Posts by Terry 6

Re: Penguin, etc.

I do wonder about this. Maybe it's just my increasing age ( as if there were any other kind) but Maltesers and Shreddies no longer seem as malty. I don't get that loss of flavour from many products so I think it's not me. I'm guessing that the beancounters decided that the cost of malt could be reduced and cheaper sugar added, at some point.

Re: Hate to disagree but...

Taste or texture? Or both. I remember trying a Hershey Bar once. Once.

Because it had the texture of wet cement. As well as not tasting of much. I now know, decades later, having recently been to the York Chocolate Experience that the smoothness in chocolate comes from a long mixing period. That those American bars don't seem to get.

I'm quite happy with English chocolate, or Swiss, or even Belgian. Milk or plain (though not Bourneville) Even white, though strictly speaking that isn't chocolate - it's cocoa butter. But not American stuff.

Re: just a couple of things

And one of your five-a-day surely!

Yeah. We still hear the "sugar rush" type myths bandied about by parents.

It was always bollox and for a long time now it's been thoroughly debunked. But it still goes on.

Re: Custard Creams lower tier than Chocolate Bourbons?

Over the many years of dull, banal and often pointless compulsory teachers' In Service Training days I can say with certainty that only the presence (or absence) of Custard Cream biccies was of significance to the day.

Re: Great marketing - I hope some profits go to the charity

I have no doubt that this is all a marketing strategy for the charity. And I assume that Weetabix' owners/ad agency have donated the campaign. The use of the word "cookies" unused in the UK other than as a suffix to "Chocolate Chip" suggests an American owned agency.

Good luck to them. I hope the (totally pointless and artificially induced) controversies roll on, and that MacMillan's* good work gets the funding it needs.

*Other cancer charities and hospices are available, often quite small ones and also in dire need of funding.

Well Acorn did become the BBC Micro. And the Electron for hobbyists with littlel spare cash. So....

I had one of those in my first year as a teacher - in Tottenham School.

Really useful. Till some little sod broke into my classroom and nicked it from the desk.

Re: Vested interests

That's the thing. Almost no one needs to know these phrases ( there are many of them in the Primary School National Curriculum English) or indeed consciously know how to use them. They should be taught by introducing (and discussing imho) good models of writing and speaking. .

But these isolated "skills" can be rote taught, tested and compared. As can "skills" such as using "wow words" to write a supposedly good opening paragraph. The N C is chock full of travesties of teaching and learning designed by people who value what can be measured. The result is a generation of 11 year olds who can read mechanically as long as the language is regular, but don't much want to read at all. And who write in a narrow, forced, stilted way that lacks originality, spontaneity or fun.

Re: Vested interests

Ah! But did you know how to do "Linking ideas across paragraphs using adverbials of time"? (Yr 5 English)

Re: Bad teachers ignore "bad" kids

There's some degree of truth there. Of course there is. There are poor teachers/doctors/lawyers even coders!

But to say the education system would just work is arrant nonsense. Which educations system? What does "just work" look like? Do we even all know or agree what we want from the education system? Would it mean every kid getting 5 A*? Would it mean that kids in inner city schools that have lousy facilities, large classes in small over-crowded rooms and constant changes of teachers will do as well as motivated kids in fee paying schools?

Does it mean learning "skills" and behaviour to become good little workers or thinking individuals who challenge what they're told? And so on. This too is a debate that's been going for centuries, arguably millennia. I recommend John Locke as a useful starting point.

Re: There may be a prize for the best/worst hybrid Austin/Morris monstrosity.

I loved my little Marina.

Reliable, cheap,easy to fix odd items.

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

Ah yes, this is the "If you were a <object> where would you hide?" solution.

This ties in well with some coments in this El Reg thread

When the target becomes more significant than what it is intended to measure

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/13/who_me/

That being said, in the UK and I think the USA targets ( and UK OFSTED) probably are more about keeping teachers in line. The idealogues within governments wanting us to teach stuff we know is of little value in ways we know don't work.

(An obvious example, few teachers -even the younger ones- have much belief in the value of relying on phonics for teaching reading. But the behaviourists whom the government trust and the vested interests they listen to love it. It's cheap to produce, simple to undestand and easy to maeasure. It might not make the kids good readers. But they'll reach benchmarks and sell lots of stuff.)

Re: Mirror Image

S'funny I posted about a similar thing a few days ago. My late dad working for a firm that wouldn't replace ancient sewing machines even though the cost of letting them fall over all the time was far higher than the cost of replacement. You can blame cash flow for some incidences of this, I guess. But mostly it's bosses who see a headline figure, (£2,000 say) and not the cost of not replacing (maybe £4,000 over the year).

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/08/patch_now_why_enterprise_exploits/

Re: Lines of Code - negative defects

Which is ....instantly. A metric only stays as a metric when no one's future relies on passing a score line.

Or to put it another way, the proxy becomes the target.

Re: When there are big data breaches...

But insurance companies do.

Re: To which you can add ...

The "Public University" gave that away. We do have less than a handful of private Universities in the UK. But ours are mostly in a strange sort of quasi-state owned status, with a Royal Charter.

Re: This

Valid point, and can, I have little doubt, be replicated in forums for Psychologists, Designers, Architects. Surveyors, Physiotherapists and lord knows what else. But, most of these kinds of professions have at least a few people who are also techies, with significant levels of training and experience.. If only, like in Education or many small companies, because they are old enough to have got started when there was no outside tech support.. I doubt there are many Software Engineers with Physiotherapy or Surveying backgrounds. (I know there will be some, of course).

Re: Why is there a shortasge of candidates?

Which raises a long known and carefully ignored issue. Applications that rely on box ticking exercises favour candidates that are good at doing box ticking exercises. This is likely not the skill set the employer most needs.

Re: Nothing new in HR

OH yes, I used to be employed by the School Psychological Service in the 80s.

They had a temp admin who'd done the job well and was wanted. The post became permanent with the usual "You have to apply for your own job" bollox. Naively her application simply said something along the lines of "I've been doing the job for two years. I'm very good at it".

An external candidate submitted a list of bullet points extracted from the job description etc. "I can do this. I can do this I can do this...".So she got the job, not the one who really knew what she was doing.

They lost a brilliant admin- the one they got was crap and was gone within the year.

Re: Early doors

Just like the youngsters now drink at home, together, before going off "clubbing". Booze in the venues is too expensive.

Re: This seems like a real legal loophole

Or simple error. Stuff happens.

And in other fields such errors aren't binding. Future son-in-law found an air fryer on Amazon for £3.99.

His order was cancelled before delivery (Should, of course, have been £40)

Re: implementing Surf control was fun

Maybe I'm being a bit over-imaginative, but I do detect a slight hint of hypocrisy there. It's OK to wok for a sex-trader, but not view their products?