Huguenot

Oh come on Emily! Back to family fortunes... We asked 100 people to describe a group of armed people with pitchforks and flaming torches chasing after an individual, our survey said... Lynch Mob - 80% Witch hunters - 20% Joke - 0% Teachers are habitually abused and threatened (and sometimes physically attacked). They are likely to be sensitive to this fact. This doesn't make them over-sensitive, it makes them real people. If this was after several months of 'heated' confrontation then it's all the more sensitive. Only a real wally would put up posters of lynch mobs around school in this context, whatever the 'joke' might have been. It is a spectacular error of judgement to expect anything else.

Growlybear I think you'll find that there are a range of situations in which you can suspend elected members, just like there are for MPs. These may include gross misconduct, criminal activity, bringing the institution into disrepute, vote of no confidence, impeachment and so on. I'm not saying any of these apply in this context, nor whether they would be fair - just saying that the board will have a range of options. Regardless of that, it is common practise to suspend elected members of organisations whilst an investigation is in place.

Emily I don't think it's realistic to imagine that a joke about an old Frankenstein movie is going to be the immediate reference that leaps to mind when it comes to lynch mobs. Let's play family fortunes yeah? We asked 100 people to name famous lynch mobs, our survey said... Ku Klux Klan - 80% Medieval witch hunt - 20% Old Frankenstein Movie - 0% Charles Darwin - 0% It would be completely obtuse to suggest any other context. If we assume that this was simply a mistake, then people should be calling Moyles position into question on the basis of a complete lack of judgement and inability to see how his actions would be perceived by others.

Reggie, Emily refers to 'previous meetings [note the plural] had been heated'. That kind of tells us that this had been an ongoing and angry exchange possibly over months. We don't know how angry or what the nature of the aggression was. All the more reason for Moyles to have chosen his poster more carefully. This looks increasingly like a lynch mob against the headteacher, and that makes the poster even more poorly chosen.

Emily, there have been no slurs on the Moyles on this thread, and the only coverage to suggest it was racist was the Daily Mail. I have merely been pointing out that there is no reason to assume that the Daily Mail reports are truthful. The Ofsted report above highlights another inconsistency in the Mail coverage. In fact the report suggested she was 'inspiring', 'supportive' and 'gets the best out of her team'. That's hardly the failed loser being represented by the Mail. If anything the only slurs in this story are those suffered by the headteacher.

I've no idea what you're losing your rag about showboat, we seem to be in agreement no? Great stuff!

I don't have any better knowledge, I'm not trying to insinuate anything. I'm merely saying that the Daily Mail has no reputation for truth, it does have a reputation for supporting white middle class citizens at the expense of other parts of society. It does have a reputation for manufacturing perspectives from which to attack 'political correctness'. It may have got the story right, but I note that its source is merely 'a friend' - and that doesn't bode well. It is indeed sad, but to be honest we have no idea how thick a skin it has been necessary for her to have, since we have no way of knowing the behaviour to which she was subject to. I come from a family of teachers who have been subject to baseless assault and battery from otherwise upstanding white middle class parents. We've had our cars spray painted with abuse. As a 15 year old I was headbutted in the street by an unknown adult assailant on the grounds that I was my father's son. I can assure you that teachers in general, especially headteachers, and their families have very thick skin. The fact that they don't comment on threads like this one is testament to their resilience.

As I said, I reckon that you'll find the DM story to which you're reacting has very little relationship with the truth of the matter. Showboat's response makes the assumption that the story is true, and there's absolutely no reason to make that assumption. We had some fun a while back finding out the 'truth' about a few DM stories. A classic was a DM story about a pensioner arrested out of the blue for having a 'penknife' in his glovebox he used for his picnics. Turned out that it was a substantial combat knife that the thug had just retrieved from his car after a drinking session in order to threaten a visitor at the pub. The landlord had called the police because he suspected the thug was drunk, had just seen him threatening violence with a combat knife, and was worried about what might happen next. Not quite the same eh? Same with this story. Who's to know whether Moyles hadn't been behaving obstructively to the head over a sustained period of time, whether he had been warned about the religious (Darwin) and racial (Mississippi lynchings) connotations of the poster, whether he had deliberately adjusted the image in order to give 'Darwin' an unusual appearance compared with the whiteness of the lynch mob, whether he had been specifically told not to put it up on the grounds for this reason, whether he did all this and himself because he wanted to discredit the head in a manufactured environment? I'm not suggesting this is the case, just putting an alternative spin on events to the one presented by the Mail. We don't know, and we'll certainly learn nothing from the Mail. My advice is don't make any assumptions about this story.

Youtube Heroin Nette...

Annette, first it's just a bit of fun with your mates. You know, just having a laugh. Then maybe it's not quite so much of a thrill. You think maybe a little bit more? Just a bit. Then maybe you're mates aren't around, so just a little bit, it's no harm... just a little bit of fun yeah?

It's the Mail. There will be a lot more to this than meets the eye. Certainly Devid Moyle will have been intelligent and capable enough to be aware of the huge number of issues and sensitivities this picture could throw up. Mind you, it seems to have been resolved now, so probably best to let it go.

Yeah, I'm worried about abuse too. I'm particularly not a fan of 'dislike' buttons. Most of us have heard the phrase 'If you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all'. Whilst in general this isn't practical (it hardly contributes to debate), I think a general 'dislike' feature doesn't even bother to explain the duisagreement. It's just plain abusive and damages communities. 'Like' if you must, but even then I'm worried that we'd end up with a forum full of smart-alec one-liners and little cliques of people blowing smoke up each others' behinds.

It's not supposed to be malicious or defamatory, they're just scraping stuff. In the most part there's a form of AI behind them, not people, so not much point in being offended. They don't just scrape off the EDF either, they're building a database from all over. One of my clients uses the same system for translation. Instead of doing what some translators do in trying to translate word for word, it tries to learn idioms and human phrases by scraping the net. It's currently in learning mode. The aim is to appear so human that they aren't banned from sites. When this goal is met they'll be peppered with commercial links or hidden code to push things like pharmaceuticals, porn and so on. You may not even be able to see the code, because it's there to bamboozle search engines rather than you.

*Washes hands*

If you've got a digital kitchen scale you can weigh coins to count them, and then bag them up for the bank. Doesn't take long that way.

LOL! Tribeca Grill?

The aim of the bots is to appear as human as possible. To that end they quote random words out of other posts, and frequently mash sentences from other posts together. They'll scrape forums for other mentions of the word and repeat the context with minor adjustments. That's why they appear to have personal information about you. They learn what does and doesn't make sense, and their attention is particularly drawn to posts that mention their username. It's not always easy to tell these apart from dickheads just posting rubbish, but since they both have the same effect on the forum's regular users, they should both be banned.

I don't really know what 'given more weight' would be? Could it even be generalised like that? I should imagine that the merits of each argument are weighed according to the needs and responsibilities of the entire community. It seems likely in that context that providing a much needed service to 5,000 residents may take priority over a single vexatious neighbour. Conversely I can't imagine a planning committee bending over backwards to accommodate another curry house. So I don't think it's possible to generalise.

Irony of ironies - is NowNo a robot too?

Hi Auntie Mimi. Responding won't do much, as I'm pretty sure both of those are robots. There's another thread on it here....

The console might have 'forgotten' it. You can reconnect them by using the red buttons: Open the battery cover on the controller and there is a Red Button. On the Wii there is a red rectangular button under a small panel near the disk drive. Click those buttons at, or near, the same time. Then just press a button on the Wiimote and it will be synced with the Wii.

"Is there any evidence for this?" There's an old quote popular in advertising circles that goes "50% of my advertising expenditure doesn't work, the problem is that I don't know which 50%" Unless you have a very specific direct response advertising campaign (e.g. 'call now for a 50% discount') it's virtually impossible to discuss the impact of a particular advert People's buying decisions are tied up with the very complex relationship they have with a brand. The brand itself is a series of emotional associations that are built up by an entire lifetime of encounters with a product. This includes the product itself, it's advertising and packaging, it's reputation and so on. For British companies exporting overseas that relationship is built not only upon their own activities, but also on their customers' perceptions of what a 'British' company is. Most of us do it all the time - for example the idea that German is ruthlessly efficient, or the Japanese products are technically advanced, or that Chinese products are cheap tat. The Royal Wedding is a massive contribution to Brand Britain. It's dominating overseas scheduling with extremely positive messages about Britain. There is certainly a large proportion of people who falsely believe that 'advertising doesn't affect me'. If they want to insist, in this light, that the wedding does not contribute to overseas perception of Britain and consequently commercial success of British companies then there's not much I can say to persuade them. They are however, simply wrong.

Really silverfox, you are completely mental now, right? Having failed to make any valid point against AV, you're now resorting to referencing weird unrelated stuff somewhere else in the world?

Tarot... *tiredly* That was 4 4 3 7. Can you see that it wasn't 5 7 5? Whatever the emotional wasteland of witsd's comment, s/he nailed the execution in a precise, alomst techincal manner. Haiku's are unreasonable in Bwitish anyway. In those bizarre pictographic eastern languages a symbol can represent an entire concept, not just a syllable.

Your use of the word 'condone' already implies that there is something wrong with celebrating 6 limbed deities. I can't see any reason why a six limbed deity is any more peculiar than an omniscient omnipresent misogynist geriatric. It strikes me that a 'defender of faith' is an eminently reasonable commitment from a monarch, in that it celebrates freedom of worship. Thes rest of it looks suspiciously like a list of your own prejudices ;-)