Chasing that extra 0.05....

I discovered this news story yesterday online: Student loses appeal over 99.95 HSC mark, a follow up to an earlier story here.

Apparently this student has hypermobility of her wrist joint (see above photo to check out what this looks like) and was offered special provision in the form of rest breaks during the exam, and a scribe to whom she could dictate her answers. As an occupational therapist who has occasionally had to assess children with hypermobility issues in the past, my understanding is that this would be the standard form of special provision in these circumstances.

This girl declined the offer of the scribe, and challenged her score because she believed she would have achieved higher marks had she been granted a computer or extra time to complete the exam. She doesn't seem to have realised that these options would have provided her with an unfair advantage over everyone else. I'm sure most people could claim they would have scored higher marks if they had been given more time or a computer to type answers into.

I think most people get tired after writing for lengthy periods of time. People with hypermobility issues in their wrist and hand joints do fatigue more quickly than most, but to complain after having been offered assistance to prevent this seems completely over the top to me. It sounded from the article as if this girl's mother was also an extremely pushy parent.

So having achieved her not-quite-perfect HSC score, this young woman is now studying medicine at the University of Sydney. It doesn't seem she's been left at such a disadvantage by her lower than expected mark. Not sure how she'll go on some of the surgical rotations if her wrist really is as bad as she claims. And I wouldn't think her behaviour to date would leave a particularly positive impression on any potential employer.

I'm pleased that the appeal was dismissed. It was one of those stories that left me shaking my head and wondering if the world had gone mad. What kind of society are we living in, where falling 0.05 short of a perfect score is to be complained about and blamed on other people? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

And in the most bizarre news headline of the day

Woman dies after waking at own funeral.

Now that's a funeral they'll be talking about for years to come...

Looking forward to hearing the details....

....of this.

Looks like it could be good news for the public education system in Australia.

Edited to add: Provided the government can come up with some funding, that is...

Lucky lizard

On Saturday while I was out and about driving, I turned right into a busy local street.

And coming in the opposite direction (fortunately in the opposite lane to me) was one of these lizards. He wasn't sitting quietly on the concrete waiting to have his photo taken, though. He was running pretty fast. Right behind him was a dog in hot pursuit. And behind them both was a car that had slowed to a crawl to give them the right of way. If I'd been a few seconds later they would have flown out into the street I was turning right from and I probably would have squashed the poor lizard, and maybe the dog as well, flat.

Not sure what happened next although I didn't hear any brakes squealing behind me so hopefully all concerned survived.

Not quite what you expect to see as you're driving along. A bit funny to think about afterwards since I didn't kill or crash into anything. Unlike this guy who was very lucky to only crash into a few cars as he drove ten kilometres the wrong way across the Westgate Bridge and freeway in Melbourne over the weekend. Scary stuff.

QANTAS grounding

Wow. This is big news. Lots of special news broadcasts going on.

I was actually thinking earlier in the week about blogging about the ubiquitous presence of Olivia Wirth, the QANTAS media spokeswoman, on television lately. It seemed like every news bulletin, there she was getting stuck into the unions for their actions. I was wondering if she was getting a bit tired of saying the same thing over and over again.

I don't know the ins and outs of the dispute. The last time I flew anywhere was in 2005 so it hasn't really impacted on me in any way. It will be interesting to see what happens next though.

What would you think if....

....you saw this sign as you were driving on the highway??

Exotic = such animals as Bengal tigers, lions and grizzly bears. Apparently the owner (of a zoo in Ohio) let them all loose, and then shot himself. Read more here.

Of course, the animal rights campaigners are now up in arms about the decision to "shoot to kill" these animals. It seems they tried to tranquilise some of them but it wasn't working very well.

Scary stuff. I wouldn't want to be lying in bed at night worrying that these kinds of animals were roaming free in my suburb.

Steve Jobs has died....and Apples I have known....

I just heard on the radio news that Steve Jobs has died. Read about it here.

In the article, it shows a picture of Steve leaning on one of the original Apple Macintosh computers. Our family had one of these when I was growing up. I did most of my Uni assignments for my undergrad degree on it.

Not long after my husband and I were married, we bought an iMac (one of the ones that came in lots of different colours) for my post grad degree. Sadly, we had to go down the PC laptop road for a while to run the software for my research data analysis. Never quite felt right.

And as I type today, here I am on a newish iMac....

Steve really did change history with his Apple computers, didn't he?

Joy and sorrow

Tonight I was going to post about finishing this puzzle. Since I started it two days after Christmas last year, it's taken a long time to reach this point. So I was pretty excited that I was finally finished. But this evening, that doesn't seem so important anymore.

Today is a sad day for friends in our church family who have lost their little boy, Sam. You can read his story here. Sam was born with a condition called campomelic dysplasia. He lived longer than anyone expected him to. He wasn't expected to survive birth but he defied all the odds. He would have turned three in early September. We rejoice knowing that Sam is in heaven and that there will be no more tears or pain for him there, but we grieve with his family who will be missing him so much right now. Please pray for his Mum and Dad, Kate and Simon, and his big sister Faith.

And I was also sad this evening to hear the news that Margaret Olley has also died today. It seems fitting that her portrait by Ben Quilty which I blogged about here a while ago won the Archibald Prize this year. A great tribute to an amazing artist who was painting right up to when she died.

As it says in Ecclesiastes 3, "for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven." Sometimes these times just seem to all come very close together...

An insider's view of life in Japan right now

Wendy is blogging here on her family's experiences living in Japan following the massive earthquake and tsunami last week. They are not in the immediate disaster zone, but the effects are starting to be felt far beyond this.

We need to pray for the Japanese people at this time, and also those Christian missionaries in Japan seeking to minister to them. It's scary to think of such a technologically advanced and "in control" society being in a situation like this.

We're getting shorter

I was reading this in the Sun-Herald newspaper on Sunday, about how researchers believe that humans have now reached their maximum height potential due to advances in health and nutrition, and that the next generation may be the first in history to be slightly shorter than their parents.

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who is married to a 204cm tall man (that is, 6 foot 8 inches in the old measurements) I found this news somewhat comforting. I don't think I would want my kids being any taller than Chris is.

The sidebar story to this article was about a guy who was 208cm tall (6 foot 10). He talked about what the top four challenging things about being tall were. I asked Chris to guess what he said. He got three of them right. Difficulty buying clothes and shoes, insufficient leg room in plane seats and fitting through standard door frames. The fourth one was fitting into standard sized beds. I quite like beds with bed-ends on them but we are destined to never have one in our house because Chris wouldn't fit into it. As it is, he takes up quite a lot of the space on my side of the bed.

There are a couple of other irritating things about being tall which I have noticed since I met Chris. One is that people are always asking him if he plays basketball (he doesn't) and the other is that random strangers will sometimes just come up when we are out and ask how tall he is. When we first started going out, we were having dinner in a restaurant one night and a woman we'd never seen before came over to our table to ask how tall Chris was. Apparently she had had a bet going with her husband over whether Chris was taller than someone they knew so they wanted to sort out who was right. I was amused for a brief moment, then thought it was a little bit strange that he had become the subject of some stranger's dinnertime conversation. Like he was some kind of freak show or something.

It doesn't seem to happen quite as much now, or maybe I have just become more used to it all. He doesn't even look tall to me now so it actually surprises me when people comment about it. To me, that's just the size he is and it's become normal for us.

The media is not there to help. The media does not feel your pain.

Read this.

This is the best bit of journalism I have seen or read on the Christchurch earthquake.

I wish I could write blog posts like that.

Just reading....

....some of the online coverage about Ivan Henjak's sacking as coach of the Brisbane Broncos NRL football team.

I found this quote interesting:

"Henjak may have been tactically excellent but the players felt he lacked empathy. Coaching the Generation Y culture requires great sensitivity because many of them are acutely sensitive and take criticism badly."

Hmm. What is going on when the fact that people are bad at taking criticism is used to sack a coach? I thought that was his job, to provide criticism to help them improve.

It just made the players sound like a bunch of whingers. Suck it up, people. Sometimes criticism is what's required. (although maybe I should admit here that my tendency errs towards being very sensitive and upset when I am criticized).

The Gen Y angle was interesting. I don't know that this behaviour is limited to Gen Y since as I have pointed out, I am a little like this myself. My experience with Gen Y types in workplaces is that if anything, some of them can be less sensitive when it comes to things like turning up on time, pitching in to help out when others are busy and volunteering for projects. They like having lots of leave and finishing early though. Sometimes it seems to me as if they view work as just somewhere they can turn up when they're not on their overseas jaunt/hike up some snow capped mountain range/surfing trip.

Perhaps though, like the comment in the article, this is a gross overgeneralisation about the behaviour of this particular generation.