- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine
While listening to my younger daughter Jemima singing in Winchester Cathedral with her university choir, I idly picked up the Book of Common Prayer and leafed through it. I came across a section that gives the methodology for calculating the date of Easter, all the way up to the year 2300. I thought that this was optimistic on the part of the bookbinders, that this particular book might last that long, but then again, some books are hundreds of years old, and a few of them are more than a thousand years old.
- Written by Peter Edwards Editor, Global Cement Magazine
Every six months most of Europe and North America, as well as a selection of countries elsewhere in the world, change their clocks: forward in the spring, back in the autumn. Nearly 1.3 billion people who live in the 55+ countries do this, to ‘benefit’ from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As ‘DST-natives’ we learn to see it as part of the natural order of things. But it is nothing of the sort, and it is starting to wear thin.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine
Back in the middle of one of the lockdowns (I forget which - it’s all becoming a bit hazy now as it recedes into the past), my brother-in-law Richard Crane gifted me a copy of a book called ‘The courage to be disliked,’ by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga1. I wonder, was he sending me a message? Anyway, Richard told me that it was a challenging book. The blurb on the front cover said “How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness.” Although I didn’t feel the need to do any of those things, I read the book and it was indeed both challenging and interesting. I wonder if the main points of the book could help you in your own life, both at work and at play?
- Written by Peter Edwards Editor, Global Cement Magazine
Over the past 12 years I have written many country reports for Global Cement Magazine, often googling the locations of cement plants, checking distances or otherwise snooping about. This has had an unexpected benefit that my ‘school book’ geography - country locations, outlines, capitals, populations - has become reasonably sharp.
- Written by Peter Edwards Editor, Global Cement Magazine
I was recently alerted to an interesting, if possibly controversial, online tool: Country Comparison by Hofstede Insights. It shows national cultural differences in graphical form. By doing so, it can help to uncover the drivers behind, and hence increase the understanding of, behaviours exhibited by different societies. The approach builds on the work of the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede (1928 - 2020), who spent much of his career investigating the dynamics of cross-cultural organisations such as the UN. The Country Comparison tool ranks societies using six metrics: Individualism, Masculinity, Power Distance,
Uncertainty Avoidance, Indulgence and Long Term Orientation, each ranked out of 100.
