Posts Tagged ‘University of Leeds’

The list of proposed motions for the upcoming referendum are up. And most of them are a joke. So I have decided to go through them in term and moan about what is wrong them with them.

Activities Groups’ Access to the Refectory
I support this, the union has awful communication with things like the university for the Refec and you know, their own venues department.

Affiliation to Stop the War
This union believes “to date no evidence of WMD has been found thus the reason for the initial invasion has proven to be unfounded.” No, a reason has proven to be unfounded. Anti-war campaigning does not represent the opinion of all our members, because, well, many of them don’t care. Have we not learned by now that we’re not going to do anything anyway? Millions of people have marched, but the fact is – it’s too late. The war is over, it ended years ago. Now we’re cleaning up and leaving. So what war are you going to stop?

Should this Union support a re-evaluation of the decision to close Bodington Hall?
I agree with this, Bodington was ace and I don’t know who the university were talking to when people were complaining about it. The only person I’ve found that lived there and didn’t like it was Jewish Dan. Everyone else loved it.

End the Siege in Gaza
Hmm, this is a tricky issue. It will be interesting to see what J-Soc say about this.

Do you want greater Freedom of Speech on campus?
See my previous blog post. I fully support this motion.

Should home fees apply to refugees?
A degree hardly would seem to be a little more than the basic right to education as the motion seems to suggest. There are lots of barriers for even British citizens to go to uni so I don’t think this is an especially big problem.

I.D Cards
Well, for a start it should be I.D. not I.D but that is a minor point. The more important point is that the I.D. card has already passed through parliament, it’s over, the anti I.D. card crowd lost. See my blog post about I.D. cards for my full thoughts on the subject.

Lads’ Mags
FHM isn’t porn. It’s not. Have some common sense. The photos in there are less revealing than you can buy in The Sun. Should we classify tabloid newspapers as porn too?

Mature Students Room
Because it worked so well with Mine.

No Platform Policy
Should we deny BNP members to speak on campus? Of course not. University is somewhere where you can have unprecedented freedom of speech. While I will concede you need to be careful when implementing it in wider society, we’re all educated individuals that can see a racist idea when we see it. Seriously, are you scared you will lose a debate with these guys?

Interestingly enough the motion resolves “to condemn homophobia, racism, sexism and religious prejudice from the University Union. To permanently exclude anyone found to be promoting such prejudice from the University Union.” I’m guessing that this condemnation and exclusion will not apply to the opinions expressed within the Muslim community to which proposer Hind is a part of.

A university campus should be a bastion for freedom of expression, censorship here is a very dark route to go down.

NUS Governance Review
I can’t really comment as I haven’t read the whitepaper. According to the motion it seems something we do indeed want to reject but obviously, this will contain some bias.

Stop the Royal Bank of Scotland/Natwest funding climate change
Societies struggle enough to find sponsorship let alone if we add even more companies to the list of companies banned. And yet again I am going to bring up the point that even if this motion goes through, we will still be selling Coca Cola products in the union. It’s pick and choose which companies you can bother to make a moral stance against.

Should our university accept from military companies and carry out their research?
The University of Leeds is research led. A large proportion of research money comes from military purposes. I notice the motion fails to provide an alternative as to where we can get research money from. Which we want to increase if we want to increase the reputation of our university.

Should the Union Support the respect for the basic liberties of its members?
No. Seriously, what a stupid motion title. This in no way describes what the motion is about and is simply aiming at getting people to say “yes” before they even know what they are voting for.

The motion resolves “to give an allowance as regards to space and facilities for peaceful demonstration that would raise awareness of and stress these basic fundamental liberties.” Which you already have. Book space outside the union like everyone else does. The union is here to support student activities in their campaigns not to run them for you.

Should Landlords Be Held To Account?
This I do very much agree with. Although house hunting happening in January is a country wide problem so the NUS as a whole really needs to get involved. That is not to say we can’t make a difference here in Leeds none the less though.

Should LUU revive The Old Bar?
What a fantastic motion, this would should be passed :D.

Stopping the sale of cigarettes
If people want to kill themselves we might as well take the money for it. Smokers are addicted – they will go somewhere else for their cigarettes.

Working whilst Learning
This I do agree with. If a lecture got moved to Monday morning now I would be screwed. I just couldn’t do it.

The first referendum of last academic year resolved to give us freedom of speech on campus.

The second referendum banned it.

That amused me. Basically we had one motion protecting freedom of speech after the trouble betwen J-Soc and the PSG. Then we had another motion in the referedum after about descrimination but it also covered religion and suggested that if anyone felt offended, there was a problem.

Now in the first referendum of this year there is a proposed motion “Do you want greater Freedom of Speech on campus?” Anyone else ever feel like we’re going round in circles?

Despite how jaded I have become by the democratic processes of the union I have actually ended up engaging with one of them.

With the referendum coming up today was the deadline for submitting motions and so I have proposed one, seconded by Kieran in an attempt to solve the problems with The Old Bar.

We have another week to submit amendments before things start moving forward. After that it goes to Union Council, who will probably reject it, then we can attempt to force it through with a petition if we wish.

Revive The Old Bar

This Union notes…

• LUU has over 30,000 members
• LUU’s membership is wide and diverse
• LUU provides a number of bars in order to cater for the social needs of it’s members

This Union believes…

• LUU should provide for the social needs of all it’s members
• Many of LUU’s members enjoy a quiet drink in a relaxed atmosphere
• The Old Bar has now become synonymous with The Terrace in providing a noisier atmosphere

This Union resolves…

• To reduce noise levels from music and plasma screens in The Old Bar
• To encourage sound from the plasma screens in The Old Bar to be turned off whenever possible

Now I just need to figure out how this works into my overall plan for world domination.

• Ok, even I am willing to admit it’s getting fairly close to Chrismukkah now. We’re getting to the point where I actually might start shopping soon, that is how close it is! Not that I’m excited, I really don’t care. All the good stuff has already happened. Well for the most part. As a general rule from here on in it’s just having to spend time with the family, lots and lots of FYP and annoying song after annoying song.
• My sister is back from uni – and she is already stealing my car!
• Charlotte is back from uni. About time too! I can finally spend some time with my real friends as we would say Michelle would say :D.
• I’m back on the case this week. Last week was my slightly more relaxed lets take a week off. It ended up really busy and with me not getting as much sleep as I would have liked but it was fun anyway. Now it’s time to do some serious work though.
• Before I kick into revision mode next week I’m spending some time on my FYP and I’m pleased to say I think I’ve managed to make a decent indent into it. I’m glad to be doing so. The deadline will be on us before we know. I mean, we graduate in 6 months, how crazy is that!

It’s been another fun weekend. Including some rumours which rather pleased me but I won’t be discussing on a public blog (don’t get excited, it isn’t juicy gossip). It has sparked an interesting series of thoughts, though.

Turns out Eric Atwell really does live this side of Leeds. He came in tonight while I was working.

Speaking of which I Googled his name to check I had the spelling correct and thought “hmm, what if I had blog to the end of this search query.” It wasn’t long before I was fishing around to see what SoC staff had blogs. While my search was admittedly limited to a narrow selection of the staff, one man, of course, failed to disappoint.

The blog is called Pythoneer’s Journal, so I’ll leave you to guess which member of staff it is :D.

Which then leads me onto the question, is it a good thing if you know that people read your blog? (Or perhaps another way to phrase it, how bad it is if you know people read your blog?). Because if you know people do, how much do you start censoring it?

I mean, would I be so harsh on coursework specs if I knew the author of it read my blog? Would I be so harsh about my PD31 group if I knew they read it? I like to think so, particularly because I knew several of my PD31 group did read my blog but it makes you wonder…

There is something magical about all-nighters.

I’m going to miss them when I graduate. Although I will hopefully graduate into an environment where there are still plenty of them. I can’t see it disappearing if I’m working at a software company beit my own or even if I sell out. Hopefully the professionalism of a company will give us the organisational skills to actually get some chair races going too.

Helen commented “you lot love all nighters.” Who is us lot? That is a very sweeping generalisation which really annoy me. But what could I really expect, after all, everyone from Wales is small minded. Eh, see what I did there ;). The point is, I kind of do love them. They suck in having to do work and I would much rather have the work done beforehand with plenty of time to spare. But if the work is out of the way and it’s just adding extra bits or polishing things off then they can be a lot of fun too.

You get a wonderful community atmosphere that you don’t really get during the day. The desks are piled high with energy drinks and cans of coke (unopened of course, nobody drinks in labs :p) and the bins in the corridor outside smell of the late night run to Fortune Cookie which last night saw us order so much food for the people in DEC-10 that we got a box to carry it all in.

In the end, while I wouldn’t miss the stress of late night coding sessions just before deadlines, I will miss the atmosphere and experience. What we should really start having are all-nighters as soon as the coursework comes out :p.

Got back my GI31 coursework 2 marks today. They aren’t too pretty. While it isn’t the mess that my first coursework was (the coursework itself was OK I thought but the mark it got wasn’t), given how much time I invested in it and what standard I thought it reached I was disappointed with the mark. I got 69 and a half. Doesn’t sound too bad but then this is one of the good modules in terms of actually examining you on useful stuff (rather than BS modules like DB). Further more this kind of thing needs to pull my grade up. How can it pull my grade up when it isn’t even a first itself?

There gets to be a point where you just have to conclude, “I’m not just not putting the work in. I’m just too stupid.”

It now being past 8am I have admitted defeat with regards to servlets. I got mine compiling but it still wouldn’t run so I’ve included it in my source code submission for some kind of consideration however small that may be. All in all though this has been a joke of a coursework and while I will be making a separate blog post about it I feel the need to rant a bit here too. My mysterious error which plagued me for hour after hour just randomly started working at 2:30. I had gone on and coded further stuff by then but this essentially placed me back behind everyone else at 2:30am!

Anyway, we’re through it now, term is over! At least for me. Sort of. I still technically have TKD today but I doubt I will go even on the off chance I am awake. I also have to sort out a few meetings with people next week with regards to my FYP and such not to mention all the work I have to catch up on for things like my websites and of course there is always FYP and lots of revision for exams that need to rescue my spiraling grade.

All in all, this isn’t the joyous end of term I was hoping for.

I love all-nighters. There is just something about spending all night in DEC-10 that is magical. I’m going to miss it next year though I have little doubt that whatever I end up doing will involve all night coding sessions.

Today being the GI31 deadline, myself, Kieran, Sarann, Nima and Will were in here all night working away. I submitted it an hour or so ago though I might go back for a little more work on it. I couldn’t focus earlier but I’m getting my vision back now lol. What I really want to do is sleep though. Having worked the weekend before last I then had Atheist Week, then the A-Soc Weekend Away then I was doing my FYP on Sunday and GI31 late-nighters all this week. All in all it’s really cut into my sleep.

I did warn people that allowing poor people to go to university was a bad idea.

I was right. Leeds Met Union have declared themselves bankrupt. They were losing somewhere in the region of £80,000 a year and have been for a long time. Because the people who go to Leeds Met are pennyless losers with no future. And now they don’t even have a union. That will teach you to blow all your money on sports facilities!