Foreign Perspectives

If you’re like me, you’ll have a range of non-digital images lying around including prints, slides, VHS tapes, and DV tapes. The resolution of the various affordable scanners has now reached the point where it’s something you’ll only need to do once rather than needing to repeat it in a few years when the resolution gets higher. So in increasing order of difficulty, here’s how you do it…

Prints are by far the easiest to deal with. Most people will have one of those all in one printer/scanners and that’s the way to go. Depending on your computer setup, you may need to install some additional software, for example in my case the scanner software was part of the HP printer software and it was already installed. Two things you need to do are to firstly print a plain coloured page that you’ll use as the background to all your scans and secondly to set the resolution to the highest (300dpi will work fine as prints are generally not printed at a higher resolution than that).

What you do is place your photos on the scanner (face down), put the background sheet behind them, and then scan them and save as JPG images. This will produce an image with, in my case, a blue background behind them. That blue background is there so that it’s easier to select the image that you want. I use Gimp (which is free) for selecting the image from the background and tidying up the image e.g. livening up the colours from a faded colour print or to modernise a black and white print. This made a massive difference on some of my images. One important point is to save the original saved image rather than just those you’ve improved.

Slides and negatives will require you to purchase a slide scanner. There isn’t a massive choice in these at the moment as people have, by and large, gone digital. You can spend thousands on them but in reality for home scanning what you need is the KODAK RODFS70 Slide scanner at around £180 or a more up to date model of that if there’s such a thing by the time you’re reading this. There are cheaper (£50-ish) scanners, but they have much lower resolution and somewhat slower: the Kodak one weighs in at 22mp which is plenty for slides and you can scan a box of 36 slides in around 7 minutes. Worth noting is that some of the much more expensive scanners are a lot slower as they do a scan of your slide in the same way as the print scanners do i.e. it takes a minute or so per slide vs the seconds that the Kodak model takes (it takes a photo of your slide using a very small camera, hence the seconds rather than minutes). You need to buy an SD card to go along with the scanner and it doesn’t require a computer during the scanning process. Slides scanned using this come out brilliantly on large screen TVs. One thing to watch during the scanning is that the brightness range of the Kodak scanner is less than that of the slides so if you’re scanning something with a very bright detail on it then you’ll need to adjust the brightness on the scanner but I found that was only required on a few slides out of the thousands that I scanned.

Videos (VHS or Betamax) aren’t much more complicated than slides but, again, you will need some items of hardware. First is something to actually play your video with (preferably the original camcorder), and secondly a USB Video Capture device (about £10). If you’ve lost the original camcorder, you can buy one on ebay for around £50. Basically, you connect the leads on your USB capture device to the camcorder, fire up appropriate recording software on your computer, and press play. There’s a wide range of software that will do this, but the free VLC should work just fine.

Digital Video is something that should be simple as it’s digital already. At one time it was but the Firewire interface that’s required has been discontinued on all PCs from around 2012 i.e. a good while ago. You could use the same approach as for VHS tapes described above, but you’ll lose a lot of resolution and it seems a shame given that DV video is already digital. As above, you will need a camcorder to play the tape, which can be bought on ebay if needbe.

In the absence of a firewire port on your PC, what you need to do is either buy a Pinnacle USB Moviebox (the 500-USB or 700-USB) on ebay (I used the 510-USB) and use the Pinnacle Studio software (around £50, but if you’re as organised as I was, you could copy all your DVs in the free trial period) and you’ll also need the driver for your Moviebox which you can get from https://cdn.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/Hardware_Installer/readmeHW10.htm (it works on Windows 11). Alternatively, you could buy a pre-2012 Mac with a Firewire port and that should be able to read directly from the DV i.e. you won’t need the Pinnacle software or Moviebox. As with the VHS options, you fire up the recording software and press play, the main difference being that the Pinnacle software can control the camcorder so you usually get a clean copy of the recording, though occasionally I found that the automatic cutoff missed bits so I had to do it manually.

All copied, so what’s next? Well, now that you’ve gone through all the work above, you don’t want to lose your digital copies so I’ve them copied onto a WD My Passport Ultra. Get the Ultra rather than the normal one as it is much faster: copying 1.5TB took over 11 hours on the normal vs around 5 hours on the Ultra as it uses USB-C.

If you’ve any questions, add them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them. I think you’ll find this is the only comprehensive guide to getting your images and videos into digital form, or at least I couldn’t find one (and I looked a LOT).

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

We’ve been investigating how our banking, investments, savings, pension, and mortgage will work when we move to Australia as we can explore that now rather than wait until everything is happening at once.

Banking turns out to be relatively simple. Many people will use Wise initially which, although not an actual bank, will give you local account numbers in both the UK and Australia. Although both will work for the usual direct debits, payments, and debit card transactions, the Australian one has some limitations, specifically it can’t be used to receive social security payments. However, much better is the HSBC Australia Everyday Global account which is a proper Australian bank account and is the only Australian bank that let’s you fully open an account from abroad (tell them that you’re using it for saving, NOT that you’re going to be moving there); the debit card arrives in a couple of weeks. Although you don’t have to have an HSBC UK Advance account, if you do, you can do instant transfers from it to your HSBC Australia account. The other plus point of this is that HSBC UK will let you keep that account when you’re living in Australia. Transfers in the reverse direction take a day or two unless you have HSBC Premier. You need to use the HSBC Australia account every month or two so that it doesn’t go dormant.

Savings are more tricky as many banks and building societies will require you to close your accounts when you move abroad. Notable exceptions to this are the Nationwide, HSBC, Lloyds, and RBS/NatWest. If your cash ISA is with one of these, you could keep it but a) can’t add more to it and b) the interest will be taxable in Australia as they don’t recognise ISAs. The same mostly applies to investment ISAs and investments generally.

Banking in Australia is a bit different. When you move, you’ll find that many of the UK banks and building societies will close your account so you want to have one or more of the above opened before you move, as you’ll not be able to open them afterwards. As you’ll notice, those I’ve mentioned above are legacy banks and in practice most (all?) of the fintech banks (Kroo, Monzo, Starling) will close your account. If you fancy a fintech in Australia, there’s UBank and Up, but you can’t open those until you are an Australian resident.

Pensions are rather more complex. Due to HMRC requirements, if you are going to transfer your pension then it can only be to an Australian SMSF which is QROPS compliant which in turn means that you’re looking at setup fees of around £2000 and similar annual fees after that. The maximum that you can transfer in this way is A$120000 (£60000) per year (potentially triple that in your first year). Alternatively you could just access your UK pension from Australia and simply declare the withdrawals in Australia (they’ll generally be subject to Australian income tax as if you tell HMRC that you’ve left, they won’t apply UK tax). Given that my UK SIPP costs all of £120/year, my current thinking is that I will just leave it in the UK and make withdrawals as I’d have done if I’d still been in the UK. One thing to note is that you don’t need an international pension and any place that seems to offer one is likely a scam. That said, some normal SIPPs come in a rebadged international version so, my one with AJ Bell does, but it’s just the same with a different name on the tin. You can only transfer defined contribution schemes, not final salary ones nor your UK state pension. If you tell the state pension people, they can pay your pension to an Australian bank account in Australian dollars, or you can get it paid into a UK bank account. As I say, this is a complex area and you’re going to need advice on this.

Credit cards are something that you may want in Australia, however you won’t have a credit history when you turn up obviously and therefore will likely get rejected when applying. Two ways around this are to open an American Express card in the UK before you leave and use their Global Transfer service (basically you apply for a card in Australia and in the application check the box that says existing customer and you should be in business. Their Australian cards mainly come with a fee and to my mind, the best currently is The American Express^® Platinum Edge Credit Card which is A$195/year after the first year but comes with enough supermarket discounts to, for me, cover the cost. If you don’t want a fee, there’s The Qantas American Express Discovery Card and The Low Rate Credit Card. Worth noting is that Amex acceptance seems much lower in Australia than it is in the UK. The other way around no credit history is to apply for an HSBC Australia credit card as they will check your UK credit history; their Premier card is free and their low rate card is A$99/year.

So what about a mortgage? If you’ve a mortgage on your UK home, you’ll likely have to pay that off before you go, or essentially change it into a buy to let mortgage (the interest rate will usually be about 1% higher). You seem to be able to keep a buy to let mortgage going although it’ll be a bit more complicated when you come to renewing any fixed offer that you may have and your choice of banks offering it will likely be more restricted. What about an Australia mortgage? Still to be researched more fully, but they look much the same as UK mortgages, albeit with fewer options and, of course, there’s the business of proving your income in Australia.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

The first thing to note is that Australia is big, really big. Not only is there different geography including the usual city, coastal, countryside, and mountains but there’s entirely different climates to consider too. So, for example, if you’re looking up north around Darwin you can have monsoons, around Alice Springs you’ve got major heat in the summer, and in Tasmania you’ve basically got a normal (for UK people) climate. Hence, we’re concentrating our search in Tasmania.

In addition to a temperate climate, Tasmania has a whole lot fewer people: the population density is around 1/20th of what I’m used to locally. That different population density obviously affects the traffic density too which is obvious to me now but confused me initially. One consequence of that lower traffic density is that you can expand the radius that you’re considering for a property. In my initial searches, I used distance as the decider but it turns out that you can drive a whole lot further in twenty minutes in Tasmania than you can in twenty minutes in Belfast.

Unless you’re planning on living in the wilds (of which there’s a lot in Tasmania), there’s essentially two major population centres: Launceston and Hobart. Hobart is the capital and we found that there’s a lot more traffic there than there is in Launceston, as you’d expect from the larger population (about 200,000 vs 80,000). This is also reflected in the house prices: something that would sell for around A$700,000 in Launceston is more like A$1,000,000 in Hobart. That said, if you drive just ten minutes further out of the centre, an equivalent Hobart property is down to A$800,000 or so: it surprised me no end how much the prices changed if you added an extra ten minutes distance.

So, what are we looking for? Well, we have two slightly conflicting objectives in that Wendy and I will be retiring, whereas the boys will be looking for work, which means that we can’t be too far from their employment, hence our searches are looking for somewhere within about 30 minutes drive of either Launceston or Hobart. We’d also like somewhere with “a bit” of land so, notionally, minimum of a couple of acres, but not loads of acres, although we’ve found that isn’t as cut and dried as it first appeared as, for example, 100 acres of forest is probably easier to look after than 2 acres of landscaped garden. We’re not moving for about two to three years, so the prices will obviously have changed over that time but we’re using as a rough guideline A$800,000 as our maximum. Interestingly, when we were looking up to April, we seemed to need that A$800,000 but looking in July we found a number of suitable properties around A$600,000. Other than that, we’re just looking for three bedrooms minimum but even that’s not so clear-cut as you’d expect as Australian homes come with the usual bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms that you’d expect but also things labelled “study” (which could equally be a bedroom), rumpus rooms, entertainment rooms, workshops, storerooms, and a whole host of other categories, many of which I’ve never heard of.

They have open viewings in Australia so we were able to visit several properties whilst we were there (you can search for these via https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/inspection-times-1; they appear up to a week or so ahead). One thing that was clear right away was that the estate agent descriptions were very accurate, but equally clear was that we also needed to know more about the surrounding area of the property that we’d be buying. To partially get around that, you can use satellite view and street view on google maps, which we were doing, but it’s a lot clearer when you’re driving up to the property and having a look around. For example, one property we went to see was just hemmed in between two others and the back garden was pretty much a sheer drop, neither of which were obvious from our online investigations. Equally though, another property has what’s essentially a small national forest in its back garden which was beautiful but not at all obvious from the estate agent description or photos: in fact that property was one we’d buy if this were two years from now, yet, ironically not one that we’d have looked at buying.

What we’ve been mainly using to do our searches is https://www.realestate.com.au (that link takes you directly to one of our searches). There’s also https://www.domain.com.au/ but we found that the facilities on it weren’t so good. The RealEstate site lets you add filters, the key ones for us being the number of bedrooms, maximum price, and minimum land. You’re best to look for one less bedroom than you think you need as it will include houses with other types of rooms that you could just as easily use as a bedroom, so we actually would like four but search for three. House type is “interesting” as it’s, of course, Australian style so you’ve the usual house, townhouse, villa, retirement living, and apartment, but also acreage, rural and land which can all include houses on them. There’s also a map search option which we’ve found to be very useful as you don’t need to know what postcode areas you want your property to be in. Once we’d done a bunch of searches, we noticed that one particular estate agent seemed to turn up in a fair number of them: Neil Hawkins and, funnily enough, he was at one of the properties that we went to visit too! I suspect that’s a common occurrence in that a particular estate agent will likely specialise in the properties that you like yourself. I’m not 100% sure that we’ll end up buying our property via Neil, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing that.

We thought at the outset that a scouting trip was essential, and it did indeed prove to be very useful. Whilst most people doing that kind of thing stay in a hotel and then just scoot around the areas that they’re interested in, we chose a self-catering property in an area that we’d previously been looking at for properties. That gave us the opportunity to get a feel for what it might be like living there and the boys pointed out later that it felt like we were living there. For Tasmania, that was Cherry Top Farmstay which is on the edge of Lilydale. It turns out that Lilydale did indeed feel like the kind of village which we’d want to be close to (we don’t want to be in a village though) as it has all the services you need i.e. decent supermarket, post office, medical centre, a small group of takeaways, coffee shops, a tavern, a petrol station, a school, and even a swimming pool. We were there for almost two weeks and were able to cover just about all the things we were aiming to do so we checked out how to sign up for Medicare, change the driving licence over, and saw round a number of other areas that we’d been considering. That said, there were a bunch of things that we couldn’t fit into the time available and we’d have needed at least another week. We’d also have liked more time to explore round Hobart as the two days didn’t really cut it, although it did highlight some negatives (the traffic) and positives (Cygnet). Our trip also had the advantage of highlighting some things that we particularly liked such as the small village feel of Lilydale and put us off Sidmouth a bit as it doesn’t seem to have that, although on paper it seems to.

As I say, we’re aiming to move around 2027 or so but we’re going to continue to look now and again as we build our evidence for my visa application that, all being well, we’ll be submitting late 2026.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

It’s been a while since the last post here! Turns out that home schooling plus real life plus blogging would require more hours in the day than there are available.

For those missing the final couple of segments of the psychology notes, they’re coming over the next few months.

So, we’re preparing for another international move, to Australia this time. We’re just back from our initial scouting trip which let us look at a few potential locations and an initial look at a few houses that would be along the lines of what we’re hoping to buy in due course. Moving to Australia is a bit more complicated than moving to France was as we (well “I”) need to apply for a visa rather than just turning up as we did when we moved to France.

We started preparations late last year when I created my IMMI account (https://online.immi.gov.au/lusc/login) which is what you use to apply for an Australian visa these days. Unfortunately, there’s no option to produce a printed version of the form so to find out what documents and whatnot you need, you’ll need to go through the whole application adding in “to be added later” or the equivalent in the various text boxes. And, there’s a LOT of information and documents that they want!

One issue that we noted as we moved through the form and looked at what others before us have done is that it’s largely geared up to couples that have been together for a couple of years and, paradoxically, much harder if you’ve been together for 20+ years as we have been. Now, I know you’re thinking that “hey, we’re married and have a couple of kids, it’ll be easy”. Nope. Each child you have just proves that you were together one day nine months before they were born, similarly for that marriage certificate. What they’re looking for is evidence that you’ve been together continuously for all those years, right up to the point when you submit the application. So, for example, the “relationship history” that you each need to write needs to cover the period from when you first met, all significant events since then, right up to the day you hit “submit” on your application.

In practice, we have found that we’re going to need to create the evidence because we haven’t been saving it up all those years. Seeing as they will be looking at this blog as part of the evidence: dear immigration officer, I know that sounds really bad, but honestly we’ve been together for over 20 years as you’ll see from this blog!

The immigration people like to see that you’ve been on holiday together which you’d think would be a doddle to prove. However, it turns out that the airlines don’t keep records going way back and we only have insurance for one holiday naming all of us because we’re on the Nationwide insurance now and it doesn’t work as proof. Accommodation booking only take the name on the credit card so are no use either. Photos sound good, but although we’ve heaps of photos, we’ve very few with both of us in them and have been making a point of doing joint selfies lately to start creating that evidence.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Chapter 5 Developmental psychology: cognitive development and epistemologies runs to around 40 pages and is one of the chapters for TMA3. It will have a fairly familiar feel for anyone who has done one of the child development modules.

Introduction gives a very brief overview of how diverse the fields of study are in developmental psychology and equally how diverse the methods used are.

Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives on cognitive development. A Piagetian perspective introduces Piaget’s constructivist approach built on the idea that children construct their understanding of the world by way of developing schemas and take place over a number of stages in their lives. So, we have from 1-4 months primary circular reactions (i.e. repetitive motions centred on themselves), from 4-8 months secondary circular motions (i.e. repetitive motions with effects away from their body) and from 12-18 months tertiary circular reactions which are experimental in nature. His theory is based on the idea that all children in all cultures will process through a series of stages in their lives: birth to 2 years sensorimotor (developing object permanence), 2-7 years preoperational (use of language to represent objects), 7-11 years concrete operational (logical reasoning, mastering conservation), 11-18 years formal operational (logical thought applied to abstract ideas). This implies that play is an important element in development although the relationship between play and guided play differs between cultures. Criticism of this approach comes from many angles in particular that individual children can be at different stages in different domains at any given point in their lives. Piagetian methods illustrates the development of his ideas through his work with Binet on IQ scales where he was interested in the errors that children made and in particular the systematic way in which this happened. He noted that children weren’t miniature adults and emphasised the idea that children needed to be allowed to talk freely in research, avoiding too many questions but rather allowing them to elaborate on their thinking: moving towards open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews. His three mountains task (Piaget, 1969) illustrated the egocentric nature of children and is difficult for 4-5 year olds but easy enough at 9-10. Other tasks were around conservation of mass, volume and number which proved difficult before around 7 (i.e. at preoperational stage) as are class inclusion problems (e.g. are there more red flowers or more flowers in a bunch of red and yellow flowers)(Goswami, 2014). He didn’t consider the effects of peers and the social situation on learning until much later nor did he consider the human sense aspect (e.g. hiding from a policeman variant of the three mountains task and similar variants of the conservation tasks [Donaldson, 1983]). A Vygotskian perspective takes a social-constructivist approach developing using the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolding of learning: cultural tools together with social interaction produce the skills and abilities that we see. Vygotskian methods presented problems for children to solve but with the addition of cues e.g. The blocks test asks children to sort blocks into categories with odd names and observes how they develop the meaning of the categorisation. Children’s self-talk explores how Vygotsky saw the disappearance of self-talk around 4-7 represented the internalisation of the concepts. This generally reappears when difficult tasks are encountered even later in life (Smith, 2007). Social-constructivist interventions Looking at talk within classrooms, Lyle (2008) noted that 90% of it consisted of closed responses in the Initiate, Response, Feedback pattern. Mercer (1995) considered the types of interactions that were used, with Warwick (2013) finding that exploratory talk was the most useful. Mercer (2014) went on to develop interventions aiming to teach the styles of speech that were required to develop collaborative working. Mercer (2006) found that these interventions improved their performance over a range of topic areas i.e. as Vygotsky would have it, developing their social skills affected their thinking skills more generally.

Measuring beliefs about epistemology begins by highlighting the teachers’s beliefs about epistemology affect how they teach. Thus a Piagetian approach will assume that children develop in set stages whilst a Vygotskyian one will emphasise social learning. Self-report questionnaires are generally used to explore the impact of these beliefs. Self-report questionnaires are developed starting from a literature review before a pilot then moving on to factor analysis. Epistemological Questionnaire (EQ) (Schommer, 1990) used a Likert scale on a range of questions such as ‘Successful students understand things quickly.’ From this, the factor analysis came up with four factors with good reliability: Fixed ability, Simple knowledge, Quick learning and Certain knowledge. Hofer’s Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) groups the factors into the nature of knowing (what knowledge is: the certainty and simplicity of knowledge) and the process of knowing (how you come to understand knowledge: the source and justification of knowledge). Erdamar and Alpan (2013) used this to consider the belief systems: fixed and certain, coming from authority figures through to complex and the need to put effort into learning. However, Schraw (2013) found that the EQ didn’t cover everything and seemed to be and went on to develop Epistemic Beliefs Inventory (EBI) to address the shortcomings. Others such as Tümkaya (2012) have gone on to add demographic and personal details producing a three factor model: ‘the belief concerning that learning depends on effort’, ‘the belief concerning that learning depends on ability’, and ‘the belief concerning that there is one unchanging truth’. As always, there is a cultural element to this and Chi-Kin Lee (2013) using EQ in China found an authority/expert factor not in the original EQ. What is culture though? Tümkaya (2012) considered university students from different faculties finding that social science students emphasised the importance of learning on effort and context whilst medical students emphasised innate ability. The case of inclusive education introduces the idea of key word signing as a way of supporting the communication skills of those with severe learning difficulties e.g. the use of Signalong which is based on British Sign Language. This is key word signing rather than a fully developed sign language. Some evidence suggests that a social-constructivist approach works best in inclusive class rooms (Mercer, 2009) which in turn implies that those teachers would have an epistemology of social-constructivism but few studies have considered this (Florian and Black-Hawkins, 2011). Sheehy and Budiyanto (2014) considered this in Indonesia (mainly on the videos). Pompeo (2011) indicated that reflecting on one’s epistemological beliefs can help improve them and hence social science students tend to be more sophisticated in terms of epistemology than science students.

Reference: Sheehy, K. (2016). Developmental psychology: cognitive development and epistemologies. In Ness, H., Kaye, H. and Stenner, P. (2016). Investigating Psychology 3. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.