Will Knott

Bellyrubs are always accepted.

I got a late enough phone call telling me that it seemed that Michael Jackson had died. The vagueness of the call and the fact that there was a panicked family search on for keys (if you’ve met the family in panic mode you will have heard how loud panic is) I asked if I could call back.

Keys found, call made.

Yup he’s dead.

I’ll admit that his death will not bring out non-existent stories about being a fan for years or the extreme sadness felt. I didn’t know him, as much as I didn’t know Farrah Fawcett. I knew of them, but I didn’t know them. I sort of feel sorry for their families who I don’t know.

Oh course, knowing of them meant that I has a tune almost of his going through my head. Go Home Productions did a mashup of “Rock With You” and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and that’s what played.

And here it is.

some RSS readers may have to click through to see the embedded video

Having said all that, I was surprised to hear that it was the number one news story on the radio, every front page and that the searches for news on the singers death slowed the internet to a crawl.

Shouldn’t there be a bigger, non-celebrity related  news story?

While the picture below looks like something for “picture is unrelated” there is a story behind it.

I don’t know the whole story, just my part.

And the phrase “bring your camera everywhere with you” (and yes I have bathroom graffiti shots to prove the “everywhere part”).

When David Maybury was departing for parts foreign, a small bloggers party was thrown for him at Le Circ. (I have a few pictures of the night). I left early via the bar’s rear door, which opens on to another street with more bars.

And this fellow was standing outside thanks to the smoking ban.

I have no idea why. I did ask if it was OK to take the shot, but I have no idea why.

Vicars and tarts anyone?

Oddly, since the window in Le Circ overlooking this scene is all stained and leaded glass, I doubt anyone inside noticed.

Sometimes you get lucky. The rain started as I was walking past the funfair, and before it reached me, this appeared.

If it weren’t for the video I wouldn’t believe that this story was true.

A week old puppy gets flushed down the toilet in North London. The fire brigade was called, but they couldn’t get down the narrow drains. So Dynorod got a call.

They used their CCTV system to find the puppy in the sewerage system(after telling all the neighbours to not flush for obvious reasons). Eventually they found the puppy, still alive and pushed the little tyke to the nearest manhole and in to the waiting arms of the fire brigade.

The puppy is alive and well, and Dynorod have an amazing story, with a video. According to the audio they did this free of charge, so I hope the video goes viral for them.

via KC of Red FM

Of course the question I now have is, why develop a CCTV system for drains that records? I mean it isn’t that pretty down there.

As I write the weather has turned to hot and humid.

At the moment life if getting in the way of blogging (and its the dull parts of life) so rather than let a full week go by without a post.. enjoy this melting courtesy of LookAndTaste.com

Of course, the other way to melt chocolate is to leave it in a car on a hot day… but it wrecks the taste.

take care,
Will

Today is Yesterday was (this post got stuck in draft) the day that the Leaving Certificate English paper 2 didn’t happen. The cause, this is really for my non-Irish reader (waves at Aunt Mary); a steward running the exam on Wednesday opened and put out paper 2 instead of paper 1 by accident in a school in County Louth.

This error has effected 51,800 students, and cost the steward his job. Admittedly, no one died. Only study plans are disrupted.

The funny thing is that this isn’t the first time such an error has happened. But this year the consequences are that the second paper is being sat on Saturday with a back-up English exam.

What occurred is a perfect storm of events…

Firstly, the timetable of exams changed. Until recently English papers 1 and 2 were sat on the same day (morning and afternoon). Since both exams are, well, tough and require a lot of writing it was felt that spreading the exam over two days would be easier on the students hands, if not on the students themselves.

If the error had occurred in the past, only the 15 students who received the wrong paper would have been effected.  True they could have informed fellow students that the paper featured “macbeth, deception, bishop, keats, walcot, larkin …” to quote the tweet, but most (lets face it, there is going to be a little comfort cramming between exams at least) of the study would have been completed long before the exam. Having a full day between exams meant that the important information could get out there and get spread widely.

Secondly there is the nature of the exam itself. Paper two of the Leaving Certificate is regarded as one of the toughest tests in the pre-university examination system. In out system exam marks mean points, and points mean University places. The English syllabus means that the students have to study eight poets and guess as to which two or three would be on the paper.

Had this been the Mathematics exam, then the information would be harder to spread. After all knowing the type of maths question does not limit the study as much as dropping 6 out of 8 poets. Equally has this not been one of the “big three” exams of English, Irish and Maths, the reason to spread the information would have decreased.

So you have a high pressure exam, which most if not all the leaving certificate students will be sitting, where the important details of which can be summed up in three or four words; the names of the poets. Words which quiet easily fit in the space of a single SMS message. Or a tweet. So a small amount of information can cause a huge amount of damage.

The third part of this is the fact that social media played a part. And yes I’m counting the leaving certificate discussion section of Boards.ie as social media. In fact it appears that the public dissemination began on Boards.

The timing is interesting here. Boards only started seeing this information close to 4pm. This implies that the information only started leaking around then. What is likely is that those 15 students started passing the information as soon as the afternoon exam (home economics as it happens) was over. Given that the steward reported the loss of confidentially around 4pm, when parents of the children informed him, this sound about right. Even if the steward had reported the breach immediately (and maybe kept his job over it) the spreading of the information would have followed the exact same time line.

Or to put it another way, the Department of Education found out the same time that everyone else did. Posibbly a short while earlier.

At least one, mostly likely two or three of the children waited until they got home, and got internet access to talk to each other. This spread the word. Needless to say, it spread very quickly amongst a number of interested students. Then wider.

Now a lot of students cut back on social computer use (e.g games) during the exams. After all its only two to three very important weeks for which they have worked two years for. Discussion was rife.

And the department of education picked it up very quickly.

There is a backup exam in case of leaks. Normally what would happen is that effected schools would get the backup paper. For a single school a delay is tolerable as the second exam of the day could be delayed by the same amount. In this case, because of social media and the internet, every school in the country (and beyond, the leaving certificate is not only limited to Irish schools, but I can’t think of any places that use it) was effected. The issue changed from containing the problem to distributing the exams to all the test centres.

So the exam was rescheduled. Not everyone was in the loop. I’ve heard stories of students studying for the English paper after it had been rescheduled. Which probably means that they had shut down all connections for study reasons.

What does this mean for the Department of Education.

1) All leaks are now national leaks. Unless the leak is a mistiming (exam starts and ends early) then assume all the information is out there. Students can only be quarantined in special circumstances, for example the Jewish students who cannot sit the exam on the Saturday for religious reasons.

2) Different colour coding for papers. All the morning exams have a different colour cover from all the evening exams. When both papers were on the same day, there wasn’t an issue, the colours were different. When the exam because consecutive mornings, then it became an issue again. Using more colours, maybe 4 colours with alternating colours for different mornings and evenings. A quicker, cheaper fix might be have the second paper being on the following afternoon. Or the following week. One would make mistakes unlikely, the other would give more recovery time.

3) Sign-off. The steward needed to get two students to sign-off the opening of the paper. Firstly these students are not disinterested parties, assuming malice, they would want this information. Secondly, these student have no training on the proper procedure. If the head of your exam asks you to sign something so the paper can be passed out, you’ll sign it. I know I signed off an exam (only 2 of us sat the paper) so I didn’t realise that I was signing a procedural document at the time.

In short, the current “the procedures have been followed” process have absolutely no purpose. Insisting that a teacher or someone equally fire-able by the Department sign off would at least make the checks viable.

So is this going to happen again?

Yes. You see, human error is likely. The consequences differ widely every time, in this case a lot of inconvenience for all the students this year. Next year, it could be something small.

Annoying, yes, but stuff happens all the time. Next ear we will all year about the steps taken to avoid this from happening again. Or at least, the steps to make if less likely.

And the odd on winning the lotto are?

take care,
Will Knott

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This is a cross-post to Culch.ie but I’ve embedded the video mentioned below.

Once I loved Big Brother . Note, there is no number following that title.

The first Big Brother .

The most interesting thing about the first Big Brother was how different the contestants were when compared to the crop over the last eight years. Few of the contestants were fame hungry. No one really knew if it would work… it was a very expensive experiment.

As a group it seems that many of the first contestants are, well, not working. Some are still working somewhere in media (usually quietly behind the scenes now). True, none of them found the dizzying heights of fame as the most famous looser of Big Brother, Jade Goody , but few people let alone reality show contestants have.

Then again, one the the first contestants, Mel is responsible for the Big Brother “eye” logo . Its her eye.

If the first year was a test, the second year was a fine tuning exercise and the third year seems to be the brass ring that Channel 4 have been searching for ever since.

The problem with Big Brother is… its boring. Nothing can really happen. Its mostly people sleeping (along the way Big Brother introduced a “no sleeping during daylight hours” rule and will play alarm clock noises at dosing contestants. Yes folks, it eventually got that bad) and talking. True, occasionally bickering and insulting each other. Add in a bit of metaphorical back stabbing and you have the basis of a soap. But a soap is better acted and paced.

Which is funny if you think about it. The contestants are usually those that want to be famous. Every contestant now knows what is going to happen, but they still line up and go for it. Big Brother isn’t a talent show (so no dreams and or surprise performances) but a group of people (supposedly) being themselves for a number of weeks.

But a funny thing happened along the way. It started to get ignored.

The explosion of racism on Celebrity Big Brother 5 in 2007 meant that the TV show was being played out on international headlines. That summer’s show (Big Brother 8 ) was a quieter affair. You know how big a TV show is from the amount of coverage it gets off the TV. Susan Boyle made this year’s Britain’s Got Talent a “must watch” show, if for nothing else but the the ability to talk about it afterward. Who wants to talk about Big Brother, until there is an explosion anyway. Not literally. There have already been too many bomb scares in that house.

The biggest thing about Big Brother 9 was not Big Brother 9 but the Big Brother zombie based TV series Dead Set , parts of which were filmed at a Big Brother 9 eviction. No doubt there are jokes to be made about Davina McCall being a great zombie.

And Big Brother 10 is about to burst on to our screens.

Whoop-de-doodle-do.

The first, opening night, show will generate media coverage. It always does. However how much of that coverage will still be there the following week. If on July 1 you approached a random man or woman on the street and asked them to name one of this years contestants, (barring an Irish contestant, Ray Shah got his local radio show partly from Big Brother) I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to tell you their name. Ratings are down for Reality shows in general at the moment, and the series mean ratings for Big Brother are on a decline .

Regardless of that Channel 4 does to the show, unless the contestants themselves are appealing, I don’t see a hugh surge in ratings yet.

As for the title, its actually from the “Literally” series of spoof videos for “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. But it applies. The series has slowly turned. I’m not too sure its turned for the better.

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