A Time of Magic

Actually, what’s more surprising is how few of the ancient bridges are still around.

Building bridges was a trial and error process until relatively recently. The designs that survived were worked out through eliminating many designs that weren’t up to the job and fell down. This isn’t entirely a recent phenomena either as the bridge at Tacoma illustrates.

Obviously small bridges weren’t really a problem. Throw a log over a river and it’s not going to collapse under you. It’s the larger constructions that are the problem as they involve all kinds of structural stresses that just weren’t well understood until quite recently. Hence, you don’t see anything like the number of Roman bridges as you might expect to see if you thought about it for a while. After all, their roads went pretty much directly from A to B so they would have crossed numerous rivers along the way yet few of those bridges remain.

Ah, but they’d have been worn out and collapsed by now. Yes, some of them would have of course but the Romans built pretty chunky artifacts as those which remain attest to so there should have been a whole lot more of them still around. Obviously, they’d have needed some repairs after 2000 odd years but you still see substantial buildings around for that length of time.

If you book a long-distance flight then chances are you’ll find that the airline you’re actually flying on isn’t the airline that’s listed on your ticket. For instance, a flight from Barclona to Sydney on Lufthansa is, at best, only Lufthansa from Barcelona to Frankfurt and from there it’ll be on Singapore Airlines. Why?

The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.

Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.

But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).

With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.

If you can cast your mind back to the 1960s one of the “big things” of the time was “programmed learning”.

A programmed learning course was a variant of a correspondence course in that you did it largely by yourself. Where it was different was that you could also do the marking ie no tutor needed to be involved.

Now the big plus point of this was that without the tutor, the courses were much cheaper and could even be sold in bookshops as they simply consisted of a series of workbooks with the answers at the back. How they worked sounds exactly how many DVD based courses work today. You went through a series of questions, then checked the answers; if they were correct, you went on to the next session and if they weren’t the book directed you to a revision of the concepts and went over it again.

Although you can get the descendants of this type of course today, we don’t use the phrase “programmed learning” because it got a very bad press at the time. Most importantly, it was felt that the technique would only work for fairly simple subjects and, to be fair, it does work best when there is a straight yes/no response.

That all changed with the launch of the Open University in the UK which started teaching the worlds first distance learning courses in 1971 after several years of preparations.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then and now similar universities exist in all the major countries of the world and together they teach just about every subject you could imagine. And then some. To be fair, there is tutor feedback in the majority of these courses but at its heart it’s still the programmed learning approach from the 1960s and before but applied to courses at a much higher level.

In fact, so much work goes into perfecting their courses that in many instances it’s actually better to study with them than it is at a conventional university: In 2004 The Sunday Times Universities Guide said “Just four institutions — Cambridge, Loughborough, York and the LSE — have a better teaching record than the OU” which is pretty amazing.

Interestingly, the Open University has been given top ranks in 19 very different subjects: Business and management; chemistry; classics and ancient history; economics; education; general engineering; geography; geology; molecular biosciences; music; organismal biosciences; philosophy; physics and astronomy; politics; psychology; social policy and administration; sociology; subjects allied to medicine; theology and religious studies which, of course, includes some rather heavy-weight topics.