Ketlane

You can set up a No Cold Calling Zone - need to get Trading Standards to do it, and they need agreement from a majority of households. We have one in our village. It is now an offence for a cold caller not to leave, and also an offence to return. Charity collections are allowed. In our area the Neighbourhood Watch coordinator was the key person in getting things done. See Doorstoppers - Trading Standards Institute

Lower tech alternative.....

I've been paying my VED by the phone system for some time now. Brilliant. Means you don't have to dig out insurance and MOT as DVLA's system already knows they are valid. The losers will be Post Office counters who will have even less work. And with ANPR and a radio link to PNC and DVLA, if the police pull a car over they already know whether it's taxed and insured or not, so the disc has no purpose. Abolition may make fraud a bit harder too - scallies have stolen tax discs and got refunds from DVLA on them: no longer possible.

If you get good at it, I am told that you can make a good second income as timetable writer for schools that don't have their own.......

If you look at the person description, the 4 GCSEs is only a starting point. They also expect a proven track record of teaching, of behaviour management, assessment, planning etc., and seek a Maths degree. The headline has given a lot of people a chance to play shock-horror, but I'm afraid, disappointingly for the tabloids, that there is less of that than meets the eye. Considering quite a number of Maths teachers don't hold a Maths degree, there is a different story to tell. What is interesting is the pay scale.....

I can understand abandoning £500-worth of seized car, but this...... BBC News - Seized Lamborghini Aventador auctioned for £218k

I have seen but can't find similar stories for Mercedes. One point that I have seen made is that it's running the engine from cold that causes most wear; vehicles which work all day and every day, with a new driver taking over as the first goes off shift, do very well. There was also a Land Rover ad of long ago - farmer leaning on very elderly Series 1, saying "I'm not going to buy a new one. This one still works," or words to that effect.

We don't stream films, so download speed not critical. A bit out in the sticks so can't hope for too much in the way of speed anyway. Been with BT for many years including a house move. No problems bar just the one where their HomeHub decided to sulk; I tried the obvious things then rang helpdesk. Phone answered nearly instantly, really helpful, explained the very hidden reset switch, all hunky dory. Also really hapy with their FON service - have used quite a number of hotspots with no problems either, both with laptops and smartphones. I have no idea whether I'd get a better service from any other ISP, but I have no incentive to change!

Enough said....

Just to adjust some of the discussion - I think that the policy being proposed is that if they didn't have GCSE C in Maths and English, they would have to continue to study the subjects - though not necessarily for GCSE. So schools/colleges could choose appropriate courses. And as an aside, the IB demands Maths and your first language for all....

Technology - or at least exam setting - will move on too. We already have on-demand papers; there are also computer-controlled adaptive tests that sense how well a candidate is doing and then choose which question to give next, easier or harder to suit. These adaptive tests mean that candidates doing the same exam at the same time aren't doing the same questions, means cheating is harder. Also means that top candidates don't have to do loads of stupidly easy questions, and that weak candidates don't get given questions they haven't a hope of answering. I think that ISEB is on to this one? With typed answers, at least some marking could be automated - although human judgement will be essential for a long time to come. And as we increasingly move to a screen-based communication system, the business of a pile of ruled A4, a biro and just under a square metre of plywood will be totally inappropriate for examining. There are tech problems, true, but the exam boards seem to have sorted out their end of things pretty well with just about everything electronic. And Moore's Law will help - the price and power of devices will continue to change very rapidly.

Interesting piece in the paper yesterday (which I've recycled so can't reference it). People good at maths were given two maths puzzles to sort out, one neutral and one affecting their political views. They solved the neutral one correctly but a good number of them got the wrong mathematical answer in the second one if it matched their political views. Worth a look at Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog - really good stuff on random controlled trials in public policy.

No comment needed....

This is the least reliable car I've ever owned. Ex-safari so had a game hatch which was about the only bit that worked every time. You'll notice that it's a bit down on one corner: snapped torsion bar. Other failures at awkward moments included main bearings, clutch cable, sliding door, shocks, bushes for shocks... Never had a handbrake that worked, all the heating hoses had been lost long ago (no trouble in most places, but got cold when we got nearer the highlands). I've been soooo grateful for cars that work ever since!

Looks like a complete nonsense when you see the detail - they didn't get together until well after the contract was set up.....

enough said??

The OED has the earliest reference to homophobia in this context from 1969. The OED also has a different meaning, with references from 1920 and 1960, marked as rare, "Fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex; also, fear of mankind, anthropophobia."

Welll.....the security services are damned if they do and damned if they don't. The alleged [still sub judice] perpetrators in Woolwich were known to the security services, as were the alleged Boston bombers: the media are complaining that they weren't followed, traced, eavesdropped enough. Then on the other hand we have the worries in this thread. And another thought - does it matter to anyone at all that I was in aforementioned Sainsbury's? Who is interested apart from Sainsbury's, who might be able to use the information to provide more goods that I might want? I've lived in a country where it was unwise to make political comments, particularly anti-Government ones, and it didn't need electronic surveillance for the police to be unpleasant: they knew who they wanted to stitch up, and just went ahead and did it. I'm not at all convinced electronic surveillance is a practical threat to the law-abiding citizen, though it might well be to the more careless criminal.

With or without yellow lines, obstructing the highway is an offence and police will take action where people are parking unreasonably. Had an interesting one in our tiny village recently - very narrow crossroads with double yellows on the crossroads itself. Car parked just about off the double yellows; large artic delivering to building site; obstruction by car took best part of an hour to manoeuvre round, with help in the end from builders to lift and move the obstructing car.

Built in to SchoolBase so I haven't looked at other products.

Morning and afternoon registers, direct into SchoolBase, along with day pupils. Office looks at registers not done - chases teachers (!) and also contacts families of day pupils absent - expected absences and sickness all entered by the office or nurse. No problems at all, attendance data straight into parent reports at end of every term, printouts etc available. Lesson attendance data is useful too - I have heard of a school which discovered (and cured!) what you might call internal truancy as a result of using it; also useful along with a scheme of work so that a pupil who says "You never taught us that" can be told "We did, lesson 4 on Friday 19th January, and you attended that lesson." Since most teachers call a register in every lesson anyway, one-click registration of the whole class is no effort at all. However.....tracing exactly where a pupil is in "free time" - say at a weekend or evening - is never easy and all a school can do is to do what a careful parent would do. Signing-in and out of boarding houses, whether on paper or some other way, works most of the time, but smart pupils will always get round any system if they are determined to do so.

I had one of those. Depreciated spectacularly. Amazing to drive and very weird indeed. The suspension idiosyncratic: no need for a jack as the car pumped itself up. Deflated when parked so the nose might end up resting on a high kerb in a car park, but the ability to increase ride height very useful on camp sites. And the radio placed between the front seats where any normal design would have a handbrake.

If your school subscribes to CLEAPSS - perhaps through the LA - they have good advice. Ask the science dept.... Welcome to CLEAPSS

Different industry, and many years ago, but daughter did a work experience placement with a fashion designer, and part of her week was some industrial espionage - looking in shops, seeing what was selling and what wasn't. Might be an opportunity for your WE student to do some planned web searching - and report back?

SchoolBase publishes a list of its customer schools on its website.