Showing posts with label cheating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cheating. Show all posts
Wednesday 3 April 2024
Sunday 11 February 2024
Friday 7 April 2023
Saturday 10 December 2022
Friday 23 September 2022
Monday 31 January 2022
Wednesday 27 January 2021
Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Why do we value lies more than lives? We know that certain falsehoods kill people. Some of those who believe such claims as “coronavirus doesn’t exist”, “it’s not the virus that makes people ill but 5G”, or “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” fail to take precautions or refuse to be vaccinated, then contract and spread the virus. Yet we allow these lies to proliferate.
We have a right to speak freely. We also have a right to life. When malicious disinformation – claims that are known to be both false and dangerous – can spread without restraint, these two values collide head-on. One of them must give way, and the one we have chosen to sacrifice is human life. We treat free speech as sacred, but life as negotiable. When governments fail to ban outright lies that endanger people’s lives, I believe they make the wrong choice.
Any control by governments of what we may say is dangerous, especially when the government, like ours, has authoritarian tendencies. But the absence of control is also dangerous. In theory, we recognise that there are necessary limits to free speech: almost everyone agrees that we should not be free to shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre, because people are likely to be trampled to death. Well, people are being trampled to death by these lies. Surely the line has been crossed?
Those who demand absolute freedom of speech often talk about “the marketplace of ideas”. But in a marketplace, you are forbidden to make false claims about your product. You cannot pass one thing off as another. You cannot sell shares on a false prospectus. You are legally prohibited from making money by lying to your customers. In other words, in the marketplace there are limits to free speech. So where, in the marketplace of ideas, are the trading standards? Who regulates the weights and measures? Who checks the prospectus? We protect money from lies more carefully than we protect human life.
I believe that spreading only the most dangerous falsehoods, like those mentioned in the first paragraph, should be prohibited. A possible template is the Cancer Act, which bans people from advertising cures or treatments for cancer. A ban on the worst Covid lies should be time-limited, running for perhaps six months. I would like to see an expert committee, similar to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament.
While this measure would apply only to the most extreme cases, we should be far more alert to the dangers of misinformation in general. Even though it states that the pundits it names are not deliberately spreading false information, the new Anti-Virus site www.covidfaq.co might help to tip the balance against people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.
But how did these claims become so prominent? They achieved traction only because they were given a massive platform in the media, particularly in the Telegraph, the Mail and – above all – the house journal of unscientific gibberish, the Spectator. Their most influential outlet is the BBC. The BBC has an unerring instinct for misjudging where debate about a matter of science lies. It thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians. As the conservationist Stephen Barlow argues, science denial is destroying our societies and the survival of life on Earth. Yet it is treated by the media as a form of entertainment. The bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime.
Interestingly, all but one of the journalists mentioned on the Anti-Virus site also have a long track record of downplaying and, in some cases, denying, climate breakdown. Peter Hitchens, for example, has dismissed not only human-made global heating, but the greenhouse effect itself. Today, climate denial has mostly dissipated in this country, perhaps because the BBC has at last stopped treating climate change as a matter of controversy, and Channel 4 no longer makes films claiming that climate science is a scam. The broadcasters kept this disinformation alive, just as the BBC, still providing a platform for misleading claims this month, sustains falsehoods about the pandemic.
Ironies abound, however. One of the founders of the admirable Anti-Virus site is Sam Bowman, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). This is an opaquely funded lobby group with a long history of misleading claims about science that often seem to align with its ideology or the interests of its funders. For example, it has downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and argued against smoking bans in pubs and plain packaging for cigarettes. In 2013, the Observer revealed that it had been taking money from tobacco companies. Bowman himself, echoing arguments made by the tobacco industry, has called for the “lifting [of] all EU-wide regulations on cigarette packaging” on the grounds of “civil liberties”. He has also railed against government funding for public health messages about the dangers of smoking.
Some of the ASI’s past claims about climate science – such as statements that the planet is “failing to warm” and that climate science is becoming “completely and utterly discredited” – are as idiotic as the claims about the pandemic that Bowman rightly exposes. The ASI’s Neoliberal Manifesto, published in 2019, maintains, among other howlers, that “fewer people are malnourished than ever before”. In reality, malnutrition has been rising since 2014. If Bowman is serious about being a defender of science, perhaps he could call out some of the falsehoods spread by his own organisation.
Lobby groups funded by plutocrats and corporations are responsible for much of the misinformation that saturates public life. The launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, that champions herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims, was hosted – physically and online – by the American Institute for Economic Research. This institute has received money from the Charles Koch Foundation, and takes a wide range of anti-environmental positions.
It’s not surprising that we have an inveterate liar as prime minister: this government has emerged from a culture of rightwing misinformation, weaponised by thinktanks and lobby groups. False claims are big business: rich people and organisations will pay handsomely for others to spread them. Some of those whom the BBC used to “balance” climate scientists in its debates were professional liars paid by fossil-fuel companies.
Over the past 30 years, I have watched this business model spread like a virus through public life. Perhaps it is futile to call for a government of liars to regulate lies. But while conspiracy theorists make a killing from their false claims, we should at least name the standards that a good society would set, even if we can’t trust the current government to uphold them.
Why do we value lies more than lives? We know that certain falsehoods kill people. Some of those who believe such claims as “coronavirus doesn’t exist”, “it’s not the virus that makes people ill but 5G”, or “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” fail to take precautions or refuse to be vaccinated, then contract and spread the virus. Yet we allow these lies to proliferate.
We have a right to speak freely. We also have a right to life. When malicious disinformation – claims that are known to be both false and dangerous – can spread without restraint, these two values collide head-on. One of them must give way, and the one we have chosen to sacrifice is human life. We treat free speech as sacred, but life as negotiable. When governments fail to ban outright lies that endanger people’s lives, I believe they make the wrong choice.
Any control by governments of what we may say is dangerous, especially when the government, like ours, has authoritarian tendencies. But the absence of control is also dangerous. In theory, we recognise that there are necessary limits to free speech: almost everyone agrees that we should not be free to shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre, because people are likely to be trampled to death. Well, people are being trampled to death by these lies. Surely the line has been crossed?
Those who demand absolute freedom of speech often talk about “the marketplace of ideas”. But in a marketplace, you are forbidden to make false claims about your product. You cannot pass one thing off as another. You cannot sell shares on a false prospectus. You are legally prohibited from making money by lying to your customers. In other words, in the marketplace there are limits to free speech. So where, in the marketplace of ideas, are the trading standards? Who regulates the weights and measures? Who checks the prospectus? We protect money from lies more carefully than we protect human life.
I believe that spreading only the most dangerous falsehoods, like those mentioned in the first paragraph, should be prohibited. A possible template is the Cancer Act, which bans people from advertising cures or treatments for cancer. A ban on the worst Covid lies should be time-limited, running for perhaps six months. I would like to see an expert committee, similar to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament.
While this measure would apply only to the most extreme cases, we should be far more alert to the dangers of misinformation in general. Even though it states that the pundits it names are not deliberately spreading false information, the new Anti-Virus site www.covidfaq.co might help to tip the balance against people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.
But how did these claims become so prominent? They achieved traction only because they were given a massive platform in the media, particularly in the Telegraph, the Mail and – above all – the house journal of unscientific gibberish, the Spectator. Their most influential outlet is the BBC. The BBC has an unerring instinct for misjudging where debate about a matter of science lies. It thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians. As the conservationist Stephen Barlow argues, science denial is destroying our societies and the survival of life on Earth. Yet it is treated by the media as a form of entertainment. The bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime.
Interestingly, all but one of the journalists mentioned on the Anti-Virus site also have a long track record of downplaying and, in some cases, denying, climate breakdown. Peter Hitchens, for example, has dismissed not only human-made global heating, but the greenhouse effect itself. Today, climate denial has mostly dissipated in this country, perhaps because the BBC has at last stopped treating climate change as a matter of controversy, and Channel 4 no longer makes films claiming that climate science is a scam. The broadcasters kept this disinformation alive, just as the BBC, still providing a platform for misleading claims this month, sustains falsehoods about the pandemic.
Ironies abound, however. One of the founders of the admirable Anti-Virus site is Sam Bowman, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). This is an opaquely funded lobby group with a long history of misleading claims about science that often seem to align with its ideology or the interests of its funders. For example, it has downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and argued against smoking bans in pubs and plain packaging for cigarettes. In 2013, the Observer revealed that it had been taking money from tobacco companies. Bowman himself, echoing arguments made by the tobacco industry, has called for the “lifting [of] all EU-wide regulations on cigarette packaging” on the grounds of “civil liberties”. He has also railed against government funding for public health messages about the dangers of smoking.
Some of the ASI’s past claims about climate science – such as statements that the planet is “failing to warm” and that climate science is becoming “completely and utterly discredited” – are as idiotic as the claims about the pandemic that Bowman rightly exposes. The ASI’s Neoliberal Manifesto, published in 2019, maintains, among other howlers, that “fewer people are malnourished than ever before”. In reality, malnutrition has been rising since 2014. If Bowman is serious about being a defender of science, perhaps he could call out some of the falsehoods spread by his own organisation.
Lobby groups funded by plutocrats and corporations are responsible for much of the misinformation that saturates public life. The launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, that champions herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims, was hosted – physically and online – by the American Institute for Economic Research. This institute has received money from the Charles Koch Foundation, and takes a wide range of anti-environmental positions.
It’s not surprising that we have an inveterate liar as prime minister: this government has emerged from a culture of rightwing misinformation, weaponised by thinktanks and lobby groups. False claims are big business: rich people and organisations will pay handsomely for others to spread them. Some of those whom the BBC used to “balance” climate scientists in its debates were professional liars paid by fossil-fuel companies.
Over the past 30 years, I have watched this business model spread like a virus through public life. Perhaps it is futile to call for a government of liars to regulate lies. But while conspiracy theorists make a killing from their false claims, we should at least name the standards that a good society would set, even if we can’t trust the current government to uphold them.
Saturday 23 January 2021
Cheating on online exams
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
COVID-19 has made in-person exam proctoring impossible and so normal safeguards have disappeared. My inbox is full of anguished emails from university students across Pakistan bewailing the use of unfair and unethical means by their class fellows. Upon combining these complaints with those of my colleagues in various universities, and adding in my own online teaching experience, a frighteningly dismal picture emerges.
Almost every university student in this country cheats. Perhaps the actual figure is lower (80-90 per cent?) but it’s hard to tell. Many students say they are reluctant and would opt for honesty if there was a level playing field. But exercising virtue brings bad grades or even failure. Rare is the student with strong moral conviction — or perhaps lack of opportunity — who is not complicit.
A system full of holes is easy to beat. Not regarded as a significant moral crime, cheating was plentiful even in the days of in-person classes. But with online exams, the bottom has dropped out. Knowing their paychecks will be unaffected, many teachers don’t care what their students do. If one is somehow caught, cheating can always be deemed to be that student’s fault. After all, the pathways to cheating are so many.
Consider: while taking an exam the home-bound student supposedly sits facing his/her laptop camera without access to books, notes, or smartphone. Correspondingly, the teacher is supposed to be eagle-eyed, watching many students simultaneously on Zoom or MsTeams. Neither supposition is true. For example moving slightly out of the camera’s field of view allows the student to copy the question and insert it into the Google search bar of that laptop or a hidden smartphone. The answer pops up even before he/she fully finishes typing.
What of a question which Google cannot answer? Such slightly clever questions can indeed be devised by a conscientious professor. One shared with me how that worked out with her class of 30. In an exam none of her students got any question right. But, upon inspection, it turned out that every wrong answer belonged to one of six near-identical sets. Conclusion: the students were either sitting in the same room or had created WhatsApp groups with members messaging each other during the exam.
From a frustrated student who emailed me from an engineering university in Karachi, I learned something brand new after which I explored the matter further. Fact: there exists a plethora of commercial companies that will get you the required answer for almost every exam question. Among them are study aids Chegg, Quizlet, Course Hero and Brainly.
The ones I tried out with physics and math problems give instant answers. All you need to do is cut and paste the exam question into the indicated box. These answer services use artificial intelligence and operate without human intervention. While not cheap, they are affordable. According to my informant, students pool in to buy a subscription and then share answers over WhatsApp. More expensive are answer services staffed by human expert essay writers. The student need provide only basic information such as the topic and some course materials.
Special automated proctoring services, hired by overseas educational institutions, can catch cheaters who are taking their exam at home. These services block browsers from accessing forbidden websites, check to see if the student has contacted a friend or answer service, verify identity and geographical location, and see if the student is looking at flash cards or boards, etc. Some can even detect Bluetooth devices and suspicious movements of the test-takers’ head, keystrokes, and eyes.
Although such proctoring services probably have some value overseas, their utility in Pakistan is doubtful and they are not used. Apart from the cost, they also assume that a student has a quiet room, wide-angle webcam, and stable internet connection. This excludes rural areas but even in cities the last condition is not easily fulfilled.
Can any online exam work in these circumstances? The answer is: yes. A one-on-one oral exam over Skype or Zoom is the only totally safe method. But this is tedious for large classes and checks only a small aspect of his or her learning. To my knowledge, only a few university teachers use it.
Despite difficulties in evaluating students, online university education has worked reasonably well in some countries. Indeed, there are distinct advantages in going digital: an instructor’s recorded lectures can be rewound and reviewed at will for self-paced learning, students can ask questions online without feeling intimidated, and learning is available 24 hours a day. Additionally, a wealth of information and knowledge is just a click away and helps a student understand difficult points.
Why then is online learning failing so miserably in Pakistan? Why has fancy 21st-century education gadgetry not excited our students’ imagination? Why don’t our academic environments sparkle with energy? Two obvious reasons stare at us. First, the generally uninspiring online lectures delivered by teachers. Second, most students and many teachers have insufficient mastery over English to usefully engage with internet learning materials.
But a more serious, much deeper reason underlies this failure. Pakistan’s education system gives importance only to getting high grades, not to actually learning a subject. Even a good teacher — and these are few and far between — cannot make a student study, read books, meet schedules, and take responsibility. Real learning is purely voluntary. Largely a result of childhood training, it cannot be forced upon students. There is an age-old adage: education is all about learning to learn. The internet and Google have made this clear as never before. Every student today has good grades but only a few actually learn while in college or university.
Although our student body is hyper religious and regular in prayer, almost all are perfectly comfortable with cheating. But online testing cannot work unless cheating is viewed for what it is — a white-collar crime. Students willing to experiment, question, model, and wrestle with a problem alone can benefit from 21st-century online education. The bottom line: Pakistan’s education system must change direction. It must seek to create a proactive mindset and an ethical community.
COVID-19 has made in-person exam proctoring impossible and so normal safeguards have disappeared. My inbox is full of anguished emails from university students across Pakistan bewailing the use of unfair and unethical means by their class fellows. Upon combining these complaints with those of my colleagues in various universities, and adding in my own online teaching experience, a frighteningly dismal picture emerges.
Almost every university student in this country cheats. Perhaps the actual figure is lower (80-90 per cent?) but it’s hard to tell. Many students say they are reluctant and would opt for honesty if there was a level playing field. But exercising virtue brings bad grades or even failure. Rare is the student with strong moral conviction — or perhaps lack of opportunity — who is not complicit.
A system full of holes is easy to beat. Not regarded as a significant moral crime, cheating was plentiful even in the days of in-person classes. But with online exams, the bottom has dropped out. Knowing their paychecks will be unaffected, many teachers don’t care what their students do. If one is somehow caught, cheating can always be deemed to be that student’s fault. After all, the pathways to cheating are so many.
Consider: while taking an exam the home-bound student supposedly sits facing his/her laptop camera without access to books, notes, or smartphone. Correspondingly, the teacher is supposed to be eagle-eyed, watching many students simultaneously on Zoom or MsTeams. Neither supposition is true. For example moving slightly out of the camera’s field of view allows the student to copy the question and insert it into the Google search bar of that laptop or a hidden smartphone. The answer pops up even before he/she fully finishes typing.
What of a question which Google cannot answer? Such slightly clever questions can indeed be devised by a conscientious professor. One shared with me how that worked out with her class of 30. In an exam none of her students got any question right. But, upon inspection, it turned out that every wrong answer belonged to one of six near-identical sets. Conclusion: the students were either sitting in the same room or had created WhatsApp groups with members messaging each other during the exam.
From a frustrated student who emailed me from an engineering university in Karachi, I learned something brand new after which I explored the matter further. Fact: there exists a plethora of commercial companies that will get you the required answer for almost every exam question. Among them are study aids Chegg, Quizlet, Course Hero and Brainly.
The ones I tried out with physics and math problems give instant answers. All you need to do is cut and paste the exam question into the indicated box. These answer services use artificial intelligence and operate without human intervention. While not cheap, they are affordable. According to my informant, students pool in to buy a subscription and then share answers over WhatsApp. More expensive are answer services staffed by human expert essay writers. The student need provide only basic information such as the topic and some course materials.
Special automated proctoring services, hired by overseas educational institutions, can catch cheaters who are taking their exam at home. These services block browsers from accessing forbidden websites, check to see if the student has contacted a friend or answer service, verify identity and geographical location, and see if the student is looking at flash cards or boards, etc. Some can even detect Bluetooth devices and suspicious movements of the test-takers’ head, keystrokes, and eyes.
Although such proctoring services probably have some value overseas, their utility in Pakistan is doubtful and they are not used. Apart from the cost, they also assume that a student has a quiet room, wide-angle webcam, and stable internet connection. This excludes rural areas but even in cities the last condition is not easily fulfilled.
Can any online exam work in these circumstances? The answer is: yes. A one-on-one oral exam over Skype or Zoom is the only totally safe method. But this is tedious for large classes and checks only a small aspect of his or her learning. To my knowledge, only a few university teachers use it.
Despite difficulties in evaluating students, online university education has worked reasonably well in some countries. Indeed, there are distinct advantages in going digital: an instructor’s recorded lectures can be rewound and reviewed at will for self-paced learning, students can ask questions online without feeling intimidated, and learning is available 24 hours a day. Additionally, a wealth of information and knowledge is just a click away and helps a student understand difficult points.
Why then is online learning failing so miserably in Pakistan? Why has fancy 21st-century education gadgetry not excited our students’ imagination? Why don’t our academic environments sparkle with energy? Two obvious reasons stare at us. First, the generally uninspiring online lectures delivered by teachers. Second, most students and many teachers have insufficient mastery over English to usefully engage with internet learning materials.
But a more serious, much deeper reason underlies this failure. Pakistan’s education system gives importance only to getting high grades, not to actually learning a subject. Even a good teacher — and these are few and far between — cannot make a student study, read books, meet schedules, and take responsibility. Real learning is purely voluntary. Largely a result of childhood training, it cannot be forced upon students. There is an age-old adage: education is all about learning to learn. The internet and Google have made this clear as never before. Every student today has good grades but only a few actually learn while in college or university.
Although our student body is hyper religious and regular in prayer, almost all are perfectly comfortable with cheating. But online testing cannot work unless cheating is viewed for what it is — a white-collar crime. Students willing to experiment, question, model, and wrestle with a problem alone can benefit from 21st-century online education. The bottom line: Pakistan’s education system must change direction. It must seek to create a proactive mindset and an ethical community.
Wednesday 31 October 2018
The ICC and cricket boards are not serious about spot fixing
Alan Bull in The Guardian
If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence.
Seems like it was Mark Wood’s bad luck to draw a short straw last week. The day after al-Jazeera released the second part of their investigation into spot-fixing in cricket Wood was put up to talk to the press. He said the accusations reminded him of “the boy who cried wolf”. Maybe Wood always used to fall asleep before his parents made it to the end of the book. Right now, five months after the first part of al-Jazeera’s expose, we are still waiting to see whether the danger they are shouting about really exists, but Wood, like everyone else in English cricket, will hope this story does not end with everyone looking the other way while the wolf eats up the sheep.
Al-Jazeera’s second film was more grounded than the first. It’s built around the fact that its source, Aneel Munawar, accurately forecast the score in 25 out of the 26 passages of play in 15 different international matches. Al-Jazeera says independent analysis shows the odds he could have done that by guesswork alone are 9.2m to one. The case is not perfect; the one big problem with it is al-Jazeera’s lawyers do not seem to trust it enough to let its journalists release the names of the players involved. But there is enough evidence there now that the story should not be swiftly dismissed.
Which, unfortunately, seems to be what some of the authorities want to do. The England and Wales Cricket Board said al-Jazeera’s information was “poorly prepared and lacks clarity and corroboration”. The tone of its response was all wrong. If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence. The ECB’s statement seemed to put it on the other side of this problem to the journalists working to expose it. Since then the conversation around the investigation has turned into a slanging match about which side is more credible than the other.
Al-Jazeera did not help by throwing back blows of its own. “The ICC, together with certain national cricket boards and their supporters in the media, has reacted to our documentary with dismissals and attacks on the messenger,” it said. “We are particularly struck by what appears to be a refusal from certain quarters to even accept the possibility that players from Anglo-Saxon countries could have engaged in the activities exposed by our programme.” That attitude may have been common once and there may still be lingering hints of it around now. But anyone who holds it is a fool.The Spin: sign up and get our weekly cricket email.
At this point the question is not whether people are spot-fixing cricket matches but who is doing it and how often. In the last 10 years bowlers, batsmen, and captains, umpires, coaches, groundstaff and administrators have been caught and banned for fixing, and they have come from England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. You should not need any more evidence that this is a universal problem. But, if you do, Cricinfo published some last week. It was the story of a corrupt approach made to the Canadian wicketkeeper Hamza Tariq at the 2011 World Cup.
Tariq explains how a friend of a friend invited him out for drinks. The man was a cricketer, which is how they got to know each other. When they went out a second time the man brought three more friends along. They bought Tariq dinner and drinks, and offered, later in the evening, to fix him up with a woman. It was only later, after an officer from the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit intervened, that Tariq realised they were grooming him. Tariq was a fringe player from an associate team but last I looked the weaknesses those fixers were trying to identify and exploit – fondness for drink, money, sex – are pretty common in countries where they play Test cricket, too.
That 2011 World Cup, it seems now, fell right in the middle of an era when spot-fixing was rife. Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif, Mervyn Westfield, Lou Vincent, Danish Kaneria: all those cases happened in 2010 and 2011. It was also around that time, al-Jazeera says, that Munawar first became involved in fixing.
It also says the ICC has known about Munawar ever since, which is one reason why it is reluctant to hand over all the information it has but would prefer to give it to Interpol instead. “We have become increasingly concerned at the ICC’s ability and resolve to police the game.”
It is not the only one to say this. Remember, Brendon McCullum criticised the ACU’s “very casual approach” in 2016. The head of the ACU, Alex Marshall, argues the unit is much stronger now and the sport has never invested so many resources in fighting corruption. But then, at the same time Marshall is saying that, the Pakistan Cricket Board has appointed Wasim Akram to its new cricket committee. Akram, you may remember, was one of a number of cricketers investigated by the Qayyum report into fixing in the 1990s. The Qayyum report concluded he “cannot be said to be above suspicion”.
The PCB chairman, Ehsan Mani, was able to justify the appointment by arguing that other players who were named in the Qayyum report were allowed to carry on working in international cricket. And he is right. One of them, Mushtaq Ahmed, was England’s spin-bowling coach for years, even though Qayyum concluded “there are sufficient grounds to cast strong doubt” on him, too. At this point indignant words do not do much to demonstrate anyone’s commitment to taking the problem seriously enough.
If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence.
Seems like it was Mark Wood’s bad luck to draw a short straw last week. The day after al-Jazeera released the second part of their investigation into spot-fixing in cricket Wood was put up to talk to the press. He said the accusations reminded him of “the boy who cried wolf”. Maybe Wood always used to fall asleep before his parents made it to the end of the book. Right now, five months after the first part of al-Jazeera’s expose, we are still waiting to see whether the danger they are shouting about really exists, but Wood, like everyone else in English cricket, will hope this story does not end with everyone looking the other way while the wolf eats up the sheep.
Al-Jazeera’s second film was more grounded than the first. It’s built around the fact that its source, Aneel Munawar, accurately forecast the score in 25 out of the 26 passages of play in 15 different international matches. Al-Jazeera says independent analysis shows the odds he could have done that by guesswork alone are 9.2m to one. The case is not perfect; the one big problem with it is al-Jazeera’s lawyers do not seem to trust it enough to let its journalists release the names of the players involved. But there is enough evidence there now that the story should not be swiftly dismissed.
Which, unfortunately, seems to be what some of the authorities want to do. The England and Wales Cricket Board said al-Jazeera’s information was “poorly prepared and lacks clarity and corroboration”. The tone of its response was all wrong. If the ECB wants to demonstrate how serious it is about tackling spot-fixing there are better ways to do it than shouting down the people who are presenting the evidence. The ECB’s statement seemed to put it on the other side of this problem to the journalists working to expose it. Since then the conversation around the investigation has turned into a slanging match about which side is more credible than the other.
Al-Jazeera did not help by throwing back blows of its own. “The ICC, together with certain national cricket boards and their supporters in the media, has reacted to our documentary with dismissals and attacks on the messenger,” it said. “We are particularly struck by what appears to be a refusal from certain quarters to even accept the possibility that players from Anglo-Saxon countries could have engaged in the activities exposed by our programme.” That attitude may have been common once and there may still be lingering hints of it around now. But anyone who holds it is a fool.The Spin: sign up and get our weekly cricket email.
At this point the question is not whether people are spot-fixing cricket matches but who is doing it and how often. In the last 10 years bowlers, batsmen, and captains, umpires, coaches, groundstaff and administrators have been caught and banned for fixing, and they have come from England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. You should not need any more evidence that this is a universal problem. But, if you do, Cricinfo published some last week. It was the story of a corrupt approach made to the Canadian wicketkeeper Hamza Tariq at the 2011 World Cup.
Tariq explains how a friend of a friend invited him out for drinks. The man was a cricketer, which is how they got to know each other. When they went out a second time the man brought three more friends along. They bought Tariq dinner and drinks, and offered, later in the evening, to fix him up with a woman. It was only later, after an officer from the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit intervened, that Tariq realised they were grooming him. Tariq was a fringe player from an associate team but last I looked the weaknesses those fixers were trying to identify and exploit – fondness for drink, money, sex – are pretty common in countries where they play Test cricket, too.
That 2011 World Cup, it seems now, fell right in the middle of an era when spot-fixing was rife. Mohammad Amir, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif, Mervyn Westfield, Lou Vincent, Danish Kaneria: all those cases happened in 2010 and 2011. It was also around that time, al-Jazeera says, that Munawar first became involved in fixing.
It also says the ICC has known about Munawar ever since, which is one reason why it is reluctant to hand over all the information it has but would prefer to give it to Interpol instead. “We have become increasingly concerned at the ICC’s ability and resolve to police the game.”
It is not the only one to say this. Remember, Brendon McCullum criticised the ACU’s “very casual approach” in 2016. The head of the ACU, Alex Marshall, argues the unit is much stronger now and the sport has never invested so many resources in fighting corruption. But then, at the same time Marshall is saying that, the Pakistan Cricket Board has appointed Wasim Akram to its new cricket committee. Akram, you may remember, was one of a number of cricketers investigated by the Qayyum report into fixing in the 1990s. The Qayyum report concluded he “cannot be said to be above suspicion”.
The PCB chairman, Ehsan Mani, was able to justify the appointment by arguing that other players who were named in the Qayyum report were allowed to carry on working in international cricket. And he is right. One of them, Mushtaq Ahmed, was England’s spin-bowling coach for years, even though Qayyum concluded “there are sufficient grounds to cast strong doubt” on him, too. At this point indignant words do not do much to demonstrate anyone’s commitment to taking the problem seriously enough.
Thursday 20 September 2018
Let’s face it. Our university factory has failed to deliver on its promises
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
In any other area it would be called mis-selling. Given the sheer numbers of those duped, a scandal would erupt and the guilty parties would be forced to make amends. In this case, they’d include some of the most eminent politicians in Britain.
But we don’t call it mis-selling. We refer to it instead as “going to uni”. Over the next few days, about half a million people will start as full-time undergraduates. Perhaps your child will be among them, bearing matching Ikea crockery and a fleeting resolve to call home every week.
They are making one of the biggest purchases of their lives, shelling out more on tuition fees and living expenses than one might on a sleek new Mercedes, or a deposit on a London flat. Many will emerge with a costly degree that fulfils few of the promises made in those glossy prospectuses. If mis-selling is the flogging of a pricey product with not a jot of concern about its suitability for the buyer, then that is how the establishment in politics and in higher education now treat university degrees. The result is that tens of thousands of young graduates begin their careers having already been swindled as soundly as the millions whose credit card companies foisted useless payment protection insurance on them.
Rather than jumping through hoop after hoop of exams and qualifications, they’d have been better off with parents owning a home in London. That way, they’d have had somewhere to stay during internships and then a source of equity with which to buy their first home – because ours is an era that preaches social mobility, even while practising a historic concentration of wealth. Our new graduates will learn that the hard way.
To say as much amounts to whistling in the wind. With an annual income of £33bn, universities in the UK are big business, and a large lobby group. They are perhaps the only industry whose growth has been explicitly mandated by prime ministers of all stripes, from Tony Blair to Theresa May. It was Blair who fed the university sector its first steroids, by pledging that half of all young Britons would go into higher education. That sweeping target was set with little regard for the individual needs of teenagers – how could it be? Sub-prime brokers in Florida were more exacting over their clients’ circumstances. It was based instead on two promises that have turned out to be hollow.
Promise number one was that degrees mean inevitably bigger salaries. This was a way of selling tuition fees to voters. Blair’s education secretary, David Blunkett, asked: “Why should it be the woman getting up at 5 o’clock to do a cleaning job who pays for the privileges of those earning a higher income while they make no contribution towards it?” When David Cameron’s lot wanted to jack up fees, they claimed a degree was a “phenomenal investment”.
Both parties have marketed higher education as if it were some tat on a television shopping channel. Across Europe, from Germany to Greece, including Scotland, university education is considered a public good and is either free or cheap to students. Graduates in England, however, are lumbered with some of the highest student debt in the world.
Yet shove more and more students through university and into the workforce and – hey presto! – the wage premium they command will inevitably drop. Research shows that male graduates of 23 universities still earn less on average than non-graduates a whole decade after going into the workforce.
Britain manufactures graduates by the tonne, but it doesn’t produce nearly enough graduate-level jobs. Nearly half of all graduates languish in jobs that don’t require graduate skills, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In 1979, only 3.5% of new bank and post office clerks had a degree; today it is 35% – to do a job that often pays little more than the minimum wage.
Promise number two was that expanding higher education would break down class barriers. Wrong again. At the top universities that serve as gatekeepers to the top jobs, Oxbridge, Durham, Imperial and others, private school pupils comprise anywhere up to 40% of the intake. Yet only 7% of children go to private school.Factor in part-time and mature students, and the numbers from disadvantaged backgrounds are actually dropping. Nor does university close the class gap: Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows that even among those doing the same subject at the same university, rich students go on to earn an average of 10% more each year, every year, than those from poor families.
Far from providing opportunity for all, higher education is itself becoming a test lab for Britain’s new inequality. Consider today’s degree factory: a place where students pay dearly to be taught by some lecturer paid by the hour, commuting between three campuses, yet whose annual earnings may not amount to £9,000 a year – while a cadre of university management rake in astronomical sums.
Thus is the template set for the world of work. Can’t find an internship in politics or the media in London that pays a wage? That will cost you more than £1,000 a month in travel and rent. Want to buy your first home? In the mid-80s, 62% of adults under 35 living in the south-east owned their own home. That has now fallen to 32%. Needless to say, the best way to own your own home is to have parents rich enough to help you out.
Over the past four decades, British governments have relentlessly pushed the virtues of skilling up and getting on. Yet today wealth in Britain is so concentrated that the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, believes “inheritance is probably the most crucial factor in determining a person’s overall wealth since Victorian times”.
Margaret Thatcher’s acolytes promised to create a classless society, and they were quite right: Britain is instead becoming a caste society, one in which where you were born determines ever more where you end up.
For two decades, Westminster has used universities as its magic answer for social mobility. Ministers did so with the connivance of highly paid vice-chancellors, and in the process they have trashed much of what was good about British higher education. What should be sites for speculative inquiry and critical thinking have instead turned into businesses that speculate on property deals, criticise academics who aren’t publishing in the right journals – and fail spectacularly to engage with the serious social and economic problems that confront the UK right now. As for the graduates, they largely wind up taking the same place in the queue as their parents – only this time with an expensive certificate detailing their newfound expertise.
For everyone’s sake, let us declare this experiment a failure. It is high time that higher education was treated again as a public good, as Jeremy Corbyn recognises with his pledge to scrap tuition fees. But Labour also needs to expand vocational education. And if it really wants to increase social mobility and reduce unfairness, it will need to come up with tax policies fit for the age of inheritance.
In any other area it would be called mis-selling. Given the sheer numbers of those duped, a scandal would erupt and the guilty parties would be forced to make amends. In this case, they’d include some of the most eminent politicians in Britain.
But we don’t call it mis-selling. We refer to it instead as “going to uni”. Over the next few days, about half a million people will start as full-time undergraduates. Perhaps your child will be among them, bearing matching Ikea crockery and a fleeting resolve to call home every week.
They are making one of the biggest purchases of their lives, shelling out more on tuition fees and living expenses than one might on a sleek new Mercedes, or a deposit on a London flat. Many will emerge with a costly degree that fulfils few of the promises made in those glossy prospectuses. If mis-selling is the flogging of a pricey product with not a jot of concern about its suitability for the buyer, then that is how the establishment in politics and in higher education now treat university degrees. The result is that tens of thousands of young graduates begin their careers having already been swindled as soundly as the millions whose credit card companies foisted useless payment protection insurance on them.
Rather than jumping through hoop after hoop of exams and qualifications, they’d have been better off with parents owning a home in London. That way, they’d have had somewhere to stay during internships and then a source of equity with which to buy their first home – because ours is an era that preaches social mobility, even while practising a historic concentration of wealth. Our new graduates will learn that the hard way.
To say as much amounts to whistling in the wind. With an annual income of £33bn, universities in the UK are big business, and a large lobby group. They are perhaps the only industry whose growth has been explicitly mandated by prime ministers of all stripes, from Tony Blair to Theresa May. It was Blair who fed the university sector its first steroids, by pledging that half of all young Britons would go into higher education. That sweeping target was set with little regard for the individual needs of teenagers – how could it be? Sub-prime brokers in Florida were more exacting over their clients’ circumstances. It was based instead on two promises that have turned out to be hollow.
Promise number one was that degrees mean inevitably bigger salaries. This was a way of selling tuition fees to voters. Blair’s education secretary, David Blunkett, asked: “Why should it be the woman getting up at 5 o’clock to do a cleaning job who pays for the privileges of those earning a higher income while they make no contribution towards it?” When David Cameron’s lot wanted to jack up fees, they claimed a degree was a “phenomenal investment”.
Both parties have marketed higher education as if it were some tat on a television shopping channel. Across Europe, from Germany to Greece, including Scotland, university education is considered a public good and is either free or cheap to students. Graduates in England, however, are lumbered with some of the highest student debt in the world.
Yet shove more and more students through university and into the workforce and – hey presto! – the wage premium they command will inevitably drop. Research shows that male graduates of 23 universities still earn less on average than non-graduates a whole decade after going into the workforce.
Britain manufactures graduates by the tonne, but it doesn’t produce nearly enough graduate-level jobs. Nearly half of all graduates languish in jobs that don’t require graduate skills, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In 1979, only 3.5% of new bank and post office clerks had a degree; today it is 35% – to do a job that often pays little more than the minimum wage.
Promise number two was that expanding higher education would break down class barriers. Wrong again. At the top universities that serve as gatekeepers to the top jobs, Oxbridge, Durham, Imperial and others, private school pupils comprise anywhere up to 40% of the intake. Yet only 7% of children go to private school.Factor in part-time and mature students, and the numbers from disadvantaged backgrounds are actually dropping. Nor does university close the class gap: Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows that even among those doing the same subject at the same university, rich students go on to earn an average of 10% more each year, every year, than those from poor families.
Far from providing opportunity for all, higher education is itself becoming a test lab for Britain’s new inequality. Consider today’s degree factory: a place where students pay dearly to be taught by some lecturer paid by the hour, commuting between three campuses, yet whose annual earnings may not amount to £9,000 a year – while a cadre of university management rake in astronomical sums.
Thus is the template set for the world of work. Can’t find an internship in politics or the media in London that pays a wage? That will cost you more than £1,000 a month in travel and rent. Want to buy your first home? In the mid-80s, 62% of adults under 35 living in the south-east owned their own home. That has now fallen to 32%. Needless to say, the best way to own your own home is to have parents rich enough to help you out.
Over the past four decades, British governments have relentlessly pushed the virtues of skilling up and getting on. Yet today wealth in Britain is so concentrated that the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, believes “inheritance is probably the most crucial factor in determining a person’s overall wealth since Victorian times”.
Margaret Thatcher’s acolytes promised to create a classless society, and they were quite right: Britain is instead becoming a caste society, one in which where you were born determines ever more where you end up.
For two decades, Westminster has used universities as its magic answer for social mobility. Ministers did so with the connivance of highly paid vice-chancellors, and in the process they have trashed much of what was good about British higher education. What should be sites for speculative inquiry and critical thinking have instead turned into businesses that speculate on property deals, criticise academics who aren’t publishing in the right journals – and fail spectacularly to engage with the serious social and economic problems that confront the UK right now. As for the graduates, they largely wind up taking the same place in the queue as their parents – only this time with an expensive certificate detailing their newfound expertise.
For everyone’s sake, let us declare this experiment a failure. It is high time that higher education was treated again as a public good, as Jeremy Corbyn recognises with his pledge to scrap tuition fees. But Labour also needs to expand vocational education. And if it really wants to increase social mobility and reduce unfairness, it will need to come up with tax policies fit for the age of inheritance.
Tuesday 3 April 2018
India's 'cheating mafia' gets to work as school exam season hits
Vast network profits from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where university places and jobs are limited
Michael Safi in The Guardian
Michael Safi in The Guardian
Men at stalls selling schoolbooks on College Road in Kolkata at the height of India’s annual exam season Photograph: Michael Safi
Afew minutes into the final year maths exam at his Delhi high school, Raghav asked to use the bathroom. Inside, he texted pictures of the test paper he had secretly photographed to a phone number he was sent days before. Minutes later, answers materialised on the screen.
“It isn’t cheating,” insists his mother Sunita, who paid 16,000 rupees (£175) for her son to obtain the phone number. “It’s a way out.”
India’s annual exam season has gripped the country in the last month, with tens of millions of students undertaking gruelling tests to qualify for the limited slots available at Indian universities – the best of them with admission rates about one-tenth those of Oxford and Cambridge.
Also hard at work is the country’s so-called “cheating mafia”, the vast network aimed at profiting from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where, each year, an estimated 17 million people join a workforce adding only 5.5m jobs.
Last week, in the latest high-profile breach, the papers for two secondary exams were found to have been leaked on WhatsApp about 90 minutes before the tests. More than 2.8 million students in Delhi and the surrounding areas have been ordered to resit the exams later in April.
“It is mental torture,” said Kirath Kaul, 15, an east Delhi student who will be forced to sit a new maths exam this month. “I was spending all day study [for the last one] and even getting up at night to prepare.”
‘A broken education system’
Cheating on exams in India is endemic, organised and elaborate. In Bihar, one of the poorest states in the country, more than 1,000 students were expelled for cheating in February.
Last year, the student who topped the state in one subject, arts, turned out to be a 42-year-old man. The student with the highest arts score in 2016 was stripped of her certificate after arousing suspicions, including by telling a TV interviewer she believed political science was the study of cooking.
In 2015, Bihar made global headlines when videos emerged showing parents literally scaling a five-storey building to pass answers to their children taking exams inside. This year, to ensure probity, the state installed CCTV cameras in exam halls and made every student leave their shoes and socks at the door.
“This is very much the sign of a broken education system,” says Yamini Aiyar, the chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research.
She blames the widespread fraud on a cocktail of intense pressure to earn a university qualification and a system that has been focused on building new schools, but unconcerned about what happens inside them.
“Studies tell us that on average about half of students that get to Standard 5 can read a Standard 2 text,” she says.
Incentives for teachers and administrators are also askew, she adds, measuring success and doling out promotions based on what percentage of children in a school or district are passing their exams. Officials are incentivised either to assist in the cheating or overlook it.
Sunita, who asked for her name to be changed for legal reasons, came into contact with India’s “cheating mafia” through the exam coaching centre Raghav have been attending before his final exams last year.
“The teacher said, your son is very weak ma’am,” she recalls. “My son was not interested in studying and I didn’t want him to repeat the year.”
The private tutor offered to connect with someone who could send Raghav the answers for his economics and mathematics papers. Nobody on either end of the phone would know each others’ identity. She signed up with four or five other families.
“It is totally common,” she says. And lucrative. “All of us probably paid this man about 60,000 rupees.”
India’s cheating industry has proliferated alongside others kinds of organised fraud such as call-centre scams, and is driven by a similar mentality, says Snigdha Poonam, author of a new book about the ambition and guile of Indian youth.
Social mobility in India is improving, according to surveys. But not fast enough to match the expectations of a generation reared on social media, western pop culture, and promises that India’s time has finally come. “The same forces drive young Indians into entering these economies built on fraud,” she says.
“[It is] the lack of legitimate options in the formal job market, a blurring of lines between honest and dishonest work, an ability to identify market gaps for services, and the resourcefulness to turn them into avenues for easy money.”
With the aid of his cheating hotline, Raghav passed all his subjects. He is now taking private photography classes and aims to make a career with his camera. Kaul, meanwhile, is studying hard, preparing to take her maths exam again on 25 April.
“But I’m worried the cheaters will perform better [than me],” she says. “I work very hard, but people only see the result – not that someone has cheated.”
Afew minutes into the final year maths exam at his Delhi high school, Raghav asked to use the bathroom. Inside, he texted pictures of the test paper he had secretly photographed to a phone number he was sent days before. Minutes later, answers materialised on the screen.
“It isn’t cheating,” insists his mother Sunita, who paid 16,000 rupees (£175) for her son to obtain the phone number. “It’s a way out.”
India’s annual exam season has gripped the country in the last month, with tens of millions of students undertaking gruelling tests to qualify for the limited slots available at Indian universities – the best of them with admission rates about one-tenth those of Oxford and Cambridge.
Also hard at work is the country’s so-called “cheating mafia”, the vast network aimed at profiting from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where, each year, an estimated 17 million people join a workforce adding only 5.5m jobs.
Last week, in the latest high-profile breach, the papers for two secondary exams were found to have been leaked on WhatsApp about 90 minutes before the tests. More than 2.8 million students in Delhi and the surrounding areas have been ordered to resit the exams later in April.
“It is mental torture,” said Kirath Kaul, 15, an east Delhi student who will be forced to sit a new maths exam this month. “I was spending all day study [for the last one] and even getting up at night to prepare.”
‘A broken education system’
Cheating on exams in India is endemic, organised and elaborate. In Bihar, one of the poorest states in the country, more than 1,000 students were expelled for cheating in February.
Last year, the student who topped the state in one subject, arts, turned out to be a 42-year-old man. The student with the highest arts score in 2016 was stripped of her certificate after arousing suspicions, including by telling a TV interviewer she believed political science was the study of cooking.
In 2015, Bihar made global headlines when videos emerged showing parents literally scaling a five-storey building to pass answers to their children taking exams inside. This year, to ensure probity, the state installed CCTV cameras in exam halls and made every student leave their shoes and socks at the door.
“This is very much the sign of a broken education system,” says Yamini Aiyar, the chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research.
She blames the widespread fraud on a cocktail of intense pressure to earn a university qualification and a system that has been focused on building new schools, but unconcerned about what happens inside them.
“Studies tell us that on average about half of students that get to Standard 5 can read a Standard 2 text,” she says.
Incentives for teachers and administrators are also askew, she adds, measuring success and doling out promotions based on what percentage of children in a school or district are passing their exams. Officials are incentivised either to assist in the cheating or overlook it.
Sunita, who asked for her name to be changed for legal reasons, came into contact with India’s “cheating mafia” through the exam coaching centre Raghav have been attending before his final exams last year.
“The teacher said, your son is very weak ma’am,” she recalls. “My son was not interested in studying and I didn’t want him to repeat the year.”
The private tutor offered to connect with someone who could send Raghav the answers for his economics and mathematics papers. Nobody on either end of the phone would know each others’ identity. She signed up with four or five other families.
“It is totally common,” she says. And lucrative. “All of us probably paid this man about 60,000 rupees.”
India’s cheating industry has proliferated alongside others kinds of organised fraud such as call-centre scams, and is driven by a similar mentality, says Snigdha Poonam, author of a new book about the ambition and guile of Indian youth.
Social mobility in India is improving, according to surveys. But not fast enough to match the expectations of a generation reared on social media, western pop culture, and promises that India’s time has finally come. “The same forces drive young Indians into entering these economies built on fraud,” she says.
“[It is] the lack of legitimate options in the formal job market, a blurring of lines between honest and dishonest work, an ability to identify market gaps for services, and the resourcefulness to turn them into avenues for easy money.”
With the aid of his cheating hotline, Raghav passed all his subjects. He is now taking private photography classes and aims to make a career with his camera. Kaul, meanwhile, is studying hard, preparing to take her maths exam again on 25 April.
“But I’m worried the cheaters will perform better [than me],” she says. “I work very hard, but people only see the result – not that someone has cheated.”
Sunday 3 September 2017
Saturday 25 February 2017
Now a degree is a commodity, no wonder more students are cheating
Poppy Noor in The Guardian
It was reported this week that the Department for Education is considering new penalties for students who plagiarise essays. This comes after an investigation by the Times in 2016 found that 50,000 students had been caught cheating on their university degrees in the three years before.
Students were paying anywhere between £100 and £6,750 for an essay, and this widespread cheating has led to suggestions that criminal records could be dished out to offenders. But with a generation now forking out in excess of £50,000 for their degrees, is anybody surprised that a university education now feels like another asset that can simply be bought?
Since the 1990s, when Tony Blair brought in tuition fees, a number of changes have been introduced that have made the decision of whether or not to go to university more about your ability to afford it (or at least not be put off by the cost) and less about your desire to learn.
Fees have increased – in the most extreme cases nearly tenfold – since they were introduced, and bursaries have been removed for the poorest students, meaning that those without family money will inevitably end up paying more, as it will take them longer to pay off their loans.
This sends a very clear message to students: your money is just as important as your mind. The right grades aren’t enough to get you into university. You need the cash (or loan) to pay for it in the first place. Buying essays – any form of plagiarism – is clearly wrong, but it feels like the logical extension of an education that comes with a high and rising price tag.
Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot at university. I went because I loved the subject that I wanted to study, I was hungry for more knowledge, and I wanted to self-improve. But for a lot of people, that’s not what university is for. The government itself, since the introduction of tuition fees, has justified them on the basis that students will end up earning more if they go to university – and so, for many, a degree feels like a route to a career rather than an opportunity to learn.
Employers have bought into the idea that university can simply be used as a proxy for employability, as is shown by the minimum 2:1 threshold required for most jobs, despite this not necessarily correlating with better performance at work. For students who feel they’re just buying a rubber stamp, what’s the point in putting in the effort?
If you plan to purchase, rather than partake in your degree, purely so you can meet that minimum 2:1 requirement, there are many ways to blag your way through it that require much less than a critical mind. You read your pre-decided list of writers, normally white male authors who have been on the list for years – often past the time when their novels felt culturally relevant or their theories genuinely held water. In fact, you don’t even have to read these writers – you can just go on SparkNotes and find a summary. Then you make some mundane criticisms that have probably been made by many others before – because, for some reason, no matter how many times students write the same essay on how Marx didn’t anticipate the resilience of capitalism, it’s apparently still worth saying. And then you move on to the next essay.
When large amounts of money are necessary to attend university, and degrees are described more and more often simply as a route to a profitable job, it’s not surprising that a pure interest in education is jettisoned.
It’s for this reason that I find the sudden dismay about all this cheating a bit of a joke. Of course action should be taken – cheating is a serious offence. But before we lament a situation in which thousands of students waste their time and opportunities by plagiarising rather than actually learning, we might want to ask how we got into this position in the first place. The £50,000 cost of a degree, rather than the comparative pennies spent on stolen essays, might be the first place to look.
Wednesday 28 September 2016
Britain is no paragon of sporting virtue – let’s stop pretending otherwise
Mary Dejevsky in The Guardian
It started on the Iffley Road running track in Oxford, with Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. It continued with Chariots of Fire, the filmed version of the same, and it was reinforced in the national consciousness with London 2012, the glorious festival of sport that everyone thought was going to be a disaster, but wasn’t.
Along the way came England’s victory (over Germany) in the 1966 World Cup, whose anniversary has been celebrated this year with mawkish nostalgia. And when the medals kept on coming, in this year’s Olympics and the Paralympics in Rio, the self-image of the UK as a highly successful and, of course, squeaky clean sporting nation seemed secure.
That image has been thoroughly discredited this week with the departure, by mutual consent, of the new England football manager, Sam Allardyce, after a mere 67 days. He was the subject of a Panorama exposé 10 years ago – and even I, as a football ignoramus, had caught the drift – which helped to explain why this “obvious” candidate for the England job had never been offered it before.
But now there he was, on camera, courtesy of a classic journalistic sting (by the Daily Telegraph), setting out how the rules of the transfer market could be circumvented, and considering a nice little supplement to his salary.
Nor, it would appear, is he alone in regarding the Football Association’s rules as an inconvenience to be challenged rather than a standard to be upheld. At least eight more guardians of the supposedly “national” game, it is claimed, agree with Sam Allardyce that ethics are for others upright or unambitious enough to heed them. The real pros know different.
If dubious practices were unique to football, that would be one thing. After all, everyone knows – do they not? – that there is far too much money sloshing round in the game generally, not least in England’s Premier League – money that is taking ticket prices out of reach of ordinary families and stifling the growth of homegrown talent.
We also know about the rot that set in long ago at Fifa, the headquarters of international football, so it is hardly surprising if something putrid also contaminates national organisations – including, alas, our own.
But it is not just English football, is it? Football may be the richest and most egregious example, but revelations in recent weeks suggest that question marks hang over other areas of UK sport. Nothing illegal, mind, nothing so crude as the“state-sponsored doping” we so loudly deplore in others, but little tweaks here and there, and especially close readings of the rule book that identify the opportunities between the lines.
So it is that the stellar success story of our times, Britain’s emergence as a world leader in cycling, looks slightly less glorious now that hacked reports have revealed the chemical help some cyclists were receiving – quite legally, it must be stressed – in order, as the people’s hero and multiple Olympic gold harvester Bradley Wiggins put it, to ensure “a level playing field”. Is a doctor’s note now to be considered part of sportsmanship?
And on the eve of the Rio Paralympics, there were reports of unhappiness within the British camp over allegations that classifications were being – how shall we say? – manipulated in the pursuit of more medals. We are sticklers for observing the letter of the law, it would seem, where the spirit of sport is concerned. But the story is starting to look a little different.
The shock here – if it is a shock – should not be that UK sports officials are as adept at playing the system as anyone else – within but sometimes also outside the law. It should rather be the persistence of the myth that only foreigners (especially Russians) cheat, and that British sport across the board – just because it is British – is cleaner, more honest and, yes, more innocent than everyone else’s. It isn’t.
Thursday 18 August 2016
This Olympics hysteria shows that Britain has turned Soviet
Simon Jenkins in The Guardian
Team GB's Olympics success shows UK can thrive outside EU, say Brexiters
No surprise, it is working. The best coaches were hired. Talent was ruthlessly selected and nurtured. Money was lavished on research, equipment, clothing and peak performance timing. The French and Germans noted that the British are doing far better in Rio than at recent world championships. Here clearly is one field in which British state investment knows how to pick winners.
Iain Dyer, Britain’s star cycling coach, talks like a Formula One boss. “We peaked in our research and innovation. The helmets were the 2012 ones, but the bikes are new, and different components and strategies are used for the first time.” Aerodynamic suits with magic chevrons are everywhere.
Rod Carr of UK Sport is equally open. He relates how the mix of penalties and incentives since Sydney led, in the case of gymnastics and swimming, to each sport thinking afresh and coming back with an investable proposition.
Athletes are unique among public servants in enjoying a hypothecated tax to give themselves up to £28,000 a year “to concentrate on training”. Poor countries can eat their hearts out.
I am thrilled by personal success, by Mo Farah’s 10,000m, Charlotte Dujardin’s horsemanship, Wayde van Niekerk’s 400m and Simone Biles’ mesmerising gymnastics. They are a joy to watch. But I do not mind their nationality. The nationalisation of sport – the hamfisted draping in the union jack after breasting the tape – so clearly diminishes the individual achievement. Ever since its introduction by Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, such chauvinism has infused democratic as well as authoritarian regimes. Olympic Games are like wars, foreign adventures offering regimes a salve to domestic woes. Athletes are recruited to the flag like soldiers. They are declared “heroes” and showered with honours.
For years, the Olympics were corrupted by shamateurism and drugs. The IOC, with British representatives present, knew perfectly well what was happening, but turned a blind eye. The most honest gold medal of recent years should have gone to the British media, alone in relentlessly revealing corruption and cheating in international sport. Yet it was accused by Britain’s Lord Coe of “a declaration of war on my sport”. When this was seen to be rubbish, he did not resign. He was declared an expert on sports ethics and appointed to the IOC. The Russians who blew the whistle on athletics doping are now forced to hide for their lives somewhere in America. These are the realities that should sit alongside the “heroism” of today’s games.
None of this explains the BBC, which has brought Rio close to a British National party awayday. The Chinese had it right. They used to dedicate their medals to the Chinese Communist party and people, who after all had paid for them. As for the accusations against Britain’s cyclists, the response is simple. Who needs to cheat with drugs when medals go to money? Perhaps the best answer is for countries that have no money to be allowed drugs, to level the playing field. They are cheaper.
‘I was touched, like everyone, by the Jason Kenny/Laura Trott ‘golden love bond’, but how many times did I need to see them in tears?’ Photograph: David Davies/PA
Australia’s cycling star, Anna Meares, said of Britain’s triumphant cyclists: “They’ve got it together … but, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what they’ve got together.” The French and Germans were heard to murmur likewise. One interpretation could be that murky word “cheating”, although Meares strongly denied that she had ever suggested this. Given the recent history of the Olympics and the fierce pressure on British athletes, the accusation is pardonable. I doubt if it is true. What Britain “got together” was the money. Is that cheating?
I have intermittently enjoyed the Olympics on television. Mostly it is hours of flatulent BBC staff killing time by interviewing one another, interspersed with a few seconds of mostly baffling hysterics. Clare Balding appears in perpetual shriek: “Oh my God, I think our great British paint is drying faster than the Russian and the Colombian paint – but we must await a decision from the judges.”
Then on Tuesday night the BBC went bananas. At 10 o’clock we were denied important news – of Anjem Choudary’s conviction, of swingeing tax fines and of possible “special status” for Britain outside the EU. Instead we had to sit for an hour and a half, waiting for three minutes of BBC pandemonium as British cyclists yet again pedalled fast. We had to watch while the BBC aired pictures of its own commentary box punching the air and howling. These were not so much journalists as state cheerleaders. I was touched, like everyone, by the Jason Kenny/Laura Trott “golden love bond”, but how many times did I need to see them in tears? It was a total collapse of news values, the corporation peddling tabloid chauvinist schlock.
Throughout the cold war, Soviet bloc nations used sport as a proxy for economic success. With the connivance of the International Olympic Committee, they turned what used to be an amateur sport into the equivalent of a national defence force, hurling money and status at their athletes while the IOC turned the Games into a lavish field of the cloth of gold – at some poor taxpayer’s expense.
The west used to ridicule the communists for this. Their athletes were derided as state employees, civil servants and cheats. Of course many took drugs. Winning was what mattered to the Soviets, the state media being monopolised to convince their people that their “system” was better.
Since Atlanta in 1996, Britain has followed suit. The poor performance of British athletes was considered by John Major as a comment on his government. He demanded medals, and lots of them. The subsidy to “elite” sport was increased tenfold, from £5m to £54m, while popular sports facilities were closing. Money was directed specifically at disciplines where individuals could win multiple medals rather than just one, away from field athletics to cycling and gymnastics. It worked. The medals tally at Sydney 2000 rose from 15 to 28.
A UK Sport graph tracks the precise link between government grant (dressed up as lottery money) and Olympic medals. By 2012, this had risen to £264m, delivering 65 medals (just over £4m a medal). For Rio it has been £350m for the Olympics and Paralympics, with the target that Britain become “the first host nation to eclipse our London 2012 medal haul”.
Australia’s cycling star, Anna Meares, said of Britain’s triumphant cyclists: “They’ve got it together … but, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what they’ve got together.” The French and Germans were heard to murmur likewise. One interpretation could be that murky word “cheating”, although Meares strongly denied that she had ever suggested this. Given the recent history of the Olympics and the fierce pressure on British athletes, the accusation is pardonable. I doubt if it is true. What Britain “got together” was the money. Is that cheating?
I have intermittently enjoyed the Olympics on television. Mostly it is hours of flatulent BBC staff killing time by interviewing one another, interspersed with a few seconds of mostly baffling hysterics. Clare Balding appears in perpetual shriek: “Oh my God, I think our great British paint is drying faster than the Russian and the Colombian paint – but we must await a decision from the judges.”
Then on Tuesday night the BBC went bananas. At 10 o’clock we were denied important news – of Anjem Choudary’s conviction, of swingeing tax fines and of possible “special status” for Britain outside the EU. Instead we had to sit for an hour and a half, waiting for three minutes of BBC pandemonium as British cyclists yet again pedalled fast. We had to watch while the BBC aired pictures of its own commentary box punching the air and howling. These were not so much journalists as state cheerleaders. I was touched, like everyone, by the Jason Kenny/Laura Trott “golden love bond”, but how many times did I need to see them in tears? It was a total collapse of news values, the corporation peddling tabloid chauvinist schlock.
Throughout the cold war, Soviet bloc nations used sport as a proxy for economic success. With the connivance of the International Olympic Committee, they turned what used to be an amateur sport into the equivalent of a national defence force, hurling money and status at their athletes while the IOC turned the Games into a lavish field of the cloth of gold – at some poor taxpayer’s expense.
The west used to ridicule the communists for this. Their athletes were derided as state employees, civil servants and cheats. Of course many took drugs. Winning was what mattered to the Soviets, the state media being monopolised to convince their people that their “system” was better.
Since Atlanta in 1996, Britain has followed suit. The poor performance of British athletes was considered by John Major as a comment on his government. He demanded medals, and lots of them. The subsidy to “elite” sport was increased tenfold, from £5m to £54m, while popular sports facilities were closing. Money was directed specifically at disciplines where individuals could win multiple medals rather than just one, away from field athletics to cycling and gymnastics. It worked. The medals tally at Sydney 2000 rose from 15 to 28.
A UK Sport graph tracks the precise link between government grant (dressed up as lottery money) and Olympic medals. By 2012, this had risen to £264m, delivering 65 medals (just over £4m a medal). For Rio it has been £350m for the Olympics and Paralympics, with the target that Britain become “the first host nation to eclipse our London 2012 medal haul”.
Team GB's Olympics success shows UK can thrive outside EU, say Brexiters
No surprise, it is working. The best coaches were hired. Talent was ruthlessly selected and nurtured. Money was lavished on research, equipment, clothing and peak performance timing. The French and Germans noted that the British are doing far better in Rio than at recent world championships. Here clearly is one field in which British state investment knows how to pick winners.
Iain Dyer, Britain’s star cycling coach, talks like a Formula One boss. “We peaked in our research and innovation. The helmets were the 2012 ones, but the bikes are new, and different components and strategies are used for the first time.” Aerodynamic suits with magic chevrons are everywhere.
Rod Carr of UK Sport is equally open. He relates how the mix of penalties and incentives since Sydney led, in the case of gymnastics and swimming, to each sport thinking afresh and coming back with an investable proposition.
Athletes are unique among public servants in enjoying a hypothecated tax to give themselves up to £28,000 a year “to concentrate on training”. Poor countries can eat their hearts out.
I am thrilled by personal success, by Mo Farah’s 10,000m, Charlotte Dujardin’s horsemanship, Wayde van Niekerk’s 400m and Simone Biles’ mesmerising gymnastics. They are a joy to watch. But I do not mind their nationality. The nationalisation of sport – the hamfisted draping in the union jack after breasting the tape – so clearly diminishes the individual achievement. Ever since its introduction by Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, such chauvinism has infused democratic as well as authoritarian regimes. Olympic Games are like wars, foreign adventures offering regimes a salve to domestic woes. Athletes are recruited to the flag like soldiers. They are declared “heroes” and showered with honours.
For years, the Olympics were corrupted by shamateurism and drugs. The IOC, with British representatives present, knew perfectly well what was happening, but turned a blind eye. The most honest gold medal of recent years should have gone to the British media, alone in relentlessly revealing corruption and cheating in international sport. Yet it was accused by Britain’s Lord Coe of “a declaration of war on my sport”. When this was seen to be rubbish, he did not resign. He was declared an expert on sports ethics and appointed to the IOC. The Russians who blew the whistle on athletics doping are now forced to hide for their lives somewhere in America. These are the realities that should sit alongside the “heroism” of today’s games.
None of this explains the BBC, which has brought Rio close to a British National party awayday. The Chinese had it right. They used to dedicate their medals to the Chinese Communist party and people, who after all had paid for them. As for the accusations against Britain’s cyclists, the response is simple. Who needs to cheat with drugs when medals go to money? Perhaps the best answer is for countries that have no money to be allowed drugs, to level the playing field. They are cheaper.
Tuesday 9 August 2016
Why we need in-game penalties for slow over rates
LIAM CROMAR in Cricinfo
If the paying public isn't to feel short-changed, administrators need to consider effective ways of disciplining teams
It's easy to dismiss complaints about slow over rates as the grumblings of a few non-representative malcontents. It's probably also true that many spectators are not bothered - at least not beyond brief shoulder-shrugging. Corruption, dead pitches, and (mis-) governance are certainly more pressing issues. Yet that isn't to say it's not a problem that shouldn't be fixed.
The way Tests are marketed works against spectators realising their loss. One is encouraged to buy a ticket for a day, not for the minimum number of overs scheduled for the day. The overs lost are almost imperceptible, unless one is keeping an eye on the progress. Even when overs are lost, the percentage of cricket reduced seems trivial. Three overs out of 90, the number that England failed to bowl on the first day at Lord's against Pakistan, is a mere 3.33%. Much ado about nothing?
A moment's consideration will, however, reveal the unacceptability of such short-changing. Would, for example, all in attendance at a football match be content if the players downed tools after 87 minutes? Would cinema-goers put up with the last four minutes of a two-hour film being chopped off? Would the audience applaud were an orchestra to pack up without playing the last few bars of the symphony?
Officially, 90 overs is a minimum, albeit more of a theoretical, aspirational minimum than a literal minimum. That it is well within the realms of possibility is highlighted by the fact that not only do recreational cricketers regularly fit 90 overs into an afternoon but also that it isn't completely unheard of for international teams to meet the target.
Six hours of 15 overs each should therefore not be viewed as too taxing, even without making use of the extra half-hour, which is supposedly a reserve, only to be used if needed. Unfortunately, it now appears that the extra time is viewed as an entitlement rather than an option to be used only in extremis. To run past the official close time may be regarded as a misfortune; to fail to complete the overs in the extra time should be regarded as carelessness.
Worse, it smacks of discourtesy. In much the same way that certain tins of chocolates appear to have quietly scaled down over the years, over rates are another example of almost invisible under-provision: the amount paid for the product stays the same, but less of the product is handed over.
To put some figures on this, take the example of England's 87 for 90 at Lord's. A top-price ticket cost £90, meaning one over held a value of £1. Therefore a ticket holder would have failed to see anything for three of the pounds that he or she handed over. Three pounds may not seem like a great deal, but it's not nothing. Not everyone at Lord's is a London high-flyer awash with cash.
Would all in attendance at a football match be content if the players downed tools after 87 minutes?
Now bear in mind 29,000 were at Lord's that day. Not all would have paid £90 - some tickets were down at £60, while some will have enjoyed hospitality in private boxes - so for purposes of argument, assume that the average ticket cost was £75, meaning the average "loss" would have equated to £2.50.
Naturally, no refund was offered; none is given if even a mere 25 overs have been bowled, 27.78% of the supposed minimum, yet again highlighting the flexible nature of the word "minimum". Twenty-nine thousand multiplied by £2.50 yields a collective loss of £72,500.
So much for the financial element. However, more is at stake. On the last ball of the 87th over, Pakistan had lost their sixth wicket. Three further overs, including one from the on-song Chris Woakes, would have been engrossing watching. Of course, it's not entirely correct to imagine the hypothetical overs as being added on to the end of the day; still, the more overs bowled during the day, the more chance of action for the spectators.
It would be impractical to force players to complete the overs regardless of conditions - playing in darkness would unfairly penalise the batting side - but if players are not going to be required to complete the scheduled overs even when conditions are suitable, then an effective way of policing it needs to be found, one that stands a chance of benefiting paying viewers.
The current system of policing over rates via the threats of forfeiting match fees, or in extreme cases, banning captains, leaves much to be desired. Suspending captains, while obviously more likely to concentrate the minds of the players, is liable to be gamed. During the World T20 in 2012, when Mahela Jayawardene was in danger of incurring a suspension, Kumar Sangakkara was named as the official captain against England. Yet it quickly became apparent that Jayawardene was still in command on the field.
Furthermore, suspending the captain perversely punishes the spectators at the next game, depriving them of seeing one of the team's best players, a point that has been made before. As far as match-fee fines go, while the threat of losing 20% of a £12,000 fee might be a significant restraint for mortals, it's hard to see how it would be anything but water off an England captain's back (water down the back being a common experience in that climate), and does nothing to compensate the ticket holders. In-game penalties, with immediate application, are the way forward.
It is curious that in England the form of the game that least suffers from running slightly overtime - T20 - is the one where teams incur the heaviest immediate penalty: six runs if the 20th over has not commenced after 75 minutes. This is despite the fact that, arguably, neither the batting side nor the spectators miss out. All the necessary overs will still be bowled. If only 114 balls are delivered before the 75-minute cut-off, rather than the required 115, the net effect is only to increase the average time taken for each delivery from 39.13 seconds to 39.47. It's hard to justify a claim that the intensity would appreciably suffer without such a constraint, although, in fairness, the introduction of the countdown clock adds an extra element of tension to a crowd-pleasing format.
Test match cricket needs such an in-game penalty much more than T20 does. A five-run penalty would be an obvious first step, but since five runs rarely makes much of a difference in a Test match, that appears too minor. Another possible approach would be to inflict a ten-over delay for the new ball - or, should the umpires determine that that would unduly benefit the fielding side, grant the batsmen ten overs with a ball of their choice: the old ball, a new ball, or an un-shined ball of comparable wear.
A more radical solution would be that should the over rate in one session drop below the threshold, one fielder is suspended for the following session, forcing the team to make do with ten men. Such a penalty would wonderfully focus the minds of the fielding team, especially if the suspended fielder turned out to be their strike bowler. While spectators would be momentarily deprived of seeing that player perform, they would be treated to the extra intrigue of the batting side attempting to capitalise on their temporary significant advantage - an 11.11% reduction in fielders, excluding the keeper and bowler - as they saw fit, quite possibly through higher scoring for that session.
Something similar could be arranged if the side at fault is batting in the next session. A player could be prevented from batting during that session, thus forcing a rejig of the batting order. If nine wickets were lost and one player was currently suspended, the team would be all out.
Whichever approach is considered preferable, it is time to make over rates an in-game rather than post-game issue, for the sake of the spectators. As a noted England skipper, of sorts, was once said to say after a humbling defeat: "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." Were a few more captains to experience such sentiments, over rates and their associated debates might be relegated to the past.
Monday 28 March 2016
The Specious Logic of a TV Cricket Expert
by Girish Menon
As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts.
---Also by this writer
Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?
On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old
----
In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.
Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.
From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.
However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.
Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:
I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.
Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.
Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.
Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup.
I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.
The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.
As a regular reader of Cricinfo I started this Easter Monday holiday by reading 'Why Ramiz gets Bangladesh's goat' Jarrod Kimber's sensitive enquiry into why Bangladesh cricket fans react so vehemently to cricket commentator Ramiz Raja. Lack of quality among commentators and highly emotional responses by social media users were the conclusions drawn by Kimber. As was habitual for me I then went on to Youtube where the channel recommended that I watch a post match analysis on the India Australia WT20 cricket match played yesterday at Mohali. I clicked on the suggestion and found that it was a Pakistani TV channel show discussing the match with Brian Lara, Rashid Latif, Saqlain Mushtaq and Glenn McGrath as experts.
---Also by this writer
Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?
On Walking - Advice for a fifteen year old
----
In the programme Rashid Latif advanced a thesis that Dhoni and Yuvraj collaborated to deceive the umpire Erasmus into giving Steve Smith the Australian captain out caught behind. Rashid admitted that he indulged in similar behaviour in his playing days and recalled an instance in Sharjah when he conspired with Mushtaq Ahmed to get Dravid out in a similar fashion. Glenn McGrath then stated a fact that that the stump microphone had not detected an edge in the Smith dismissal.
Rashid Latif then commented on how a carefully cultivated image enables a cricketer to trick an umpire into giving them the benefit of doubt which enables them to get an unfair advantage in tight situations. He spoke about Gilchrist's carefully built reputation as a walker and how it helped players like him with umpires in situations when the evidence was not clear cut.
From this discussion I realised that in such a situation not using technology gives the benefitting team an unfair advantage. After all the decision to give Smith out (if he was not out?) had a game changing impact on the match with Smith being Australia's in-form batsman. At the same time I'm sure many Indian cricketers will readily admit the number of times they have been at the receiving end of bad decisions because of BCCI's refusal to use technology to help adjudicate umpiring decisions.
However, I was more worried by the specious logic used by the commentator Rashid Latif to insinuate that Dhoni and Yuvraj cheated like he used to in his playing days. Latif's false argument in the world of logic is called 'Shifting the burden of proof'. It consists of putting forward an assertion without justification, on the basis that the audience must disprove it if it is to be rejected.
Madsen Pirie in his book 'How to win every argument' gives another example to help you understand Latif's false logic:
I believe that a secret company of Illuminati has clandestinely directed world events for several hundred years. Prove to me that it isn't so.
Shifting the burden, Pirie writes, is a common fallacy on which rests the world of conspiracy theories, UFOs, monsters, Gods etc. Advocates like Latif make us the viewer accept the burden of proving that his statement is false. As a viewer I would find it difficult if not impossible to disprove his insinuation.
Also, by shifting the onus of proof Latif is able to put forward mischievous views without producing any shred of evidence. This is dishonesty.
Of course the whole programme appeared to have an anti India bias (not surprising) underpinned by the conspiracy theory that events, grounds, pitches and umpires are all collaborating to ensure that India would win the WT20 cup.
I too felt like Kimber's Bangladesh supporters and realised that the only way India can resolve this shifted burden of proof is by not winning the trophy.
The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs cricket league.
Tuesday 9 February 2016
Declare a No Ball when a batsman attempts an early run
Girish Menon from CamKerala CC
David Hopps in his
piece, 'Is
the game going to the dogs' suggests that Stuart Broad in the forthcoming
World T20 should without warning 'mankad' Kohli and Raina off successive balls.
This is his way of reminding us of the role of convention and civilised
behaviour in cricket and he implies that in its absence anarchy would prevail.
So, I decided to
look up the meaning of convention on the omniscient Google and found that one
of the meanings of convention is 'a way in which something is done'. I think it
is this definition of convention that Hopps uses to criticise Keemo Paul for
mankading Richard Ngarava in the U19 World Cup.
----Other pieces by the author
----Other pieces by the author
Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?
----
I then asked myself
what would be at the other end of the spectrum of convention and I felt the
term 'creativity' would fit the bill. Google defines creativity as ' the use of imagination or original ideas to create something'. When Keemo's act is examined from this
perspective it is a creative act, not illegal, and an imaginative way to reach
the objectives of his task.
In the history of the world, not just
cricket, whenever any creative solution is implemented, affected governments
would debate and proscribe such activity if it was not in the 'public'
interest. In the case of 'mankading' such an inquiry has been conducted by the
ICC and the act has still been deemed legal, hence the furore baffles me.
Hopps felt that it was newcomers who
failed fail to honour cricket's conventions. So I asked myself, two questions:
'Is it newcomers to cricket who
disrespect its conventions'?
and
'Are conventions in the best interests of all
participants?'
In the case of Keemo Paul, yes he is
definitely a newcomer to cricket, so probably was the original sinner Vinoo
Mankad and the other mankaders in between. I suppose these guys may have read
about the laws of cricket and how the umpire's decision should not be
questioned. As they plotted to get the opposing batsmen out, a difficult task
at the best of times, they may have noticed this anomaly between the law and
its actual practice. Being young and innocent they may have focussed on their
objectives and failed to realise the opprobrium that will befall them if they
challenged cricket's archaic anomalies.
So who makes conventions? A historical
examination of societies will reveal that conventions and practices evolve out
of the systems devised by the powerful. A history of cricket also reveals that
it's rules and conventions were determined by upper class batsmen epitomised by
the roguish W G Grace. The bowlers were the proverbial servants meant to exist
for the pleasure of batsmen. It is these servants, like the erstwhile British
colonies, who now challenge the prevalent conventions albeit legally in the
case of the mankaders.
Hopps then gives an example of queue
jumping to illustrate the catastrophe that will befall mankind if any
convention is broken. Yes, the effects of queue jumping has created havoc in India
© PA Photos
© PA Photos
Returning to mankading, I believe that cricket's
current convention enable non striking batsmen to cheat wilfully throughout an
innings and it is time for conventions keep in tandem with the laws of the
game? I actually even have a solution for the mankading problem. Declare a no
ball* and penalise the batting side every time a non striker steps out of the crease illegally. This could be
done by the third umpire while the on field umpire focuses on the bowler's
actions.
* This no ball means a one run penalty and a ball reduced from the batting side's quota.
* This no ball means a one run penalty and a ball reduced from the batting side's quota.
Tuesday 21 April 2015
UK supermarkets dupe shoppers out of hundreds of millions, says Which?
Rebecca Smithers in The Guardian
The competition regulator is to scrutinise allegations that UK supermarkets have duped shoppers out of hundreds of millions of pounds through misleading pricing tactics.
Which? has lodged the first ever super-complaint against the grocery sector after compiling a dossier of “dodgy multi-buys, shrinking products and baffling sales offers” and sending it to the Competition and Markets Authority.
The consumer group claims supermarkets are pushing illusory savings and fooling shoppers into choosing products they might not have bought if they knew the full facts.
Examples raised by Which? include Tesco flagging the “special value” of a sweetcorn sixpack when a smaller pack was proportionately cheaper, and Asda raising the individual price of a product when it was part of a multi-buy offering in order to make the deal more attractive.
Richard Lloyd, the group’s executive director, said: “Despite Which? repeatedly exposing misleading and confusing pricing tactics, and calling for voluntary change by the retailers, these dodgy offers remain on numerous supermarket shelves. Shoppers think they’re getting a bargain but in reality it’s impossible for any consumer to know if they’re genuinely getting a fair deal.”
“We’re saying enough is enough, and using one of the most powerful legal weapons in our armoury to act on behalf of consumers by launching a super-complaint to the regulator. We want an end to misleading pricing tactics and for all retailers to use fair pricing that people can trust.”
The cumulative impact of all these different pricing tactics is that it is impossible for people to know if they are getting a fair deal, the consumer group says, particularly when prices vary frequently, consumers are in a hurry or are buying numerous low value items.
About 40% of groceries in Britain are currently sold on promotion, according to the retail analysts Kantar Worldpanel. With £115bn spent on groceries and toiletries in 2013, Which? said consumers could be collectively losing out to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The right to make a super-complaint to the CMA or an industry regulator is limited to a small number of consumer bodies such as Which? and Energywatch. Once Which? has submitted its dossier to the CMA, the regulator has 90 days to respond.
As a first step the CMA could request a market study, in which it could demand further information from the supermarkets themselves, before escalating to a full-blown investigation. A decade ago Citizens Advice helped bring the payment protection insurance scandal to public attention by lodging a super-complaint with the now-defunct Office of Fair Trading.
Which? has previously made super-complaints on care homes, credit card interest rates, Northern Ireland banking, private dentistry and the Scottish legal profession.
Meanwhile, new research suggests that more than 1,400 suppliers to Britain’s supermarkets are facing collapse as the cut-throat price war takes its toll on the industry.
The number of food and beverage makers in significant financial distress has nearly doubled to 1,414 in the last year, according to insolvency practitioner Begbies Traynor.
The findings will increase the pressure on the government and the groceries code adjudicator to take action to protect suppliers and prevent large companies from delaying payments or changing agreed terms.
Examples Which? sent to the CMA
Seasonal offers: higher prices only applied out of season, when consumers are less likely to buy the item. It found a Nestle Kit Kat Chunky Collection Giant Egg was advertised at £7.49 for 10 days in January this year at Ocado, then sold on offer at £5 for 51 days.
Was/now pricing: the use of a higher “was” price when the item has been available for longer at the lower price. Acacia honey and ginger hot cross buns at Waitrose were advertised at £1.50 for just 12 days this year before going on offer at “£1.12 was £1.50” for 26 days.
Multi-buys: prices are increased on multi-buy deals so that the saving is less than claimed. Asda increased the price of a Chicago Town Four Cheese Pizza two-pack from £1.50 to £2 last year and then offered a multi-buy deal at two for £3. A single pack went back to £1.50 when the “offer” ended.
Larger pack, better value: the price of individual items in the bigger pack are actually higher. Tesco sold four cans of Green Giant sweetcorn for £2 last year, but six cans were proportionately more expensive in its “special value” pack, priced at £3.56.
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