Foreign Perspectives

The basic problem that Greece seems to have is that it has never really properly adjusted from the days when it could devalue the Dracma every couple of years.

In such an environment, you don’t really need to worry too much about creating a real economy as you can always pull in more tourists by reducing the value of your currency every now and again. Since that hasn’t been an option for ten years, what they did instead was to borrow more and more money to balance the books until they reached the point when they could borrow no more.

The problem now is that they have no economy to generate the money required to repay all those loans and neither can they devalue to reduce the value of the loans. Instead, what’s going to happen is that they will have to have those loans renegotiated to reduce their value directly. Snag is that this just pushes the refinancing out to the organisations which provided the loans who in turn need to be refinanced. The bigger problem is the sheer scale of the loans which, built up over ten years, amount to a significant proportion of Germany’s GDP. Proposals to privatise the debt just relocate the problem.

The current refinancing is essentially just lending more money to allow them to make the debt repayments without fully recognising that the capital needs to be repaid too. That’s, naturally, where the problems are going to mount up.

And, of course, that’s just Greece with Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland not too far behind them.

Despite downing tools with everything except preparation for the biology exam for the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to remain broadly on schedule with the chemistry reading so far.

Unfortunately, there’s quite a lot of stuff to be done on the DVD as well and some of that is required for the first assignment due at the end of next week so I’ll need to get going on that. What has been useful is to have read over the first couple of course books earlier in the year so at least the reading is quite easy to do the second time around.

That bit of easier going is just as well as I’ve still not come down from the stress of the biology exam yet. I’ve never done anything like as much revision for an exam as I did for that one yet still there were questions that I couldn’t do as it was an exam which pretty much required you to know the entire course in quite a bit of detail which isn’t an overly realistic proposition.

This morning saw the final S204 exam as it’s being replaced by S294 from next year plus another course a year or two later.

As usual the two short answer questions were all over the place requiring quite a comprehensive knowledge of the course contents to be able to fully answer 12 from the 18 on offer. Individually each of them seemed relatively easy but this being the section of the exam that required you to show you’d a good overall grasp of the course, you needed pretty detailed knowledge for a fair number of them. So, yes, they were easy but only if you had put an awful lot of time into learning the course content.

The three data handling questions didn’t require a great deal of specific biological knowledge and seemed fairly easy to do. That said, a broad knowledge of the course content obviously helped here.

I suspect that some people may have come unstuck on the essay questions. Some were fairly broad but there seemed to be a lot of detail required for some of them too.

Overall, on my pessimistic estimate I seem to be on a fairly safe pass so not a bad exam in the end.

The Open University is generally quite far ahead of the game when it comes to producing software to go along with its courses. Snag is, that those courses generally run for around 10 years and that’s a very long time indeed in software. The net effect of that is that it’s not quite so easy to just plonk in the DVDs and CDs that come with your course. However, it is possible, so here’s how….

Method one: for Linux and Mac

Almost all older OU software assumes that you have a Windows computer and generally speaking a Windows XP computer. However, you don’t need to have one.

1. Browse the CD/DVD and check if there is a setup.exe file or an index.html file.

2. If it’s an index.html file then you can probably just open it and carry on. If it’s a setup file, then you should install Wine (either from www.winehq.org, or from the Linux repositories); there’s no charge for the software.

3. Once you’ve installed Wine, double-click on the setup.exe file (for Linux, you will need to set the file permissions to allow execution).

If that doesn’t work, see method two.

Method two: for Linux, Mac and Windows 64 bit

This usually applies to older OU software and affects Windows 64bit systems in some cases too.

1. Install VirtualBox (from www.virtualbox.org or the Linux repositories); there’s no charge for the software.

2. Register at www.DreamSpark.com and then download Windows 2003 (you could download Windows 2008, but that’s too modern for some OU software). This gets you two files: en_win_srv_2003_r2_standard_with_sp2_cd1_X13-04790.iso and one with “cd2” in place of “cd1”.

3. Start VirtualBox and set it up for Windows. This will bring up a screen titled “Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager”. Click on “New” (top left icon on my screen), click on next and it should ask you for a machine name: it’s best to name it something like Windows2003. Also select the operating system (ie Microsoft Windows) and version (Windows 2003). Click next and it asked for the base memory size. For Windows 2003, 1mb is more than enough. Note: the size set here can’t be more than half of the memory in your computer. Next takes you to the question about the hard disk. This is the hard disk of your new VirtualBox/Windows machine, not your own computer! The default size of 20gb is more than enough for OU stuff – don’t worry too much about that size as it only expands to 20gb as you use it. Couple more nexts and you should get back to the original VirtualBox screen as at step one, with “Windows2003 powered off” or “Windows2008 powered off” listed.

4. Install Windows… Select Windows2003 then click on “Settings”. Click on Storage and you’ll see a CD icon saying “empty” beside it. Over to the right of that there is a CD icon underneath the heading “attributes”, click on that then “choose virtual CD/DVD drive” and browse to the first “.iso” file as per step one. Click on OK and you’re back to the first VirtualBox screen. Double click on your Windows2003 and it will start to install the software. For Windows2003 then you’ll need to select the second .iso file when prompted to insert the second CD. You’ve the various Windows settings to go through along the way but they’re just things like the time, date, and keyboard.

5. In parallel with step 4, you can copy the various course CDs/DVDs onto your computer as .iso files. On Linux, Brasero works well, for Mac you can use Burn (http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html) but in both cases there are loads of alternatives.

6. Once all that’s done (and it’s not nearly so complicated in practice as it might sound!), you just double-click on Windows2003 to start up the windows machine. You’ll need to attach the .iso files as required, which you do by clicking Devices, CD/DVD Devices, Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file when you’re running Windows.

The course books for S205 arrived on Thursday which is usually pretty much a non-event for me as I generally work from the PDF copies of them.

However, the seven DVDs that came with the books gave some pause for thought. Books for courses aren’t so bad in that the course team producing them can see how much of a page-count they’re expecting their students to work through. DVDs are a completely different matter and sometimes course teams seem to ignore the amount of material that is contained on DVDs. After all, for them, it’s easy to plonk on a bit more. Anyway, for S205 they’ve pretty much admitted to doing just that as they’ve included a whole range of videos and animations from previous courses essentially for our interest. Whether the time will be available to actually watch them all is quite another matter of course.

The website opened this morning and has what seems like another DVD full of stuff for download. Certainly it was getting on for an hour to go through the sheer number of files for download. I’ve made a start on installing what’s quite a wide range of software that comes with this course. As with S204, it needs Windows so I’ve fired up VirtualBox for that yet again.

Handily enough, they have pulled out the summaries for the books which is what I normally do as step one of revision for a course. They’ve not only included a specimen exam paper but a second real one with answers: a nice touch and something that other courses should do.

Most worrying is the October 27th date for the first assignment, just two weeks after the S204 exam. I’ve had a look at it this morning and it doesn’t seem too bad and seems to only need a couple of diagrams (they always eat up the time) so hopefully it won’t take too long to do.

The first “hello” comments are on the chat forum and already several people have owned up to finished off S204 at the moment which I suppose is what one would expect as there’s a lot of commonality between biology and chemistry.

Anyway, ’tis back to S204 now as I want to complete the first pass through all the material by the end of the week. Boy is the revision time for it going fast!