Interesting Links for 02-10-2014

[andrewducker]

• Learning How To Learn
  (tags: learning education Twitter )
• A fantastic explanation of how you can tell when your cemetery is full of plague victims
  (tags: disease history death )
• Armed police U-Turn vindicates Lib Dem campaign
  (tags: police guns Scotland )
• Instructions for your local park
  (tags: howto fun park )
• If Films Were Reviewed Like Video

Comments

[gonzo21]

I'm very pleased to hear there has been a u-turn on armed police officers. I have no idea how the SNP managed to stealth it into law such that our police were now apparently regularly going around armed, and very few people seemed to have even heard about it.

[andrewducker]

I don't think it required a legal change - I think that it's considered an operational matter, with local decisions taken by each police force.

Of course, the SNP combined the Scottish police forces into one, and effectively put them under the control of Strathclyde - which has always had a harsher approach than other areas, from my understanding.

[gonzo21]

Yeah, I was very concerned when they put Strathclyde police force effectively in charge of the whole country. They are... not the police body I would have wanted to be picked for that role.

[bart_calendar]

Meanwhile, it baffles me that cops can do their jobs without guns.

If I'm robbing a liquor store and a cop turns up and I think he has a gun, I'll surrender. If he turns up and I know the odds are way high he doesn't have a gun I'll throw a bottle of vodka in his face and run.

[steer]

There is absolutely no relationship between the amount of homework kids do and their final grades As you might have sensed on twitter I was somewhat frustrated by this article. First you need to start by calibrating expectations. Very little actually makes a large difference to educational outcomes. Things you might expect like "having books in the house" or "having parents who read to children" have been seen to make statistically insignificant contributions to high-school grades. This, of course, raises the question do they make no difference or do they make a small difference that the study didn't detect

[andrewducker]

I think I've come from the other side, where I was assuming that it did have an effect, and therefore discovering that if it does have an effect it's absolutely minimal comes across more strongly than it will do to you, where it seems that that's what you expected.

[steer]

You also have to translate what that minimal effect means of course -- they don't report the scale when effects were observed [0.1% have improved grades, 0.01% or 1% -- this was another issue I had with that report]. A few thousand students getting a passing grade rather than fail out of a few million is a minimal effect in some terms but you might say worth implementing.

One thing that does have a large effect on educational outcomes is the wealth of your parents (obviously not directly from their possession of $$$ but via the things that brings).

[xenophanean]

I agree, looks dubious to me. The author has been honest that the study and data he's getting his result from look flawed. Once you've realised that, you shouldn't try to draw strong conclusions.

[randomdreams]

If you dig around enough you can find a video of at least one of the (known) six or so oil fires stopped with nuclear blasts that the USSR tried out in their version of the nuclear-weapons-for-civil-uses program. Definitely Dante-esque.