Just to let you know we have added the Atheist Blogroll to the site now – this is a frequently updated link to loads of great blogs. Well worth checking out and if you have a blog of your own – Join Now! It doesn’t have to be an Atheist Blog as such, but you can find more details out from Mojoey’s site. What are you waiting for?

Following the previous post and a helpful comment from Nullfidian, I found the school website, which is depressing enough. It seems it is a “foundation school.” This got me wondering what a “foundation school” was anyway. Teacher net has some sort of explanation of the types of schools. D’oh. Did I say explanation? I meant list. Because the definitions make minimal sense and just got me ranting.

Apparently a foundation school is what used to be a “grant-maintained” school (which used to mean half-private, but subsidised by the state in exchange for taking a few non-paying kids. Now it appears that they run themselves but the DES pays x amount for them. hmmm.) I’ll say no more about this on-the-face-of-it silly school. It doesn’t seem to offer much except to people who don’t want their daughters to mix with boys so it’s pitching itself at the Islamic parent population,

Some of the other categories seem baffling. I suddenly remember I’m paying my taxes for these:-

Couple of categories of religious indoctrination units schools. Oh good. I love the idea that I am paying for kids to be isolated from people who haven’t been brought up to believe the same stuff as them. (Note for the slow-witted, that was Sarcasm)

Other wierd categories of “specialist” schools. These seem totally daft in concept to me. How fair is it to base a secondary education on whether kids are good at music or sport? Or, Rhiannon forbid, “business and enterprise”? Arghh. Maybe someone can explain to me why these exist but, to be honest, I am not interested so don’t bother. I prefer to deny their existence,

But the category that totally freaks me out is the three categories of child jails. From Secure units to the three truly menacing sounding 365 -days -a-year Secure training units. Quote:

Secure Training Unit (STCs)
There are currently three STCs in operation, they were set up under the Private Finance Initiative and are operated by private providers under contracts managed by the Home Office

They take kids from 10 to 17 (ten???) Are there really enough ten year-olds so dangerously disturbed that they have to be sent to child jails? Three of them, even with all the other units that exist. Thor forbid I or any of my blood ever come across one. All the same, surely kids that damaged and dangerous need some really heavy-duty assistance. Like somebody looking at what their parents or “carers” have done to them? Or why the rest of us aren’t concerned to prevent it?

Private Finance Initiative? Group 4? Securicor?

Doesn’t this seem too Dickensian for words to anyone else? Now on this one, I really would welcome some explanation. If anyone who works in one or has been in one reads this, can you explain what happens in them and what purpose they achieve.? I would be extremely grateful.

Tags: Schools, Education, Private+finance+initiative, Crazy Schools, education, Secure training units, STCs, child jails, Faith Schools, Specialist Schools

Another entertaining link courtesy of the Nullifidian Blog. This time it is Professor Alister McGrath who comes under the spotlight. Claiming his two doctorates (molecular biology and theology) as a ground point, Prof. McGrath is about to publish a book called the Dawkins Delusion – a not even subtle attack on Richard Dawkins.

That title alone is enough to show that the religious-right struggle to grasp the concept of humour, not to mention the issue with the fact that Dawkins is not God. Dawkis is not the Prophet, or Pope of Atheism. Will the religious crusaders ever grasp what the concept of Atheism means? It is not worship of some hitherto unknown deity. The God Delusion presented arguments about why worship of God was a mistake, and God probably does not exist. If the Dawkins Delusion is going to try the same tactic it will be funny. No one worships Dawkins and he certainly does exist!

The Nullifidian blog nicely deconstructs most of the nonsense and woo surrounding the book (and Prof McGrath) but one bit I could not ignore:

[Prof McGrath] continues: “When I was an atheist, I sounded like Richard Dawkins. I focused only on the things that fitted my theory. One of the things that made me stop being an atheist was realising things are rather more complicated.”

Now that was funny. Belief in the invisible friend is more complicated than working out how life forms evolve and adapt to their environment. Amazing, isn’t it. Yeah, “God Did It” is such a complicated concept to try and hold in your head. I love the way Prof. McGrath refers to him self as an ex-Atheist. That really tickles.

There is another side swipe a Dawkins, saying he “refuses” to debate with the anti-Dawkins Prof McGrath. Remember, Science is not Guided By Consensus. Debates are meaningless.

The UK is getting worse as far as education goes. Following from a post I found on the Nullifidian Blog, I ended up at the BBC News page for Friday 2 Feb 07, with the title “Teacher sacked over religion row.”

In a nutshell, a supply teacher at a Slough secondary school was “sacked” (after “several days” rather than an eight week contract) for saying “most suicide bombers were Muslim.” For context the supply teacher was teaching Religious Education so the debate about religion is probably appropriate.

Now it appears (the only source is the BBC website) that the teacher (Mr Andrew McLuskey) was sacked after the pupils complained at his comments. To put this in perspective, the school is predominantly Muslim, so it could be agreed that his comments were “ill advised.” Mr McLuskey was obviously upset that he never had the chance to defend himself and the BBC reports the school comments as follows:

The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils’ welfare. “I don’t think it’s important what I think,” said the school’s deputy head teacher Ray Hinds. “It’s what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset.”

This is mind boggling. A quick Google search has reported that at least 99.9% of suicide bombers are Islamic, or supporting an Islamic cause (you can rarely ask the bomber about his religion after the event). It seems to me, that what Mr McLuskey said is factually correct.

It is certainly not the same as saying “Most Muslims are Suicide Bombers” which would have, quite rightly, caused outage and is blatantly false. The comments made by the deputy head are telling and it is a worrying story they tell.

I am sure the School (who oddly are unfindable on the internet), feel they have done the right thing but in reality all it has done is play into the hands of the right wingers who will cry “political correctness” and probably lead invariably towards backlash.

In the sad world where teachers can be sacked for saying something which, while correct, upsets the pupils (and I suspect the deputy head), it is no surprise that creationism and other forms of religious fundamentalism is sneaking into our society.

Tags: Education, Crazy Schools, Religion, Islam, Suicide Bomber, Society, Rants, Mistakes

Loathe though I am to admit it, there is actually an article (op-ed piece really) in this months .net Magazine which I agree with. Yes, it is shocking.

This is temporary. There are rantworthy bits to the rest of the magazine. Normal service will be resumed soon

The normally loathsome “Gary Marshall’s Big Mouth” section is about a news item in which two UK schools have banned Wi-Fi devices after parent’s complained about the health risks the devices posed. Strangely for .net they are actually on the ball here and, as Gary Marshall points out it is a load of “bollocks.”

There is no evidence that Wi-Fi is dangerous and from a scientific point of view you can’t prove they are “safe.” Sadly, some of the less informed people out there will hit upon this and assume it means they are dangerous. You cant prove using pens is safe, but you can say there is no evidence it is dangerous. Shall we ban pens? The reductio ad absurdum on this one could go on for ever.

What the schools really should have done, is made the parents come back in for science lessons. Well done to .net for standing up for sense and science (for a change).

Tags: Science, .net Magazine, Web Design, Wi-Fi, WiFi, Wireless Networking, Technology, Health and Safety, Education, Crazy Schools

Just a quick one, there have been a couple of changes to how the styles on this blog are handled. Mainly this has involved the introduction of a few new clasess (download, code, note, taglist, alert, new, construction, taglist and information) which can be added to <p> tags to give a bit of inline style alteration.

The taglist class is already in use, but we are not going to go about add retrofitting it two hundreds of messages.

Let me know what you think, or if there are any other things you think we should add.

Doing a search on Technorati tags for Error Messages was quite enlightening. First off it linked me to a site called RegSpyWareCleaner.com (which I refuse to link to but you can see it’s profile on Technorati).

The main thing to notice is the spelling mistakes: For example, posts have titles like “Kill spywrae,” “Spywarei nfo” and “Daware se” (I assume that is something to do with Adware – which the site often calls Addware). Now I am not doing a spelling offensive here, but it is interesting that a supposedly professional site, trying to sell its product to English speakers doesn’t spell check its content.

The more important thing is when you realise what is basically a Google Ad site has six backlinks on Technorati. That is surprising. Who in their right mind would backlink? There really is little on the site you could call content, and at first I though the links were just other blogs laughing at the site (as this one nearly was). However a second search on Technorati shows who the culprits are.

Now there is nothing wrong with getting backlinks, until you see these are from dodgy looking spyware sites which make the same spelling mistakes. The most recent is a post titled “Spyg ames” (I am not going to link, they have enough backlinks already) which is from a site that has 67 blogs linking to it. A quick visit shows it has almost no content (and what it does, seems to be by accident). That is amazing. The site has six times as many inbound links as this blog, which produced over 120 quality posts last month! Checking on Technorati again, shows that these 150-odd links from 67 blogs (this time all the linking blogs have zero links of their own) are from yet more scrap sites which do very little other than show Google ads.

I get the sinking feeling that if I carried out the same checks on each of the other blogs which have backlinks, I would find pretty much the same story.

So much for the power of the social web and the value of backlinking.

Tags: Technorati, Web 2.0, Useless, Technology, Rants, Backlinks, Social Networking, Backlink Spam

What is it about “Web 2.0” sites that they feel the need to wrap error (or unavailable) messages in all manner of flowery nonsense? In the past, technorati has often returned a spurious message about the monster escaping and now it seems Flikr has followed suit.

For those who were wondering where the images on the right hand sidebar have gone – this is the answer:

Now, I am sure I am not alone in thinking that is a lot less than an I would normally think of as an answer. If you follow the link to the Flickr Blog page you get some more details, but surely that defeats the point of having the error message?

Not to long ago, every site which considered itself trendy had “doorway” pages, which were normally little more than a flash animation or a “cool” (i.e. crap) logo which they wanted visitors to look at before they got into the site. This lasted a very short time (although there are still sites which do this…) and very quickly people realised that it was madness. When people visit a site, they expect to see the site – not some artistic nonsense. That error message is basically useless. It tells you nothing about what is going on and forces you to continue to visit more pages just to find out what the problem is. What lunatic thinks this is “usability?”

Likewise, when people see an error message they expect to be told what the error is, not some attempt to be trendy and humanise the website. This is what the blog says:

Downtime tonight

UPDATE@11:50pm: Still going smoothly. Looks like we might finish up a few minutes early.

UPDATE@ 9:40pm: Flickr’s now down and busy bees are switching and racking and installing and setting up. All proceeding wel!

Tonight at 9pm (San Francisco time – view in your local time) Flickr will be down for maintenance for up to four hours. We apologize for the length of this downtime, but we’re making some big changes which will enable us to roll out new features faster. So … it’ll be worth it!

As usual, photos will still be served, but you won’t be able to access Flickr site or API. We’ll post here once we start and when we’re ready to come back up. Thank your for your patience!

Now how hard would it have been to put that on the previous page?

Tags: Flickr, Technorati, Error Messages, Web 2.0, Bad Ideas, Useless, Technology, Rants

Well, it is a new month so as you would expect the latest .net magazine appeared. It is still early days but so far there is little sign of improvement (traditionally the writers seem to get a lease of life at the start of the year, but by Oct – Dec are producing mostly garbage), which could bode ill for the rest of the year.

I will write more on it another day, but I am still intrigued that instead of printing more letters they have brought back the “penny forum” nonsense – if you want to read the forum, go to the forum – and they waste pages at the back with pure drivel.

One thing which made me laugh was a quote which read:

There aren’t many digital cameras or DVD players out there without the DivX logo slapped on them…

Wow. Can I suggest the journalist who wrote that needs to actually leave the building every now and then? Ideally (s)he should also visit some shops before making such a broad sweeping remark.

Last time I looked in Currys, Comet, Dixons and PC World – I found two out of a total of about 50 different types of DVD player which would play DivX. I have yet to see a digital camera which has DivX “Slapped on it,” so I can only assume the writer was completely making things up.

If they are going to lie about something like this, where do they draw the line? Can you ever be sure what they say is true?

More on .net will follow if the magazine seems worth it.

Tags: .net Magazine, DivX, Web Design, Technology