andrewducker

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6408893/index.html?part=rss&tag=gs_features&subj=6408893

http://www.gamespot.com/6408893

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/print-your-own-unknown-pleasures/

http://jwz.org/b/yhnP

Previously, previously, previously.

http://sameatschildren.tumblr.com/post/45962915522/do-it-now-guide-to-proper-bra-fit-and-measuring

http://previous.delicious.com/url/69d15176fd8d604ebf8dee567d9f064c#andrewducker

http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/4424117.html

http://previous.delicious.com/url/064c5cf00c70e9ad3a984431ad8c92a8#andrewducker

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/everything-americans-need-to-know-about-eurovision

http://previous.delicious.com/url/218d0625328182defbdaceb8cc969dd7#andrewducker

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-let-gays-get-married-we-must-be-bonkers-8629685.html?fb_action_ids=10151420322626120&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151420322626120%22%3A157505811088407%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151420322626120%22%3A%22og.recommends%22%7D&action_ref_map

http://previous.delicious.com/url/e759c5edcd84a5984bd64715da7b57bf#andrewducker

http://imgur.com/a/60fev

http://previous.delicious.com/url/9630fee826e93300d114ed0f2319dff3#andrewducker

http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/51237115385

When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?” and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.” I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.

You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.

http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/51237051867

mbrainspaz:

Neil Gaiman’s, ‘That’s all I’ve got’ face. By now, twenty people have probably already done this, but I’ve had a boring morning so have another anyway. :)

http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/51236986377

minimal-pilgrim:

Something to make you smile:

A free download from audible.com of Neil Gaiman reading his Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and H.P. Lovecraft inspired short-story ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’ from his collection “Smoke and Mirrors.”

(It also has a preview of “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.”)

http://andrewhickey.info/2013/05/24/linkblogging-for-240513/

http://andrewhickey.info/?p=3646

For those of you who have been wondering why I’ve not been writing as well as I used to, and why I’ve not had the energy to reply to comments as much — I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnoea. It turns out that I wake up an average of ten times an hour while I’m asleep, and I haven’t actually had what anyone else would call a proper night’s sleep in two or three years.

Luckily, I am getting a CPAP machine in August, and I sincerely hope that I’ll be able to go back to my old standard of writing on here then. Bear with me — the end is in sight. Soon I’ll have the energy to go into imaginative flights of fancy, and to write about politics, and to read comics when they come out rather than months later and write about them, and all the other stuff I’ve done too little of. I can’t wait.

Seriously, expect August to be the rebirth of this blog, in terms of my personality. I’ve missed me, and I’m looking forward to being him again.

For now, though, have some links:

Relative Dimension on Marco Polo and dying of thirst.

Mark Thompson on the lessons from the coalition negotiations

Social problems as a disconnect between iterated and one-shot prisoners dilemmas

Josh Marsfelder has started a new blog, looking at Star Trek from an anarcho-feminist viewpoint as a critical history of utopian futurism. Those who read Phil Sandifer’s blog will find the general style familiar, but this is worth reading in its own right.

Leonard Pierce on Orson Welles’ Mr Arkadin

Vitamin C kills drug-resistant tuberculosis. Exactly as orthomolecular medicine predicts.

Creating quantum entanglement between particles that never exist at the same time — “Using entanglement swapping between two temporally separated photon pairs we entangle one photon from the first pair with another photon from the second pair. The first photon was detected even before the other was created. “

John Scalzi on Kindle’s new legal, commercial, fanfic move.

The day that hell was abolished in Britain

Millennium on The Name Of The Doctor

And Alex Wilcock on John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6408827/index.html?part=rss&tag=gs_features&subj=6408827

http://www.gamespot.com/6408827

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/discoblobs/

http://jwz.org/b/yhnO

Previously, previously.

http://thisisthesignal.tumblr.com/post/51237615264

http://thisisthesignal.tumblr.com/post/51237594349

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MatthewTaylorsBlog/~3/dn4ICMIXIs4/

http://www.matthewtaylorsblog.com/?p=6284

For those of you who waded through the self-indulgence and obscurity of yesterday’s post, it might come as something of a surprise than I do occasionally get out and try to make a difference in the real world.  So, today sees the publication of the RSA’s ten month inquiry into school education in Suffolk. Although the lion’s share of the work was done by my splendid colleagues Joe Hallgarten and Louise Bamfield, I chaired the Inquiry and the stakeholder group which informed it.  The background to the report is the erratic performance of Suffolk schools over the last decade. Despite recent improvements, Suffolk is still performing poorly in comparison with national averages and its statistical neighbours. Poor aggregate levels of pupil progress and attainment are combined with wide gaps in educational achievement between disadvantaged groups and other pupils.  In the words of the County Council, ‘Suffolk is stuck’.

The full report is available here. I’m particularly proud of the methodology we used, eschewing the usual closed door Commission and one way consultation process and opting instead for a set of Solutions groups which have not only informed the work but engaged hundreds of people and developed solutions which are already being implemented even before the County Council has responded to the report.

At the heart of the report is our belief in the power of collaboration. Our approach is to combine devolution of responsibility and resources to schools with an expectation that they commit to strong partnerships with:

‘Pyramids’ of secondary and their feeder primary schools and early years settings where objectives and accountabilities are focussed on the attainment and progression of every child;

Other neighbouring schools and organisations working with young people and the wider community where the objectives and accountabilities are focussed on the well-being of every child;

Schools with a similar profile to themselves in ‘families’, where the objectives and accountabilities are focussed on the quality of teaching and learning and school improvement.

For this collaboration to make a difference it must be long term, substantive, focused and based on measurable aims. We have called the report ‘no school an island’ to signal the importance that we attach to the principle that publicly funded institutions must take both individual and shared responsibility for the interests of the children and young people of Suffolk.  We believe that schools now need to open their doors more routinely and purposefully to a wider range of partners, engaging with employers to enable children and young people to have a richer understanding of, and engagement in, the world of work, and to involve the wider community, especially parents, in valuing education and raising children’s achievement.

Another key recommendation (there are twenty in all) is that Suffolk should form a strong partnership with an inner London authority. Partly to learn from the latter’s success but also to address the danger of insularity in Suffolk and to provide opportunities for schools, teachers and pupils to develop new relationships, insights and ambitions. Yesterday saw the first step as pupils from Suffolk and Hackney met and studied together at Holy Trinity School, Dalston under the encouraging gaze of teachers and councillors from both Councils.

Suffolk County Council has been supportive and encouraging but officers and councillors will now take a few weeks to develop a considered response to the report. When exploring successful improvement strategies there is a tendency to overlay a post hoc neatness on the process but, on closer inspection these change processes – from Ontario to London Challenge – turn out to have been multi-faceted and emergent.  Achieving a step-change in performance will require effort and adaptation. We hope many of our ideas will work well but others will no doubt need to be refined.

But whatever emerges from the County, many of the ideas in our report are already progressing. For example, there is the collaboration between two clusters of schools around the development of a 9-14 ‘mid-Bacc’ focussed among other things on ensuring  a successful and substantive primary secondary transition. There is also the work done by the employer engagement group which rests of the powerful foundation of a set of core competencies – communication, responsibility, teamwork and initiative – jointly agreed by teachers, employers and young people. Using this framework Suffolk schools can benefit from the palpable enthusiasm among local employers to engage more fully not just with schools as institutions but with the content of teaching and learning.

I have really enjoyed the Inquiry process and, although I say it myself, I think our approach is relevant not just to Suffolk but represents a robust and imaginative way to addressing the issue facing all localities: how do we improve standards and maintain some kind of local public accountability and engagement in the context of councils’ losing their provider role and of the establishment of more and more Academies and free schools?

This blog first appeared on the website of Public Finance

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22269698

http://previous.delicious.com/url/7abae2b972c9af6e59aa88f0e20664d7#andrewducker

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/the-extent-of-kinect-2-s-visual-drm-is-beginning-to-emerge/0116138

http://previous.delicious.com/url/e5f0c2979134288bd9bce85de1ee93bf#andrewducker

http://blog.smartbear.com/project-management/everything-i-know-about-project-management-i-learned-from-game-of-thrones/

http://previous.delicious.com/url/8f6247a74298b4cb6260465a20930bc3#andrewducker

http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/51225331143

Not to be rude, but did you read the Scalzi article I linked to? The one I said I agreed with? I think that specified exactly what made me uncomfortable.

And, because it hasn’t been reposted here in weeks, here is what I think of fan fiction: http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/21746253134/neil-gaimans-opinion-on-fanfiction