Keys Corner

British banking has been an absolute disgrace for the last 15-20 years. Electronic funds transfers between banks have always taken a minimum of three days, and in our experience sometimes even longer. Now, after increasing pressure from consumer organisations and even the Bank of England, the banks have agreed to speed transactions up to take less than 24 hours. This will bring them into the same ball park as the German banks have operated in for as long as I can remember.

However, don’t get too excited yet – the Brits need until the end of 2007 to pension off the monkeys now used to process the transfers and replace them with modern computer systems. The task force which has come up with this proposal is now looking into why cheques (which on the continent are now almost extinct) take so long to clear in the UK.

The British museum has been unknowingly exhibiting work by Banksy, better known as a graffiti artist. The “prehistoric cave-painting” was described as follows:

“This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era.
The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.
Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls.”

Those of you who live in the UK don’t need to read any further. You already know what Sudoku is, since all the major newspapers have been publishing it for weeks now and a sizable proportion of the nation seems to be addicted to it. For the rest of us, Sudoku is a grid-based game, originating in Japan, with a simple rule:

Fill in the grid so that
every row,
every column, and
every 3×3 box
contains the digits 1 through 9.

It really is that simple. There is a web site http://sudoku.com/ where you can get more information and play the game, or you can take a look in pretty well any British newspaper, or take a look at some of these sites:

• Lets Play
• The Daily SuDoku
• Sudoku Fun

or you can play it with letters at BBC Newsnight. And if you haven’t wasted enough time yet, download it to play on your Palm Pilot (freeware).

Update (2005-05-17):
Vowe says the Palm application doesn’t work – I haven’t had time to try it out, as just after I posted this, OS X (Filevault?) destroyed part of my operating system and I decided to do a clean re-install of everything, which took all of yesterday. Pretty well everything is now restored – I have just one or two more programs to install this evening after work.

A little late (this happened last week), but none the less, pretty amazing:

That hole in the wall (in Basingstoke, UK), was made by a BMW hitting a kerb at speed and then hitting the house.

I just can’t imagine how fast it must have been going to hit a first floor wall, let alone knock a car sized hole in it.
(Having just not expressed an opinion about the US military, I’d better keep my thoughts on BMW drivers to myself too )

A system of marking exams that is aimed at making the process faster and more efficient is being introduced in the UK:

Pupils’ complete exam scripts will be scanned into a computer file by the company managing the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) examination board’s computer marking, Milton Keynes-based Data and Research Services.

Candidates’ answers will then be divided up between questions requiring longer responses and those with just one-word answers.

The scanned one-word answers will then be emailed to offices in India where workers will type them up so they can be marked by a computer programme back in the UK, AQA said…

...AQA said each single-word answer would be typed in by two people and any discrepancies would be picked up by the computer programme and investigated.

Perhaps someone can explain – convincingly – why that (scanning the answers, picking out the one-word answers, mailing them to India and double-keying them into a computer, manually investigating the discrepancies) is more efficient than marking the one-word answers on the spot in the UK?

I wasn’t going to comment on yesterday’s royal wedding, but then I found this delightfully irreverent description of the BBC and ITV coverage of the event in the Scottish Sunday Herald. Here’s a taste:

... the wedding itself must be counted a modest success. The bride didn’t scrub up too badly considering she’d spent her first 50 years in sweaty jodhpurs, smelling of old labrador and potting compost. That voluminous dress was cut to hide a multitude of sins. The hats were more of a gamble – the first bore a passing resemblance to the one worn by Vera Duckworth at Ken and Deirdre’s nuptials on Friday, while the second seemed to be made of porcupine quills…

Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology and professor emeritus of bacteriology at Aberdeen University warned today that British government estimates of 50 000 deaths from avian flu are based on enormously optimistic assumptions (that the death rate is no higher than for normal flu and that there is only one wave of flu) and that the government is making a mistake similar to the one made 10 years ago regarding BSE. He believes a more realistic figure is around 2 million deaths, many from pneumonia, for which there is still no effective treatment.

In the last week, 2 nurses in Vietnam have caught avian flu. Infection of health workers is a first indication, according to health experts, that the virus has become capable of jumping directly from one person to another.

The British government has ordered over 14 million doses of an anti-viral drug for delivery in two years time, which can be used to treat avian flu (at the moment there is no vaccine available, although tests are being made on experimental vaccines which are expected to offer some protection against the flu). A marginally better situation than in Germany, where risk of avian flu has been played down, with the government focussing more on the danger to German poultry, than on the risk to the human population. (I don’t recall seeing any reports in the German press about measures being taken to protect the local population against avian flu, despite the World Health Organisation’s latest warning that “The world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic.”).

The current status of influenza infections in Europe is available here, by the way.

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The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has some advice for office parties.

Tips include:

Resist the temptation to photocopy parts of your anatomy – if the copier breaks, you’ll have Christmas with glass in painful places.

and

Office furniture isn’t designed to be as sturdy as the furniture in your local pub, so dancing on desks could do them and you a lot of damage. Likewise, the boardroom table is meant for weighty documents, not overweight executives.

(via The Word Company)

A BBC poll released on Thursday, shows that 60% of those under 35 have never heard of Auschwitz.

This is really surprising, given that the image of the Germans and Germany in the UK is still, 60-odd years later, frozen in the past, thanks, apparently, to the history curriculum at school and the diet of war-films that are shown on TV.

The Independent makes me realise how lucky I am to not have been born in 1887 – if I had been, I would have had to sit an entrance exam to get into grammar school. Their article includes part of an examination paper recently found by someone whose father passed the test. Education experts say that today most A-level candidates (that puts them at about 18 years old) would struggle to pass the papers – and the entrance exam in question was taken by 11 year-olds in 1898.

To get an idea of the difficulty, try this question – the answer is in the Independent:

Where are Omdurman, Wai-Hei-Wai, Crete, Santiago, and West Key, and what are they noted for?