UK : Northern brain drain? Apparently 310 000 young people who graduate from Universities in the North leave for London and the South. The Grauniad reports aren't 100% about exactly what these folk do for a living once they get there, in reality I suspect they end up working in the same shitty call centres and financial services companies rather than the "vibrant creative industries" the Grauniad and others claim are still found in the capital.
BTW I was born in London and lived there (and also just outside in Reading, SE England) for much of my life; and quite frankly wouldn't want to live there again.
This is one of the articles aimed at the Grauniad readers. Be aware though the two "young lasses" are not that young, they are nearly as old as myself and are writing about long gone "good times" from 1990s/early 00s. To be fair Helen Pidd does also write some decent articles about cycling, ironically it was riding a bike in London which made her decide to return to the North :laugh_at:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/21/northern-brain-drain-moving-back-london
UK : The British people in 600AD Note the large size of Northumbria, which extends well beyond the present borders of England some distance into Scotland.
[IMG]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwSLxm7XEAAQug4.jpg:large[/IMG]
DE : Don’t let off bear spray in your school corridor! (from Polizei Bayern)
1862. Verdacht der gefährlichen Körperverletzung durch Benutzung eines Tierabwehrsprays
Eine 19-jährige Schülerin brachte am Freitag, 14.10.2016, ein sog. Tierabwehrspray in ihre Berufsfachschule in der Isarvorstadt mit. Sie zeigte es einem 20-jährigen Mitschüler, der das Spray an sich nahm und kurz den Auslösemechanismus betätigte. Daraufhin verteilte sich ein Sprühnebel der stark reizenden Substanz aus der Spraydose im Flur der Schule.
Da zu diesem Zeitpunkt, um etwa 09.40 Uhr, gerade ein Unterrichtswechsel stattfand, befanden sich sehr viele Schüler im direkten Einwirkungsbereich des Sprays. Bei insgesamt 19 Personen kam es zu Reizungen der Augen und der Atemwege. Acht Verletzte mussten mit Rettungswägen in verschiedene Krankenhäuser gebracht werden, wo sie jeweils ambulant behandelt wurden. 11 leichtverletzte wurden vor Ort kurz behandelt und gingen dann nach Hause.
Das verwendete Spray ist frei verkäuflich und durfte auch von der 19-Jährigen geführt werden.
Es wurden Ermittlungen wegen gefährlicher Körperverletzung gegen den 20-jährigen Schüler eingeleitet.
Incident 1862 : Suspicion of dangerous bodily harm caused by use of animal defence spray.
On Friday 14.10.2016 A 19 year old student brought along to her vocational school in the Isavorstadt a so-called animal defence spray. She showed the spray to a 20 year old classmate, who took the spray and briefly triggered the operating mechanism. [Achtung! some of these things lock the valve on when you do that!]. Thus a spray of the highly irritating substance was discharged from the can into the corridor of the school.
At this time, around 09:40, there was a changeover of class, so many students were directly in the path of the spray. In total 19 people suffered eye and respiratory irritation. 8 casualties were taken by Ambulance to various hospitals, where they were treated as outpatients. 11 lightly injured casualties were treated in place and then went home.
The spray used is legally sold and posessed by the 19 year old.
The 20 year old is under investigation for causing dangerous bodily harm.
UK : England : good article about exam related hassles ni this country not sure if there are any UK teens who can still easily get to this website (thanks to the various content filters) but it might be of use to any parents of schoolkids who stumble across this post...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/27/blight-childrens-lives-five-good-gcses-exam-success
"retro" system documentation ;) OK this might seem strange behaviour in the 21st century but (perhaps due to my age) - but I sometimes find computers way too distracting and writing things down by hand seems to makes them stick in my brain more.
Even though the water flow meter is a fairly basic system, it is still good practice to write up some kind of system documentation for my colleagues and to remind myself of important bits of the system works (I might eventually reuse the design for an animal detector in my garden).
I also wanted to try and practise/improve my handwriting and stop it getting even worse due to increasing use of computers - it has never been particularly good to start with, the nuns who once taught me (I expect they are all in Heaven by now) would probably give me 6 out of 10 if they are in a good mood and think "I guess he is a bit of a late developer, only took him 37 years...." and probably also thinking "he will have plenty of time to improve when he lands up in Purgatory" (I expect they still use hand written index cards and files for tracking telecoms faults like the PTT did until 1980s)
For anyone who is curious about the pens used (I still often use fountain-pens, otherwise my writing would be even more completely unreadable):
The red text was written with a Lamy Safari, OB nib and Waterman red ink - the blue-black text with a Pelikan M200, M bin and 4001 blue-black ink (that one now always stays at home with me as I am paranoid about mislaying it, I managed to get it for €60 which is a bargain compared to how much they are today!)
UK : British schools offered "Asian maths teaching methods" This slightly worried me at first as I was reminded of the pressure my Dad put on me to always do well in maths at school - but having looked at it the methods SG is using are very progressive (they are from the 1980s and are a development of European progressive education from the 1970s) and less high pressure better than current "Western" teaching!
Asian maths method offered to schools - BBC News
more in depth about how they teach the kids
BBC Skillswise - Can the Singapore method help your children learn maths?
DK/UK : Ø found in English council document This was sent to me from our community cycling group - a promenade (I think the same word is used in other North European languages) is a raised path near the sea (which is more pleasant to walk along than on a gravel beach). It is at Felixstowe, about 21km away from here. I have not yet been there (as turning up on an e-bike that can do 30km/h is more than likely to land me in some sort of bother) but from what I could see of it on Google Maps there would be plenty enough room for everyone if they just put some lines on the street like every other country does ;)
first time I've seen Ø used as a bullet point..
Consultation
There are two clear options:
Ø Keep the signs which prohibit cycling on the promenade, so continue to make it unlawful; or,
Ø Allow cycling, by removing the signs and making cycling on the promenade legal.
DE : ADAWIS (Arbeitskreises Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache) Found this through a BBC news article where some German Professors were arguing that the dominance of English in scientific discussion could be as detrimental as that of Latin a few centuries ago.
My personal experience, although German can be challenging and mine is not particularly strong hence why I try to watch Die Sendung mit Der Maus ( the kids science programme) every week to improve it, is that knowing even a small bit has benefits - particularly outside of formal education (such as on hobby electronics and engineering/science websites) as well as computer security blogs, there is much better in depth content to be found in German - the complexity of the language itself makes "dumbing down" impossible.
As an example reading a booklet from Siemens about electric distribution networks and the apprentices training manual from Die DBP-Telekom from the 1980s helped me finally crack the mystery of why one site at work is particularly plagued by electromagnetic inteference and how this could be mitigated as part of new building works...
Last year Ofcom UK warned folk "the cheap China fairy lights and LED lamps might cause your wifi to act up" and added a few paragraphs of non specific info.
Today I was reading two blogs from German speaking radioamateurs; who found some of the various new eco friendly lamps made a rough noise on their shortwave receivers.
Two of them (one in DE, the other in CH) painstakingly set up an experimental lab complete with monitoring antennas and spectrum analysers; and posted up their results (showing QRM (interference) into VHF frequencies (including those used by DAB radio) and a critique on the LED driver circuit (which when used on a TN-C-S electricity network with combined neutral and protective earth is likely to upset all radio reception throughout the entire building where such lamps are used...
EDIT: the Philips lamps are in fact better types than other brands (although there are plenty of cheap unbranded energy saving lamps which do create bad interference); and one of the chaps involved turns out to be a Professor who works in a lab that tests equipment for EMC compliance as his day job...
Startseite | ADAWIS: Arbeitskreis Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache e.V.
what decent scientific calculators are available in Europe? The 1990s era Casio I inherited from my late father has developed a defect in the LCD screen; and a newer one I got at the local supermarket (intended for high school students) although just right for A/AS level exams lacks some useful functions for computer science (such as hex, octal and binary) and doesn't have much programming capabilities.
I am considering treating myself to a new one; as TBH its about time I actually understood a bit more of the numbers behind what I do such as converting milliwatts/watts to dBW for radio communications; working out lag on telecoms circuits by comparing this with the speed of light etc; as well as impedance matching in electronics.
Any of the clever folk here have suggestions about which models to get? I originally thought the TI and HP programmables were unobtanium here in Europe but you can purchase them onliine (quite like the idea of those with an entire Z80 CPU built in to them ;) )
I've noticed the ones that used to cost about €300 are way cheaper
DK : Matematikside (på Dansk) / Maths learning site found this from one of the Enigma links
From Professor Vestegaard who currently teaches at "gymnasium" (high school) level (in Northern Europe the Gymnasium is a type of school, not just the place to exercise your physical body, but your brain as well)
(Although Mrs Robinson probably knows all this maths anyway :laugh_at: )
Matematik for gymnasiet og for andre interesserede
for those who cannot read Danish (I can just about manage it as it is similar to Dutch and German) he has provided a list of English sites
Links til Matematik Sites
DE: 8500 new teachers for German classes to 196 000 refugee children At first I thought this was way too few; but TBH it would make the class sizes no worse than 1970s/80s UK and the kids are likely to be better behaved.
That is of course assuming these are individual extra classes for the refugee kids and the new teachers are not diverted to other subjects/classes for everyone else in the school; which might not be unlikely given there is already a shortage of teachers in Germany in many areas before the refugee crisis (there is also a shortage of children across Northern Europe!)
If the German government is going to do this I think they should also put all the learning materials online at the public broadcasters websites so the teachers can all get to them easily and everyone else in the EU or any age who might want to learn German as a second/third language can use them; as that could help everybody in the long term...
EN : Germany recruits 8,500 teachers to teach German to 196,000 child refugees | World news | The Guardian
DE : Flüchtlinge: Länder schufen bis jetzt 8200 Sprachklassen - manager magazin
NL / DK : NL Wikipedia schrifweek Denemarken Link naar Wikipedia NL beneden / link below
For those who do not understand Dutch; the Dutch Wikipedia editors have devoted a week or two to improving all articles about Denmark and surrounding countries.
There isn't a similar project on English Wikipedia that I can find; the rationale behind the Dutch project is because of the global environment conference earlier this month (even though it was in France rather than Denmark; that one was in 2009).
There is some logic to this; the idea being that if enough people in NL know about Denmark and surrounding countries this might make them more aware about melting glaciers. (consider where all the water might end up...)
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Schrijfweek/Denemarken
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