Category Archives: life

St. Mary and St. Margaret’s Church Heritage Weekend and Fundraising Launch

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Tomorrow, on Saturday the 12th, the local Parish Church, Saint Mary and Saint Margaret’s, will be holding a ‘Heritage weekend’ and fund raising launch for the new ‘community church room’ that is planned to be built into the church.

We’re going to be presented with some of the results of the archaeological dig on the Church grounds (and Castle Bromwich hall, upon whose grounds the Church sits), hear from local historians, and get unprecedented access investigating a church which is at it’s heart almost a thousand years old! The gardens of Castle Bromwich hall are also well worth a visit, containing walled baroque gardens that are the only remaining example in the country of a formal English garden design.

If you have an interest in the Castle Bromwich and it’s history then perhaps this might be something you’d like to come along to.

Details:

  • Time: 14:00
  • Date: Saturday the 12th of September, 2009
  • Location: St. Mary and St. Margaret’s Church, Castle Bromwich, just behind Castle Bromwich Hall.

Here’s the flyer for the event:

Links:

UK innovation ranking compared to the rest of the World – why do we get so little ‘bang’ for our ‘buck’?

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In this follow-up to my earlier piece on the UK economy, I explore why the UK gets so little ‘bang’ for its considerable R&D ‘buck’. Despite ranking among the top global spenders, we lag in innovation performance. I argue that structural complexity, a bias towards theoretical research, and poor alignment between academia and business are holding us back, and unless we address these root causes, tweaks and funding adjustments won’t get us into the global top tier.

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The End of the World?

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In the future, once we’re all ensconced in our virtual reality worlds, is this the way it will all end? On February the 28th, 2009, Tabula Rasa, an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft and RuneScape) was shut down, after failing to attract enough subscribers related to the current economic downturn.

In his article “Analysis: Tabula Rasa’s Final Moments – A Firsthand Account“, Simon Carless evocatively writes:

By the afternoon, the West Coast server Hydra was the last server standing. As more and more of its citizenry logged on for the last hurrah, and foreign players from dead servers poured in to squeeze a few more hours out of the game, it became increasingly congested, buggy, and lag-ridden. The intended scenario was indeed playing out not just in the game and the fiction but as a metagame: the active duty population swelled as humanity prepared to make its final stand.

Simon’s description reminded me a little of the recent Doctor Who episode “Utopia”, where at the end of time humanity are huddling together as heat death consumes the planets they had colonised. The ‘Futurekind’ almost like NPCs, also collecting together, prior to being finally terminated.

In a doubly ironic twist of fate, ‘Tabula Rasa’ is Latin for ‘blank slate’, or rather ‘slate wiped clean’, popularised by John Locke as a rather now out of fashion philosophical thesis that individuals are born without any built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception alone (the whole ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate is more balanced now). It also resembles the off state of the server infrastructure that would have supported the game that presumably had it’s ‘memory’ wiped clean, prior to being redeployed to support other functionality.

Thanks to Mick Farren’s blog for bringing this to my attention.

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links for 2009-05-15

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Industry contributions to the UK economy and investment in R&D; by industry

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A critical look at the imbalance in the UK economy, highlighting the disproportionate contribution of the services sector to GDP and the overconcentration of R&D investment in manufacturing. It warns that this structural imbalance makes the UK vulnerable to economic shocks and calls for a more diverse and innovation-driven industrial strategy.

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DBERR’s views on the future growth of the UK economy ‘New Industry, New Jobs’

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Are you concerned about the state of the UK economy in the future, because I know I am, so I’ll be exploring some of the issues being faced by the UK economy, especially when it comes to science, technology, engineering and industry contributions to the UK’s GDP in my next few articles. …..

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Thoughts on hearing that Northern Rock are to lend £14 Billion in mortgages

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Just wanted to jot down a few thoughts on hearing that Northern Rock are to release £14 Billion into the UK economy via lending for mortgages.

Frankly it seems pretty obvious that this isn’t just the UK Governments method for pumping liquidity into the UK housing market, but also demonstrates a frustration with the money used to help ‘prop up’ the Financial Sector. Much of the Government bail-outs were supposed to help restart the financial institutions in question to start lending again, this plainly hasn’t happened. I think everyone, especially the UK Government, is disappointed that the money has been used to shore up the massive debts run up, as well as the short-falls exasperated by the world-wide economic downturn.

Northern Rock was the first of the big financial companies to bite the bullet and need to seek massive Government investment to stay solvent, or be nationalised, whichever you prefer.

What’s phenomenal about this apparent ‘turn of face’ given that up until today they had closed their books to new mortgage lending (in fact they had been aggressively repossessing homes across the UK), is how much the Bank had ‘closed the gap’ between it’s original debt and what it now owes; a massive two-thirds, the original level of debt when it sought Government intervention was £27 Billion and it now stands at £9 Billion.

The Shadow Treasury Minister, Greg Hands, is concerned about the dichotomy between existing Northern Rock customers, facing repossession, with all the new mortgage customers; a very valid point given that the Bank has said that it will be restructured, with new mortgages and existing mortgages managed separately, furthering any gap between the two groups.

Evidently this is not all that there is to this story and the three other questions I think we should be asking right now are:

Given that the number of homes in the UK repossessed by lenders rose last year by 54% to 40,000, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), how much was this number contributed to by Northern Rock?

Given that the new management team at Northern Rock successfully decreased the Banks debt by £18 Billion, how much of this was done via straight forward repossessions and how much by other methods, and if replicable in an appropriate manner, can any of these alternative approaches to repossession be turned into ‘best practices’ which can be shared with the rest of the UK banking community to reduce their levels of debt too?

Given that organisations like the CBI are saying if credit isn’t available soon the recession is going to get a whole lot worse what is the Government going to do to get the other Banks and Financial Institutions lending again as soon as possible?

Castle Bromwich Hall Church Fete

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Our local C of E Church, St. Mary and St. Margaret’s Church, in Castle Bromwich, just before the arrival of our new Parish Priest, Gavin Douglas, and family…

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The Ken vs. Boris Show

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So the ‘battle’ for Mayor of London is being called ‘the Ken vs. Boris show’.

Strange to think that in the majority of the search results I’ve generated whilst researching the subject most of them came up with ‘Ken vs. Boris’, rather than the other way around, almost as though Boris Johnson is in the stronger position of the two, both in and out of the sentence.

That Ken Livingstone has a battle on his hands this time round is without a doubt. I spend the majority of my working life in the City, and frankly I haven’t heard a good word said about him in almost ten years, when I was still at Harrods, building Harrods Online (yes, I know, pretty isn’t it, although it’s been almost eight years since I spent three ‘heady’ years there, and I expect it’s probably been re-engineered since then, although you never know, as software I engineered is still in commission after over fifteen years).

Of course the battle for the position of the Mayor of London should not be confused with that of the Lord Mayor of the City of London, which is something completely different.

Over on the BBC website they are asking the lowest common denominator question of ‘does it matter outside London ?’, and given the wholesale reliance that the UK economy has on the Finance and Trading industry centered in London, it’d be extremly hard to see how it isn’t.

That the people of London choose both the best Major for the City and it’s re-energisation, it’s imperative that they also choose someone who can help re-energise the Financial ‘Engine’ of the UK which sits at the heart of the Capital. This is especially true given the ongoing credit crisis, made even worse yesterday with the annoucment that Bear Stearns would sell massively under their expected value.

Andrew Sparrow, a journalistic political blogger over at the Guardian website, has a nice piece ‘Boris invites Ken to get on his bike ‘, which includes the following snippet, in regards to the ‘green’ agenda:

Boris, of course, was funnier. Ken, apparently, never learnt to ride a bike, and, after a question about cycling, Boris urged him to “show a lead” and learn now.

Other headlines include the Telegraph with ‘Boris Johnson prances round Ken Livingstone’, the Times with ‘It’s Horrid Ken v Chaotic Boris’, and I’ve found you can even get betting odds on the ‘competition’ along with the tag line of ‘Red Ken vs Blue Boris ‘.

Frankly it must be the Brummy from Nechells in me, but I actually thought the funniest caption ended up being the Sun’s ‘barmy Boris VS crazy Ken’.

Let’s just hope that the City gets someone who at least attempts to live up to their promises, and who can genuinely help to revitalise not just local authority politics in London, but the Financial sector too, for the sake of us all in the UK.

Goodbye Arthur C. Clarke

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Farewell to another hero of mine with the demise of Arthur C. Clarke earlier today.

I have fond memories of Arthur, mainly from the ITV series ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World’, and of course from the parody done by the Goodies in the episode ‘Big Foot’.

Arthur’s work was prescient, and he well understood the symbiotic relationship between Science Fiction, and that of Science, Technology, and Innovation:

I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.

As a ‘retired’ table top RPGer my favourite quote of his, which I heard, I think from Paul Cooke, was:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Whilst this following quote amusingly goes very much against Okham’s Razor (which itself is a principal I like, and use, a great deal):

The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

I also like these quotes by Arthur too:

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.

Apparently another of his most famous works, ‘Rendevous with Rama’, is being adapted and produced as a film, and according to IMDB will be ready for release in 2009. Let’s hope so, and that it’s a fitting adaption.

He leaves the the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation to carry on the good work of promoting Science and Technology in his name.

So here’s to the man, who along with Stanley Kubrick in the adaption of 2001: A Space Odyssey, managed to change the entire World’s understanding of what ‘Space’ might sound like, especially when spaceship’s ‘dock’. Less whoosh, bang and zap, and more ‘An der schönen blauen Donau’ (also known as ‘On The Beautiful Blue Danube’ by Johann Strauss II).

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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Goodbye Bobby Fischer

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I’m saddened to hear from this entry on Terry Gardener’s blog that Bobby Fischer passed away yesterday (Thursday the 17th of January, 2008).

Bobby was one of the cleverest, and yet yampiest, Chess players ever, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and it’d be a real surprise if you hadn’t heard of him. Even if you weren’t keen on Chess, Bobby was a ‘larger than life’ figure, often getting in the Press, and had even had the Musical Chess based upon him.

He achieved a FIDE estimated ELO rating of 2785 after winning the 1972 World Chess Championship against the outgoing Grand Master, Boris Spassky.

Unfortunately there’s a danger that it’s likely to be some of his behavior and some of the comments he made that he will be remembered for, rather than his Chess playing, or the innovations he brought to Chess (both theory, practice and the game itself).

In an effort to promote Talent and Creativity, rather than an encyclopedic Analysis of Chess openings, and generate more interesting and vibrant Chess games, he developed Fischer Random Chess (‘FRC’ or Chess960 as it’s now, more frequently, called).

Other Chess innovations he provided us with included the Fischer Chess Clock.

Personally I hope that it’s these and his Chess play that he will be remembered for as time passes, because essentially he was an outstanding player.

It was extremely unlikely that I was ever going to join this list and now I’ll definitely never get the chance.

Bobby’s Chess Hero was Paul Morphy (another hero of mine too), of whose unprecedented Chess playing talent he said:

“he was the greatest of them all”

Howard Staunton, the man credited with giving us the Staunton Chess set was so afraid of playing, and losing to, Paul Morphy, that he hid away saying he was too busy ‘annotating the works of Shakespeare’ to play the young Morphy.

This article points out the many similarities between Bobby and Paul Morphy: they were both prodigies, they both dominated the other players of their time, they were both were American (unusually in times led by European and Russian play), they both quit in their primes, and they both suffered in Psychological terms. It’s well worth a quick read.

Goodbye Bobby Fischer – you’ll be sorely missed.

Remembrance Day, 2007

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So Remembrance Day, 2007, it always seems to roll around so quickly – and how quickly we all seem to forget the debt we owe those who have fought and died for us to live comfortable and peaceful lives at home in the UK. …..

The Fair Finance Consortium – fighting Financial Exclusion one step at a time…

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I’d like to introduce you to just one of the organisations fighting financial exclusion in the West Midlands – the Fair Finance Consortium.

The Fair Finance Consortium is a collaboration of 10 independent Not for Profit financial services providers who operate throughout the West Midlands, members include:

  • ART
  • Black Business In Birmingham (3b)
  • Black Country Enterprise Loan Fund
  • Black Country Reinvestment Society
  • Coventry and Warwickshire Reinvestment Trust
  • Impetus
  • North Staffordshire Risk Capital Fund plc
  • Sandwell Advice and Money Link
  • Street UK
  • The Arrow Fund
  • The Halal Fund

All of the members are either Independent Not for Profit businesses, Charitable Foundations (Ltd by guarantee), or Industrial and Provident Societies (IPS). Unlike ‘For Profit’ organisations loan capital (money earned from loan repayments) is recycled, and loaned out again and again.

In my mind the most important work that the FFC does is in fighting financial exclusion – helping small businesses, entrepreneurs, and sole traders as well as individuals who would otherwise be excluded from credit – this in turn helps to reduce the number of ‘door step lenders’. They also help to build financial literacy – especially Street UK which is soon implementing the UK’s first “Not for Profit” Bill Payments service and will be offering it’s customers banking facilities – this is a big step forward in providing a holistic and ‘one stop shop’ approach to the financially excluded in the West Midlands (more about this in a later post soon).

I asked George Keenan of the Fair Finance Consortium if he could give me a short introduction to the Fair Finance Consortium. Over to George:

“During the summer of 2004 eleven independent Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) establish the Fair Finance Consortium (FFC) part funded by the RDA, and the CDFI sectors National Association, the CDFA. Their collaborative objective is to improve the access to and the ability for people to locate and select CDFIs as the realistic alternative provider of business finance (Offering loans from £1,000 up to £50,000). Their products are designed to help startups and SMEs including social enterprises, situated within the conurbations of the West Midlands, who are unable to secure investment via traditional sources such as banks.

By 2005 (FFC) had shaped the interim brand strategy, Implementing a diverse mix of awareness techniques, that commenced with the launch of www.fair-finance.net in March 2006. This regionally customer focused online web portal set out to simplify the online search experience.

April 2007 marked the first anniversary of their web portal, which received over £2.5 million in loan applications, the membership continue to build a growing reputation for tackling market failure by investing in innovation and funding growth, building a stronger economic region via an accessible client focused sector.”

George has a blog, where he talks mainly about all things CDFI related – he’s recently relaunched it with better functionality around comments and inclusivity of opinion – George Keenan’s Fair Finance Blog – it would be great if you could have a look.

Goodbye Tony Wilson…

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Very sad to hear earlier today that Tony Wilson passed away this week (Friday the 10th of August). …..

Good luck and all the best to all of those involved in the search for Madeleine McCann. Here’s hoping that Madeleine is found safe and well very soon.

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Goodbye President Yeltsin

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President Yeltsin passed away today – Monday, the 23rd of April, also known as Saint George’s Day, 2007. …..