"A barbeque summer"?

The Met. Office is backtracking over the forecast it published earlier in the year, the one promising "a barbeque summer".

Despite low temperatures and much rain, the Met. Office insists that its forcast wasn't actually inaccurate, because the temperatures in June were a whole degree Celsius above average and rainfall was below the average for the period.

What the Met. Office is saying now: "When we are looking at seasonal forecasts, we are looking at the season as a whole, not a specific day or week". What it said on 30 April (not, as might be imagine, April 1) was: "Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer". So both the forecast and the backtrack are considering the season as a whole.
Following a change in Consumer Law in the UK in 2008, fortune-tellers are required to advise customers that their predictions are not "experimentally proven". Isn't it time the Met. Office was required to do the same? Or perhaps it should sell off its expensive equipment and invest in some seaweed.

Pandora's Box (1)

The Guardian's comment page today considers the future of British universities, complaining that "Every expansion since the redbricks were built has been branded an expansion too far by an elite convinced that only they are [sic] fit to benefit from university. If they [sic] had prevailed,* many of today's lawyers and accountants would instead be consigned to dead-end jobs".

That seems to express precisely why the universities should have been left alone.

* The internet version substitutes "had had their way" for "prevailed".

Going up, but there's no way back

Labour's obsession with what it sees as the universities' "failure" (never its own) to accommodate the working classes ignores the fact that an academy education is but one factor involved in social mobility.
As Jenni Russell observes, "Anyone who hopes to be socially mobile has, by definition, to learn to read a culture that is not the one they [sic] grew up with". This means learning to identify and adopt the behaviour of a different class in order to fit into both professional and social situations. (Of course, it also means joining Labour's "enemy", the middle classes, and thus accepting its contempt and hatred, a point apparently beyond the understanding of Millburn, Mandelson & Co. As Shakespeare put it, "this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof").
As always, Labour seems concerned to present social mobility as something that can only benefit the socially mobile; Tony Harrison's biographical poem "Bookends" suggests otherwise, clearly warning that headlong mobility can cause rifts nothing can heal:

I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped deadwe chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.

You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…

The "scholar" me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

At night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we're alike!

Your life's all shattered into smithereens.

Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.


II

The stone's too full. The wording must be terse.
There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it--

Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse.
It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet!

After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we're on our third)
you said you'd always been a clumsy talker
and couldn't find another, shorter word
for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:

You're supposed to be the bright boy at description
and you can't tell them what the fuck to put!

I've got to find the right words on my own.

I've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can't squeeze more love into their stone.

Blood, they say, is thicker than water; it may be that fear of disloyalty and family breaches need addressing if Labour is serious about tackling the reasons for faltering social mobility.

Wookey Witch

Wookey Hole has appointed a witch, to be known as Carla Calamity, on a salary of £50,000 pro rata.

Now that wasn't an option the Careers Service mentioned at school…

"As a Christian and a paediatrician…"

Dr Sheila Matthews, a paediatrician sacked for requesting permission to abstain from voting in adoption cases involving same-sex applicants, has been reinstated, but will not now be involved in the decision-marking panel.

Dr Matthews maintains that her opposition to same-sex adoptive parents is a professional opinion, based on her research into the subject. So why muddy the waters by referring to her religious beliefs? Publicising that she holds her views "As a Christian and a paediatrician…" completely compromises her professional objectivity.

The Christian Legal Centre (a body whose subjective stance is eponymously stated) insists that Dr Matthews should also be reinstated to the voting panel and allowed to abstain in cases where prospective adopters are a single-sex couple. This is patently nonsensical and might well compromise the panel's objectivity and operational validity - suppose, for example, that all the panel members chose to abstain for religious or other personal reasons.

Dr Matthews should either commit to carrying out whole-heartedly the tasks required of the panel (for which she would presumably be remunerated), formulating a decision on the unique merits of each case and basing her final decision only on her professional appreciation of the case, or she should not be on the panel at all.

Woof!

The BBC reports that civilians who have been given powers to issue penalty notices and fines for dog fouling "have been vetted and trained"…

More university places (follow-up)

With £100 million due to be cut from the education budget, reports of the existence of a secret list featuring up to 30 universities thought to be in danger of financial failure in the next year, and news that 50% of graduates are earning below the repayment threshold, how exactly is the government planning to fund the 10,000 extra university places announced only a week ago?

And with grants frozen and fees rising, who will be able to take advantage of the additional places?

Windows 7 hype

Windows 7 will be released in a couple of months and has already attracted controversy, not least because Microsoft quickly withdrew its much-hyped promotional pre-order price scheme.
The reportedly huge number of preorders is not necessarily evidence that the latest version of this operating system is being breathlessly anticipated by countless multitudes of excited, expectant and grateful customers. The promotional price is likely to have played a major part, since it reduced the cost of the home version from a bloated £149 to £49.

The flocking customers, however, are just as likely to be evidence of a desperate hope that Win7 will have resolved the many and frequent issues encountered by Vista users. Indeed, so many customers flocked to place orders on the day pre-ordering opened that Microsoft's online shop crashed… which seems to say it all.

Thinking "left-of-centre"

Ben Stephenson, head of drama commissioning at the BBC, has apparently caused outrage by his declaration that the Beeb should promote "peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking".

It's not entirely clear how the characteristics Stephenson is encouraging will lead to better programme-making, given that some of the terms imply a lack of flexibility in approach; originality might be more welcome to licence-payer and evader alike.

However, critical responses have focused on the term "left-of-centre", which has been interpreted – apparently without pause to consider the term in context – to mean "Left-of-centre", suggesting a political bias inappropriate to the corporation. (The BBC has rather suggested its own guilt by apparently pointing to Boris Johnson's single appearance in EastEnders as evidence of political neutrality.)

Stephenson insists he was using not using the term politically, but to indicate a slanted approach, as in "left-field", which certainly seems more meaningful than a political connotation in context. To avoid confusion in future, perhaps Stephenson should employ the phrase "off-centre". This might still be interpreted politically, but at least the direction of any potential bias is ambiguous.

Digital television

The UK government plans to switch off analogue TV services by 2012. Given that digital signals are often interrupted by severe weather, including the rainstorms that seem to have become ever more frequent throughout Britain, does it also have some secret plan to improve the weather?

Pandemic: a definition

Pandemic: hysteria affecting everyone; a democratic panic.

Wolf! Wolf!

It's becoming increasingly difficult to evaluate the seriousness of global health threats. Concern about swine flu seems to be fluctuating hourly, ranging from "We're all doomed" prognostications to more pragmatic "It's flu. So?" shrugs.

In the UK, the government appears unable to decide where swine flu should feature in its ever-increasing list of serious issues. Worry, don't worry, worry, don't worry… the instructions alter frequently. In a decision that must surely have boosted Royal Mail's income, the NHS sent letters out some weeks ago to remind individuals of their "unique personal NHS Number[s]"; the term "pandemic" occurred no less than three times. A vaccination programme is being rolled out, although it's unclear how many doses will be available before the start of the "normal" flu season and, as the vaccine isn't produced in the UK, there are fears that it may not arrive at all. Now there are mutterings about schools not reopening at the beginning of the autumn term for fear of spreading the virus.

At present, fewer people are suffering from swine flu than from déjà vu: these scares are becoming commonplace. In 2003/4, the severe acute respiratory syndrome [SARS] virus was being reported as a potential global killer; in 2005/6, it was the turn of avian flu, with experts insisting that 50% of the global population might die. Swine flu itself isn't a new virus: in its June 2009 Bulletin, the World Health Organisation looked back to 1976 when an outbreak in the USA led to plans to vaccinate the whole population; the threatened pandemic failed to happen and the government lost credibility.

This is a useful warning. Governments, health authorities and other organizations need to be more responsible about the information they publish and way it is published. While there have indeed been deaths from the present outbreak of swine flu, and may well be more, the mixed messages being sent out help no-one.

This is a situation in which govenments need to be less enthusiastic about embracing openness. Shout "Pandemic!" too often and no-one will believe it any more. One day, and perhaps that day will be soon, there will indeed be a pandemic, a global outbreak whose threat is real and widespread. If the idea of pandemic is linked only with scaremongering, it will, as in the story of The Boy who Cried "Wolf!", be all the harder to convince people of its reality.

More university places

Earlier this month, the Association of Graduate Recruiters reported that the number of graduate positions had decreased by 25%, with 48 graduates competing for each post and starting salaries frozen.

Now Gordon Brown promises to provide up to 10,000 extra university places to accommodate increasing demand fuelled by recession and rising unemployment. Perhaps the recession will be a distant memory by the time the additional students graduate and there will be degree-level posts for all. Or perhaps this idea is as short-term as the contracts of the academics likely to be employed to teach them, and simply a way to keep more people off the unemployment lists.

Pointless research 2: the "solicitation purr"

Dr Karen McComb has discovered that cats use special "soliciting purrs" to manipulate their owners. Quite how this improves humanity's - or even felinity's - lot is unclear, although McComb is gracious enough to thank "Archie, Clyde, Fuzzy, Hippolythe, Marbles, Max, Mojo, Morgan, McKee, Pepo [and] Socks" for services rendered. Who is using whom?

Pointless research 1: wallets with baby photos

Professor Richard Wiseman has conducted a study into the return of lost wallets. The experiment had wallets with various different contents placed around Edinburgh. The results suggest that people are more likely to reunite a wallet with its owner if the wallet contains a photograph of a baby; many more of these were returned than the wallets with other contents, such as family group photographs, puppy pictures and charity donation receipts.

It's mildly interesting, but don't bother to hunt out a cute baby picture just yet. Although Wiseman professes himself "amazed" by the high number of sample wallets returned (a depressingly paltry 42%), as none of the samples contained any money, it seems unlikely to reflect what would happen outside the experimental box. After all, most people who lose wallets would probably have money and/or credits cards in them…