Bring on the rain.
by nicktaylor3 7 hours ago
Thursday, 11 June 2009
NUS: Funding Our Failures 2
Thank you to those who linked me yesterday. Blog hits were up 1,000% on the day before, which is nice. I wanted to collate a couple of afterthoughts I originally appended to the first post and perhaps offer some more constructive thoughts.
Firstly, a couple of good criticisms I saw other people voice: 1) it is wrong to assume someone's university education is the key factor in their ability to earn 2) universities might choose to invest most in subject areas which provide a greater return.
That said, I don't think this idea is completely without merit, its just unfairly weighted against those who become very successful. Using their example figures, over 20 years, "a graduate on £40,000 would pay £125 a month, while someone on £16,000 would pay £5". That's £30,000 against £1,200. The gap is just too large considering both these people had the same opportunities given to them.
Obviously there's something to be said for taxing the rich, that's how the rest of our tax works after all. But given that this is coming from the NUS, who supposedly represent us, it would be nice if their solution solved problems without massively taxing some of their members.
What I'd propose is that the system takes into account how much an education actually costs and imposes a minimum and maximum proportion of that cost which one might be expected to pay back. For example, someone on the lower end of the scale might be made to pay back only 50% of their total costs over a period of 25-30 years, while someone on the upper end is expected to pay back 200% over a period of 10-15 years.
That way, those who can afford to pay more do so without being completely shafted, but those who can't are still expected to make a decent contribution towards the three years they enjoyed at university.
Posted at 11:37 BST | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
NUS: Funding Our Failures
The NUS has launched a Blueprint detailing how they think higher education should be funded in the future. Their proposal revolves around a system called 'progressive graduate contribution', which basically means you pay for your degree based on how much you earn afterwards. In their words, this means that "those who benefit the most from university by earning more will contribute more".
Problem is, there are two case studies missing from their document:
The Waster: He came to university because he didn't want to get a job and it looked like a laugh. He rarely attends lectures and spends most of his time getting pissed. He leaves with a third-class degree, works a series of low-paid jobs involving telephones and never contributes towards the cost of his education.
The Scholar: She came to university because she wanted to succeed. She enjoys a healthy social life without forgetting what she's there for. Having worked hard, she gets a first-class degree, soon scores a highly-paid consultancy job and spends the rest of her life paying for wasters to go to university.
I'm all against top-up fees and the NUS proposal has noble goals, but can we please think of an alternative that doesn't persecute successful students and reward idiots?
They provide a link to lend your support to their campaign, but unfortunately, there isn't one to tell them that their proposal has an enormous, appalling oversight. Best you can do is email fundingourfuture@nus.org.uk to let them know.
EDIT: Posted some more thoughts, including how I think this might be fixed.
Posted at 11:34 BST | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Social Media and Earthquakes
There was an earthquake this morning, which I found out about via Twitter, despite the epicentre being about 15 miles away in Ulverston. It later became apparent that everybody else in the room (indeed in the town... and county) felt it except me.
For me, the noteworthy thing wasn't the earthquake (although the fact that our nuclear plant sits on a minor fault line is worrying), or the fact that I missed it (even if I did feel out), but the way Twitter exploded. Lancaster and #earthquake both quickly made it into the trending topics, briefly outshining Susan Boyle, although still eclipsed by swine flu.
I'd read about the way Twitter was used during the Mumbai attacks and the Hudson River crash, but it was the first time I'd felt like I was there when it all went off. I felt like a citizen journalist, albeit in an inept, Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan kind of way. It brings to mind something I wrote in a recent paper about how this kind of technology can make you feel like you were there and you participated, even if you didn't really.
But I also realised the flipside of that point -- you can be so involved in social media that you don't even notice the Earth move.
Posted at 13:07 BST | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Media Player Usability
What is it about media players that causes developers to constantly dick around with what should be a relatively straight forward set of features. Every time a new version of Windows Media Player came out (fortunately not very often) I had to revise my mental model of how my music library worked and now I'm on iTunes, I have to do it that much more frequently as even minor updates seem to tweak the library in incomprehensible ways.
For example, following the recent 8.1 update, if I run a search on my library and launch a track, it isn't then followed by the next search result like it used to be. No, its followed by the next track on the source album. That makes a certain amount of sense, but when that album finishes, it moves on to the next album in my library, which likely bears no relation to my original search results. For example, this morning I ran a search on Spinnerette, set the results going, and fifteen minutes later got Stereophonics in my ear.
Not to mention its slow and the double-click timing isn't quite right. I'm confident that very few people would use this software were it not tied to some particularly pretty hardware and a well-stocked online store which sells only a poorly supported file format.
As far as I can tell, the core functionality for a media library should be pretty damn simple:
- Maintain a queue of songs to play. This is the only part of the program from which songs are played.
- Allow me to pick an album, song or selection of songs to either append to the queue or replace it altogether. Ideally we'd be able to pick which of these was performed by a double click and which was performed by CTRL + double click.
- Treat playlists like albums.
- Allow me to easily navigate from a song on the queue to its origin playlist or album.
Windows Media Player had this more or less right a few versions ago, I think 9 or 10, but then they broke it. The iTunes DJ/Party Mix was supposed to provide something resembling this functionality, but does so in such as complex and inflexible way as to be useless. Rather than fixing it, 8.1 simply adds the baffling ability for my friends to "suggest" tracks remotely (at LAN parties?)
Please fix it.
Posted at 12:17 GMT | 1 Comments | Link This | Email This
Friday, 6 March 2009
Twitter, Advertising and Brand Names. Simples!
If you've been here before (assuming you're not reading this on Facebook or Blogspot), you might have noticed the appearance of a Twitter status across the top of the page. I joined ages ago, when I set this site up and became obsessed with all things Web 2.0, but lost interest due to lack of anyone to follow. Fastforward a year or two and Twitter is suddenly incredibly chic and full of celebrities, so I go back and have a second look. This time it hooked me.
A few days ago I get an email saying Aleksandr Orlov is following me on Twitter. That's the furry founder of CompareTheMeerkat.com, not the Soviet spymaster. Quick look at his profile shows that he's not just spouting occasional bits of advertising, but actually replying to his thousands of followers. The ad agency behind the meerkat campaign has clearly got some intern who spends all day pretending to be an anthropomorphic Russian meerkat on social networking sites.
I am completely and utterly jealous of that intern.
Another bit of Twitter-related marketing hasn't ended so well. Skittles launched a fancy new website which attempts to get down with the kids by just displaying a small menu over Skittles-related social networking pages, including one page which displays real-time search results for Skittles on Twitter. Queue much merriment as the Internet catches on and fills the Skittles website with obscenities. The Twitter feed was quickly downgraded from the home page to a 'Chatter' subsection.
Got me thinking about something else I saw recently--an electronic 'Sharpie' display which lets passers-by scrawl on a digital billboard. The consensus seems to be that its a mock-up created by some design student rather than a real system, but as cool as it would be, you've got to wonder about the implications. If somebody writes obscenities across your digital advert, could you be fined under advertising standards laws? And can major companies really risk putting their brand names in our hands like Skittles did?
Posted at 12:46 GMT | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This