MAPPED: Department of Education officials spent £156,000 on Coventry hotels
An expensive sleep: Department of Education officials stayed at Ramada Hotel and a Premier Inn
Department of Education officials spent more than £156,000 on Coventry hotels for the financial year 2012-2013.
The figures were obtained thanks to a written question to Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, by Conservative MP Priti Patal in the House of Commons.
Gove revealed on 25 April that 1,464 of his department’s employees stayed in hotels within the UK and 52 officials stayed in hotels outside of the UK for the financial year 2012-2013. Continue reading →
Intern Stories: ‘I had to sleep on a stranger’s floor’
By Ian Silvera
Libby Page is a 20-year-old fashion journalism student, author and a campaigns and policy co-ordinator at Intern Aware. Libby is in her final year at the London College of Fashion and has decided to concentrate on unpaid internships in the fashion industry for her documentary driven dissertation.
The young journalist was first attracted to the subject area because of her own experiences. Libby, originally from a small town in Dorset, found that she had been very lucky undertaking internships mostly in London thanks to her friends and family. The baking enthusiast wants other to share the same opportunities she has, whatever their economic background.
Libby said: “I’ve carried out seven internships all together. Even though none of them have been longer than a month, I’ve been able to rely on friends in London to help me survive on the unpaid internship circuit.”
Libby’s first placement was at a small, local paper based in London. As a keen 16-year-old, she told me that she had an enjoyable and exciting experience in the capital city. The young woman said: “It was great. I was even able to interview celebrities. One night I attended the BAFTAs and got to meet Rupert Everett on the red carpet.”
She added: “Because I was so young and inexperienced I didn’t know what to do at the time, but the other journalists pointed me in the right direction and explained that it was my turn to interview Rupert. I didn’t think too much about because I was just thrust into the interview.” Continue reading →
A lesson from Superstorm Sandy: How to find sources using social media
By Ian Silvera
Getting sources in the middle of a disaster zone was once a problem, now, in a world where an extraordinary amount of people own smart phones, you can connect to victims instantaneously from almost anywhere on the globe.
But what software is on offer to help reporters find those affected? Well, simple searches on Twitter or social networking site Facebook may yield some contacts. However, you have to wade through an endless list of ‘junk leads’. This time consuming process means that you will lose out against your competitors.
Another, and more favourable approach, would be to use a piece of technology like TweetDeck. The social media dashboard allows users to scan through tens of Facebook messages and Tweets. The application will speed up the process of filtering through mass Tweets and statuses, but what if you were able to geo-locate social media users? Surely that would be a much more efficient method? Well, the good news is that there are numerous websites out there that offer this opportunity.
Read more here.
Opinion: Comprehensive schools have failed the working classes
By Ian Silvera
David Willetts has now joined a long list of politicians who refuse to admit the obvious. The comprehensive system has failed.
I was not surprised when the universities minister proposed that universities in England should “treat white working-class boys the same as ethnic minorities”.
In 2010, Lord Mandelson, then New Labour business secretary,argued that top universities should lower their entry requirements for disadvantaged applicants by as much as two A-level grades. He openly queried: “Why are we still making only limited progress in widening access to higher education to young people from poorer backgrounds?”
It seems that Willetts has come to the same, deluded conclusion: schools should not improve their performance, but universities should lower their grades.
Read more here.
The philosophy of Christmas comedy
By Ian Silvera
Christmas and comedy have a well-established relationship. Morecambe and Wise re-runs, naughty cracker jokes, an endless stream of comedy DVD adverts. The relationship between comedy and philosophy is less well known.
But comedy has occasionally drawn inspiration from philosophy. Reaching into the archive, there’s Monty Python of course and Beyond the Fringe, and more recently The Simpsons and Ricky Gervais (UCL philosophy graduate, class of 1983) have explored explicitly philosophical issues.
But these examples are one-sided: comedians commenting on philosophy. What about the other way around? What do philosophers say about comedy?
Read more here.
