Book reviews: Sun-Herald

Creating Magic
Lee Cockerell
(Random House, $32.95)
Cockerell worked at Disney for more than a decade, eventually as an executive vice-president of operations. Anyone who has visited a Disney theme park will be amazed at how they keep the level of service so high throughout a full day catering to so many families with young children, high expectations and usually in hot weather. He shares 10 strategies and all the secrets of how, despite having the usual stresses of outsourcing labour, job cuts and restructuring, employees can be trained and motivated to keep the Disney magic alive. Inspirational and comprehensive. CW

Dating Makes You Want To Die
Daniel Holloway and Dorothy Robinson
(HarperCollins, $24.99)
Aimed at the older person who has been suddenly plunged back into the dating scene, this book gives an update on the modern rules of dating, from personal makeovers to proposing, meeting the parents and staying together. It’s good if you feel trepidatious about dating and want an idea of where to set boundaries but overall I felt there were too many rules. If you’re that clueless, you’d be better off reading an etiquette guide. Also, the authors try to be humorous, but this involves derogatory jokes about obese people and an assumption that all single people are “pathetic, unloveable” losers. Boring. CW

Croc
Robert Reid
(Allen and Unwin, $26.95)
Danger, death and destruction are the gist of this book about lethal animals – human and otherwise. It’s divided into four sections: hunters, victims, lucky escapes and crazy capers. I turned straight to the victims section, which avoids repeating cases covered in similar books by focusing on incidents in north Queensland. I then skipped back to the section about croc hunters, which has amazing tales of Crocodile Dundee loners and adventurers being completely insane and taking their chances against large saltwater crocodiles. Definitely a book that will enhance any trip north or for those too scared to go. CW

International masters of online study

WORKING with talented people from around the world and the flexibility of fitting in study across time zones are some of the reasons students enjoy online courses. All that’s needed is a computer, digital camera and scanner.
At Southern Cross University, a new graduate certificate of recruitment, placement and career development is a distance-education course for people in the employment services and recruitment industry.
Course co-ordinator and lecturer Ros Cameron says Blackboard and Illuminate software are provided by the university. Most communication is done in the Blackboard forum, which includes videos, and assignments are submitted online. Students need to spend five to 10 hours a week studying.
The University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts has been running a fully online master of cross-disciplinary art and design coursework degree for the past 18 months.
Postgraduate course co-ordinator and lecturer Simon McIntyre says the students, aged from 23 to 65, are in locations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, the US, Philippines and the United Arab Emirates.
“We have students in outback Australia who only have access to a shared dial-up internet account.”
Lectures are delivered as text and images, videos or podcasts. After lectures, students come together in an online message board to discuss ideas.
Interactive media and design teacher Andy Polaine is in Germany and has been teaching online since 1999. “Face-to-face classes usually suffer from a few dominant personalities, time pressure and being too full. Online class interaction is much more active and engaged,” he says.
“Online students and teachers can take time to think about what they want to say, disagree and debate with more confidence because they don’t have the face-to-face confrontation.”
He says online teaching usually emphasises a collaborative process. “Conversations are automatically archived, so when someone says something brilliant in a particular thread, everyone can go back and refer to it.”
Polaine says a downside is that the life on campus dies out but the weakening of the students’ union through the abolition of compulsory fees has helped that process anyway.
“Universities need to rethink what the physical campus is about and I believe it’s about creating flexible, social and collaborative spaces to meet and work. Otherwise there’s not much point in leaving the comfort of your computer and home.”
Student Lianna Wittenberg, who lives in Singapore, started studying in March. “The interaction can be fast paced or slow. It is interesting in the way the written word can be taken. There have been instances where I have read something, taken offence to it and later realised it may have been written in a different tone,” she says.
“I have found the experience quite a roller-coaster ride. I am often rushing back to the message board to see if anyone responded to my comments. My friends joke that the online course is the new Facebook as I am always on it and checking who said what.”
She describes the convenience as “excellent”. “With time differences, job and social commitments, I can still manage to work online and achieve some great results.”

Drastic shortfall of building apprentices

Construction apprentices are in critically short supply, Cotton Ward writes.
A looming shortage of 40,000 building tradespeople means a bright future for current apprentices.
Master Builders’ Association executive director Brian Seidler says that in the construction industry "all areas are in high demand".
"During the next seven years we’ll have 80,000 tradespeople retiring. We only have 40,000 building apprentices. That’s a shortfall of 40,000.”
New home construction is down but Seidler says that "when NSW picks up in a few years, it will be a delight for builders – they’ll be able to charge whatever they like".
The shortage of apprentices is caused by two main issues affecting small and medium businesses: workers’ compensation and occupational health and safety laws.
"These smaller businesses would rather hire [skilled] people than train them," he says. "We’re lobbying [the NSW Government[ to change the laws to be less onerous on employers, so they can get an exemption for apprentices."
Trades identified by the Department of Education, Science and Training’s National Skills Needs List as being in short supply include bricklayers, carpenters and joiners, electricians, fibrous plasterers, painters and decorators, plumbers, roof slaters and tilers, stonemasons, and wall and floor tilers.
Builders do a four-year apprenticeship, which includes spending one day a week studying at TAFE. The final year usually involves working full-time. But finding an employer can be difficult.
"We have 450 people seeking apprenticeships through the Master Builders’ Association’s group apprenticeship training scheme every year," Seidler says. "About 250 of them are suitable, but we can only place 70. Employers need more incentives to take on young people."
With the MBA Apprenticeship Scheme, apprentices are in a full-time employment-based training program and are outsourced to builders and subcontractors in different environments. They gain a nationally recognised qualification that has been developed by industry. Its apprenticeships are open to anyone aged 16 or older. It’s preferable to have completed year 12, vocational studies at school or have work experience in the industry, and to be competent in maths and English at year 10 level. Applicants should be fit and agile, able to work at heights, have an aptitude for working with their hands, enjoy working as a team and be willing to travel to different sites.
To apply for an apprenticeship, send a resume to the recruitment officer at apprenticeship@mbansw.asn.au

JOIN UP TO EARN A GOOD LIVING
David Battye, 22, is in the second year of his carpenter and joiner apprenticeship and was the Apprentice of the Year for carpentry last year.
"I always liked to build things after school. I could have gone to university but a family friend is a tradesman and he said it was a good living," Battye says.
He works for Southern Cross Constructions and keeps afloat financially by working a total of about 50 hours a week, including overtime.
"The first year can be tough and it can be difficult to stay motivated but you have to keep at it," Battye says.
"I’m lucky because the company I’m with has overtime and I can earn an acceptable amount. Some smaller builders don’t do overtime."
He spends one day a week at TAFE studying theory in the morning and doing practical workshops in the afternoon. When he has finished his apprenticeship, he plans to do two years of study to gain a builder’s licence.
"I want to go through and get all the certificates and work in building management," Battye says. "Over the long-term, you go further if you study."

Keep your fingers to yourself

Too many fingers can have an effect on your typing and your appetite, as a young temp discovered in Perth.
In 1985 I got a temping job as a secretary at police headquarters in Perth. About 12 of us were sent to the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) to process the state’s criminal records onto the computer system.
Getting in and out of the building was like the opening sequence of Get Smart. The bureau had its own lock-down section within the HQ and it was difficult to use the kitchen and toilets because the doors locked behind you and we didn’t all have the right passes, so we’d have to get an officer to accompany us. Everyone was completely straight-laced and several of the temps were fired and no reason had to be given, due to the nature of the work. Usually, it was because they’d made a joke about friends who’d smoked dope.
It was an exciting section – one day they brought bomb debris into the office for examination and another time I got to hold a hatchet that had been used in a murder.
There was one phone in our area and it was permanently guarded by a uniformed police officer. We had to ask permission to make a call and then every word was monitored to make sure we didn’t pass on any records information.
The detectives had a black sense of humour and were very sociable. They held events at each other’s houses and once I went for a ride with the police sirens blaring. The detectives also had a billiards room. All the cues were lined up on the wall and padlocked as they’d had problems with someone stealing them.
Hardly anyone in the bureau used to go to the canteen, as it was too difficult to get out of the lock-down section and the only exit to the canteen was lined with stomach-churning murder photographs.
After a couple of weeks in the lock-down area, I was whingeing about there being no chocolate or soft drinks and the detectives told me they had half-price Kit Kats in their fridge, which was padlocked. I handed over the money, they unlocked the fridge and said “OK, get one.”
I reached in and there were severed fingers in plastic bags next to the Kit Kats. “What are those fingers doing in the fridge?” I asked, and they said it was something to do with checking fingerprints: “We only keep them for three days.”
That was it – they were men of few words. I went back out to the records area and didn’t say anything, but I never ate that Kit Kat and never again did I buy one from them.

Kinsey movie review

You’ll be shouting “I’m normal! I’m normal!” after seeing Kinsey, because every sexual practice seems to be OK. The film is based on the life of Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), the American researcher famous for his studies on sex and his 1948 bestseller, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. When his wife (Laura Linney) has sexual problems, they find it difficult to get good help, so he starts teaching a course on marriage and sexuality.
Kinsey and his staff later conduct 18,000 interviews on sexual behaviour. What’s amazing about this film is that it shows how backward sexual understanding was at the time, and how a lot of basic information written about in Cleo magazine such as female orgasms were first researched and taught to the masses by Kinsey.
Cotton Ward (published in Metro section)