Guy's Other Stuff

Thursday, 8 August 2013

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+

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

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

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

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

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!

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Pay day loans

There has been quite a lot of the discussion in the cafe these last few days about pay day loans. As has been widely reported in the media the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has proposed that, rather than being outlawed, pay day loan companies such as Wonga should face competition from credit unions. He has promised that up to 15,000 churches could be used by credit unions as locations from which to operate.

Unfortunately for him the Archbishop then discovered that the Church of England Commissioners, who look after the church's pension fund and investments, has been indirectly putting money into Wonga through a US venture capital firm called Accel. In a way this doesn't matter as the extra publicity has keep the story going, and it is virtually impossible for any investment, however ethical, to be completely without indirect complications of this sort.

The discussion has several strands. First there is the question of whether pay day loan companies should be more tightly regulated, or even banned. Should the interest rate, which on an annualized rate is 5853% at Wonga,be capped?

In the cafe we all agreed that banning these companies would not be a good idea as they would likely just be replaced by less visible and more obnoxious loan sharks.

The question of an interest rate cap was more contentious. Mike Rowe and some others argued that any attempt to impose a cap would just distort the market. They went along with the Archbishop's view which is that the best way to approach the problem is to offer a viable competitive alternative. A few others though argued that the real problem was the automatic rollover of debts each month so that they became impossible to pay back. So their answer was not so much a cap on the interest rate as a limit on the number of months over which a debt could be accumulated. Mike said that unfortunately this would introduce an element of moral hazard. If a debtor knew that the debt would be frozen after a certain number of months then this would reduce, or maybe even remove completely, the incentive to pay it back before then.

This point led us on to discuss ethical rather than straight economic aspects of the situation. In some religions the idea of interest itself is considered unacceptable. As Giles Fraser in his Loose Canon column in the Guardian said, at one point Christians had declined to become money lenders themselves, leaving it to the Jews who they then persecuted for it.

As economists we recognise the need for interest payments on opportunity cost grounds. If a lender makes funds available for someone else to use then they are unable to use the money themselves. But why should interest rates reach such ridiculously high levels? "Normal" rates of 5% or even 10% seem to be acceptable but of course certain groups are more likely to default on the loan which means the lender will want an additional premium to cover this risk.

Is the real problem that the ordinary high street banks have just not been willing to make loans available to low income families? Decision processes have become too automatic and less personal. In the old days the local bank manager would know his customers and would help them to arrange a suitable pay back plan.

It will be interesting to know how this will develop. Will the government feel that it has to do something and intervene in some way? Or will credit unions operating from churches provide a competitive alternative to companies like Wonga?