Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago the list of things that you could legitimately carry on board with you was long: a case (up to 110 cm total dimensions) plus an assortment of “personal items” which included such things as a handbag, coat, umbrella, walking stick, camera, a reasonable amount of reading material, essential medication, binoculars, briefcase or laptop and a musical instrument. Bring a child and you can add a child seat and can take the pram up to the aircraft door.

Although those were the former “official” items that you could take, in practice bags substantially larger could usually be taken and, of course, you could always add even more courtesy of the duty-free shops that you reached after check-in which naturally was never even weighed. Oh, and let’s not forget the various exceptions that were often made too.

Fly from most countries today though and you’ll find that things are considerably more strict. The bag is still the same size (after a brief shrinking to 55cm) but not all umbrellas are allowed and you’re actually going to need to use that walking stick for it to be allowed. Even medication is now often limited to a 100ml bottle size and should also fit inside your trusty resealable plastic bag too.

Yet, despite all the fuss that they tend to make over what are very small things (notably that plastic bag I find), security levels are, if anything, getting lower because the security staff are going increasingly from a checklist rather than knowing why things are being done which can’t be good. For example, on my last trip I found that they fixated on my lack of small plastic bag to hold 2 30ml containers. That fixation meant that they ignored 1) the six inch steel pin 2) the steel spring 3) the contents of the 30ml containers and 4) the cake. The cake? Well, a cake nicely iced with the look and consistency of plastic explosive in a sealed plastic container should have meant that they insisted on the container being opened so that the cake could be checked for traces of explosive.

So what really should be allowed on? No problem with the carry-on bag sitting at the long-established 110cm standard size. If it’s filled with electronics then they may well need to be checked separately but given my recent experience I don’t believe that the people looking at the screens have the knowledge or experience to detect a real item from a bomb. They should insist that the items are switched on: that’s a simpler and more reliable way of checking that they’re the real thing. After all, batteries aren’t that clear on a scanner so why should anyone assume that scanning one means anything?

Fair enough on largely banning the sharp items and on using the plastic bag as a means of checking the volume of the containers in it and letting the staff read the labels but the staff should know that it’s used for those reasons and if they don’t then they need better training. They should be checking the liquids too because many people are now using resealable bottles to get down to the 100ml and therefore reading the labels doesn’t provide any reliable information about the current contents yet you often see security staff closely examining the labels to decide if the liquid is allowed on-board. The original reason for the clear plastic bag was so that they could check the contents yet that’s no longer a valid reason given the much higher usage of resealable plastic bottles these days as a consequence of the 100ml limit. In many ways, it would be much better to allow larger normal bottles.

Perhaps most importantly, they need to get away from the rigid list based approach and train the staff properly as to what they’re looking for and why they’re looking for it. My cake wasn’t on the list and yet it’s something that really should have been checked: that it wasn’t tells me that we’re just fooling ourselves that longer lists for the security people means better security.

The number of hits that myself and Wendy have been picking up on our main blogs has gone up quite dramatically over the last month or two and, ideally, we’d like to know why that is but, of course, the problem is that we’ve not just done one thing with the blogs over that time.

First off, we moved the blogs from a UK based host to one based in America. Since both blogs are targeted at a UK market (if one could call a 40/30 traffic split targeting) one would have expected that this would reduce the number of hits thanks to the geo-targeting that the search engines get up to. Having said that when I say we target the blogs what’s actually happening is that we’re writing in British English rather than American English and we’re writing about topics that arise in the UK rather than those that arise in the US. That said, the differences in British and American English are so small and so little used within the blogs (I’ve not used one word so far in this post that is in country-specific English) that I can’t see it affecting the search engine hits to any substantial degree. Also, many of the topics that we write about are international in scope which presumably explains the almost equal split between British and American readers. Thus, on balance, the change in ISP shouldn’t have made a difference.

Next, we changed how the titles come out on the blogs. Previously they would have been listed as, for example, “Foreign Perspectives » Blog Archive » Title of the post” whereas now they come out as “Title of the post | Foreign Perspectives”. Now on a really top ranking blog it might well be to the advantage of the blog to have the blog name coming first but Foreign Perspectives isn’t, yet, in the top ranks of the blogging world so perhaps it’s best to have the post title coming first? I suspect that’s contributed to the rise but I don’t know how great the contribution has been.

Then we thought we’d have a go at promoting the blogs on social networking sites. You might think that this would have a very large and noticeable effect but whilst it is noticeable in the stats it’s not, usually, that large. Some posts do pick up a bit of a following in Twitter but most don’t. I suspect that I could work on this is a promising area to develop but I’ve not done so as yet. The other social networking sites rarely pick up on the posts or at least people reading it elsewhere aren’t clicking on the link to the post. So chalk up some rise to this one.

Finally, we compared note as regards topics we were writing about. In my case I’ve written a little more stuff in the entertainment category and that’s certainly had a bit of an impact on hits but, again, not an overly substantial one.

So overall, there are a couple of things that would seem to be contributing to a rise in readership but none that seem to be sufficient to produce the doubling of hits that we’ve noticed over recent months.

Since I only started with the Open University so that I would be able to “speak a little more French” I was only ever really pottering along with what was ultimately to become my modern languages degree. That’s not to say that I wasn’t working hard at it but rather that I just wasn’t in a hurry to complete it by a particular date. At the time I started out that seemed to be largely the approach of a lot of people on the courses that I was doing. Certainly nobody seemed to need to pick up a degree at any particular time amongst the tutorial groups that I was in over the years.

However, over that time the mix of people doing the OU courses has changed substantially. In the “good old days” they simply would not accept anyone under 21 and the average age of the students seemed to be somewhere in the 40s albeit with quite a sizeable proportion well over 60. These days, the courses are more likely to have a fair representation of those doing the degree full-time just after their A-levels since it’s a popular choice compared to traditional universities in these days of increasing charges: even full-time the OU wouldn’t cost more than £2000 a year on the most expensive courses and in most cases it would be more like £1200. The older contingent are still there as indeed are the sizeable representation in the 40s or thereabouts but the average age is substantially down.

That shift in demographics seems at least partially to account for the shift in emphasis from merely pottering along to more of a drive to complete the degree as soon as is reasonably possible. For example, throughout the seven years of the modern languages degree I never had anyone mention that they were planning on speeding up the attainment of their degree yet quite regularly I now get people trying to persuade me to do exactly that. I’ve sort-of succumed to this pressure in that I will probably be running with the Human Biology course starting this October rather than waiting ’til the following October to start Exploring Psychology thus, for the first time, I’ll be doing two courses at once albeit only for a month.

In addition to the move towards doing degrees quicker these days I suspect that the lower age range will eventually have an effect on the range of course on offer. I don’t think that widening will be particularly noticeable though as they’ve been widening the range of courses for many years now and the only real gaps seem to be in the area of creative arts and a general medical programme (though they do offer nursing courses).

What may be noticeable sooner is the shortening of time taken to do degrees which presumably will produce something of a bulge in graduations at some point.

Despite various TV talent shows having been on the go for years they can still throw up some major surprises of one sort or another although this years crop from Britains Got Talent seems to have broken all records in terms of surprises this time around.

For one thing there’s the heavy bias towards the cute and vulnerable acts this year. Sure there’s probably a feeling that the youngest hopefuls should be encouraged that little bit more but as many have shown this year, they simply don’t need any legup on the older hopefuls. Well, except for Hollie Steele, of course, and for reasons which escape me the judges seemed to be puppets under the control of her mother. That wouldn’t have been so bad but her act just wasn’t up to the professional standards of the other young contenders and they didn’t get anything like the assistance that she did.

On the other side of the coin we saw Susan Boyle who came out of left field and surprised everyone. Although it’s usually taken as wrong to judge on appearance, for a high level talent show like this one, appearances do count. Not that it mattered because she simply overturned that initial judgement completely and will probably become someone we’ll hear quite a lot of in the years to come. Her other surprise was the collapse after the show. This was someone who seems to have been aiming for an opportunity like this for her whole life and yet she doesn’t seem to have thought through what might happen if she were to do really well.

Two very different surprises for sure.

We’d a special interest in reading to our kids when we were in France and we wanted them to grow up knowing English as native speakers and readers.

Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it was the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it was the French nursery rhymes and fables that they were coming across so at home we made a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

To begin with, we concentrated on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

When we were in France, we got a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learned French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. In the end though we were only defeated entirely by one book.