Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2010

Over the last year that Mum’s spent with us we’ve really began to notice that she’s slipping into old age and sometimes it seems that she’s doing it at quite an alarming rate.

For instance, in 2008 we all went on holiday to Venice and she was able, with not too much difficulty, to follow us round. Granted, not at a fantastic speed, but she managed it. Just over a year later it’s obvious that she’d have no chance of being able to do that as her walking ability has dropped dramatically in the last year.

She’s also gotten into the habit of repeating things that can get seriously annoying at times. We don’t really need to know that it’s rainy/sunny/whatever every 10 minutes or so! Whether she’s been doing that for a while is difficult to say as she wasn’t with us constantly before 2008 and indeed with us being over in France for the previous five years we didn’t get the chance to notice that anyway.

Related to that is the forgetfulness or rather the losing of the sense of time. On Saturday she was all set to go to church for instance. That’s fairly new though but I guess it’s something else that we’ll notice more as time goes on.

She’s not “old” generally but seems to be heading that way going by some of the things that we’ve been seeing.

Everybody know that this limits the maximum working time to 48 hours a week but it covers rather more than that.

To begin with that 48 hours is an average usually over 17 weeks but that can be extended up to 52 weeks in some circumstances. Thus you could, in principle, be working, say, 60 hours for several weeks at a stretch yet still remain within the limits of the directive which I suspect is probably not what many people would think the directive allows.

In addition to the limits on the working week there’s also mandatory rest breaks. Work 6 hours or more and you must have a 20 minute break. For each 24 hour period you must get at least 11 consecutive hours of rest thus the maximum working day is effectively 13 hours. Finally you must have a minimum of a 24 hour break each week (or 48 hours per fortnight) ie you can only work 6 days a week on average.

For night time workers (ie those working at least three hours between midnight and 5am) there’s a few more rules including the right to a free health assessment and a maximum of an average of 8 hours per 24 hour period.

Finally, you’re entitled to a minimum of 4 weeks annual holiday.

So there’s quite a bit more to it than “a 48 hour week” and quite a lot of areas where it doesn’t work quite as you might expect. For instance, if you’re on-call then that only counts fully towards the 48 hours if you have to be in work: work from home and only the actual working time itself counts.

I’d both the astronomy and human biology assignments back in the same post yesterday.

As it’s the first of the astronomy assignments I’d really no idea what to expect. It’s been a long, long time since I did any kind of physics course so I wasn’t quite sure how best to approach it all. What I did was take on board the comments from the previous biology assignments which certainly seemed to have helped some in that the mark came out at 79% which is a nice start for sure.

Funnily enough, the biology weighed in at 74% though I suppose a slightly lower mark isn’t a great surprise in that it was the last TMA I did after some four weeks solid of doing them so I was a bit worn out with them all.

What was interesting was that the astronomy assignment was much more difficult to do than the biology ones have been. Since I have quite a background in physics/astronomy I was expecting that the astronomy assignments would be fairly easy going in comparison to the biology ones yet, to date, the reverse has been the case. Oddly, I’m finding the biology course much more interesting to do as well.

Since there’s only one biology assignment to be done the assessment calculator is at it’s most interesting in respect of “substitution” scores. It turns out that even if I don’t do that final one I would pick up 56% overall on the assignments which isn’t bad although doing the final assignment should raise that to something in the 70s. As always, I still wonder how “real” the assignment marks are at this point ie will my exam mark reflect the marks I’ve received in the assignments? In recent years, the exam mark has ended up within a few percent of the TMA average (previously there used to be quite a difference) so that’s reassuring though this’ll be the first science exam I’ve done for many years.

Physically disabled people obviously need a bit of a hand in the ever larger car parks outside major supermarkets these days but the problem is in identifying those people who actually need that bit of a hand.

At the moment, the identification is purely through possession of one of the “disabled parking” badges on a car. The problem is that these seem to be handed out like confetti with many people possessing them who clearly don’t need them but get them purely through reason of them being old. Yes, some old people need them but those are disabled old people, not those that are simply old and see it as their right to have one of those disabled badges. It’s as bad with the parent and child (formerly mother and child as it remains in some places). Yes, you need a wider bay to unload the kids into a pram, but you don’t need a wider bay for teenagers (unless they’re so stupid that they just swing the doors out).

What’s really needed are two stickers: a “parking close” one and a “wide bay” one.

At the moment, there seem to be very few people in our local supermarket who would need the “parking close” one which is as you would expect. After all, even if you parked in the closest disabled or child parking spot to the door, you’d still have to travel several hundred yards within the store to get to the back and would probably end up travelling something like a mile or more if you went round all the aisles. Thus “disabled” people who claim that they need to park close to the shop really only need to do so if they have a wheelchair in which case they actually need a “wide bay” sticker.

It’s obviously different in smaller shops but for supermarkets it appears that a massive reduction in the “disabled” slots (and probably in the parent & child ones too) would help those people who really need them.

In theory my course decisions for the next couple of years should be very easy in that I spent time on working out my overall course schedule a couple of years ago.

Now, to be fair, the OU messed me up by changing the goal posts last year and cutting short all the named science degrees. However, that simply resulted in a change in the sequence of the courses rather than a change in the overall strategy. Now that I’m actually getting going on the courses it’s introduced a few more thoughts.

To begin with my overall plan was to do both a physics and a psychology degree. In practice, I ended up started on the psychology degree last year though once that was underway it turned out that it was sensible to add in a biology course which I’m in the process of finishing off. Then, thanks to the OUs cancellation of named science degrees, I needed to get going on the physics hence I’m in the midst of the astronomy course right now.

Overall, this has the effect that I’m effectively in the midst of a psychology, biology and physics degree or rather courses from all three. The problem is that I’m finding that the biology is both much easier than expected and extremely interesting too. On the other hand, I’m finding that the astronomy isn’t as interesting as I’d expected it to be. Strangely I now find myself wondering if biology rather than physics would be the way to go for me. Thus, I’ve not yet gotten around to signing up for the major physics course starting this October.

Ordinarily, this would be fine but with the withdrawal of all named science degrees kicking in over the next couple of years it means that when I choose either physics or biology I definitely won’t be able to do the other one.