No, just no!

Short post because I can hardly contain my disbelief:

Lia said the family wanted Bloemfontein academic Danie Krugel to be allowed to take his equipment to Dubai to search for Kerry. Krugel has developed a system that can allegedly track missing people anywhere in the world using their DNA.

Linky

I decided when I created this blog that I would not swear on this blog and keep the material relatively PG rated. The above quote, especially the bolded word, has had me this close to breaking that rule. That such a blatant fraud is now being graced with the term academic, has me quite livid. I believe that The Mercury (the newspaper this article is originally from) needs to be the recipient of a harsh email campaign at the least.

(In case you were confused Danie Krugel is in no way an academic in any generally accepted usage of the word.)

Education

I was sitting in a discussion recently with other members of staff at my faculty here at the University, in which the Dean of the faculty was providing us with some information about the general state of affairs at our University. What was well interesting to me was the following factoid he stated:

Of the 500 000 matriculants in South Africa each year, only about 2000 are African students with a C or higher in mathematics. In the process of searching for a source for this I happened on Stat’s SA’s website which has some very nice tools to analyse their data with. With this data I drew up the following chart:

Essentially I tried to calculate the percentage of each demographic group which has a Grade 12.

Quite shocking statistics. Even the white females with a grade 12, are less than 40% of the total white female population! For those other sceptical bloggers who have lamented and wondered why we have a lack of critical thinking and scepticism in this country, I think this graph gives a pretty good reason.

(And yes I know that being educated does not necessarily mean that one is immune to pseudoscience, superstition and all kinds of scams. And, of course, that not being educated, does not necessarily lead to belief in pseudoscience and superstitions. I just feel that having a good secondary education gives you the necessary tools (science, maths, and language) to critically examine different claims and beliefs.)

But beyond just posting this statistic, I want to issue a bit of a challenge to the readers of this blog (yes I know you’re out there, even those of you trying to get me to gamble online): What are you doing to improve these statistics? I honestly see education as the best and probably quickest way to improve South Africa in terms of Socio-Economic development. If we want South Africa to move from a Developing to Developed country we desperately need a educated middle class. What are you doing to make this happen?

So I would suggest to you, the reader, to try and make it an active part of your thinking to look for opportunities to improve education. Make a donation to a school or educational non-profit. Help a student with maths, science or language. Sparks someone’s interest in science or engineering. Do something, anything, to help those young enquiring minds learn something new and useful.