Thoughts From A Small Island

I have noticed that there was an error in last week's blog, The Holiday Planner ,  when I inadvertently relocated Paphos, which is in Cyprus, to Crete. No doubt many of you noticed this but were too polite to point it out! As I mentioned last week, holidays can be stressful and our trip to Paphos was quite stressful in the booking but fortunately pretty much stress free in the implementation. Pretty much but not entirely, because as anyone who has ever flown knows, the bit between arriving at the airport and actually boarding the plane seems designed to be awkward and stress inducing, although in fairness it could have been worse.

Inside Stansted.  Picture: telegraph.co.uk 

We arrived at Stansted in good time, our car was taken away to be parked and we entered the terminal, where a few things have changed since I was last there. Firstly entry to the security screening area requires scanning your boarding pass, which two out of the three of did at the first attempt; Val had to have three goes before the machine deigned to open the gates. Something always happens to one of us at when we pass through airport security: at Los Angeles a few years ago, Val was taken off to a side room after the fingerprint recognition machine decided that she actually had no fingerprints whatever. After the boarding pass scan, the line for the security checks, which is where Stansted always appears to be particularly chaotic, and this time was no exception. First up, the ritual that would have made a great task on The Krypton Factor[1], of fitting your 100ml bottles of toiletries into a clear plastic bag, which it is advertised measures 20cm x 20cm, but is actually 19x19 (yes, I did measure it).

Having fallen foul of Stansted's security a few years ago when flying to Majorca when our toiletries were deemed not to meet the necessary standards and which resulted in us being delayed and having to run to the gate, where we were the last two passengers and only just got on the flight, we were certain to make sure that we were OK this time and passed through without incident, unlike the elderly lady and the toddler in a buggy who had to pass their shoes through the scanner. If a lot of these checks seem a bit arbitrary, then I'm sure it because they are to a large degree. These sorts of restrictions, which aren't uniform across Europe, let alone the world as a whole, were introduced more as a means of suggesting that something was being done in the fight against possible terror attacks on airlines rather than as a means of defeating a specific threat. After all, when we flew back from Majorca  after that incident I mentioned, there was no requirement to transfer our toiletries into a clear plastic bag. This year at Paphos on the way back I actually asked if they had any plastic bags at security as there was a sign saying they were needed; none were available so our toiletries went through the scanner in our normal luggage.

That was just one of a few contrasts between the airports at Stansted and Paphos. At Stansted a great deal of remodelling is going on, hence the area after the Duty Free shops and around the restaurants is a bit frenzied. Having plenty of time to spare on this occasion, we treated ourselves to a meal in Giraffe (and very good it was too). At Paphos the departure area is an oasis of calm. Fewer shops, fewer places to eat and crucially, fewer passengers. Stansted serves 19.98 million passengers per year; after an upgrade, Paphos will be able to handle 2.7 million per year. While planes were taking off every minute or so from Stansted, there was only one departure from Paphos in the two hours we spent waiting for our flight home.

We were sorry to leave Cyprus; none of us had been to the island before but hopefully it won't be too long before we return as almost everything about our trip was right. The hotel we stayed at, The Annabelle, is quite large (218 rooms) but never impersonal. We ran out of superlatives in describing it. We had a well appointed suite with a sea view from our balcony and the service is attentive without being intrusive. 

Nice waking up to this view each morning.

We had booked half-board as it was the same price as bed and breakfast; we figured that we could eat out if the restaurant wasn't to our taste, but we never did. The restaurant is a buffet, something which can sometimes mean that meals are a bit of a bun fight, but this was really very good and had the bonus of allowing the more fastidious of us to tailor our meals exactly to our tastes and permitting the more enthusiastic of us to go round a few times to sample the widest range of dishes.

I had some company to go with my coffee.

Only being there for five days we stayed pretty close to the hotel, but managed to sample some culture (the Kato Paphos Archaeological Park), indulge in some retail therapy (The Kings Avenue Mall), go on a glass bottom boat trip and generally chill out. In the afternoons, while Val and Sarah took a dip in the pool, I would find a shady spot to read a book, and would often be joined by one of the cats that frequent the hotel. We took some walks, although it was a bit hot at times and one walk along the coast had to be cut short when it got dark.  Every day we took a stroll down to the marina and enjoyed a  coffee at The Poseidonas Cafe. Generally it was quite a laid back few days and we were sorry to come home.

Medieval Castle of Paphos

Kato Paphos Archaeological Park, including yours truly and Val at The Odeon.

The lovely church of St Nicholas that we found on one of our walks.

We returned to Stansted and used the automated passport gates that you can use if you have a new biometric ‘chipped’ passport. These are supposed to speed the process up, but there was still a long queue and some people were rejected and had to be processed manually. It seemed to take an age for the machine to recognise my photo and open the gates and Sarah had to have a number of goes before finally being allowed through but overall it was probably a bit quicker than standing in line waiting to be processed by a human being. We picked up our car, which took a bit longer than I was happy about; the ten minutes they promised on the phone stretched out to half an hour, something which I was going to provide feedback on when Purple Parking sent me an email with a link to their survey. Unfortunately the link in their mail didn't work. Still, I did add a couple of reviews on tripadvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/) of the hotel and the archaeological park. Tripadvisor is a site which I've usually found pretty reliable, unlike some, as a recent news story from the BBC showed,  suggesting that at least 20% of comments posted on review websites are bogus (there is no suggestion that tripadvisor is one of those sites).

Cyprus in general and The Annabelle in particular are now firmly on my list of places I'd like to revisit in the future.

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[1] The Krypton Factor was a British TV gameshow that was part quiz, part assault course. It ran from 1977 to 1995 but was revived for two series in 2009/2010.

Maths: What Is It Good For?

Not since Einstein wrote E=mc² on a blackboard has anything containing an equals sign created such a hullabaloo as the now infamous Hannah's sweets question in last week's Edexcel  GCSE maths paper. The question, which got distilled down until it fitted into a 140 character Tweet, appeared to make little sense at first. It began  by stating that Hannah had a bag of sweets, some of which were orange and some yellow, that she then took and ate two. The students sitting the exam were then asked to show that n2-n-90=0, which at first appeared to be the mathematical equivalent of a non-sequitor, until  online articles began appeared that explained that the question was not asking for a solution to the equation, but was asking that the students did some basic probability.[1]

"Albert said that e=mc2"

Like no other subject, maths has always had a reputation for posing questions that try to smuggle the real world into the equation, although more often than not the links  are somewhat tenuous, or else the "participants" in the question are performing some apparently illogical or pointless exercise, like 'John and Matthew are filling a swimming pool 50 metres by 25 metres by 2 metres with Coca Cola, how many cans will they need to buy to complete their task?' But no amount of camouflage can hid the fact that like most questions in most exams, students are being asked to regurgitate facts they have learned by rote, with perhaps a little analysis thrown in. Yet whether it is showing that n2-n-90=0 or calculating how many 330ml cans of Coke are required to fill a swimming pool of certain dimensions, most people taking maths exams (or most other subjects, come to that) will know one thing for certain; after they have finished their exams they are extremely unlikely to need to call upon that knowledge again. Naturally those students going on to study a subject at university will use the knowledge they gathered in their chosen subject, but what thereafter?

Early tweets on the subject expressed students' frustration with the question

In many respects education is about learning to learn, learning to analyse, learning to apply rather than learning facts. For most people, education is about becoming capable rather than the specifics of subjects that will never be applicable to their work or indeed their home life. I once worked in an IT department where there were as many people with degrees in agriculture as there were in computing (there were one of each). There being no relevance in an agricultural degree in writing COBOL, the significance of that degree was obviously only in the particular programmer's ability to learn, assimilate and process information. How one gets from agriculture to computer programming is proof that that individual, like many people, did not know what it was they wanted to do when they started their course, or at least had their mind changed about what they wanted to do at some point during their time at university. Knowing what you want to do when choosing A levels or a university degree is helpful if not essential, and although embarking a medical degree without an ambition to be some sort of practitioner would be wasteful, I imagine there are many people whose career choice only becomes settled after they have started studying or even after they have finished. When I was at school I envied those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do when they left; I was one of a fairly large group of people who sort of drifted into a career. Forty years later I sometimes wonder what became of the people who knew what they wanted to do; did they achieve their goals I wonder? And those like me who ended up in jobs through inertia rather than ambition, how happy were they with their decisions? Going back forty years or more, to the days when I was taking my O and A Levels, I do not remember anything like the pressure that was exerted on my generation of students compared with that faced by 16 and 18 year olds today. I took eight O levels; passing four would have been considered a success, so long as one was maths and another  English and as it happened I passed seven. Nowadays, when 16 year olds are taking ten or more GCSE's, just passing is not enough; A's and A*'s are all that people want.

Hannah's sweets, the full question.

Funnily enough, the one O level that I failed was one which would have been quite useful in later life, at work. I failed French, and in some ways it was a conscious decision. I had no aptitude for the subject and disliked it immensely. I concluded that if I concentrated all my efforts on it to the detriment of my other subjects, I might just scrape a pass, so I abandoned any pretence of revising for the exam and failed miserably. When I ended up in the international payments department at HSBC I found that even a passing knowledge of French was useful as many banks in France and almost all of those in Algeria and Morocco would only correspond in that language. To my amazement I found that although I could not speak the language I could translate many of the telexes we got from the banks in those countries. The little French I remembered from school actually proved useful;  it certainly proved more useful than physics or history, both of which I passed, which made me wonder if I ought to have tried harder with French at school.

I somehow passed maths at O level, since when my use of the subject has been minimal and confined to arithmetic; algebra, quadratic equations and the like baffled me then and continue to do so now, but I cannot ever recall a time when I have thought to myself "I really wish I could remember my polynomial multiplication" so, as with the knowledge I gained in other subjects but which I subsequently forgot, that has never been a problem for me.

And that is something which students finishing their GCSE, AS and A2 exams would do well to remember. As important as those subjects are now, as important as the grades they will get in August will be, come ten years time, or five years time and for some people, even in just one year's time, those grades will be irrelevant except as a matter of nostalgia. The knowledge that they acquired will be useful principally to try and answer some questions on University Challenge. I am not saying that exams aren't important or that we should not care about grades but just as important, if not more so is learning how to learn and how to interpret and apply knowledge. The skills I learned at school that proved most useful once I started work were a retentive memory, curiosity and having an enquiring mind. At no time has being unable to show that n2-n-90=0 proved to be a disadvantage; better French would have been useful though.

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[1] The Guardian explained it as well as anyone, here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/jun/05/how-to-solve-the-maths-gcse-question-about-hannahs-sweets-that-went-viral

Absolute Power

Most weeks, when I sit down to write my blog, the subject presents itself quite nicely. This week however I have been staring at a blank screen and wondering what on earth to write about, because the story that has dominated the  news is that of the circus surrounding world football's governing body, Fifa and its president, Sepp Blatter, and regular readers may recall that I vented my spleen on that subject back in November (Sblatter! Are FIFA Beyond Parody?). There has been so much in the papers, on the internet, on radio and television about the arrests of Fifa executives last week and the re-election of Sepp Blatter as president of the organisation and his subsequent shock resignation a few days later, that there would seem to be little that I can add to the sum of knowledge on the subject, however as I have remarked before, ignorance is no obstacle to having an opinion, so here goes.

This whole saga has thrown up some issues that go beyond the specifics of the alleged bribery and corruption and the morally dubious award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, including the perception of Blatter and Fifa that we have in the West as opposed to that held in other parts of the world. Both Sepp Blatter and Qatar Foreign Minister Khaled al-Attiyah have said that the attack on that country's right to host the 2022 World Cup is "racist" and once the racist card is played, it is often difficult to refute. But is it racist to condemn the manner in which the stadia are being built in Qatar? Migrant workers have had their passports withheld, are unable to return home without paying for exit visas and many Nepalese workers have been unable to go home to bury their relatives who have died in the recent earthquakes.

Can we really gloss over the fact that in 2014 Nepalese migrants working on construction of the stadiums and infrastructure died at a rate of one every two days? According to The Guardian newspaper  that  figure excludes deaths of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers, "raising fears that if fatalities among all migrants were taken into account the toll would almost certainly be more than one a day." The Washington Post estimates that 4,000 workers will die by the time the project to build the stadia is complete. Not since the construction of Britain's railways in the 1880s and 1890s when workers died at a rate of nearly 500 a year can there have been a construction project with such a high mortality rate. Yet the reason Qatar's fitness to host the competition is being debated is because of alleged kick-backs and whether the competition should be moved to winter to avoid the blistering heat, not the fact that there could be as many as 50 deaths for each game that will be played in the finals.  Is human life really so cheap that we can afford to ignore these deaths?  Last week, Fifa's sponsors, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Adidas, Budweiser et al were concerned about the reputational damage they might suffer by association with alleged corruption within the organisation; they seem to be much more relaxed about being associated with a competition that, by the time it takes place, will been responsible for  many thousands of deaths.

Before Sepp Blatter fell on his sword and resigned (or was he pushed? Rumours of a "smoking gun" have been mentioned), he had been blathering on about the support that he had from the world game, and in Europe many people would have been scratching their heads and wondering how he could be so deluded, except that Blatter did command a lot of support. Support from the Asian and African nations whose profile he had raised by increasing the number of places available to them at World Cup Final tournaments, nations whose Football Associations have benefited from Fifa's money to support and develop grassroots football in their countries. How much of that money went where it was intended is moot.

Some people have questioned the role of the United States in the arrests of Fifa officials and the potential investigation of Sepp Blatter himself. Just recently Blatter was pontificating on the fact that Fifa is not accountable to any other authority but for those who question the United States' jurisdiction in this matter, remember that if you use email or transact in US Dollars, the US will hold you accountable for any wrongdoing. Virtually every email sent anywhere in the world will at some point pass through or be stored on a server in the US; every time you transact in US Dollars (even if your transaction does not got to or originate from the US) your payment will pass through New York. By dint of these two facts the US have jurisdiction. To have any chance of avoiding the long arm of American law enforcement, don't correspond by email and don't use their currency. As with every person in a position of power, Blatter and his associates became to believe themselves fireproof, Teflon coated, able to act with impunity, until along came someone with greater power.

It is said that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,"[1] and this is entirely apposite to  the whole Fifa scandal (or scandals, because goodness alone knows what is to come); absolute power creates a cloak of invulnerability and self deception. The statement last week by  FIFA’s director of communications, Walter De Gregorio, that the arrests were actually “a good thing” showing that the organization is on “the right track," was a delusional piece of doublespeak worthy of Orwell and typical of the fantasy that all large organisations create in themselves that they can do no wrong and that any criticism, any prosecution even, is either a wholly unjustified attack, or as in this case an actual vindication of their methods.

While many have welcomed the US investigation and some people have positively rejoiced at Blatter's resignation, including FA chairman Greg Dyke (who is scarcely above criticism for some of his boneheaded plans to "improve" the game in England), it would be as well to inject a note of caution until the proposed reforms of Fifa are published and a successor to Blatter is elected. Nothing has changed yet and there is no guarantee that whatever change comes about will be to everyone's taste. Bowing to the inevitable, Blatter said "Fifa needs profound restructuring," but words are cheap, changing the culture of an organisation the size and diversity of Fifa, where dubious practices appear to have become the norm will be an immense challenge.

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[1] John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902), historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton said it originally.