A license to teach is not empowering

Ed Balls’s white paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future, published today, contains the breathtaking proposal that teachers should have licences to practice which would need to be renewed every five years.

Incredibly, the general secretary of the NASUWT seems to support this. From the BBC report:

The general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, Chris Keates, said licensing could give qualified teacher status “the long overdue recognition that it is a high status qualification” like those in medicine and law.

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Looking for examples of language use trends

Hello internet, I’d like your advice.

I am looking for analyses and examples from anywhere in the world of shifts in language use patterns and language policy for a project I’m working on.

These might include information on language loss and endangerment, language protection schemes, language rights issues, language and ethnicity, globalisation of languages, emergence of distinctive regional standards (e.g. Chinglish, Singlish), changing official attitudes to multilingualism, conflicts over choice of language, etc. I’m also keen to see any good papers on theoretical issues in the branches of sociolinguistics that deal with language choice, language cultures and language policy. For this piece of work I’m interested in language use in the very broad and traditional sense - i.e. which languages people use to communicate. Information on morphological, lexical or syntactic change, sociolect or dialect, and similar are not really of interest for this (though always interesting in themselves).

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Just because you read it on a blog doesn’t mean it’s not rubbish

Dave Trott at CST Advertising thinks he knows about the origins of on one’s tod, meaning on one’s own. What he shows with his post is that a) he doesn’t, and b) he cares more about winning arguments than being right.

In fairness, that’s his point. The blog’s argument, which is ultimately about advertising, is that in an ad pitch ‘whoever wins makes the best argument’, and that ‘all that wins is the best argument, not necessarily the best ad’. This is probably true, and he concludes quite neatly:

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Content, kings and civil social media

Since before social media was a term anyone knew, we’ve been used to the idea that ‘content is king‘ on the web. Any blog post (and now any Twitter post that stands a chance of being re-tweeted) should contain some new information, analysis or synthesis to avoid being lost in all the noise. This was true back when many individuals and organisations thought it was fine to build flashy websites with nothing useful on, and it’s still true now that the web is littered with dead blogs with nothing to say.

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Avocados and other unlikely claims

My post on avocados, ethics and supermarket histories appears on the Futures Company blog today.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may expect that I’d have something to say on the highly-publicised claim by Global Language Monitor that there are now a million words in the English language. I do - their claim is meaningless - but clearly lexicographers think in packs, because two former colleagues of mine from the OED have already said it perfectly, so I’ll defer to them.

In Praise of Prose

I’ve just read the excellent The Back of the Napkin, by the visualization consultant Dan Roam. Now, say the words ‘visualization consultant’ to people and they are likely to recoil slightly, imagining some person or organization churning out fantastically complicated systems diagrams in dense Powerpoint decks. But Dan’s book is about representing information simply, and he demonstrates pretty persuasively that most strategic problems can be drawn up pretty simply. (There’s a line of thought among strategic analysts that says that the ones that can’t arise from faulty strategies.) His cartooning style also makes the book a delight to thumb through.

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Predicting earthquakes the easy way: the what, not the when

Natural disasters are among the most unpredictable drivers of the future. If you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger (you never know), governing a state whose economic powerhouses sit along and around the San Andreas fault, you can make as much economic policy as you want, and it won’t matter much if an earthquake or an eruption knocks San Francisco off the map and Los Angeles into the sea. There is a science to measuring and predicting this sort of thing, but it’s not good enough yet to provide reliable early warnings. For now, natural disasters can still take us by surprise.

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Why fakecharities.org is wrong about charities

Two-sentence version: Fakecharities.org thinks government funding makes charities mouthpieces of the state. It is wrong.

Long version…

Bad Science author Ben Goldacre brought the website fakecharities.org to the attention of a fairly wide readership the other day when he wrote this Twitter post:

FakeCharities.org: fun idea, nicely run site http://rly.cc/8qVXn

The link is to a blog post on the website of the free-market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, who describe fakecharities.org as ‘excellent’.

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Using a sledgehammer to find a knife

Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived areas in London, and in the country. Of England and Wales’s 376 local authorities, it’s in the top 20 for overcrowded housing and single-parent households (a good indicator for poverty and poor outcomes for children), and in the top 30 for unemployment. It has among the highest levels of gang activity in the capital. To say it has a bit of a youth crime problem would be a generous understatement.

The council has introduced mandatory electronic weapons screening in 15 of the borough’s 19 secondary schools. (The Times headline is wrong to call the checks ‘random’ - they are to be routine. It also repeats the rather uninformed story about stab vests.) So far no knives have been found, but the council has denied that it is being alarmist.

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Funders as think tanks

Over at Mission Measurement there’s a good little post cautioning against an overly narrow conception of what philanthropic foundations are for. As Kim Silver (the MM author) says, the US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s recommendation that a good funder should give ‘at least 50 percent of its grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups’ excludes foundations with entirely different objectives (such as environmental foundations), and makes some unnecessary assumptions about what they should fund.

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