Foreign Perspectives

Much as we would like to have been able to leave the bathroom well alone after our last experience with a plumber, it’s starting to look like we’ll have to undertake a more major upgrade to the bathroom and possibly something really major will be needing done to the kitchen as well.

That being the case we’ve started revisiting the bathroom faucet issue once more. Although we had all of these replaced earlier in the year if we’re needing to redo the whole bathroom this time then we’d be wanting to take a little more time over the issue rather than going for the quick fix option that we did the last time around.

Regardless of the work needing done in the bathroom, the kitchen is definitely going to need some quite major work done on it over the next few months courtesy of the leak (or, probably, leaks) that we’ve developed. Quite where we’d start on that though is an issue for another day!

Last night Britain’s got Talent rewrote the rules of auditions for itself by allowing Hollie and her mother to get another, undeserved, chance to perform her act. Well, her second act I suppose you could say.

That’s really no surprise as the judges this time around seem to be completely biased in favour of the “cute & vulnerable” where a child performer was involved. Hollie merely took this advantage much further than the other children on the show already have.

Whilst it wasn’t a surprise that they’d do this, it does show just how much the show can get taken in by that cute & vulnerable label. That would be fine if the child concerned was very good but Hollie just isn’t. Whether she’s got the potential to be, I don’t know, but at the moment it just looked like a pushy mother wanted her little girl to succeed regardless of anything else.

Although it’s notionally all down to a public vote in reality the judges by their comments can exert a lot of influence on which acts will go forward. They’ve made no allowances for lots of very professional acts in this and previous editions of the show but then they didn’t fall into that cute & vulnerable category.

Sadly this time around a poor performance from Hollie knocked a very good one from Greg Pritchard. That’s just not right.

The latest assignment on the child psychology course is a bit of an odd one for me in that we’ve to do what is essentially a small research study and write up a scientific report on our findings.

Although in previous times this type of assignment was carried as a real practical involving children, changes in the laws have made that too difficult to do so instead we’ve been given recordings of interviews with various children to work with. Thus we don’t need to contact any children ourselves to carry out the research although I’ve been trying out some of it on my own kids.

It’s based on research that Rosenberg did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is one of those psychological experiments that look like they would make little or no sense to the participants at the time but which turn up some quite interesting results. As you’ll probably gather from my title it’s all about identity and in particular how one’s identity changes over time. Conceptually the experiment is really simple. Children (it works on adults too) are given a sheet of paper with ten lines beginning “I…” and asked to complete them in whatever way they see fit. So, for example, someone might put “I am a boy”, “I like reading”, and so on. Once they’ve completed that, they’re questioned on each statement basically to clarify just what they mean by them and the results are analysed.

Clearly one would expect the younger children to have simpler concepts of self and that’s generally the case in that they will refer, largely, to physical descriptions or activities rather than anything deeply philosophical. Likewise, older children will have a more developed sense of self and wlll usually have more sophisticated answers. However, what’s less obvious is that the younger children are, on the whole, talking about themselves by way of things that others could observe whereas the older ones tend to talk more about things that only they could know ie they have developed a sense of who they are that isn’t dependent on what others can see them do.

Naturally, as we get older that sense of self gets increasingly complex. So, whereas a child will have, for the most part, a single “self”, adults gradually acquire different layers of self over the years. Thus there’ll be the self that’s portrayed at work, the self that paints landscapes, the self that one’s family sees and so on. Clearly too one’s hopes and dreams will generally change over time too: that wishing to be a fireman or whatever mutates somewhat over the years.

As always, Ken’s tutorial on this was fascinating at all kinds of levels. Perhaps the most inspiring example that he gave was of a student who had been doing my current course a few years back. He was 92 at the time and was one of the many people that you meet at the OU who were finally getting around to doing that degree that wasn’t an option when they’d been younger. Now, you might think that this guy had left it rather late to be doing a degree but as he said he just wanted to get it completed before he died so that he could put BA on his headstone. However, as with many such people he got a little carried away with it and finished up with THREE doctorates. I don’t know about you but that certainly set me thinking along the lines of… if that old geezer can do a doctorate, what’s stopping me? In many ways, it’s not the high-flier types that provide inspiration to do something but the people like him who, let’s face it, many people would have consigned to the waste bin of life who provide the real inspiration.

So, who are you right now and who do you want to be?

Let’s face it, many people would love a job where they could sit out on the beach and claim that they were working.

Whilst it’s clearly not an option for everyone, there’s getting to be quite a growth in information jobs which would let you do exactly that. Well, in principle anyway: as always, it’s rarely so simple as it might appear.

If you consider the very popular route of blogging, you’ll find that the vast majority of blogs don’t make any sizeable amount of money. Why? Well, the normal route of using adsense doesn’t work particularly well with sites with dynamic content as it usually takes adsense a couple of days to get the keyword targeting right by which time your blog will have moved on and a different set of keywords would be relevant. Secondly, you need major traffic or very well targeted traffic for affiliate schemes to work.

However, there is the option of doing sponsored posts which can be profitable even with relatively low traffic volumes. Typically you can make around $20 per day on a site with PR2 or above by writing three or four articles each day of, usually, 50 to 200 words each. If your blog gets to PR5 or over you can do really well with this option.

Other potential options are selling e-books or charging for subscriptions which are popular with some making money online blogs. There’s even SubHub which might eventually evolve into a worthwhile venture for the participants although at the moment it’s mainly an article repository for Internet business articles with a sideline in running up and hosting custom blog templates (at a rather exorbitant price).

Naturally, you don’t need to choose one single route to making money online. Personally, I do sponsored posts on blogs and also have a range of adsense funded sites with subscription options.

We’ve lived for decades, centuries even, in an era when prices are, on the whole, expected to increase year after year for the vast majority of goods.

The only category of goods where we are familiar with the effects of deflation are electronic goods and in particular computers so it’s helpful to examine how we treat those. For these there is the expectation that each year will see computers that are a little bit better than their predecessors and additionally they’ll be cheaper. What happens therefore in our buying decision is that we wait until we actually need a new computer before buying one. Now in respect of computers “need to buy” is slightly different from normal products in that there is innovation in the software too which forces us into purchases that would otherwise be un-necessary: that would be unlikely to happen with a normal product.

On the other hand, in an inflationary environment we buy a car now rather than next year because we can be confident that the car will be more expensive and so it is with pretty much everything.

You can even see the effect yourself by considering petrol prices. Until a month or two back I filled the car as often as possible on the basis that the price was rising quite sharply and could be expected to continue doing so. Then things changed as prices started going down very sharply indeed. The approach then was to fill the car only when absolutely necessary as that would be likely to get me the lowest price overall.

In fact, deflation might be a good thing to have but the snag is the period of adjustment that would be required would be extremely painful for everyone. The change from a “buy it now” attitude that’s relevant in an inflationary environment to a “buy it later” attitude appropriate for deflationary times means that factories build up stockpiles and therefore need to cut back on production and the jobs associated with it ie unemployment jumps. At a more personal level, house prices drop dramatically both because of the increased unemployment and because people are moving to a “buy it later” mindset.

One side-effect is that innovation is forced upon many industries which is usually a good thing to happen. However, it’s not an option for a considerable number of products: when was the last time that there was a really innovative potato?

On the whole, it probably is a good thing, it’s just that the transition period would probably be far too painful for governments in general to accept that.