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Posted: 29-01-2013 19:12 Post subject:

Tell it to the judge!

Posted: 01-02-2013 10:21 Post subject:

Anger at Gypsy and Cornish in same box on form

A benefits form which grouped Gypsies, travellers and the Cornish together is being withdrawn after complaints.
The tick box for ethnic backgrounds was included in a Cornwall Council housing form.
Liberal Democrat group deputy leader Alex Folkes said: "Being a gypsy and traveller or being Cornish are two different things."

Cornwall Council said it was "inappropriate wording" and a "genuine error" which had been rectified.

Mr Folkes wrote in his blog: "Some people will suggest it is offensive. And they are right. Not because being likened to a gypsy or traveller is an insult. It isn't.
"But because the two backgrounds are so entirely different.
"What Cornwall Council has done in designing this form is to create a 'bucket' category for anyone who doesn't appear to fit into 'normal' definitions.
"It's offensive to Cornish people and offensive to gypsies and travellers."

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-21276009

Posted: 01-02-2013 11:37 Post subject:

Seems like Folkes needs to get a life and concentrate on coming up with real policies, not attempting to justifying his existence by pouncing on itty bitty mistakes and blowing them up out of all proportion.

Posted: 01-02-2013 12:07 Post subject:

But was there a tick box for Pixies?

Posted: 21-03-2013 08:55 Post subject:

Obama limo breaks down in Israel after 'fuel mix-up'

One of Barack Obama's fleet of armoured limousines has broken down in Israel after being filled with the wrong type of fuel, reports say.
The car had been waiting for the US president's entourage to arrive when it was filled with diesel instead of petrol, Israel's Channel 2 reported.
A replacement limousine had to be flown in from neighbouring Jordan, Maariv newspaper said.

Mr Obama is making his first visit to Israel since taking office.
He was welcomed at Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.

It is believed the limousine had left the airport some two hours previously and had broken down on its way to Jerusalem where Mr Obama was due later.

The owner of a local tow-truck company, Moti Matmon, told the UK's Daily Telegraph that the US Consulate in Jerusalem had asked him to recover the vehicle.
"They told me that this was Obama's car," he told the newspaper.
"They didn't say what had happened to it. They just said it had got stuck. Only the mechanic was there when I arrived. The driver had left in another car. The whole thing was very funny."

Mr Matmon said the limousine was being repaired at a garage in Jerusalem

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-21863035

Posted: 30-05-2013 10:21 Post subject:

Cambridge University students stumped by unanswerable question
Cambridge University students were left baffled after spending time on a physics question only to find it was unanswerable.
By Josie Ensor
2:22PM BST 28 May 2013

The Cambridge candidates sitting a second year natural sciences paper had been asked to solve two problems in an exam paper.
But when they looked at the information they were given to work with they spotted the vital 'i' symbol needed to calculate the answers was missing.
The omission meant it was impossible to answer the equation that involved a "commutation relation and a factor of sqrt(-1) in a spin-operator matrix".

Baffled students spent an hour scratching their heads before one spotted the mistake and brought it to the attention of examiners.
The invigilators granted them an extra 15 minutes to complete the paper on Saturday.

Around 300 students are thought to have sat the exam and an estimated three quarters of them will have attempted at least one of the faulty questions.
One who asked not to be named said: "Some people would have just skipped those questions without attempting them – but they still got extra time.
"The time I wasted on that question plus the extra panicking was way more than 15 minutes.
"The mistakes themselves weren't huge but it also made me question whether there were other mistakes."

Another student added: "All I can say is thank you to the genius who had enough brains and courage to realise the mistake and point it out to the examiner.
"I could have spent all afternoon on it."

A spokesman for the university said yesterday: "We regret that there were two typographical errors in the Part IB physics examination sat on Saturday 25th May.
"The examiners will ensure that no candidate is disadvantaged."

Mistakes in exam papers were found in a number of AS and A-Level papers two years ago.
Ofqual, the exams watchdog, was asked to investigate after a geography AS-level paper and a business studies GCSE were found to have questions which were impossible to answer.
The AQA exam body apologised and all students were awarded full marks for the question.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/10084335/Cambridge-University-students-stumped-by-unanswerable-question.html

Posted: 05-06-2013 12:49 Post subject:

Posted: 20-06-2013 06:59 Post subject:

A warning to us all (especially in the murkier waters of Forteana):

School librarian finds fake Blake poem
By Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent

A school librarian has discovered that a poem widely attributed to William Blake, including in school reading lists, was not really written by him.
Rather than the work of an English poet in the 19th Century, Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room was written in the United States in the 1980s.

This mislabelling shows how the internet can replicate errors, warns Thomas Pitchford, a librarian in a Hertfordshire secondary school.
"We just accept too quickly," he says.

An online search for "Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room" will produce numerous references to this as a poem by William Blake, the radical English writer and artist who died in the 19th Century.
There are essay questions, anthologies, lesson plans, discussion forums, teachers' resources and online reference websites all interpreting this poem as an example of 19th Century poetry.

But Mr Pitchford says that when he saw the poem attributed to William Blake, he immediately thought the style bore little relation to the poet's other work.
He soon established that the poem was really by Nancy Willard and had been published in 1981 in an anthology called A Visit to William Blake's Inn.

But the librarian, who works at Hitchin Boys' School, then realised how far and wide the mistake had travelled, with internet sites copying and distributing the false connection with Blake.
Many schools have been teaching the poem as an example of Blake's work.

He believes that the poem has been spreading as a fake Blake poem since 2001, with the intervening years embedding the poem ever more deeply into a range of websites and online resources.

His blog, the Library Spider, has dozens of examples of how the poem has slipped into being used in the classroom.
Websites across the English-speaking world are littered with references to this as a poem by Blake, from individual school anthologies to state publications.

A special reading programme for gifted pupils in Illinois asks pupils to talk about the poem
Instructions for teachers in a Kentucky school district use it as a classroom example
A teachers' resource book from a major publisher recommends it
Education agencies in the US states of Texas and Louisiana promote the teaching of this supposed work by Blake
A US state university worksheet gives students the poem as an example of a style of writing

Mr Pitchford is now in the process of contacting websites to try to overturn what has become a widely established belief that this is a work by Blake.
He says it is a cautionary tale of how the internet can "mutate" reality, but he does not believe that pupils should never trust the internet.
"It's easy to get on your high horse about it, but books have also had mistakes. You can't say books are always better," he says.

Instead it means that using the internet for research means thinking much more about what the search engine shows as the result.
"It shows that research can't just be going with the first answer."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22971225

Posted: 20-06-2013 11:03 Post subject:

I wondered if the error originated on poetryatlas.com. which seems to have been compiled by a dingbat.

There are many mistaken attributions, such as The Luck of Edenhall by William Wordsworth!

The Two Sunflowers poem mentioned does not appear under Blake, though. Cool

Posted: 27-06-2013 09:04 Post subject:

Around the world in 20 gaffes
On the anniversary of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, we look at other famous geographical and travel-related gaffes.
10:58AM BST 26 Jun 2013

Fifty years ago today, John F Kennedy addressed the residents of Berlin with the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner". Although the phrase was grammatically correct, a "Berliner" is also the local name for a jam doughnut.

Here are 20 other geographical and travel-related gaffes...

“I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people” - Dan Quayle rofl

"And in terms of the Maldives or the Falklands, whatever your preferred term, our position on this is that we are going to remain neutral." - Barack Obama on the Malvinas/Falklands row

"Amigo! Amigo!" - George W. Bush tries to get Silvio Berlusconi's attention at the G-8 Summit

“You look like you’re ready for bed!” - The Duke of Edinburgh to the President of Nigeria, who was wearing national dress

"The people of Peru, I think, deserve better." - Dick Cheney criticising Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela.

"It's great to be back on terra cotta." - John Prescott Cool

"We have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border." - John McCain during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

“You managed not to get eaten then?” - The Duke of Edinburgh, to a British trekker in Papua New Guinea

"Over the last 15 months, we’ve travelled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go." - Barack Obama.

"When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go. You can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem." - Mitt Romney asks why aeroplane windows don't open.

"Syria is Iran's path to the sea" - Mitt Romney, again. The two countries do not share a border.

"I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix." - Dan Quayle

“It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.” - The Duke of Edinburgh to then Paraguay dictator General Stroessner Twisted Evil

"My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize." - Republican Hank Johnson of Georgia, talking about the island of Guam.

"You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska" - Sarah Palin

“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” - The Duke of Edinburgh to Cayman Islanders

“I'm so happy to be in the great state of Chicago” - Dan Quayle

"Africa was a country on the brink" - Senator Rick Santorum

"Ubeckibeckibeckibeckistanstan... a small insignificant state." - Herman Cain struggles with his pronounciation.

“If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don’t travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly.” - The Duke of Edinburgh, to the Aircraft Research Association

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/10143022/Around-the-world-in-20-gaffes.html

Posted: 27-06-2013 09:17 Post subject:

The Duke of Edinburgh quotes aren't gaffes they're reasoned observations. Very Happy

Posted: 27-06-2013 13:35 Post subject:

Posted: 27-06-2013 14:14 Post subject:

Posted: 27-06-2013 15:31 Post subject:

Posted: 18-07-2013 07:58 Post subject:

PayPal 'credits' US man $92 quadrillion in error

Online payments broker PayPal has admitted it erroneously credited a man with $92 quadrillion (£60 quadrillion). Shocked

Chris Reynolds, 56, of Pennsylvania, found the amount when he opened his monthly statement.

But the error was quickly recognised and his account had returned to zero by the time he had logged in.
"This was obviously an error and we appreciate that Mr Reynolds understands this was the case," PayPal said in a statement to the BBC.

The online money-transfer firm said it would offer to make a donation to a charity of Mr Reynolds' choice.

The $92,233,720,368,547,800 statement had been "quite a big surprise", Mr Reynolds told the Philadelphia Daily News, which first reported the story.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23352230