Monday, November 07, 2011
Completing the circle
On October 22nd I noticed a company which sold a package which would help you write the perfect CV. Today I notice a company to which you can sent the perfect CV once you have written it - http://jooble-uk.com/. So whether you want to be a canning machine attendant (excluding food and drink) (CODOT 842.50) in Tambacounda, a palaeontologist (CODOT 214.30) in Villavicencio or a nuclear weapons engineer (CODOT 229.60) underneath a mountain in Qom this is the site for you. Or maybe even a little something in the UK.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Quartets
Saturday saw the start of the concert season at Dorking Halls (http://www.dorkingconcertgoers.org.uk/) with what must be around our 15th concert with the Endellion string quartet. It seems that they have been playing the halls for around twenty years and we must have been going there for more than ten. On Saturday, for a change, three works we did not know at all: Haydn Op. 50/5, Beethoven Op. 95 and Tchaikovsky Op. 30. The Haydn a jolly piece but very fast. The Beethoven also off to a fast start and I would have done better to have had a rehearsal in the morning. Took to it much better when I had a replay after the event from the people behind http://www.quartettoitaliano.com/. But even at the event, clearly the most magisterial and masterful of the three. The Tchaikovsky was much more accessible on a first time around. Good audience, but one which was oddly subdued. Perhaps it was new to most of them too.
Now into the second pass of 'That they may face the rising sun' by John McGahern. An interesting tale of rural Ireland, set perhaps in the sixties or seventies. A rural Ireland which seems rather violent compared with the rural England that I know. A fair bit of coarseness, casual brutality and fighting. A fair bit of poverty. A world where music, song and amateur dramatics are, or at least were, important. A slightly tense relationship between those who have stayed, those who have gone and those who have returned. Much time spent on the natural beauties of the place, time which smells a little of the inkhorn. Not of someone who has lived in the country all his life. I await a copy of 'Amongst Women' from the library, Amazon, for once, having failed me.
Prompted to turn up my three volumes of the CODOT occupational classification from the Manpower Services Commission, fourth impression, 1978. These are the brave people who thought to produce a hierarchical classification of occupation with 18 major groups broken down into 73 minor groups, in turn broken down into 378 unit groups. The unit groups list some 3,500 occupations. The organisation is slightly classist, in that most of the higher grade occupations appear towards the beginning of the classification. Our members of Parliament have been placed, for example, unit group 001, ahead of big cheeses out in the real world at 002. Archaeologists do rather badly attracting just one occupational heading, lumped in with social workers and religious occupations. Mathematicians, an occupation I once aspired to, rate four occupational headings, albeit a lot further down the list. Whereas, as a middle of the road IT person I am comfortably ahead of the archaeologists, in major group II, in a gang attracting five occupational headings.
Pleased to see that even back in the benighted seventies, the Commission knew which side its bread was buttered on and listed no less than 18 different sorts of broker. But the brokers should not get too excited because the Commission also listed 20 different sorts of boiler. Down among the working classes I see I could have been a curtain glazing machine attendant, while the very last occupation is just a not elsewhere classified. But the three before that are heavy labourer, light labourer and stage hand in that order. So that puts wannabee luvvies helping out in their proper place. Real luvvies get to rub shoulders with conjurers and clowns in a more respectable part of the classification.
All in all, the business of trying to organise occupations in this way is much more interesting endeavour than I realised when I was involved with such things. Although perhaps doomed. Well, I might think doomed, but it looks as if the National Statistics Office are still at it, with the current classification being the offspring of CODOT and the thing done by the Census Office. Major groups still rule, although, to be fair, there are now rather fewer of them.
Monday, June 14, 2010
A waking wonder
This morning's deep thoughts. I start with overlapping quotes from the fathers. First, Marx said something about how bourgeois chatter about the world while socialists change it. Second, Aristotle (or someone of that sort) said something about there being no point in being angry about something that just is and there being no point in being angry with something which is not sentient. So, for example, there is no point at being angry about or with the mountain. But there might be some point in being angry with Vulcan who might then get the volcano going under the mountain for you.
So I think that anger, like the other violent passions, just wells up in one. Sometimes one is not quite sure why one is angry. Sometimes one is not allowed to be angry with the cause of the anger; perhaps because the cause is god, a loved one or a loved object. But, in any event one is angry and the anger needs to be vented in some way. So quite often, one vents the anger on whatever happens to be at hand, cooking up whatever excuse comes to hand. Toast overdone, toast underdone, toast not done at all. Whatever.
But the Greeks, anticipating Freud in this as in so much, thought of the wheeze of the scapegoat. So you pick out a handsome and valuable goat and the population of the village all join in in beating it up and beating it out of the village, carrying all the pent up anger with it. They talked in terms of carrying all the pent up sin with it but we don't have to believe that. Many years later, witches were used for similar purposes. And even now, we still go in for what amount to witch hunts. We are angry about something going wrong and we want someone to vent our anger on. OK, so witch hunts are a bit more complicated than this, but I think I have part of the truth.
There is a catch though. I think scapegoats and witch hunts only work well for more or less public problems. A public problem with a public and shared solution. Private problems, private angers, need a more private solution. Which is apt to mean that someone or something nearer home is going to get bashed.
All this brought on by a very sedate morning. Started with Couperin, lately organist to the king & etc. Presumably the king in question being the Sun King. Works for the harpsicord; Book 1; Order 3; La Tenebreuse & etc. La Tenebreuse especially striking. Such command, control and depth of tone - all from an anglophone too, one Kenneth Gilbert, despite it coming on a French imprint, harmonia mundi. Not sure what a tenebreuse is in this context though. The word seems to be an adjective meaning dark and mysterious - which the music certainly was - but my sources don't say what it might mean used as a noun.
Followed up by a good read over breakfast of the May 26 edition of the 'Cornish Gazette'. Proper provincial newspaper with lots of fascinating small ads. So, for example, I could become a pasty crimper, experience preferred but not necessary. Several posts vacant in Indian Queens. On the other hand, according to Her Majesty's 1978 classification of occupations (CODOT aforementioned), this occupation does not exist. The nearest among the half dozen or so baking occupations is a 'Table hand (bakery)', a sort of semi-skilled bakery assistant. Not sure that being in a non-existent occupation would be a very good career move. Maybe I ought to write to the Her Majesty's secretary about this lacuna in her classification.
Or I could buy a Copper Maran in good condition for £12. One of these, it seems, being a sort of hen. BH thought it was something to do with tin mining. This among several pages of fish, fowl, horses and other country life. There were also several ads. advertising boxes of household stuff which should be of interest to a car-booter. I had not realised this secondary wholesale market in goods for car boot sales existed. Rather in the way of fancy goods wholesalers who supply the souvenir shop trade.
Overall, one got the impression that Cornwall must be reasonably poor, despite the price of property, with a lot of ads. for things costing less than £5. Don't think that would be worth the bother in Surrey. Maybe e-bay does not reach all the way to Lands End.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Brickabracked
It has been a good weekend for brickabrack.
Started off at Bourne Hall Library where I acquired two films and two books for the grand total of £3.27p. A good haul, with, for some reason, Bourne Hall Library offering far higher grade cast offs than Epsom Library. Half the haul was consumed last night. First, a German entertainment called 'Eden', a romantic tale involving a very talented, very fat but more or less asexual cook. Kept us happily engaged for a couple of hours with little recourse to either flesh or blood. Good sound track with real music and a good proportion of silence. All in all, excellent value for money. Second, a Chinese entertainment called 'UFI in Her Eyes', in the form of book tricked out to mimic the sort of file secret policemen might keep on a subject. A rather good bit of book production from Random House but flying the (at least once upon a time) very respectable Chatto & Windus flag. A cautionary tale, breezily covering some of the same ground as 'Country Driving' noticed on March 1st last year. Very good, if not quite excellent, value for money.
Then today was the first car booter of my season at Hook Road Arena. Spent rather more than at Bourne Hall, coming away with a fine wooden walking stick of the right length and made with the approved bent wood. Plus a large rubber ferrule. At £2, vastly superior value for money (VFM) to the new one sourced from Worcester Park. Then there were three 500 piece jigsaws, not all of recognised brand but one cannot be too picky at 10p each; a huge undercut of what seems to be the going rate at our local charity shops. Outing completed with 3lbs of quite respectable cherries, these at the full rate of £2.20 the pound.
By coincidence, I was moved this morning to take a look at my three volumes of statistical hubris called the CODOT classification, dating from the seventies of the last century and sourced at a previous Hook Road car booter. An enumeration of some 3,500 occupations, intended to support the central management of the UK labour market and the production of statistics thereabout, an enumeration which presumably drowned in the rapidly evolving labour market and the shrinking role for central management. I had been moved by reading an article in the TLS about what some might regard as a thousand pages of psychiatric hubris, the new and enlarged edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V (or DSM-5 for the less pretentious)) from the American Psychiatric Association. I wonder in passing whether this is a US association which by its name extends its jurisdiction to Canada, Central and South America? Not to mention the Falkland Islands and the Galapagos Islands.
The article has many words on how this latest edition seems to be in thrall to the pharmaceutical industry, the psychoanalytic industry being in decline. It notes in passing that the psychoanalytic people were not all that interested in this DSM sort of thing at all, whole person people before their time - with the result that the DSM committees were packed with chemical cure rather than talking cure people.
It explains how Big Pharma wants a stable classification to support its research, development and marketing activities, none of which is very easy if you do not have lots of handy pigeon holes into which people can be shoved after filling out a few pages of questionnaire. They want to be able to say if you have a patient with diagnosis A give him (or her) lots of our shiny new drug B - not forgetting that some of these shiny new drugs are, indeed, shiny. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Notice also that Big Pharma has plenty of incentive to bring all kinds of behaviours into the psychiatric net inside which chargeable treatment is applicable; behaviours which would once have been contained or managed by society at large more or less for free.
Along the way, it seems that in order to get the insurance money needed to pay for mental health treatment, you have to have been diagnosed to a DSM recognised disorder which is included in whatever insurance you happen to be carrying about. DSM brings order to the otherwise messy world of mental disorder insurance. For which purposes it is also good if diagnosis is repeatable. That is to say if psychiatrist A diagnoses disorder B in person C at time D, it is good if psychiatrist E comes to the same diagnosis B at time F where F is not that much bigger than D. All of which has conspired to encourage a tick box job on symptoms.
The trouble seems to be that mental disorder is a complicated beast, not presently reducible to a hierarchical classification which reflects facts on the ground in a scientifically or medically satisfactory way. We do not yet know enough about mental processes or disorders to be able to do this - and it may yet turn out that the brain is sufficiently plastic to make cut and dried diagnoses at the DSM level of detail inappropriate and unhelpful.
A different sort of trouble seems to be that one has to pay to look at DSM IV TR, this being the current version. It might have been mainly produced by people on the public payroll but the public does not get to look at it without flashing the plastic again. See, for example, http://www.appi.org/Pages/default.aspx.
Messy old world out there.
Started off at Bourne Hall Library where I acquired two films and two books for the grand total of £3.27p. A good haul, with, for some reason, Bourne Hall Library offering far higher grade cast offs than Epsom Library. Half the haul was consumed last night. First, a German entertainment called 'Eden', a romantic tale involving a very talented, very fat but more or less asexual cook. Kept us happily engaged for a couple of hours with little recourse to either flesh or blood. Good sound track with real music and a good proportion of silence. All in all, excellent value for money. Second, a Chinese entertainment called 'UFI in Her Eyes', in the form of book tricked out to mimic the sort of file secret policemen might keep on a subject. A rather good bit of book production from Random House but flying the (at least once upon a time) very respectable Chatto & Windus flag. A cautionary tale, breezily covering some of the same ground as 'Country Driving' noticed on March 1st last year. Very good, if not quite excellent, value for money.
Then today was the first car booter of my season at Hook Road Arena. Spent rather more than at Bourne Hall, coming away with a fine wooden walking stick of the right length and made with the approved bent wood. Plus a large rubber ferrule. At £2, vastly superior value for money (VFM) to the new one sourced from Worcester Park. Then there were three 500 piece jigsaws, not all of recognised brand but one cannot be too picky at 10p each; a huge undercut of what seems to be the going rate at our local charity shops. Outing completed with 3lbs of quite respectable cherries, these at the full rate of £2.20 the pound.
By coincidence, I was moved this morning to take a look at my three volumes of statistical hubris called the CODOT classification, dating from the seventies of the last century and sourced at a previous Hook Road car booter. An enumeration of some 3,500 occupations, intended to support the central management of the UK labour market and the production of statistics thereabout, an enumeration which presumably drowned in the rapidly evolving labour market and the shrinking role for central management. I had been moved by reading an article in the TLS about what some might regard as a thousand pages of psychiatric hubris, the new and enlarged edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V (or DSM-5 for the less pretentious)) from the American Psychiatric Association. I wonder in passing whether this is a US association which by its name extends its jurisdiction to Canada, Central and South America? Not to mention the Falkland Islands and the Galapagos Islands.
The article has many words on how this latest edition seems to be in thrall to the pharmaceutical industry, the psychoanalytic industry being in decline. It notes in passing that the psychoanalytic people were not all that interested in this DSM sort of thing at all, whole person people before their time - with the result that the DSM committees were packed with chemical cure rather than talking cure people.
It explains how Big Pharma wants a stable classification to support its research, development and marketing activities, none of which is very easy if you do not have lots of handy pigeon holes into which people can be shoved after filling out a few pages of questionnaire. They want to be able to say if you have a patient with diagnosis A give him (or her) lots of our shiny new drug B - not forgetting that some of these shiny new drugs are, indeed, shiny. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Notice also that Big Pharma has plenty of incentive to bring all kinds of behaviours into the psychiatric net inside which chargeable treatment is applicable; behaviours which would once have been contained or managed by society at large more or less for free.
Along the way, it seems that in order to get the insurance money needed to pay for mental health treatment, you have to have been diagnosed to a DSM recognised disorder which is included in whatever insurance you happen to be carrying about. DSM brings order to the otherwise messy world of mental disorder insurance. For which purposes it is also good if diagnosis is repeatable. That is to say if psychiatrist A diagnoses disorder B in person C at time D, it is good if psychiatrist E comes to the same diagnosis B at time F where F is not that much bigger than D. All of which has conspired to encourage a tick box job on symptoms.
The trouble seems to be that mental disorder is a complicated beast, not presently reducible to a hierarchical classification which reflects facts on the ground in a scientifically or medically satisfactory way. We do not yet know enough about mental processes or disorders to be able to do this - and it may yet turn out that the brain is sufficiently plastic to make cut and dried diagnoses at the DSM level of detail inappropriate and unhelpful.
A different sort of trouble seems to be that one has to pay to look at DSM IV TR, this being the current version. It might have been mainly produced by people on the public payroll but the public does not get to look at it without flashing the plastic again. See, for example, http://www.appi.org/Pages/default.aspx.
Messy old world out there.
