Wasp traps

[beebopper]

Would be useful if your work finally helped with vascular dementia and the like but you really should stop blowing smoke up your own a**e. Your privileged status within a Russell university is a world away from the realities of higher education for the vast majority of students and I stick by what I said earlier. I think a freedom of information request might be in order to discover the truth of the distribution of funding and resources pertaining to your research to see if any tuition fees are going where they shouldn't and that your students actually get value for their money.

He just answered your question. This shows that he can convince his peers his work is worthy of publishing. That is a major part of an academics job.

 

[BKF Admin]

Calm it down please and play nice....
Admin.

 

[Swarm]

What a shame, I thought you'd closed it.

 

[Erichalfbee]

What a shame, I thought you'd closed it.

Same here.
So I decided to

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

So how many students have been fleeced at £9000 per annum to fund your academic extravagance???

I have no delusions. As an employer of analytical chemists, pharmacists, technicians and other science graduates I get to see and evaluate the output from universities and in keeping with the latest survey of other employers I concur with the majority of those employers that we prefer to employ individuals with life skills rather than graduates. I feel sorry for graduates who have been exploited by academia that emerge with life changing debts after being ripped off by universities. As vulnerable young people, prospective undergraduates are miss sold full time degrees that provide little opportunity of a decent job (50% of students do not use their degrees in their careers) and furthermore don't honour their promise of full time education frequently providing less than 10 hours of teaching time per week. The upshot being that armies of graduates leave university unprepared for work, with work ethics that are not up to the task of the pressures of the workplace and with debts that suffocate their life chances and national productivity. Anyone who defends the UK's higher education system needs to hang their head in shame. You can keep your peer reviewed papers. And you call me a snake skin oil seller!

Would be useful if your work finally helped with vascular dementia and the like but you really should stop blowing smoke up your own a**e. Your privileged status within a Russell university is a world away from the realities of higher education for the vast majority of students and I stick by what I said earlier. I think a freedom of information request might be in order to discover the truth of the distribution of funding and resources pertaining to your research to see if any tuition fees are going where they shouldn't and that your students actually get value for their money.

Must play havoc with the back - carrying that humungus chip around on your shoulder

 

[Karol]

I was going to let your comment ride JBM but this issue is too big for petty baiting.

I don't have a 'chip'. This is my working interface one which has massive implications for all of you if and when you need NHS care or have people you know and care about who are going into higher education.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...cide-problem-students-taking-lives-overtakes/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/23/nhs-drug-errors-may-causing-22000-deaths-every-year/

Universities have become parasites and represent a structural flaw in our society that causes misery for millions.

When I studied my full time degree, my lectures and practicals ran from 9.00am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday with one hour off for lunch and 3 hours off on a Wednesday afternoon. In addition to this I had to undertake self directed learning in the evenings and at weekends. The final year was more intense with research projects extending into the evenings.

The same full time degree now is only 10 to 15 hours per week with maybe one practical per week and with considerably reduced term lengths.

More importantly, when we took certain tests or exams where errors could cause patient harm including fatalities, the pass mark was 100%. That pass mark has dropped to 40%. So basically universities are teaching their students that it's okay to make errors in critical environments.

When fees were introduced universities started to be sued by students who were failing their exams. In response, universities lowered their pass marks. In patient facing roles that's scandalous but helps give an understanding behind some of the above headlines.

The other thing that happened which promulgated this structural flaw is that in response to Shipman, the government in its wisdom decided that the health professions were not competent to regulate themselves so it took self regulation away from the professions. What was it replaced with? Academically centric patient representative regulatory bodies. The problem with that is that before the change, the professions held academia to account. After the change academia became unaccountable with a free hand to decide the competence of its outputs. Convenient as reducing the quality of those outputs also reduces the ability of those outputs to forensically challenge and hold academia to account. Basically it means that universities hold a monopoly on the information by which their performance can be judged which means that they can produce biased information to suit their own needs with few being the wiser. It's amazing how many universities operate gagging clauses in contracts for their academics and how they work to suppress freedom of speech in their institutions.

https://www.theguardian.com/educati...rmer-employees-lib-dems-compromise-agreements

(Might explain Beefriendly's panicked response earlier? A Damocles sword that I'll let hang to encourage a more friendly level of debate).

Here's the thing. When I came out with my degree, me and my fellow graduates were the finished competent article. Not now! Why? Because universities know that by reducing the quality of the graduates they produce, they are able to extend their teaching into the NHS to make more money. In practice this means that more experienced front line staff are having to spend time away from patients baby sitting graduates and teaching them the basics that universities fail to teach because it isn't profitable for Unis to do so and because Unis know they can make more money by offering extended teaching in the work place at an additional cost to the NHS.

So you get students coming out of Uni having been miss sold full time degrees that aren't full time (trading standards violation) with suicidally high debts contaminating critical environments with astronomical error rates that suck the life blood out of productivity. The NHS does not need more funding. It needs a competent accountable higher education system which is benevolent and delivers quality capable finished article graduates with the right work ethic and appreciation of safe standards.

And for the record, I feel deeply sorry for our young people and the manner in which we are letting them down. It won't be long before the last generation of graduates trained under the old benevolent free system retire and pass away breaking the continuity in knowledge and experience and then you'll really see the extent of the calamity of our present direction of travel.

Once again my head is above the parapet. If I have a chip JBM, it's getting slated for trying to be a good soul.

 

[TooBee...]

Calm it down please and play nice....
Admin.

The rumours of your demise have been greatly exaggerated then

Your ALIVE

 

[TooBee...]

...
Universities have become parasites and represent a structural flaw in our society that causes misery for millions.
...The same full time degree now is only 10 to 15 hours per week with maybe one practical per week and with considerably reduced term lengths.

...That pass mark has dropped to 40%. So basically universities are teaching their students that it's okay to make errors in critical environments.

...The NHS does not need more funding...

...And for the record, I feel deeply sorry for our young people and the manner in which we are letting them down. ...

I recognise a lot of what has been written here, my degree was a waste of time, things were moving along so much in the real world, that when I sat my exams, the Governing / Regulatory bodies in which I was being examined on, were in the process of being disbanded, meaning the Module was already out of date! etc.

 

[beebopper]

Oh boy.

More obfuscation from keyboard warrior who appears to have too much time on his hands.

 

[Beefriendly]

In response, universities lowered their pass marks.

Karol the above, like many other observations in your rant, is totally incorrect.
The pass marks for an Honours degree have not changed in the last 30-40 years to my knowledge. 1st class (70%+), 2(i) (60-69%), 2(ii) (50-59%), 3rd class (40-49) and pass (30-39%).
I set and marked enough honours degree exam questions to give you sleepless nights.

 

[Beefriendly]

It's amazing how many universities operate gagging clauses in contracts for their academics and how they work to suppress freedom of speech in their institutions.

Its like you've been taken in by some anti-educationalist rant written by a beano reader. I'd suggest you check your before mouthing off another load of carp.
Admin has asked to us to play nice so I am.

 

[steve1958]

The best bait for wasp traps in my local area appears to be fish.
I used a small piece of raw cod.

I've tried meat, beer, sugar, and fish.
The fish won.
However it does get a bit smelly after a few days.

 

[mpenn]

I find orange juice or strawberry jam works .

 

[Karol]

Karol the above, like many other observations in your rant, is totally incorrect.
The pass marks for an Honours degree have not changed in the last 30-40 years to my knowledge. 1st class (70%+), 2(i) (60-69%), 2(ii) (50-59%), 3rd class (40-49) and pass (30-39%).
I set and marked enough honours degree exam questions to give you sleepless nights.

Would help if you kept to the script. I said nothing about pass marks for an honours degree.

So for example one of these critical tests might be 10 calculation questions on subjects such as working out the safe dose of a medicine to be administered to a child. You'd think that the pass mark should be 100% as a single error could be fatal. Not now it ain't. 40% pass mark which means that it's okay to kill 6 out of 10 patients and that sadly is the attitude of a significant number of graduates coming into the NHS.

So, let's take UCL shall we? Here's their financial statement for 2016:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/finance/docs/docs-corporate/2016_ucl-annual-report.pdf

It's page 22 that you want. Income specifically.

So income from tuition is £610 million (fees and subsidies). Other income is about £720 million.

Now lets look at your degree in Neurosciences:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/study/undergraduate/neuroscience-ibsc/NEUR_HANDBOOK_17_18

Page 6 is interesting. 40-50 hours of lectures and 375 hours self directed learning per module.

How is your degree full time? And if tuition funding is 45% of UCL's income but students only get access to 12% of teaching resource, how does that square with your claims to be funded entirely by research grants? Presumably you keep a record of the time you spend on your students to ensure that it represents 45% of your total employed time. Given that term time is actually less than 6 months of the year, that must mean you must be lecturing and marking for 100% of the remaining 6 months.

Page 34 of the financial accounts is also interesting - your highest paid earners.

University marking of degree papers does give me sleepless nights - literally. The number of times our household gets called out in the middle of the night to correct errors is frightening.

 

[Karol]

The best bait for wasp traps in my local area appears to be fish.
I used a small piece of raw cod.

I've tried meat, beer, sugar, and fish.
The fish won.
However it does get a bit smelly after a few days.

Using protein means that you are catching wasps that are largely harmless to your bees because they are still in their hunting phase when they are at their greatest ecological value.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

I was going to let your comment ride

That would be a first.

Chip>shoulder
Bee (or should that be wasp)>Bonnet

Sound more like one of them chem trail obsessives by the day.

 

[BKF Admin]

Thread shuts at midnight...

 

[Beefriendly]

Would help if you kept to the script. I said nothing about pass marks for an honours degree.

.

When fees were introduced universities started to be sued by students who were failing their exams. In response, universities lowered their pass marks. In patient facing roles that's scandalous but helps give an understanding behind some of the above headlines..

Universities main exam system is to award Honours degrees. What other pass marks are there?
With rants and idiosyncratic rationale like this I think you may be in need of professional help and medication.
Like you I try to care for people, so please please Karol seek professional psychiatric help before it's too late.

 

[Beefriendly]

Thread shuts at midnight...

Good one...I'll ready the pumpkin and handsome prince.

 

[Beefriendly]

How is your degree full time? And if tuition funding is 45% of UCL's income but students only get access to 12% of teaching resource, how does that square with your claims to be funded entirely by research grants? .

More total and utter nonsense from you . You really do not have a scoobies how universities work and interact with the research communities. Typified by asking a nonsensical question about how my degree is full time....Oh dear..... I shall try to explain in simple terms.
My funding and entire salary came from competitively awarded MRC research and Welcome Research program grants. We paid overheads to the university for the space we occupied. There were no teaching commitments to students involved in what were pure research grants. Their teaching fed off us.
I taught and lectured on a voluntary basis as asked . It was usual for world experts in their field to give lectures to students on their particular specialties. This was done in my own time with no salary paid to me by the university. As where many of the lectures I gave on various other specialty courses.
This is done to ensure students get the latest information in fast changing fields where University employed lecturers can easily get left behind. This isn't some nice school with text books that cover the whole course...., we were the guys doing the experiments which wrote the next set of text books....of which I have written a few. And of course it's always nice to be asked to give lectures as it reflects that people realise you know what you are talking about. Some advice you might pay heed to.

Just remember before you come back with yet another smart Alec remark (only 6 hours left to reply....) you asked me a question I answered it.