Damn you, Capitalism!

Last week, those very smart people over in MIT unveiled a design for a plane which could reduce aviation fuel consumption by up to 70 per cent, make about as much noise as a really tiny kitten and as the picture shows is quite pleasing on the eye too.

Using a blended wing body as opposed to the usual narrow body design, this is the latest in a long line of design development that aims to radically increase the efficiency of aircraft. As anyone who's worked out their own one out, regular flying leads to a crater like carbon footprint. So, this should make a massive dent in the carbon emissions of the western world, yeah?

If only it were that simple. That most dastardly of things, capitalism, comes in and ruins everything. These sort of designs have been knocking around for a while, but market forces hold them back from any sort of commercial roll out. Look closely at that picture; there are limited passenger windows. Earlier designs such as what has know become the Boeing X-48 didn't have any passenger windows and that provoked such a negative reaction in focus groups that they were dropped as commercial prospects and now exist entirely as military or NASA projects.

It's not just consumers that would be holding these designs back. The narrow body design is universal, which means that it's what all airports, ground crew and all the other various pieces of machinery that interact with a plane are built to work with. In particular, refueling in this type of aircraft takes more time and for that reason alone the low-cost airlines would ignore them.

Concorde showed that while there can be a niche for non-standard design, it also shows how difficult it is to change and how unenthusiastic many airlines and airports are for change. True, Concorde was obscenely loud and inefficient, but it had it's selling point and made a profit on its (two) routes. These planes have a selling point, and its appeal is much more broad based than high flying executives needing to be in NY in 2 hours for a meeting. There's hope that these designs will one day be the staple of our air travel experience, but without significant US and EU subsidies, that could be a long wait.

Invigilating: A View From the Other Side

In the course of my education, I sat many an exam. 99% of the time when you sit an exam, you are oblivious to the goings on around you. The room next door could be on fire, but unless I remember the precise statement of that ridiculously named theorem I spent most of last night trying to understand, I'll happily ignore all alarms going off around me. However, for the last couple weeks, I have been on the other side of the fence: invigilating. I've supervised a wide range of subjects and students, and I have a few observations to share.

1. Class and society hoodies all have TERRIBLE puns on them. Universally terrible. I think the History one "We get all the dates" and the Philosphy one "We think about doing it a lot" are the worse offenders. Please, someone, be original!

2. Some people have either no dress sense or must be going straight from the exam to a night club. Hmm... that's actually quite possible, but I refuse to believe that it's universally true. Seriously though, some people need to realise there's a time from tonnes of make-up and fancy clothes. 9am exams are not them.

3. Arts departments need to get better at naming their modules if they want me to take them seriously. I've found two types of annoying module title: ones that have absurdly general titles (HI2001 - Ireland, Europe and the Wider World for example) or titles that are just absurd in themselves (GG3001 - The Nature of Geography).


4. On the other hand, many sciency subjects are so specific that I doubt they'd ever be used again e.g. ZY4012 - Population Dynamics of Birds. I really wonder what makes the dynamics of bird populations so particularly interesting.

5. Does wearing a WWJD? bracelet in a religion exam count as cheating?

6. When did it come into vogue to wear ear plugs during an exam? I seem to have missed that boat.

7. It's a lot of fun to read all the various papers and imagine how you approach to answer questions that you know little to nothing about. This is much more fun in the humanities as they use words the lay person can understand in their questions. My favourite one was from the AP2002 (The Social Psychology of Organising) paper. Question one was "Explain the relationship between money and happiness." I immediately knew that the answer lay in differential equations and the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey interaction model.

8. Why, oh why, did those engineers insist on doing precise drawings on the normal scripts when graph paper was available? GAH! The inaccuracy of it all hurt me inside.

9. People have some odd exam rituals. One (very) mature student brought their teddy bear into the exam with them.

10. Despite the availability of perfectly safe cheating mechanisms (the ol' writing on the leg and going to the loo routine is actually impervious) some people are still idiots and try smuggling written notes into the exam. You'd be surprised how quickly an invigilator adjusts to noticing when people aren't looking at their script or are fidgeting at all. Just so you know, materials has been confiscated from at least two people in exams I was invigilating.

11. I have no sympathy for people who forget to bring a spare pen while managing to remember to bring a pen in the first place. Like, you're doing many exams and presumably writing a lot! What did you think was going to happen! Also people who use a pencil but don't bring a topper or an eraser.

12. You'd think that after several exams, people would remember that they have to write their seat number down on their scripts too even though there's no box for it. Also, people who leave it until you're hovering over them waiting to collect their script to begin filling out their details on their five exam books are the single most annoying people in the world and every time I'm tempted to "accidentally" drop a couple of them in the bin.

13. When checking someone's student id and details, I'm mostly just checking if they're hot and if so making a mental note of the address on their timetable.

That's Just Not Cricket

Earlier today, an England team won the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup. The English squad included one Irishman, one Pakistani, and more South Africans than you can shake a stick at. Despite their reliance on their foreign born players (none of their top three scoring batsmen were born in England), without a doubt this victory will be the source of an infinitely large number of boasts by drunken English yobs for the next while. I am very much looking forward to England getting beaten in the soccer World Cup now.

It does raise the issue of player eligibility though. While Pietersen and Kieswetter never played for South Africa, Morgan did play for Ireland. According to the ICC's rules for player eligibility a player is only eligible if "he has not played Representative Cricket for any other Member Country during the 4 immediately preceding years". This would seem to suggest that Eoin Morgan is very ineligible to play for England, having played with Ireland up to 2007. However there is a catch: 

Cricketers qualified to play for Associate and Affiliate Members can continue to represent that country without negating their eligibility or interrupting their qualification period for a Full Member Country up until the stage that the cricketer has played for the Full Member Country at Under 19 level or above.

So, in other words, if you're from one of the "lesser" cricketing nations, you're fair game to any of the full members (providing of course you've fulfilled the residency requirement).  This to me seems like a ridiculous double standard.

When you add in the non-existent rules about an associate member becoming a full member, this all becomes very haphazard. There is no clear timeline on when Ireland, arguably consistently the best Associate member over the last ten years and definitely the second best at the moment (behind Afghanistan), will ascend to elite status of Full Member. As a result, our best players defect to England for a chance to play test cricket which is denied to them with Ireland. This leaves Ireland with a team which is unable to compete with the test nations (as all the players who are at that level have been poached), which provides the ICC with a convenient excuse to not upgrade Ireland to Full Member.

The hilarious thing is that the ODI and Twenty20 World Cups have shown that so called inferior nations are capable of holding their own against the big boys. I'm sure everyone remembers Ireland's remarkable victory over Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup. That was not an isolated incident. In that same tournament, Ireland drew with Zimbabwe and beat Bangladesh; both full members. Ireland beat Bangladesh again in the Twenty20 World Cup last year and in that same tournament the Netherlands beat England. While this year's World Cup didn't provide the upsets of previous years, the facts remain that Ireland have reached the Super Eights of two World Cups, outdoing many Full Members in the process and are yet no nearer to reaching Full Member status than they were before.

Ireland applied for Full Membership status last year, but the process of that application could take several years to be worked through. The criteria for Full Membership seem quite arbitrary. Improvement in the cricket structure is necessary but a "flexible approach is to be taken and not one based on win rate". The criteria also asks for a strong financial setting, but given that Ireland can't get consistent games against top nations without Full Membership, we can't get the revenue that those tours would bring. Also mentioned is the incredibly vague need for a "cricket culture".

However, even if Ireland do achieve Full Membership and eventual test status, Morgan would need to have not played with England for four full years before he can put on the green again. After the ease of his defection to England, how does this seem fair? Surely, the ICC should include an exemption for players returning to their original Associate Member nations, particularly if they have just gained full membership status. The presence of that experience in the Irish squad would improve the standard of the entire team no end.