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The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

I'm off this afternoon to get vetted, or maybe that should be "doctored", for next year's council elections. It always seems early, but I guess it's only eight months away from elections with maybe another election in between where candidates for the next locals can get their face about a bit. I thought I would share some of my candidate approval form with you (there's some of it for the panel only I'm afraid!). Would you allow me to stand?

Today's Guardian carries a nice enough piece by Simon Jenkins in praise of devolution and localizing taxation, in particular through "ability to pay" local income tax. Clearly Daahling has yesterday set the scene for another big spat about Council Tax as it seems that the local government settlement is going to leave little option but for local authorities to raise the hated tax by more than they otherwise would.

Of course I think Jenkins, and the Lib Dems, are wrong on LIT - and are certainly wrong on removing all forms of property tax - but we in ALTER are prepared to accept LIT I think now on the proviso that we replace some other tax with a land tax at a national level (preferably a whopper like income tax for me!). Anyway - here's a taste of the Jenkins article (of course he's also wrong that it was a Tory script Daahling was cribbing from but don't let that get in the way of an otherwise good article!):

It was a Tory tax proposal that rewrote Darling's script:

The way forward can only be the European way, to devolve a major slice of spending on public services back to where it was before the mid-1980s, to local authorities. There it must be covered by some element of ability to pay - as bravely proposed by the Liberal Democrats. Darling cannot go on financing central programmes with above-inflation rises in a partly regressive property tax. There is no alternative, one day, to some form of local income tax. Council tax could be cut by a quarter with roughly one pence on income tax. Scotland is even now contemplating such a proposal. Yet ask Brown or Cameron for a view on such fiscal devolution, and they will look as if you wanted to murder their cat.

Giving taxpayers some scope to determine the level and quality of their public services is the only way to sustain future rises in public expenditure. That scope can come only through the local ballot, over health, police, education or whatever. Local income-related taxes exist in almost every country in Europe. They are intelligent taxation. Only in Britain do they scare party leaders witless.

In the first few sentences on Question Time tonight David Milliband, whom I generally quite like for a Labour minister, said that there's a debate to be had within the Muslim community, that all the great faiths have had in the past, about whether they side with those who seek co-existence with others or domination over others.

He's right of course, this is a debate that has been held by the world's other faiths, as well as Islam, through centuries. And you know what - the faith that seems to have most consistently decided on the "domination" answer over the centuries is Christianity. And it's probably no surprise that even today, the spread of western liberal-democratic hegemony by hook, crook or force, is still driven primarily by those of a Christian religious bent, like Bush and Blair.

If we set ourselves up as world police then those with a grievance against the world are going to target us. Personally, I don't vote for a Westminster representative to see some jumped up MP straddling the world like some Titan. I long to see the day when we put our own problems and communities first, to try to become smaller in the world.

I know that seems counter-intuitive. I understand the arguments about how we are trying to spread freedom and democracy and so on. But it took us centuries to discover true democracy (and in many aspects we are not there yet). Our example, in a globalised world, with media beamed into homes on nearly every square inch of the planet, will stand, whether we are aggressive and imperialistic about it or homely, self contained and introverted.

For those of us who want less government for ourselves, why should we want that to be any different on the world stage? The Co-operative Common Wealth of Oxfordshire is a multi-racial, multi-faith, diverse community with yes, some problems yet also huge opportunities. Were we on our own, or substantially so, would we want to project our might across the world in the same way we seem to do when we combine as a nation? I doubt it. And nor, I would suggest, would we be the target that we are as a nation for disaffected others around the world.

Coexistence for me, rather than the domination of the global power elite.

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