Monthly Archives: May 2009

Ideas that should exist – Twitter Toilet Roll

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There seems to be a craze of connecting bits of hardware to the Internet, and then making these devices either update Twitter, or download stuff from it. There’s everything from my own contraptions, uses for old PCs to chairs that tell the Internet when you fart. Maybe I’ve just come up with an idea that’d complement the twittering toilet…

We all know Twitter is a bit pointless, but also curiously compelling to read.

So why not have a toilet roll dispenser that, at the push of a button, prints out the latest 50 or so tweets on the Twitter timeline or your own tweet list onto some nice two-ply for you. Read the messages then wipe your bum on them and flush away!

This would also be a great way to show those spammers what you think of their “vertically oriented SEO optimization, entrepeneurial make-money-fast” help websites. The device could even filter based on some criteria so only the useless messages get printed, and then @reply to the authors with “@yourname thinks your last post was so pointless, it’s now on a piece of their toilet paper”.

And like most homebrew hardware projects, this needs to use an Arduino with at least six shields, a host PC and several miles of cat5 cabling ;-)

Have GCSEs become easier?

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Maybe, maybe not. However here’s some exam questions from the 50s.

First we have some GCE O Level  General Science:

1.   State the Principle of Archimedes, and describe
carefully an experiment you have carried out to verify
this principle.
      Explain briefly (a) why a hydrogen balloon rises,
but will eventually stop rising; (b) how a balloonist can
control the altitude of his balloon.

And then on Monday 29th of June, 1959 at 2pm until 4:30pm you might have sat the “Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham Joint Matriculation Board”‘s GCE English Language Paper A. This is a scanned image so you’ll have to follow the link.

And to finish off, how about a nice bit of algebra.

Looks quite hard and testing doesn’t it. Lots of complex words, very terse layout and zero help given to the kids sitting the exam. It’s assumed they knew what to do. Proper exam.

Let’s look at modern equivalents since they seem to take a lot of criticism. Here are comparable exams that were sat last year. They’re real GCSEs, not “applied” or a “99% coursework with token exam” course.

English Physics Maths

There’s a very different style of exam paper now. They look more like application forms than a list of questions. There are boxes for marks, the kids doing the exam know what is expected of them (making education more about knowing what’s going on, rather than guessing what you’re supposed to do), and it tells them exactly what to do – so if they do it wrong nobody can complain “well I didn’t know I only had to answer one question”.

Look at the actual questions though; I don’t think the content of exams has become easier – the same sorts of things are still being tested. The difference is that the style of questioning and the layout of the paper has been made simpler.

Of course, what we can’t see from the old papers is what the grade boundaries are and what you needed for a C grade.