February 25, 2008 at 1:56 am (Environment, Friends of the Earth, Polluting Cars)
As you may already be aware, the London mayor recently introduced a £25 hefty daily charge on high emissions vehicles (band G), my personal opinion is that this is a brilliant thing and it should encourage car manufacturers to produce more efficient cars.
Porsche appear to be burying their heads in the sand…
Check out my boss at Friends of the Earth ‘end’ a Porsche representative…
February 25, 2008 at 1:48 am (Tottenham)
Today, I went to the new Wembley Stadium for the first time. Spurs came back from 1-0 to beat Chelsea 2-1 in a gruelling battle after extra time. It is the first trophy that Spurs have won since 1999 and the 4th time that they have lifted the Carling Cup trophy.
The atmosphere was pretty poor during the first half, and Wembley is so big that a lot of the fans at the in the upper stands must have hardly been able to see the players. It was a great day nontheless.
Well done spurs.
February 22, 2008 at 5:34 pm (Entrepreneurship)
In my last post I mentioned Oxford Entrepreneurs.
I highly reccomend this organisation to anyone at Oxford interested in entrepreneurship or social change.
Over the past two years I have attended a number of inspirational OE speaker events:
- Tom Hunter (A billionaire philanthropist and the richest man in Scotland)
- John Bird (Founder of The Big Issue)
- Karan Bilamoria (Founder of Cobra Beer and Chairman of the UK India Business Council)
- Levi Roots (Dragon Slayer and Founder of Raggae Raggae Sauce)
Not to mention:
- David Langer (Co-founder of Groupspaces.com and my former boss)
On Tuesday I attended the Oxford Entrepreneurs flagship event: Idea Idol:
Check out the promo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu1DHCyG8xE
The event involved six ‘2 minute elevator pitches’ folllowed by 15 minutes of grilling a panel consisting of distinguished members including: Deborah Meaden, investor millionairess from BBC’s Dragons’ Den, Katherine Mathieson, Head of Future Innovators at NESTA, Reshmi Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp and Sebastian Grigg, Managing Director of Investment Banking at Credit Suisse.
One of the winners, Altitude Medical, received prizes worth £5,000 to help develop their idea of using door handles that automatically release hand sanitizers in hospitals as a method of helping reduce the spread of hospital bugs such as MRSA. What a brilliant idea!
February 22, 2008 at 5:25 pm (Economics, Innocent Smoothies, Jobs)
Yesterday I posted about the bad news of failing the civil fast stream assessment centre. Since receiving this news I found out about two exciting opportunities:
1) A graduate programme at innocent smoothies – this is something that I had been looking for a long time, and it seems like some sort of miracle. Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent is going to be coming to Oxford in a couple of weeks to talk to Oxford Entrepreneurs – an unmissable event.
2) A directly recruited policy analyst position at the Treasury.
Life is never as bad as it seems, it is only as bad as you make it. Good news is always around the corner.
February 21, 2008 at 6:50 pm (Economics, Human Behaviour)
Yesterday, I attended a billiant lecture on aid by Justin Sandefor, a development economist at Oxford University.
He made reference to a study conducted on Israeli daycare centres that was made popular by Freakanomics:
“Imagine for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center. You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed to be picked up by 4 p.m. But very often parents are late. The result: at day’s end, you have some anxious children and at least one teacher who must wait around for the parents to arrive. What to do?
A pair of economists who heard of this dilemma — it turned out to be a rather common one — offered a solution: fine the tardy parents. Why, after all, should the day-care center take care of these kids for free?
The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380.
After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went … up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.“
Once they removed the fine, parents continued to pick up their children late.
Even though I think that fines can act as brilliant instruments to influence behaviour, a poor fine can have seriously negative effects. Before the fines, parents made an effort to pick up their children as they felt bad. Paying the fine removed this bad feeling, and this stayed after the fines had been removed….
February 21, 2008 at 6:05 pm (Economics, Jobs)
Over the past few months I have applied to a number of jobs related to economics and consultancy. The government economic services (a branch of the civil fast stream) was a scheme that I was most hopeful of getting. Once in, I would have been able to start a career as an economist in the health, education or environment sectors – it would have been a great stepping stone towards my dream of becoming a development economist.
This afternoon I received a message in my Fast Stream inbox:
“Thank you for attending the Fast Stream Assessment Centre recently. We are very sorry to say that, after careful consideration, the Board has not recommended you for appointment to this scheme on this occasion. You will be aware that competition for the Fast Stream is intense and you did extremely well to reach the Assessment Centre stage.”
Yet another rejection.
I guess life could be a lot worse, and I still have a number of options open. It’s just a bit frustrating how I spent more than 3/4 days preparing for and attending interviews and assessment centres related to this scheme. All these applications have really cut into time that I should have spent revising for exams. Oh well.
Hopefully the response from the Bank of England will be more positive on Wednesday.
February 21, 2008 at 12:49 pm (Uncategorized)
Did you see anything this time?
Did you see this gorilla?
Very few people actually see the gorilla, partly because you are asked to watch the people in white, but mostly because you are too busy focusing on the ball. Now you can ask yourself how much else are you missing every day because you are too busy concentrating on other things?
A book was written about this very concept. We are generally so busy in our day to day lives that we fail to see things that are blindingly obvious (but are only blindingly obvious once we notice them). Entrepreneurs and inventors often have that ability to find solutions to problems that everyone else just deals with.
Send this page to your friends and see if their minds are more observant than yours!
If you can’t get them to sit with you. Have a go at sending them this youtube link..its not quite as good, but it still works.
