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The Bangkok Festival of Arts & Music is advertising a concert by the Chelyabinsk State Symphony Orchestra on Friday (Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Ravel). However, searching Google for Chelyabinsk Orchestra gives only 3 hits - two of which are from Thai newspapers, and one from an Indian newspaper. Does anyone know if this is a real, professional orchestra? Perhaps it's better known under a different spelling? Is it worth paying to hear them play?

However it is well known that across the board mutual funds underperform simple direct investment. The fact is they have been proved incapable of making investment choices which beat the market as a whole.

I think this is an oversimplification of the issue.

(1) Yes, the average fund manager under performs against the benchmark index - but not all fund managers are average. In most sectors there is a small handful of managers who have consistently beat the benchmark (even after fees) over prolonged periods - decades in some cases.

(2) Where the fund manager has flexibility of asset class (e.g. can switch between equities, gold, conventional bonds, index linked bonds and cash) and can make good judgement calls, he/she can act much more defensively than if tied to a single asset class. Funds such as Troy Trojan and Ruffer Total Return have both employed such flexibility to great effect over many years, as has the Personal Assets Trust investment trust. With a traditional ETF you remain exposed to a single sector/asset class come good or bad.

(3) ETFs in some sectors are very heavily weighted in favour of a single stock, so may not provide an appropriate level of diversification; a fund manager should be able to reduce the single-country risk.

(4) Not all ETFs are backed by the physical security, so there is a significant counterparty risk; other ETFs don't fully replicate the underlying index, so there is a risk of tracking error.

The decision between using a passive investment versus an actively managed one is one that requires careful consideration and isn't a case of "ETFs are always better".

The miracles of using an egg timer... Put the eggs in cold water, bring to a boil and once boiling set the timer to 4.5 minutes.

Stay tuned for next week's cooking class when we unveil the secrets how to properly butter a slice of bread.

sent from my Android phone

It rather reminds me of the stir that was caused when, back in 1998, Delia Smith taught Britain how to boil an egg, and Gary Rhodes publicly accused her of insulting people's intelligence. Her advice, however, is still good: http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/eggs/how-to-boil-an-egg.html

(And British people no longer need to know how to boil an egg, because they can buy them ready-boiled in the local supermarket.)

Very fresh eggs are harder to peel because the membrane under the shell sticks to the shell when they're fresh. This bond loosens over time. Eggs that are about a week old, stored in the fridge are easier to peel. That said, I find the shells of Thai eggs to be much thinner than those of European eggs. I had a lot of eggs that broken when boiling until I started to pierce the rounded end of the shell with a knife point. Still, about 1 in 10 will crack on me. Lots of salt in the water helps coagulate any white that escapes.

Always best to plunge the eggs into cold water when cooked. Not only does this stop them carry on cooking, it stops the formation of the dark, greeny ring on the outside of the yolk that one sometimes finds. Since tap water in Thailand is relatively warm, I usually add a few ice cubes to help cool it down.

Why would the OP not want to use one of the UK platforms? Hargreaves Lansdown doesn't allow offshore clients, but Transact, Skandia and Cofunds certainly do. (Don't know about FundsNetwork.) Alternatively, use a platform specifically aimed at expats, such as Internaxx.

If the OP's intention is to gain exposure to the Thai stockmarket this can be done through unit trusts/OEICS such as Allianz Thailand, JF Thailand, Amundi Thailand or Fidelity Thailand, or the Aberdeen New Thai investment trust. (This investment trust is only available through Transact and Internaxx I believe.) Alternatively, if the platform supports the purchase of ETFs, then there's the iShares MSCI Thailand Index Fund ETF.

Indeed, if one's personal economic future is tied to a particular country, then it's prudent to bias one's investments towards that country's economy. However, one should remain diversified, which can't really be satisfactorily achieved using the fund offerings of any single Thai bank.

One also needs to be able readily to switch investments should the economy develop significant problems. Remember that the Tom Yang Gung crisis started in Thailand. Such switching can be done fast and more cheaply using one of the platforms mentioned above.

So, not going the Thai bank route wins heads down for me: more investment choice, lower costs, greater ease of switching investments. Oh, and any income is not taxable in Thailand.

Asavant have an excellent reputation did my friends implants who looked like Goofy before. Now still looks like Goofy but with a nice

Yes, Asavanant are very good. However, not in Silom/Sathorn area, but very close to Thong Lor skytrain station.

http://www.asavanant.com/

As others have indicated, it's like the "long a" sound in English. As in rain, day, say, hate, etc.

Except all four examples provided are diphthongs /eɪ/. The Thai vowel is not a diphthong, it's /eː/

It's funny what a little bit of publicity will do - even if it's here on Thaivisa. Suddenly I get my reply. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of reply I was hoping for. Cofunds has suddenly decided that I should never have had trading access to my pension account (even though they were fully informed when the account was set up as to its nature and purpose, and it was they that recommended the "IFA with a single client" setup on their platform).

I'm now left with either making requests via my IFA who will then have to forward them to Cofunds by letter (and, of course, the IFA is most unlikely to do this for free), or changing custodian, which will costs me thousands. Let's just say that I'm not very happy at the moment.

Thanks, wordchild, for the link. It doesn't exactly describe my situation, but does show that Cofunds hasn't put a lot of thought into the design of its system for client segmentation.

My problem is that I appear on their system as an IFA with a single client (myself). My actual IFA doesn't have access to the IFA account, so can't set up the segment for me. I can't do it myself - don't have the appropriate level of system access. And Cofunds can't (or won't) do it. That doesn't explain, however, why my client account has disappeared.

Cofunds (Business Support) has been looking into my problem for three months now - and the problem was long ago escalated to the complaints department.

My last communication from Cofunds (late last month) included the discouraging line:

"In the event that we are unable to resolve this matter by 28 September 2012 we will write to you again detailing the options available to you at that time."

Does anyone know whether there is a way of escalating problems above the regular Complaints Team at Cofunds?

As a result of the UK RDR, Cofunds introduced a new setting on client accounts (client segment) which is required before a client can trade. Neither I nor my IFA nor Cofunds appears able to set up the appropriate client segment for my account. As a result I have been unable to trade for almost three months. Furthermore, my client account apparently disappeared from the system about a month ago, so I am no longer able to monitor my investments through the Cofunds platform.

Cofunds support has been frankly useless. I have yet to receive from them a proper explanation of what the problem(s) are or in what timescale they will be resolved.

Has anybody else with QROPS investments (or similar) held on the Cofunds platform experienced similar issues? And if so, have they been resolved, and how?

In spoken speech it's usually รึ rather than เหรอ. I.e. short vowel, high tone, rather than long vowel, rising tone.

รึ is an informal (and very common) contraction of รึป่าว (reu plaaw) meaning "or not".

The meaning (depending on context) could either be "Is that true or not?" (meaning, I think you may be mistaken and/or not telling the truth), or "Is that true?" (meaning, that sounds a little unlikely/incredible - is it really true?).

More literally, you [implied] use me [very familiar] a lot, but the money [slang] never increases.

Samitivej Srinakarin children's hospital has a good reputation plus a specialist clinic dealing with children's weight problems. (The clinic doesn't appear to be listed on the website, but I noticed it when I was there last week.)

http://www.samitivejhospitals.com/Children_Hospital/en

ขนมจีน (chinese rice noodles)

Slightly off topic, but despite the presence of จีน in the name, ขนมจีน are not Chinese, they're originally Mon. In the Mon language the name means "to cook twice".

I didn't mention trans fats. Food deep fried in oil or pork fat doesn't contain trans fats. Only food cooked in shortening (hydrogenated animal fat) contains significant amounts of trans fats.

The problem with the OPs child is that he isn't eating very much. Encouraging him to eat energy-dense food is going to up his calorie intake much more effectively than giving him a shake, which contains far fewer calories per unit volume. One risk with giving shakes is that he will eat less normal food, which contains a much wider range of essential nutrients than shakes.

Shakes are also bad for a couple of other reasons: excessive protein intake can cause kidney damage by chronically increasing glomerular pressure; Asians (and I'm assuming the child concerned is part Asian) are very often lactose intolerant, which could lead to gastric upset (likely reducing the amount of food eaten) and/or diarrhea (again, reducing nutritional uptake).

(1) Have you had your son checked out to make sure there isn't any physiological problem causing his low body weight, or psychological problem causing his reluctance to eat?

(2) Rather than giving a shake, try and increase the calorie content of what he does eat - and that means getting him to eat more fat. Coconut milk-based curries, fatty cuts of meat, deep fried foods, fried rice rather than plain. Don't worry too much about protein. The human body needs surprisingly little. Based upon his weight and age, you son only needs 30 g protein per day.

(3) If he is eating very little, consider giving him a children's multivitamin tablet to make sure that he's getting all the nutrients he needs.

In my opinion, ต้องการ is probably better translated as "need" or "want", rather than "like".

Two legs on each side per body segment (except for the first segment) - it's a millipede.

then run them for 10 minutes in a tumbler dryer, that is reckoned to kill the mites and the allergens that weren't killed in the cold water wash.

If you Google the subject, you'll find that 10 minutes isn't enough. Government-type sites suggest 30 minutes to one hour. That'll be expensive.

I also think that buying a cold water washing machine + tumble dryer is probably more expensive than buying a front loading machine.

Chaengwattana for the last two extension has pushed me to change from investment visa to a retirement visa. For me there were a couple of factors to consider (1) with an investment visa I can (if I want) get a work permit and work, (2) the investment visa paperwork is trivial compared to a retirement visa and doesn't include trips to my embassy. For marriage versus retirement, the first point would for some, also be a consideration.

Yes, I know the original post is years old.

Iron has been smelted in Thailand for at least a millennium, so it's a possibility. (See, for example, http://euraseaa14.sh....php?thisID=237). That said, my initial reaction was that it was more likely to be for pottery or bronze.

Based upon far too many hours watching the British TV archaeology series "Time Team", I believe the correct thing to do is get a very powerful magnet and pass it over the area. If it's iron smelting you should pick up lots of tiny fragments of iron which will cling to the magnet. Viewing the fragments (small spheres versus flakes) under a microscope should tell you more about their origin.

Could you not use a metal detector?

No, the specs of iron (a mixture of minute spheroids and tiny flakes of scale) are far too small and not in sufficient quantity to be detected by a metal detector.

The tone of a Thai syllable is determined by the presence or absence of a number of factors including the class of the first consonant of the syllable (and the second in the case of a cluster);

The second in the case of a cluster? That doesn't sound right to me at all, unless I'm missing something.

Incidentally, J. Marvin Brown has suggested that historically the tone marks did directly correspond to the tone. (After all, King Ramkhamhaeng was smart, so why would he have invented the rather complicated system we have today?) Subsequently, Brown posits, there was an event - The Great Tone Shift - during which tones for the different classes changed dramatically leaving today's system. Of course, knowing this does nothing to help one read Thai today.

Edit: Ah, just got what you mean. You're referring to leading ห and ย modifying the class of the following consonant. I'd interpreted what you wrote as meaning "in a consonant cluster it's the second consonant that determines the tone".

(1) The bank does not own the property, it is simply holding the chanote as security to make sure that the property can't be sold or remortgaged until the mortgage is paid off. The property is yours, and in the event of your death it will be passed on to whoever you specify in your will (or to close relatives - not your partner - if there is no will).

(2) You can't make two wills. Only the last one will be valid. You need to decide whether to leave the property to your partner (who will then have to sell it within a year after your death), or to your sister.

(3) Technically, there's no need to register the will. A holographic will (i.e. written by hand) doesn't need to be registered or witnessed. However, in your situation, registering does sound like a good idea.

(4) A usufruct would be for the life of your partner - not you. There would be no need for another usufruct after your death - even though the property changes owner.

(5) I am not a legal expert, but I rather doubt that you can include stipulations in your will about what your sister should do in the event that your partner wants the house sold. After all, the house will belong to your sister, not to your partner, and I would think that only she could decide whether or not the house is sold, and when. Legally, she could sell it with your partner still living there. The usufruct would remain in place, so your partner could continue to live there, but there would be a new owner.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. However, you really do need to take professional legal advice - and I suggest you do this before talking to your bank about usufruct.

For example, เปล่า . . . I know it's ป + เล่า as I've memorized it that way . . . but why not เป + ล่า?

เปล่า is not ป + เล่า - ปล่ is a consonant cluster an is treated as a single unit. First thing the OP needs to do is read up about consonant clusters in Thai. There's an introduction at http://www.thai-language.com/ref/double-consonants, though most textbooks will probably give a clearer explanation.

(1) Google only has 1.15 million results for สเริม, - and a large proportion of those is a result of Google's incorrect parsing of Thai words. For example, อาหารสเริม appears under this search. เสริม has 153 million hits.

(2) The spelling is probably either an artifact of how the Thai language has lost initial consonant clusters over the centuries (and continues to do so), or reflects an initial consonant cluster in an imported word which can't be pronounced in Thai. (Though in the latter case I think it's more usual to insert an extra unstressed /a/ after the initial consonant, as in, for example, "sport -> "sa-port".)