El Pibe

"workforces come out with as a deliberate block to asking them to do their flipping job" whereas ironically its the mangerialised desire to have boxes ticked that actually prevents them from doing so, or rather that becomes the job and even a bear can't shit anywhere reasonably because he doesn't know what a wood looks like anymore. Life's funny like that.

reading her biog I pity your alter ego and his misguided crush "Rosamund is a reporter on the City desk with a fashion obsession. It has regularly been noted that this combination makes her a real-life Rebecca Bloomwood from Confessions of a Shopaholic, although she hopes with more financial savvy and better taste in clothes." Especially given the fallaciousness "taht[sic] this sense of 'try' is followed by an infinitive." Standards of journalism these days eh! *she is rather pretty though I'll grant you*

I for one don't accept that. Again how do you quantify better? Waiting lists down? THey probably are, but then we were released from hospital 4 hours after the birth of our child after a 60 hour labour, once upon a time you might have had at least a day to recover. Also tell that to my consultant surgeon uncle who retired, utterly dissillusioned by what had happened to the NHS. Or my mum who had also devoted her life to the NHS. Treated like a human being when seriously ill in the early 90s, treated like a number during her cancer treatment recently including being pumped full of a drug she was allergic to by a nurse who ignored her when she pleaded with her to double check.

The thing is you're analogising by making parallels with a blantantly commercial environment. That doesn't translate to making kids optimistic or enjoy learning. It has tied schools to following strict curricula and tied teachers' efforts to achieving exam targets. Concentrate efforts on those that will achieve and damn the rest. All efforts will be channelled into achieving the presentation of a reality* (something New Labour knew all about) rather than to create a genuine better reality. I've already said where appropriate they should be used, and yes the Tories brought in some targets. Labour introduced an ethos of managerialism into the public sector as the very philosophy under which everything could be marshalled, quantified and compared. It's a nonsense, and panders to the idea that complex (human) systems are controllable, when we all know they are inherently chaotic. I think this was a fools errand, its undermined the quality and indeed purpose of our services, has cost millions and isn't being undone nearly quickly enough. *juking the stats as the wire referred to it as, a marvellous expression

It's perfectly possible to measure something withough imposing a target. But the moment you decide to do so you have define performance, something Labour were very very bad at. 'I do ideas I don't do detail' Blair was often heard to say. THe moent you decide to quantify things can be a slippery slope, but the moment targets are imposed and punishments meted out for failure to meet them then the unquantifiables go out the window adn that's what has happpened to both health care and education,wiith the many ill effects that has had on both workers and customers, err i mean pupils and patients. I admit there are some fairly sensible pointers to keep an eye on, number of deaths from post operative infections say. BUt step away from the (failry) clear cut and it all becomes harder. How do you measure the positive effect inspirational teachers have on their pupils? How do you measure hte effect that kind personal nursing can have on patients?

Badly Acting... scans AND makes more sense.

Oh you'll love this one, it has a picture of Thomas Micklewright, surrounded by lovely ladies smeared in foie gras!! (it's important to note the lack of comma between ladies and smeared else it would rapidly turn from delightful to disturbing)

wot quids said on pretty much all those above counts. I was reading a fawning article on the beeb today about how statiistically Capello was the best manager EVAAAA. It's ridiculous. Laughably weak qualifying groups and a string of good results against easy opposition followed by pathetic tournaments. See also Sven's reign. It was much more fun when we squeaked through, had a couple of poor group games and then stormed to glorious and noble defeat looking like the shining stars of the tournament, and how clse, how beautifyully close in 90 & 96. Ironic that '96 gave us '30 years of hurt' when actually the subsequent 15 have been far more galling. Give me excitement and pain over arrogance and inspidness any day of the week. Golden genereation my arse!

What a very Blair moment. He introduced the awful cult of target-driven managerialism into the public sector almost singlehandedly, demoralising vast swathes of our teachers, nurses, doctors and civil servants, and he spins this by saying he did it to make people feel good. Oh dear. There will be a very special circle of hell reserved for that man.

Plus I think it's fine to obstinately split infintives, especially if it winds people up ;)

I think the frontier is a more amorphous concept than that, more a lawless area rather than a bigg rubber sheath, it continues the Western analogy that was the original star trek vision, basically Gunsmoke on a submarine...err..in the future.

aye, that it be.

Try to would be grammatically correct latin but though English is influenced by latin, it isn't a romance language. It's more a sort of germanic-latin hybrid with bits of brythonic thrown around (in the same way that Irish idiomatic expressions are often direct translations from the Gaelic into English, particularly their liberal use of the gerund). The criticism (particularly around the split infintive) is aimed at victorian and edwardian educators' attempts to instill a latin grammatical discipline on English that sits rather ill at ease with common practice. Thus 'try and' isn't an idiom that flies in the face of the rules more that the rules are denying the long established idiom of 'try and'. ;-) *edited for the 700 superfluous 'but's hanging around......and weird caps*

Mr World Wide Words comes to the rescue Apparently it just winds up colonial types And if it's good enough for Jerome K Jerome.....so try and learn to love it. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-try1.htm

Can i add "Irregardless" to the list?

File under don'ts

I would be, and have guiltily enjoyed UDT's ludicrous posturing and bulletproof self-belief, but frankly it has become quite excruciating to watch. UDT I've no idea why you enjoy hanging out in the forum or what it is you're trying to persuade others' of other than your own omnipotence, but stop it, seriously it's just embarrassing.

x post. A minefiled it may be, but I guess a natural consequence of the changing shape of the game over the last 15 years. The beigger they are the harder they do fall and serious injuries have been rising as a consequence meaning you have to regulate to try and protect the players, though I get what you're saying about it being hard to judge for a player in the middle of a blood and guts encounter.

Most annoyingly I thought Davies had lost it for Wales and was hoping he would be feeling thoroughly ashamed at himself. Despite the subsequent citing this kind of lets him off and gives him the excuse to say 'they're just as bad, harumph'. I tenhd to agree that erring on the side of caution is probably for the best, especially if there is a 0 tolerance approach to stamp this sort of thing out.

By the letter of the law it was definitely a penalty, he was lifted and his upper body hit the ground, even though the card was questionable. You can nitpick but it was stupidly unneccesary in the dying seconds of a game with a narrow lead within kicking distance but that far from the touch line. Though it was no where near as bad as the Davies tackle.

What was it Santerme once called it? Walts was the word I think.

"This is the kind of stupidness that I'm often faced with, Bob." I reckon you can probably research hubris on Wikipedia too.

I think you'll find that's brillant

"No-one wants Greek debts or increasingly Portuguee, Italian and Spanish debt without a huge interest rate becuase they are genuienly convinced that they won't get paid back as the sums don't add up" I do find this a bit odd. Whist I obviously get that higher risk requires greater return, I don't see why anyone would buy it if they think there's no chance of a return. You can quote yields of 1,000,000% if you like, doesn't matter if defaulting is inevitable. Plus it seems to me that there's an element of self fulfilling prophecy about demanding higher yields from nations who look like they can't sustain their levels of debt. Also it's a little unfair on Spain that has comparatively low levels of sovereign debt, I realise it's tax receipts are down but I wasn't under the impression it was in any imminent danger of defaulting. Just random, thoughts really. On the defaults in general my gut instinct says it won't be apocalyptic but may be a necessary step in resetting many economies (though doubtless will be followed by a Euro break up of some degree), and preventing it has more to do with political principle, getting German and French creditors paid (Greece alone has a multi billion pound deal for tanks and helicopters it has yet to cough up for) and the aforementioned hopes of keeping the Euro low. I did see an interesting graph about levels of historical levels of sovereign debt and sovereign defaults that rather suggested it's inevitable given the current situation.

Could it be that this is less to do with cognitive ability and more to do with congnitive functioning? In other words if you spend a lot of time being trained to think in simplistic terms and not to question ideas for yourself (is indoctrination too harsh a word for this) that one's neural pathways end up stuck in lack-of-critical-thought gear and will persist the prejudice handed down by parents or influential peers at critical developmental stages? Or do I lend this paper with too much plausability, or should I just go 'wot brendan sed'.