Education

The BBC has a story today about Alan Milburn's report into dwindling social mobility, and I was pleased to discover that, despite being a member of the spin and cover-up obsessed Labour party, he has delivered a report (with the help of a number of unnamed independent experts) that reaches some bold conclusions. These conclusions have been known to some people for a while now, but have not been the fashionable thing to say.
Of course, the report also harps on about some old things that I hope will be forgotten with New Labour. For example, the report calls on universities to consider social background when choosing from applicants. As should be obvious, and is repeated by the universities themselves, their job is not to make up for the government's failure to provide decent school education by sacrificing their own standards.
The report does, however, point out that efforts to attract the attention of poorer applicants, and fight their low aspiration, cost perhaps £10,000 per pupil; a whopping amount which could be better spent by the universities on bursaries and scholarships if only secondary education were good enough.

The report also raises the problem of the number of places at university increasing. This well-meaning attempt to provide even more people with a university-level qualification has actually caused there to be a divide between those with degrees and those without, so that those without can no longer work their way up. Degrees have become so common that having one is now a necessity for senior positions. This combines with the problem that degrees have had to lower standards to accept so many more people, making many degrees meaningless. If a person can't even get a meaningless qualification, he must be a poor candidate!
With degrees meaning little, the social advantages of the rich: networks, friends in the profession, the ability to support children through internships and work experience (and to find them) all have much greater impact on the child's employability.

The solution, which was discovered, and even used, many decades ago, is to have a state-funded selective school system. This gives students from every background the chance to get a good school education and a place at a good university.
If universities had fewer state-funded places, but such places were actually free, rather than funded by student loans which then go to pay top-up fees, they would be accessible to all, and the students would have the ability to apply for internships and use university services with the knowledge that they did not have to earn money during the holidays in order to support their studies during term-time.

The idea that reducing the number of university places might increase social mobility and equality is counter-intuitive to many people. This is because it rests on the 'elitist' doctrine of letting the talented from any background do well, rather than on the stupid doctrine of trying to ensure that everyone, even the grossly untalented, has the same probability of doing well. If we can ensure that doing well costs nothing for the best of the best, we can be sure that we will have social mobility.
If we ensure that doing anything costs something, we can be sure that only the rich will achieve anything.
We do not have the money to work miracles and turn the untalented into the talented, nor reverse nature by equalising talent between people. We have only a choice between allowing success to be dictated by ability, or by parental affluence.

Until people realise that not everyone can be a star we're going to be stuck with the pointless pursuit of the highest level of education for all, which will merely cause ever higher levels of education to be created in order for the best to distinguish themselves, each level costing more and more money, and creating an ever-shrinking pool of parents who can afford to have their children go through it all.
The only way out is to break with the revulsion of selection in education and ensure that, however many levels of education the rich create, the government always funds the best of the poor through them.
To try to fund everyone wholly will bankrupt the nation, and to fund everyone partially gives the rich the advantage that we want to eliminate.

free association

I heard on the BBC's Moral Maze (8/7/09) a woman trying to support legal discrimination against homosexuals. As part of her misguided attempt to place her religious conviction above basic decency and law she said that freedom is the ability to associate freely.
She was talking about how beautiful it would be for a Christian school to employ only Christians, in both teaching posts and in other posts (such as a gardener) such that everyone reinforced the same idea.
"The principal that's running the school needs to be free to employ a staff that believe in the same things that he believes in. That's the beauty of association around a doctrine; around a creed. That's true freedom."
I can understand this concept of freedom. It's a worrying idea though, because although we have vast amounts of information available to us nowadays, there is a great deal of bias and ignorance in society because people do not use that information.
The idea that it's beautiful that people can insulate themselves from other opinions, and indoctrinate children in one set of unfounded beliefs without any challenge at all is a revolting one. Schools especially must expose children to all options, including evidence-based beliefs. But even other walks of life suffer when people are insulated from opposing beliefs. With insulation we get intolerance, misunderstanding and misinformation.
If I return to a free market metaphor, people can only choose the best purchase with perfect information; this is a basic principle of economics. The same is true for ideas: it is a disruption of the market of ideas to prevent people having access to ideas. It is deceitful to hide better ideas in order to convince people to accept your own. It is an admission of inferiority and a disruption of the freedom of others.
Of course, if an adult chooses freely to associate around a doctrine it's a trickier issue. People who exclude other opinions are entitled so to do.
A person can ignore new knowledge and associate only with charlatans, and by so-doing gain misguided opinions. We might think of ways to persuade people not to be so lazy, and not sink into the morass of bias that is human nature, but the best way is through education. If we can teach children about the virtue of free-thought; about how valuable freedom is, and how what separates us from the other animals is our thinking mind and ability to overcome our instincts, then our children will be less likely to give in to the human desire to reinforce beliefs and biases, and will be more likely to use the information that our current society can provide in such abundant amounts.
The problem of too much information is like the problem of too little: both lead to inadequate decision-making. However, the problem of too much information is an inbuilt human instinct (as we can see from TED talks on human psychology) that we can fight. The problem of too little, which is what this woman wanted to impose, is not something that those subjected to it can avoid.

The freedom to associate around one opinion might be a freedom, but it is against our duty as members of a democracy. A voter's duty is to inform himself of both sides of any issue about which he cares so that he can make the best choice. Our society cannot survive as a properly-functioning unit if we focus on rights and freedoms, and never on duties and responsibilities. It will dinsintegrate into unconnected and misunderstood 'free associations' of biased and intolerant groups.
When we get a citizenship test, we must have a section that asks about issues, and opinions on both sides, and we might need to administer something similar to voters. Ensuring that voters do their duty by considering the issues is a difficult problem, but one that needs to be addressed.

Having a cold

It's not pleasant, and I couldn't help but notice how much snot my nose feels obliged to produce. At a rate of 1ml/min. (at its peak) that's a lot of mucus.
The sinuses, in total, seem to have a capacity of about 30ml, meaning that an hour into a cold they'll all be utterly full and the pressure will start to build. It's not helped by the fact that the maxillary sinuses have their drain at the top of the sinus, making drainage impossible when the head is upright.
It feels, however, more like the frontal sinuses are the ones causing the pain, since they're the ones in the forehead. Why that might be I don't know. Perhaps the inflammation up there has more sensitive tissue against which to push.
I wonder whether people with big sinuses tend to have an easier or harder time with colds. If sinuses developed to protect from blows to the face then men should have bigger ones, and this might explain why they find colds so much more unpleasant, if bigger sinuses lead to greater pain. On the other hand, it hardly seems likely that we'd suffer blows to the face much more often than to the rest of the head, and we don't have rear sinuses.
I'm not sure that sinuses are particularly helpful with humidifying and heating inhaled air, since they're connected to the nasal passage by such small holes. That makes it difficult for air to circulate into them int he duration of inhalation.
They might insulate delicate facial structures from temperature fluctuations, but given that we don't have them anywhere else, we have lived our lives in temperate climes and no-one seems to notice problems from breathing cold air through the mouth, I don't like this answer either. We could test it easily by examining humans from different environmental backgrounds.
That leaves the possibility of sinuses giving the voice resonance or being necessary for making the face lighter. I can't see any value intrinsic in having a lighter face; the ease with which one might make facial expressions will hardly be changed by having lighter bones in the upper part of the face, since the bones move little if at all.
Resonance is a nice idea. Is it worth having a resonant voice in exchange for regular sinusitis? Is sinus size related to the pitch of a person's voice?