Foreign Perspectives

Northern Ireland has had a variant of the Alternative Voting scheme for many years and in the vote today one of the biggest downsides of it is very plain to see.

In place of what was once a relatively short voting paper were two around two feet long with around 20 candidates on each. Even reading down the list takes a while and with two elections and the ballot for the AV system today, the queues are somewhat longer than usual. Is that a fairer system? Well, it would be, if people paid as much attention to their vote as politicians always seem to think that they do. In reality, people just don’t do that and thus the system probably ends up producing a result that’s less representative of “the people” than what went before. Picking one person that you’d quite like to represent you is much easier than choosing two or three amongst a much longer list of people.

Having said that, it’s more likely that people will add a name or two as a protest which they couldn’t do if there was only one person that they could vote for. Thus in response to the widespread dislike of the mass immigration that we’ve experienced one could expect that the BNP will pick up some protest votes.

Although it can take longer (a lot longer) to produce a final result from AV, that’s something that only happens every four or five years so is probably the weakest argument on the anti-AV campaign.

Is it worth having to give the potential for a protest vote? Maybe, but for me the biggest downside is that it makes it a good deal more difficult to use your vote effectively and that more than cancels out any advantage of protest vote potential.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the Open University’s main chemistry course for a while now but it’s one of those courses with widely varying opinions which put me off. Basically there were those who rated it pretty much as A-level and at the other end of the extreme those who rated it as pretty much impossible.

The reason for such wide variations is generally down to the differing backgrounds that people have. Come to a course with just the minimum entry requirements met and you’ll find it at the very difficult end of the range, come to it with quite a lot of preparation and it can be very easy indeed to do. The snag is that you generally won’t know what the “right” preparation is until you find yourself in the midst of the course. For instance, the “right” preparation for the Exploring English course isn’t a whole bunch of English courses and is instead a couple of their foreign language courses.

Anyway, S205 has been on my October short-list but generally getting pushed out by courses which were widely held to be doable.

In theory it’s easy to calculate the amount of time that you need to set aside to do an OU course. On the face of it the only complication is that you need to do one course to let you estimate the scaling factor to apply to their estimates. Thus they quote 16 hours a week for a 60 point course and 8 for a 30 point course; my normal scaling factor is 1/2 so that generally makes it more like 6 hours for a 16 pointer and around 3 for a 30 pointer.

You might think that they’d quote around 3 hours a week for a 15 pointer but they’re run over a shorter time so generally it’s around 8 hours that they quote and sometimes as much as 11. Likewise, not all 30 point courses run over 9 months these days: those run over 5 months quote 11 hours a week rather than 8.

What’s also noticeable is that for the more intense courses (i.e. those run over shorter periods) the scale factor to apply is different. Thus for A251 I found that it took more than my predicted 5 hours a week throughout and a whole lot more in the final week to do the ECA. Also, you’ll find that courses largely presented online can seem to take more time in that you have to be online quite often to do them and can’t do your own thing as is the case for most OU courses.

In times gone by the way to gauge the intensity of a course was simply to ask those who’d done it. With a bit of luck you’d find someone who’d done both a course you’d already done and one you were thinking of doing. Thus I know that S283 that I haven’t done yet will be quite a bit easier than S282 which I have done. Unfortunately, with the demise of FirstClass, this is becoming much more of a hit and miss affair and the option of searching for blogs describing courses doesn’t turn up a whole lot (although if you’re doing science, check out Julian’s blog which has blow by blow descriptions of all the courses he’s done).

As it stands right now, there’s very little to go on out there and it can be conflicting too. For instance S205 is described both as extremely difficult and as little beyond A-level. Having read through some of it, it does seem to be at the easier end of the scale but that might be down to me comparing it to S204. You certainly need to read the course descriptions more closely these days, have a look at the course materials in your regional centre, ask the students in your tutor group and try FirstClass too.

I have finally gotten around to completing this which “just” leaves the writing up to be done.

Home experiments used to be all the rage in the Open University science courses but they seem not to be so popular these days or at least not on such a widespread basis. That’s not to say they’re not around in significant numbers on some courses though: last years Astronomy (S282) course came with loads of them. For the biology course there are two experimental weeks although in reality it’s more like a couple of experimental days if the first one is anything to go by.

The problem of course is all the health and safety considerations that come to bear on these things nowadays. What’s particularly odd about the biology experiment is that step one is to acquire a chemical that is one of three components that are very popular with bomb makers: something that has caused some difficulty in purchasing said item for a number of students.

The potato experiment comes in three segments. In the first segment we’d to try a pilot experiment with our liquidised potato and hydrogen peroxide to select a suitable concentration of liquidised potato to use in the later experiments. All by itself that part took over an hour for me and I ended up having to repeat it as the catalase in the potato went off mid-way through the second experiment.

The second experiment takes even longer. Despite having got into the swing of it, that one ended up taking several hours which is where the problem in my first attempt lay as the catalase goes off in around three hours so having the mid-point falling at close to that time was asking for trouble. The objective of that one is to find the period when the catalase is working at its peak rate which almost always is going to fall in the first minute so it makes for a very boring 9 minutes for each of the five replicates that you’ve to run.

In the final experiment you get down to the meat of the experiment which is to show that the reaction rate is dependent on the concentration of the catalase which takes another couple of hours.

Add up all the experiment times and you’re looking at around six hours to complete this. And then you have to do some statistical work and write up the experiment.

As in last years SXR270 glucose assay, the problem with this experiment is that you need to do so many replicates that it gets to be very mechanical and boring which doesn’t seem right given that what you’re working on comes with some really interesting theory behind it.

We meet the potatoes again in August when we’ve to devise our own experiment. The devising of it is what needs most thought unless you have a commercial laboratory handy. Thus, things like examining the effect of different temperatures are complicated unless you choose 0C and whatever the room temperature is but even then it’s not so simple as the liquidised potato needs to be kept in the fridge ie you only really vary the temperature of the water you’re diluting it with. Comparing how it works in the light and dark would be nice to do but doesn’t seem practical and neither does varying the colour of the light. Varying the pH would also be nice to do and certainly possible but how would you measure the pH without laboratory equipment? You could even compare different ages of potato but that’s complicated in that you’d need to use the same variety of potato and you don’t know its age (unless you’ve grown it yourself…hmmm).

When you’re starting out on your first degree that’s usually a fairly easy question for most people to answer. They’ve gotten themselves all fired up about a particular subject and are at least intending to follow that through to the end.

It’s different when you’re doing a degree part-time though. Sure, there are people who are all fired up about a particular subject and will follow that through to the end. But there are a lot of others who are fired up about a whole range of courses or are looking upon it as life-long education. For that group, it’s not always obvious what degree they are doing at any one time as it’s quite easy to flick from one to another as you carry along.

Take me for instance. Since the start of last year I’ve done courses in biology (5), physics (3), computer science (2) and history (1) which is fine as I’m broadly aiming to complete a life sciences degree by 2014. However, the pattern for next year is almost certainly going to be completely different. Moreover, when you tot up the points totals it’s currently looking like my “miscellaneous” degree will be completed first and that’s currently a very varied degree indeed with contributions from mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine and history.

Actually, apart from life sciences, I don’t really think of myself as doing a degree at all but rather a whole series of really interesting courses. For a first degree that would probably be a recipe for disaster on the CV but for me the degree is just a side-effect and not an end in itself.