@thatmarkelliott.bsky.social
Music, cycling, political and other random ramblings. Work: computer scientist/language tester/psychometrican in some order. Once drew trees and was told it was "better than felling them", which is a start, I guess. Views my own, cat photos will happen.
🚨Breaking🚨
Tottenham have reached the "Harry Redknapp rules himself out of return" stage of crisis...
I once had a hedgehog hiss in my face. I will not be taking questions.
Also how noisy they are
They're not going to catch the red squirrel, the robin or the puffin, the hedgehog will just roll up in a ball, and good luck with the stag, the golden eagle and the badger.
Proposal: If the culture warriors want the animals off the banknotes, it's really very simple - they prove they are real warriors by sending a team to fight a team of the animals. Winner takes all.
You say the census was impossible, but I understand he had certain connections who could Get Things Done, so
I bet they didn't even try the water in the Royal Pump Room either, the cowards.
Kemi Badenoch's spokesman denies she is ashamed of British animals, after the Conservative party call the Bank of England's decision to put British wildlife on our banknotes "deeply depressing"
In all the Discourse today about the UK, and what should happen to Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, not to mention Cornwall, I can't help but notice that Doggerland has been overlooked yet again.
The power move now would be to reverse the decision and replace the existing people with new ones - I suggest Clem Attlee for Churchill, Zadie Smith for Austen and Turing with 🤔 ... well, if not me, then maybe Rosalind Franklin.
(Whether an item about the height of the London Eye is relevant to a test purportedly demonstrating whether someone has the knowledge to be suitably integrated into the UK to gain citizenship, possibly not in London, is a question I shall leave for others to answer...)
It is, per Messick, "excess reliable variance that is irrelevant to the interpreted construct" - things affecting scores that aren't related to what test scores are meant to show. Could be due to e.g. artefacts of the test format, or to Qs that are irrelavant to what you're supposed to be testing.
Or in other words, what we really need is federation.
The Barnett formula isn't perfect, but it does at least take control out of ministers' hands - but it doesn't cover all the devolved governments' grants, which it should (possibly in a modified form to account for the fact that there are different needs in different areas)
Either government is properly devolved, in which case the finances need to be ring-fenced and outside of Westmister's influence (short of a change to the settlement) or it isn't. Devolution at the pleasure of the central Westminster government isn't real devolution.
Seems to me that there are two things here:
1) Starmer's highly centralised government arguably rowing back on devolution, but
2) A fundamental flaw in how devolution has been established that Westminster gov can just turn the tap off if they choose without legislation. An unsustainable bodge.
This is a strong move.
18 yr old Bahar had offers from York and Reading, but 'thanks to Shabana Mahmood, she will now never escape the Taliban.'
'Britain has decided that the girl who fought the Taliban’s agenda, who learned English in secret, who turned down a forced marriage, who won her place, is an asylum risk.'
Two more months like that and net disapproval will be under 50%
Today is the day I have been waiting for patiently - the day the Bluesky discourse finally centres on construct-irrelevant variance...
Can't really blame Kim here. Trump's motivation for his foreign wars (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba next?) seems nothing more than self-aggradisement - showing the mighty Trump can deal with the countries that crossed the US but other presidents couldn't sort out - and North Korea looms large on that list.
The topic of the looming threat of nuclear armaggedon came up not so long ago with one of my children, who suddenly twigged that I grew up with the sustained looming threat of nuclear armaggedon in the 80s. Was happy to give a primer on what to look forward to, and how it gives us stuff like 👇
ONJ, on the other hand, was literally spawned by (the antecendent of) Hills Road Sixth Form College - her father was the headmaster of Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, which became HRSFC
(I belive some of them went to Hills Road Sixth Form, and they met the others and formed the band at what was then Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology but is now ARU)
That's Olivia Newton John you're thinking of - easily confused
it's almost enough to make you forgive the place* for foisting Pink Floyd on us all.
*in an earlier incarnation
That whiff of authoritarianism again. This is no way to conduct debate on important matters - denying people access to all the relevant information and expert opinions renders the democratic process hollow.
Blue Labour in one county?
Having mastered epidemiology, Russian history, toilet paper supply chain logistics, bridge design, balloon aeronautics, and large language models, I'd like to offer my thoughts on how the closing of the Strait of Hormuz will impact Brent crude....(1/67)
Mind you, some of the historical buildings that are now gone are ones that are well gone, such as the Gorbals tenements where my grandmother grew up.