Foreign Perspectives

Archive for June, 2009

With the world economy falling apart around us this is one of those times where many people wish that they had invested in gold as, of course, with everything else falling gold is doing quite nicely as usual.

The key thing is to keep your savings and investments diversified and moreover to keep to a regular savings and investment programme. If you’re doing that, it shouldn’t really matter whether the price of gold is sitting around the $200 mark or if it’s sitting at the $900 mark since, as with all investments, it’s pretty much impossible to hit the bottom of the market when you’re buying and it’s equally difficult to hit the top when you’re selling. That said, the gold price is currently off the top achieved in May.

But if you’ve decided to buy some gold bullion for a rainy day, how do you go about it? In principle there are all kinds of investment schemes around these days which let you buy a share in a pile of gold and that’s a sensible way to go about it in that the costs are lower than they are if you some gold bars. However, that lower cost comes at a price, namely that you’re trusting that some intermediary actually has that piece of gold for you and that, should they go bankrupt, that you’ll be able to get your little piece of gold. Certainly these firms have all kinds of reassuring things to say about that but at the end of the day, to my mind, there’s nothing to beat having a lump of gold in your hand.

If you’re aiming at looking after the gold yourself it’s relatively easy to buy it these days by way of Bullion by Post who offer the usual range of investment sizes of gold bars. In terms of bars, the smallest that you can get is the one ounce bar which weighs in at around £600 these days (the price varies throughout the day) or you can get the one kilo bars that you see in photos of Fort Knox and the like for around £19000. The larger bars carry less of a premium over the spot price for gold (ie they are cheaper per ounce of gold) but unless your portfolio is really large the larger bars aren’t going to be terribly practical purchases for you.

One thing to bear in mind if you’re collecting these things in your house is the security and insurance aspect. Clearly if you are stockpiling gold in your house you’re building up a major asset and your insurance company would want to see it adequately protected. It’s possible to avoid this hassle by using a safety deposit box in your bank which will save on the insurance and you may be able to get it free too depending on your bank.

Sounds an easy solution to the pornography issue for sure although it obviously doesn’t solve the abuse angle in this case.

However, there’s a problem with this approach. For one thing it’s a child safety measure yet many parents give their children phones for child safety too and these days most phones come with cameras. Is eliminating the possibility of inappropriate photos more important than knowing that your kids can call you for help? Given the relative rarity of these cases I suspect that being able to call is probably more important.

OK, so let’s just make photos of naked children illegal then. That’s easy, isn’t it? Not really because for one thing you’d need to arrest all the paedeatric doctors as, of course, they have textbooks containing photos of children, some of whom are naked. OK, so we can make an exception for doctors then. Well, I’m currently doing a child development course and next year will be doing one on human biology. Are you going to arrest students for having photos of children? Then there are the parents who drag out the cute photos of their little girl or boy in the bath and I’m sure that most parents have such photos these days. Finally, there’s the relatively new phenomena of sexting to consider. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for it to be illegal to take a photo of yourself, regardless of what age you might be at the time.

How many more exceptions will you need to make?

What we need to remember in all this is that it’s not the photos per se that are the issue. It’s the people who “get off” on seeing inappropriate photos of children and for them the Mothercare catalogue is their equivalent of Playboy.

The problem with really high profile cases such as Vanessa George’s seems likely to be is that the very high level of publically expressed opinions can mean that the court case can be thrown out.

To avoid that what usually happens is that a reporting restriction is invoked whereby it’s deemed to be in contempt of court to publish specific information about the case in advance of a verdict being announced. That system worked really well in pre-internet days but is increasingly unworkable in the Internet age as I’ve said before. As it stands right now there don’t appear to be any reporting restrictions in place for this particular case which has had the effect that it’s been talked about on TV, radio, newspapers and, of course, blogs and 99% of what’s been said is very much along the lines of “let’s lynch her now” as you’d probably expect.

However, there’s also the not so small matter that she hasn’t been convicted yet so is rechnically innocent of the charges at the moment. That’s as it should be, of course, since the whole British legal system is built on the premise that people are considered until a case is proven against them. You might think that with all the public outrage that she couldn’t possibly be truly innocent of all those things that she’s been charged with but it does happen. After all, people have been arrested for taking photos of their own children before now and they’re generally laughed at when they reach the courtroom.

The vast majority of people have only heard, at best, second hand reports of the charges. They haven’t even heard second hand accounts of the evidence. Don’t forget that the grandmother I referred to above was charged with producing pornography yet it turned out she was doing nothing of the sort when the evidence was examined.

Are you still prepared to say that Vanessa George is guilty having merely heard an account of the charges against her?

When we got back from France it wasn’t long before James was set to go on a school outing and the school were asking for parents to volunteer to come along to help with looking after the children. So, we volunteered or rather we tried to because we were told that we’d first need to get a CRB check done and found that we couldn’t get one as we didn’t have the necessary documents at the time which seemed a little silly at the time but the school had a policy of requiring a CRB check for parents helping out with school trips.

However, documentation aside, the real problem with the CRB check is that it only looks at previous convictions and, of course, Vanessa George didn’t have any. In fact, she still doesn’t so would pass a CRB check right now which is obviously somewhat ridiculous given what she’s been getting up to.

In some ways the CRB check has made it a lot easier for undesireable people of one sort or another to get into positions that they shouldn’t be in. That’s because in place of what would previously have been effectively an assessment by the principal of whether or not someone was a suitable person to be working with young children, now the school child protection policy says that she must instead rely on a CRB check as indeed do a great many schools and nurseries around the country.

However, clearly there still needs to be an assessment of the type of person that gets each job. Whilst Vanessa presumably won’t be getting any more jobs dealing with children she’s managed to harm quite a lot of children before she was caught and that doesn’t seem right. The other thing that this case highlights is that women are just as likely to interfere with children as men.

Hopefully this case will highlight the need to reduce the complete dependence on the CRB check that has built up since it was introduced.

Although I don’t read the blog stats religiously by any means it’s interesting to keep an eye on them now and again to see what’s popular and what’s not.

For instance, at the moment I’m doing fairly well from people searching for a little assistance with the latest ED209 assignment. Not surprising really as this is one of a mere handful of blogs that have been writing about their experiences with the Child Development course as they’ve been working their way through it this year.

Is it actually useful to try to find some pointers for the assignment this way though? So far, I suspect the answer is “not really”. For instance, Tim has been relatively quiet about it of late and my own contribution certainly doesn’t hand it out on a plate although I do say something about identity and there will be more about the TMA over the coming week. What’s more surprising is that there haven’t been any blogs writing about the course before this year. Tanya has been brave enough to upload all of her assignments for the course but it’s for an earlier year and the assignment questions were quite different so you’ll not get a whole lot of help there.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of just how reliable the information that one would find on a blog about a TMA. After all, even if I were to upload the entire TMA answer this evening you wouldn’t know what mark I was going to get for it. Having said that, I imagine that you could probably have a reasonable guess as to where the mark might fall which in turn would indicate how much work you might need to do to achieve such a mark yourself. Would that really be helpful though? Take, for example, Exploring English (U211) where in the very first assignment you’re required to upload the first half of your TMA, the second half being a critique on someone else’s uploaded TMA. With that you can easily get a feel for the overall quality of work that people are doing in your tutor group. That in itself was quite reassuring for me but then I picked up 90% on that TMA and I can understand that others might find that it was quite intimidating. So, grand if you’re at the top end of the marking range, potentially quite demoralising if you’re sitting in the large middle ground (which is why most OU forums ban discussion about marks).

If anything, the child development course and indeed psychology courses in general with the OU seem much worse than knowing how other people were doing was with the English course. Quite why that is I don’t fully understand but it seems to be related to the fact that a large number of the psychology students are treating the courses as vocational training so it’s more important to them to do well than it might be in another area that’s more of a hobby subject. Thus, whilst I’m more than happy tootling along in the 70s, others in my group are very much aiming to be in the 80s. Having said that, although I’m very content with the marks to date I have already more or less decided to up the pace at which I’m pottering along with the psychology degree thanks to some gentle prodding on the part of fellow students.

So, as always, be careful what you wish for. If you’re a consistent 60% person, would you really be over the moon to see a 90% type assignment? For that matter, there’s the not so insignificant issue that all tutors don’t mark in a 100% identical manner.