Intute blog

The Intute service, including Informs will be unavailable on Tuesday 24th November 2009 between the hours of 8am and 12 noon, while we carry out essential server maintenance.

The Virtual Training Suite will be available as normal.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Oil rig bursts into flames after massive spill (The Times)
Fire on Australian oil rig delays plans to stop leak into Timor Sea (Guardian)
Australia oil well leak ‘plugged’ (BBC)
The Australian government is investigating the operator of the West Atlas oil rig, PTTEP to see if it caused the disaster.

Exploration and Production in the Marine Environment (Australian policy)
Workshop on oil spill response (Ghanaian Government)

see also:
How Oil Drilling Works
Oil Platform (Wikipedia)
HSE : Offshore Oil and Gas Resources

This week Nick Clegg sparked a storm by suggesting that it wasnt worth having a Queen’s speech. See some more on this topic via his blog.

But what is the real purpose of the Queens speech- what role does it serve? Find out more from these Intute selected resources.

The Parliament site has a good FAQ section which explains the process.

You can find the timetables of events for tomorrow and read transcripts of previous speeches.

The new BBC democracy Live site will have coverage.

Also providing good coverage and discussion is the Guardian newspaper and as events unfold during the day.

It is worth checking the main party political websites for their reaction as some produce alternative Queens speeches. The Labour Party has released a podcast ahead of the speech.

Finally info 4 local government will be summarising the main contents of the bill and providing links to government resources.

Help! You have an assignment which includes statistics but are not sure where to find reliable information.   Google just found 600 million results! What to do? Intute can suggest some good starting points.   It has a Business Statistics section with some useful websites.

Looking for UK statistics? The key website is  National Statistics Online, the official UK government website.  It’s divided up by category – eg. crime, economy, children and population.  It publishes the latest reports on the economy, for example the Economic & Labour Market Review.   There ’s also the ESDS (Economic and Social Data Service) which has key economic data.   UK Business Barometer is a nice service from Nottingham University.   It surveys people who run small businesses (SMEs) to guage their views on issues like credit management, the recession or the impact of foreign workers leaving the UK.  More data on SMEs can be found on the government’s BIS website; these are Statistics from the Enterprise Directorate Analytical Unit.  Find out business survival rates,  numbers of start-ups and employment figures.

For data on products and brands, search for “trade associations” on Intute.  Many such bodies will provide statistics or reports.

If you are looking further afield, there are services dealing with European and international statistics.  Most countries have their own statistical services, eg. France has INSEE which, luckily for those non-French speakers, has an  English version.   The USA has STAT-USA for business, trade and  the economy.   The European Union publishes European Business, available on line or in paper form.

Still need to find something? Ask the Intute Helpdesk.

The popular TV game show Deal or No Deal has been turned into an economics classroom experiment by John Sloman, Director of the Economics Network.

The game can be used to demonstrate expected value and risk attitudes and students can use it to make calculations. It can also demonstrate the diminishing marginal utility of income.

An Excel file can be used by the lecturer to control the game and play the part of the banker, while students discuss the risks, psychology and odds at each stage of the game.

Deal or No Deal has been a topic for a number of popular economics articles available via EconPapers and Google Scholar that explore topics such as decision making, risk and rationality.

The Economics Network features a range of classroom experiments and games for use in the classroom.

Intute features more Internet resources on the topic of Economics.

Following on from this week’s earlier posting on Berlin I wanted to highlight a few new resources added this week on the same theme.

The BBC poll looked at levels of satisfaction. On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Europe in 1989, it asked citizens from different nations a variety of questions relating to their opinion on the disintegration / break-up of the Soviet Union (USSR), attitudes towards state control of industry and capitalism in general. Results tended to show some dissatisfaction.

The Cold War International History Project created a section with declassified documents on the rise and fall of the wall.

More declassified materials were released in a briefing book by the National Security Archive

In Germany.

Deutschland Radio has recorded some interviews with those involved.

The German government created a website which has speeches and videos of the recent celebrations as well as some background on the wall from the perspective of the German government

FriedlicheRevolution.de: magazine and media monitor summarises and reviews current debates in the German press. It also highlights, events, publications, conferences and other commemorations. This includes access to some full text articles, sound recordings, interviews, oral histories and films made by its partners. These include: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung; Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.

More can be found via Intute

Dr Sarah Baillie a senior lecturer in veterinary education at the Royal Veterinary College won the ‘Most Innovative Teacher of the Year’ award at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2009 for her work with haptic simulators.

The Awards programme called Dr Baillie’s “Haptic Cow”:

“possibly the most significant innovation in veterinary education in the past 50 years.”

The Haptic Cow is a life-like simulator that trains veterinary students in internal bovine examinations, an innovative educational resource that mimics the feeling of real bovine anatomy.

The LIVE Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) provides links to other interesting veterinary medical haptic projects (including an equine colic simulator and a feline abdominal palpation simulator).

Feel free to browse the Intute: Veterinary Medicine collection of evaluated Web resources on veterinary anatomy - this collection includes some interactive educational resources, many outlining ‘traditional’ methods of teaching anatomy.

Want to see what climate change means in reality – right now?  what’s it like watching your entire food supply disappear in a brackish morass? or your children dying of highland malaria? would you travel miles to fetch a jug of water?

Look at some of the videos from the new Climate Change 2009 Conference site http://www.klima2009.net/en/videos

Thanks to the kind folks at NASA, imagery from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) has now been embedded into Intute’s World Guide – Natural Hazards pages. The satellite provides real-time imagery monitoring cloud, storm and hurricane formation in the Western hemisphere from a geostationary orbit.

Latest GOES West Imagery

The imagery is used to monitor storm development and is a key source for the US National Weather Service.

You can view the embedded GOES imagery on Intute, read more about the GOES project at NASA, and view the GOES FAQ.

I missed blogging about 9 November and the Berlin Wall on that day, but thought I would combine it with today, formerly called Martinmass.  This was the feast of St Martin of Tours, sometimes called Old Halloween.  It is not really observed in England anymore, but when I was in Berlin one winter, I noticed publicity about Martinmass and the ‘Martin Goose’ or Martinsgans which was served roasted in restaurants with red cabbage and dumplings.   A nice custom.  There is an entry on Wikipedia about St Martin.  (We can’t vouch for the contents, but it makes interesting reading. ) Find more about saints on Intute in the Religion and Theology section.

Intute has many resources about the amazing fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago.   A few examples – newspapers ran special reports, including  The Guardian and New York Times. Not everyone thinks it has been a complete success though – see the BBC World Service Poll,  indicating wide dissatisfaction with capitalism.  There are some great museums dealing with the Berlin Wall and Germany in the 20th century and they have websites you can access – the Checkpoint Charlie Museum is one.  My personal favourite is the DDR Museum (East Germany Museum) in Berlin.  A very hands-on place.   Apart from the Wall, Berlin is a fascinating city and Intute has many other resources about it, including Politics, Art, History and European Studies.  A few suggestions:

Bauhaus Museum Berlin – wonderful photos.  Marlene Dietrich website – great for Dietrich researchers.  Berlin  Airlift – interesting site about the blockade and airlift of supplies to non-Soviet parts of Berlin.    Intute also has a wide range of resources about Germany in general, in our Modern Languages and Area Studies section.