Links - 25th September 2019 (2)

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Hong Kong protesters storm parliament - "‘While handshakes and photo ops are clearly better than threats of war, military tension, the normal diplomatic protocol would be to achieve something during negotiations before giving North Korea and the North Korean leader a valuable photo op with the US president. And some have called this disruptive diplomacy. You call it alternative diplomacy. Others say that it shows Mr. Trump prefers style over substance perhaps?’
‘Well, in defense of Donald Trump. Traditional diplomacy had not worked. I mean, there had been a vast sort of apparatus, six party talks grinding on year after year after year. North Korea was able to exploit them to play parties off within the talks and steam on with its nuclear program, developed more and more sophisticated ballistic missiles, apparently enhanced its warheads and put itself in a very dangerous position from the point of view of its neighbors, not least Japan who are terrified of these tests that take place over Japanese territory. So Donald Trump thought I better try something completely new. And all credit to him, he achieved apparent early breakthroughs, went far further in the process of engagement with North Korea's leader than anyone else had before. But has there been a really positive outcome? Certainly not yet.’
‘There also appear to be divisions in Washington at the moment over whether the US would settle for a nuclear freeze in North Korea rather than a ban. And some saw it as significant that Mr. Trump was accompanied to the DMZ by Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who is seen as slightly less hawkish than John Bolton, who was sent off to Mongolia’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Sudan: Darfur comes to Khartoum - "[On Ebola] ‘One thing that shocks me reading about it is the level of disbelief amongst the population. It sounds as though about a third of people one survey suggested don't believe the virus exists’...
‘There's really only one way that you tackle Ebola. You find people who have it really quickly. And then you get them into a secure hospital setting where you can minimize the risk of them spreading it to other people. That relies so heavily on trust within a community. And without that trust you see what you're seeing in this Ebola outbreak, you're seeing around about a third of people dying at home in the community, not going to an Ebola treatment center, because there's not only the disbelief around Ebola, there's the lack of trust in the people there’"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How not to run a restaurant - "Food can be the most dangerous of all passions when it comes to business.
‘My head was saying look, this has nearly killed you’...
‘The restaurant trade is tough. You only have to look at the recent collapses Jamie Oliver's UK restaurant empire for proof of that.’
‘You see the pretty side. See that lovely interior of the restaurant, you know the open kitchen with the cool people with tattoos and big knives, cutting up things and talking about sous vide and pickling this and that. But on the other side of the cube is rats and garbage and no money to be had anywhere. It's, it's all these things you don't see on the other side of that cube. And I don't think anyone's really talked much about it.’..
‘I was guided by a light, a bright burning warm light that I followed around like a moth. And that light was Marco Pierre White portioning up a salmon in his kitchen in 1998. I wasn't looking at faulty plumbing, I wasn't looking at how much it costs to pay people to work for you and that they have their own needs and their own livelihoods to worry about. I didn't look at not seeing my kids for days at a time. I didn't see any of that. I was blinded by this light… I drank a lot. There's addiction issues in restaurants because the pressure is so high’...
I actually started to hate cooking, I hated to go into the grocery store, I hated food. My one day off a week, which wasn't really a day off, that was kind of an evening off, I guess, I’d go home and order pizza or something and just eat it on the couch with my kids. I wouldn't waste a second in my kitchen. But my love of food came back thank God. And now I come home after my job in an office. And I cook for my family and that hour of cooking gives me infinitely more pleasure than any second in that restaurant did"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The quest for black gold - "‘In South Korea's capital Seoul, landfill mountains once loomed over entire neighborhoods. But now more than 95% of food waste in the country is recycled. Up from just 2% in 1995’...
‘Like most people in Seoul, Buna [sp?] has to pay to get rid of it [her waste]’"
Doesn't charging people for food waste encourage over-eating?

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, When is a burger not a burger? - "‘They've deceptively used a meat counter that we've built a relationship for 60 plus years.’
‘Yeah, we, we sell millions of packs of vegetarian burgers and sausage and other meat replacements throughout Europe. We've never received complaints from people who have bought our products in error thinking it was meat... I'm pretty sure that people understand what is the actual meaning of the product. What is the actual content, as long as you clearly mark that is not just beef burger or burger, but it is plant based, vegan, etc.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, President Ulysses S Grant - "One of the complicating factors of America’s Civil War and Reconstruction that followed it is that not every slaveholding state was part of the Confederacy. So you have states like Kentucky and Missouri, there are slave holding states that never joined the Confederacy. But they become, for some reason, they become the battle grounds, really, between African Americans and whites. There are more lynchings take place during Reconstruction in Kentucky, than any other time, when you think of lynching in the south, you tend to think of South Carolina, Mississippi, but actually, in the early years of reconstruction, it was Kentucky... Grant could have sent more troops into South Carolina. But you know, how would it have gone down if he sent troops into Kentucky? It wouldn't have made any sense. People would have said but these are not the states that formed the Confederacy, what are you doing?"

Historian Chris Parkes on the Stonewall Riots | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "There was a backlash in a manner of speaking but it did not… come from the place that I suspect most people would imagine. The first real evidence of a backlash to the Stonewall Riots came from other gay people. It came from the more conservative elements in LGBT activism at the time, the homophile movement, who saw this as a disaster. They were horrified at a riot breaking out, that... queer people had rioted. They had thrown bottles at the police, that the rioters themselves had been people that these homophile activists didn't want associated with them. They were drag queens, they were street kids, they were transvestites. They were the people that were so, you know, lacking in dignity and in respect in polite society, that the calls that they were making, the homophile activists were making, for greater respect for homosexual people. They would never, it would never gain them respectability, if these calls for homosexual rights were associated with these terribly disrespectful drag queens and flame queens"

The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art - "Elephants, zebras, and rhinos would all look pretty different if they were interpreted the same way dinosaurs are."

The great university con: how the British degree lost its value - "Over the past 30 years, successive governments, from Thatcher to Blair, to Cameron and May, have imposed a set of perverse incentives on universities. Their effect has been to degrade and devalue the quality of British degrees. Academic standards have collapsed. In many institutions, it is the students who now educate the universities, in what grades they will tolerate and how much work they are willing to do. “We have got to protect ourselves from complaints,” says Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted.”  At a glance, British universities are a national success story. They have increased the number of undergraduate degrees they award fivefold since 1990, while the proportion of Firsts they hand out has quadrupled – from 7 per cent in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2019. For every student who got a First in the early 1990s, nearly 20 do now. Masters’ degrees, meanwhile, are nearly ten times as common as they were. Universities have, it seems, managed to surge in both size and quality. And they have done it all while spending comparatively little on teaching, and despite a wave of sudden changes to how they operate. In no other publicly funded sector has so dramatic an expansion seemingly cost so little and achieved so much. Our universities, we are regularly assured, are “world class”. They are a prime British export; international students flock to study in the UK... Oxbridge is leading the charge: 96 to 99 per cent of its English, history and languages students get “good honours”... “The logical conclusion of the current drift is that by 2061, 100 per cent of people [will] get Firsts,” says Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. In fact, if the next 20 years are like the past 20, it won’t take half that time... “In schools now, students are being virtually spoon-fed, and that is feeding through.”... In 2007, Robert Coe, then a professor of education at Durham University, detailed the scale of the problem. Coe’s research looked at how students of similar inherent ability compared over time. By using a standardised test, similar to IQ, one could see how equivalent students had been graded differently at A-level. The results were startling. Those who were being given Ds and Es in the late 1980s were being given Bs and Cs by the mid-2000s. British pupils did not measurably improve on any international metric during that time, nor have they since... “Ideas that students readily understood ten to 15 years ago, they struggle to understand today,” Peter Dorey, professor of British politics at the University of Cardiff, told the Commons inquiry in 2009. “Many of them are semi-literate.” Dorey described seminars in which students sat listlessly, waiting to be told how to “pass our exams”. “They will brazenly admit to having read nothing”... when European students transfer to Britain, they describe the universities as “far less demanding” than their own... Employment rates among young adults are unimpressive. British productivity has been stagnant for the past decade, and the graduate premium is weaker than ever. Most tellingly, in 2016, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) studied basic skill levels among recent graduates from 23 countries, England ranked in the bottom third. According to their study, one in five graduates in England could not handle literacy tasks more complicated than understanding the instructions on a packet of aspirin, while the numeracy level of 28 per cent was limited to estimating the fuel left on a petrol gauge. These rates were around three times worse than the top eight countries, which spend around $19,000 per student. England spends $26,000 per student, more than any country except the US, which spends $30,000... Why does management impel lecturers to grade up? Because universities need good grades to rank highly in league tables... “brilliant teaching departments would be shut down if they didn’t publish research”. It would be irrational for a lecturer to focus on teaching. They must publish or perish... “It is the worst-kept secret in the academic world that, for unseen examination papers,” the committee was told, “most tutors provide their students with the contents of the paper beforehand.”“Difficult areas of the syllabus are either omitted in their entirety or simply not examined,” they heard. These failings persist. And now, as then, should these tricks fail, marks can always simply be “uplifted”... one in two recent British graduates is not in graduate work, a rate that has consistently risen since 2001
Yet, we are told, standardised tests are useless
So much for sending more and more people to university - just because you have a degree doesn't mean it's worth anything

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Oxbridge & private schools - "Cambridge now talking about taking people with Bs, we know that to get an A in A level maths this summer, you only had to get 55% of your questions answered correctly. So I think there is a serious worry some of the people going up from all sorts of schools will struggle when they’re there, they’re going to get a lot of fee debt, and won't have much to show for it at the end. That doesn't make anyone happy. Much more important is to place the emphasis on the quality of schooling, and the preparation
Since there's grade inflation they can just give everyone 'good honours'

My fellow lecturers won't say it in public, but students today are moaning, illiterate snowflakes - "When I tell people who have had nothing to do with universities recently that I’ve taught British undergraduates who are simply incapable of writing a correct sentence in English, most smirk in disbelief. Perhaps because I’m a writer of fiction they assume I’m indulging in some dramatic exaggeration. When I raise this with fellow lecturers, however, they nod mournfully.There is still a mania that everyone should go to university and every endeavour should be a degree (whether sculpting or golf management). It’s had a very bad effect on education.There’s an “everyone must pass” attitude, which is compounded by the “sick note” epidemic. The student who is currently suing Oxford University because it allegedly “didn’t take her anxiety seriously enough” isn’t an unusual figure... Almost every fourth essay you have to mark has a cover sheet pleading extenuating circumstances: Asperger’s, autism, anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, dyslexia, dyspraxia. In my day, extenuating circumstances meant that your family had died in a car crash a month before your finals. And if you don’t pass, no need to worry because you’ll almost certainly have the chance of a resit or a resubmission. Essentially, if you can be bothered to turn up, you’ll get a degree. When I suggested to my department head that it might be beneficial to axe one or two students to gee up the performance of the rest, he commented, without any hint of irony: “We can’t fail them, because then they’d leave.”I taught English literature for four years at Christ Church University in Canterbury. I taught some 120 first‑year undergrads, of whom I asked the question: “What is a sentence?”Only six came up with the formula: subject, verb, object (and two of them were foreign students). They hadn’t heard of this grammar stuff. Some were even shaky on what an adjective is. And these weren’t physicists or business studies students, this was the literature class. Everyone is guilty. The Labour Party for comprehensive education (I went to a comprehensive. It was indeed egalitarian, in that everyone got a mediocre education). Margaret Thatcher for the turn your shed-into-a-university policy. Tony Blair for abolishing the requirement for foreign languages.And then of course the Equality Act, which requires Universities to make “reasonable adjustment” for those less able. What a gloriously flexible, litigious word “reasonable” is. Again, I doubt many academics will go on record with this, but I had experiences with students who had some “disorder” who were extraordinarily able in using their disability to their advantage... In the humanities we seem to have a system where many students pay a lot of money, learn very little and gain very little employability. The students I mentioned who are functionally illiterate represent perhaps only one per cent, three, five? But there they are, at university.The real problem is the much larger group who don’t really have the tools to benefit fully from a course, which is quite often not that demanding.The educational absurdity of Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby is being recreated in our arts faculties, where all you need to do is read a couple of books (or watch the DVDs), rehash some platitudes about racism, gender stereotypes, climate change and say Foucault to scrape a degree."