moesasji

I'm not 100% sure I understand why you are confused. Table 7.16 is the following: It essentially says that 10% of all house-holds have missed an payment on important things like mortage, minimum payment on creditcard or a bill for gass, electricity or rent. That percentage increases if house-holds with borrowing are considered, to a staggering 17% of house-holds when they have a non-mortgage loan! The figure that I posted earlier then splits out how those 10% of households in arrears are distributed over different types of households if I understand it correctly. *) Unfortunately the report doesn't split out of what those arrears for these 10% of households consist of...but they mention that for about half of the households these arrears are <GBP 400, the mean being GBP 1100. The relevant statement is probably on page 78. **) Just as a side-note: a staggering 14% of households with a credit or charge card has in the past 12 months at least once not been able to make the required minimum-payment on credit or charge-card (table 7.14) edit) Fixed the screenshot of the table so that the percentages are actually visible!

Right I'm sure you are really making a point accusing people of lying without actually backing up anything of your numerous claims: source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent *) Bottomline: where does it claim that it has to be proven as working? (Note that I do agree that a patent invention is strengthened it if you have a working implementation).

To be honest you miss a crucial element of what a University does.....how do you get your students from A-level physics into a state that they are useful for you to work as a post-grad student? *) patenting is the combination of concepts into an entirely new way, with a suggested implementation. So it's not only the concept that is under consideration for a patent. Indeed not yet patented but has been submitted...a slip. You are probably well aware that universities are asked to protect inventions.....so that in this case is done before asking to support developing a proof of concept.

@Frozen_out: To understand your frustration. At what point in your career did you leave university for a corporate research lab? An important question as I personally don't recognize the picture you paint of the university and I don't get the impression you are fully aware of how much time is being wasted on fundraising. I myself have worked at both university and industry and both have their strengths and weaknesses in the system. For progress in science you simply need involvement of both partners (something in which the UK is very weak in comparison to Asia or to a country as Germany!). In particular as someone has to train PhD-level scientist to work in industry or do you want to do this yourself as well? One major advantage of university is that research is open so people can learn from the progress/failures of others. As a sideline: the drive to fundraise in the UK is currently killing the most ambitious proposal due to the low successrates on funding proposals which is below 10%. In combination with the fact that you can no longer re-submit proposals once it has been unsuccessful a disaster to be honest. *) As an example, my latest proposal is applied and would have a major impact on future healthcare. This is something that all 5 referees explicitly recognize and find it very important and recognize it as a major breakthrough in many different areas of research (if it would work). The 2 referees with an industrial background seem to be particularly enthusiastic. Unfortunately one out of the 5 doesn't believe that the underlying technology is possible mainly because he is coming from another area so considers it unfundable. His/her misunderstanding is easy to point out if you would sit down... yet this now most likely leads to the proposal being unfunded and ending up in the drawer. Months of works and a great concept (already patented) wasted. So please show me where somebody in an ivory tower is deciding to waste money.

Sorry, I read your reply out of context: I read it as saying "other than tunnelling in FETs I don't see where QM is useful (in general)". Clearly not what you said upon re-reading. My apologies..... I would agree that QM in itself has not been crucial for the concept/development of a computer, although I would say that for the creation of modern transistors I does play an indirect role. Simply because it is difficult to disentangle concepts such as bandgaps in semi-conductors, doping-levels from QM as a general theory. *) Off-course the transistor is an example as it was discovered by Bell labs, which was a company research lab. However private research-labs of that kind don't exist anymore as times have changed and few company research labs offer that kind of freedom to explore. The few companies that have large research labs are mostly in Asia, where connections between industry and universities are much stronger.

For someone with a physics-degree you should be ashamed. How would you come up with a concept of a laser without a basic understanding of quantum-mechanics? Population-inversion in a multi-level quantum system is an idea that doesn't exist in classical physics let alone something as stimulated emission.

Yes, but you can be reasonably sure that the largest fraction is people renting. The graph below is from the "Wealth in GB" report. The biggest fraction in arrears are renters... The whole >170 pages long report is quite interesting due to the amount of detail. I found the level of outstanding mortgages surprisingly low....consistent with the tiny fraction of them being in arrears (in contrary to common belief here). The link to the report itself: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_economy/wealth-assets-2006-2008/Wealth_in_GB_2006_2008.pdf

Maybe you should think 5 seconds longer as "Bearwithasorehead" has a point if you read it in the correct light. What happens if you build houses that are too small for children to play in (and convert all decent size family houses into flats)? And there is very little that parents can do about that! He simply points out that in newbuilt areas children have to play on the street as they don't have anywhere else to do this. Most "dedicated" play-areas are frankly a joke and not suitable for purpose with a single slide and one other "toy" to play with and not enough space to run around. If you want to live quiet and not disturbed by children it is a perfectly valid point it is better not to live in an newbuild area that is catering for young families. *) In "normal" family houses with decent gardens you would not be disturbed but those kind of houses don't exist in a newbuild area.

Doing this makes one really, really depressed to be honest (as it is GBP 700 for 3-bedroom and GBP 950 for a 4-bedroom house in my area). So rents that are difficult to afford when working unless you have a very high house-hold income....

Thanks for the helpful suggestions FreeTrader, have figured out how the data-sets connect. An eye-opener to see how long it took for people to "recover" from the previous boom/bust cycle. Until the end of 2000 on average re-mortage was higher then the average purchase price. Not something I had expected based on the graph on the frontpage. A real shame that this data-set does not go further back as it would be nice to see what happened during the actual boom-period to learn for what is coming.

Partly....those vague "descriptions" of the data-set are doing strange thing with my head. Going through their index actually helps....let me see if I can figure things out for myself.

Mmm...plotting LPMB4B5 divided by LPMB3C8 indeed gives a curve that looks much more convincing. To my surprise I get quite low numbers and not the 148k you mention above. See below: Not sure what goes wrong here, as I do seem to have the right data-set and little can go wrong in simply dividing them. LPMB3C8 Monthly number of total sterling approvals for secured lending to individuals seasonally adjusted LPMB4B5 Monthly value of total sterling approvals for house purchase to individuals (in sterling millions) seasonally adjusted @Freetrader: Do you know an easy way to do the inflation-correction on these numbers?

Thanks for this XswampyX! Your method looks sound to me....only thing that shouldn't happen is the negative numbers appearing in the Housing Associations. However that might simply be an effect of the "seasonal adjustment" being different between the two columns. However that would clearly have very little impact on the total outcome this being a small fraction. Do you have a way of comparing this against average wage-increase during this time. As now part of the increase is due to increase in both wages/inflation. Correcting for that might give a better idea of the average mortgage in comparison to average salaries. I don't believe that there are that many households that can afford a 200k mortgage (which is the last data-point) in the graph. This number would simply have to come down further...question is whether or not this graph would show a trend for the average mortgage. *) I find it a bit surprising that this graph shows no signature around 95-96 which was the bottom of the bust according to the graph on the home-page. However this might be hidden by wage-increases at the start of the boom-period??

And that indicates the problem....average people struggle if the outgoing for rents exceed 40% of the total after tax household income (I think 30% is the norm for a typical household to keep below). Assuming that we take 40% a household would need to have an after-tax income of GBP 2050 per month. Which is GBP 24.600 after tax, corresponding to ~33k a year income needed just to survive. Is 33K really the average house-hold income for people that don't own houses? *) Note that the much more realistic calculation using 30% as rental-outgoings requires a ~45k household income. edit) Added graph of house-hold income for all people (including those owning!!) below:

It lies in what you define as "poor". If you mean "poor" as not owning property then your completely right as a massive amount of the wealth is tied up in houses (=39%) and pensions (=39%). The point that I was trying to make that people who did not (or could not) participate in the housing bubble are struggling due to the insane levels of rents with little alternative as they have to live somewhere. Salaries have to be pretty high to have decent rental accommodation for a family....giving handouts on the "average" level of rent for a region in benefit to landlords in my opinion will by definition push rents up as argued in the times-article currently on the front-page: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6974622.ece

Do you have a link to the original data to read more as it appears very surprising and I would like to digg a bit more into this. (and finding things on the Bank of England website is not always that easy) Note that the graph is clearly perfectly consistent with the notion that the expensive houses where selling (=very large mortgages), while the total number of transactions fell of the cliff which would lead to increasing average house-prices on low numbers of sale. Strange thing is that the party seems to end in April 2009, yet that is not consistent with what I see happening around me in Bristol where expensive houses are still flying of the shelves...difficult to see where the money is coming from (except bank of Mum and Dad) **) If there is no error in those graphs then some people on those >400k mortgages or going to get in serious trouble once the interest-rate is jumping up to more normal levels. Very short term perspective indeed...

You forget one aspect...this whole "housing-benefit" thing pushes up the rent in private renting to unaffordable levels for many. To illustrate what the effect of this is: the graph below from the "GB Wealth report by the office of national statistics" speaks for itself. The whole >170 pages long report is quite interesting due to the amount of detail. I found the level of outstanding mortgages surprisingly low....which probably means that the young <35 - 40 years with recent mortgages are the only one with serious problems servicing the. The link to the report itself: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_economy/wealth-assets-2006-2008/Wealth_in_GB_2006_2008.pdf

A shocking graph to be honest and I find it peak almost unbelievable. Just a question: what is the source for the numbers used in this graph?

Clearly off-topic, but I don't see on what source you base this equality between Holland and the UK....the wiki-page I linked to definitely shows the large gap I mentioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density ? I don't think including Guernsey, Jernsey, Gibraltar and Bermuda into the UK would closing of the gap, but couldn't be bothered to add the numbers. edit) Ignore me : stupid continental European not reading carefully that you mention England instead of UK.

Being Dutch I simply have to comment on this. The population density in the UK is in reality far less than in the Netherlands. The Dutch population density is ~400/km^2 which puts it ahead of Japan (340/km^2) and very far ahead of the UK which has a population density of ~250/km^2! (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density) *) For completeness: last time i saw the Dutch news house-prices were declining steadily even though expensive and houses are of a very high standard in comparison to my experience in the UK. **) For people putting in the argument that a lot of area in the UK is not suitable to build on. If I look around the Bristol area when driving to London (or to Cardiff) there is an awful lot of space next to existing train or road-connections that the Dutch would have used to build towns seeing the problems that exist of unaffordable housing!

*) Fixed the link in the above quote to make things easy for the lazy... Really surprising is that the number of vacant properties is actually increasing year-on-year by about 20.000 properties: see http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-10-15b.292814.h

An interesting analysis on UK houseprices and possible scenarios by neweconomics.org that I haven't spotted yet in the forum. Interesting is that they explicitly compare against predictions from the treasury. A link to the pdf version of the report: http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/House_Prices_and_the_UK_Economy.pdf To summarise, the UK’s housing sector is characterised by highly inelastic supply and volatile, pro-cyclical demand. Self-perpetuating waves of booms and busts in house prices are a perennial feature of the UK economy, and have been further fuelled by a combination of credit market deregulation and a flood of global liquidity. As we confront what is widely viewed as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it is clear that the UK economy and its housing sector will be severely affected. The second part of this paper explores three possible outcomes in this regard. Graph of their predictions is given below: **) the unexpected recent bounce back is not included in their graphs, but still the graphs/document appears an interesting analysis.

What a miracle of journalism...if I remember correctly 2008 was one of the worst Christmases ever for the shops. Yet the numbers are reported only as an improvement compared to 2008....what a surprise. The real question is how the numbers compare to 2007....let me guess much worse as they are not reported?

Surprising to see that none of you realized that this massive cut is just one of the first concrete examples of the pound having decayed 30% in value in the last year. The contribution to European Science facilities are to be payed in Euro's, so suddenly there is a massive funding gap that somehow has to be filled. Which in this case is done by pulling out of project leading to wasted investments in both people and infrastructure. It is particular scary that they also have decided to cut number of PhD-students + fellows by 25%. So when the UK would get out of recession in 5 years you would have a shortage of highly qualified people. Insane! So much for making science the cornerstone for future improvement And just to remind one-self on the worth of Browns' promises: In February, Gordon Brown delivered his first speech on science in Oxford and stated: "The downturn is no time to slow down our investment in science but to build more vigorously for the future." (from http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/16/science-funding-cuts-stfc-physics-studentships) and these massive cuts have not even into account the 600 million cut on universities/science in the pre-budget report. Similar things will happen btw with other European expenses that have to be payed in Euro's, although news-papers like to report this as the fault of Europe. The increase itself is simply the result of the incompetence of the UK-government.

I honestly don't know if I agree with the limited supply argument...the amount of properties for sale around me is much larger then I've seen in the last three years. Just a search 1/4 mile around the property that just went at silly prices highlights quite a number of similar properties still for sale or Sold STC, see http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=POSTCODE^1014996&minBedrooms=3&radius=0.25&includeSSTC=true&_includeSSTC=on Note that I'm reasonably sure that at least two of those now having a Sold sign have been sold by auction less then a year ago. Strange thing is the speed at which properties are currently being "snapped up" around me. My personal feeling is that a considerable amount of people just look at the afford-ability assuming that interest will remain historically low as that is what the news-papers are writing. Just a quick look at long-term saving rates should tell them different or these are being sold as BTL. Not sure which of the two, but I'm afraid it is the first category as that is definitely what some of my colleagues have been doing.