I graduated from a mid-grade private high school in 1988, and I think most of the students did NOT cheat - at least, not much. In both high school and college instructors would sometimes (but not always) hand out three versions of tests to discourage cheating. However, my sister who attended a public high school reported that cheating was rampant in all her classes - with the teacher often leaving the room during tests and the students openly collaborating.
Cheating seems to be much more common now at all levels of education, but is more common some places than others. As you note, one culprit is the insane demands of modern schools - both in amount and stupidity of material. I remember absolutely detesting make work as a child, and I often simply didn't do it. My grades in 4th grade were terrible as a result. Worse still, one teacher (in 4th grade) alternated between giving us material suitable for college students and material suitable for kindergarteners - it was either so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible, or so far beneath us as to be insulting. On the rare occasions he gave us work at our grade level, it was often boring and repetitive. That is NOT a good learning environment. (On the other hand, I had an excellent science teacher that year.)
The problem is, most modern schools follow that formula across the board: lots of make work, lots of homework, lots of rote memorization. No wonder kids are cheating. If I were in their position I'd probably cheat too. If all you know of history is a list of dates and places, you don't know anything about history - and the students instinctively know it. They don't want to waste their time memorizing lists they're not interested in and will never use. The stuff that interests them, and the stuff they'll actually use, they'll learn. However, all the homework and make work that's piled on these kids displaces the time and energy they need to develop their critical and creative thinking and to learn relevant knowledge. Kids these days aren't stupid, they're educated into ignorance.
A few more notes on cheating: Since college I have gone back to school at several levels: for courses that were primarily for certification, for regular courses at community colleges, and a couple graduate level courses. While I can't say who cheated how much and where, I can say that in virtually every case where a test or a course was primarily about certification, cheating was rampant. So rampant, in fact, that many instructors simply read out the correct answers to the class - sometimes asking everyone to choose one answer to get wrong to make the results look normal. I did not see any cheating in the regular community college courses, but they were also largely hands-on, or were full of older, self-motivated students who wanted to be prepared for a state test that is not easy to cheat on. I didn't notice any cheating in the graduate level courses either, though essay questions are harder to cheat on.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a much wider culture of cheating than when I was in school, and even more unfortunately we have devised a system in which cheating is the only rational choice for most students. At this point, I suspect we would get a better educated public if we ended government schools entirely.
Seriously - pretty much everyone I know has noticed that those buttons for crosswalks and the doors on elevators usually don't work, though there are exceptions.
And generally, it irritates us every time it happens.
But we know that the people who maintain these things think we're too stupid to know when we want to cross the street or to close the damn doors on the elevator, so we know there's no point in complaining as they've already given us a big "Screw you!" by their actions.
So, we go on pressing the buttons hoping that this might be one of the occasions where they still work, and curse the bastards that have done this to us.
I did like the post about politicians, though. Yeah, that's becoming obvious, too.
The Soviet Union never imprisoned political dissidents either.
However, being dissatisfied with the glorious leadership of the country was generally evidence of psychological problems, nyet? That would require psychiatric treatment, of course, for their own good.
Does anyone recall the American that set himself on fire in front of the White House to protest public policy? This was maybe about 5 or 6 years ago, IIRC. I never did learn what he was protesting. The media simply reported that he "had a history of psychological problems" and we never heard anything else about it.
Of course, some dissidents in the Soviet Union were also criminals. Perhaps they assumed the guise of legally protected dissidents in order to cover up their crimes - but the secret police are very good at "finding" evidence of crimes, and those criminals had to be jailed, nyet?
China is, in fact, doing a fantastic job. That is not to say that they have arrived at a fair and free society yet - not by far. They still have much farther to go, but they have already come a long way.
The Chinese people, much like the American people, have been fed nationalistic propaganda and are inclined to believe it. The educated classes usually know better than to take that propaganda at face value but still love their country.
That said, there is still widespread dissatisfaction with the Chinese government for many reasons, including its policy of censorship. Even many within the government understand the problems with the system as it is, but having seen such examples as the breakup of the Soviet Union they have chosen stability over freedom. In fact, I partially approve, though I think they could be working their way towards freedom much more quickly. Freedom doesn't mean much if a deeply ignorant public turns it into a free-for-all which turns into violence and millions dead.
And, after all, it's not as if the West is in a great position to criticize: Women have had the vote for less than a century in the United States, effective civil rights for blacks is less than half a century old, and gay rights are still in contention, and other struggles have doubtless not begun. Children's rights in the United States have actually regressed a great deal in the past century - witness the prisons we call public schools.
It is also notable that in this article a Chinese spokesman says "This is an obscenity against the peace prize," because obscenity remains unprotected speech in the United States. The Chinese government simply has a different definition of obscenity than Americans do.
For all that, I see this as a great thing for China and Chinese freedom. External pressure can be very useful in struggles for civil rights. The Soviet Union rightfully criticized the United States for its unequal treatment of blacks, and enough Americans saw the truth and embarrassment of it that they changed. Perhaps most important was that the American people understood the validity of the criticism and demanded change. Among themselves it wasn't such a big deal, but when they saw that the whole world - even the Soviets - could see through their hypocrisy it was just too much. Hopefully now the Chinese people will see the truth of the situation and demand change for the sake of national pride, and maybe Americans and others can learn something from all this too. We still don't have a single free nation in the world - just different shades of freedom.
Um, if they both have the same genes, had the same upbringing and experiences in life, etc., then there's a good chance that if one of them is the best at something the other will also be rather good at it.
If anything, this could be seen as proof of the primacy of genes.
It doesn't appear to be widely known that one of the astronauts who went to the moon, Charles Duke, had an identical twin, Dr. William "Bill" Duke, who remained on earth.
Dr. Duke passed away this year due to lifelong health problems, but if these sorts of experiments were practical surely they could have been done four decades ago.
Charles Duke has jokingly claimed that the hoax theories were spurred by people who saw Bill visit Mission Control while he was on the moon.
It's true that China executes more prisoners than any other country, but the numbers are still relatively small - 14th place per capita when factoring in documented executions. The U.S.A. is 20th, per capita - 7th in raw numbers.
China's 470 executions in a recent year wouldn't even make a dent in the U.S. prison population. Per capita, the U.S. would need about another 120 executions per year to match China's record, and that wouldn't be enough to uncrowd even one typical U.S. prison.
There are several factors here: the war on drugs is one significant contributor. If one includes both inmates who are being held for possession and inmates whose real crimes were only committed as a consequence of the drug war (e.g. they shot a competitor, or robbed someone to pay the inflated price for their fix, or robbed someone after they lost their job because they tested positive for marijuana on a drug test, etc.) then over half the U.S. prison population is there because of the drug war. If we include those who committed other victimless crimes or petty offences we are talking about an overwhelming majority that should never have gone to prison.
Unfortunately, they have gone to prison, and prison makes more prisoners. Once imprisoned, a person is more likely to commit more crimes. Children of prisoners are also much more likely to commit crimes and become prisoners themselves.
That said, most criminals are young men - and most of them age out of criminality. A few do not. They need to be locked up or otherwise prevented from committing more crimes. They are more likely to commit theft than other crimes - these are the people who have long rap sheets with low level offenses, but they are ultimately one of the two groups most damaging to society - the other group being those with poor anger management abilities.
Any attempt at reform will fail if it does not focus on these two most detrimental forms of criminality: violence and theft (including fraud). Even so, we will need to get away from zero tolerance policies - we should not consider a touch as an assault, nor should anyone ever have to feel concerned about the legality of defending themselves or others from attack. Mostly we need a little common sense, which is always in short supply.
This is not correct. Regulars can reload and fire a volley every 12 seconds.
Granted, militia can't be held to the same standards as regulars. These would have been farmers who didn't train with firearms every day, and who would have been hesitant to engage in combat as their presence was required at home. Even so, 70 seconds would have been plenty of time to fire at least 2 volleys.
I will want an override - computer security is already an issue, and I don't want to put my life in the hands of an anonymous cracker - but as a general rule I will be happy to let the car drive itself while I attend to other things en route. Why, I could contribute to/. on my way to get pizza!
Since a real helicopter flight hired for a flight scene in a movie became a real crash that happened to be filmed and was worked into the movie as a scene of a crash caused by tomatoes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRDJ9oyjcMc
Is that surreal enough for you?
This latest crash is also pretty surreal - at least for those of us who grew up in an era when cars didn't drive themselves.
Great idea! I've seldom heard a politician admit the truth, that what we need are pragmatic problem solvers.
Also, my condolences to your friend on losing her next electoral contest.
The people won't countenance a politician refusing to tell them sweet, sweet lies.
I do have one idea, though I'm not sure how it would fit into Canadian politics, but for the U.S. I'd like to see personal representation in the lower house, so that every citizen can choose their own congressional representative, who will vote for their constituents the same way shares are voted at a stockholder's meeting. That way every citizen can have a representative who is accountable to them and no one else.
Unfortunately, there's no way the career politicians will ever let that happen . . . peacefully.
I agree - though as I recall, from, lo, many many years gone by, WordPerfect was a pretty nice little program.
One problem: vi doesn't handle footnotes well, so maybe HTML would be appropriate here. It can still be done within vi, and HTML can handle graphics, too.
On the other hand, vi wouldn't handle Portuguese characters so well. Make them all switch to English!
Well, actually I could reduce this traffic problem with an application of technology, but the original poster said his overarching purpose is to save lives.
But seriously, I visited Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates two years ago, and the drivers there are the worst I've seen anywhere - and I've been a lot of places. They are not merely bad drivers but extremely aggressive drivers. It's like they have a death wish or something - which may be understandable, seeing as they are forced to live with themselves.
Now I'm reflecting on the myriad places I've been and the bad drivers thereof - Lima, Bucharest, Chicago, Washington D.C., Johannesburg, Guayaquil - there were some bad drivers in these places, but there's at least an order of magnitude difference between any of those and Abu Dhabi. If Abu Dhabi resembles other middle eastern cities in terms of traffic, I certainly sympathize with the OP. Still, I don't see a technological solution - at least, not one that lets the bastards live.
You're right about statutory rape being a "strict liability" "crime". I recall reading in the local newspaper a few years back about a middle-aged woman who pretended to be something like 18 or 20 years old and communicated with various men online. Her online conversations showed enough education and maturity that none of the men doubted she was an adult, but she claimed she was very shy in person, so the men weren't suspicious when they met her underage daughter and had sex with her. The mother had even procured a fake driver's license for her daughter, who looked older than her age. The motive was the mother wanting to re-live her youth, and her daughter was just a prop - but when the police found out about it they hunted down all the men they could locate and put them in jail and on the sex offender registry, even though the men in question had multiple reasons to believe this young woman was of age and the young woman cooperated in the ruse. This happened in North Carolina, and if the "crime" had happened 20 years earlier it wouldn't have been a crime, because the age of consent until the late '80's was 13.
Meanwhile, we're willing to prosecute 12 year olds as adults, and in at least one case a 10 year old girl was put on the sex offender registry for life for "playing doctor" - but school officials committing obvious and serious crimes - I mean, spying on children in their own bedrooms for heaven's sake - get a free pass because they work for the government. They are part of the government "family". They belong with the masters, not with the slaves.
As long as it's only one, or a few, bad teachers, this could be true.
However, it most definitely should not be in the first few years of elementary school, especially as in those grades a kid frequently only has one teacher. Kids need a chance to see what a good teacher is like before they run into the idiot that shows them that they should be willing to think for themselves.
Meh. I'd choose no schools before the American public schools anyway.
Naturally, the newspaper in question has a right to do this, and especially if they are a small paper they may feel they don't have the resources available to consistently moderate user comments. Traditionally, newspapers confirmed the identity of people who wrote letters to the editor - which also is helpful in eliminating spoofing.
However, there is certainly a downside. Sometimes, the things that most need to be said require anonymity. When the prevailing dogma - whether secular or religious - precludes the truth, those who wish to speak the truth must take steps to protect themselves. Slashdot has found a pretty good way of reducing the impact of trolls while both preserving anonymity and allowing the use of pseudonyms that allow regular posters to develop a good reputation without revealing their true identity.
I hope and expect that most online media will follow Slashdot's example, rather than the example of the Sun Chronicle.
Don't you know that there are predators waiting on every corner? According to the NCMEC, 1,500,000 children go missing each year!!! (if you count 17 year olds who run away from home multiple times for each escape attempt - an average of 115 if you only count "typical" kidnappings).
But seriously, I recently traveled through South America, and the kids there are like actual human beings. With a little capital and rule of law, they'll go far.
As for North American kids: two words - "opportunity costs".
If Americans had any knowledge of history, you would be getting lots of angry replies to your post. Especially on this July 4th weekend, when for some reason I forget we have some extra time to do such things.
If Britons had any knowledge of history, you would be getting lots of even angrier replies to your post.
I don't know if you'll find this in Wikipedia or not, but when I was in Helsinki last December I was told that some people take a dip in the ocean every day, though only for a minute or two during the winter. I asked how cold the water was, and it turns out that the water in the Baltic Sea is brackish and contains less salt than ocean water, so even when there is ice on the surface the water is still above the freezing point.
There's a modern sculpture in Helsinki that commemorates Sibelius, but it appears that the Finns don't really understand the piece any more than anyone else.
One tour guide expressed surprise that I was not dressed as warmly as the locals, but I was wearing the ball cap that I bought at the South Pole and I figure it was keeping me warm.
The quality of light in Helsinki in December is remarkable, and the sky has such pretty shades of blue and purple - it is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. Arriving by air at night, I looked down on the city and it looked like some undulating, glowing deep water organism. I also visited one day in the summer of 2006, and it was beautiful then, too, but in different ways.
The reindeer meatballs and potatoes sold at the Christmas market downtown were excellent - and, of course, the people are very nice.
Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be . . .
That was a funny article about the difficulties with a foreign language, but truth is it's not much different from any other language. A great deal of communication in English can be transmitted by tone, duration of a vowel, and other things not readily perceived from the written language - even a phonetic spelling.
It's true, and it's not just English. I recently traveled through parts of South America, and most of the locals could understand my bastard Spanish in Argentina, but fewer could understand it in Peru after I had several more weeks of practice. There are many factors, such as how many foreign speakers someone has spoken to (and from which countries), as well as local pronunciation.
Of course, tone in English is seldom used to differentiate between two words with radically different meanings, but it is often used to indicate whether a sentence is a statement or a question, and serious, humorous, or sarcastic. And English has such delightful idiomatic expressions, such that "Slim chance" and "Fat chance" mean the same thing.
On the other hand, "We will raise the barn" and "We will raze the barn" sound exactly the same but have opposite meanings.
All languages, save perhaps Esperanto, are full of contradictions and exceptions. Some may be easier than others, and English is probably more fault tolerant than most, but there is no way to avoid it.
That's not much of an accomplishment, but Scandinavians in general speak pretty good English (with some exceptions). Germans who bother to learn English also tend to have good pronunciation. The best English is spoken by the Dutch. Londoners come in around #27, right behind Glaswegians but ahead of East Indians.
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I graduated from a mid-grade private high school in 1988, and I think most of the students did NOT cheat - at least, not much. In both high school and college instructors would sometimes (but not always) hand out three versions of tests to discourage cheating. However, my sister who attended a public high school reported that cheating was rampant in all her classes - with the teacher often leaving the room during tests and the students openly collaborating.
Cheating seems to be much more common now at all levels of education, but is more common some places than others. As you note, one culprit is the insane demands of modern schools - both in amount and stupidity of material. I remember absolutely detesting make work as a child, and I often simply didn't do it. My grades in 4th grade were terrible as a result. Worse still, one teacher (in 4th grade) alternated between giving us material suitable for college students and material suitable for kindergarteners - it was either so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible, or so far beneath us as to be insulting. On the rare occasions he gave us work at our grade level, it was often boring and repetitive. That is NOT a good learning environment. (On the other hand, I had an excellent science teacher that year.)
The problem is, most modern schools follow that formula across the board: lots of make work, lots of homework, lots of rote memorization. No wonder kids are cheating. If I were in their position I'd probably cheat too. If all you know of history is a list of dates and places, you don't know anything about history - and the students instinctively know it. They don't want to waste their time memorizing lists they're not interested in and will never use. The stuff that interests them, and the stuff they'll actually use, they'll learn. However, all the homework and make work that's piled on these kids displaces the time and energy they need to develop their critical and creative thinking and to learn relevant knowledge. Kids these days aren't stupid, they're educated into ignorance.
A few more notes on cheating: Since college I have gone back to school at several levels: for courses that were primarily for certification, for regular courses at community colleges, and a couple graduate level courses. While I can't say who cheated how much and where, I can say that in virtually every case where a test or a course was primarily about certification, cheating was rampant. So rampant, in fact, that many instructors simply read out the correct answers to the class - sometimes asking everyone to choose one answer to get wrong to make the results look normal. I did not see any cheating in the regular community college courses, but they were also largely hands-on, or were full of older, self-motivated students who wanted to be prepared for a state test that is not easy to cheat on. I didn't notice any cheating in the graduate level courses either, though essay questions are harder to cheat on.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a much wider culture of cheating than when I was in school, and even more unfortunately we have devised a system in which cheating is the only rational choice for most students. At this point, I suspect we would get a better educated public if we ended government schools entirely.
Seriously - pretty much everyone I know has noticed that those buttons for crosswalks and the doors on elevators usually don't work, though there are exceptions.
And generally, it irritates us every time it happens.
But we know that the people who maintain these things think we're too stupid to know when we want to cross the street or to close the damn doors on the elevator, so we know there's no point in complaining as they've already given us a big "Screw you!" by their actions.
So, we go on pressing the buttons hoping that this might be one of the occasions where they still work, and curse the bastards that have done this to us.
I did like the post about politicians, though. Yeah, that's becoming obvious, too.
That's destruction of property and clearly a crime, but pray tell - how do you know their reasons for keying your car? Did they leave you a note?
The Soviet Union never imprisoned political dissidents either.
However, being dissatisfied with the glorious leadership of the country was generally evidence of psychological problems, nyet? That would require psychiatric treatment, of course, for their own good.
Does anyone recall the American that set himself on fire in front of the White House to protest public policy? This was maybe about 5 or 6 years ago, IIRC. I never did learn what he was protesting. The media simply reported that he "had a history of psychological problems" and we never heard anything else about it.
Of course, some dissidents in the Soviet Union were also criminals. Perhaps they assumed the guise of legally protected dissidents in order to cover up their crimes - but the secret police are very good at "finding" evidence of crimes, and those criminals had to be jailed, nyet?
China is, in fact, doing a fantastic job. That is not to say that they have arrived at a fair and free society yet - not by far. They still have much farther to go, but they have already come a long way.
The Chinese people, much like the American people, have been fed nationalistic propaganda and are inclined to believe it. The educated classes usually know better than to take that propaganda at face value but still love their country.
That said, there is still widespread dissatisfaction with the Chinese government for many reasons, including its policy of censorship. Even many within the government understand the problems with the system as it is, but having seen such examples as the breakup of the Soviet Union they have chosen stability over freedom. In fact, I partially approve, though I think they could be working their way towards freedom much more quickly. Freedom doesn't mean much if a deeply ignorant public turns it into a free-for-all which turns into violence and millions dead.
And, after all, it's not as if the West is in a great position to criticize: Women have had the vote for less than a century in the United States, effective civil rights for blacks is less than half a century old, and gay rights are still in contention, and other struggles have doubtless not begun. Children's rights in the United States have actually regressed a great deal in the past century - witness the prisons we call public schools.
It is also notable that in this article a Chinese spokesman says "This is an obscenity against the peace prize," because obscenity remains unprotected speech in the United States. The Chinese government simply has a different definition of obscenity than Americans do.
For all that, I see this as a great thing for China and Chinese freedom. External pressure can be very useful in struggles for civil rights. The Soviet Union rightfully criticized the United States for its unequal treatment of blacks, and enough Americans saw the truth and embarrassment of it that they changed. Perhaps most important was that the American people understood the validity of the criticism and demanded change. Among themselves it wasn't such a big deal, but when they saw that the whole world - even the Soviets - could see through their hypocrisy it was just too much. Hopefully now the Chinese people will see the truth of the situation and demand change for the sake of national pride, and maybe Americans and others can learn something from all this too. We still don't have a single free nation in the world - just different shades of freedom.
Um, if they both have the same genes, had the same upbringing and experiences in life, etc., then there's a good chance that if one of them is the best at something the other will also be rather good at it.
If anything, this could be seen as proof of the primacy of genes.
It doesn't appear to be widely known that one of the astronauts who went to the moon, Charles Duke, had an identical twin, Dr. William "Bill" Duke, who remained on earth.
Dr. Duke passed away this year due to lifelong health problems, but if these sorts of experiments were practical surely they could have been done four decades ago.
Charles Duke has jokingly claimed that the hoax theories were spurred by people who saw Bill visit Mission Control while he was on the moon.
It's true that China executes more prisoners than any other country, but the numbers are still relatively small - 14th place per capita when factoring in documented executions. The U.S.A. is 20th, per capita - 7th in raw numbers.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_exe-crime-executions
China's 470 executions in a recent year wouldn't even make a dent in the U.S. prison population. Per capita, the U.S. would need about another 120 executions per year to match China's record, and that wouldn't be enough to uncrowd even one typical U.S. prison.
There are several factors here: the war on drugs is one significant contributor. If one includes both inmates who are being held for possession and inmates whose real crimes were only committed as a consequence of the drug war (e.g. they shot a competitor, or robbed someone to pay the inflated price for their fix, or robbed someone after they lost their job because they tested positive for marijuana on a drug test, etc.) then over half the U.S. prison population is there because of the drug war. If we include those who committed other victimless crimes or petty offences we are talking about an overwhelming majority that should never have gone to prison.
Unfortunately, they have gone to prison, and prison makes more prisoners. Once imprisoned, a person is more likely to commit more crimes. Children of prisoners are also much more likely to commit crimes and become prisoners themselves.
That said, most criminals are young men - and most of them age out of criminality. A few do not. They need to be locked up or otherwise prevented from committing more crimes. They are more likely to commit theft than other crimes - these are the people who have long rap sheets with low level offenses, but they are ultimately one of the two groups most damaging to society - the other group being those with poor anger management abilities.
Any attempt at reform will fail if it does not focus on these two most detrimental forms of criminality: violence and theft (including fraud). Even so, we will need to get away from zero tolerance policies - we should not consider a touch as an assault, nor should anyone ever have to feel concerned about the legality of defending themselves or others from attack. Mostly we need a little common sense, which is always in short supply.
This is not correct. Regulars can reload and fire a volley every 12 seconds.
Granted, militia can't be held to the same standards as regulars. These would have been farmers who didn't train with firearms every day, and who would have been hesitant to engage in combat as their presence was required at home. Even so, 70 seconds would have been plenty of time to fire at least 2 volleys.
I agree 100%.
I will want an override - computer security is already an issue, and I don't want to put my life in the hands of an anonymous cracker - but as a general rule I will be happy to let the car drive itself while I attend to other things en route. Why, I could contribute to /. on my way to get pizza!
Since a real helicopter flight hired for a flight scene in a movie became a real crash that happened to be filmed and was worked into the movie as a scene of a crash caused by tomatoes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRDJ9oyjcMc
Is that surreal enough for you?
This latest crash is also pretty surreal - at least for those of us who grew up in an era when cars didn't drive themselves.
Great idea! I've seldom heard a politician admit the truth, that what we need are pragmatic problem solvers.
Also, my condolences to your friend on losing her next electoral contest.
The people won't countenance a politician refusing to tell them sweet, sweet lies.
I do have one idea, though I'm not sure how it would fit into Canadian politics, but for the U.S. I'd like to see personal representation in the lower house, so that every citizen can choose their own congressional representative, who will vote for their constituents the same way shares are voted at a stockholder's meeting. That way every citizen can have a representative who is accountable to them and no one else.
Unfortunately, there's no way the career politicians will ever let that happen . . . peacefully.
Huzzah for vi!
I agree - though as I recall, from, lo, many many years gone by, WordPerfect was a pretty nice little program.
One problem: vi doesn't handle footnotes well, so maybe HTML would be appropriate here. It can still be done within vi, and HTML can handle graphics, too.
On the other hand, vi wouldn't handle Portuguese characters so well. Make them all switch to English!
This would actually work, if we could give guns to all the women in the middle east.
Well, actually I could reduce this traffic problem with an application of technology, but the original poster said his overarching purpose is to save lives.
But seriously, I visited Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates two years ago, and the drivers there are the worst I've seen anywhere - and I've been a lot of places. They are not merely bad drivers but extremely aggressive drivers. It's like they have a death wish or something - which may be understandable, seeing as they are forced to live with themselves.
Now I'm reflecting on the myriad places I've been and the bad drivers thereof - Lima, Bucharest, Chicago, Washington D.C., Johannesburg, Guayaquil - there were some bad drivers in these places, but there's at least an order of magnitude difference between any of those and Abu Dhabi. If Abu Dhabi resembles other middle eastern cities in terms of traffic, I certainly sympathize with the OP. Still, I don't see a technological solution - at least, not one that lets the bastards live.
You're right about statutory rape being a "strict liability" "crime". I recall reading in the local newspaper a few years back about a middle-aged woman who pretended to be something like 18 or 20 years old and communicated with various men online. Her online conversations showed enough education and maturity that none of the men doubted she was an adult, but she claimed she was very shy in person, so the men weren't suspicious when they met her underage daughter and had sex with her. The mother had even procured a fake driver's license for her daughter, who looked older than her age. The motive was the mother wanting to re-live her youth, and her daughter was just a prop - but when the police found out about it they hunted down all the men they could locate and put them in jail and on the sex offender registry, even though the men in question had multiple reasons to believe this young woman was of age and the young woman cooperated in the ruse. This happened in North Carolina, and if the "crime" had happened 20 years earlier it wouldn't have been a crime, because the age of consent until the late '80's was 13.
Meanwhile, we're willing to prosecute 12 year olds as adults, and in at least one case a 10 year old girl was put on the sex offender registry for life for "playing doctor" - but school officials committing obvious and serious crimes - I mean, spying on children in their own bedrooms for heaven's sake - get a free pass because they work for the government. They are part of the government "family". They belong with the masters, not with the slaves.
The United States rots from the inside.
As long as it's only one, or a few, bad teachers, this could be true.
However, it most definitely should not be in the first few years of elementary school, especially as in those grades a kid frequently only has one teacher. Kids need a chance to see what a good teacher is like before they run into the idiot that shows them that they should be willing to think for themselves.
Meh. I'd choose no schools before the American public schools anyway.
One more reason to like New Zealand. Sensible people, those Kiwis.
Naturally, the newspaper in question has a right to do this, and especially if they are a small paper they may feel they don't have the resources available to consistently moderate user comments. Traditionally, newspapers confirmed the identity of people who wrote letters to the editor - which also is helpful in eliminating spoofing.
However, there is certainly a downside. Sometimes, the things that most need to be said require anonymity. When the prevailing dogma - whether secular or religious - precludes the truth, those who wish to speak the truth must take steps to protect themselves. Slashdot has found a pretty good way of reducing the impact of trolls while both preserving anonymity and allowing the use of pseudonyms that allow regular posters to develop a good reputation without revealing their true identity.
I hope and expect that most online media will follow Slashdot's example, rather than the example of the Sun Chronicle.
Don't you know that there are predators waiting on every corner? According to the NCMEC, 1,500,000 children go missing each year!!! (if you count 17 year olds who run away from home multiple times for each escape attempt - an average of 115 if you only count "typical" kidnappings).
But seriously, I recently traveled through South America, and the kids there are like actual human beings. With a little capital and rule of law, they'll go far.
As for North American kids: two words - "opportunity costs".
If Americans had any knowledge of history, you would be getting lots of angry replies to your post. Especially on this July 4th weekend, when for some reason I forget we have some extra time to do such things.
If Britons had any knowledge of history, you would be getting lots of even angrier replies to your post.
""Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think."
It doesn't mean to adjust your hat?
Somebody best tell Robbie Burns he got it wrong!
I don't know if you'll find this in Wikipedia or not, but when I was in Helsinki last December I was told that some people take a dip in the ocean every day, though only for a minute or two during the winter. I asked how cold the water was, and it turns out that the water in the Baltic Sea is brackish and contains less salt than ocean water, so even when there is ice on the surface the water is still above the freezing point.
There's a modern sculpture in Helsinki that commemorates Sibelius, but it appears that the Finns don't really understand the piece any more than anyone else.
One tour guide expressed surprise that I was not dressed as warmly as the locals, but I was wearing the ball cap that I bought at the South Pole and I figure it was keeping me warm.
The quality of light in Helsinki in December is remarkable, and the sky has such pretty shades of blue and purple - it is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. Arriving by air at night, I looked down on the city and it looked like some undulating, glowing deep water organism. I also visited one day in the summer of 2006, and it was beautiful then, too, but in different ways.
The reindeer meatballs and potatoes sold at the Christmas market downtown were excellent - and, of course, the people are very nice.
Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be . . .
That was a funny article about the difficulties with a foreign language, but truth is it's not much different from any other language. A great deal of communication in English can be transmitted by tone, duration of a vowel, and other things not readily perceived from the written language - even a phonetic spelling.
Suuuure, you're saying. Or, Yeeeaaaaah, Riiiiiight!
It's true, and it's not just English. I recently traveled through parts of South America, and most of the locals could understand my bastard Spanish in Argentina, but fewer could understand it in Peru after I had several more weeks of practice. There are many factors, such as how many foreign speakers someone has spoken to (and from which countries), as well as local pronunciation.
Of course, tone in English is seldom used to differentiate between two words with radically different meanings, but it is often used to indicate whether a sentence is a statement or a question, and serious, humorous, or sarcastic. And English has such delightful idiomatic expressions, such that "Slim chance" and "Fat chance" mean the same thing.
On the other hand, "We will raise the barn" and "We will raze the barn" sound exactly the same but have opposite meanings.
All languages, save perhaps Esperanto, are full of contradictions and exceptions. Some may be easier than others, and English is probably more fault tolerant than most, but there is no way to avoid it.
That's not much of an accomplishment, but Scandinavians in general speak pretty good English (with some exceptions). Germans who bother to learn English also tend to have good pronunciation. The best English is spoken by the Dutch. Londoners come in around #27, right behind Glaswegians but ahead of East Indians.