A Building For Eureka Moments
The winner of the Stirling prize was announced last night and it’s reported here on the BBC’s web site. I particularly liked this bit, about the winning building; the Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University.
Stanton Williams received a £20,000 prize. Director Alan Stanton described the design as a 21st Century cloister, which encouraged scientists to interact and exchange ideas.
“Two scientists working on two pieces of research could bump into each other in the corridor and have a eureka moment, and say, my God, there’s the possibility of some really interesting scientific breakthrough here,” he said.
“Quite often, accidents are important, in science as they are in any creative endeavour. The building is there to try to ambush scientists into meeting and talking.”
I’ve worked in some crap buildings, most notably the electronics lab at Enfield Rolling Mills, but some good ones too, like ICI’s state-of-the-art offices for the 1960s in Runcorn. But then until probably about 1980, I rarely saw a scientist, researcher or innovator in anything pleasant. Even banks in those days had some really grim premises, if Lloyds Bank’s offices in Lombard Street were anything to go by. The Chief Management Accountant, who I effectively worked for, had a dingy office tucked away on a mezzanine behind a stair-case.
Could all of this, explain our dismal economic performance in those years? Anybody with a brain felt unwanted and went where they were appreciated.
We really don’t take working conditions for researchers and innovators seriously. Hopefully, this new lab in Cambridge will set the new standard.
Getting A Loan Of £5,000 Or Less
I don’t need to borrow money, but I do have a trap setup to make sure that I get information about Zopa and the other peer-to-peer lenders, as obviously I want to put my money in the best places.
I found this article, entitled.
Money Insider: Want a loan of £5,000 or less? Shop around,
In yesterday’s Independent. The article has some interesting things to say about borrowing money and this in particular about Zopa and Ratesetter, two of the peer-to-peer lenders.
Zopa, the first peer-to-peer lender in the UK, is now in its eighth year and RateSetter, one of the more recent lenders in the peer-to-peer market, both offer some of the best value deals at 9.5 per cent APR and 9.7 per cent APR respectively for a £3,000 loan over three years. Just because you’re not familiar with the names doesn’t mean you should discount them — the peer-to-peer market has quickly established itself as a credible alternative to the big banks — and the interest rates are much better than you’ll find on the high street. Zopa has already lent more than £230m and RateSetter has advanced more than £36m to personal customers.
It also highlights another prudent way to borrow from MBNA.
Another option is the Rate for Life card from MBNA. Although not strictly a personal loan, there’s nothing to stop you using this long-term fixed-rate credit card in the same way you would as a loan. If you transfer your balance to the card and set up a monthly standing order for your current account, it works exactly the same as a personal loan.
All of this adds up to the fact, that the banks are under pressure to maintain their traditional place in the financial field. The second paragraph I’ve highlighted illustrates this, in that conventional wisdom says that borrowing on a credit card is an expensive business and should avoided at all costs. If I’d heard this in the pub and not read it in a respected newspaper, I wouldn’t have believed it.
But as in all things these days, the rule of innovation applies; innovate or die. The banks do little of the former and are flirting with the latter.
Would You Buy A Bank Branch?
You’re a very rich man and you are the CEO of a bank that you feel is reputable, so would you buy one bank branch let alone 316 as Santander tried to do from RBS, as is reported here?
I think the answer is no. Three hundred and sixteen times no!
They would have been transferring 1,800,000 customers to Santander. I used to have my account at the Woolwich Building Society and when it was taken over by Barclays, I didn’t feel that I wanted to bank there, so I moved to Nationwide, where I bank on-line.
So how many of these nearly two million accounts will move somewhere else, like one of the new banks being started by such as Tesco or Marks and Spencer?
I’m not affected, but I choose which bank I’m with! Not some faceless man in Spain!
I wonder also how many people adhere to one of my friend David’s rules of banking, which is to bank with a bank headquartered in the UK and preferably England.
I think too, that five thousand staff will be transferred with the branches and the accounts too. How many of the good ones will jump ship and join someone else.
But these days with more and more people banking sans branch, like I do, surely the best thing to do would be to convert these 316 branches into places of hospitality?
They could perhaps be converted into burlesque bars , offering good food and drink, with a couple of cash machines to emphasise their heritage. It would certainly do wonders for the image of bankers. They wouldn’t even have to change the signage, if they called them Royal Burlesque Shows.
Politicians interfere Too Much In Health Care
Not me that said that, but the view of Dame Ruth Carnall in this article about stroke care in London. This is an extract.
She went on to criticise politicians for interfering too much in health changes.
She said: “Politicians too often reduce complex medical arguments to soundbites.
“Compromise is a mistake but is hard to resist. There is a political aversion to major changes as we’ve seen with the debate over A&Es.”
But then politicians love to interfere and the sooner we get more politicians who are caring people first and politicians second, the better.
The trouble with healthcare is that for serious problems, there just isn’t the money to have super-duper unit for that problem at every hospital. So especially in places like London, cutting the number of units for each speciality is a good thing.
I would also say do we want to go back to the 1950s and 1960s, where there were loads of local general hospitals, which did everything and usually did it in a less than perfect way. I can’t remember anyone in those days, who was totally pleased with the service they got from the local hospitals in Barnet and Enfield. I, myself, have a gammy arm, which may well have been caused by substandard treatment when it was broken by the school bully.
Surely, the wonderful outcome of the Fabrice Muamba case, should be a lesson to everybody. He was probably saved by the absolutely top-class emergency treatment he revived on the pitch by a cardiologist who happened to be in the crowd and a swift removal to a cardiac hospital.
According to Dame Ruth, London now has eight major stroke units and the political delays cost seven hundred lives.
Where Are All The Women In The FTSE 100?
The Standard asked this question last night in an article. All of the usual reasons are given and never being at boardroom level in a large company, I wouldn’t know why there are so few.
i do remember though at a dinner of the Ipswich law Society many years ago, the Education Officer or something like that of the Law Society getting up and saying that looking at the statistics of legal education, that by the turn of the millennium, there wouldn’t be any good male lawyers coming through.
i don’t have the statistics, but I know quite a few exceptional female lawyers who could have done well in business. so why do exceptional women choose certain professions like law, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science, but shun others like business and engineering?
Everybody has the right to a good career and exceptional people will succeed, wherever they go. So perhaps the problem is not the selection process, but the reasons why the various groups choose their particular career path.
I was interested to see that one of the women featured is Alison Cooper, the head of Imperial Tobacco. It’s not a job I would do on ethical grounds and I’m rather surprised that a woman has decided to do it. But she does like an odd cigar. As she has two daughters, I bet she gets a bit of stick about it.
History Repeats Itself
One of the classic tales about Ted Kid Lewis, is that late one night, he was walking home through the East End, after a function and he was set upon by four thugs. As he despatched the last into the gutter, he produced his visiting card and dropped it on the attacker.
And now a group of thugs have tried to nick Amir Khan‘s Range Rover in Birmingham! It’s reported here in the Telegraph.
In this attack, the report says that there were about six thugs, but then Amir had his brother, Haroon, who is another boxer with him.
Apparently, the thugs didn’t make a complaint to the Police.
The Biggest Cannabis Plant In The World
This story just has to be passed on. Here’s the first paragraph.
An elderly couple have unwittingly grown the “biggest cannabis plant” police officers had seen after buying what they thought was an innocuous shrub from a car boot sale.
The question also has to be asked, as to whether the seller in the sale, knew what they were selling.
I don’t think, I’d know what a cannabis plant looked like.
NatWorst Opens The Door To The Fraudsters
Natwest have brought in a system called Get Cash based on a mobile phone app. But according to this on the BBC’s web site, it’s all started to backfire.
It looks to me that the Get Cash app is just too easy a target for fraudsters and it appears to me as a humble programmer and system designer, that they used programmers and designers, who didn’t understand the criminal mind.
If my bank offers me a mobile phone app to do my banking or use a credit card, the answer is no, no a thousand times no!
Incidentally, the computer that does my banking, never leaves my house and sits behind a door with a powerful lock on it.
I usually only draw out cash from a small number of cash machines fairly close to my house or at the Angel.
Do We Need A Royal College Of Teaching?
This question is raised in a news item in The Times today.
After all most professions have them and it could easily be argued that they raise the status of their professions.
In some ways, it’s strange that one doesn’t exist already.
The Gun Lobby Says No
As always the gun lobby in the UK is resisting attempts to change their sport for the good of others. In this case, it’s about the use of lead shot, which has been shown to kill birds like mallards which think it’s food and eat it. The story is here on the BBC.
The arguments put up by the shooting lobby are rather spurious in my opinion and would not be put forward by most of my friends who shoot. I used to know one old colonel, who for instance used to go shooting rabbits with a hi-tech air rifle, as he felt it was more skilful than using a shot-gun. He also got something more appetising for the pot.
The Anonymous Widower 