Yesterday, while I was at a KCC initiated conference, Eastcliff Matters author Cllr David Green published a post entitled "Failing Schools Rescue Plan". In this he explains that KCC will be taking action to make sure the lowest performing schools improve their figures on the percentage of students getting A to C grade passes at GCSE. This is a good thing but there is a limit to the work a school can do with students to help them improve academically.

He also quotes Kent Labour's Children & Families spokesman, Clive Hart, as saying "Local councils with high numbers of grammar schools are among those with poor performance figures. Kent has one of the highest numbers of grammar schools in the country." and then going on to observe that we have one of the highest counts of grammar schools. I have no firm opinion on the whole eleven plus and school selection thing but I can not help but wonder if Clive Heart is suggesting that mixing higher performers and lower performers would produce better averages (it would by force of maths alone) or that we are facing a more complete breakdown of analytical thinking.

While I would not expect many readers to be on first name terms with such phrases as "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" I would expect that common sense should indicate that just because two things follow each other that one cause the other. This would be like saying of a cow that the head causes the tail. There are clear underlying problems that are not excuses and that must be addressed before these issues go away.

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» Continue Reading: Begging the question: how did you conclude that?

I slept through the entire thing (as always) but the earthquake early this morning managed to wake all my children up. My wife tells me that the youngest did not want to go back to sleep. Bless him (I bet my wife was not thinking that at 1am).

Apparently this was the strongest quake since 1984. Fortunately no-one was reported as being hurt in Kent (as far as the early morning news reports). There is a little disagreement in the early news sources as to if the earthquake was 5.2 or 5.3 on the Richter scale.

click the "read more" link to comment and to find more links.

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» Continue Reading: Did the earth move for you too?

There is a large amount of online information about Thanet's History and Heritage. Some of it is very interesting and well written, some of it, well, it's heart is in the right place. However it is not doing so well on the inter-connectivity front so I figured what was needed was a round up of local pages.

We shall start with Ramsgate Mitch, because I had the site open in one of my tabs: "more 'Lantern' news..." and this short ditty deals with a missing lantern(?) I was not entirely clear and was not able to find the post that it was a follow up to. If anyone wants to update me then I will update this. I traced things as far as ericsgate.blogspot.com which is an invite only blog and there the trail went cold. (Just as I got to the end of writing this item I spotted a mention in an off topic comment so hopefully I'm just being blind and can edit or update shortly).

So on to other topics...

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» Continue Reading: A Carnival of Local History and Heritage

The Wikipedia is a large public encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is hoped that by having so many eyes looking at the articles that the quality will slowly improve. This appears to be largely the case.

The wikipedia has a large number of pages on the subject of Thanet and things in Thanet (such as Thanet College, The Scenic Railway and Invicta FM to name but a few). In this article I hope to give a general overview to the articles and the nature of the Wikipedia (for those who have yet to discover it).

The List of people in Thanet details an overview of famous or notable persons that lived in or visited Thanet. People include Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Gary Rhodes, Siouxsie Sioux, T.S. Eliot and a host of others.

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» Continue Reading: Wikipedia and the "Open Documentation" of Thanet

We are being asked to provide more money, each year to fund new police officers and yet it would seem that our local coppers are ill equoipped to stop thier own stuff being stolen.

"CASH, televisions and computers are some of the items stolen from Margate police station in the past five years, we can reveal."
Furniture, clothes and TVs are stolen from police station, Kent Online

If I recall there was a large investment of money made recently that was spent on PCSOs (Police Community Support Officers) instead of the regular "bobbies" we were led to believe we would get. Now we are being told that we will have to foot the bill for something we in Thanet were told would be given to Thanet.

I'm none too impressed. How do you feel?

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» Continue Reading: Are Thanet police worth the money?

Parents and teachers are today being advised that they "need to install software" to keep their children safe but are not necessarily being told of the inherent limitations of such software. The issue of Internet safety can never be dealt with exclusively with software. At best software is a tool but as with all tools it is how you use it that maters.

Keeping yourself and your children safe online is the Key Message of today. Police and Teachers all over Kent (and the whole UK for that mater) are highlighting the dangers that exist on the Internet. The most important principle of keeping your children safe remains unchanged - talk to your kids before someone else does.

Thanet has a few unique additional issues for consideration due to it's smaller size but relatively large scale of social media use. In this article I will cover the basics of Internet safety as well as some of the challenges that Thanet faces. I will also be exposing some of the myths of Internet safety.

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» Continue Reading: Software is no golden bullet - Internet safety in Thanet

At the end of last year I wrote an article entitled "What is Matt bookmarking in Thanet?" wherein I provided a listing of all the sites in my "Thanet" bookmark folder. That list of bookmarks has grown and changed as I keep an eye on what is going on in our little isle. Several months on and it reprisents a cross section of the wierd, the wonderfull and "the noted" of Thanet online.

Some links are NFSW (not safe for work) and some are most evily none discriptive. The have ended up in the folder because I noticed them for some reason. Perhaps that reason was research, perhaps not. I tend to note far more information than I can reasonably use.

Sadly this is part of the nature of "the wired world" and something I'm going to have to solve sooner or later. In the mean time here is what Matt is currently bookmarking.

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» Continue Reading: What is Matt bookmarking in Thanet now?

Thanet District Council ran the "I Love Dane Park" public consultation from Wednesday 14 February to Friday 30 March 2007 in a bid to whip up a little excitement about the park and get some direction for changes. Direction, it my cynically be suggested, that was mostly planned already. (Something I am sure Cllr. Shirley Tomlinson, or any other member, will deny vigorously).

According to the council's own website: "Results from the "I Love Dane Park" consultation show that local people want to see better lighting in the park in the future..." [SOURCE: "I Love Dane Park" - consultation results, Thanet District council website]. This work is supposedly well underway with the lighting already in place but local reports indicate otherwise.

Yesterday I took a trip tot he park on a fact finding mission and "Warning: Dane Park in Unsafe Hands?" was the result. As I mentioned at the end of that Article I went back there that night to find out more...

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» Continue Reading: Danger: Bad Lighting in Dane Park.

Yesterday I took up an invitation to to attend a "breakfast" arranged by Fathers in Thanet, a "dads group" that meets every second Saturday at the Six Bells Centre (run by KCC). While I was there I was able to talk with some of the dads there about issues that they felt were most pressing.

After I had explained "what's a blog?" by likening it to an online newspaper a number of issues were brought up.

1. That it is impossible to take a pushchair out and about with getting the wheels covered in dog poo. It was also mentioned by a number that things were made more difficult because the paths are often too narrow. Dads would like to see some councillors spending a day pushing a pushchair around Margate.

2. That Dane Park is a disgrace. I was told that not only do the lights not work but that the council ripped up the "old" swings but they have not even put in the "new" ones. Apparently the whole operation makes a mockery of the "I Love Dane Park" consultation of last summer. I went to investigate.

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» Continue Reading: Warning: Dane Park in Unsafe Hands?

My apologies to my regular and irregular commenters but I have had to activate an anti spam question while I write a more sophisticated way of filtering junk. While irritating it is less irritating than seeing six thousand links for the local blue pill. This anti spam question takes the form of a random and dead easy question that is added to the form.

It will remain until I have the time to write a sophisticated filter that can actually analyse the comment and figure out if it is spam. I could bore you with the technical and geek details (think "Bayesian methods" or the like) but the short story is that I have something in mind. Until then, sadly, you have to answer a stupid question to post a comment.

Sorry.

Love Letters to Margate is the project of a trio of young artists that could be sending ripples through the established order of things. Each of the three artists behind Love Letters to Margate are 25 or under and they are shaking things up a bit. The exhibit which starts on Valentines Day was created without any local authority arts funding, council commissions or other "arts money" what-so-ever.

Kate Limond, Selina Tolfree and BJ Fisher-Smith are the young artists who are showing Thanet artists that art need not be tied ever decreasing "arts funding". There was no waiting for Thanet District Council to commission work and the trio have not felt the need to wait for an expensive gallery before showing what they can do. As a result "Love Letters to Margate" opens at the Sandy-Wiches cafe, Cliftonville, on Valentines Day.

"It's quite fashionable to malign Margate (yes, we mean you, Sir Bob), and it is too easy to get sucked into Margate-bashing.", says the trio. "Moreover, we think art should be as accessible as possible and in your face, especially if you can have a cup of tea at the same time."

The main focus of the exhibition is to present a different view of Margate.

I contacted Kate to find out more...

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» Continue Reading: Art in Margate: Inside Thanet's New Big Thing.

You may not have realised it yet but blogs (such as this one) have the power to set the agenda and it's not just the writers that have the power. Readers have an equal power and part to play in bringing councilors to heal. This might sound amazing but it is really just common sense.

There is only one kind of voter that a candidate for Thanet Council is going to worry about and it is not the ones that are already exposing a party line. Those guys are already well entrenched in their chosen ideology and are a simply "safe votes" that are of little or no concern to a potential council leaders campaign. The ones that the fight is over are known as "swing votes".

A swing vote is a vote that might be cast in any direction and it is these that make the final decision. Election campaigns are all about the swing vote. There is a second vote that scares the potential councilor even more and that is the revived vote.

Many hundreds of thousands of people do not vote. Not ever. When a demographic that normally does not vote gets politically "enlivened" anything could happen, all bets are off and even "safe seats" are no longer safe.

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» Continue Reading: The Thanet Blogger Vote. See Grown Men Beg! Make Sandy Ezikiel & Co Fight For Your Vote.

This Saturday saw the first in what promises to be a long line of enjoyable social experiments. My wife and I hosted a "Bring and Give" party and as far as I know it was the first of it's kind. It went very well and to everyone's benefit too.

The idea was a simple one - guests arrive with something to give. We left this as vague as possible so that the something might be a few words of encouragement or armfuls of items. This stuff could be things you purchased specially or things such as books, DVDs and videos) that you have but probably don't use any more.

These items would probably be greatly enjoyed by other people. Take for example a DVD, Video, CD or Book. There is a good chance that you started watching, reading or listening soon after you obtained it. After that it went on a shelf where many times it is simply left to gather dust with the collection of films and books where we gaze over them from time to time thinking "seen it".

Once at the party everyone was free to help themselves to any of the items on the table, taking home whatever one wished. We made sure the selection was suitably wide by making sure the table was loaded with items before we started. So at all times there plenty of choice and variety or quality items.

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» Continue Reading: An interesting exchange