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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 1d

This won't be everyone's experience, but for me, the financial bottleneck in buying is scraping together enough cash to pay all the bills on the day you get the keys. Even if 100% of the SDLT goes onto the price, that's £5k you don't have to find on the day.

Chaminda Jayanetti @cjayanetti.bsky.social · 2d

even for a non-first time buyer, where the impact is heavier, it's still outdone by deposit and mortgage.

at £300k, SDLT is £5k, deposit perhaps £30k, mortgage perhaps £16k a year

at £500k, SDLT is £15k, deposit let's say £50k, mortgage over £25k a year

Reposted by Matt Perks

Jimmy @thatcareersguy.bsky.social · 2d

See also the drop-off in apprenticeships for 16-18 year olds in general since 2018/19, and the subsequent proliferation of business and management level apprenticeships at Level 6 and 7 for people already in work who, frankly, don't really need them. Guess who was in charge?

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, a bit like Infant + Junior sharing a site.
I'd say one's more like that and the other is a primary school that has gradually added Y7-Y11, but I've not spent enough time there to know how integrated the two phases are.
Any shared site must make cross-over experience easier, though.

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Reposted by Matt Perks

Nature Portfolio @natureportfolio.nature.com · 2d

A paper in Nature Communication reports on a new method to produce strong, biodegradable plastic from bamboo. The bioplastic resembles oil-based plastics in strength, shapeability, and thermal stability but can biodegrade in soil within 50 days. go.nature.com/4h1xv0X 🧪

This is figure 5, which shows processability and formability of BM-plastics for diverse products.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 2d

There are two near us in Southampton / Winchester.

Also about 100 middle schools left in England. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

List of middle schools in England - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

Massive changes to some ITT bursaries.
getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/funding-and-...
Biology and Geog £26k --> £5k

Teacher training bursaries

Find out about the teacher training bursaries and scholarships available, depending on the subject you’re training to teach.

getintoteaching.education.gov.uk

Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

I think it would be fascinating to see what would happen if Y6 teachers were seeing their Y6 children again in Y7, although I'm not sure what, if anything, it would change about Y6.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

I agree this transition is a major area for improvement in our system.
I think 2. is more complex. I think it's the wrong sort of challenge. Lots of children find KS3 very difficult, whilst actually producing a lower standard of work, at least in science.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

Intriguing post about eliminating aeroplane contrails by @hannahritchie.bsky.social
I was aware they caused radiative forcing (both ways), but had no idea they were avoidable by minor re-routing.
www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/eliminatin...

Eliminating contrails from flying could be incredibly cheap

Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?

www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

Yes, I think they work harder for the grumpy ones.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

That's interesting. Don't have time to read properly now but I'm wondering (a) how successfully did they account for background factors, (b) have they properly considered the relationship between textbook use and teaching effectiveness?

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

It will be handy for astronomers if you can see all the interstellar object labels when looking at them from Mars.

James Felton @jimmfelton.bsky.social · 3d

We *may* have the first ever images of an interstellar object, taken from the surface of another world!
www.iflscience.com/interstellar...

Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Have Been Caught In Perseverance Rover Photo

People think they've found Martian images of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on NASA's website. They might be right.

www.iflscience.com

Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

The trainees I work with come back from Y5-6 astounded at how capable children are prior to Y7.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

There are 5 days of INSET offering some potential.
I'm 💯on board with this. The trainees on our programme do 1-2 days. It's enough to open their eyes to Y6 but not enough to embed what this means for Y7 and KS3.

Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 3d

We need 1000s of these in UK. There's a few, some of which have design issues to iron out, but it's the way forward in lots of places, I think.

World Bike Forward @urbanupgradeglobal.bsky.social · 3d

Further up the same Stockholm street from the clip below is another traffic-calming device: intersections where cars may cross but the design is a sidewalk with low curb. Drivers tend to inch across, some of them likely not sure if they're really supposed to be there.

Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 5d

Welsh 20 mph speed limit interesting on this. Basically, it's reduced the typical speed on a lot of urban roads from over 30 mph, to just under. Typical speeds are now what you'd expect if 30 mph limits were properly enforced. However, a few people are driving *very* slowly to actually obey the law.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

Yes, that's a nice point.
Is this insurmountable, though?
You can cut your finger off with a saw, but it can still be a useful tool if you keep your fingers out the way.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

I'm also interested in why opening and closing the fridge (in my head this is thinking about the same set of ideas on multiple occasions) is not at least associated with creativity.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

... is how we refine our search if we're getting unhelpful returns. Is this not also a thing with an LLM? e.g. prompting, "I don't understand that, can you give me some examples?"

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

We may be beyond rescuing this conversation, but I can see that coaxing a chatbot to give you an answer you're happy with is not productive. On the other hand, asking in different ways is how we handle human conversations when we don't understand each other, isn't it? And changing search terms...

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

Motivated reasoning is always hard to avoid, but I don't think I love LLMs. I worry about the potential outsourcing of intellect but I am interested in what they can and can't do.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 7d

A lot of my thinking is probably sad but it's not deliberately anti-intellectual - just a bit limited.

I don't fully dislike your metaphor. I was wondering if it had a restriction as an analogy. Sometimes the limits of similarity are interesting things to think about.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 8d

"The best way for Labour politicians to appear authentic is to avoid saying things they don’t believe"
💯👇

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 8d

New post:

"Identity Crisis"

Labour keeps trying to appeal to a lost white working class vote + alienating middle-class grads / ethnic minority voters that are a much bigger part of their coalition.

Why? And how can they rebuild their coalition more effectively?

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/i...

Identity Crisis

How Labour can rebuild their voter coalition

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Matt Perks

James Murray @james-bg.bsky.social · 8d

But that is not what the Tories have done here. Instead they’ve said ‘climate change is real, it demands a response, we’re just not going to tell you what we’d do about it’. Just tragically unserious.

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Matt Perks @dodiscimus.bsky.social · 8d

So, the repeated attempts lead to inspiration, and a decent meal?

I'm not convinced updating search terms doesn't change the ingredients you're working with but, either way, is this a bad thing?

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