Keys Corner

Xtra-Google bundles all the different Google services on one page. Take a look – its quite impressive just how many different services Google offers these days.

A system of marking exams that is aimed at making the process faster and more efficient is being introduced in the UK:

Pupils’ complete exam scripts will be scanned into a computer file by the company managing the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) examination board’s computer marking, Milton Keynes-based Data and Research Services.

Candidates’ answers will then be divided up between questions requiring longer responses and those with just one-word answers.

The scanned one-word answers will then be emailed to offices in India where workers will type them up so they can be marked by a computer programme back in the UK, AQA said…

...AQA said each single-word answer would be typed in by two people and any discrepancies would be picked up by the computer programme and investigated.

Perhaps someone can explain – convincingly – why that (scanning the answers, picking out the one-word answers, mailing them to India and double-keying them into a computer, manually investigating the discrepancies) is more efficient than marking the one-word answers on the spot in the UK?

I bought an Airport Express yesterday to stream music from the 500-odd CDs that we have on loaded into iTunes on our Macs to the stereo in the lounge. When at first the installation refused to work (unusual for Apple – everything is usually very easy to set up), I assumed that the problem lay with my using a D-Link WLAN access point to broadcast from the computers to the lounge and started searching the web to find a how to configure this piece of non-Apple hardware, to work with the Airport Express.

After several unsuccessful hours of experimentation, I remembered I had set the D-Link access point to filter out all non-authorised WLAN clients. After I added the new hardware to its authorisation list, everything worked just fine.

As Thomas Watson said – thinking helps. (Or as Ruth always tells me: assume makes an ass out of u and me).

I found this a little late, but it makes an interesting read:

...It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer – a London Daily Express reporter on the scene – say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion…

You can read the whole article by clicking the link in the first line. Although this happened 72 years ago, it is strikingly similar to recent history, isn’t it? You can check the facts here.

Sometimes I despair of German polititians. Do you have to ask why Germany has the weakest economy in the EU, with more unemployed than at any time since the Weimar Republic in the 1930’s, when leading members of the government tell the public at large to boycott German companies?

Reuters 2005-04-17: India, Pakistan Leaders Hold Talks After Cricket.

By jingo, I’m glad to see they still remember their British colonial heritage! Nothing like a jolly game of cricket to get the peace process moving again.

Weight of one Sony digital dictaphone: 69 grams.
Weight of accompanying documentation: 209 grams.

Unverhältnismäßig. Which is an expression we seem to use disproportionately more often in German than in English. It means disproportionate.

Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned before that the local council is fighting graffiti by allowing artists to paint high quality “graffiti” in places which get vandalised. The previous example is still in good condition, but here is another example, also in Oberursel, on the road to Schmitten.

Only a few hundred metres from here, you can see what tends to happen otherwise:

The office where I am currently based is largely constructed using glass, except for the outer walls. We have glass walls pretty much everywhere and in the central area, around the reception desk, the lifts and floors are also made of glass (frosted, in the case of the floors – they are the milky green and yellow areas in the photo). The photo above is of one of the 4 lifts on it’s way down to the ground floor.

I wasn’t going to comment on yesterday’s royal wedding, but then I found this delightfully irreverent description of the BBC and ITV coverage of the event in the Scottish Sunday Herald. Here’s a taste:

... the wedding itself must be counted a modest success. The bride didn’t scrub up too badly considering she’d spent her first 50 years in sweaty jodhpurs, smelling of old labrador and potting compost. That voluminous dress was cut to hide a multitude of sins. The hats were more of a gamble – the first bore a passing resemblance to the one worn by Vera Duckworth at Ken and Deirdre’s nuptials on Friday, while the second seemed to be made of porcupine quills…