Why posh restaurants are wasted on the rich. Unless we change the way we fund universities, our system will collapse. England's universities have been humming as another wave of near 340,000 undergraduates begin their rite of passage into adulthood.
University is their gateway to knowledge, a career and a future. But, above all, it is about learning to think for themselves, becoming themselves, even. For them, nothing will ever be the same again. The university sector is one of the few parts of the English institutional structure that still works. Over the decades ahead, as new technologies, unleashed by digitisation, transform our economic base, the universities could and should be an important asset to the country, both as a fountainhead of knowledge and as a unique space for bringing together people, society, business and ideas. Stop slagging off Jamie Oliver. He’s earned the right to these opinions - Comment - Voices.
I’ve always found this rather unjust and felt rather sorry for him, but then there are plenty of famous Britons who are adored like national treasures who will die broke.
And then there are successful yet maligned figures like Oliver, who has been nicknamed “Fat Tongue” and had his populist appeal and everyman jocularity ridiculed for the best part of two decades. Oliver’s first supposed faux pas this week was repeating an anecdote about a woman feeding her kids an evening meal of chips with cheese out of styrofoam trays, which left him sad and stumped. As G4S 'overcharging' and BBC payouts reveal, life in the UK just isn't fair. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
So said George Orwell in 1946, and it's still true. What Orwell had in mind was the human tendency to ignore evidence that contradicts some deeply held conviction, even when that evidence is right before your eyes. We can ignore the obvious in another way too – when we become so used to it that we no longer even see it. Schools are failing our children simply because they are technophobes. Alex Polizzi: an angry helper too far. Here's an idea for a TV series.
A successful, no-nonsense television mogul is taken to a number of ailing independent production companies to fix all their problems. He initially encounters resistance when he orders them to stop relying on stale old formats about successful, no-nonsense moguls who go to help failing businesses, but then – because this is the way that these things go – he changes the font of their logo, plays Rule the World by Take That and everyone weeps with gratitude. To be fair, it's only a matter of time before this series actually happens.
Every other industry already has one of these "angry-helper" shows. Hotels have The Hotel Inspector. No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app. How we used to read the news, back in the era of the Web: Go to newspaper website.
Click on story. Read. Eden Hazard should NOT be vilified for Swansea ball boy 'kicking' Swansea City stars slam Chelsea's Eden Hazard for ball boy kick - Football News - Football. Swansea City players have slammed Chelsea midfielder Eden Hazard following his sending off for kicking a ball boy.
The Belgian was dismissed 10 minutes from the end of Wednesday night’s Capital One Cup semi-final second leg, when Swansea knocked Chelsea to reach the club’s first-ever major cup final. Hazard lashed out at a Swansea ball boy who was holding on to the ball after it went out for a goal kick and was shown a straight red card by referee Chris Foy. Eden Hazard was not to blame for ballboy fiasco - today's footballers are for encouraging kids to milk the situation. But this is where today’s footballers must take a large share of the blame.
Charlie was only doing what so many kids do on the parks of this country every weekend. He was exaggerating the situation, feigning injury if you like, because he had seen his heroes on TV behave exactly the same. Adrian Durham column on Hazard and the ballboy, Leon Britton, Arsenal, Villa and Newcastle. By Adrian Durham Published: 09:42 GMT, 24 January 2013 | Updated: 15:49 GMT, 24 January 2013.
A Point of View: The British vomitorium. 28 December 2012Last updated at 10:55 ET With the Christmas dinner done, writer Will Self says that the UK's collective new year resolution should be to bring an end to the national obsession with food.
Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst? Adults Have Ruined Facebook with Juvenile Showing Off. About two years ago, I wrote about the Facebook phenomenon that was (finally) hitting adults.
My essay, “Thirty-Seven-Year-Old on Facebook,” discussed my personal experience—while laid up with a broken leg—with Facebook. It’s an amusing piece, so I’ve been told. I wrote it when I was enjoying Facebook. Now, there’s that serious Facebook movie out, “The Social Network.” Why HMV will die and how they could have survived. Not much music in the window. They filled it with a display for Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger single in 1995. Those days are gone. HMV is the last recorded music retail outlet left in the UK high street. Over the past few years we’ve seen the demise of Our Price, Woolworths and Virgin Megastore/Zavii. Now, for the very same reason HMV are closing around 60 stores.
“I Am a Teacher. Let Me Teach.” Matthew Swope has been teaching physics for ten years. He is a STEM teacher, the kind that every district wants. Before becoming a teacher, he was a Marine, then a police officer. He took a big pay cut to become a teacher. He loves teaching. Read his words of wisdom: I am a teacher. At least a few members of Team GB have apologised for failure. When a train is late we do not applaud. When Hitler became runner-up in the war, the streets of Berlin were not lined with bunting in his honour. And if a union goes out on strike in support of their brothers and sisters in another sector, we arrest its members. That's because second (and secondary action in the case of my third well-thought-out analogy) is a bad thing. Why then is this nation happy to tolerate – celebrate, even – the abysmal performances of Team GB which result in anything other than gold medals at the London 2012 Olympics?
As chief executive of the perhaps little-known Channel 8 Television (Britain's brightest broadcaster), I have to say it beggars belief that BBC pundits and the nation at large continually tell these athletes they've let no one down – they have. Give the BBC a Gold Medal: A Love Letter to Britain’s Olympic Broadcaster. Recycle the Olympic Seats « David Prescott. Just got back from the Olympic Park to hear Locog’s trying to solve the problem with empty seats at venues.
I managed to get a £10 entrance only ticket to the park, not expecting to see any Olympic action other than on the big screens. But as we walked around the site, we came across a long queue for the ticket office. We assumed this was for tickets for the Mittal Orbit or maybe for other events later in the week. But no. It was for recycled tickets to watch the basketball and handball. When they leave the venue, their ticket is scanned again, notifying the ticket office that seat is now free. Those tickets are then put back on sale for a fraction of the price. Is a union flag onesie acceptable? A Jubilee letter from a republican to royalists. Don't talk garbage!...or why American words are mangling our English. Bank holidays are crap – let's scrap them. I'm all for sharing, but why the online obsession with revealing every detail of your life? Sharing. Now there's a basic social concept that has somehow got all out of whack. The idea behind sharing is simple. TV's current obsession with the Titanic is too much.
Learning Zone Class Clips - Developing argument - English Video.