Foreign Perspectives

One of the problems with the Open University is that up until a year ago they put out a prospectus giving about a paragraph on each of the courses which they run and you’re talking about hundreds of courses over dozens of different subject areas.

Net effect is that I found it very easy to find loads of courses that I’d potentially be interested in over the years but ’twas only a year ago that I finally got around to sitting down and working out a rough masterplan containing all the courses that I might be interested in doing at some point along with a pathway through the resulting maze of courses. Something of a crazy waste of time really as to do all of those on the list would take decades by which time a great deal of them would have long since been replaced by more up to date versions or perhaps completely different ones altogether. That said, it was a useful exercise in working out the medium term sequencing of the courses as there’s mix of February/October and October/June cycle courses and changing between one cycle and the other is something that you don’t want to be doing terribly often.

Anyway, I am technically on the very first of those courses right now (ED209 Child Development) and already there’s a course change in the overall route. What’s happened is that as a result of looking in more detail about the requirements of the courses coming up means that it’s useful to add a completely new course (SK277 Human Biology) into the medium term schedule in order to make it easier to do one that I’ll be getting to in several years time (SD226 Biological Psychology).

That leaves the medium term timetable looking like this:

• October 2009 SK277, Human Biology because that’ll make SD226 (Biological Psychology) a whole lot more doable and because it seems like a fascinating course in its own right;
• October 2010 DSE212, Exploring Psychology which is the psychology course that I really should have done first (along with DXR222, the associated residential);
• September 2011 A251, World Archaeology because it sounds dead interesting and I’ll need 30 points later on;
• January 2012 MST121, Using Mathematics because I need to get my maths back onstream for…
• October 2012 S207, The Physical World and SXR207, the associated residential

Eh? Where did World Archaelogy come from? That’s from my prospectus browsing. Although it’s completely unrelated to everything else I’m currently planning on doing it sounds like a really interesting course.

Where did the maths and physic courses come from? Aren’t you doing a psychology degree? Well, I have a whole host of physics courses on my masterplan simply because they sound fascinating and S207 is the first taster of those. After that I will have completed my October start sequence of courses and that’s when I’ll decide whether to complete the psychology degree or the physics degree first (long term I’ll probably do both). Thus although the course that follows it will definitely be DSE232 Applying Psychology (because it’s a September start and only runs for a few months) the one after that will be either DD307 Social Psychology or MS221 Exploring Mathematics depending on which route I choose at that point.

That brings up an issue that hasn’t arisen before in the form of enabling courses. Although I’m aiming for a physics degree that requires a fair number of maths course to enable me to do the various physics courses and they generally need to be done in a particular sequence.

There’s also the matter of a number of courses I quite fancy that I can’t see me doing a particular degree in. For instance, A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism c.1780-1830 seems quite interesting and I’ve even read one of the recommended texts for it. Surprisingly S104 Exploring Science, although brilliant by all accounts, is one that I have provisionally dropped from my masterplan on the basis that I don’t seem to need to do it although I might revise that opinion after I’ve done the biology course. And, of course, there’s the MSc in psychology that I’d quite like to do too at some point not to mention the Creative Arts degree that sounds like fun. Still, for the moment I think I’ll just potter along through my medium term plan….

It’s usually taken as read that an accountancy job is a job for life but these days that’s no longer the case and that there is such a thing a specialist accountancy recruitment agency should be no surprise to anyone.

The particular difficult with accountants is that there can frequently be tie-in, no-competition and no conflict of interest terms in their employment contract. So, it’s not quite so easy to move jobs or to find a new accountancy job even in normal times as it is with “normal” jobs and, of course, these are far from normal times so it’s that much more difficult these days.

That said, if you’re searching for, say, “accountant jobs Edinburgh” you will find jobs around with some of those at quite surprisingly high levels. What you will see though, courtesy of the contract restrictions above and, of course, non-disclosure that there’s very little meat to the job descriptions and you’ll usually need to formally contact the employment agency to find out more should you be attracted to one of those on offer. In many ways that’s something of a nuisance but unfortunately it’s something that isn’t easily avoided.

So, if you fancy being a qualified accountant in Edinburgh there are definitely possibilities, just allow for needing to contact the agency rather than relying on information on the website listings.

In eras of normal economic activity there are always rumours that come true. That interest rates will fall (or rise), that the chancellor is on his way out (or not) and so on. However, it’s more of a problem in times like these.

For example, the West Bromwich building society was rumoured to be about to need a rescue package back in May. In fact, that hasn’t happened and may never happen, yet I’m quite sure that more than a few depositors with the society withdrew cash whilst other potential depositors probably decided on a different building society. So far that’s been “a few” depositors or potential depositors but it could very easily become a tide and fell the society just as happened with the Northern Rock.

And yet, we also get rumours in the other direction. Thus the markets don’t seem in such dire straits lately as they were not so long ago. The flow of companies announcing bankruptcies seems to be slowing (no substantial companies for a while now) and even the housing market may be in the first stages of an upturn.

The problem isn’t the rumours as such but rather that in dire economic times the effect of such rumours tends to be much more extreme than would normally be the case. That’s, of course, why the government tend to be somewhat more reluctant to say anything as it’s extremely easy for an off the cuff comment to be perceived as negative these days. Still, we’re sure to have a new government soon, aren’t we? Or is that just a rumour too?

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.