Evaluation, statistics and OR

Nasty developments

Over the past month I have noticed a nasty little tendency cropping up on my blogs, and if it happening to me, it is happening to others as well.  I have to say it appears to happen less on this thread than on my other one, and is I think something to do with the level of traffic a site receives.

So what is this little gremlin?  It is Spam, which appears to congratulate the author for being so altruistic as to share information, but as it is badly spelt (often coming from Masters Dissertation students allegedly - but I think not), and sometimes includes a reference to a website to visit, it is obviously not from the heart.  Particularly as the spelling mistakes are the same for many different authors.

I have zero tolerance towards spam e-mail, spam contributions to my weblogs, and to cold sales calls placed to any of my phones, and that includes Skype.  Working remotely, working as a freelancer is difficult enough at the best of times, but this sort of rubbish steals my time in that I have to remove it, while giving me concerns as to whether it is causing any other damage.

If anyone who does do spam, spam contributions or cold calling sales is reading this - please think about what you are doing and imagine you are trying to do something very important yourself, but are impeded by this activity, or your wife, mother, sister, girlfriend is getting this hassle.  Make a New Year's resolution to do something valuable with your life instead of this!

Participation in Learning: half full or half empty?

Such is the volume of news reporting and issuing of statements, that two stories were published by the BBC within 24 hours of each other that give the average reader no hope of understanding how well the UK is doing in terms of skills.

First was what should be an extremely good news story - more than 1 in 4 of the entire population of England is in education and training.  While that will underestimate the number of people actually learning, it is a tremendous statistic.  I could spend a happy while picking holes in it, with particular reference to the Unique Learner Number, but that would be nitpicking.  The expansion in participation in education and training is a marvellous thing and some of the statistics quoted tell a marvellous story.  Read the story for yourself here - but if you don't have time, know that in the late 1950s about 10% of school leavers achieved 5 O-levels while today the minimum performance level for a school is 30% of 16 year olds achieving 5 A*to C GCSEs, with some Grammar schools achieving 99% or 100% of this and many bog standard schools achieving at least 50%.

The writing of the story tries hard to make this a bad news story by asking how all this education is going to be paid for, but "as any fule kno" gaining skills and qualifications pays for itself both for the individual and for the economy as a whole, so stop asking silly questions.

Where does the downer come from then?  A day later the University and College Union points out that in their analysis the UK is falling being in the qualifications race and that there is not enough investment in education and skills.  While the UK has made tremendous strides (according to the first article), any progress is trashed as inadequate and lower than our competitors in the second.  We are allegedly behind such economic dragons as Portugal and Greece in the qualifications race and must do better.

Two things strike me about some of this latter report - is the quality of education the same, are they comparing like with like, is graduateness in the UK as good, better or worse than graduateness in Greece or Portugal or the USA.  At one time, it used to be said a UK degree was as intellectually challenging as a USA masters, while the West Germans used to make the same unfavourable comparison between a German degree and a UK degree (I never believed that however).  Secondly, if Portugal and Greece have such better education and qualification rates than the UK, why are the PIGS countries of Europe regarded as the drag on European economic growth?  (PIGS by the way - Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain.)

Another happy thought is that the financial services companies that sparked off the global slowdown employed some of the brightest mathematical PhD students from the best universities - and look where that took us all!