Foreign Perspectives

It seemed at the time to be a difficult course to revise for and it proved to be quite difficult to do on the day too.

The multiple choice part was by far the easiest to do in practice with 60% of people picking up 70% (ie grade 1 or 2) on it and only 6% failing it.

The short answer questions show a dramatic drop in overall performance though. Although the individual question results don’t look too bad (50% in grade 1 or 2 in the two easiest questions, 25% on the two hardest in part 1), the overall mark for this section of the paper shows only 20% getting grade 1 or 2 and 25% failing it which means that a number of people didn’t answer the required number of questions.

By far the worst section was cosmology with question 15 on dark matter being a disaster for most people. Only 49% passed it and just 7% picked up a grade 1 or 2. Surprisingly, question 13 on Hubble classifications wasn’t much better with 52% passing it and 12% getting grade 1 or 2; I’m not sure why this happened as the question doesn’t look amazingly difficult but clearly an awful lot of people dropped marks all over the place on it.

Some individual questions proved to be surprisingly difficult and have a deceptively easy look to them. Question 10 on star properties felled 35% of those doing it and Question 12 on the end of life of stars proved to be difficult to do really well with although most people passed it. The Hubble classification question was a shock to me as it looks like it should be easy to do well with it yet few did and almost half failed it. Probably the oddest result is that of the final question on the universe though, with almost identical numbers of people in every percentile which implies that people generally did that last and just answered whatever they could. Quite a peculiar spread to the marks even so.

Answering the right number of questions is something that many people fell down on. Despite not overly great marks in individual questions the overall marks for the short answer section were lower than most individual questions which implies that people skipped questions altogether. You just can’t afford to do that on a difficult paper and it resulted in 25% of people failing that section. Thanks to the multiple choice section this equates to around 10% failing overall.

Rather a difficult subject to do well with and one that I’m glad I don’t have to repeat. Commiserations to the 40 or so people who will be resitting it.

The final TT280 result sneaked in without me noticing a few days ago.

Our merry band have been reduced by another 20 this time with the original 481 now down to 437. As before, almost everyone is in the 85-100% range with the marks and consequently have over 15% towards their final mark. You need to pass both the CMAs and the ECA so everyone still needs to clear 40% on the ECA rather than the 30% that they may think they need.

The ECA itself is a bit of a peculiar beast, consisting of a four page website, a 1000 word report for the client and a 2000 word technical report. Previous versions of the course appeared to have ran with a single combined report which makes more sense as there’s a lot of duplication between the two reports and going by the course descriptions, later courses in the web applications certificate only have one report.

The website itself is a doddle with the only hassle being that it must validate. Having said that, if you haven’t written any HTML before it would probably be a bit of an eye opener but in reality they only require a very simple website. I’m using the W3C’s Amaya program to run it up which handily validates everything as you write. That immediate validation is something of a pain at times but does avoid the grief of having to go through hundreds of validation errors later on.

The ECA is due next week which seems to have come around terribly quickly and despite me running three weeks ahead for most of the course I’ll only be submitting the ECA a few days early. That’s the problem in general with the TT courses: any slack you may build up is eaten up very quickly indeed.

When the Economist mentions something in several different articles it’s a pretty good bet that the something is in big trouble.

Last week they opened with a potted summary of the emergency support fund being set up by the Euro zone governments in an effort to patch up the radically different speeds which they’re running at. Then there was the leader urging leaders to forget about the option of breaking up the Euro and how dire it would be for a time. Finally, there was the briefing going through how it would be done and how difficult it would be to do.

The problem with the emergency fund being explicitly set up is that everyone knows just how much money is in the kitty. That’s sure to prompt some people to stretch that kitty to the limit whether they be speculators or governments wishing that they could just devalue.

Listing the processes necessary to recreate an old currency is frankly just asking for trouble. As they point out, doing so would cause massive upheaval in the financial markets lasting years and knock-on consequences of the real economy in the country doing it internally and through difficulties in trading with other countries during the change-over period. Unfortunately, those countries are already facing years of upheaval and austerity budgets and moreover their country’s finances will be run by un-elected officials from other countries during that period. Wouldn’t the upheaval in recreating their own currencies be worth it for them? At least they’d be able to have a real say in how their budget was run.

One of the major problems they foresee is the logistics of printing the new currency in secrecy. Unfortunately, there is one Euro zone country that doesn’t need to do that. Ireland’s banks already print sterling notes and one, relatively doable, option would be simply for Ireland to revert to their former linked currency explicitly, at least for a while.

So, will it be Ireland that will pull out first? Whoever it is, they seem unlikely to be the last.

My Dad would have been 84 today had he lived but, sadly, he didn’t quite make it to even 82.

The photo here was taken on whilst he was over in France with us for John’s first birthday.

That’s the pity really… John was only 3 when he died so for him his Granda left him half a lifetime ago. We were over in France for most of John’s life up to that point whilst James grew up knowing him most of his first couple of years of life.

Interestingly though, both of them continue to mention him every couple of months or so and they haven’t forgotten him as much as I’d thought they would have by now. Sadly, they both have fewer memories of him than I’d hoped they would have had over the years but sometimes they create memories of him in situations where they would have expected him to be. Thus, James mentioned that Granda would have been there on his first day at he new school and that he’d have still been looking after them in what’s still their favourite park.

Of course, in many ways most of their “memories” of him will be of things that they would have expected him to have done over the years but which he didn’t live long enough to do. So he didn’t see them start in their new school, didn’t get to see James in the end of year event nor either of them in the Christmas carol singing. But they carry the memory of what he would have done through their experience of the things that he did do for them.

I think it’s fantastic that they can keep the memory of their Granda alive in that way.

Not so long ago there were all kinds of restrictions on transferring money abroad due to currency controls that lots of countries had in place. They’re almost all gone now and it has become more of a natural thing for “ordinary people” to need to transfer money abroad.

Most of the time it’s due to holidays, of course, but an increasing number of us are becoming small scale international jet setters with homes in more than one country and with both of those come a need to transfer money abroad.

Holidays usually involve a different category of currency conversion in that you are on the spot when you need the money, the amounts involved are smaller and you probably don’t have a local bank account. However, whilst the amounts may be smaller individually, added up over the years they will come to quite a hefty sum. Also, many of those who holiday in the same country each year may be considering the purchase of a property there and so have that local account too.

Most people ignore the costs of all those international transactions to their detriment. One friend of mine found that almost 10% of his entire salary was going in such bank charges simply because he was living abroad and using his “home” account in exactly the same way that he always had ie lifting small amounts frequently.

Saving money on those transactions is usually fairly easy. If you don’t want to change your bank, check out exactly how they charge for use of credit, debit and cash cards abroad. You will usually find that debit and cash cards are more economic ways of getting cash than credit cards are in that you won’t be paying interest on the money. However, that’s not to say that they are cheap. Typically a withdrawal of £100 in the local currency will cost you £4 to £5 but note that this includes a fixed transaction charge so withdrawing £20 will cost you around £2 ie 10% whereas £200 would be about £7 ie 3.5%. You can eliminate these charges altogether with some travel money cards.

It’s slightly better if you buy things, usually. Using a typical Mastercard or Visa card will only incur the foreign exchange charge ie buying £100 of goods will cost you £2.75 and that £20 item would be 70p. Therefore you should buy things with the card directly rather than lifting the cash to pay for them.

What about larger amounts ie if you’re living abroad or have a holiday home abroad? Well, if you follow our advice and get one of the better travel money cards you can lift £500 per day which means that it’s quite viable to use that card in conjunction with a local bank account to transfer amounts equivalent to several thousand pounds. You certainly couldn’t buy a house in that way but it’s enough to fund the payments for electicity bills and the like.

If you are talking thousands, then the usual way is to ask your bank to do a SWIFT transfer. This will cost around £25 plus there’s a currency exchange charge (which isn’t widely known). However, that too can be eliminated in some circumstances. For example, if you bank with HSBC then you can do free transfers to an HSBC account elsewhere in the world but the HSBC Premier account that you need to avail of this costs £20/month (unless you have £50,000 or more on deposit with them) so it’s not as useful as it first appears. However, if you are buying in Spain, the Halifax run to a free account which offers free transfers from Halifax UK accounts to Halifax Spain ones. What’s less obvious is that this route gives you a pretty much free way from pounds sterling to euros anywhere in Europe as banks are required to transfer euros at the same level of charges in other European countries as they do domestically ie to get euros in an account in France, you could transfer from the Halifax UK to Halifax Spain and from there to a French bank.

Other options include the use of the specialised money transfer services such as HiFX (there are lots of similar services around).