Would you buy a used essay from this man?

In response to my recent post Returning, one person attempted to submit the following comment: It’s not so simply to bring a great custom essays, especially if you are intent. I recommend you to find buy a custom essay and to be devoid from discredit that your work will be done by essay writers. Well obviously [...]

Profiting by the news

This week on August 28th, something happened that could yet change the way we think and determine what we know and how we know it. It received news coverage, but I suspect not enough. So what was this event? It was the delivery of this year’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival. It was [...]

Abolishing slavery

A few weeks ago I was listening to a competition on the radio. One of the multiple-choice questions was this. When was slavery abolished? (a) 537; (b) 1833; or (c) 1949. As I listened to this I couldn’t help wondering what the person who had assembled these options was trying to do. All of these [...]

Returning

It’s that time of year again when well-meaning people I know will say something like this to me: ‘ I expect you are now getting busy again.’ I usually nod politely and bite my lip. Well yes, we are busy, but frankly we’ve been pretty busy throughout the summer, and I expect this is true [...]

Mind your language!

Last year I wrote a post on political correctness, and mentioned the occasional attempts to sanitise our language of all possible suspect associations. In fact, I should say that I am not against being sensitive with language and avoiding expressions that are clearly offensive, particularly terms that were once used to dismiss ethnic or racial [...]

Higher education and class

In a quick follow-up to the post on this blog of last night, the Higher Education Authority has released figures that show the extent to which in Ireland the children of so-called ‘higher professionals’ (mainly doctors and lawyers) are hugely over-represented in the student body in degree programmes that lead to professional qualification. ‘Higher professionals’ [...]

Professional qualifications and postgraduate degrees

In a previous post I questioned our national attitude towards the professions (doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so forth), and asked whether we were training too many people for these careers, and whether we were getting our priorities wrong when we were valuing them (at university entry level) above the actual ‘productive’ professions of engineers, managers, [...]

Assessing aptitude

As readers of this blog will know, I am no fan of the so-called ‘points system’ in Ireland, under which applicants for university programmes are admitted in accordance with the points score they achieved on foot of their final school examination results (the Leaving Certificate). The result of this system is that the points needed [...]

The search is on!

Last year in a post I listed some of the more unusual or unexpected terms entered by people in search engines which brought them to this blog. Here are some new ones I rather liked, not least because they demonstrate a fairly zany outlook, and because I cannot imagine how some of them ever got [...]

What do we do now?

I am a fan of the actors Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. So when they both appeared in the same movie in 1990 I made sure to see it as soon as it opened. The movie is Awakenings. In summary, the plot revolves around a doctor (Williams) who discovers that a particular medication can [...]