Items to share: 31 March

• Received wisdom | Prospect Magazine
  Is the Flynn effect (rising IQs) going into reverse?
   
• Cheese made with "gecko technology" Swiss humour!
  
  
• Friday Weird Science: The Urinal Problem , and  The Social Psychology of Flatulence Two pieces worthy of nomination for an IgNobel prize from Neurotic Physiology. Incidentally, didn't Goffman write about the first issue in Relations in Public; microstudies of the public order (1971)? If not, he should have done.
   
• Want superconductivity? Add red wine. Yet another use for a wonderful substance! From Boing Boing.
   
• Ballet dancers in super slow motion; self-explanatory
  
  
• How to Write Like a Scientist. Badly
   
• Daniel Kahneman: "A Short Course in Thinking about Thinking" An Edge Master Class by the author of the recent Thinking; Fast and Slow. A good taster for the book.
   
• Rhetological Fallacies Probably appropriate for 1 April--but there's much more to this than that: an "infographic" of rhetorical and logical fallacies.
  
  
• Science on the Rampage by Freeman Dyson from The New York Review of Books
  
  
• Robert Frost recites "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" from Open Culture.
  
  
• Quality Teaching: We're Looking in the Wrong Places This is US-centric and school-based, but exposes the delusional obsession with blaming teachers as individuals for poor student performance, and of course the fallacies behind Ofsted teaching grades, and here, disputing whether their view of "outstanding" teaching makes contact with reality...
  
  
• Risky biscuits from Prospect Magazine: it's a hoary old topic but still interesting.
  
  

Items to share: 24 March

• Is Homeopathy A Sham? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR  Interesting to find this. In a lecture earlier this week (link to come) on the "Limits of Reflective Practice" I speculated that this generally inoccuous but over-rated approach to professional practice survives--like homeopathy--as a "meme", not because it does what it sets out to do, but because of side-effects valued by its proponents.  Perhaps it is a matter of selective attention (a la Invisible Gorilla) that I seem to have picked up three alternative medicine pieces this week:.

• Diluting the scientific method: Ars looks at homeopathy : An earlier link on the "memory of water" (18 March) has mysteriously disappeared... Thanks to David S for noticing and suggesting this sounder counterbalance.
  

• Evidence-based medicine v alternative therapies: moving beyond virulence:  And in the same area, a counter-blast which deserves to be entertained, at least.

• It's 'not' history - Research - University of Cambridge The history of negation

• Body Language - Lapham’s Quarterly More precisely, cultural variations in gesturing.

• Barack Obama and sign language: ASL, that is.

• Online PhD Resources:Thanks to a correspondent for pointing me in this direction--looks interesting.
  

• Robbers' Cave Experiment: A Week with the Boys Not quite as famous (or notorious) as Milgram's obedience experiments, or Zimbardo's prison, or Asch on conformity, the Robber's Cave study of creating conflict and co-operation is nonetheless a classic which could not be replicated today (Sherif et al., 1961). Well, not in an academic setting, but of course "reality" TV operates on different rules...

• Tour the Amazon with Google Street View; No Passport Needed

• 'Keep Calm and Carry On: The Story of the Iconic World War II Poster
  

• Astronaut Films Auroras from Above | Open Culture Stunning

• Removed by request (1 Feb 3013)
  

• NCBI ROFL: Which brand of ball point pen is best for an emergency airway
  puncture? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine Just in case you need to know... (The site isn't serious, but the studies are.)
  

• Nick Kwiatek — Web & interaction designer + developer Just stir up the screen and see what happens...
  

• Presentation Zen: Videos to help you rethink education, learning, and school Nothing particularly new, but a useful compilation to have access to nonetheless (US-centric, of course)
  

• The End of Pax Papyra and the Fall of Big Paper - Forbes I always like takes on the less obvious impact of technologies, promoting sideways looks.
  

• Bryan Appleyard ‘The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty’
  

Items to share: 18 March

• I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter - NYTimes.com

• Philip Tetlock on Expert Prediction Just a pointer.

• BBC Two - Horizon, 2011-2012, Out of Control? On the role of the unconscious, but not as Freud would have it.

• Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’? - The Washington Post

• Water has Memory Almost lends credibility to homeopathy (a claim the piece does not make). [This link has now been taken down--the source was here. Thanks to David S for the correction.]

• Art Direction: (musical) instruments from the inside on the Behance Network 

• Rome Reborn – An Amazing Digital Model of Ancient Rome | Open Culture

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » “It’s Killing Me. I Gotta Know.” The suspense and excitement of doing maths.

Items to share: 11 March

Apologies for this (late) ramshackle listing. I'm experimenting with delicious as a means of gleaning interesting links. It is indeed easy, but getting the results from there to here appears to be convoluted, until I get the knack...

• Times Higher Education - This edition - Satisfaction and its discontents Frank Furedi on the National Student Satisfaction Survey--distorting the culture of higher education.

• Neurons v. Free Will : the backlash against reductionist neuroscience--but do read the comments.

• Big Dog, Little Dog: The Mosaic of Learning Styles A defence! Still not convinced.
   
• PHD Comics: The Methodology Translator Ought to be in the handbook for every research methods course.

• Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Doubtful Pedantry: Interesting thoughts about the impact of confidence and certainty, and credibility

• ...and this sort of follows on, on the virtues of not being defensive about one's teaching. Creating an Authentic Learning Environment by Embracing What’s Real | Faculty Focus

• Clear Your Google Web History - Wired How-To Wiki In case you are concerned about the new privacy policy. And here is some useful background: I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

• A fitting tribute to Alan Turing « Mind Hacks He would have been 100 last week.

On Pinker's latest

“One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it.” — E.M. Forster (Attributable  of course to cognitive dissonance.)

In that spirit Steven Pinker's On the Better Angels of our Nature is brilliant. It's the book of the century!

It's on "the decline of violence in history and its causes". The Preface sets out the argument very succinctly, so you don't really have to read the rest. The main body smacks of protesting too much, but I'm not a historian and really capable of evaluating the evidence Pinker cites; but then, nor is he. Other critics have complained about his use of relative rates of violence (instances per 100,000 population raather than absolute figures) as if it were a sleight of hand. I can't, for example, comment knowledgeably on that. I am largely convinced by what Pinker discusses, but then I don't know enough to know what he doesn't discuss, and the counter-arguments and counter-evidence.

The final chapter on game theory and violence is more convincing. But overall, I'm not convinced that Pinker has added very much to Robert Wright's argument in Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation: The Logic of Human Destiny (2001)--certainly not 700 pages worth.

I expended all that effort, and all I got was this lousy blog post!

Items to share (3 March)

• Social history comes alive in these images of the East End of London of less than fifty years ago.

• Will we ever decode dreams?

• Michael Ruse  on Thomas Kuhns' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50 years on.

• Interesting piece arguing that in the Middle Ages it was usual to go to bed at sunset or shortly after, and then to get up again for an hour or two around midnight.

• Ben Goldacre argues for more randomised trials on social policy and initiatives across the piece as well as medical interventions

• Jean McNiff (of action-research fame) has a new website. (Thanks to Jim Crawley's delicious feed.)

• How Technology Shaped Our Metaphors for Remembering

• Based on marketing toothpaste, a different take on the traditional behavioural account of learning.

• A technological fix on how to make people shut up!

On starting from the question

Background: Recently I went to observe a training session for nursery nurses (staff at day-care facilities for pre-school children). They are a major constituency for vocational education, but the job is low-status and traditionally undertaken as a process of drift, from leaving school with few qualifications to motherhood. Not "parenthood"--not only are young men rare in the sector, they are often regarded with suspicion. The pressure for training comes from well-meaning government regulation and inspection of everyone from registered child-minders to nursery schools by Ofsted.

So, in practice the class consists of eight young women. Because of the nature of the scheme, which requires the accumulation of assessed units of competence--taken in no particular order--into a portfolio which can be presented for accreditation (roughly), this group has met only for this morning. Some of them know each other and have met before, most don't and haven't. Similarly the tutors (I forgot--there are two of them and they are [in-service] students on our course) have met some of them before and even know their names, and in a couple of cases know something of their background and work setting, but are meeting others for the first time. And this particular group may never meet again.

The topic concerns the systematic observation of children to... Do what?

The EYFS sets out recommended procedures for systematic observation of children, and recording them.

So... how does one teach that? Boring, but simple.

First, ask why "we" might want to undertake such observations.

The students don't know each other and so they don't trust each other. Come to that, they don't know or trust the tutors--there is no track record of knowing whether wrong answers will be met with encouragement to get closer to the answer, or humiliating scorn for monumental ineptitude.

Good move from the tutor: everyone has to write down their answer, and then she goes round the group asking them to read them out. Everyone says, "to assess development" in one way or another. But because they are reading what what they wrote, the last person is not humiliated by failing to come up with an eighth distinctive reason.

So we now know that they know an acceptable answer. (And further questioning elicits more, and a later pair exercise makes them more comfortable with each other...)  Yes, an "acceptable" answer. The criterion is fundamentally about the process in the class.

I don't want to get too precious about this. This kind of closed-question, guess-what-I'm-thinking, Q and A has been the staple of such courses from time immemorial (for all the much-vaunted "Socratic method", he was a serious perpetrator, too). And it works.

I've just been watching Call the Midwife on BBC1. A newly-trained midwife on a solo call is faced with a breech birth; you can see her (no tricks, just Miranda Hart's acting) recalling her training as she carefully follows the recommended procedure (which may well have been up-dated since). She learned how to do that from just the same kind of instruction, I'm sure, especially given that it is set in the early 'fifties.

And as I was writing I came across this real-life example. That crew may well have learned the same way, too.

And yet. The dramatic, high-stakes situation depicted concentrates the mind wonderfully; she would have reached back into her training and drawn everything she could from it, no matter how badly it was done, as would the fire crew.

Systematically observing children is not like that. It's more of a chore. Quite rightly, the staff would rather be playng with the children and responding to them moment by moment. (Indeed, is there any evidence that other than in gross and obvious cases of "abnormal" behaviour--which tend to force themselves on the observer--that the effort expended on such surveillance has any payoff? The session I observed implied that it was principally about generating evidence for a report for the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator [a.k.a. SENCO], which could then be produced for Ofsted as evidence of due diligence. )

So--leaving aside reservations about the whole idea, and living with what we have got--how do we get the class members to engage with the requirements?

The template for the session is information-transmission. That first of all requires motivation, and in this session the students were asked to come up with their reasons about why we might observe. Then they were provided with standard observation tools, and encouraged to familiarise themselves with them and use them with a video clip. I was quite interested to see how detailed (and time-consuming) the tools are.

I wonder if this couldn't be flipped. How would it work if the students were shown the video first, and encouraged to pay close (but non-specific) attention to it, and then asked what they observed, perhaps in an open format first, and then testing them on specific points? (I'm reminded of the Sherlock Holmes trick of asking Watson what he can tell about their latest client, and then showing off his skill by reeling off a lot more information he has picked up by observation and deduction--on Sherlock they do it very neatly with key-words labelling the tell-tale signs.)  

The point is they won't report much to begin with, because they don't know what to look for. But this technique would make them aware of that, and create a need (i.e. motivation) to get hold of the tools, so they would be more likely to take them in.

And similarly, later they could be shown completed examples of the observation sheets, and asked to interpret what story they tell, and what hypotheses (or in Sherlock's case) conclusions they might draw from the raw data. 

Perhaps one could use selected clips from CSI or a similar forensics-based show?

(23.01.12)

A few days later, the students and I discussed the session and the alternative strategies. They have done something similar in the past, and agree it is more engaging--but it all takes so long to "cover" the material. Yet again, the tyranny of the syllabus, which is all about "knowing about". It matters more that the material has been seen to have been taught, than that it has been learned. And paradoxically that puts more of a burden on the trainees and their mentors at work, because everything has to be addressed again there, often without the benefit of understanding the underpinning principles which could be addressed in class, and which would have increased the probability of the practical instruction "sticking".

Items to share (25 February)

• Fascinating extract from Robert Trivers' "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others" (2011)

• And slightly related: Matt Ridley on how internet anonymity removes inhibitions.

• Bryan Appleyard on Rupert Sheldrake, a heretical biologist who nevertheless poses some challenging questions. (Sheldrake's site)

• It's taken a long time (13 years or more) for Jerry Fodor to review two books by Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, but it's a platform for an interesting discussion (and rejection) of "psychological Darwinism".

• Another mind and brain piece: V S Ramachandran on what neurology can tell us about human nature.

• "The idea that the self can be split into body and mind is at the root of psychology, but there is no laboratory test, questionnaire or brain scan that tells us this – it is a product of our culture." Vaughan Bell briefly discusses alternative views.

• Dan Meyer's exploration of how text-books could develop when freed from the constraints of size and weight and printing; it's about maths teaching, but also applies much more generally.

• And a selection of pieces, largely by or about Stephan Collini, on what universities are for.  Here he is interviewed for Times Higher Education. Here he is in conversation with Laurie Taylor on Radio 4. Here is his book reviewed in the Guardian, and here in the Independent.  And coincidentally, it appears, here Jeffrey Williams surveys the emerging field of which Collini's book is a part, "critical university studies".

• Now back to something sensible.

...And on to something completely different. Another of Adam Curtis' quixotic takes on recent history.

Items to share (18 February)

• The myth of brainstorming, (and why the building matters more than you think).

• Misquotations--cheesy banality hijacks nuanced wisdom.

• The ever-rational Ben Goldacre sympathetically (and sensibly) entertains some way-out ideas.

• Correcting the misunderstanding of memes (Burman 2012).

• Academic translation guide (thanks to Simoleon Sense)

• What are the humanities for? A big question in higher education at the moment, and rarely answered as directly as this--they introduce us to the art of living, they are a toolbox for life. Here are seventeen full lectures from that course at Stanford University on video (I've only sampled them so far). The liberal arts tradition has almost gone from British universities, but it's still alive and well in the USA.

• Willpower is back in fashion. 

• Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred: Marilynne Robinson contemplates religion, science, art, and the miraculous.

• A very British fox.

• TED quotes.

• A collection of discussions and illustrations of the Prisoners' Dilemma. (Note that at the end there is a link to a page on the Tragedy of the Commons. That's interesting, in that the original article by Hardin (1968) is apparently "one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal", and the most uncritically accepted. My quote above is from an interesting dissenting article [decidedly from the left, but not necessarily any the worse for that] by Ian Angus in 2008; The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons which suggests that it has never been demonstrated in practice, and yet it is adopted because of its convenient fit with pre-existing ideological interests. Illustrates the principle that utility comes first, and truth a poor second in these circles. Well worth reading.)

• Interesting piece on Better Living Through Electrochemistry and a companion article by the same author (Sally Adee) in New Scientist. Is this likely to have an impact on mainstream learning, and what are the implications?

On a classroom double-bind

A colleague has just circulated links to a  package on Learning to Teach Inclusively, which includes a video on "setting ground rules".


Social Work - Classrom session - Setting inclusive ground rules from Learning to Teach Inclusively on Vimeo.

You might like to watch it and think about (OK--"reflect on") your impressions before clicking to get past the break below.

Items to share (11 February)

• Thoughts on excavating an anthill. (Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.)

• I can't claim to have fully explored this site of free educational tools for cognitive neuroscience, but even casual perusal reveals brilliant material.

• Extermiknit!

• The wisdom of crowds strikes again--quite unexpectedly--with a new font.

• Very US-centred, but nonetheless a fascinating exploration of "industrial bread"--from chemistry to process management to politics and culture.

• Now we've actually had some snow, anyone for yak-skiing? (Thanks to Dr Grumpy)

• The Upside of Dyslexia

• Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

• Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus

• Excellent extended further critique by Jim Hamlyn of the Susan Cain articles on introversion, linked to earlier.

• Indulge me! I've actually read Julian Jaynes' magnum opus (and foolishly lent it to someone about 20 years ago and never got it back). This is a good review of a great and original (if indeed totally wrong-headed) idea, which is so much less likely to see the light of day today, with the imprimatur of a respected publisher. The freedom of the air-headed blogosphere, where anyone can say anything, has diluted the potency of such serious fancies to nil. The absence of any bar to publication has undermined the value of it...

• I've been longing to know this for years! 

• A balanced view of Google's new privacy policy.

On the limitations of e-learning

Even if you are not concerned with maths education, this post by Dan Meyer on What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Math Education Again And Again is well worth reading, because e-learning does change the content of most (if not all) subjects. I made the point (rather more vaguely and broadly) in this paper, which is now over ten years old. For all the increased sophistication of the technology, the arguments still stand.

Items to share (4 February)

• The ethics of brain boosting

• What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? (Thanks to the Browser for these two links)

• The Rise of the New Groupthink: more from Susan Cain (and see Jim Hamlyn's comment on the 28 January post--thanks Jim.)

• Stuart Kauffman takes on the entire Western philosophical tradition! On The Inadequacy Of The Empiricist Tradition In Western Philosophy 

• By implication, Geoff Pullum would like to see political speeches run through Turnitin.

• This is stunning--worth a special trip to the V and A. (Thanks to Nigeness)

• Hello?

• Top five regrets of the dying: according to a palliative care nurse.

• Happy Groundhog Day (2 February) and here.

• Equality and Diversity Training: Cambridge University's Own Goal according to Mary Beard. Hear, hear! Interesting to think, though, how long it took Mary to write this excellent piece, compared with how long it took to tick the electronic boxes. I'm pretty confident of which was more valuable.

• All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting! And if Borgen is to be believed, they are the norm in Denmark.

• Brainstorming debate (and forget all the PC stuff about epilepsy--that community has no problem with the term): Against and  For.

On Franklin's Gambit

Thanks to Jim Hamlyn's intriguing review, I have just finished reading John Kay's Obliquity. I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it as Jim is--it's easy to read, but also repetitious and wordy, almost padded. Nevertheless, it is the book I have been looking for, for some time, because it addresses an issue--namely tackling problems and challenges indirectly--which has interested me for some time, and to which there has not really been an accessible introduction I can point other people to, and say, "It's all there!" There's been a series of books, largely by economists (as Kay is), perhaps most notably by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2008), which touch on similar areas, but without the clarity of focus Kay brings to bear.

Kay starts thus:

For over ten years, I built and ran an economic consultancy business, and much of our revenue was derived from selling models to large corporate clients. One day, I asked myself a question: if these models were helpful, why did we not build similar models for our own decision making? The answer, I realised, was that our customers didn't really use these models for their decision making either. They used them internally or externally to justify decisions that they had already made.

They were playing what I now call Franklin's Gambit, after the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: 'so convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'

In my early days teaching, when we actually had long summer breaks, I moonlighted for a small management consultancy. I was so naive, that I reported back to the boss after a few days on an early assignment, that I didn't know what to recommend to him (the boss) to advise the client. He laughed and said, "You don't understand! The client has always already decided what to do. He employs us to give him good reasons for doing it, so your job is to go back there tomorrow and find out what he has already decided."

Today I was approached over the net by an overseas researcher seeking the views of academics on the various competing taxonomies of education objectives, helpfully accompanied by a handout summarising the models he was investigating. Some were familiar, and there were two I had never heard heard of; most were horrendously complicated. They were just unmanageable, and I couldn't imagine anyone actually using them. I thought, "these are not designed to be used. Despite appearances, the only person (if anyone) who got anything out of these was the person who designed them." That is not to say that the exercise of designing them was not useful, as a way of clarifying the designers' thoughts--it's just not directly communicable to other people.

I'm an unregenerate builder of conceptual models; my Doceo site is full of more or less half-baked ones, which people do occasionally tell me are useful, but I do try to keep them simple, with a focused and limited range of convenience.

...but even then, I suspect that most of even those are employed in the service of Franklin's Gambit--just seeking a legitimation for what someone was going to do anyway.

Which rather puts most educational theory in its place.

So now I've got to work out how to respond to 29 Likert-scale questions on learning taxonomies...

On "Borgen"

I've just emerged from watching another two hours of Borgen on BBC4. It's possibly even better than the West Wing, principally because as a few critics have pointed out, Danish politics are more intimate and personal than the vast US stage.

Danish politics? After the Killing and of course Hamlet a while ago, that seam must be exhausted, surely? Far from it, but I am interested in just what compels me to commit two hours on a Saturday night to watching a pair of episodes (incidentally, one episode at a time is a feast; please don't force-feed us). And it is a compulsion. I did have a couple of other things to do this evening, but I didn't do them. I did not even open this infernal machine while it was on.

Partly that was because it demanded my full attention because it is subtitled (although there are occasional disorientating moments of perfect unaccented English). I could not let my visual attention wander and rely on background hearing to make sense of what was going on, so for example, checking email while watching is not an option. Similarly, but more surprisingly, muting the sound and relying on the sub-titles just does not work for some reason. The content is in the subtitles, but the paralanguage is on the soundtrack and the main visuals.---That is the takeaway point from a teaching perspective, but;--

It has lots of other things going for it... It's rather late to pick up many of the themes by now, but 80% of each episode stands on its own.

Just a pity if you missed the reason why Kasper is such a lying s**t. That didn't need subtitles, and I've never seen anything like it, but it was brilliantly both discreetly graphic and could not have offended any naive viewer. It does relate to this recent post.

Items to Share (28 January)

The Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips 

"On the Mechanics of Choice"; good summary article on the psychology of decision-making

A perceptive but sceptical discussion of Apple's further forays into the education market, raising again whether technology and education are on divergent paths.

Is this a game-changer? MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency.

Vindicated! The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance (review article)

Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking

It's been a slow week, but this is daftly delightful and even uplifting--even if you are not a Doctor Who fan! (15 mins)

...and forfeiting all intellectual gravitas, watch this on the Canadian space programme. (1:30)

On abuse undetected for years

The story is here. A teacher at a primary school in Somerset was convicted today of 36 counts of the sexual abuse of children during his 15 years of employment at the school, many of them taking place during classes, and despite concern having been expressed by colleagues on thirty occasions. The head teacher has been dismissed.

How could that happen? All too easily. I wrote in a similar area here. In view of some of the comments I received on that post (now deleted, of course) I want to be clear that I am not making excuses for anyone and still less condoning child abuse.

Several times in my career I have come close to having to report abuse, of elderly people and people with learning disabilities and mental health issues as well as children. I'm relieved to say that I have never had to make the call because someone else more closely involved has beaten me to it. Once I decided not to make the call, and it appears that I made the right judgment, although...

I have also been on the fringes of many cases, talking to social workers and others about their experiences. And in a different capacity as a teacher trainer, I have sat in on many many "safeguarding" training sessions.

I do know the ropes, both in policy and principle, and in practice.

Cut to the chase... the reporting system is misconceived. It's a top-down idealised model. Whoever you are, if you have suspicions of abuse, report to your supervisor.

That is the worst possible scenario...

1. Your supervisor is your boss. An abuse report is the last thing she wants to hear--so unless you have a group of supporters (who may well evaporate at the least sign of opposition), you are not going to approach. It is not a good career move.
2. Because the boss may refer it up the line to her boss, but despite the formal procedures, boss1 is in the same position to boss2 as you are to boss1. Follow?
3. Regardless of the number of stages before external action is taken, the default action at each stage is of course denial: "It's probably all a misunderstanding/mistake/personal issue/ will sort itself out..."
4. And the longer that goes on, the worse will be the consequences if there is an inquiry, so cognitive dissonance sets in...

The problem is that supervisors/managers/headteachers are just not equipped to respond proportionately to concerns. My admittedly anecdotal experience over many years is that at their level the safeguarding training does not work. It is experience which counts. Faced with one case every few years, and a vague idea of what ought to happen (which rarely does) they have no idea of a graduated and nuanced response. There are two positions; Denial and Disaster.

The matter needs to be taken out of their hands.

However fallible our social workers are (and of course by the nature of their task they get no publicity for their unsung achievements, just their disasters) they've been there before. They are pretty good at sorting through malicious referrals, deluded suspicions, reasonable concerns, serious cases, and emergencies. Referrals do not faze them. They can do proportionate responses, discreet investigations, re-assurance of reluctant victims and families

Good grief! I've got a positive proposal!

So the safeguarding/reporting procedures need to be changed. Regardless of what you are taught: If you suspect abuse,  

• first report it to the NSPCC (the organisation is far from perfect, but it is accessible and ubiquitous and not in hock to any local interests), and 
• then to your boss. 

You don't need to admit to having made the referral--it's better if you do, of course. Having a named referrer "gives the inquiry legs" as they say.

Many years ago I taught on a continuing professional development course on pastoral care for teachers. During the coffee break, one of them took me aside and sought advice about one of her pupils, who (she believed) was being abused at home. I explained the formal procedure, but she stopped me,"I know all that, but, if I pass this on, she'll end up in care--and I've seen what happens to children in care--her chances in life will be blighted. And if I don't, she'll continue to be abused, and learn that there is no point telling anyone because nothing happens..."

It's always a difficult call.

On the journal scam (ctd.)

Following on from this earlier post; there is a protest here from someone much closer to the situation than me.

[Up-date 26.02.12] More.

Items to share (21 January)

• Geoffrey Pullum on the demise of the apostrophe.

• ...and here on normal and formal language. I'm an ironic formalist; I know the "rules" and sometimes decide to break them (as does Pullum). It's not the same as not knowing the (sensible) ones.

• What is the ACI? 

• Lecture by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on impact of failures within systems; one of the few people who seems to see systems as they are, rather than as we would like to believe them to be.

• Be careful; there are 191 answers to this year's Edge question, and will take a l-o-n-g time to get through them.

• We know crows are bright, but who would have thought they went in for snowboarding? Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link

• Need to write an article in a hurry? Send for Pootwattle.

• Abraham Maslow in context:

"Maslow had a nobler humanity in mind than the one our cult of the self produces in barbaric multitudes. [...] The prospect of a race of moral giants has issued in a breed of selfish twerps, with a sizeable proportion of genuine degenerates. How the highest democratic longing — to realize the best in one’s nature — has been debased into a pervasive complacency, even a widespread monstrosity, is more than an interesting question in intellectual history; it is a grave and ongoing public catastrophe."

• V S Ramachandran's quick tour of some of the most intriguing case studies revealing the powerful, adaptive potential of the human brain.

On disclosure

Yet again I have been asked about my presence (or rather lack of it) on Facebook and Twitter, and Google+ and LinkedIn and... I'm not going to go in to all the details about what such sites expect one to disclose about oneself; it's all old hat. That isn't my problem.

My problem is about imposing on other people. I did sign up for Facebook some time ago, and obviously clicked some buttons without reading the small print, as 99% of users presumably do. It then proceeded to "invite" all my gmail contact to be my "friends" --I've been on the receiving end of this too many times to mention, and so I know how much of an imposition it is, not to mention the implied snub in refusing to "friend" someone. (The usual verb in the real world is "befriend"--that does have its dark side, too, but its paradigmatic relationship is rather richer than this impoverished online version.) I then spent over an hour crafting, pasting and editing dozens of apologies to them. Actually, it did bring some people to mind whom I had neglected, but that did not make up for my unintended imposition.

LinkedIn I can understand. It's about networking and business and work. I just don't respond because I'm semi-retired. I'm interested in doing things for people who are sufficiently interested in me to seek me out--which ain't difficult because there is a contact link at the bottom of all my web-pages. I'm no longer in the business of promoting myself, but I can see it makes sense.

But there is a degree of arrogance in other social networking sites, an assumption that other people will be interested in me and the minutiae of my life, to the extent that I can push it at them. It fits with and feeds off the inanities of  "celebrity culture". To a certain extent writing a blog buys into the same idea, of course, so I'm already guilty, but I'm not going to compound the offence.

I suspect--although I can't see how to test this--that there is an inverse correlation between the interestingness (horrible clumsy word, but I can't find precise synonyms) of a person and their compulsion to project themselves to a diffuse cloud of acquaintance on the net. Up-dating a defined community of family, friends and colleagues is a different matter, of course. Even so, I'd rather be selective and incremental--it's about interaction and conversation rather than broadcasting.

No, Google+ circles are not the answer, although a tiny crawl in the right direction.

I've bored you long enough. Should I send this?