You couldn’t make up this extract from a student’s essay a friend just sent me:

If the state allows one to free to earn more money he will do so regardless of others positions in society as human nature has a constant demand for more. This will inevitably lead to the notion of luxury goods, which is another step away from Hobbes’ “states of nature”

Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.

Two-thirds of respondents also thought they would own a house by the time they were 25. In reality, only 14% of homeowners are aged 25 or under.

With the rising cost of higher education hitting students hard, recent figures suggest young people will be left with more than £20,000 of debt by the end of their courses. But the poll shows today’s school children do not realise how out of pocket they will actually be: the average expected figure was just half the reality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/30/teenagers-expect-earnings-51000

Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)

Given that I’m going to vote in the UK, I next tried the EU Profiler, which is an international project that aims at providing the relevant information on party positions for all 27 member states. After evaluating a new set of another 30 items, I was presented with a fancy two-dimensional graph that shows that I should vote for the UK LibDems, although they look more like my least-bad option since the policy space around my ideal point is not exactly crowded. This is because I am luke-warm (but warm) when it comes to European Integration plus a bit of a lefty when it comes to the “socioeconomic” dimension. This dimension, however, looks a bit dodgy, because according to the map, the Tories would be ever so slightly to the left of Labour. Well, maybe they are. At least no one suggest that I should vote UKIP or BNP (who sent me a flyer the other week, suggesting that all those immigrants should leave the UK).

In a bold move I switched from British to German parties and was a little surprised to learn that I should vote New Left, which is reasonably close to my ideal point while the Liberals are rather far away. So it would seem that I suffer from a national-political personality split.

Should I vote for the Left party?!?

Still not content with the results, I returned to the wahl-o-mat and discovered that they too have teamed-up with researchers from other countries, meaning that we have apparently two competing pan-European profiler projects. So I answered a final UK-specific questionnaire and was reassured that I should indeed vote for the LibDems, though apparently for different reasons.

While their accuracy of the results might be debatable, these tools provide a lot of information and are great fun.

I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact that while each party has its own preferences, they could possibly agree on a set of four or five measures. And no, because the font size was large and time was short, they did not pay any attention to proposals supported by say the Conservatives and the Liberals which are opposed by labour.

Nonetheless, they seemed to get the basics right. Most amazingly, the whole thing was correctly labeled as a Venn diagram. Just like that, no quotation marks, no references to quirky scientists. Is the Mail where all those students with a training in formal analysis end up? Good graduates go everywhere, bad graduates … ?

Well done, junior!

“remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look almost-real, which is slightly disturbing.

Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up:

• “The peace settlement created a problem regarding Germany and Austria. What was this problem and what were its consequences?”: Germany and Austria were not content with this and were still at war with each other.
• “Why did communism spread in Central and Eastern Europe after World War Two?”: Communism spread because after world war II, Stalin came into power and was spreading communism into the other countries as he was connected to people in high places.
• ‘Putin’ is a post-communist form of government. In the long run, he’ll probably turn out to be right.
• Threats to communism in the 1950s and 1960s include the 1980 Solidarity challenge.
• ‘The aim of the 1919 peace settlement was the establishment of independent, democratic nation states. Why was this not achievable in CEE…?’ ‘They could not achieve it because of lack of transportation and route links.’