BOW WAVE 173

Entropy Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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(c)2003 WavyLine.com	Issue No 173 17 Mar 03
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Container Figures
3. UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2002
4. New Book on Cryptography
5. Leadership Seminar
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Taken from Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing, (2003) Heinemann, London, a powerful new voice in American fiction:

"This is our Da's faith. All other things may change, but time remains the same. "Growing disorder:this is how we must tell time. Lunch is not only never free; it gets, every day a little more expensive. This is the only sure rule in our cosmos. Every other fact, you will one day exchange. But bet against the Second Law, and you are doomed. The name isn't strong enough. Not second anything. Not a law of nature. It is nature."

He raises us to believe this. "things fall down and get more broken. More mixed. Mixing tells us which way we point in time. This is not a consequence of matter or space. It's the thing that gives time and space their shape." Who know what the man means? He's his own independent country. All we know is: No one breaks the Second Law and lives. Like don't take candy from strangers. Like look both ways before you cross the street. Like loose lips sink ships, a law I will never quite get until after all my ships have sailed."

New Readers this week include:

Heidrun Toben of Marsh in New York
Kenneth Carmichael and Steve Browne of Axa Insurance in the UK Phil Grierson of XL in Bermuda
Pinar Gurpinar and Banu Sanli of Marsh in Instanbul Felicity Landon

News of Readers

Charles Whiteaway, Executive Director at the Hong Kong-based broker FP Marine Risks Ltd. has been in the news recently as his firm has become the latest insurance broker in Asia to be granted direct access to Lloyd's.
.
FP Marine Risks was established in January 1994 and provides marine insurance solutions for the Asian shipping and trading communities.Accreditation will allow FP Marine brokers to contact Lloyd's underwriters directly without using a London-based intermediary, according to a Lloy's of London bulletin.

Best wishes to Goh Teik Poh who has been appointed by APL this week to head its Operations and Network division. He will no doubt find all his experience in the business of equipment management will stand him in good stead in the months to come.

Readers Write:

Susan Agerskov at BIMCO has drawn our attention to the BIMCO site which now has some suggested clauses to be adopted in relation to the US 24 Hour Rule. See the wordings at:

http://www.bimco.dk

Rather a lot of items this week which suggest the tendency of all things.

Enjoy.

2. Container Figures

There has been quite a lot of press of late on the vexed subject of measuring the volumes of the container shipping industry. Many of the strands were drawn together in an excellent article by Matthew Flynn who is now working the shipping beat as an independent. Here is a flavour of the recent piece, which appeared in Lloyd's List on 12th March:

"For all the finger pointing, there are no signs that the industry has corrected the fundamental problems in demand-supply calculations, even as the container industry is lurching into another containership binge. This is reportedly a top agenda item for the Box Club at its next meeting in Barcelona on March 19.

Meanwhile, there have been roughly 70 new big container orders reported since November in an avalanche of bullish sentiment that show the lines are ready to buy tonnage even after the past year’s losses running into the billions.

Projecting supply/demand in the container industry has to be the highest market analysis needed by any liner chief executive. It is he who decides when to place orders for new tonnage, and it is on his head to sort out the implications of working within the respective alliances to upgrade the networks or reduce capacity when demand fluctuates.

Niels Kim Balling, managing director of Econships, a shipping and logistics consultancy, remarked: "It will be interesting to follow what the industry, which remains quite fragmented, can ultimately agree on as the solution to equipping their chief executives with better management tools.

Mr Balling said he had given up calculating out supply and demand because there was not enough information released into the public domain by the carriers.

"The industry has to grab hold of this and resolve it themselves. They can’t rely on outside analysts," he said. The newly emerging consensus is that the demand side is probably undercounting the real numbers, even in the main east/west corridors, by at least 5%."

contact Matt at:

matthew.flynn@attglobal.net

3. UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2002

For the first time this publication is available on-line

From the highlights:

The Review of Maritime Transport, 2002 indicates that, after 15 consecutive years of positive annual growth, world seaborne trade (goods loaded) contracted to 5.83 billion tons. Indicators for world fleet productivity calculated in tons carried per dwt and thousands of ton-miles per dwt showed a decrease of 2.7 and 4.5 per cent from the figures for 2000. Latest figures show that world container port traffic continued to expand at a rate of 15.4 per cent over the previous year, reaching 225.3 million TEUs. The ports of developing countries handled 94.2 million TEUs, or 41.8 per cent of the total.

Read the whole thing at:

http://www.unctad.org/Templates/webflyer.asp?docid=2956&intItemID=2096&lang=1

4. New Book on Cryptography

On-Line Security guru Bruce Schneier and Niels Ferguson have written a new book on practical cryptography. It is the book they wished they had ten years ago (as do the rest of us who follow the fortunes of the secure messaging industry).

Read the Preface and Table of Contents at:

http://www.counterpane.com/book-practical.html

5. Leadership Seminar

Philip Wake of the Nautical Institute has passed on word of a Seminar the Institute is organising through their West of Scotland Branch on Leadership & Teamwork in the Shipping Industry on 27th March 2003.

The venue is the Glasgow College of Nautical Studies and the event, being well supported by the ship management community, is likely to produce a lively debate of the issues facing the industry.

If interested contact Philip at:

Tel: +44(0)20 7928 1351
email:nst.org

6. And Finally.....

Many thanks to Gordon Elliot for these immutable laws:

Law of Documented Relativity
Nothing is as easy as it seems or as difficult as the manual makes it out to be.

Law of Time Management
Everything takes longer than the amount of time you have available to do it in.

Law of the Indirect Search
The quickest way of finding something is by looking for something entirely different.

The "Wait for me while I write it down" Law.
If you have a pen, you don't have paper.
If you have paper, you don't have a pen.
If you have both, nobody answers.

Law of Telephone Priority
If you dial a wrong number, it will never be engaged.

The Principle of Archimedes Updated
Any body submerged in a bath makes the telephone ring.

Law of Gravity
If you manage to remain calm when all around you are losing their heads,you presumably don't understand the gravity of the situation.

Law of Experience
A well's depth is only known by he/ she who falls into it.

Definition of a Specialist
1) A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less.
2) An advanced specialist is someone who knows everything about absolutely nothing.

Practical Guide to Modern Science:
If you can mix it, it belongs to Biology.
If it stinks, it belongs to Chemistry.
If it doesn't work, it belongs to Physics.
If nobody understands it, it's Mathematics.
If it is not applicable it is Economics or Psychology.

The Law of Courses, Exams and the like:
1) If the course you most want to be on has space for x students, you can be sure that on registering for the course you will be x+1.
2) 80% of the final exam will be based on the one class that you missed or on the only book you didn't read. 3) All teachers work on the basis that you have nothing else to do besides study their speciality.

Law of the Essay Writer
The most valuable quotation will be the one in which you left out the author's name in the footnotes.

Law of Units of Measurement
"One size only" means that it does not suit any size.

Law of Free Fall
1) Whatever force is used to try to grab a falling object will lead to more damage than if it were left to fall freely. 2) The probability of a slice of bread landing with the buttered side facing down is directly proportional to the value of your carpet.

Law of Queues and Bottlenecks
The next queue along always advances faster than the one you are waiting in. There is no point changing queue, the law doesn't change.

Law of Sticky Tape
There are two kinds of tape available: the type that doesn't stick and the type that can't be unrolled.

Laws of Life
1) A healthy person is someone who has been incorrectly diagnosed by his/her doctor.
2) All the pleasures in life are either illegal, immoral or fattening.

Fundamental Law of Particle Attraction
Every flying particle will always find its way into an open eye.

Law of Sod's Laws
If you believe that these laws express bitter existential pessimism, this goes to show that you have still got a long way to fall.

BOW WAVE is published each week to around 7550 Readers in the transport,insurance,shipping and finance industries.

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