love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Aruba.

Data shows we need to remove France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos & Aruba from our list of #coronavirus Travel Corridors to keep infection rates DOWN. If you arrive in the UK after 0400 Saturday from these destinations, you will need to self-isolate for 14 days.

— Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps) August 13, 2020

Turks and Caicos has had fewer cases since the pandemic started than the 300 who tested positive at the M&S sandwich factory in Northampton this week but I’m sure there’s a logic to it somewhere.

Turks and Caicos unlucky to get drawn from the tombola, oh no sorry I mean data.

pic.twitter.com/xkUMMOQapc

— Rosewood Shoehorn (@apiarism) August 13, 2020

I'm interested in how many of those sandwich factory workers will turn out to be completely asymptomatic, if it's as large a proportion as I suspect then there are major implications. If nothing else it underlines the sense that we aren't going to genuinely get a grip on this until the country is able to routinely test large numbers of people with zero symptoms.

I know a lot of kids will be disappointed by their A Level results today, but just remember: the BBC are always looking for people your age to come on and say things that are extremely right-wing.

— Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) August 13, 2020

sic posted this on climate change thread:

The Brittleness Bubble is far, far bigger than we're acknowledging.

A staggering percentage of the world's critical infrastructure is now entering a world where climate conditions routinely exceed the tolerances for which that infrastructure was designed. https://t.co/chIOcoZ4Gw

— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 13, 2020

I mean these are random 'climate' type events to look out for.

Flooding and landslides as well. The Aberdeen crash is being linked to a landslide, something similar happened in Kent last night (though the train didn't derail) and one of the main London-Kent routes was knocked out for weeks last year.

think of the opportunities for jobs and development this creates tho, and who better to take advantage of this prima facie case for a green new deal than

oh

We'll end up with income support sanctions if you don't take a zero-hours job spreading your arms out and trying to physically hold back the mud at railway sidings instead.

looking forward to that post getting revived in 3 years as sarcastic optimism

Can't wait to see some of these shitty newbuild homes that have been banged up willy nilly getting washed away in the monsoon season, just a week after they've been handed over.

if The Greens can't capitalise on how useless the 2 main billionaire-donor driven parties are when major parts of UK infrastructure starts falling to pieces, then they never will.

idk man there's a lot of kneejerk tankies and Maoists out there who will never trust them

can't see anyone to the left of them now nor who are serious about the challenges of climate change, so if i can be arsed voting they have mine. Even though Bartley is a bit of a prick and don't get me started on imago's hero!

There's a germ of possibility in there, just need a good purge

when I say *challenges of climate change* what I really meant was the impending mass die off and civilisational collapse lol

A useful but grim thread:

A brief thread:

I’m going to be taking a step back from here (again). Not because I want to, but because if I don’t, I worry that I’ll lose my job. And I have a family to support.

And the people driving that are not on the Left. They’re on the Right.

— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) August 12, 2020

(Public Affairs Officer for the Board of Deputies)

As ever the replies are best avoided

when the Greens make Magid Magid leader that'll be the signal for a mass influx tbh

Then the Right, those people who mock the idea of “cancel culture”, trip over themselves to write to my employers demanding that I be punished, or sacked, for what I have said.

there we have it, it's fine when it suits them and the ones that moan the loudest never actually get "cancelled" if anything they a higher profile out of it. Like who the fuck cares what Prick Knave has to say, yet yesterday he was everywhere.

"How you doing tonight Cleveland?"

How we all feeling in the Red Wall tonight? Private school kids marked up, working class kids marked down - the clue was in the word Tory when you voted for them 👇🏽 https://t.co/LJKU4GsIsW

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) August 13, 2020

since when did school age kids get on the electoral register in the North? he needs to cut down on the spice

if there's one thing angry parents want right now it's smug condescension from the president of stoya's fan club

Conspiracyish take on the travel corridor thing I heard yesterday is that it's designed to exclude countries that compete for British tourism (so said tourists will vacation within the country instead and boost the economy), is that mad?

Surely no one will actually abide by the quarantine anyway?

It is me, I'm the mug who will.

But I reckogn if you have a steady job and just dance up there after yr vacation someone might grass on you, no?

It depends, my daughter's holiday in Majorca is fucked because her and my ex can't not quarantine in good conscience

A grand total of three people were fined in the first seven weeks of restrictions being imposed.

aiui, you give them a phone number when you land and there's an extremely remote possibility that someone might call you up to ask you where you currently are.

So basically as long as you aren't at a railway station or anywhere else with a tannoy announcement you're basically fine?

Unless they've devised a more sophisticated system since, i would guess so.

I think it was in Thailand where the tracking app isn't optional and they have stiff penalties for those that break quarantine, but they pay you to stay at home. That sounds like a functional system at least.

You and Aaronovitch are the reason I first bought a Times subscription all those years ago and the column I read religiously (even where the sermon has been hard to hear!). Gutted.

— Wes Streeting MP (@wesstreeting) August 14, 2020

Jesus

Jee

sus

Can you imagine reading Aaronovitch and thinking "this is my guru?"

Ffmffs

Making the sign of the cross at that tweet.

More details of our legal challenge to the A Level tragi-shambles (which compliments that brought by our friends, the brilliant @Foxglovelegal) follow. THREAD

— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) August 14, 2020

if i were a young person adversely affected by my exam grades i would simply choose to become a hereditary peer

I fluffed my A-levels. Taught me how to hustle. First to get a place in Univeristy. And haven’t stopped ever since. Grades are great, but grit and perseverance win every time. 🚀

— Lord Bethell (@JimBethell) August 13, 2020

SV knows more than me but most of this outrage is predicated on bullshit

xp He's the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Innovation at the Department of Health and Social Care, you can't say he doesn't know the hustle!

I wish one of these cliched rugged rich pricks that fucked up their a levels would shame the devil and admit that a healthy dose of nepotism got them up the first few wrungs on their irresistible rise to the top.

Will read this depressing piece later.

For @LRB I wrote about the migrant situation and how the winner in all of this is, once again, Nigel Farage https://t.co/ubMaaHduCa

— Your Mum says Black Lives Matter (@judeinlondon2) August 14, 2020

xps There's no 'good' way of doing it but the methodology OFQUAL used was worked out after extensive discussion with exam boards on how to make the results as consistent as possible with recent years, and it has been broadly successful in doing that. The major statistical outlier in the number of A-grades awarded to private schools is because a higher proportion of their classes have too few candidates to fit into the statistical model.

It's inevitably going to lead to unfair outcomes for some students but going just on teacher assessments would as well. The assumption that 'all working class students were marked down by 12%' assumes that they were all marked up by 12% in the first place. What you'll have had is a group of kids whose marks were either too low, or more commonly, too high, and another group whose marks were basically accurate. Not applying any kind of model to account for this would have meant that, on average, the more accurate your teacher is, the bigger the disadvantage.

The problem with Windmill QC challenging on the right to appeal is that there is nothing uniform to evidence an appeal with. Mock grades will apparently be allowed but again, this just privileges learners who had the opportunity to do them or who had generous teachers. In the absence of mock grades, how are you meant to prove that you deserved a higher end result? Cohort appeals, where schools can evidence reasons why a group of students had been predicted substantially higher grades than previous year groups, are allowed but they're restricted on fairly narrow grounds otherwise everyone would try it.

It's also worth noting that regression models and statistical analysis based on prior cohort achievement also forms a part of how exams are always awarded, to ensure comparability across different years.

imo, the fairest way to do it would be to defer university intake until January and let everyone take exams in October or write the whole year off and have everyone restart but neither of those was considered practical. It sucks but if you've missed out on grades you were confident you'd get, you can still take exams in October and start university in 2021.

I don't have anything to do with UK qualifications and am not involved in the technical side of exams so am not an 'expert'. I have no particular dog in this horse but, absent of a better way of doing things, idk whether people who understand about 10% of what they'd need to in order to have an informed opinion telling state-educated kids that their grades are worthless is a particularly helpful move.

I'd add that if you are looking to solve educational inequality in a hypothetical rounding error and not in the underlying conditions that mean you're twice as likely to get A grades if your parents pay for your school than if you go to a state comp, you're looking in the wrong direction.

That's a general 'you', not anyone here obvs,

imo, the fairest way to do it would be to defer university intake until January and let everyone take exams in October or write the whole year off and have everyone restart but neither of those was considered practical.

Yeah, aiui, the outcome (grades in August) was determined by Williamson and OFQUAL was tasked with finding the fairest way to make it happen. Financially, i can see why deferring wouldn't have been viable for universities, though.