ST Online: Student gets 2 marks for using f-word correctly
A BRITISH high school student was awarded marks for writing nothing but a two-word obscenity on an exam paper because the phrase expressed meaning and was spelt correctly.
The student, who wrote 'f*** off' after being asked in an English exam to 'describe the room you are sitting in', got two marks out of 27 and would have scored higher if he had added some punctuation, chief examiner Peter Buckroyd told The Times.
'It would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for, like conveying some meaning and some spelling,' Mr Buckroyd was quoted as saying.
'It's better than someone who doesn't write anything at all.'
Mr Buckroyd is a senior examiner for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, one of several bodies that grade British high school exams, and the incident took place in 2006.
The alliance confirmed the newspaper's story but said Mr Buckroyd's decision to award the student marks was not official policy. It said obscenities on exam papers 'should either be disregarded, or action taken against the candidate, depending on the seriousness of the case'.
WHEN SELLER'S AGENT CLAIMS FEE FROM HOME BUYER May 13, 2008 By Tan Hui Yee
ONE week after The Straits Times reported that housing agency PropNex was suing two independent home buyers for not paying its agent a fee, the firm withdrew its case.
The agent, Mr Ricky Low Yong Sern, had been hired by the seller of a $400,000 terrace house in Whampoa which marketing specialist Loh Yi Min and his wife, polytechnic lecturer Ariel Wee, bought last year. The couple had acted on their own without hiring an agent. They refused to sign the commission agreement to pay Mr Loh a fee equivalent to 1 per cent of the price of the property, which was classified as an HDB flat. Mr Low claimed he was entitled to the commission or a fee commensurate with the services that he said he had provided.
PropNex dropped its landmark suit as part of a confidential deal both sides reached through mediation last Tuesday. Given that the sum at stake - about $4,000 or less - would have been dwarfed by the roughly $10,000-per-day cost of a trial, it was surprising the case went as far as it did.
But the case is not unique in the HDB resale market, where a growing proportion of buyers and sellers is transacting without agents. Last year, 3.6 per cent - or 1,060 people - submitted their applications through the HDB's e-Resale system, which caters to buyers and sellers without agents. This figure has been creeping up - it was 2 per cent in 2003 and 3 per cent in 2005.
Growing awareness of consumer rights has given momentum to the debate over whether independent buyers need to pay a fee to sellers' agents. Adding to the controversy are rogue agents who mislead buyers into signing commission forms at the last minute by claiming it is a 'rule'.
Appleseed Ex Machina, the kick-ass awesome follow-up to the earlier Appleseed. Because John Woo's the producer, you'll see his trademark slow-mo gun battles, dual-wielding protagonists and flying white doves. Cracks me up.
Got home, plugged it in, restarted my modem, configured the AirPort (with the utility I had already installed), configured both my MacBook and my Acer (my backup/gaming rig), and I'm online on both! All in just 15mins!
Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.
By Po Bronson Published Feb 10, 2008
In the last few years, a handful of intrepid scholars have decided it’s time to try to understand why kids lie. For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling, then at Penn State University, recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21. Using gift certificates for free CDs as bait, Darling’s Mod Squad persuaded high-school students to spend a few hours with them in the local pizzeria.
Each student was handed a deck of 36 cards, and each card in this deck listed a topic teens sometimes lie about to their parents. Over a slice and a Coke, the teen and two researchers worked through the deck, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.
“They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents.
Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.
Being an honors student didn’t change these numbers by much; nor did being an overscheduled kid. No kid, apparently, was too busy to break a few rules. And lest you wonder if these numbers apply only to teens in State College, Pennsylvania, the teens in Darling’s sample were compared to national averages on a bevy of statistics, from academics to extracurriculars. “We had a very normal, representative sample,” Darling says.
For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.
So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?
Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people -- and attracts the most criticism -- is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.
To me, it's basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it's both wrong and dangerous.
2:36 pm - Wired News: Innovation? How About Just Taking Out the Trash?
by Tony Long 11.22.07 | 12:00 AM
The tech industry -- makers of hardware, software and every ware in between -- prides itself on innovation. If George Bush is the decider, then Steve Jobs and his pals, er, rivals at Dell and IBM are the innovators, the geniuses, the gurus.
We’ve elevated these guys to rock-star status, which I suppose makes sense, because they provide the tools that allow a self-involved culture to wallow in its narcissism. They keep us kitted out with must-have laptops and iPods and Blackberries, thereby giving us texting and virtual worlds and, hoo-wahhh, our own personal music.
Unfortunately, all these way-cool necessaries wear out or become obsolete (and way too soon -- more on that in a bit). Now, Johnny I’m-Way-Deep-Into-Myself can’t afford to fall behind on the gadget front, so he’s going to ditch the stuff he’s got to get the newest stuff, the best stuff.
This makes the mandarins at Microsoft and Apple and all those other Incs, Corps and Plcs very happy indeed, because continually buying their new toys keeps their profits high and, they’ll tell you, keeps them innovating.
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.
I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.
Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.
1:03 pm - Wired News: Your Outboard Brain Knows All
By Clive Thompson
We're running out of memory.
I don't mean computer memory. That stuff's half-price at Costco these days. No, I'm talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we're remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.
Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?
Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?
Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?
Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?
Do men have an innate tendency to rape?
Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?
Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?
Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?
Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?
Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?
Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?
Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?
Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?
Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?
Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?
Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?
Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?
Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?
Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas -- ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order.
3:09 pm - The Economist: American power - The hobbled hegemon
Jun 28th 2007 | CAMP LEJEUNE AND FORT BRAGG From The Economist print edition
Its troubles in Iraq have much weakened it; but America is likely to remain the dominant superpower
Alex Williamson
THE men and women of America's 82nd Airborne Division, whose battle honours include the D-Day landings of the second world war, like to call themselves the nation's “911” emergency service—ready to parachute in, at a moment's notice, to any troublespot in the world. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the 82nd Airborne was the first to deploy in Saudi Arabia to hold the line. And when George Bush announced his surge of forces into Baghdad last January, the “All-Americans” were the first reinforcements.
These days, though, the 82nd Airborne is no longer America's quick-response service. Its sprawling base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina has emptied out, with all four of its brigades now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the rest of the year at least, the high-readiness brigade is provided by the 101st Airborne Division. Still, the All-Americans insist they can be counted on to “fight and win” in other places if needed. One divisional command sergeant-major says the paratroopers can deploy from anywhere to anywhere and always take their parachutes, just in case.
A two-hour drive from Fort Bragg, at Camp Lejeune, home of the II Marine Expeditionary Force, officers say they too are operating “with engines at full throttle”. They no longer have time to rehearse major assault operations, and their training for counter-insurgency is hampered by equipment shortages. Indeed, about half the marines' pre-positioned kit, stored on ships around the world and in vast Norwegian caves, has been drawn down to give front-line fighters what they need.
Such signs of strain on America's military forces are like dead “canaries in the mineshaft” that warn of impending disaster, says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defence think-tank. In the sixth year of the “war on terror” deployments in war zones are ever longer, while “dwell time” at home to recover is shorter. The army and marines say morale remains strong but, equally, they say the current tempo cannot go on indefinitely. At some point either the resources must increase, or demands on the forces must be reduced.
6:16 pm - BBC News: Tracking the true cost of coffee
Coffee is produced by a number of different global industries in almost every country in the world, making it one of the best products for tracking globalisation.
BBC World Service's The Cost Of... programme tracked a kilo of coffee from its origins in Ethiopia to the fashionable coffee shops of Europe and the US.
In the Ethiopian village of Yirgacheffe, farmers take sacks of raw coffee cherries to a market set up by a local farming co-operative.
Scales weigh the coffee and money is paid to each farmer. At this primary stage, a kilo of coffee cherries costs $2.25 (£1.12).
For some, however, the price they receive is far less, because where co-operatives are not an available option, farmers are offered below market rate by middlemen with the promise of ready cash.
Robbie Shalo, one of the coffee harvesters who works during harvesting, sells at three birr per kilo - or 33 cents.
"This is not enough to live by, even though I work here," he explains.
"When this job is finished, I will work on my own farm to make a little money to support my family.
"But it means I have nothing to eat, nothing to live for. That means death."
MARXIST, RADICAL feminist, Foucauldian, deconstructionist, post-colonial and queer. It reads like the fight card for an ideological battle royal. In fact, these are some of the major schools of thought in literary criticism from the past 40 years - and they have much in common.
Central to these and all other approaches to understanding literature that are influenced by post-structuralism is the idea that there is no innate human nature. Nature is nurture or, put another way, our nature is to spoon up whatever culture happens to feed us - and we are what we eat.
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary biologists have irreparably shattered the blank slate, most students of the humanities still insist that humans are born all but free of any innate qualities.
My fellow literary Darwinists and I hope to change their minds. By applying evolution-based thinking to fiction, we believe we can invigorate the study of literature, while at the same time mining an untapped source of information for the scientific study of human nature (see "Truth in fiction"). Darwinian thinking can help us better understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with stories.
It may sound like an innocent endeavour, but this is potentially revolutionary. If literary Darwinism is mainly right, then much of what has been written and said in the realm of literary theory and criticism in the second half of the 20th century is in need of significant revision.
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