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Nothing to do with the preview (which I can neither SEE (view) not hear), but if you are wondering why the iplayer doesn't work for you...
It's probably one of those clauses in the small print, something like "Employees of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and their families are not permitted to take part in the competition."
hey the newsletter just arrived, as I was listening to the Ed and Jasper show - so well done to whoever pressed THAT button. 10/10 for timing.
Meanwhile, I do think you might be overdoing coverage of the Chris Langham trial. Can't help feeling you are only covering it in so much detail because Mr Langham is well known, surely he's not the only person on trial this month for similar offences but this is the only one we're hearing about. There should be coverage, but I'm starting to feel uncomfortable with the amount of time you are devoting to it.
Annie,
I second that
in spades.
xx
ed
Did I hear correctly on the news - that David Cameron thinks schools ought to be places where children fear their teachers? How appalling, if true. That may be good enough for Eton, but it's not good enough for any of the hundreds of children I have taught. Shame on him.
Sid
Oh, boy, the ideal item for you:
There's an I Scream shortage because of sewage in the water at Gloucester factories.
One for the Beach too.
And for the ancients of days like myself. Go ahead and make the stuff I say. Call it Tutti Fruitti or Troppo Fruitti and it will remind us all of every Italian ice cream they sold English tourists there for the decade after 1945.
Memories of youth when the 'runs' meant Compton and Edrich and something you were fit enought to do when Mussolini's Revenge struck.
Has anyone else had difficulties viewing the PM website?
According to PM, it's working perfectly. And if you all agree with PM about that, it must mean that I've been barred!
Grrrrrr!
Fifi
And no Newsletter either.
Eric doesn't love me any more.
* sob! *
Fifi
Just four points
During this period of inclusion there has been a increase in mainstream school achievement (see SATs).
A recent common committee found that 90% of parents were happy with the current situation.
The number of special school has fallen by 7 percent but the number of children attending special schools has fallen by about 0.01 percent.
It is the moderate learning difficulty places that are going and there is no evidence that there is any decrease in the number of special school places for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties or for children who have complex and profound difficulties.
During in the last 10 years there has been an increase of about 100 000 additional staff in schools (Teaching Assistants)
Madam FiFi (6)
....seems fine to me, just too many pics of Eddie!
ttfn........Eddielicious......init?
We should remember the involvement of Microsoft in the iPlayer, a company which always reminds me of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation - "It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the Corp's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
Aye to that Dragon!
xx
ed
At 1.30pm today, ´óÏó´«Ã½'s local TV News had a "Breaking News" item. It concerned a Post Office robbery that took place at 11.00am. That's not BREAKING news, that's BROKEN news; It's history. Let's move on.
An example of real brekaing news was exemplified by cutting to live footage from New York showing a passenger aircraft crashing into the Twin Towers.
So what are the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s time limits controlling the labelling of an item as 'Breaking News'?
Eddie just read out a suggestion to have backward facing seats on trains ... problem is that trains don't turn around when they arrive at their destination. So - backward facing seats on the journey to X become forward facing on the way back.
Fitting swivelling seats is not an option!
Paul Webster @ 13, you say "Fitting swivelling seats is not an option!"
Why not? On of the other correspondents to PM seems to have thought they were in use in Japan, so what is the reason for them being not-an-option in England?
Paul - even worse, some trains reverse direction on the same journey! If you ever feel a need to travel from Birmingham New Street to mid-Wales, you will enter and leave Shrewsbury station at the same end - so you're either reversing all the way from Brum to Shrews, or you're reversing all the way from Shrews to Wales...
It would be nice if occasionally there was some more intelligent questioning of politicians on issues like school inclusion. The piece on PM 30 July made assertions such as special schools being the place all parents want for their children who might be 'special' and that such children are disruptive to other pupils, that there exists such a thing as a 'mainstream' teacher as opposed to a 'special' teacher without so much as a challenge... I nearly drove my car into the ditch.
Not all parents want to see more special schools - I certainly do not. Where exactly is the evidence that 'inclusion' has failed? Just what is the 'special' training given to some teachers which means they can teach 'special' children? Children with special needs are childen first and foremost and also have ordinary needs like making friends, playing, being with their family, going to parties etc. Special schools are set up to meet special needs not the ordinary needs of children. Once children who attend special schools leave is there some sort of special world they are going to live in or will they have to try and live in their community again? All children should be together and learn from one another - let us not go back to a world when disabled children were locked away from view....
OK rant over
I'm largely with Jo here (16). I also agree to a great extent with Niall (8).
I sometimes wonder why we pay so much attention to what parents want - given that it's not the parents who are the actual 'clients'. The same applies to MMR and other issues.
Sid
well Sid, it could have something to do with parents wanting the best for their children and quite often knowing what that is.
and given my time over again I wouldn't let anyone near either of my children with an MMR vaccine.
Fishy Chris (14) You ask why a swivel seat is not an option, citing the situation in Japan as an example. To swivel a seat requires more room as the seat is rotated. It is possible that the train companies in Japan operate a passenger carrying service rather than a "pack 'em into a cattle truck" system.
H.
admin annie @ 18, if this is a painful subject for you please don't answer, but if you feel able to give a brief explanation as to why you would reject the MMR vaccine for your children if you had your time over again I would be interested to know the reason.
Humph @ 19, that would make sense. I didn't think of it because the only lasting image I have of trains in Japan is the suburban services and a picture of people being pushed onto the train in order to cram more bodies aboard, and I doubt that's actually either relevant or prevelant now that I come to think about it.
I was just following the thought raised by the letter read out on the programme, really. As with the "why don't we have double-decker trains?" question that surfaces all the time, to which the answer is given as "because they wouldn't fit through the tunnels and bridges", I suspected there might be a simple reason. Thanks.
Hi Chris, My younger son had the vaccine at the correct age whatever that is. He subsequently suffered from a form of word blindness which led to difficulties in spelling. He also showed some of the symptions of mild autism. Of course some symptoms are just aspects of personality rather than necessarily a sign of autism I know. He finds it difficult to relate to others of his own age and is very ordered about some aspects of life - he would never watch a series of DVDs or read a series of books out of order for example but then I would tend not to do that either. There were other things too but I won't go through the whole list.
I think my basic problem is that I subsequently went through agonies of guilt and remorse ( and I include in that nights of torrential weeping stifled in a sheet so as not to wake up my husband,) because I thought that these things MIGHT have been as a result of the vaccine in which case I had given over my child to someone who then damaged him. And of course the really awful thing is that there is no way of having a 'control', so I will never know if he would have had all these traits anyway or whether they are the result of the injection.
It really upstes me that we are not allowed the vaccines separately because then I could have had him vaccinated for mumps, which is very important for boys, and not bothered with the others since the measles vaccine gives little protection,and geman measles is generally a mild thing these days in the west. I have never understood why the NHS is NOT prepared to give parents the choice of having these things separately.
My sister, who is currently living in America where her son had to have a measles vaccination certificate before being allowed into school had opted out of the MMR before she went there and she paid to have a private measles injection done.
admin annie @ 22, thank you. I am sorry for asking you to bring that to the front of your mind, and I very much hope your son finds the place in life where he is happy and is able to be himself to his fullest potential. I'd add that not being like everyone else isn't a cause of shame or a necessarily a drawback in the long term, though it may be a more difficult row to hoe. All power to him, maybe he'll be one of the rare geniuses of the world, manymany of whom have been unlike other people in a way that now looks like part of the autistic spectrum (thinking of Nikola Tesla here, I have to admit, but he isn't the only example by any means).
I agree that I can think of no reason not to make separate innoculations available so that the agony of decision is removed from parents -- except of course the old one, money, and a horrid suspicion that the MMR is cheaper to administer than single innoculation.
I can also see why the NHS, which is supposed to provide *preventive* medicine as well as treating illness, is very keen to try to eliminate the pool of measles in our country by innoculating as much of the population as possible: measles used to be one of the major killer diseases, along with diphtheria and scarlet fever, which innoculations have pretty-much eliminated, like polio, as common childhood hazards. Rubella isn't particularly serious for a boy, but if someone's little boy infects his mother's pregnant friend with the disease it may kill her baby. Mumps, as you say, may be merely very unpleasant indeed for a girl, but it is serious for males at any time of life. I can understand the urge to eliminate these horrors from people's lives.
However, I feel that the way the triple-jab was steamrollered into place was both wrong-headed and, as soon as doubts had been raised, counterproductive: if they are forced into having something done to their children that they don't feel confident is beneficial or not having it done at all, many people will reject innoculation against these diseases altogether.
In fact it seems to me that parents have been put into a no-win situation: damned if they do (putting their child at risk!) and damned if they don't (ditto, plus potentially putting everyone *else's* children at risk). That seems to me to be very wrong, as well as agonising whichever way one chooses if something goes wrong.