Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Most people are still in search of their ideal holiday spot I’m sure. But what is “ideal” anyway?

Obviously it should take into account your interests and those of the group which you’re travelling with. But is it enough to consider each of those individually? What if there was a single spot that took account of all possible interests?

Argueably, orlando vacations would be very close to allowing for all possible interests. Granted, not quite in a single spot but in a fairly compact region you can take in theme parks, beaches, wildlife, museums and just about everything else that you can imagine.

Does that make it “ideal” though? Not for everyone certainly but it is very close to ideal for an awful lot of people.

Although they can be annoying, it does seem to be a good sign that the people trying to sell you credit cards are back in the shopping centres again and those annoying teatime calls trying to do the same have restarted too.

I imagine that there are all kinds of grand things that the economists are saying these days about when we should be starting to get out of this recession but I think the banks trying to push more credit onto us must be amongst the clearest and most easily understood sign of them all. Not only does that show that the banks have money to lend once more but it also shows that they’re at least prepared to consider lending it too. You might think I said the same thing twice in the last sentence but I didn’t. They always did have money to lend, what they wouldn’t do was actually lend it.

Moreover, this isn’t like them lending via mortgages (which also seems to have restarted, going by the number of “sold” signs going up lately). With a mortgage they have some security (ie they can take the house off you). With a credit card, they are taking a real risk that they could lose the money so overall it’s more encouraging to see people trying to sell you credit cards than it is to see more mortgages being approved.

Now, I’ll grant you that they are probably going to offer you a lower limit than you might have expected in the past, if they offer you a card at all that is. However, that they are trying to actively sell credit cards now seems a very clear sign that an upturn is on the way.

One of the biggest problems in getting out of France is the sheer quantity of post and email that continues to generate.

This wasn’t so bad when we were actually working in the hotel as we were online daily and keeping on top of everything that came in but now that we’re away from that we don’t have nearly so much time to devote to that as it seems to need. For instance, in the past week I needed to go through dozens of pieces of post and thousands of emails only to find a mere handful that were relevant and needed action taken on them.

Despite France having quite a strict no-spamming law, the quantity of junk email coming from France far exceeds that from anywhere else in the world and almost all of it seems to contravene the French law. The reason why that should be is quite simple: French ISPs require anonymous logins to their mail servers so anyone can send anything and, of course, they do.

The Vanessa George affair showed the major weakness of the CRB system ie that you’ll get an “all clear” if you haven’t been caught yet.

However, the various schools are required to have the CRB check done on anyone who comes into contact with children. Thus last year our offer of assistance to go along and help with the supervision on a couple of school outings was turned down.

Ironically, this year we are allowed to go along even though all we’ve done is to put the form in for the CRB check to be done. How come? Well, there’s such a backlog of checks to be done that they have to operate essentially as they’ve always done and assess whether or not a given parent is a risk to the children. That seems to be close to offering the best of both worlds in using the CRB as a backup to the judgement of the teachers.

So all being well, we’ll be off to seen round the airport by the time you read this.

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.