Cycling Related

Sonic Budgie wrote: ↑

3 years ago

It rather ties in with this one, which I'm sure you've all seen before. The footage is from 5 years ago but has only been released recently as a consquence of the current climate;

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 56526.html

No wonder they blurred out his face: it's Simon Pegg!



Seriously, that is shocking. I just read this interview with Jon Stewart, and this quote gave me insight in the police stops I have watched.

The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas.

I didn't realise it applied here, too, but it is explicitly what that cop is doing.

Don't you love him boasting he stops more whites than blacks. In Cambridgeshire!

Joan wrote: ↑

3 years ago

No wonder they blurred out his face: it's Simon Pegg!

I was sure I had seen the vid without the face blur, so thought I'd have a little look and immediately came across this, where in direct reference to @The Real Ravenhurst s comment, the couple were stopped for "driving a motor vehicle on a road". I've no intention of looking for or posting anymore, I'm sure there are far too many other examples.

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-12/bla ... ing-a-car/

The case is being discussed on the Today programme... Neomi Bennett comes across very credibly.

Regulator wrote: ↑

3 years ago

The case is being discussed on the Today programme... Neomi Bennett comes across very credibly.

Thanks. Listen to the that (1:42:30, on BBC sounds). Yeah, it's really bad. She literally has done nothing wrong, her momentary hesitation gets immediate and escalating threats of violence yet somehow the CPS and a judge saw she was criminally at fault. For a nurse, this might even stop her career. I am not sure if the conviction had stood, whether she could work with vulnerable people anymore. Even if she had been "obstructing", how can a minute of trying to sort out what was happening in your head, when there was no risk of her fleeing possibly be worth suck a serious black mark? This must be racism. I can't imagine all those people would have felt the same about a white woman who claimed she was afraid. Well, unless she seemed chavvy. Certain classes can be vilified like certain races in the UK.

Sonic Budgie wrote: ↑

3 years ago

I've no intention of looking for or posting anymore,

I understand the sentiment, but this is not like watching police murders in the USA, this is happening in our country, and the only way to be aware of it is to watch them. I am angry and I find it oppressive. Good. Now maybe I will do something about it.

PS: seriously disturbed by my use of "black mark" in this context. I don't think the phrase is racist, but I don't think our language's association of black with bad or negative things is helpful, either.

Joan wrote: ↑

3 years ago

I understand the sentiment, but this is not like watching police murders in the USA, this is happening in our country, and the only way to be aware of it is to watch them. I am angry and I find it oppressive. Good. Now maybe I will do something about it.

Sorry, I should probably have been clearer. I wasn't suggesting that I would avoid watching them or not acknowledge their existence, a reasonably active Twitter will put them under your nose anyway. I meant I wasn't going to start filling this thread up with link after link to similar stories and videos.

I don't know what else the young man was doing, but please, next time you go for a ride be sure to be wearing a helmet, hi-viz and have a licence plate, lest you be accused of anti-social behaviour.

BTW, check out how many police there are!

She looks completely baffled.

I reckon that one of the other officers planted the bits about helmet, Hi-viz, and licence plate in her head before they got out of the van, just for the bantz.

...slavery wasn't genocide, because otherwise there wouldn't be so many damned blacks in Africa and...

Sorry, I tuned out at that point.

If it's a fact that teacher predictions are optimistic, and if it's a fact that they are more optimistic for disadvantaged pupils, is there any algorithm they could have used that would not produce the effects now being criticised?

JohnToo wrote: ↑

3 years ago

If it's a fact that teacher predictions are optimistic, and if it's a fact that they are more optimistic for disadvantaged pupils, is there any algorithm they could have used that would not produce the effects now being criticised?

Such an algorithm doesn't exist, in my opinion; teachers' assessments should be honoured. See this Guardian article for a robust opinion on judging this kind of thing using algorithms and statistics (the analogy with speeding fines seems a good one to me). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... ithm-flaws

The reason for this fiasco seems largely to be that teachers were thought likely to overestimate students' prowess, and this would result in unfairly good results - but given the extraordinary circumstances this year and the disastrous effects they will have on these young people's lives for years to come, I'm afraid I don't see much wrong with that. They are going to need all the help they can get.

I don't think there are easy answers. Simply going with teacher predictions would have resulted in massive grade inflation (I think we know that, because the algorithm used to ensure minimal grade inflation could only achieve that by downgrading 30-something percent of predictions and only upgrading 2%). Maybe you're right and this generation of young people deserve that. But I tend to think the risk would have been that nobody would trust this year's grades, and the inflated grades they got would have been of limited value anyway, and all the surrounding generations would have felt unfairly hard-done-by. Simply going by teacher predictions also introduces a massive error factor according to which schools and teachers tend to be optimistic and which pessimistic, and that also seems unfair to the young people concerned. Plus, if they'd said in advance they were only using teacher predictions, the temptation to game the system by being dishonest would have been massive, and I'm going to bet that private schools would have played that game more cynically and more successfully than state schools, further exacerbating existing disparities.

There was no good solution that I can see (nor should we expect there to be - you can't import a factor as massively disruptive as lockdown into a system and expect to find a way of making everything all right). We can probably all agree that what they did - choose a system, then change it at the last moment on the fly - is amongst the worst things to do. But I can't help thinking that the system they chose, if they'd put the work into explaining it and managing explanations, was a defensible system.

I'd read that article but didn't understand it because it gave no real details of the statistical analysis the chap did.

JohnToo wrote: ↑

3 years ago

I'd read that article but didn't understand it because it gave no real details of the statistical analysis the chap did.

Aye, there's the rub.

OK, there's a new Guardian article, and it's starting to become clearer:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... -is-unfair

There now seem to be two components: the adjustment for the school's prior attainment, and the subsequent rounding of allocated percentages into actual pupil numbers, the latter set up always to round down and never up. I apologise if this has been common knowledge to everyone else all along

Think back to all those times in your own life when you have waited for a result or a judgement, from the trivial to the crucial, then ask yourself which statistical analysis or algorithm would have made you happy to learn that your personal result depended on factors like how many people succeeded/survived/won their case last year, or what the general level of success was for the testing centre, or diagnostic clinic, or county court, or whatever, or what population it served. Think about how you would really feel and what consequences might follow. Insurance claims might work like this, but judgment of students' individual academic achievements should not.