Diary Of An ADI

Archive for August, 2009

I don’t want to get into the question over whether the Pan Am bomber was guilty or not, but you can’t help wonder at the problems Ronnie Biggs has had in getting released by comparison.

Biggs was involved in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, in which around £40m in today’s money was stolen. The gang beat up the guard with an iron bar. Biggs was jailed in the early 60s for his crime, although he escaped in 1965, and hid in Australia and then Brazil. He gave himself up in 2001. He still had 28 years left to serve, and there was no chance he was ever going to be released until recently, when he was virtually on his Death Bed.

Al Megrahi – assuming he was guilty, and his conviction says he was – was responsible for the deaths of nearly 260 people. And yet the Scots caved in and released him after 8 years in prison and - surprise, surprise – he gets a hero’s welcome in Libya, is denying he had anything to do with it, and you can bet the Libyans will make a few more choice comments before long.

Worse still, the Americans are well pissed off. In the UK, we know that giving the Scots their own parliament was potentially a risky business – they’ve never been able to look after themselves properly anyway - but when you add American ignorance over the fact that this was a Scottish decision and not a British one (Americans are not good at geography at the best of times: England is in London, and that’s as good as it gets), you can see this one souring relations quite a bit.

I’m not trying to make light of anything. It’s just that when someone kills 260 people and is jailed for life, it seems a little odd that they can be released after 8 years. This goes for all murderers – why is parole an option?

EDIT 22/08/2009 – Yes. Gadaffi is now saying Gordon Brown encouraged the Scots to make their somewhat bizarre decision. However you look at it, this is major shit-stirring! If it’s untrue, it’s just Gadaffi making himself look foolish (and he could be a half-decent leader if he ever got his head together). If it’s true, then Gordon Brown will have lost any respect I ever had for him.

A few months ago I bought a new scanner – an HP G4010. At this time I was using Vista Ultimate (64-bit).

Windows 7 is still unreleased, so anyone installing it needs to be aware that it isn’t yet the full package – and that is especially true of drivers. There are few third party W7 drivers available at the moment - Hewlett Packard informed me that a W7 driver for the G4010 is on the way, but it isn’t available yet.

Now, so far I’ve not had a problem with many drivers or other software. Most of the Vista stuff installs and runs perfectly on W7, with a few exceptions (but betas are often available). One piece of software I am very annoyed with is Raxco’s PerfectDisk 2008. Unlike most software, this one is deliberately programmed only to install under Vista so even if it worked under W7 (which is quite possible, since W7 is based on Vista anyway), it is deliberately prevented from installing. In other words, you are forced to upgrade – and I consider that to be a rip-off, even if upgrading is only $19.99.

I was a little annoyed to find that HP’s installer for the G4010 also wouldn’t run at all. No error – it is just deliberately prevented from running on anything other than XP or Vista. I’ve since had a fiddle with W7 and it appears that the drivers wouldn’t work even if they would install, so I’ll have to wait until the full W7 release before HP releases specific drivers.

But this is where W7′s XP Mode comes into its own. The XP drivers install perfectly on the Virtual Machine and the scanner is up and running again. So for the time being, if I need to scan or do OCR, I can do it in Virtual XP and immediately switch to W7 to use the files produced.

Windows 7 is fast and extremely versatile.

Well, the BBC has been behaving as if no one ever – in the history of the universe – has ever got their exam results at this time of year. And once again, record A Level pass rates have been recorded.

I heard a funny job advertisement on Smooth Radio the other day. For anyone who doesn’t know, Smooth Radio is a radio channel which specialises in half decent music part of the time, absolutely crap music for another part of the time, and inexplicable and ne’er-acknowledged silences the rest of the time. The inexplicable silences can be quite a big chunk if the station is going through a bad patch. Oh, and it also likes to arrange for the news, adverts, and music pre-recorded loops to all play at the same time, sometimes. Especially at weekends when there’s no one around to push the right button on the DJ console. Oh (again), it also likes to claim that it doesn’t play the same music over and over (like other local stations do), which is only true if you don’t include Rod Stewart, Michael Bublé, and anything to do with Motown… other than those, they don’t repeatedly play the same music over and over.

Anyway, this job wanted someone with:

…a 1st degree or equivalent and [exceptional] administration skills.

What the hell is equivalent to a 1st class degree? A BTEC? A food hygiene certificate? A season ticket to Stoke City? And it goes to show how valuable a degree really is when they want someone with a 1st who has exceptional “admin skills”.

The Daily Mail did an article a while ago about how questions from past papers were baffling to pupils trying to answer them today. Admittedly, the Daily Mail will no doubt run a series of articles over the next week about how it is ridiculous to suggest exams are getting easier and that it is children getting smarter which explains improving pass rates. Even in one of its more lucid articles from today it quotes…

Mike Cresswell, director general of the AQA, insisted there was no evidence to suggest exams were getting easier.

He said: ‘The improvements differ between regions so naive dumbing-down arguments do not wash.’

We all know this is total bullshit – exam questions are NOT as hard now as they were in the past. So, I did a bit of scouting myself and here’s what I found (this is for O levels and GCSEs, but it holds true for A Levels as well).

First of all, thanks to Maths Answers, I found a few Maths O Level papers from the late 1950s and late 1960s. Anyone who did O Levels will know that the first section always had the “easy”, “quick” questions in it. So from 1957, we have:

1957 O Level Maths Paper - Section 1

And from 1968 (note that there was also a question A6 but I clipped it off just so I could keep it in a graphic the same size as the 1957 one): 

1968 O Level Maths Paper - Section A

Now, I hope you’re all sitting comfortably and have been meditating or playing Nintendo DS brain-training games – we’re about to see some modern GCSE Maths paper questions. If you don’t prepare yourselves properly, your brains might explode from the strain…

2008 Maths GCSE - Question 1

You can immediately see how standards have not dropped in the slightest – this question is easily as tough as any of those from 1957 or 1968! I mean, is that a nice clip art of the cathedral, or what? And it gets harder. Also from the same paper we have question 2:

2008 Maths GCSE - Question 2

That one must separate the wheat from the chaff. And it moves on to question 3:

2008 Maths GCSE - Question 3

Statistics, too? And now the really heavy stuff… question 4:

2008 Maths GCSE - Question 4

OK. Sarcasm over. I could go on, but you get the idea. This paper was one I picked randomly, but they are all the same.

Now, if you seriously believe that the modern question papers are difficult per se then you have no right passing an opinion on whether or not they are easier than they were 40 years ago - you simply don’t know enough to comment (or you are a parent so blinded by love for your child that you just can’t see facts staring you in the face). They are easy. Extremely easy.

No one who is capable of answering the older papers will be in any doubt that the modern ones are much, much easier. Embarrassingly so. So embarrassingly easy, in fact, that you seriously have to question the suitability of anyone in government or elsewhere - like Mike Cresswell, who argues they are not  easier - for the positions they currently occupy. It is extremely unlikely anyone taught the syllabus for the 2008 paper would understand a single word of the 1968 or 1957 ones, let alone be capable of answering the questions, and people like Mike Cresswell are responsible for a wholesale decline in educational standards as a result of their transparent attempts to talk themselves up.

Let’s face it, Mr Cresswell and his kind wouldn’t be in their jobs long if they admitted exams were being dumbed down, would they?

Speaking personally, I can answer every single one of the questions on the 2008 paper without breaking sweat – they are basic general knowledge, with the answer provided in the question itself. But even though I passed Maths O Level (and have a degree in Chemistry), I’d have to do some serious revising to be able to answer a lot of the questions on those older papers.

I can’t believe this is even a debate. Exams are easier now. It’s a demonstrable fact.

I meant to post this last week after a lesson with one of my pupils (here you are, A G-N – as I promised)!

There is a small shrimp – called a Mantis Shrimp – which has one of the fastest reactions in the animal kingdom. It can move its front legs so fast and with such power that it can stun small fish and even break into crab shells or damage aquariums. (EDIT: Please don’t take this post as hard scientific evidence – apparently the trap jaw ant can bite faster than the mantis shrimp can punch, and there are other contenders depending on how you measure it. If you’re doing your school homework, do it properly instead of reading peoples blogs!)

Well, I reckon A G-N can beat this hands down if he puts his mind to it! Last week we were doing a manoeuvre and I have never seen anyone’s left leg release the clutch so quickly without reason! We had a good laugh about it, which is why I’m posting this – I’d never say anything about a pupil if they were likely to take offence. It didn’t happen again this week, though.

Seriously, though, it is a common problem with pupils learning to coordinate their legs properly. It can be very frustrating.

Well done MB for passing with just 3 driver faults. Be careful out there!

Now, it’s even spreading to our literature.

Winnie The Pooh And Piglet

At least we seem to have forgotten about how mankind was going to be wiped out by Avian Flu:

Turkeys Cartoon

I’ve been using the evaluation version of Windows 7 and I’ve got to say it is incredibly stable, based on my own experiences. But I’ve just installed the XP Mode functionality, and I’m blown away.

One piece of software I regret losing (unless I use my old XP system) is Flash MX. I had regularly upgraded my version of Flash, but when Adobe took over Macromedia, it simply became impossible to justify the cost. In keeping with Adobe’s pricing policy, I would have had to hand over close to £400, 4 pints of blood, and probably both kidneys in order to upgrade any further. And when Vista came along, Flash MX ceased to work.

But anyway, I was aware of the so-called ‘XP Mode’ that Windows 7 was going to contain. So I downloaded and installed the necessary files from Microsoft’s site. Installation was very quick – this is something I have noticed with Windows 7: it is very fast compared with Vista.

Flash MX installed first time and it works like a dream. XP Mode obviously isn’t as fast as plain old XP on a dedicated machine (it is a virtual machine), but it is perfectly usable.

You need to have a decent spec for your PC to get the best out of it. Mine’s running a quad core processor with 4GB RAM, and has a 8800 GTS video card – but as long as your processor can handle VT functionality you should be OK.

Microsoft was doing a special offer until recently, where you could pre-order Windows 7 Professional for £99.99. The email they sent me suggested Windows 7 Ultimate would only be available to OEM builders. However, it turns out that you can pre-order Ultimate for £199.99 or delivery October 22. I’ve put my order in already – I’m glad I missed that special offer deadline, as I was going to pre-order the Pro version.

In Europe, Windows 7 is shipping without Internet Explorer – the E version – and there’s also a version without Windows Media Player – the N version. Bloody stupid EU!

I want a PC I can use, not one I can boast about having Linux on to my idiot mates.

EDIT 30/09/2009: I’ve noticed a few people searching for the preorder deadline. Microsoft did offer a special price if you preordered before a certain date, but this expired in early August. I missed it myself, but I am glad I did – the offer was only for the basic and professional editions, as I was given to believe that the Ultimate edition would only be available to system builders. It turns out you WILL be able to buy the Ultimate edition.

I have preordered mine, and it is due for delivery on or after 22 October 2009 (the release date). You can preorder the other versions too (click here for the Microsft order page or here for the (cheaper) Amazon page)- but not with any special pricing that I am aware of. The Ultimate edition is priced at just under £200.

News At Ten just came on… I was casually listening to the headlines. Bill Clinton in North Korea, British Army and Sikorsky helicopters, and so on.

Then there was the last item:

Britain’s best loved carp is dead - caught 64 times. But why did she die?

I think I could take a wild guess at that.

If these few words are insufficient to satisfy your urgent need for more information on this (and if you are a fisherman, this probably applies to you), you can listen to an idiotic radio interview on the BBC website. Some clown is trying to say it died from a nut allergy!