Thursday 8 August 2013

Message from Guy

The news that Kostas is going back to Greece and his blog is therefore going to be suspended, at least for now, was probably a surprise for most readers. There are a number of reasons why I this is happening.

First, although it has been fun writing the blog every day it has become a bit of a burden, especially as I have found myself getting increasingly tired after the chemotherapy sessions. I have also sometimes found it hard to come up with a new topic for the daily blog.

But there is another reason too. I have two projects that I am keen to work on and so I need to free up some time for them.

The first thing that I want to do is create a new blog that will enable me finally to provide follow up material for the book that I had published in 2000, Computing for Economists. This book is now well out of date of course. I have been asked on several occasions to update the book but for various reasons I didn't take this on. However I do feel that there is a place for a more current and relevant set of material for economics lecturers and students providing help in the use of technology in learning and teaching. But rather than providing this in a book form, which rapidly becomes out of date, I think a blog would be the ideal format. This way I can write up a bit at a time, gradually building up the content. I can also update any sections that need to be changed due to new developments, or where I have feedback from readers pointing out errors or omissions on my part. The blog will be called something like guyscfeupdates. I am considering using Wordpress rather than Google's blogger facility but I will decide on that only after some experimental work to see what looks best.

The other project that I want to work on is the novel that I always planned to write after I retired. The idea is to have an economist who helps to solve crimes. At the same time the book should be amusing and also provide some insight into key economic ideas.

Originally Mike Rowe was going to be the detective and Kostas his sidekick but the way the blog got written means that now Gus will be the detective and there will be a new Greek PhD student as his assistant. I am not going to rush the writing or publish the book until it is finished but I might send some of you samples to give me critical feedback at some stage.

This won't be the first economist as detective novel. Some of you may have come across Murder at the Margin by Marshall Jevons (1993) Princeton University Press ISBN 0-691-00098-0 I briefly referred to this book in my report in CHEER on the January 1995 ASSA meeting in Washington DC.

Marshall Jevons is actually the pen name of two economists, William L. Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinga, professors of economics at Trinity University, San Antonio and the University of Virginia, respectively. There was also a follow up book in 1998 called A Deadly Indifference and I have now found an even earlier book by these authors called The Fatal Equilibrium published in 1985.

Goodbye

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

What I am about to tell you will come as a bit of a surprise. This is going to be my last blog post for a while. For personal reasons I am having to go back to Greece and so I have handed in my notice to Mike Rowe. I won't leave officially until the end of December but I won't have time for any more regular blogging for a while. I shall however keep the blog account open so there may be the odd post from time to time keeping you up to date with my news.

The problem is that my mother is very ill after having suffered a stroke and my father is finding it difficult to cope. I have been lucky enough to secure a job at the University of Crete starting in January. Although my parents live in the Pelopponese I shall probably have to live in Crete but travel to see them on a regular basis.

Mike Rowe has been very understanding. He has told me that he is really sorry to see me leave but that he recognises the circumstances and that personal and family matters must come first. He has told me that I can spend the rest of the summer in Greece - I shall travel out on Sunday - and that he will try to arrange my teaching commitments for next term in blocks so that I can go back to Greece for a few days every now and then.

I have asked Jenny to come to Greece with me. Understandably she says that she can't give me an answer straight away on this. She needs time to think about it. But she has said that she will try to get some more time off before term begins to join me there for a week or two.

I am going to miss the USE and the UK a lot. As many people have told me I have become more like a Brit during my time in England.

To finish I would just like to thank all you loyal readers of this blog. I hope that you have found it interesting and even entertaining at times. It has given me the opportunity to sound off abut certain things going on here at the USE and at other HE institutions that annoy me. And it has been fun to tell you about some of the characters in the economics department and elsewhere at the USE.

Goodbye for now.

Malia

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

People have been asking me what I think about what has been going on in Malia in Crete. A British tourist was murdered there recently.

It seems that he was fatally stabbed in a fight between rival groups of young British holidaymakers.

Malia, and some other towns in Greece, have become party resorts for young tourists determined to have a wild time. This follows the pattern of development of some resorts in Spain.

Now the locals are concerned about the effects of this rowdy and sometimes violent behaviour. The mayor of Malia has set up a meeting for later this year with mayors from other Greek resorts of this type and the Tourism Ministry in Athens. It may be that they look to develop more limited special and isolated zones for these young visitors away from the town centres. That way they hope to keep the town centres free of drink-fuelled youngsters at night.

Part of the trouble is that the locals didn't really anticipate quite what would happen when they started responding to the demands for late night drinks and the effects that it would have on British youngsters. Greeks of the same age enjoy drinks too but tend not to look to get stupidly drunk, or aggressive and violent.

Another issue is the way that some tour reps encourage the young tourists to visit pubs and clubs from which they can get a commission. Often these places provide shots and other high alcohol drinks which remove the youngsters' inhibitions which leads to bad behaviour.

It has been reported that as many as 2000 young British tourists can now be found in Malia during the summer months. They are mostly teenagers straight out of school. They are unaware of Greek traditions and patterns of behaviour. I think we need to do more here in Britain to educate them about how crazy you should be when on holiday in a foreign country and where you should draw the line. Local doctors report frequent cases of injuries that these young people have suffered after drinking too much. And there is a big responsibility too on the tour operators who should think more carefully about the message they send out about these resorts.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Sun+

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Continuing our discussions in the cafe about TV and Internet sports services we turned our attention to the new Sun+ subscription deal.

The recently appointed new editor of the Sun, David Dinsmore, has introduced the new online subscription service priced at £2 per week with the attraction of a full range of Premier League football clips available behind the paywall. Sun readers will also be able to access the service on a more ad hoc basis by collecting tokens from the printed version of the newspaper.

There is much interest as to whether this latest attempt to extract revenue from an online newspaper will fare better than some earlier cases. For example in 2010 when the Times and Sunday Times placed its web version behind a paywall it is estimated that web traffic fell by over 90% and that there was a considerable loss of revenue from advertising. Other publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have moved much of their material behind paywalls, but they have also kept a certain amount of pages freely available too.

The Guardian has resisted the pressure to introduce a paywall but they have offered readers a full online subscription service which works out a lot cheaper than the cost of buying the printed version every day. They are clearly hoping that many readers will consider this a worthwhile deal. The Daily Mail has been very successful with its extended online services, focusing on celebrity stories. These have become particularly popular n the United Sates.

Dinsmore believes that the football clips will be particularly attractive to the 55% of Sun readers who are male.He puts some of the recent fall in sales of the Sun down to the increase in its cover price from 30p to 40p and he says that a £2 a week subscription will be a very attractive price.

Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis believes that the Sun needs about 300,000 subscribers to create a sufficient revenue stream to pay for the new service (Source: The Guardian, 1/8/2013). It will be interesting to see how quickly it can achieve these numbers.

Now we hear that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has purchased the Washington Post.It will be interesting to see what his plans are for the newspaper.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

BTSport

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

As you know most of the department are extremely interested in sport, both on TV and at actual live venues such as St Marys' and Fratton Park. They also like visiting cricket grounds down here on the south coast at Southampton, Hove and Guildford. So there has been much discussion about the new BTSport offering which was launched on 1st August.

A few people heard a radio interview with Mark Watson from BT. He was very upbeat about the new package, describing it as a game changer. He said that over 500,000 customers had already signed up for the new service, including over 23 thousand during the month of July.

It is of course a triple play deal with broadband, telephone and digital TV bundled together.

However, when pressed by his interviewer, Watson admitted that the majority of those who had signed up for the service were existing BT broadband customers. The interviewer noted that BT had lost 7 million broadband customers since 2006. Was the new offer essentially a strategic investment designed to hold on to as many existing customers as possible rather than an attempt to attract new customers? Watson argued that broadband was still a growing market place and BT was looking to increase its market share.

The interviewer noted that BT had spent over £1 billion in acquiring football, rugby and other sports rights. But Sky subscribers would have free access to the new service, including the ESPN channels already on its system. Everyone in the cafe discussion agreed that no Sky subscriber would have any reason to switch to BT.

The interviewer asked Watson where he thought the service would be in three years time. Would they have acquired Champions League rights? Watson declined to answer this question but said that all BT services were regularly reviewed and that the company would respond appropriately to any new developments.

The advertising for the new service shows that there will be a regular programme hosted by Clare Balding. She is now rather ubiquitous. Is she spreading herself around too much?

Monday 5 August 2013

Surrey

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Gus came back from a meeting at Surrey University with news of something that has all the staff there wondering about what their Vice Chancellor is up to.

Apparently he put forward plans a while ago to assess academics 'performance on the basis of how many of their students achieved at least an Upper Second Class mark on their modules.

The plan, initially released in June 2012, which included a foreward by the VC Sir Christopher Snowden, was only shelved after long discussions with the unions.

The university commented that "The intention of this target is not to inflate grades unjustifiably but to ensure that the levels of good degrees sit comfortably within subject benchmarks and against competitor institutions." They later said that staff were recommended to provide a normal distribution of marks.

Julie Hall, Vice Chair of the Staff and Educational Development Association at Surrey was quoted in the THE of 18th July as saying that any sort of grade target risked compromising academics' abilities to award marks impartially.

Gus said that he fully agreed with this comment. Indeed he criticised the notion that the distribution of marks on each module should be the same, let alone conforming to a normal distribution.

He said that he would expect a different pattern of marks on compulsory core modules such as intermediate microeconomics, maths, stats and econometrics that some students found challenging. Indeed it might even be the case that one found a bi-modal distribution. Conversely self-selected options that students really liked might give rise to a highly skewed distribution with a high percentage of Upper Seconds and Firsts.

The idea that the distribution of marks on any module should be normal is based on a misunderstandng of statistics. Where it might have some relevance is on a module with a very large number of students with lots of seminar groups where students had been allocated to the groups randomly. In that case the mean marks for the groups might start to approximate a normal distribution (according to the Central Limit Theorem). However in some universities instead of taking these marks as given, attempts may be made to adjust the marks to provide consistency across groups, on the basis that one has to correct for differences between the inputs from different seminar leaders.

Gus said that in his view it was appropriate for very wayward marks to be referred for further scrutiny but that formulaic references based on average marks or the percentage of marks above or below particular targets were statistical and educational nonsense.

What next, he wondered? League tables ranking lecturers by the average marks awarded?

Friday 2 August 2013

Real Ale Train

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Last Saturday was Gus's birthday and Heather treated him to a ride on the Real Ale Train. This is a monthly fixture on the Watercress line which runs from Alresford to Alton in Hampshire. The train of ten coaches goes up and down the line several times while those on board can consume various real ales. Food is also available.

Jack and Richard were also invited and Heather was good enough to be the designated driver taking them all up to Alresford and back. It can't have been much fun for her as the three men gradually got sozzled.

The men really enjoyed the experience sampling a range of real ales, favourite of which they agreed was something called "Good Ol' Boy" which is brewed somewhere near Newbury. As well as the beer they all enjoyed a hot chicken curry.

The one disappointment of the evening was the fact that the carriages were pulled, not by a steam engine as they had expected, but by a diesel locomotive. They did see a steam train at Alresford station but for some reason it was not used.

Gus has posted on Facebook a few photos, including one showing Heather with the Station Master at Alton, a rather rotund gentleman who lives up to the image of the Fat Controller.

Gus said that he wanted to recommend the Real Ale Train to Mike for a departmental bonding session. We could hire a minivan and have a group booking. Heather had told him not to be so ridiculous. The idea was far too male oriented - departmental bonding experiences needed to be less sexist. Perhaps a visit to Marwell Zoo would be more suitable. However when Sian heard this she said she would much rather go on the Real Ale Train than visit a zoo. Bubbles also said she would like to go on the train.

So it now seems that we might organise another train ride at some point for a rather larger group of people, even if it is not an official departmental event. I had better ask Jenny if she wants to go.

Thursday 1 August 2013

Bank notes

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

Another topic that has been the subject of cafe discussions is the decision by Mark Carney, the new Governor of the Bank of England, to replace Charles Darwin by Jane Austen on the £10 bank notes.

Of course this has largely been due to pressure brought about by the petition organised by Caroline Criado-Perez who subsequently became the victim of a Twitter based rape hate campaign by some sick and obnoxious men. There was much discussion in the cafe as to what can be done to stop these unpleasant uses of the social media. Should Twitter be doing more? Should the perpetrators be ignored, blocked, prosecuted or fought with humour and disdain? The consensus was that, except in extreme cases where actual bodily harm was threatened and the police should be involved, mockery was the best approach. But it must be hard for Caroline Criado-Perez, and the Labour MP Stella Creasy who has also been the target of these offensive individuals, to deal with the threats made to them.

To return to the matter of the bank notes some people wondered why the number of people appearing on bank notes could not just be increased. Why could we not add one more person to the set of people displayed on £5, £10 and £50 notes with at least one of those extra people being a woman? Well, of course, costs would rise. Designing and printing a wide variety of notes that are not easy to forge is a costly business. Richard wondered what the situation is for bank notes in other countries. Who appears on euros, Canadian dollars or Australian dollars for example? I made it a project to find out.

It turns out that the euro notes all feature places and maps rather than people. The Canadian notes have people on the front but only one is a woman - Queen Elisabeth II.

Australia does rather better. Notes have people on both the front and the back and in every case one of the images is of a woman. Of course Australia is not free of misogynistic tendencies as former Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently discovered.

I think what Caroline Criado-Perez was also getting at was the question of who should be making decisions of this sort. All too often it seemed to be a group of middle-aged white middle-class males to whom the question of fair female representation just did not occur.

So which women would you want to add to our bank notes if we could have more of them? I would have to vote for Ada Lovelace - but then I am a bit of a nerd!