Culturally similar to the US, but cheaper. Oh Canada, eh?

Not that the Guardian spells it out in their article, but it's been like this for a couple of years now... funny how the UK media tends to notice things like this around Christmas when they try and book their own tickets, isn't it??

The rector is elected by students to represent their interests...

is forecasting how much house prices in the UK will fall in the next year or two.

Tesco's moves into small 'food' stores [i.e. Tesco Express etc.] bear closer scrutiny.

This is widely regarded as true, despite being completely inaccurate. Tesco's smallest stores aren't really food stores, despite beliefs to the contrary: they're really newsagents cum off-licenses [liquor stores] which happen to sell Tesco branded food. Now, in most neighbourhoods these stores open, there are already plenty of newsagents and places to buy booze: however, there often aren't many places to buy food.

And when up to a third of a 3,000 square foot store is devoted to alcohol and newspapers, that's a lot less food choices for your local consumer.

Because we all know it's important that the flat-earthers and antediluvians get their say too...

Congestion fees in London are reducing congestion, and radically reshaping how Londoners use both cars and public transport. This we know. The other effects of charging are, to put it mildly, less well understood and if we are honest they are also largely unexamined.

In particular, we know very little about how charging affects retailers. Charging does have some significant positives for retailers - in particular it is very good for their logistics systems. The negative impacts are, however, very poorly understood.

While retailers [particularly John Lewis] argue that the charge is behind a drop in sales, we know that consumption patterns in the UK are still rather fluid and that:

1. mobile customers are still migrating away from inner city retailing to out of town shopping centres
2. direct retail competition to central London is growing, particularly in other city centres [especially in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow
3. online shopping is still growing fast in the UK: this is money that isn't going directly into high-street stores

So, how much of the retail decline in central London is the fault of the congestion charge and how much attributable to wider patterns of retail restructuring...?

You might expect the intersection of bicycles and trains [and, admittedly, transport policy in the UK] to be a source of great amusement, and you'd be right.

Train firms allowed to ban cycles

Nothing like a little bit of joined up-thinking on the whole cycling/commuting thing, is there??

Thanks very much to the lady driving a metallic red Renault Megane who turned off of Broughton Street this morning without paying the slightest bit of attention to the traffic around her and who was so busy fumbling with her mobile that she almost hit both me and a cyclist...

Now I'm a cyclist and generally very pro-cycling in general but there is a serious need for some sort of sanction against muppet cyclists - the ones who are listening to music as they ride, who overtake on the inside, who weave through cars like they're indestructible... and so on. You know the type.

Maybe the Police should confiscate the muppet's bikes and give them instead to people who've had theirs stolen?? This would have the lovely side effect of making the police record every stolen bicyle, which would be a nice change.

aka: the impending collapse of the US economy/dollar

There is no better example of the media's inability/unwillingness to take numbers and ideas seriously than discussion of the US deficit and its long-term implications for the relative value of the US dollar.

The US deficit is exploding, partially due to Iraq, but mostly due to increased defence expenditures [Star Wars et al], the cost of the new prescription benefits, which will be far higher than anyone ever believed, and Bush's complete inability to reign in government spending.

While I hate to ever admit that 'student' leaders are right [particularly as the National Union of Students - the NUS - doesn't even represent all universities, not to mention all students...] if the Scottish Executive was really concerned about admission rates of English students in particular courses surely they could just have a wee chat with SHEFC, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council about it???

After all, the odds that English students would come up to Scotland to do a law degree and then move back to England does rather beggar belief [as the English and Scots have separate legal systems].

The real issue is that some Universities orient their medical schools more to English students than Scottish students, and as the English and Scottish school systems are markedly different this is a serious structural disadvantage Scottish students face.

PS: I wonder when everyone who's so upset about the lack of dentists in Scotland will start asking questions about why the University of Edinburgh was allowed to shut its Dental School in the early 90s...?

And how is this different from the way things were before they reorganised themselves??

There is a bit of a myth that there are police on the street at night in Edinburgh, because if they are then [with the notable exceptions of those working on Lothian Road...] they're invisible.

You have to admit it, the man speaks sense.

Flash slideshow

No Mr Anderson, it's not, and that's why they want to open there. Princes Street has been in decline for quite a while, a decade by my estimate.

Major retailers are either bailing out being priced out, or considering large-scale reconstruction. Even Mr Anderson recognises that much of the street is unusable .

This would probably have a lot to do with a combination of rising interest rates and ludicrously high house prices... people just don't have the extra money, which forces retailers to keep prices down.

A nice middle-class reporter who hadn't done a day's manual labour in his life isn't exactly qualified to comment on much to do with the railways, although this didn't stop the BBC from trying.

What was a bit strange was that the show was basically about one reporter, the opinions of a Professor being shown undercover tapes, and a supervisor in Scotland who was quitting, who was the only one in the programme who was really an 'insider'. Although it was interesting from a fly-on-a-wall perspective, I didn't find it particularly convincing.

Now, there are apples and oranges and then there's these numbers... a comparison is only useful if you care comparing comparable things, and these numbers are too vague to compare. I don't know what's worse, the politicians using them to make a pseudo point [yes, PFI is expensive], or the fairly uncritical "reporting".

Nice to see the fat-american meme is showing no sign of dying out any time soon...

Which is of course completely useless for shoppers who park on the street...
Transport guru my ****. But then we are talking about the man who allowed cars to park in bicycle lanes, so we shouldn't be too surprised.

A better alternative would be to tax out of town parking. That would even things up a bit...

The funny part is that the closest police station - Gayfield Square - is 50 yards from the top of Leith Walk. So much for deterrence, hmm?

On the train on the way home I was sitting just along from three... hmm... ned-ettes?? who were discussing one of their number's upcoming court appearance... when one admitted serving three months, and told the defendant that she might have to serve time she shouted [loud enough for the whole carriage to hear] "but it's only my first offence...!". I wasn't surprised they got off at Polmont.

Degree grades 'in need of update'

Two fundamentally opposed ideas, both true. If you give out Firsts [the 'top' degree grade in the UK] to the top 5% of students, and you then increase the number of students by 50%, logically you will be giving out 50% more firsts. If you're still only giving them to the top 5% though, your 'standard' for granting grades hasn't changed, hence "no deterioration in quality".

Given that your increase in student numbers has [generally] resulted in far larger numbers of relatively weak students, more students who would have got 2.1s will now be getting 1sts. And since many departments have decided on their own that they aren't giving out enough 1sts, the fundamental basis for UK degree classifications has completely changed over the last decade.

Bit late for that.

Election exit polls 'useless' and 'distorted'

Not that this is news or anything... the question is, given that exit polls are fundamentally flawed, will the media do anything to develop more accurate measuring/forecasting methods??

Won't be betting any money on it, myself...

There are a couple of marked difference between ScotRail, who used to run the passenger railways in Scotland, and First ScotRail, who took them over at the end of October...

1. Punctuality is even worse than ever, and trains seem even less likely to leave on time than before.
2. But we get an apology when we arrive, just to make sure that we've noticed that we're late.
3. They no longer tell you at Glasgow Queen Street where the next Edinburgh train will leave from if it's not arrived. Which means you end up with 100 people standing in front of the ticket barriers not knowing where to go and getting in the way of other arriving and departing passengers.
4. Trains are a damn sight dirtier.
5. And worst of all, the trains are smaller/shorter.

Ok, so it was really stupid to tell people to use the contact form and not make sure that the silly thing actually worked. Some strange redirect/.htaccess things going on, but it should work now [i.e. it works for moi...]

The old news directory now points to
/archives/site_news/, as it should have for the last three months. RSS/RDF link also points to a live file.

Other miscellaneous fixes to come...

Well, after a bit of an up and down weekend I think things are beginning to settle down. Photo galleries are all moved [and download much faster...] and templates re-installed.

Apologies to the 240 of you who discovered that I'd forgotten to upload the stylesheet the photo galleries depend on. Muppet.