Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2010

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

Last night there was the choice between watching round 2 of the UK wide debates or, for those of us outside England, watching our own local guys debating instead.

In the end we opted for the local guys simply because the UK-wide debate was getting really boring with all the expected reactions trotted out on cue. There’s only so much interest you can drum up to watch a fairly calm debate: what’s needed is a bit more fighting between the parties I think as there didn’t seem to be any real depth of feeling coming across this time around.

Our local debates were even more calm and collected if anything (there was the one with the main leaders, another with the also-rans). As in the national debates, the parties that have no real power had all the wonderful ideas to put forward but with no worries about taking responsibility of implementing whatever grandiose ideas that they could come up with. As usual, the greens came across as wanting to take us all back to that calmer and gentler time that was the middle ages when we could all grow our own food, didn’t pollute too much and died horrible deaths at an early age. They generally don’t mention that last bit for some reason.

There wasn’t even much following up of the scandals that the two major party leaders had been involved in which seemed a shame in some ways as it was the only part where the level of debate even approached an interesting level.

Why are they all so boring? Everyone says that they want to encourage people to become interesting in politics but they don’t seem to do anything substantial about it. That’s a shame because it is interesting and affects us all: it’s just that the debate format being used at the moment just isn’t a suitable means to generate that interest.

All being well, I’ll be off to Mount Stewart with the school tomorrow though I’ll not know for sure about it ’til later today.

The problem is that two of the normal class helpers are stranded thanks to the grounding of the planes but then they’re opening up the airways again later today, or at least in some areas they are. Thus, I don’t know if they’ll be back today. It’ll really mess up James if I’m not there though as he’s really set on having either me or Wendy along with him.

One other downside is that the forecast isn’t looking too good for Wednesday at the moment and Mount Stewart doesn’t seem like a great place to be if it’s raining.

Except for several volcanoes of course.

The problem is that in recent years we seem to have had such a series of global problems that I’m sure that many people figure that it just can’t get any worse. Starting with the economic woes we seemed to be teetering on the abyss a number of times yet it just seemed to get worse for quite a while, far surpassing the worst that anyone thought they’d see at the outset of the difficulties. At least the swine flu seemed to be a non-runner in the disaster stakes. Yes, people died, but they all seemed to be people who’d have died with any flu that came along and the numbers overall, so far, were less than in many normal flu epidemics.

We’re not quite at the end of the volcano problem as I write this so who knows when that will truly end? In the 1820s it ran for over a year but, of course, none of the modern technology that we take for granted was in place at that time. Right now, nobody knows just when the eruptions will stop and there’s talk of another volcano in Iceland going the very same way (a bigger one too).

What we’ve not seen, yet, though is a really major solar flare. Little ones happen all the time but really big ones have only happened in other stars and, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any way to predict whether or not they’ll happen one day with our own sun. Still, at least that’s one natural disaster that we’d not need to worry about too much as within 24 hours we’d all have been wiped out.

Puts the last year in some context, eh?