Leatherhead Matters

Gordon Brown & his government keep chuntering on about inequality of access to our universities, particularly our top universities. His solution to this perceived inequality is to bludgeon the offending universities into social profiling of applications. Note that grades & ability don’t appear to enter the equation.

A recent speech by Michael Gove provides a pointer to why students from economically deprived communities don’t fare so well in University applications.

“In the whole of Islington in the school year of 2006-7 not a single child took a GCSE in one of those sciences.”

This was provided by way of example.  “Mac” diplomas are all the rage in state schools but, as many of the holders of these diplomas find when they apply to University or, for a job, they are next to worthless. Gordon knows all too well that the fundamental problem is the desperately poor quality of state school education in deprived areas. His huffing & puffing at University Chancellor’s is merely a diversionary tactic!

What past childhood obsession would drive someone to dedicate a web site to:

Apparently the answer is to view toilet signs through the prism of “Art”. The site has some wonderfully quirky examples of toilet art & humour from around the world. There is also a facility for you to contribute your own examples to the site.

Some examples from the site are shown below.

If you also find yourself obsessed by toilet signs, click on the logo above to visit the “Toilet Signs”site

Strange how doom mongers always seem to get the headlines and even stranger when these headlines are replayed decades later. Here are a selection from the 1970’s. Will the current headlines on Climate Change seem just as strange in 2040?:

“In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer “  Paul Ehrlich

“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 & in ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct“. Paul Ehrlich

“This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century” Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976.

” There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it” Newsweek,1975.

“This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000“. — Lowell Ponte “The Cooling”, 1976

“ If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000…This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age“. — Kenneth E.F. Watt, Earth Day (1970).

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population”. — Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

H/T centerrightcitizen