A weekend in the Lake District

Friday .

A last minute cancellation and some re-arranging of others means we can get away earlier than expected, meaning we can beat the conjestion north of Birmingham and so arrive in the Lake District late afternoon. This gives us a brief opportunity to visit the Leighton Moss nature Reserve close to where we are staying. Beautiful read beds, fantastic bird watching facilities - though most of the birds were black headed gulls. We may have seen a red start as well . ..

New growth

From there we carried on to Silverdale with enough time for a walk along the estuary. There are far more birds here than at Leighton Moss, including a huge flock of some sort of wading bird out on the exposed mud - most impressive

No idea what these birds are - we feel we should know

Saturday

The day of our big walk in the Langdales. As usual, I have had some trouble coming up with a route that is suitable for Linda, but I had high hopes that we would be able to add on a bit to a walk that we have done before up to Stickle Tarn below the Langdale Pikes themselves

At the start of our ascent - the stream by the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel

A rare photo of me - Linda is not a keen camera operator

Pavey Ark - one of the finest cliff faces in the Lake District

Jake's Rake - a pretty scary way to ascend Pavey Ark, and a route that I last did in the early 1990s. Not at all suitable for Linda

Crossing a stream as we move round to the eastern ridge of Pavey Ark

An earlier plan for today had been to traverse to the west from Stickle Tarn and ascend Blea Rigg from where I would have been able to see Easedale Tarn, where dad's ashes are scattered. But progress is not quite fast enough I felt, so we skipped this and ascended Pavey Ark by the eastern ridge - the easiest way I thought.

It actually turned out to be a reasonable scramble, but luckily had no precipitous drops so Linda was just about ok on it.

Linda on the summit of Pavey Ark

Not many sheep on the hills yet

Descending Pavey Ark

And ascending Harrison Stickle, the highest of the Langdale Pikes, with Pavey Ark in the background

Linda doesn't quite make the summit of Harrison Stickle. Her hip is hurting her a little and the last scramble seems a bit too much. She did get to within 25 feet or so of the top though

Climbers on the face of Pavey Ark

Linda's unusual descending technique on tricky rocks

Tired at the end of the walk - back just above the hotel

We are back at the starting point by around 4:00 for a drink. The bar has copies of the Langdale and Ambleside Mountain Rescue Service review of 2010 which makes for some interesting reading.

Sunday

Another walk, this time just a couple of hours round Grisdale Forest

A much-recovered Linda with the Coniston fells in the far distance

One of the many sculptures in the forest

We always like forests . . .

Progress in trading - but some negatives

Our main research effort on trading has been the move from relatively slow intra-day systems towards what might be better described as High Frequency Trading. But in the last couple of weeks, we have had some set backs in this process and are now beginning to move back the other way to systems that trade 6-10 times a day rather than 30 times. Initial work has focused on improving our trading of crude oil and has already thrown up some excellent results. The main question now is whether the same sort of thing can be created for EC and the DAX.

Moving away from HFT also gives us the chance to trade in a more nuanced way as there is enough time to perform the slightly tricky calculation that this requires. In particular, I am looking at fast-reversing stop strategies that could eliminate a number of whipsaw losses. I have created a selection of "exemplary case studies" where certain methods work really well, and soon I will be moving on to the detailed testing of these ideas.

While Jerome did the existing trading today, I shadowed the trading with such a reversing stop strategy in place and both got some good results and found that I could keep track of things as time went on. So another promising area to consider - and certainly one that I feel much more comfortable with from the point of view of doing the actual trading. I have come to hate doing the actual trading as the intensity involved is too high for me and I get distracted too easily and make mistakes. Something slower but more nuanced would be better

The Fallen

The last few days have seen me reading Dave Simpson's The Fallen - my current non-work or climbing related reading. This is actually rather a fun book - a search for as many of the past members of The Fall as he could find. At least half the names are people I've never heard of.

As usual, this sends me back to the vast collection of cds I have by The Fall. Today I heard Grotesque for the first time in perhaps 20 years - I had forgotten just how great Container Drivers and especially Impression of J Temperance were. This was followed by Slates. I remember buying the vinyl version when it came out - the 10" version.

I saw The Fall about a dozen times in the early 1980s, and then once a few year's later. They played Oxford a couple of years ago. I should have gone (and taken Linda). I have bought most of the cds over the years, and generally find some tracks I like every time. But the peak for me was around 1983 with the Peel session that featured the stupendous track, Smile - perhaps one of my personal top 5 tracks.

A few years ago there was a superb documentary of tv about them - The Wonderful and Frightening world of Mark E Smith. I should have another look for that - I think I downloaded it at the time.

. Around the last time I saw The Fall - late 1980s, with the rather scrummy Marcia Schofield on keyboards

Another major trading enhancement (we hope)

We have been through some major upheavals on the trading. An approach which we quite liked late last year rather fell apart in early 2010 and would have been very poor to have stuck with. But we have moved to approaches which are far more in line with our basic psychology and are now at the stage when we are probably approaching something like a stable basis.

Yet this weekend produces another significant amendment with an apparently small change turning out to make quite a bit profit change. Now if we can actually produce about half the expected profit per day at about the current risk levels, we should be very well set.

But the main thing is that the systems are very user friendly. I personally don't like doing the actual trading, but even I am able to do a few hours at a stretch with it. I am able to read a bit as I trade and that helps me manage. But the main trading is done by Jerome and that is definitely for the better.

My work now switches onto estimates of worse case daily and weekly losses and hence the possibility of estimating maximum position size (which is probably quite a bit above where we are now). I even allowed myself to do a couple of future projections for the next six months. I should really avoid doing this as it always adds to the disapointment if we hit difficulties, as we always seem to do.

Shameless - older episodes

The last few days we have been watching a few episodes from season 7 of Shameless which we somehow seem to have missed at the time. In the latest episode, Chesney and Carl are on the run after being accused of murdering some guy. They wind up on the Welsh border and take shelter in a farm where a rather attractive older lady is busy with a sideline in growing marijuana. For a brief period, this seems like heaven to them. Or, as they express it, "a Milf on a weed farm, what more could you want?"

Inspired by watching last year's episodes, I have also gone back to season 4 and 5 and my all time favourite character - Carrie, the mad policewoman. A real shame when she left I thought. So maybe we will watch season 4 and 5 again next.

One of Carrie's rare raunchy moments

And the slightly fetish version of Carrie from the closing credits. There is also a James Bond spy themed closing credits in which she appears.

A year or so ago the actress who played Carrie - Amanda Ryan - was in one of the period dramas that we were watching. After Shameless, it was pretty odd to see her in something like that, but she has, apparently appeared in some quite high-brow things

The theme of growing marijuana led us back to Saving Grace, one of our favourite films. I was particularly taken this time by the two old ladies who make themselves what they think is a pot of tea. But like It's Complicated, that we also saw recently, some films are more or less adverts for smoking weed.

Two old ladies from Saving Grace

Climbing - a wild idea

Watching the TV series, Everest -Beyond the Limits, I have been struck by a number of interesting points. For instance, after his failure in the first series, Tim, the LA biker with numerous bits of metal holding him together, made it to the top. He is a real burk and is definitely not what you would call a mountaineer, but none the less, there he was, getting to the top. And then there is the 71 year old Japanese retired school teacher. After climbing Cho Oyo, he has attempted Everest and is now the oldest person to have reached the summit. It is tempting to say that if they can make it, maybe I am being too circumspect in looking at what I might be able to do.

So a brief internet search locates a UK company called Jagged Globe, which runs a who series of high-end climbing expeditions. And they run a number of 8,000m peak trips, my focus being on Cho Oyo. They don't avoid the difficulties, but there is loads of information on the site and this had caused me to consider some pretty radical ambitions. Cho Oyo costs just over £10,000 and takes 45 days. For the moment, this is the mountain I am thinking about - with a tentative target date of Autumn 2013. Maybe do a winter climbing trip next January, followed by something in the summer and autumn of next year, and so on. At the very least, this provides some good motivation for going to the gym (where I can now do 50 lengths of the pool and 25 mins on the cross trainer - such a jump from 3 or 4 weeks ago)

A view down to Everest, with Cho Oyu to the left and the somewhat easier trekking peak, Mera Peak, in the foreground

From the walk in to Cho Oyu

And a view of Cho Oyu that makes it look quite imposing. The sixth highest mountain in the world, but also widely considered the easiest 8,000m peak

Recent mountaineering reading

My current reading is rather dominated by climbing-related stuff. At the moment this is Doug Scott's Himalayan Climber, which I received as a leaving a present when I left Smith and Nephew at the end of 1992. He really has lived an extraordinary life

Doug Scott - the John Lennon of mountain climbers

On the summit of Everest - a famous photo

Prior to Doug Scott, it was Chris Bonnington's Kongur - China's Elusive Summit, one of my dad's climbing books (which I have kept all of). The other three members of this Bonnington expedition are now all dead - Boradman, Tasker and Rouse

And prior to that it was Nick Heil's Dark Summit, a different version of the summer of 2008 on Everest - the season that was filmed for the Discovery programme I've been watching recently What next? Perhaps Greg Child's Thin Air, or one of Reinhold Messner's books (though I can't find these at the moment) One good side effect of this is to provide me with significant motivation for going to the gym. Perhaps surprisingly, I am now making real progress - I'm up to doing 40 lengths of the pool, 20 mins of weights, 20 mins on the cross trainer machine, not bad progress for four weeks of effort.

Stephen Pern in Japan - an old video

While transferring some old tv shows from dvd to the PC's hard drive, I came across one of my all-time favourite programmes, Stephen Pern's film about walking the length of Japan. This has some wonderful moments - his experiences in traditional Japanese inn's - Ryochan? - some great campsites on the many ridges he walked along, an amazing view of Mount Fuji in the early morning, some amazing koto music. A truly great programme.



Stephen Pern at one of his high mountain campsites

I was also reminded of a couple of other programmes on similar themes - for instance, Lesley Downer's retracement of the "narrow road to the deep north". And some books on the same theme - for instance, Alan Booth's The Roads to Sata. What a shame Pern didn't write a book about his trip. His US book, The Continental Divide, is really good. He suggests in the film that he has pretty much lived his whole life as a traveller. Now that is truly something to have achieved

The latest data bash - a new market from Monday

The results of the latest data bash mean that we are close to adding a new market to our trading - the German stock market via the DAX future. As always, we are looking for profitable markets that are largely uncorrelated with what we have already and this seems to fit the bill. I have been sketching out a new series of research programmes for the coming weeks. Everything we are doing is back under the microscope. Some things don't suit me well from a psychological point of view - mainly the hyper fast trading we do in crude - and I am keen to move away from them if possible. I just don't have anything to replace this with yet! How much longer can the constant data bashing go on? I need to tidy up all the research spreadsheets I think. Fill in some gaps, bring some stuff right up to date. Then step back and really think hard about where we are going with it all. In a couple of weeks we are hoping to go to the Lake District and I will have a couple of days off work for the first time this year. Hopefully I will be able to see things a bit clearer for having a break

King of the Slums Peel Session

A name from the distant past springs to mind - King of the Slums. In particular, their amazing Peel session from the mid 1980s (?). Few people have sought to develop the electric violin in rock music after John Cale in the Velvet Underground. But Sarah Curtis is one of the few. All four tracks of the Peel Session - Big girl's blouse, fanciable headcase, leary bleeder and venerate me utterly - are excellent, and all with the discordant droning electric violin overlay. I used to have this at a cassette tape - one of the 210 Peel extract tapes I produced from 1978 to around 2000. But as so often is the case, I have found a copy on a download site as part of a huge download just called "Peel Sessions", containing 270 session from 1967 to 2002. No doubt some excellent stuff that I haven't heard for years, for instance the Altered Images Peel Session with Dead Pop Stars, Loop's session featuring Afterglow, but sadly not Yeah Yeah Noh's session from 1984 which I would really like to hear again



A "new" release from King of the Slums is available on Amazon. It features a new version of one of the Peel session tracks. I have a quick listen to the sample available but it is terrible - the wild, out-of-control violin is dropped own in the mix, when it should be highlighted. A great disappointment I thought

David Bedford & Mike Oldfield's "Argiers"

The current edition of The Wire magazine has a long feature on the Bristish Composer David Bedford. I only have one full length CD by him, Star's End. And I only really knew his other works from the couple of pieces on the Mike Oldfield Boxed collection. As with so many articles in The Wire, I am immediately keen to hear more and to listen closely again to what I already have - can there be any more validation of a music magazine?

Cool hair and beard!

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I first came across Mike Oldfield in the late 1970s when he had one or two hit singles - Portsmouth and In dulci jubilo. I saved up for weeks to buy the Mike Oldfield Boxed 4 lp set, but in the end I think my dad bought it for me for Christmas. I haven't listened to Tubular Bells for years, but Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge are both on my ipod and I do listen to them both quite regularly.

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The 4th lp in the boxed set was called Collaborations and it is this which has some other David Bedford music on it - a bit from Star's End and The Phaeacian Games. But the highlight of Collaborations was Argiers; a simple acoustic guitar and recorder piece that has haunted me for years. I have, in the past, tried to buy a cd copy of just Collaborations but it was always only available in the 3 cd boxed set. However I have now tracked down a copy of it online and am delighted to hear it for the first time in many years. This is the track that I whistle in the bath, hum in the car, hear in my head several times a week. Yet I hadn't heard the original for more than 10 years. It is so amazing to hear it again.

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Since downloading it somewhile ago, it has played on repeat perhaps 25 times in a row - and it is still great.

Mike Oldfield Boxed

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This recortd comes from a time when receiving a new record was something amazing - with the enormous quantities of music now available so easily, something has definitely been lost. The anticipation of saving up to buy something, the intent listening that each record received (except Jon Lord's The Gemini Suite which always sticks in my mind as a record I bought, played once and vowed never to listen to again ever). The music I listened to from about 1976 to 1984 is definitely "my music" regardless of the enormous amounts of stuff I listen to now.

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How I always remember Mike Oldfield - I don't think I have listened to anything new by him since buying Boxed. Perhaps I was sure this could never be beaten?

Everest - Beyond the Limit. TV show

As part of my fitness motivation I have been thinking about mountain climbing for the first time in a while. If I ever do want to do a "big climb", I do need to get in betrter shape. So this Sunday I went to the gym for 75 mins and had a much better time than previous. I didn't feel so rushed, and so could do some proper work. I ached a great deal this morning, so some good was done

I have then come across a Discovery Channel show on climbing Everest - a bit like Deadliest Catch in that it is a multi-part, reality TV show following a particular climbing season with one of the commercial climbing firms on Everest. It has to be said that I don't approve of Sherpas fixing lines all the way from the North Col to the summit and then amateur climbers dragging themselves up the ropes to the top. with sherpa assistance.

This has also prompted me to look through the current KE Adventures brochure and I am attracted to loads of trips, including Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Pyrennees, Peak Lenin, Mera and Island, and a huge route to K2. So now I have a few possible targets for when I am fitter

"The kids grow up" documentary

Emma and Linda's "Fitness Fiesta" and brownie making

Emma arrived back in Oxford around 9:00 last night after a regular day's work and a relatively slow journey back on the coach. Linda and I had been in an Irish pub where Linda has a couple of very big glasses of wine and gets a little tipsy, and where she buys a really poor drawing of me done by some guy in the pub. We have pizza out and then home via the garage to buy Phish Food - perhaps this isn't going to be a de-tox weekend afterall. Emma seems in very good spirits and was saying how happy she is generally at the moment.

So Linda and Emma are away for a few days at a fitness weekend in Nuneaton. I have a couple of days here on my own. My small contribution to their weekend is to make a tray of chocolate brownies this morning using the Jamie recipe in his 30 minute meals book. Surprisingly perhaps, they came out really well and the addition of pecan nuts on top and cherries within particularly good.

For the rest of the day I worked on the daily pack spreadsheet that we'll use from Monday and continued to follow the markets in real time. I would have really liked to have spoken to Jerome for an hour or so today but he is away with the kids and I haven't heard from him.

Spare time is mainly spent reading Jim Curran's book on K2

Mountain Climbing theme

In Blackwells with Emma the other week, we bought a couple of books that were marked "3 for 2" but she struggled to find a third, so I choose Graham Bowley's No Way Down about the 2008 K2 disaster. Reading this the last fews days has re-kindled my enjoyment of mountain climbing books.

A few days ago I began sorting out the old TV recordings in the cupboard downstairs and have come across loads of climbing videos, including Jim Curran's excellent K2 Triumph and Tragedy. That has always been one of my favourite climbing films, but I have decided to re-read his book first. The multiple deaths in 1986 occur at camp 4 on the picture below. In 2008, they occur because the serac marked above the Bottleneck collapses and takes out the fixed ropes - hence "no way down"

It has been some years since I have been on this theme though i occasionally buy Trail Magazine and sometimes Adventure. I also still receive each year the brochure for KE Adventures. I have noticed they are running a 28 day trek which goes to K2 Base Camp. But I am so unfit at the moment, that such a trip would be out of the question. I mentioned the possibility of such a trip to Linda but she got cross that I could be thinking about such a thing when I should be thinking about the trading instead.

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It seems ages since I went on those two winter mountaineering courses in Scotland - scene of my greatest climbing accident when I tumbled around 100 metres down a long snow slope when I caught a crampon on my trousers. I managed a regulation ice axe stop on that occasion but the others in my group were still amazed that I survived wholly unscathed. On that trip I took a day off the course later in the week and while on a walk through a forest saw the only golden eagle I have ever seen.

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My climbing ambition had always been to climb Mera peak, a 6,300m Trekking peak in Nepal and the highest it is possible to get to without any advanced climbing skills. I have thought about maybe looking at doing that in 2013 when I will be 50. I suspect that if I leave it much later, my chance will have passed.

Latest Trading developments & some wild markets

We are now getting ready for the new systems to come online from next Monday. It has taken something like four weeks to complete this process and has been a major intellectual effort. I am beginning to feel the effect of the constant 12 hour days, weekends included.

Our major problem remains the estimation of worst case drawdown. Though we have lots of data available, we are not encountering many losing days. Of course I can estimate the loss from the standard deviation of the returns, even though we have few actual losing days. But this is a somewhat suspect approach. Our system's worse days tend to be fairly flat, while the main source of variance is upwards. This is clearly a good feature, but does make downside risk hard to assess. If we really believed the stats are correct, we could trade in quite big size. But for the moment we just need to be careful.

But one good thing in the last couple of days is that one of our markets has gone through a really wild phase. As North African nations tremble and tumble, oil is really wild. Earlier today, it experienced a 285 pts range in just 10 mins, which is higher than most day's total range. The trading systems worked fine through the day - indeed they did really well. But this has also blown out the statistics somewhat, also due to the inclusion of upside volatility. As a result, I have been reading up on various statistical methods that I could use instead of variance and standard deviation - things like semi-deviation and stats like the "Sortino ratio". But this has not been that successful so far.

My main trading-related reading remains Steenbarger's Enhancing Trader Performance. Progress on this has been slow but the book is excellent. Jerome is currently reading the prop-trading book I sent him about SMB trading.

On the other hand, I have also had a look at a book that promised much but has turned out to be completely absurd - Carr's Micro-Trend Trading. To get some feel of this absurdity, about page 80 it digresses into a discussion of how one should tithe 10% of your trading earnings. Apparently some passages from the Old testament prophet Malachi explain why this will result in your becoming even richer.

Much comment on the recent documentary about the financial crisis, Inside Job, which has just been issued in the UK. I have downloaded a copy and plan to watch it this weekend, along with a Discovery channel series about climbing Everest and some rugby.

As I write this I am listening to a superb live recording of Neil Young from 2009. A "greatest hits" type set. Most enjoyable.

Cool pictures from the Linda Rasche website of trading set ups. I am slowly working towards a 5 screen set up.

But perhaps what you really need is 16 screens

Mogwai in Oxford

It is half-term week and Linda has decided to accompany me to another concert after the success of seeing Hawkwind before Christmas. Tonight it is Mogwai at the Regal in Oxford. They are one of the few bands that I have bought pretty much all their records as they have come out. Their new album was released this week, but for the last two weeks I have been listening to a live concert recording of them in London to a small audience prior to this main tour getting going.

As expected, a show made up of lots of repetitive musical structures played at various volumes. Such a musical structure always reminds me of 1970s King Crimson. I have no idea why it is so effective, but bits of the show were quite magical, even though they didn't play 2 Right, my favourite track from the live show I downloaded.

Linda is left with ringing ears. No sure if the music was to her taste, but at least it was a rare evening out. I was reminded the other day about a show I saw back in 1987, Swans at the Town and Country Club in London. I didn't take Linda to that one - boy was that loud.


"Five balding 40 year olds from Scotland" according to one of the reviews I read of the Hoxton show. Is that a bad thing?

Getting back to normal

Slowly things are getting back to something like normal. But one never really knows what the alsting effects of the recent events could be.

I have been throwing myself in trading work developments - working 12 hours oplus per day till dropping off to sleep exhausted mid-to-late evening. Waking up at 4:30a.m. or so, I am having a constant run of great ideas - or so it seems

Reading has mainly been a 700 page sociological account of sex in Japan, Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai (the author died recently and i was reminded about this book by his obituary in the paper), Patti Smith's excellent Just Kids, and Kristin Hersh's very odd autobiography, Paradoxical Undressing - the last two of which I bought with the Waterstone token I got for Christmas

Music is mainly the wew cds by Mogwai, PJ Harvey and Swans. I am most impressed with PJ Harvey's latest. Not sure I am that keen on the newest incarnation of Swans as it doesn't feature Jarboe, who I always took to be vitally important to the mature Swan's sound.

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For me, the perfect Swans lineup

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Swans in 1997 - the last tour. The Swans are Dead double cd is a superb live album. The versions of "Lavender" and "Blood Promise" are stupendous

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For some years around 2000 I corresponded with Jarboe, as she had available other live recordings of Swans and was slowly developing her own solo material. Anhedoniac remains a really disturbing recording. As a result, I have loads of signed Jarboe stuff, rare recordings, etc.

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A recent photo from her website - http://www.thelivingjarboe.com/ A artist well-worth supporting in my view. And still a very striking looking person!

A really bad few days. . . .

The last few days has seen us go through one of the worst periods we have ever endured - worse even than the last fews days of my dad's life back in 2006

On the one hand, it was very unlucky that the event occured. On the other hand, it was very lucky that given that the event occured, things did not tuern out considerably worse than they did.

That is all that perhaps need be said at the moment.

Bjork - some live recordings

A live concert on Sky Arts from the recent tour, reminds me of how great a performer Bjork is, and how genuinely odd she is. I am constantly surprised that she has managed to retain an audience. But she is one of the few people who I look forward to hearing new material from.

I am pondering of celebrating my 50th birthday in 2013 by visiting Iceland! Midnight sun in June of course. Perhaps a camping trip to the wilds of the interior??

Trading psychology - enhancing performance

The last few days I have become somewhat obsessed with the question of elite performance. I have been of the view that Jerome hasn't been pulling his weight, not doing all that is necessary if we are going to succeed in our endeavour. I have been pondering on going ahead without him and have been generally berating him for the mistake that occur and the general feeling that he needs to work much harder.

This has largely been inspired by the book One Good Trade that I have been reading the last few weeks, an insight into the world of prop trading firms. This has emphasized the things they look for in prop traders and we don't measure up at the moment.

Jerome's response to the recent criticism has been positive. He has a much better feel for how much work I am currently doing and there has been some improvement in his own work ethic. i will send him this book soon

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As recommended by Bellafiore, I have recently purchased Brett Steenbarger's Enhancing Trader Performance and that has set me off into more rages about our poor processes. Things have got to improve over the coming months

Full of insights into elite performance in all fields