There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
A-levels and U-turns
The secret algorithm that penalised all students — especially those from poorer schools — shows just how little our ruling class actually believes in meritocracy, explain SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
LOOKING into the details of the now-abandoned algorithm used to predict exam results in England last week it was announced that students and teachers had squeezed a hard-fought and rapid U-turn out of the Conservative government.
The reversal of previous decisions in the A-level results fiasco in England followed earlier U-turns by both the SQA under the SNP in Scotland, and the Welsh Labour government.
In an already agonising and difficult year, the government had used an opaque algorithm that was not available for public scrutiny to predict grades for students who were unable to sit their exams due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The word algorithm here is being used to mean the use of statistics to predict and determine outcomes, rather than merely monitor and analyse distributions to better understand them. As in the old saying “lies, damn lies and statistics” — algorithms, or the systematised application of statistics, can be used to justify any political will imaginable.
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
