Captains of Industry demand more immigrants

[DaveB]

To stay ahead we have to avoid being sucked into the "labour pool" and make sure we are in a position where we can sell non-commodity skills into the market place at premium rates.

Interesting thought Dave.

From my perspective view my former skills of Piano Tuning and Repair is far more lucrative than my IT skill set ... but Im unsure as to what you mean by non commodity Dave ?

I'm talking about commodities in the literal sense. Raw materials that can be processed for added value and sold on. Probably not the clearest analogy to use but what I meant by non-commodity skills are those that cannot be readily sourced in the market or produced by giving basic training to a cheap labour pool. They are niche or specialist skills that rely on experience and other "intangible" qualities that mean they cannot be turned into commodities.

Piano tuning is not something I would class as a commodity skill. It requires training, practice and a fundamental talent to do well - Not withstanding the use of electronic aids like those used for guitars etc. Do Piano tuners use these?

Like it or not business is coming to regard coding as a commodity skill. Those who do it well know it's not, but they arn't usually the ones doing the hiring or controlling the budgets.

[_V_]

Support and administration in IT are now firmly commodity skills.

You need to be higher up the food chain to thrive in IT. Analytical skills, design skills, architecture, etc.

Or specialise - Security for example.

[AlfredJPruffock]

Hi Dave

Thanks for the clarification.

You asked

Piano tuning is not something I would class as a commodity skill. It requires training, practice and a fundamental talent to do well - Not withstanding the use of electronic aids like those used for guitars etc. Do Piano tuners use these?

Electronic Tuners can used in limited applicaions eg when the tuning has to be set at say a quarter below pitch as is often the case with older pianos to offset the risk of fracturing the Frame, especially with the underdamper models prior to 1930s.

Yet there is no way an electronic tuner can be used to to tune an entire piano, one reason for this is due to the Acoustic Laws of inharmonicity, string stretching etc.

Piano tuning in essence is half science and half art, it also take several years of practice and a very good musical ear to do a good job,as well as much patience when dealing with older pianos, not to mention the clients at times !

I jest,the clients are great and appreciative, at the end of the tuning one invariable is given a cup of tea and asked to play a tune or two, thats the fun part !

Oh and you get paid too !

You dont have to have so called perfect pitch by the way, a common misconception, the Middle A for examples should be set at 440hz , you can use an electronic tuner, or in my case a Tuning Fork.

Its interesting to note that it only in recent times that pitch has been stanardised.

In 1939, an international conference recommended that the A above middle C be tuned to 440 Hz.

This standard was taken up by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955 (and was reaffirmed by them in 1975) as ISO 16.


Some idea of the variance in pitches can be gained by examining old tuning forks, organ pipes and other sources.

For example, an English pitchpipe from 1720 plays the A above middle C at 380 Hz, while the organs played by Johann Sebastian Bach in Hamburg, Leipzig and Weimar were pitched at A = 480 Hz, a difference of around four semitones.

In other words, the A produced by the 1720 pitchpipe would have been at the same frequency as the F on one of Bach's organs.

Pitches did not just vary from place to place, or over time—pitch levels could vary even within the same city.

The pitch used for an English cathedral organ in the 17th century for example, could be as much as five semitones lower than that used for a domestic keyboard instrument in the same city.





See notes on this topic

I dont like these electronic gadgets myself.

In fact pianos are tuned by the beat ratio of two pitches, altough I use this method the art is being able to comprimise the tuning as often the beat ratio can be correct but does not sound well musically.

Thats the art side of it.

Of considerable complexity is the Piano repair side , there are over 1000 moving parts in a piano and just try re stringing a piano ...that is a job and a half !



Sorry for going on a bit but this is one of my pet topics ...

Notes


The note A above middle C played on any instrument is perceived to be of the same pitch as a pure tone of 440 Hz, but does not necessarily contain a partial having that frequency.

Furthermore, a slight change in frequency need not lead to a perceived change in pitch, but a change in pitch implies a change in frequency. In fact, the just noticeable difference (the threshold at which a change in pitch is perceived) is about five cents (that is, about five-hundredths of a semitone), but varies over the range of hearing and is more precise when the two pitches are played simultaneously.

Like other human stimuli, the perception of pitch also can be explained by the Weber-Fechner law.

Pitch also depends on the amplitude of the sound, especially at low frequencies. For instance, a low bass note will sound lower in pitch if it is louder.

Like other senses, the relative perception of pitch can be fooled, resulting in "audio illusions".

There are several of these, such as the tritone paradox, but most notably the Shepard scale, where a continuous or discrete sequence of specially formed tones can be made to sound as if the sequence continues ascending or descending forever.


Concert pitch


The A above middle C is nowadays set at 440 Hz (often written as "A = 440 Hz" or sometimes "A440", and known as concert pitch), although this has not always been the case .

Pitch is often cited as one of the fundamental aspects of music.


Labeling pitches

Pitches are often labeled using scientific pitch notation or some combination of a letter and a number representing a fundamental frequency. For example, one might refer to the A above middle C as "A4" or "A440." However, there are two problems with this practice. First, in standard Western equal-temperament, the notion of pitch is insensitive to spelling: the description "G##4" refers to the same pitch as "A4." Second, human pitch perception is logarithmic with respect to fundamental frequency: the perceived distance between the pitches "A220" and "A440" is the same as the perceived distance between the pitches "A440" and "A880."


This creates a linear pitch space in which octaves have size 12, semitones (the distance between adjacent keys on the piano keyboard) have size 1, and middle C is assigned the number 60.

Distance in this space corresponds to musical distance as measured in psychological experiments and understood by musicians. The system is flexible enough to include "microtones" not found on standard piano keyboards.

For example, the pitch halfway between C (60) and C# (61) can be labeled 60.5.

[DaveB]

Hi Dave

Thanks for the clarification.

You asked

Sorry for going on a bit but this is one of my pet topics ...

No probem and thank you for the clarification. Always interesting to learn something new

[_V_]

I did a quick Google and was dismayed to see how many Polish there are in Piano tuning.

Only to realise later they were talking about polish.

[xoggoth]

Unfortunately the fears about hordes of mainly Roma criminals from Bulgaria and Romania are not "right wing scare stories" at all.

It is a Home Office report that has identified some 560,000 Romanians with a history of fraud and other offences who are likely to come. The major recent warning on criminals from Bulgaria has come from their own leader and he should know. I will look out the links when I get back.

[ratewhore]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../29/nimm29.xml

Immigrants unable to earn more than £27,000 a year should not be allowed to settle in Britain because they do not make "a positive contribution", a report says today.

This is relevant only to non-EU immigration isn't it?

[AlfredJPruffock]

I did a quick Google and was dismayed to see how many Polish there are in Piano tuning.

Only to realise later they were talking about polish.

In fact the art of French Polishing is very difficult.

I once worked for a piano restoration company in London.

When a piano had been restrung, re felted,tuned etc a specialist French Polisher was brought in from about two hours outside London.

This chap was in his early eighties but he worked with a phenomenal speed and the piano case looked fantastic after his work.

I could have spent a month doing what he did in half an hour and still I could never get anywhere near the finish he could master.

A true craftsman.

Perhaps thats where we have go it wrong, perhaps a craft is far more satisfying than any form of office work.

[Viktor]

Unfortunately the fears about hordes of mainly Roma criminals from Bulgaria and Romania are not "right wing scare stories" at all.

It is a Home Office report that has identified some 560,000 Romanians with a history of fraud and other offences who are likely to come. The major recent warning on criminals from Bulgaria has come from their own leader and he should know. I will look out the links when I get back.

Xoggoth,

Don't let the bulltulip form Daily Express and Sun invade your brain. There are problems with Romania and Bulgaria but not on this scale. UK needs a better immigration policy not those bull-sh*&t articles. The side-effect with this EU enlargement will be that if you slam the door then those low-skilled will come anyway. Only by means of a better degree of control inside the country you can control immigration effectively.
And btw not because of Eastern Europeans the public services are becoming a pain now in UK. Have you seen the crime statistics among the people coming from EU countries in Eastern Europe? Is Romania and Bulgaria so different compared with Poland, Lithuania, Hungary? Think...

[Asterix]

Joke

'Captains' of the British Industry, eh ? More like Captain Mainwearing in Dad's Army (at least he was willing to fight for his country).
Truth is there are NO more true British companies and the ones that are calling themselves such, like BT, BG, BP, BAA should be made to drop the B from their name.
Let's see now what BG, BP, Sainsbury's and others have got in common (among other things) : outsourced IT systems, I hear you saying ?