Interesting Links for 21-03-2014

[andrewducker]

• Where’s our tax cut? ask paintballing sherry enthusiasts
  (tags: funny politics UK )
• UCL open letter to The Daily Mail, pointing out its racism and sexism
  (tags: DailyMail racism sexism viafanf )
• 5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus
  (tags: mathematics education children )
• The Only Fantasy Map You’ll Ever Need
  (tags: fantasy maps )
• Lost poems of Douglas

Comments

[philmophlegm]

The UCL letter. On the one hand this might be typical knee-jerk 'The Daily Mail is EVIL!!!!!' bollocks. On the other:

I fear that this is inevitably what happens when an organisation's boss describes it as "hideously white". People will inevitably suspect that people are chosen to speak because they tick a demographic box rather than on merit. The BBC is an organisation after all that actually targets a minimum percentage of "BME" employees. http://www.bbc.co.uk/diversity/workforce.html

If they're below those targets (and they are), that would seem to be a tacit admission that members of certain ethnic groups will be more likely to get a job than members of different ethic groups, just so they can meet their own targets.

In the case of Dr Hiranya Peiris, this seems to be genuinely unfair on her (although I think it's a reasonable suspicion to have). In the case of Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock... Well, put it this way - I've seen the new series of The Sky at Night where she has replaced Dr Lucie Green as one of the two main co-presenters, alongside Dr Chris Lintott. Lucie Green is a really good science presenter (although she ticks one fewer box on the diversity checklist), and my own suspicion was that Aderin-Pocock got the job because she ticked a very BBC-appealing demographic.

Choosing a speaker on the basis of skin colour would be racist. It seems perfectly reasonable for a newspaper that campaigns (rightly in my opinion) against political correctness to raise this as an issue. In this particular case, it looks like they've done Dr Peiris a disservice, but other people have accused Newsnight of selecting guests according to politically correct criteria in the past. Even that moronic excuse for an accountant Richard Murphy accused Newsnight of sex discrimination when they asked his young female assistant and a young female fashion blogger to join a male Deloitte accountant in a discussion on tax avoidance. (To be fair to Newsnight, the fashion blogger may well hold more sensible opinions on this issue than Richard Murphy...)

[iainjcoleman]

I don't think the Daily Mail writer's erroneous assumption that the BICEP 2 team were all white Americans had anything to do with the Director General of the BBC.

That Mail piece was simply what happens when a knee-jerk, unresearched opinion is tossed off by a racist. There's no need to get into contortions trying to explain it away.