Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2009

Tornado to the rescue!

Filed under: Britain, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:44

With all the winter weather in England this week, the railways are struggling to cope. One of the newest locomotives didn’t have any problems with the snow and ice:

TornadoInSnow_22Dec09

Passengers were rescued by a steam locomotive after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England.

Trains between Ashford and Dover were suspended on Monday when cold weather disabled the electric rail.

Some commuters at London Victoria faced lengthy delays until Tornado — Britain’s first mainline steam engine in 50 years — offered them a lift.

They were taken home “in style”, said the Darlington-built engine’s owners.

iPhone fans “suffering from Stockholm Syndrome”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I think it’d be safe to say that Victor Keegan‘s inbox will be overflowing with anguished defences of the iconic iPhone after this article:

The iPhone isn’t perfect
With most examples of new technology, the owner’s desire to be seen at the cutting edge blinds them to admit any faults

When hostages defend their kidnappers, it is known as “Stockholm syndrome”. Something similar happens to iPhone users, according to the Danish analyst Strand Consult, when they fall so in love with the device that it blinds them to its defects such as a poor camera, lousy battery life for heavy users and no Bluetooth facility that can transmit photos.

This provoked a predictably outraged response from iPhonistas, but the truth is that a kind of Stockholm syndrome happens not just with iPhones but with most examples of new technology where the owners’ desire to be seen at the cutting edge irrationally blinds them to admit any faults.

There are lots of things you could call the iPhone, but “perfect” certainly isn’t one of them. I’m very happy with my iPhone, but the camera isn’t as good as the one I had on my old Treo 600 (introduced in 2003) and the battery life is quite significantly worse. I don’t use Bluetooth, so that deficiency isn’t important to me.

QotD: College football and graduation rates

Filed under: Education, Football, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In college news, TMQ contends that football-factory coaches emphasize winning above all else because there is no reward for academic outcomes. Cory Scott of Ambler, Pa., notes this column by Jay Paterno, the quarterbacks coach at Penn State and Joe’s son, proposing that academic success be added as a factor in the BCS formula. If it were a factor, Jay Paterno finds, Alabama would still be in the title game next month — but facing TCU rather than Texas. Here, Lindsey Luebchow of Yale Law School takes a similar approach with her third annual Academic BCS rankings. Luebchow analyzes the top 25 football schools at season’s end and factors in both graduation numbers and the NCAA’s “academic progress rate.” Looked at this way, with more classroom emphasis than Paterno’s ranking, the BCS Championship Game would pit Penn State against Stanford — while Texas, with horrible academic stats for football, plummets all the way down from No. 2 to No. 25 and an appearance in TMQ’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback Bowl Presented by TMQ.

Paterno and Luebchow are on to something big. The BCS is all about elaborate computer formulas. Football-factory coaches and boosters often claim for the sake of show they care about academics. Make it official — add academic measures to the BCS computer formula! Do this, and within a single year there would be intense focus on classroom performance at every BCS-hopeful school. This isn’t a whimsical idea, it is a perfectly serious and practical idea — if the NCAA and the BCS want to prove they’re not just moving their mouths when they say they care about GPAs and graduation.

Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas'”, ESPN Page Two, 2009-12-22

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