Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.

Just as the choice seemed to have settled on Amazon’s Kindle as the ebook reader of choice with its 6″ screen and £109 price tag so the sands have shifted underneath us with the imminent arrival of a whole range of Android powered tablet computers.

From the reader angle, you have a long battery life (often measured in weeks), black and white screen which doesn’t give you eye strain and easy access to books from the Amazon model. The only downsides are that they are black and white screens and can’t run video but then paper books don’t run video either and most are in black and white too.

For the tablet computers, the screen sizes are 7″ to 10″ which is comparable to the 6″ and 9″ of the Kindles. Battery life at 7 to 10 hours is good by PC standards but poor by ebook reader standards and it’s going to be more difficult to read them outside. On the plus side you get colour and can run video. Pricing for the 7″ models seems to be about double that of the Kindle, for the 10″ it’s comparable to the Kindle DX (a number of manufacturers are coming out with these so the prices aren’t settled yet).

If you’re only reading novels, the clear choice remains the Kindle. However, if your taste runs to coloured texts with illustrations my inclination would be to go for one of the 7″ models or, if you’re not bothered about portability, the 10″.

It sounds like a daft question if you’ve got one but isn’t quite so daft if you don’t so I thought a potted guide would be in order.

Although in theory there are loads of them out there, in the UK for practical purposes there are basically two makes with a total of four models.

The Sony ones let you read PDFs and a number of other formats of which epub is the main one that they use. They have two ways of enlarging the text though the pocket edition only does the first one. The first way is through enlarging the text but not the images with the pocket edition offering effectively six sizes (three portrait, three landscape) and the touch edition ten (five portrait, five landscape) ie the six of the pocket plus four larger sizes. How this works with PDFs varies depending on how the PDF was prepared but generally you find that the photographs appear but diagrams generally don’t. The second way is a zoom facility only available on the touch edition which lets you magnify the PDF image. This would be perfect but doesn’t let you move to the next page so you’ve to unzoom the image, move to the next page and zoom it up if you want to do that. In practical terms I use the font enlargement method nearly all the time and it’s rare that I use the PDF zoom facility. You can add notes and highlighting on the touch edition which sounds useful but is very hard on the batteries and in practice I’ve never really used that facility. The pocket edition has a 5″ screen, the touch a 6″ one; it makes quite a difference to the reading with the larger screen but you get used to the smaller one and for some reason I find it easier to get through the reading with less words on the page but that might just be me. Price-wise it’s aroud £140 for the pocket edition, around £220 for the touch version.

I gather that the Amazon versions offer similar facilities using Kindle format as default but they also handle PDFs. Big plus points are that they are a lot cheaper (£109 for the basic 6″ version) and that you can buy books direct from Amazon obviously (with the Sonys you buy on your computer and transfer the books to the reader later). On the book buying front, prices are generally around the hard book price level although there are thousands of free ones (eg www.gutenberg.org has over 30,000). There’s also the Kindle DX which is around £250 and gives you a 10″ screen. They both come with a little keyboard for note-taking though as I say I’ve never really used the facility on the Sony so this isn’t a deciding point.

To transfer documents (which can include your own documents in Word and PDF form) you connect the device to your computer where it comes up as another disk drive; just drag and drop from there. In principle you can also use the supplied software (or Calibre which is free and better) but drag and drop works fine. With the Kindle you can email PDFs to your Kindle (but they charge you for that) or buy using the one-click facility. Both can charge up via the USB link but it’s much faster to plug them into the mains (you need to get a Sony PSP charger [about £20] to do that, the cheap Kindle comes with the charger).

One thing to watch is that effectively all the readers are black and white. Colour is available but at around £800 so in reality it’s probably best to wait a couple of years for that. Most of the time you don’t miss that but, depending on what you read, there are times when colour would be really handy. Due to limitations of the technology you can’t run videos. Page turning usually takes a fraction of a second but can be longer on complex pages. It’s difficult to define “complex” in this context as it depends on how the authors have prepared the page so you couldn’t tell by simply looking at a page in a book if it were “complex”.

The other major limitation if you’re buying books is that there is currently no second hand market. Basically you pay close to the full hardback price and can get nothing back if you’ve finished with a book you’ve bought.

If I were starting again I’d go for the cheap Kindle basically because it’s the cheapest.

However, do you really need one of these things? Certainly if you’re only reading the odd paperback the answer is probably not as not only are you looking at hardback prices, you also need to part with at least £109 to begin with. However, if you’re one of those people who need a few dozen paperbacks on holiday it’s a different matter as it is if you have access to a large library of PDFs like many students.

For guys cosmetics are a major minefield and one that they simple don’t even think of venturing into except around the time of Christmas or birthday presents and even then unless they’re handed a note, chances are that they’ll come back with the wrong thing.

That’s even for relatively simple stuff too. What on earth is night cream for instance? Why should it be different from day cream? When you read the descriptions there seems to be no really good reason for there to be a difference at all.

Of course the real reason for such things is that it allows for more potential marketing to be done. Thus any brand you can name puts out a whole range of stuff with different names largely so that they can sell more stuff.

In case you haven’t notices, the post-war baby boom began to hit retirement age about five years ago and the retirees will continue to rise in numbers for another ten to fifteen years.

This group has been one of the largest target markets since the 1960s and drives much of the marketing and product development spend that you’ll have seen over the last fifty years or so. Thus today we see things like face wrinkle cream hitting the shelves in quantities that would have been unheard of only ten years ago and all because this group are getting to the point where they need such things.

What’ll happen over the next twenty years as they retire will be a shift in marketing towards a much older age group than hitherto we’ve been used to. The cosmetic industry will have a field day naturally but then so will all kinds of medical aids companies and, of course, the financial services people will move to produce products aimed at a more mature market. No more will the example customer be a 30 year old: think 60 year old these days.

All being well this massive shift will let me buy that immortality pill at some point 🙂