I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you wouldn't go Sarf of the River after dark!
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
She's also - and this shouldn't matter, but it does - easy on the eye.
And she knows it, and uses it
A hint of Thatcher, perhaps
Except Thatcher made it from provincial Lincolnshire to Oxford, a career as a chemist and a tax barrister before becoming an MP.
Rayner did not even do A Levels nor did she have a career of much note before becoming MP. Yes she had a tough backstory but so did many other people
So you don't think that being top regional official of UK's largest trade union was chopped liver?
Some people might say that it was bigger deal than being a chemist & tax attorney.
Though climbing teh union greasy pole is a bit like the old USSR. Talent meant nothing it was all down to who you aligned yourself with, bit like Scottish labour used to be , all sorts of flotsam and jetsom floated to eth top of both.
Corvid cases are up in Australia to 115,976 reported today. A new record by quite a lot
Cases in Aus are not quite 'doubling aver 2 days'
8 Jan: 115,976 new cases and 25 new deaths in Australia 7 Jan: 77,699 new cases and 18 new deaths in Australia 6 Jan: 72,121 new cases and 12 new deaths in Australia 5 Jan: 64,453 new cases and 18 new deaths in Australia 4 Jan: 47,695 new cases and 5 new deaths in Australia 3 Jan: 37,030 new cases and 7 new deaths in Australia 2 Jan: 32,216 new cases and 6 new deaths in Australia 1 Jan: 35,208 new cases and 14 new deaths in Australia 31 Dec: 32,807 30 Dec: 21,240 29 Dec: 18,159
This is merely consistent with the huge acceleration in the spread of Omicron seen here and in many other developed nations with well-established mass testing systems. Once it gets its teeth stuck into a population, this is just what happens.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
It’s a very fair point that she is an absolutely gold plated self-made woman but that in and of itself doesn’t make her PM material.
I think she's more qualified than an old Etonian with a 1st in PPE.
The equivalent for someone from that background would be astronaut, self made billionaire or something
What about an OE with a 2nd in classics?
More seriously, very few people are up to the job, and that's about a lot of things that are hard to predict and measure.
But apply the "Imagine X is Prime Minister. Do you sleep soundly?" test. On the government benches, Boris fails that test. Sunak passes, so does Hunt; Javid, Truss and Gove maybe... that's about it, I think. For Labour, Starmer would send you to sleep, but that sleep would be peaceful. Nandy and Reeves might pass it, I don't know them well enough. I don't think Rayner does, and I don't see that changing.
On the other hand, pose a different question: "Imagine X is Prime Minister. Does that boost your spirits at times?" Boris PASSES this test (for me, I imagine others differ). Sunak doesn't really, nor do any of the other Tories. Maybe Truss, too early to say
Starmer fails it, I cannot ever see my mood being boosted by the thought, sight or sound of him at Number 10.
Rayner does (hypothetically), just by having done what she's done, getting there from where she was. Nandy, no, Streeting, no, they are all totally boring. Like the Tories. Burnham might faintly cheer me by being quite affable but as the threader makes clear, his path is strewn with serious obstacles
Hmpft!
Genuinely, would you vote for Rayner? I find that very surprising if so.
For Leon she has the bonus of being a woman and having a pulse, vote almost in the bag at that point.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you would go Sarf of the River after dark!
I don't have to go sarf of the river, I live there! Greatest place on earth.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you would go Sarf of the River after dark!
I don't have to go sarf of the river, I live there! Greatest place on earth.
The hostility of Essex cricket fans towards Kent is quite noticeable. It does feel to be a different place though. And it's noticeable that there's no public transport between the two counties. Can't take a bike, either over the Dartford Crossing, although one can be taken on the Tilbury Ferry. (or used to be able to do, when I was concerned about such things.)
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
She's also - and this shouldn't matter, but it does - easy on the eye.
And she knows it, and uses it
A hint of Thatcher, perhaps
Except Thatcher made it from provincial Lincolnshire to Oxford, a career as a chemist and a tax barrister before becoming an MP.
Rayner did not even do A Levels nor did she have a career of much note before becoming MP. Yes she had a tough backstory but so did many other people
Her father was a prosperous local businessman and pillar of the community - Alderman Roberts, I believe he was known as. So she had a teeny, weeny leg up.
Did he not run the corner shop in Coronation Street as well
Someone has been laying Rayner since this thread started. She is now 11/1.
Unsurprisingly, the shortest Scot on the list is very long: Ian Murray at 69/1. He wouldn’t be value at 200/1.
Anas Sarwar’s name is not even on the list, so I’m presuming he would be longer than 210/1, the longest price listed.
I am unfamiliar with Welsh Labour politicians, so maybe someone else can identify the shortest Welsh candidate on the list?
There might not even be one. Regardless, there's virtually no prospect of an MP representing a constituency outside of England being elected to lead the Tories or Labour ever again.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
I would say in response that I don't think that there can be a 'woke' government, because 'woke' is too difficult to define. It is ever shifting and almost meaningless as a term. However, Scotland is a possible example. And New Zealand. The influence is pervasive in almost all governments in Western Europe and the Anglosphere, albeit to differing degrees. Some places are doing better than others. I would say that France is less gripped with this than the UK and US; but clearly France has other problems.
Off now to take my son swimming in our municipal swimming pool, built in the late 1970's by an architect friend of mine it always reminds me for some reason of saner times.
“Woke” as a political concept doesn’t exist in Sweden. I’m assuming it is largely absent in most other languages too. English speakers can be an odd bunch.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you would go Sarf of the River after dark!
I don't have to go sarf of the river, I live there! Greatest place on earth.
The hostility of Essex cricket fans towards Kent is quite noticeable. It does feel to be a different place though. And it's noticeable that there's no public transport between the two counties. Can't take a bike, either over the Dartford Crossing, although one can be taken on the Tilbury Ferry. (or used to be able to do, when I was concerned about such things.)
Kent is a stunningly beautiful place but I always feel like I've gone back about 50 years when I go there, and not entirely in a good way.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
What is this nonsense you're talking about? Are you not aware of the daily re-engineering of the "human heart" that happens in all aspects of society? The fact that it's rare to see people rutting in the street, and staving one another's heads in with blunt objects, is testament to this fact. We do countless things that go against our natural urges. When the sun went down before 4.30, you're still expected to work not just go to sleep then and there. If someone drives recklessly and endangers me, I don't chase them down and choke them with a tyre iron even though I really want to. I don't go into the village store and just take what I want from the shelves and flatten the little old woman who works there just because I can. We plan, control, manage, monitor, and restrict our basest instincts all day, every day.
That's what civilisation is.
Now that's to say nothing of this specific organisation, which I haven't really looked into and frankly I don't really care about right now. It's just that the form of your argument is so wildly strange that I can't even begin to understand why you use it. Stopping bad behaviour is normal, even if we disagree on what bad behaviour consists in.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
It also seems reasonable to conclude that enforcing them is an example of Politician's Logic.
Finally, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that every civil servant at the DfE should be sacked.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you would go Sarf of the River after dark!
I don't have to go sarf of the river, I live there! Greatest place on earth.
The hostility of Essex cricket fans towards Kent is quite noticeable. It does feel to be a different place though. And it's noticeable that there's no public transport between the two counties. Can't take a bike, either over the Dartford Crossing, although one can be taken on the Tilbury Ferry. (or used to be able to do, when I was concerned about such things.)
Kent is a stunningly beautiful place but I always feel like I've gone back about 50 years when I go there, and not entirely in a good way.
Eldest son and family live in West Kent and it's certainly different from N. Essex. And amazingly so from SE Essex,
Someone has been laying Rayner since this thread started. She is now 11/1.
Unsurprisingly, the shortest Scot on the list is very long: Ian Murray at 69/1. He wouldn’t be value at 200/1.
Anas Sarwar’s name is not even on the list, so I’m presuming he would be longer than 210/1, the longest price listed.
I am unfamiliar with Welsh Labour politicians, so maybe someone else can identify the shortest Welsh candidate on the list?
There might not even be one. Regardless, there's virtually no prospect of an MP representing a constituency outside of England being elected to lead the Tories or Labour ever again.
Fantastic if true.
Next step: zero Scottish or Welsh MPs in the English legislature.
Someone has been laying Rayner since this thread started. She is now 11/1.
Unsurprisingly, the shortest Scot on the list is very long: Ian Murray at 69/1. He wouldn’t be value at 200/1.
Anas Sarwar’s name is not even on the list, so I’m presuming he would be longer than 210/1, the longest price given.
I am unfamiliar with Welsh Labour politicians, so maybe someone else can identify the shortest Welsh candidate for next GB Labour leader?
Reading your first sentence I immediately thought you had some good inside info but further ones showewd you were just talking about betting.
I am the recipient of a good, broad, traditional liberal Scottish education Malcolm, but the private lives of obscure foreign politicians is not one of my stronger topics.
Someone has been laying Rayner since this thread started. She is now 11/1.
Unsurprisingly, the shortest Scot on the list is very long: Ian Murray at 69/1. He wouldn’t be value at 200/1.
Anas Sarwar’s name is not even on the list, so I’m presuming he would be longer than 210/1, the longest price listed.
I am unfamiliar with Welsh Labour politicians, so maybe someone else can identify the shortest Welsh candidate on the list?
There might not even be one. Regardless, there's virtually no prospect of an MP representing a constituency outside of England being elected to lead the Tories or Labour ever again.
Fantastic if true.
Next step: zero Scottish or Welsh MPs in the English legislature.
Not unless we have a big shake up or replacement of current SNP leadership. They have their feet under the table and are as big a set of no good troughers as the Westminster parties.
Corvid cases are up in Australia to 115,976 reported today. A new record by quite a lot
Cases in Aus are not quite 'doubling aver 2 days'
8 Jan: 115,976 new cases and 25 new deaths in Australia 7 Jan: 77,699 new cases and 18 new deaths in Australia 6 Jan: 72,121 new cases and 12 new deaths in Australia 5 Jan: 64,453 new cases and 18 new deaths in Australia 4 Jan: 47,695 new cases and 5 new deaths in Australia 3 Jan: 37,030 new cases and 7 new deaths in Australia 2 Jan: 32,216 new cases and 6 new deaths in Australia 1 Jan: 35,208 new cases and 14 new deaths in Australia 31 Dec: 32,807 30 Dec: 21,240 29 Dec: 18,159
This is merely consistent with the huge acceleration in the spread of Omicron seen here and in many other developed nations with well-established mass testing systems. Once it gets its teeth stuck into a population, this is just what happens.
What ole Arcinda doing in New Zealand? Seems omicron is inescapable
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Incidentally, what I do not understand is this obsession with the data in 123 schools. There are thousands of schools. 123 is not really a useful number.
Surely if you wanted a decent sample size the obvious thing to do would be to compare rates in England with those in Scotland? Or even just compare rates in Manchester and West Yorkshire with those in Glasgow and Edinburgh?
@MoonRabbit Moonrabbit my nags for today , did not see anything great so have done a yankee and a single on Mullins horse. All short priced but will see how it goes. Gauloise 12:40 Sandown, have this as a single as well Flemenstide 12:55 Wincanton, will do single if price decent Walk In The Storm 12:13 Newcastle Crystal Glory 14:33 Newcastle
Nice short term saving but it will quickly destroy all their heritage as the knowledge will be completely lost. It also means that the various pieces of Spode my family own that the museum wanted - including bits that should never have left the factory (it’s the only colour match plate known to exist) will be going to Bowes instead.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
I think the American international system has been completely captured as have a few high profile schools in NY and elsewhere. It’s more a canary than a thong right now.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Given that the data show a reduction of infections with face coverings, it is a little beyond the pale to say that "it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless". What you've done is go from the fact that evidence isn't strong enough based on the sample size, to saying that the opposite conclusion is the favoured one. That isn't an honest conclusion to draw from what you've copied and pasted above.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Given that the data show a reduction of infections with face coverings, it is a little beyond the pale to say that "it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless". What you've done is go from the fact that evidence isn't strong enough based on the sample size, to saying that the opposite conclusion is the favoured one. That isn't an honest conclusion to draw from what you've copied and pasted above.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
One of those 'wish I'd thought of that moments'. If the idea takes off, they'll make a killing
Doesn't seem like such a bad thing if it works and is cost effective. Unless you think that prejudice in the education system is a good thing/ unavoidable/ not really happening (I'm not sure I believe any of those personally).
Yep, but the schools and LEAs will end up paying through the nose for software likely of dubious quality and utility. That's my point.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Incidentally, what I do not understand is this obsession with the data in 123 schools. There are thousands of schools. 123 is not really a useful number.
Surely if you wanted a decent sample size the obvious thing to do would be to compare rates in England with those in Scotland? Or even just compare rates in Manchester and West Yorkshire with those in Glasgow and Edinburgh?
Scottish schools went back - with masking in secondaries still in place - in mid-August, followed by what was, by the standards of the pre-Omicron era, a gigantic spike in the Scottish case rate in early September. It is possible that the two events were not entirely unrelated...
Whoever was responsible for this study was probably afraid that using the Scottish numbers wouldn't give them the result that they were looking for.
Nice short term saving but it will quickly destroy all their heritage as the knowledge will be completely lost. It also means that the various pieces of Spode my family own that the museum wanted - including bits that should never have left the factory (it’s the only colour match plate known to exist) will be going to Bowes instead.
Crap. We obviously didn’t get there in time. (We had the same fight with Walthamstow and Blackburn & won both those times). Museums are a footfall generator not a cost centre.
Yes. I have shared the Chronicle article bemoaning the emptiness of Newcastle at NYE before. There were a few. But many fewer than normal.
Yes, I spotted that. Thank you. But the Scotsman has done some proper investigative work to confirm anecdotal evidence.
It is the blatant bullshitting on PB that is so irksome. Loudmouth know-it-alls pointing the finger and laughing at Scotland and Wales when clearly they haven’t got the faintest clue what they are talking about. The Hogmanay exodus nonsense went on for days and days. Blatant lies.
After all these years you are still surprised Stuart, it is de rigeur.
Made more sense for the Wales/England border - was Chester etc mad over New Year?
All the party-goers in Scotland had a big house party like me, screwing hospitality and spreading Covid like wildfire.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
One of those 'wish I'd thought of that moments'. If the idea takes off, they'll make a killing
Doesn't seem like such a bad thing if it works and is cost effective. Unless you think that prejudice in the education system is a good thing/ unavoidable/ not really happening (I'm not sure I believe any of those personally).
Yep, but the schools and LEAs will end up paying through the nose for software likely of dubious quality and utility. That's my point.
Well if it isn't cost effective or doesn't work then I'm against it. I thought people's objection was more philosophical. In my experience as a parent, schools fork out a lot for various IT based things - payment systems, parent evening organisers, additional online tuition etc, and I'm sure a lot of money gets wasted on procurement, in part thanks to academisation.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
Nice short term saving but it will quickly destroy all their heritage as the knowledge will be completely lost. It also means that the various pieces of Spode my family own that the museum wanted - including bits that should never have left the factory (it’s the only colour match plate known to exist) will be going to Bowes instead.
Crap. We obviously didn’t get there in time. (We had the same fight with Walthamstow and Blackburn & won both those times). Museums are a footfall generator not a cost centre.
You can hardly be blamed for that. This has come right out of the blue. Basically Stoke have mucked up by overspending on vanity projects (like this one, https://www.visitstoke.co.uk/spitfire, on which they've blown the heritage budget for about the next five years) and need to make savings in the next three months or they will be for it themselves. But nobody (including apparently the city council themselves) knew that until about a month ago. And this is about the only saving they could make in that time.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
The whole diversity champion initiative thing seemed a bit like a former campaigning organisation seeking to transition to being just another part of institutional bureacuracy.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Incidentally, what I do not understand is this obsession with the data in 123 schools. There are thousands of schools. 123 is not really a useful number.
Surely if you wanted a decent sample size the obvious thing to do would be to compare rates in England with those in Scotland? Or even just compare rates in Manchester and West Yorkshire with those in Glasgow and Edinburgh?
Scottish schools went back - with masking in secondaries still in place - in mid-August, followed by what was, by the standards of the pre-Omicron era, a gigantic spike in the Scottish case rate in early September. It is possible that the two events were not entirely unrelated...
Whoever was responsible for this study was probably afraid that using the Scottish numbers wouldn't give them the result that they were looking for.
That in itself is a worrying suggestion, because such studies shouldn't be fitting data to a predetermined conclusion.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
So the real 'Q' is outed?
Yep, and the guy has a lot to answer for. Why we let him do headers on here beats me.
Given that the data show a reduction of infections with face coverings, it is a little beyond the pale to say that "it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless".
What you've done is go from the fact that evidence isn't strong enough based on the sample size, to saying that the opposite conclusion is the favoured one. That isn't an honest conclusion to draw from what you've copied and pasted above.
Point of order: I claimed that it was reasonable to assume that masks in schools were useless, not that it had been proven. Definitively proving the negative in these instances being somewhat difficult.
However, masks in schools are merely one amongst many interventions that have been in place when countries entered the Omicron wave or were applied shortly thereafter, and there's precious little evidence from the international data that any of them are of much use against the variant. This gives one further confidence that making schoolchildren wear pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces is most unlikely to be in any way beneficial. Let us look, for example, at the case rate trends in the UK, France, Italy and Spain: the UK has by a distance the most relaxed mask rules of the four and, indeed, the other three now have mandatory masking outdoors, extending into very young age groups.
The result is that the UK is in the middle of the pack in terms of current case rates, and all four nations have followed similarly steep trajectories in case rate rise during this phase of the pandemic. And that's before we get into the topic of what looks increasingly like the failure of hard lockdown to suppress Omicron in the Netherlands.
Vaxports, social distancing, masks - no apparent evidence that any of it stands in the way of Omicron. And, although we're going to need to wait a little longer for more Dutch case rate data to know for sure, it looks like even a hard lockdown only delays the peak slightly, rather than flattening or preventing it.
Going forward, there remains a case for blanket testing, medical grade masks and other targeted interventions to protect vulnerable individuals and settings, at least for the time being. But at a population scale, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the effect of restrictions is weak and perhaps even non-existent - and that certainly includes leaky cotton or paper face coverings. This doesn't seem a particularly controversial statement to make given what is known of the present circumstances.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Incidentally, what I do not understand is this obsession with the data in 123 schools. There are thousands of schools. 123 is not really a useful number.
Surely if you wanted a decent sample size the obvious thing to do would be to compare rates in England with those in Scotland? Or even just compare rates in Manchester and West Yorkshire with those in Glasgow and Edinburgh?
Scottish schools went back - with masking in secondaries still in place - in mid-August, followed by what was, by the standards of the pre-Omicron era, a gigantic spike in the Scottish case rate in early September. It is possible that the two events were not entirely unrelated...
Whoever was responsible for this study was probably afraid that using the Scottish numbers wouldn't give them the result that they were looking for.
That in itself is a worrying suggestion, because such studies shouldn't be fitting data to a predetermined conclusion.
Indeed. But if that was the thought process, would any of us be surprised?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
Absolutely. I was there over New Year, and that flux is still there. Lots of hopeful things beginning to happen, and so many ways it could be brilliant- but the High Street is in a really bad way.
Like a lot of northern towns, it faces a difficult question- its old purpose has largely gone, so what is it for now?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
The DfE throughout the pandemic seems to have been the perfect example of the other side of the 'plan for the worst case (but possibly unlikely) scenarios, but don't implement hugely expensive interventions "just in case"'.
At every stage when things look bad they have been caught out by an obvious lack of planning, whether it be contingency planning for remote schooling, management of exams, best way to open schools "safely" in a way where they can face down the teaching unions etc etc. It's not even as if the various things they've been caught out by have been remotely difficult to foresee as scenarios.
Given that the data show a reduction of infections with face coverings, it is a little beyond the pale to say that "it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless".
What you've done is go from the fact that evidence isn't strong enough based on the sample size, to saying that the opposite conclusion is the favoured one. That isn't an honest conclusion to draw from what you've copied and pasted above.
Point of order: I claimed that it was reasonable to assume that masks in schools were useless, not that it had been proven. Definitively proving the negative in these instances being somewhat difficult.
However, masks in schools are merely one amongst many interventions that have been in place when countries entered the Omicron wave or were applied shortly thereafter, and there's precious little evidence from the international data that any of them are of much use against the variant. This gives one further confidence that making schoolchildren wear pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces is most unlikely to be in any way beneficial. Let us look, for example, at the case rate trends in the UK, France, Italy and Spain: the UK has by a distance the most relaxed mask rules of the four and, indeed, the other three now have mandatory masking outdoors, extending into very young age groups.
The result is that the UK is in the middle of the pack in terms of current case rates, and all four nations have followed similarly steep trajectories in case rate rise during this phase of the pandemic. And that's before we get into the topic of what looks increasingly like the failure of hard lockdown to suppress Omicron in the Netherlands.
Vaxports, social distancing, masks - no apparent evidence that any of it stands in the way of Omicron. And, although we're going to need to wait a little longer for more Dutch case rate data to know for sure, it looks like even a hard lockdown only delays the peak slightly, rather than flattening or preventing it.
Going forward, there remains a case for blanket testing, medical grade masks and other targeted interventions to protect vulnerable individuals and settings, at least for the time being. But at a population scale, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the effect of restrictions is weak and perhaps even non-existent - and that certainly includes leaky cotton or paper face coverings. This doesn't seem a particularly controversial statement to make given what is known of the present circumstances.
No no no no no. You can't just take a snapshot in time and conclude much. The UK, last I checked, had a moderately high relative case rate, but that current case rate is to be understood in the context of the cumulative infections in recent months. The UK's cumulative case rate since the summer has been high. As others have ably pointed out, that affects the current rate because of infection-acquired immunity, which reduces symptoms and transmission.
Also, your sophistry is showing: "pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces". In the space of two posts you're gone from quoting statistics to using classic anti-masker descriptors, which prove nothing about efficacy. if you're going to go with the evidence, stick with it. You aren't on weak ground by any means. Don't spoil it by resorting to silliness.
Lastly, the point you've made about delta / omicron is important. But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. I have a gut feeling that masks versus omicron are of limited use. But sometimes the evidence can surprise gut feelings and I'm waiting to see what evidence does come out before I nail my colours to the mast. It's the rational thing to do.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
That must have been some SERIOUSLY dodgy stuff, given Portsmouth's historic reputation!
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
That "enemy" is not imaginary, but it is grossly exaggerated. There are a handful who take woke to the extreme and could be dangerous, but they are tiny in number, have very little power and will never do so.
There are far more who are woke to the extent of try and be nice to people, treat them equally, consider their feelings, what they want to be called, and let them get on with life, who are the vast majority of the woke but in no sense problematic for society.
As I see it the main problem is that the reactionaries, driven by twitter and social media, hear the words of the first group, but consider the (potential?) threat of them by adding both groups together to see a far bigger and more dangerous threat to existing society than they should.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
Having lived north, south, east, west and central London, it is all London. Each area distinct at a much more local level than n/e/s/w/c. Great, average and bad areas in all of them.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
I think it shows that throughout this pandemic the serious studying/modelling (whatever you think of it's outputs) has been focussed directly on Covid and nothing else. When Johnson said the other day that we (and the NHS) just had to 'ride out' the Omicron wave because the wider costs on the economy and society of more restrictions was too great, does anyone really think he had a range of modelling at his fingertips to justify such a statement?
It is this lack of competing modelling/studies throughout the pandemic that have allowed the Covid modelling (always with worst case scenarios, even if other options did exist) to dominate the media and public perception. All competing disadvantages were just wishy-washy speculation easily dismissed by Public Health experts and Covid restriction enthusiasts alike. And in fact allowed them to come up with their own narrative on economic effects of various Covid measures.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
Absolutely. I was there over New Year, and that flux is still there. Lots of hopeful things beginning to happen, and so many ways it could be brilliant- but the High Street is in a really bad way.
Like a lot of northern towns, it faces a difficult question- its old purpose has largely gone, so what is it for now?
When I think of my home town (well, nearly) of Derby, I see a place filled to the gunwales with history and massive levels of technological innovation. Yet it is a small city surrounded by larger ones, and it tends to be swamped out by the others. It doesn't have a USP.
Gosport could be a superb place. It has lakes, marinas, great beaches and open spaces, all wrapped up in a rich and vivid history, much of which is still extant. IMO one important thing it lacks is a railway station.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
The big secret being that a huge amount of schooling serves little or no purpose other than allow parents to go to work?
No no no no no. You can't just take a snapshot in time and conclude much. The UK, last I checked, had a moderately high relative case rate, but that current case rate is to be understood in the context of the cumulative infections in recent months. The UK's cumulative case rate since the summer has been high. As others have ably pointed out, that affects the current rate because of infection-acquired immunity, which reduces symptoms and transmission.
Also, your sophistry is showing: "pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces". In the space of two posts you're gone from quoting statistics to using classic anti-masker descriptors, which prove nothing about efficacy. if you're going to go with the evidence, stick with it. You aren't on weak ground by any means. Don't spoil it by resorting to silliness.
Lastly, the point you've made about delta / omicron is important. But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. I have a gut feeling that masks versus omicron are of limited use. But sometimes the evidence can surprise gut feelings and I'm waiting to see what evidence does come out before I nail my colours to the mast. It's the rational thing to do.
On the first point, the Dutch had a substantial late Autumn Delta wave, before progressively tightening restrictions. It'll be interesting to see whether their Omicron case rate trajectory also mirrors ours.
On the second, guilty as charged - though I'm in no mood to apologise. Masks are horrid. Nobody enjoys wearing them, and it's not an offence to say so. The sooner they're gone, the better.
On the last point, there will probably never be sufficient evidence on mask wearing in the community to satisfy either the pros or the antis that they were wrong. The studies produced throughout the pandemic have been predominantly of low quality (relying on low sample sizes, flawed methodology, and suffering from the difficulty of accounting for confounding variables,) and it now looks very much like the last major case wave of the pandemic will be over in a few weeks' time. Thank God.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
The big secret being that a huge amount of schooling serves little or no purpose other than allow parents to go to work?
Eccentric. But I don't think masks play into that in a meaningful way.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
The big secret being that a huge amount of schooling serves little or no purpose other than allow parents to go to work?
Eccentric. But I don't think masks play into that in a meaningful way.
Well i think that was my 'point'. Harder to produce studies on the negative impacts of masks, the base position is "schooling has no benefit"! ;0
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
That "enemy" is not imaginary, but it is grossly exaggerated. There are a handful who take woke to the extreme and could be dangerous, but they are tiny in number, have very little power and will never do so.
There are far more who are woke to the extent of try and be nice to people, treat them equally, consider their feelings, what they want to be called, and let them get on with life, who are the vast majority of the woke but in no sense problematic for society.
As I see it the main problem is that the reactionaries, driven by twitter and social media, hear the words of the first group, but consider the (potential?) threat of them by adding both groups together to see a far bigger and more dangerous threat to existing society than they should.
What about at city level? I only know what I read from this side of the Atlantic, but there seem to be highly woke governments in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, which have been pretty negative for those cities.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Can't imagine how language classes are being taught at the moment!
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Don't know how anybody can argue that Southwark isn't "proper London". Southwark literally exists as evidence that a lot of "proper" London is a mirage.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Pearly Kings. Up the Junction. Doing the Lambeth Walk. Battersea Power Station Station.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Pearly Kings. Up the Junction. Doing the Lambeth Walk. Battersea Power Station Station.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Like this very much. In practice, historically, and with apologies to the many good people here on the Labour side, I have voted to keep Labour out. But I know that most in the Labour Party are good people who simply want the best for their country. Even the scariest ones like Corbyn aren't actually evil, nor wrong all the time. It is, or should be, a battle of ideas, not of goodies against baddies. (Though if I was to make one criticism of Labour members it would be a tendency aomg some to see Tories as inherently bad people.)
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
Fighting for gay rights was harmless eccentricity? Well it's a view.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
Not too sure about that. If every line of speech in every language is reduced to "fwa fwa fwa fwa fwa" behind a stupid effing gag necessary item of respiratory PPE, then the children can hardly fail to get their answers right, can they?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
Yes it definitely does, which is probably why we ended up with schools with mask mandates having similar rates of absence as schools without them.
There were also other more anecdotal reports from teachers about the quality of the masks and kids wearing the same masks for probably weeks at a time without replacing or washing them. It seems unlikely that there's any significant benefit to kids or teachers in those cases, only the drawbacks of a frustrating classroom experience.
Once again, I'm not closed to having masks at schools just as I'm still open to the possibility of a lockdown. There's just no evidence to support either right now, in fact the government's own report in masks in schools says there isn't enough evidence to support them, they've just done it anyway.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
The DfE throughout the pandemic seems to have been the perfect example of the other side of the 'plan for the worst case (but possibly unlikely) scenarios, but don't implement hugely expensive interventions "just in case"'.
At every stage when things look bad they have been caught out by an obvious lack of planning, whether it be contingency planning for remote schooling, management of exams, best way to open schools "safely" in a way where they can face down the teaching unions etc etc. It's not even as if the various things they've been caught out by have been remotely difficult to foresee as scenarios.
One quibble - although they blamed the unions the real issue with reopening was headteachers complaining that the guidance was incomprehensible and/or unworkable. The unions just happened to be a politically safer scapegoat, as it concealed the real problem was government failure and incompetence.
And I would point out headteachers and to a great extent the unions were proved right by the total train wreck we had.
@MoonRabbit Moonrabbit my nags for today , did not see anything great so have done a yankee and a single on Mullins horse. All short priced but will see how it goes. Gauloise 12:40 Sandown, have this as a single as well Flemenstide 12:55 Wincanton, will do single if price decent Walk In The Storm 12:13 Newcastle Crystal Glory 14:33 Newcastle
Interesting you said that there Malc, I took about 2 hours longer than usual as well. I’m not so ‘cocky and vicious’ about today either. 🤔
*Betting Post *Horse Racing 🐎 Paging as usual @Malc@Stodge, who are not afraid at times to post tips, and anyone who wants to share love of the sport today like Mr Decrepiter, Mt Kinabalu etc
I appreciate not every gambler loves sharing and sharing publicly. I suspect though some reading PB may be betting on horse racing regular particularly the Saturday coverage, I will be placing bets today and means a degree of “due diligence” on my choices - I’m a open and honest girl I don’t mind sharing what led to my decision 🙂
last couple of weeks proved difficult when weather makes it slippy - even in hurdles they can leap last fence in lead and get the landing wrong, so just 2/4 not 3/4 last time but including a 28-1 long shot. I might well have better strike rate recently with my Long Shots than naps! 🤭
MoonRabbits tips this week. (NO NAPS)
Wincanton 13:30 - Mi Laddo Excellent form and has won over 2m, I think not as many questions of trip and handicap as rivals.
Sandown 13:50 - Paddy’s Poem (LONG SHOT) 11 yr old, heavily handicapped, hasn’t raced yet this year with better days over much longer trip. But surely too good to be this far out in the betting amongst this crowd? Say hello to this weeks long shot.
Wincanton 14:40 - Earth Business Form, going, and fairly handicapped.
Sandown 15:00 - Rolling Dylan this old horse pulled wagons on the Oregon trail in youth, but has shown it’s veteran 3m staying power in two recent second placing.
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Like this very much. In practice, historically, and with apologies to the many good people here on the Labour side, I have voted to keep Labour out. But I know that most in the Labour Party are good people who simply want the best for their country. Even the scariest ones like Corbyn aren't actually evil, nor wrong all the time. It is, or should be, a battle of ideas, not of goodies against baddies. (Though if I was to make one criticism of Labour members it would be a tendency aomg some to see Tories as inherently bad people.)
Agreed on this, as someone who votes Labour to keep the Tories out (this has not worked recently) while accepting that Tories are wrong but not wrong-uns. The Tories are Evil tendency in Labour is certainly real and is unfortunate - it's more of an expression of emotion than thought in my opinion. If anything I'd say that that kind of thinking has also infected the Right now, sadly. Eg all this anti woke nonsense, the idea that the Left hate Britain, or some of the more hysterical stuff on Corbyn's perceived anti semitism. We need to be able to disagree without demonising each other.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
That "enemy" is not imaginary, but it is grossly exaggerated. There are a handful who take woke to the extreme and could be dangerous, but they are tiny in number, have very little power and will never do so.
There are far more who are woke to the extent of try and be nice to people, treat them equally, consider their feelings, what they want to be called, and let them get on with life, who are the vast majority of the woke but in no sense problematic for society.
As I see it the main problem is that the reactionaries, driven by twitter and social media, hear the words of the first group, but consider the (potential?) threat of them by adding both groups together to see a far bigger and more dangerous threat to existing society than they should.
What about at city level? I only know what I read from this side of the Atlantic, but there seem to be highly woke governments in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, which have been pretty negative for those cities.
I know very little about those places but judging by the house prices things can't be quite so bad for those residents.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
That's a very perceptive point.
My argument against it would be a very simple one. There has not actually been a genuinely woke government. Biden isn't really woke. Obama wasn't. Clinton wasn't. The Democrats that have won power have done so because they were centrists, and were able to attract across the political spectrum.
Indeed, the great irony seems to be that the biggest excesses of woke happen in the US private education sector, who are so desperate to prove they are not simply breeding grounds of privilege.
@Charles has seen far more woke at the American school in London, than my kids have in public education in Los Angeles. Now, maybe that will change as my daughter goes to High School next year, but I do wonder the extent to which we're inventing an imaginary enemy.
That "enemy" is not imaginary, but it is grossly exaggerated. There are a handful who take woke to the extreme and could be dangerous, but they are tiny in number, have very little power and will never do so.
There are far more who are woke to the extent of try and be nice to people, treat them equally, consider their feelings, what they want to be called, and let them get on with life, who are the vast majority of the woke but in no sense problematic for society.
As I see it the main problem is that the reactionaries, driven by twitter and social media, hear the words of the first group, but consider the (potential?) threat of them by adding both groups together to see a far bigger and more dangerous threat to existing society than they should.
What about at city level? I only know what I read from this side of the Atlantic, but there seem to be highly woke governments in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, which have been pretty negative for those cities.
That says more about the propaganda you consume rather than what life is like in those cities.
Comments
Although, to stick with your analogy, Labour in Scotland did turn a bit lagan rather abruptly.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1044767/Evidence_summary_-_face_coverings.pdf
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule
*The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low
*The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unsurprisingly, the shortest Scot on the list is very long: Ian Murray at 69/1. He wouldn’t be value at 200/1.
Anas Sarwar’s name is not even on the list, so I’m presuming he would be longer than 210/1, the longest price given.
I am unfamiliar with Welsh Labour politicians, so maybe someone else can identify the shortest Welsh candidate for next GB Labour leader?
And it's noticeable that there's no public transport between the two counties. Can't take a bike, either over the Dartford Crossing, although one can be taken on the Tilbury Ferry. (or used to be able to do, when I was concerned about such things.)
That's what civilisation is.
Now that's to say nothing of this specific organisation, which I haven't really looked into and frankly I don't really care about right now. It's just that the form of your argument is so wildly strange that I can't even begin to understand why you use it. Stopping bad behaviour is normal, even if we disagree on what bad behaviour consists in.
Finally, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that every civil servant at the DfE should be sacked.
Next step: zero Scottish or Welsh MPs in the English legislature.
Surely if you wanted a decent sample size the obvious thing to do would be to compare rates in England with those in Scotland? Or even just compare rates in Manchester and West Yorkshire with those in Glasgow and Edinburgh?
Moonrabbit my nags for today , did not see anything great so have done a yankee and a single on Mullins horse. All short priced but will see how it goes.
Gauloise 12:40 Sandown, have this as a single as well
Flemenstide 12:55 Wincanton, will do single if price decent
Walk In The Storm 12:13 Newcastle
Crystal Glory 14:33 Newcastle
Have we covered Stoke councils firing of all their museum curators https://www.artsindustry.co.uk/news/2762-stoke-turns-its-back-on-pottery-heritage-with-curator-redundancies
Nice short term saving but it will quickly destroy all their heritage as the knowledge will be completely lost. It also means that the various pieces of Spode my family own that the museum wanted - including bits that should never have left the factory (it’s the only colour match plate known to exist) will be going to Bowes instead.
What you've done is go from the fact that evidence isn't strong enough based on the sample size, to saying that the opposite conclusion is the favoured one. That isn't an honest conclusion to draw from what you've copied and pasted above.
Whoever was responsible for this study was probably afraid that using the Scottish numbers wouldn't give them the result that they were looking for.
All the party-goers in Scotland had a big house party like me, screwing hospitality and spreading Covid like wildfire.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed.
Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit.
In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was.
Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
However, masks in schools are merely one amongst many interventions that have been in place when countries entered the Omicron wave or were applied shortly thereafter, and there's precious little evidence from the international data that any of them are of much use against the variant. This gives one further confidence that making schoolchildren wear pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces is most unlikely to be in any way beneficial. Let us look, for example, at the case rate trends in the UK, France, Italy and Spain: the UK has by a distance the most relaxed mask rules of the four and, indeed, the other three now have mandatory masking outdoors, extending into very young age groups.
The result is that the UK is in the middle of the pack in terms of current case rates, and all four nations have followed similarly steep trajectories in case rate rise during this phase of the pandemic. And that's before we get into the topic of what looks increasingly like the failure of hard lockdown to suppress Omicron in the Netherlands.
Vaxports, social distancing, masks - no apparent evidence that any of it stands in the way of Omicron. And, although we're going to need to wait a little longer for more Dutch case rate data to know for sure, it looks like even a hard lockdown only delays the peak slightly, rather than flattening or preventing it.
Going forward, there remains a case for blanket testing, medical grade masks and other targeted interventions to protect vulnerable individuals and settings, at least for the time being. But at a population scale, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the effect of restrictions is weak and perhaps even non-existent - and that certainly includes leaky cotton or paper face coverings. This doesn't seem a particularly controversial statement to make given what is known of the present circumstances.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil?
No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Like a lot of northern towns, it faces a difficult question- its old purpose has largely gone, so what is it for now?
At every stage when things look bad they have been caught out by an obvious lack of planning, whether it be contingency planning for remote schooling, management of exams, best way to open schools "safely" in a way where they can face down the teaching unions etc etc. It's not even as if the various things they've been caught out by have been remotely difficult to foresee as scenarios.
Forrard on...
Also, your sophistry is showing: "pieces of flimsy blue paper over their faces". In the space of two posts you're gone from quoting statistics to using classic anti-masker descriptors, which prove nothing about efficacy. if you're going to go with the evidence, stick with it. You aren't on weak ground by any means. Don't spoil it by resorting to silliness.
Lastly, the point you've made about delta / omicron is important. But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. I have a gut feeling that masks versus omicron are of limited use. But sometimes the evidence can surprise gut feelings and I'm waiting to see what evidence does come out before I nail my colours to the mast. It's the rational thing to do.
There are far more who are woke to the extent of try and be nice to people, treat them equally, consider their feelings, what they want to be called, and let them get on with life, who are the vast majority of the woke but in no sense problematic for society.
As I see it the main problem is that the reactionaries, driven by twitter and social media, hear the words of the first group, but consider the (potential?) threat of them by adding both groups together to see a far bigger and more dangerous threat to existing society than they should.
It is this lack of competing modelling/studies throughout the pandemic that have allowed the Covid modelling (always with worst case scenarios, even if other options did exist) to dominate the media and public perception. All competing disadvantages were just wishy-washy speculation easily dismissed by Public Health experts and Covid restriction enthusiasts alike. And in fact allowed them to come up with their own narrative on economic effects of various Covid measures.
Gosport could be a superb place. It has lakes, marinas, great beaches and open spaces, all wrapped up in a rich and vivid history, much of which is still extant. IMO one important thing it lacks is a railway station.
I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
On the second, guilty as charged - though I'm in no mood to apologise. Masks are horrid. Nobody enjoys wearing them, and it's not an offence to say so. The sooner they're gone, the better.
On the last point, there will probably never be sufficient evidence on mask wearing in the community to satisfy either the pros or the antis that they were wrong. The studies produced throughout the pandemic have been predominantly of low quality (relying on low sample sizes, flawed methodology, and suffering from the difficulty of accounting for confounding variables,) and it now looks very much like the last major case wave of the pandemic will be over in a few weeks' time. Thank God.
I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
In practice, historically, and with apologies to the many good people here on the Labour side, I have voted to keep Labour out. But I know that most in the Labour Party are good people who simply want the best for their country. Even the scariest ones like Corbyn aren't actually evil, nor wrong all the time.
It is, or should be, a battle of ideas, not of goodies against baddies.
(Though if I was to make one criticism of Labour members it would be a tendency aomg some to see Tories as inherently bad people.)
There were also other more anecdotal reports from teachers about the quality of the masks and kids wearing the same masks for probably weeks at a time without replacing or washing them. It seems unlikely that there's any significant benefit to kids or teachers in those cases, only the drawbacks of a frustrating classroom experience.
Once again, I'm not closed to having masks at schools just as I'm still open to the possibility of a lockdown. There's just no evidence to support either right now, in fact the government's own report in masks in schools says there isn't enough evidence to support them, they've just done it anyway.
And I would point out headteachers and to a great extent the unions were proved right by the total train wreck we had.
*Betting Post *Horse Racing 🐎
Paging as usual @Malc @Stodge, who are not afraid at times to post tips, and anyone who wants to share love of the sport today like Mr Decrepiter, Mt Kinabalu etc
I appreciate not every gambler loves sharing and sharing publicly. I suspect though some reading PB may be betting on horse racing regular particularly the Saturday coverage, I will be placing bets today and means a degree of “due diligence” on my choices - I’m a open and honest girl I don’t mind sharing what led to my decision 🙂
last couple of weeks proved difficult when weather makes it slippy - even in hurdles they can leap last fence in lead and get the landing wrong, so just 2/4 not 3/4 last time but including a 28-1 long shot. I might well have better strike rate recently with my Long Shots than naps! 🤭
MoonRabbits tips this week. (NO NAPS)
Wincanton 13:30 - Mi Laddo
Excellent form and has won over 2m, I think not as many questions of trip and handicap as rivals.
Sandown 13:50 - Paddy’s Poem (LONG SHOT)
11 yr old, heavily handicapped, hasn’t raced yet this year with better days over much longer trip. But surely too good to be this far out in the betting amongst this crowd? Say hello to this weeks long shot.
Wincanton 14:40 - Earth Business
Form, going, and fairly handicapped.
Sandown 15:00 - Rolling Dylan
this old horse pulled wagons on the Oregon trail in youth, but has shown it’s veteran 3m staying power in two recent second placing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ITMRHJnaJY
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
So that's an each way patent:
1.15 Sandown GOA LIL
1.30 Wincanton MIDNIGHT CALLISTO
3.35 Sandown VOLKOVKA
Feel free to follow me over the cliff....
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/brixham-defies-brexit-covid-storm-6446059