their best. It is the case that approaches to Maths across OECD countries differ. Jurisdictions which prize critical thinking and problem solving as well as creativity are the areas in which young people – highly able or otherwise – do well in Pisa tests.
“The creation of additional elements in league tables is not the way to improve outcomes for the ‘highly able’ students. A broad curriculum in which critical thinking is prized would be. The NUT hopes that the Department for Education will have regard to this when the secondary curriculum review is published, and will reflect on it as responses come in to the primary curriculum review.”

/facepalm. What a load of pap and stupid utterances. This is the comment from another teaching union head.

Nasuwt teaching union head Chris Keates said the tests used to draw the comparisons, and the way children prepare for them, differed between countries. "Their conclusions raise more questions than they answer. They are not comparing like with like. "The education systems are different. The pupils taking the tests are selected differently. Some countries do nothing but prepare for the tests for months. Some, like Shanghai may not enter a pupil sample generally reflective of the student population and use crammer sessions to prepare."

ooooo, that’s a new one, Chris, so the test itself was bad, our students are all math geniuses and great. /facepalm. Great leadership there.

End result? nobody is talking about actually doing anything, the politicians are blaming each other, one teacher head is blaming the government and the other is blaming the tests themselves.

My poor children of my nation.

How Our Education System Turns Away Thousands Of Brilliant People Every Da

so who invented email?

Son

Another very interesting story here...who really invented email? I first used email when I landed in Manchester in 1992, way way way after all this happened. quite interesting, this debate about electronic history.
Love
baba

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/05/shiva-ayyaduri-email-us-postal-service/?page=all
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai — the MIT lecturer who invented e-mail — had spent years blasting the struggling United States Postal Service for its failure to embrace the revenue potential of his creation. So when he was recruited to help save the U.S. Mail earlier this year, Ayyadurai made headlines and was suddenly a star. That’s when the trouble started.

The Philosopher's Beard: The art of business and the science of economics

Dear Kannu

Good to hear that your religious education exam went well. 

I was reminded about the forgotten links between religion and economics. Religion is concerned about the behaviour and actions of the believers. Strangely enough, so is economics. And business. Some of the fundamental aspects of economics such as money,  interest rates, assets, free markets, tax deductibility of some expenses, accounting etc have some fascinating religious links. 

Anyway. Here's an interesting article on the difference between business and economics. It's good that you are studying economics first. It will give you a good picture of the overall world, markets etc etc.

it's surprising how many business people forget the basics of economics. But then people who forget the laws of economics are condemned to keep on violating them and pay for it. Spend less than you earn. Mind your cash flow. Invest in the future. Ensure you make your customers successful. Keep open to new ideas, capital and labour. Don't subsidise things. Etc etc. 

Love

Baba

The Philosopher's Beard: The art of business and the science of economics
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2011/10/art-of-business-and-science-of.html

---

Business and economics are tied up together in lots of people’s minds. After all, they’re both about money, aren’t they? An awful lot of people seem to believe that economics is Big Business and business is small economics. (Even the generally reliable Economist magazine seems to use this definition in deciding what should go in its business or economics sections.) The failure to keep the two apart leads to some bizarre misconceptions in the popular understanding. For example the idea  that countries are businesses in competition with each other, or that business is about self-serving greed and economics is the soulless science of large scale greed.
Business is the art of commerce. Economics is the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. Just from the definitions we can immediately see one clear difference. Economics concerns systems and general principles and is therefore a theoretical subject eminently suitable for academic study in a university, while business is a practical discipline that does not belong there. Sure there are skills that are important for successful business life - like managing people well, knowing how to make a spreadsheet, giving great powerpoint - but there’s nothing academic about them. Business schools also make much of their case-studies, analysing a famous or infamous company or manager, usually with a particular theme in mind. This may properly be called biography (or creative writing), and seems as useless to practical business life as the obligatory single course on moral theory. Of course there are real theoretical economics issues associated with business that can be the subject of rigorous academic research, such as the economics of imperfect competition (industrial organisation), the theory of the firm, and logistics. But these can just as well be studied in economics departments.
So why does business studies exist as an independent academic subject? Two main reasons spring to mind: demand from students, and demand from business professionals. First, teaching business studies at universities allows young people who want to pursue a career in commerce to attain a certificate of academic prestige, which is fashionable these days [previously]. They also seem to have the mistaken idea that university is a good place to learn useful skills (when in fact students of business studies, and other vocational subjects, seem to learn the least from their college experience). In order to meet this lucrative demand, simulacra of academic departments were created, which then, in order to support their legitimacy, had to invent some new field of scientific research or recharacterise an existing area of study as ‘business economics’.

The True Cost of Commuting

Dear son

I think we have talked about this. I detest driving in the city. Driving in the countryside is marginally better. A more useless exercise I cannot imagine. With all the new technology and facilities to hand, to physically make an effort to transport yourself is frankly silly. Not to mention very expensive. 

I would have lived in the city but it's not a fun place for kids and it's not possible to buy a house in there. I cannot live without a garden and the ability to garden. Hence a compromise. 

Still this economic argument in this article is great. Makes perfect sense. Which is why I'm happy with our old car :)

See if you can come up with a better economic argument or a different one. 

Love

Baba

The True Cost of Commuting | Mr. Money Mustache
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/

---

 

The True Cost of Commuting

It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block’s Annual Street Party.

I was talking to a couple I had just met, and the topic turned to the beauty of the neighborhood. “Wow, I didn’t even realize this area was here”, the guy said, “It’s beautiful and old and the trees are giant and all of the families hang out together outside as if it were still 1950!”. “Yeah”, said his wife, “We should really move here!”.

Then the discussion turned to the comparatively affordable housing, and the other benefits of living in my particular town.  By the end of it, these people were verbally working out the details of a potential move within just a few months.

Except their plan was absurd.

Because these two full-time professional workers currently happen to live and work in “Broomfield”, a city that is about 19 miles and 40 minutes of  high-traffic driving away from here. They brushed off the potential commute, saying “Oh, 40 minutes, that’s not too bad.”

Yes, actually it IS too bad! … But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let’s take a typical day’s drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 days per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel*.

That’s EVERY ten years. And that’s with a commute that most Americans claim is “not too bad”.

HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE S UPPLY OF HOME-GROWN IS LAMIC TERRORIS TS IN THE UK

One of my friends passed this paper across to me. I am constantly surprised at the usual image of terrorists being from poor families. No, I am afraid not. People who want to commit violence for a political or religious reason are NOT poor or illiterate, you need to be fairly smart to get over the usual threshold of violence, be able to rationalise violence and be intelligent enough to understand that you need to do extraordinary stuff to get out of the way of the law.

Here in the UK, a comparison was done between UK Muslims and UK Muslims convicted of terrorist offences (77). To no surprise, they find that the terrorists are significantly higher educated than the usual population. Curiously and strangely, there is also a statistical significance if you are male, unemployed, married and UK citizen. Go figure. A facetious comment was that your wife is going to make your life so difficult at home when you are unemployed that you take up terrorism? Also, curiously, “

Ethnic origin is also a statistically significant predictor of being convicted, with this most likely if
UK Muslims are of African and mixed Southeast Asia-White ethnic origin

Hmmm, not sure what one can say about this. But one should keep a beady eye out on those universities.

The law of contradictions

What me boss said…

“As we rebuild the regulatory system we need to be wary of two traps — firstly, we should also be wary of using the phrase ‘never again’ — if we learn anything from history it is that we are destined to repeat mistakes whenever we believe that we have solved definitively the cause of the most recent crisis. Secondly, we have to avoid being over-prescriptive, as we cannot foresee every possible scenario.

These traps are seductive, pandering to the basic human desire for there to be meaning in life, for there to be some kind of order to show that fate is not capricious — ie, somehow we all get what we deserve. Indeed, it is a core objective of both political and economic systems to promote a comforting perception of predictability. Ever more today, society does not want to acknowledge unpredictability, particularly around economic outcomes — we want to believe an unwelcome outcome is the cause of failings that need both to be compensated and cause revisions to be made to the system to reinforce predictability and so restore confidence in the future.

This leads us to seek out definitive solutions to identified problems. But just because a solution is demanded of course does not mean there is a soluble problem. Many commentators would make this observation about the eurozone today. If only it were as simple as moving a toggle switch between ‘austerity’ and ‘growth’.

And there are many such conflicts challenging the restoration of growth:

· We want stability as well as growth, we promote economic growth as well as fiscal austerity;

· We want banks to lend more and also grow capital both in absolute and ratio terms;

· We want the banking system to have access to private capital at the same time as we debate the future shape and capitalization of its activities and restrain dividends;

· We want to see more competition in financial services but we don’t want to see the higher returns that would attract external private capital;

· We want to see fewer interdependencies without losing the benefits of scale;

· We continue to incent the banking system to lend ever more to governments and then agonise what happens if the same governments don’t/can’t pay;

· We want the system to respect market signals but then we don’t like what ratings agencies say;

· We want greater transparency but fret about how immediately markets react to events not yet able to be responded to a policy level;

· And finally, while we have made great strides in defining what we don’t want the system to do we have made less progress in determining what we want the system to look like when we are finished.

We continue to pose important questions which underpin many of the challenges in getting the financial system back to business as usual.

· For example; are there gaps in coverage? Shadow banking?

· Is the aggregate of all the measures both complete and in train duplicative or reinforcing? Who is responsible for ensuring this?

· Is there coherence between banking, insurance, pension fund and asset management regulation? Again whose responsibility is it to check this?

· Is there market capacity for the capital raising and funding assumptions being made?

· Does the understandable focus of national fiscal authorities towards limiting their contingent risk to domestic deposit bases risk unwinding many of the elements of globalisation of economic activity?

· If fiscal authorities don’t want the contingent risk of the banking system does anyone else and at what price?

· If a consequence is to unwind globalisation to some degree and establish a ‘home market’ bias — does this impact the availability and cost of financial services delivered to multinational groups?

· Does this change the competitive landscape between companies domiciled in Europe versus the US versus Asia? Does this matter?

· Does the public policy concern over systemically important institutions create a greater probability of stability because of their higher capital requirements and supervision or does it further concentrate activity into these institutions because of their elevated status; current experience suggests that in times of great uncertainty customers prefer the largest institutions.

· Does prospective bail-in of creditors change positively the probability of a future bank failure because of greater market led discipline or does it simply reallocate systemic losses away from the future income of society (through taxation) towards society’s current and future savings (via insurance and pension funds) — and if so have we deceived ourselves that we have achieved very much?

· And finally, is there too much focus on products, platforms, infrastructure, capital and liquidity because they can be defined and measured as opposed to focussing on behaviour which is much more difficult to pin down objectively?”

Do not mess with Finland

I found this interesting because I had read about the best sniper in the world who operated in this war. He popped off 505 Soviet Soldiers, in 100 days, during a time when the hours of daylight were very small, using a basic rifle and NO telescopic sight. Fascinating. There is an updated factoid here.

Stalin had eviscerated the Red Army and the result was rather predictable. (Despite the presence of Zhukov, but that’s a post for another day)

Dont also forget that Finland then threw its lot in with Germany to regain its lands in the continuation war and then in World War II. Complicated stuff.

That said, PISA tells you that Finland is usually the best in the world in education. Go figure. What an amazing country.