Foreign Perspectives

Although they’ve one of the most frequently used pieces of technology around for a long time, most people don’t buy a new TV terribly often.

However, it always seems to be close to the worst time to buy one no matter when you’re looking for one, doesn’t it? For a long time it was safe enough buying TVs: from the 1970s when colour came out in the UK it was OK to pick up a 405 line set for getting on for 20 years until the 405 line broadcasts were turned off. Even within that period it was fine for quite some time if you bought a 625 line model as they were fine well into the 1990s.

These days it’s a whole different story though. Not only have we moved from the simple 625 line broadcasts in their 4:3 aspect ratio to the more common widescreen version but we’re also getting into the digital transmission era, moving to flatscreen technology and high definition all at the same time.

Aside from the flatscreens being a whole lot lighter than their predecessors, there isn’t really a whole lot going for them right now in that the colour on the old style CRT versions is generally better and you don’t get those annoying little coloured spots that are found on flatscreen versions. Most flatscreens come with digital tuners as standard though which is something of a plus in that the analogue signals are gradually being turned off.

What about HD though? Well, that comes in two versions: the real thing and “HD ready” which means that it’s not really HD at all. Going for true HD seriously bumps up the cost though and since there aren’t really a whole lot of HD broadcasts around at the moment, it seems to make more sense to go for an HD ready TV now with a view to replacing it in four or five years time when the price of true HD will have dropped and the number of HD programmes should have gone up a lot.

Of course, by then chances are the first of the 3D TVs will be starting to drop to relatively sensible prices….

One of the essential things to do early on in starting an Open University course is to get yourself into a study group.

Although there are regular tutorials associated with the course there tend to be quite a lot of things that don’t come up during the tutorials for one reason or another but which are often vital to your success on the course. Not all of these will be obvious at the off either. For example, one of the most useful things that I picked up early on in the French course was from just how extensive another student made his notes and what he was making notes on. Seeing just how extensive the notes of another student are has a great deal more impact than hearing at a tutorial that you should make notes.

Less tangible reasons at the start are the encouragement to keep going that you can get from other study group members. As an indication of how important that is, the only people who finished the French diploma were those who were in the study group three years earlier: everyone else dropped out along the way.

Then, there’s the magnification of sources that arises from having a number of people working on the problem. On Saturday for instance our group turned up four separate sets of notes on different aspects of the course.

Finally, there’s the reason that you joined the study group for in the first place… talking about the assignments!

For me there can only be one place to go and that’s the wide open plains of the American wild west. Yup, the big country.

Motorhomes aren’t things to confine to towns and cities but rather to use on the wide open road and few places get more wide open than the likes of Arizona and Texas. OK, it’s a bit of a struggle for the big beasts to get up some of the hills around the canyons but it’s the modern day covered wagon and the old timers had a bit of a struggle up the very same mountain ranges.

Monument valley is, of course, John Wayne country. That’s the backdrop that you’ll see in countless westerns and even today you can park your rig in one of the remaining indian emcampments. It’s miles from anywhere too so you get to see the stars in the night sky just as the old-time pioneers did.

Move a little further south and you can even tie your “hoss” up right in the centre of Tombstone just a little ways down from the OK Corral. Next morning you can even stroll down the very same wooden sideway that Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Clancys did because that section of Tombstone has been preserved just the way it was in those days.

So where would YOU take your RV?

One of the biggest surprises that I had when I started the psychology course this year was the sheer number of separate tutorial groups that it has in the area. Previously with the language courses it was one group to cover the whole of Ireland whereas there are six or seven separate ones for this psychology course and it’s not even the most popular course (Exploring Psychology in case you were wondering).

That larger number of students is also reflected in the blogging world with myself prattling on here, Lynn doing something vaguely similar and Tim being very dedicated. And that’s just from the crop of students studying the course right now with Tanya and presumably others being around in previous years.

Where does all this interest come from though. Well, for me this is notionally the first course in a psychology degree being followed out of interest at the moment although I tend to use my qualifications eventually. The others in my tutor group pretty much all seem to be working with children in some connection so the current course is of more immediate benefit to them. That doesn’t explain why Exploring Psychology (which is considered the first OU psychology course) is running with around 8000 students but I guess that understanding how peoples’ minds work is an interesting topic for an awful lot of people.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the recession is that there are both more people looking for jobs and fewer jobs to go around.

Sounds obvious but that combination means that each job on offer attracts a great deal more interest. Popular jobs can attract hundreds of applicants and even more specialised ones where you’d normally expect a handful of applications can attract far more applications than the employers are equipped to adequately deal with.

That massive scaling up of applications can clearly swamp the employers who end up being forced into reducing the numbers significantly to something more manageable. How they do that can often be quite counter productive as typically they will do things like increase the level of qualifications or experience above that required and asked for. Now, you might think that having more qualified staff would be a “good thing” but if the job really needs just a few GCSEs and you end up selecting someone with a masters degree (which happens), is that person really going to be considering the job as a viable option for them long term? One likely side-effect of this strategy is that once things do pick up many of those over qualified staff that you chose will leave.

Another equally random approach is to reduce the level of advertising of job vacancies. This is better than the “over qualified” approach but is difficult to achieve these days once a job vacancy appears on any website. The other problem is that by reducing the advertising you may miss the very person who is ideal for the job although were you hit with an unrealistic number of applicants you’ll likely miss that person anyway.

In the computer field one common tactic is to ask for a whole series of specific skills. On first sight, this appears to be better than the other approaches. However, if the list of skills is too long it’s possible to end up with no applications, even in the current climate, and this approach also has similar employee retention problems as the “over qualified” approach when the economy eventually picks up.

At the moment there doesn’t appear to be any fully workable solution and things can only get worse in the months to come as the number of jobs on offer reduces and the number of applicants continues to climb. Let’s just hope that things get onto a more even keel soon.