Pig Sty Avenue

"...I doubt not but in time Ardrossan will become a grand emporium; but the people of Saltcoats, a sordid race, complain that it will be their ruin". ( Galt, p3 ). I know where you're coming from, Miss Pringle.   Mind you, it seems that everyone in the UK complains incessantly, although maybe that's just the impression you get if you watch too much rolling news from the BBC: mostly whinging about the weather, the resultant "travel misery", (where "misery" really means "inconvenience"), and, horror of horrors, Christmas presents bought online which might not be delivered on time.  Ffs.  But there I go, complaining about the complainers.   And it's cheap to be smug when you're in that serene state that travellers know, when the visa's in your passport and the flight's booked and you're wondering what books you'll buy at WH Smiths in Departures.   Wolf Hall 's in the frame, and so is Empire of the Sun , whi...

I still feel nauseous whenever I think about Newcastle's ownership.  The feelings don't diminish much when I read this sort of stuff .  Those people flog you if you're gay or drink Brown Ale, mind.  Couldn't be worse than Ashley, though, and as they'd be on a PR mission, they would necessarily not do stupid things...

Fucken Aye

Getting to grips with the shape of item characteristic curves in Baker, I came across the concept of a three parameter model, where the third parameter allows the fact that candidates will successfully guess the right answers to some items, per Birnbaum.  This is something I'll get around to researching some day.  My preliminary theory is that "guessing" is a fundamental part of candidate performance, not simply because, (say) when doing a multiple choice test I've a one-in-four (or five) chance of getting it right, but because it may not be pure guesswork, but what is usually called an "inspired" guess, the correct answer lurking in the candidate's subconscious and recalled at need.  In other words, in a real life language situation, they would recall the correct usage.  Most language learners will be able to provide anecdotes of situations where, say, they remembered a bit of vocabulary from God-knows-where, or were unexpectedly able to use the subjun...

Ah well .  Hughton and the players deserve the credit, no doubt, but it offers some hope for the future.  And of course, Ashley remains a twat and a shite, but, wtf.  I mean, just think about the kind of people who own English Premier League clubs.  Would you want to meet any of the bastards socially?  Sheik Mansour spends all that money, and doesn't even go to the games, (they'd let him in for nowt, and he'd get a good seat - does he watch it on telly, one wonders?); the Glazers, ffs, like that family out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre ; and don't even get me started on Abramovich.  So our own fat guy's in good company.  Put it another way, big capitalists have ugly souls.  For now, we're stuck with them, though.  For now.  

Having uncurled from my foetal ball position, and emerged from the cupboard I was hiding in, the only comfort I can offer is that it's no good crying over spilt milk.  My own feeling still is that Hughton would have gone on to become a great manager of Newcastle.  But what do I know?  The situation we're in is that the club we love is owned by a fat useless bastard, who may or may not have made a correct decision with the appointment of Pardew .  We shall see.  The result of today's game against Liverpool will speak volumes, unfairly perhaps as he's only had one full day in the job, but Chris Hughton got no mercy and Pardew should expect none.

With basic literacy students we do something called language experience where you negotiate a text with the student, and then type it up, print it, chop it around, get them to write it out...  One short text can produce hours of work, and is good for letter and word recognition and formation.  Well, the techniques seem to work with a five year old native speaker.  You can make a singing lesson of it, too From LYRICS MODE .COM lyrics archive Lyrics | Winx Club lyrics - We Are The Winx lyrics Close your eyes And open your heart. Believe in yourself, That's how it starts. Dreams will come true just wait and see, 'Cos the magic's in you and the magic's in me! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! Come join the club! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! We are the Winx! Come join the club! We are the Winx! Magical flowers, Digital powers, Rhythmns and tunes, The sun and the moon, Magic shapes and shifting tides, And the fire burning deep inside, We...

You.  Fat.  Useless.  Fuck.

It's good to know I'm not the only one who assumed that Jeremy Hunt was worse than his famous brother, Warwick.

Time in Visa Limbo continues to be well used.  I need to get to grips with IRT, big time.  A good starting point is Baker's Basic Item Response Theory , and the software that goes with it, (you'll need Visual Basic 5.0 if you're running anything later than Windows 95, and I have no idea how to run it on a Mac or Linux or wtf). There are a lot of web resources on IRT and Rasch measurement, and I'll link to them in a new post when I'm a bit further down the road with this. I'm going to use the label IRT for posts connected with this, eschewing other terms such as CAT.

Talking of crazy fucktards, God Bless America , (scroll down to the last para of the main post for the best bit).  And how come Amazon got to be hosting the data , anyway?  Good excuse to go elsewhere for my books in future. It's classic case of stable doors and horses heading for the horizon.  You can get it here , and no doubt in 10,000 other links near you.

This is what happens when some people take five minutes out of looking at porn and downloading movies, I suppose.  Does Anonymous google its way to that particular two year old post?  It's a bit disappointing really: thousands of blog posts and the only one that attracts any crazies is (I've just re-read it) a rather restrained gripe about a dodgy scanner I was sold.  Not that I want to attract crazies.