Foreign Perspectives

It’s the usual equation for me though seemingly never for an obvious reason.

With the archaeology the tutor has been giving really good comments on the assignments that I’ve put in. Just as well as I’ve studied neither history nor art subjects in any form for a very long time indeed.

So, in the first one I lost marks in leaving out what seems obvious in hindsight, namely the dates of the various events. I’d bandied about the terms for the periods alright, just not added the dates. Easy to fix obviously.

In the second I’d not put in enough in the way of references which seemed to drop a similar number of marks as the overall mark was much the same as for the first one. Not quite so easy to fix as I found out in the third one.

For the third one, there were dates everywhere and a page and a half of references which took ages to research. In this world archaeology course I thought that I’d take two empires as they suggested and add references from around the world. Net effect was that within the word count you couldn’t say a massive amount about those additional examples so 10% less than before! I think I fell into the trap of this course: it covers a lot of ground in a short time and leaves you with lots of examples whereas what’s really wanted at this level is an in-depth critique of a few cases with perhaps a short reference to other examples.

Which leaves the end of course assessment to do. There are two options on this one. In the first you’ve to look at the impact of cultural contact and movement which sounded good to me as there are lots of examples. For the second you’ve to choose three examples of the impact of population growth on the development of societies.

Prior to receiving the latest mark I’d decided to go for the first option as it seemed to allow the inclusion of loads of examples but I suspect that the second option is probably better as it would force me into concentrating more on fewer examples. The problem with doing that is that it depends on being able to find references to quite detailed aspects of the impact of population growth and in some really interesting societies there’s not a whole lot of detail to draw upon. So, for example, whilst presumably population growth had a major impact on the formation of early agricultural villages, there’s next to nothing to say about them.

Are you going for the sexy undies again or are you going to buy your girl some chocolate this time?

The downside of the undies is that men tend to buy something sexy whilst women are looking for something comfortable. The two rarely meet in the middle. Sexy stuff is generally tight and made of thin material but women are looking for comfy and this time of year thin material generally doesn’t cut it.

But why do they like chocolate so much anyway? These days a lot of it is to do with the marketing by the chocolate companies, hence the mass of those little heart shaped chocolates that you see around Valentine’s Day.

However, there are also chemical reasons behind the attraction of chocolate. It’s a sweet and we are all attracted to sugary things for a start. However, it also contains triggers for your endorphins (the “feel good” chemicals) which other sweets don’t. Finally, specifically for the women it contains phenylethylamine which is related to chemicals peaking during orgasm.

It’s been over six months since I last heard from my previous employer (who I’m still notionally working for) so I was a bit taken aback to get a phone call telling me of two potential jobs.

Even more oddly, both seem quite reasonable jobs too and not wildly out of line with my previous experience either which is itself quite unusual.

The first one seems like a normal systems analyst job for the most part. I’m a bit wary of it though as some parts of the job description seem to indicate that it’s aimed at an insider so I don’t really rate my chances with it.

Slightly oddly given my own situation the second one is a secondment which I’m sure will complicate life a bit and also has the problem that there’s an end date for it with no obvious route “back”. That said, it’s an almost perfect fit for me or seems to me to be anyway. Whether it’ll seem so to them is, of course, a different matter.

Whatever the result, if nothing else it shows that they’ve not completely forgotten about me.

The OU World Archaeology (A251) course is a peculiar beastie in many ways.

For a start, it’s a 30 point course which would normally mean that it would run either February to October or October to June. Instead it runs November to March which is a bit out of sync with other courses and also means that it runs at around a 60 point workload.

That “60 point” workload for a 30 point course means that it feels like it’s racing along, often at a headlong pace. Thus we covered the development of agriculture, cities and empires in three separate four week chunks and have an assignment every month.

The style of assignment changes radically too. The first one was the usual OU assignment based on the course texts, the second required a small research element outside the texts, the third requires a small amount from the texts and a lot of research and the final one looks like it will be all research. Quite a progression and one that finds me needing to do a lot more work for the third assignment due this week than I did for the previous two. The final one is supposed to run over three weeks rather than the one week for each of the previous ones.

On the whole though it feels more and more like you’re doing real archaeology, digging out information for yourself. The downside of that is that it means that this isn’t a course to be taken as lightly as many people do. It looks like an interesting course that you can just slot into even the tightest timetable but in reality it’s rather a full course with frequently massive amounts of reading to be done and increasing amounts of work to be done for assignments as the course progresses.

For all that, it is an interesting course. I just wish that they’d scheduled it over the normal 9 month timetable. That would have let me wallow in some of the topics it covers rather than just watch them race by.

That used to be the standard question when international phone calls first became commonplace several decades ago.

Frankly, with so little contact, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about. Just as well really with the costs of international phone calls being at totally crazy prices back then.

It’s different now of course with international calls frequently being cheaper than even local rate calls. No, really: check the tariffs from your phone company and compare against some of the cheap calling services. Right now our normal local rate is around 7p a minute but it only costs us 2p a minute to call Australia!

However, despite the increased number of calls, the “what time is it” question still gets asked a lot in our household. You’d think we’d have gotten the hang of time differences by now, wouldn’t you?