Maybe it’s just me, but I find the piece excerpted below (in HuffPo) rather disturbing, along with the revelations that the same thing is going on in Australian schools. It is less common in Britain; parents are more likely to tell the school to f*ck off, and in any case the school day is an [...]
One of the hard things about teaching is that there is only so much you can do. You can try to lead students to information, but in the end, it’s up to them how much of that information they choose to take in, and final responsibility for performance in exams, tests or essays rests with [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Children, Law, Parenthood, Public Policy, Society
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Tagged Education, fortune cookies, Geelong Grammar, Law, law degree, Rose Ashton-Weir, sense of entitlement, study, Sydney University, teaching, tertiary degrees, VCAT
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Instead of doing, you know, actual work last night (how do I hate thee HMRC, let me count the ways), I spent quite a bit of the evening reading articles and responding to the news that new Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has cancelled (I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but never mind) the [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Academia, Australia, Books, Economics, Law, Literature, Politics, Popular culture, The Left
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Tagged Campbell Newman, David Hicks, externalities, Guantanamo Bay, Jonathan Haidt, merit goods, Miles Franklin Award, milton friedman, Nick Earls, Queensland Premier, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Stella Prize, Tony Abbott, Unaipon Award
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Scientists have produced a colossal picture of our Milky Way Galaxy, to reveal the detail of a billion stars. It is built from thousands of individual images acquired by two UK-developed telescopes operating in Hawaii and in Chile. Archived data from the project, known as the Vista Data Flow System, will be mined [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Art, Britain, General, Internet, Science
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Tagged a billion stars, astronomy, dr nick cross, eye candy du jour, mike read, milky way, photography, UK national astronomy meeting, UKIDSS/GPS sky survey, university of cambridge, university of edinburgh, vista data flow system
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January 18, 2012 – 7:16 am
This Sceptered Isle slides further into the shitter, alas: I can do no better than reproduce much of this excellent post from a British blog (it provides important context and background). The difference here is that I know the young man in question, and am young enough (just) to remember what school bullying felt like. [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Britain, England, Religion, Skeptics
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Tagged British Humanist Society, collective failure of nerve, islam, Jesus and Mo, peter tatchell, political correctness, Rhys Morgan, Stanislaw Burzynski, University College London, Will's Liberal Thoughts, wingnuts
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January 8, 2012 – 7:52 pm
A while back, SL wrote a post on how charging very high fees for university degrees was difficult to combine with the provision of a quality education. She used the US as an example of a university system where the tendency towards expensive degrees had led to grade inflation. She commented: First the demands coalesce [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Australia, Fark!, Law, Public Policy, Society
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Tagged Academia, criminal law, criminal offences, death threats, fee paying degrees, students, threats, universities
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December 20, 2011 – 7:16 am
Appearing on the 98.9 Queensland radio station – an Indigenous, government funded radio station – Meryl Dorey is now advising the listeners in rural and remote areas on vaccinations. Here’s some of the transcript that I’ve made: ———————- Tiga Bayles: Today I have an interesting guest with an interesting topic; we’re talking about freedom of [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Australia, Drugs, Free Speech, Funnies, Media, Politics, Popular culture, Racism, Skeptics, Society
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Tagged anti-vaxxers, AVR, dopey dorey, kylie sturgess, meryl dorey, tiga bayles, token skeptic, vaccination
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November 20, 2011 – 2:58 am
I have formed the view, over the last few years, that it is difficult to combine quality university education with the charging of very high fees to students. This is because, soon enough, the fee paying students will demand things of the course providers that those who received their education for free or for very [...]
September 1, 2011 – 2:01 am
This film was made by someone I would not have expected to run a libertarian (or, these days, Swedish) argument when it comes to education. Below is an excerpt, which contains excellent statistical information. Like his other (more famous) film, this one becomes emotionally manipulative in the second half: only watch all of it if [...]
…When presented like this. Graphic artists David McCandless and Stefanie Posavec have attempted to show the difference between left and right (something always fraught with danger) by means of my favourite learning tool, the Mind Map. What’s especially interesting is their attempt to factor libertarian thinking into the mix, which means that a surprisingly large [...]
