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litfreak: don't pay through your nose to get that OED subscription - use the NUS
lib account! Lib page -> databases -> search by title -> OED
Since litfreak did not leave a return email address or URl, I shall have to respond here: I went to the library page but didn't find the OED. Do I have to do it in campus?
[Addendum: She with dyed hair and an attitude problem but disavows the title of "ah lian" has kindly sent me the link: https://libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/login?url=http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl]
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NUS is ranked 18th top university in the world by 1300 academics from 88 countries (click on: Graphic: World's top universities at the bottom)
I suppose it's because one of their criteria was: "a university's success in attracting foreign students". Since we import PRCs, Vietnamese and Indians by the
People are expressing their disbelief:
"nus is ranked better than columbia. this must be a sick joke"
"Come on, NUS ahead of Columbia...piece of BS...must have bribed the paper or something..."
"nus is above cornell eh
wah above cmu also
better than ivy league schools arh
then why do government give scholarship to the brightest brains to go abroad and study
why not study here in singapore at better uni
muahaha"
Update: Since the Times has decided to be a bitch and remove a link to the short ranking from their page (though it is still available if you know the URL), I have, ah, procured the full ranking breakdown for your perusal. (http://sky.prohosting.com/gssq/misc/unis.htm)
NUS only scored 46/100 in the International Students Score, whereas LSE got 100/100 and Imperial College London got 51/100, so no, it's not just that we import PRCs by the truckload.
NUS
Peer review score (the best institutions in the fields the academics felt knowledgeable about): 266/1000
Int'l faculty score (success in attracting internationally renowned academics): 35/100
Int'l students score (success in attracting foreign students): 46/100
Student/faculty score (ratio of faculty to student numbers): 10/400
Citations/faculty score (amount of cited research produced by faculty members): 18/400
Final score: 385.9/1000
NB: This is the Times of UK, not the Straits Times.
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Faith at Work
Don Couchman, a dentist in Colorado who has made his dental practice a workplace ministry, related a story not long ago about how in the middle of performing a root canal, the Lord spoke to him and told him to go on a pilgrimage to Argentina. I interrupted to ask how he knew it was the Lord. ''The sheep know the shepherd's voice,'' he said. (Some workplace Bible-study groups, including those at the Riverview bank, feature training in how to distinguish between God's voice and random thoughts.)
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A novel perspective on the caste system:
This brings us to the Hindu concept of caste. On no other score is Hinduism better known or more roundly denounced by the outside world. Caste contains both point and perversion. Everything in the discussion of this subject depends on our ability to distinguish between the two.
How caste arose is one of the confused topics of history. Central, certainly, was the fact that during the second millennium B.C, a host of Aryans possessing a different language, culture, and physiognomy (tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired) migrated into India. The clash of differences that followed burgeoned the caste system, if it did not actually create it. The extent to which ethnic differences, color, trade guilds harboring professional secrets, sanitation restrictions between groups with different immunity systems, and magico-religious taboos concerning pollution and purification contributed to the pattern that emerged may never be fully unraveled. In any event the outcome was a society that was divided into four groups: seers, administrators, producers and followers.
Let us record at once the perversions that entered in time, however they originated. To begin with, a fifth group - of outcastes or untouchables - appeared. Even in speaking of this category there are mitigating points to be remembered. In dealing with her lowest social group, India did not sink to slavery as have most civilizations; outcastes who in their fourth stage of life renounced the world for God were regarded as outside social classifications and were revered, even by the highest caste, the brahmins, from Buddha through Dayananda to Gandhi, many religious reformers sought to remove untouchability from the caste system; and contemporary India's constitution outlaws the institution. Still, the outcaste's lot through India's history has been a wretched one and must be regarded as the basic perversion the caste system succumbed to. A second deterioration lay in the proliferation of castes into subcastes, of which there are today over three thousand. Third, proscriptions against intermarriage and interdining came to complicate social intercourse enormously. Fourth, privileges entered the system, with higher castes benefitting at the expense of the lower. Finally, caste became hereditary. One remained in the caste into which one was born.
With these heavy counts against it, it may come as a surprise to find that there are contemporary Indians, thoroughly familiar with Western alternatives, who defend caste - not, to be sure, in its entirety, especially what it has become, but in its basic format. What lasting values could such a system possibly contain?
What is called for here is recognition that with respect to the ways they can best contribute to society and develop their own potentialities, people fall into four groups. (1) The first group India called brahmins or seers. Reflective, with a passion to understand and a keen intuitive grasp of the values that matter most in human life, these are civilization's intellectual and spiritual leaders. Into their province fall the functions our more specialized society has distributed among philosophers, artists, religious leaders, and teachers; things of the mind and spirit are their raw materials. (2) The second group, the kshatriyas, are born administrators, with a genius for orchestrating people and projects in ways that makes the most of available human talents. (3) Others find their vocation as producers; they are artisans and farmers, skillful in creating the material things on which life depends. These are the vaishyas. (4) Finally, shudras, can be characterized as followers of servants. Unskilled laborers would be another name for them. These are people who, if they had to carve out a career for themselves, commit themselves to long periods of training, or go into business for themselves, would founder. Their attention spans are relatively short, which makes them unwilling to sacrifice a great deal in the way of present gains for the sake of future rewards. Under supervision, however, they are capapble of hard work and devoted service. Such people are better off, and actually happier, working for others than being on their own. We, with our democratic and egalitarian sentiments, do not like to admit that there are such people, to which the orthodox Hindu replies: What you would like is not the point. The question is what people actually are.
Few contemporary Hindus defend the lengths to which India eventually went in keeping the castes distinct. Her proscriptions regulating intermarriage, interdining, and other forms of social contact made her, in her first prime minister's wry assessment, "the least tolerant nation in social forms while the most tolerant in the realm of ideas." Yet even here a certain point lies behind the accursed proliferations. That proscriptions against different castes drinking from the same source were especially firm suggests that differences in immunity to diseases may have played a part. The presiding reasons, however, were broader than this. Unless unequals are separated in some fashion, the weak must compete against the strong across the board and will stand no chance of winning anywhere. Between castes there was no equality, but within each caste the individual's rights were safer than if he or she had been forced to fend alone in the world at large. Each caste was self-governing, and in trouble one could be sure of being tried by one's peers. Within each caste there was equality, opportunity, and social insurance.
Inequalities between the castes themselves aimed for due compensation for services rendered. The well-being of society requires that some people assume, at the cost of considerable self-sacrifice, responsibilities far beyond average. While most young people will plunge early into marriage and employment, some must postpone those satisfactions for as much as a decade to prepare themselves for demanding vocations. The wage earner who checks out at five o'clock is through for the day; the employer must take home the ever-present insecurities of the entrepreneur, and often homework as well. The question is partly whether employers would be willing to shoulder their responsibilities without added compensation, but also whether it would be just to ask them to do so. India never confused democracy with egalitarianism. Justice was defined as a state in which privileges were proportionate to responsiblities. In salary and social power, therefore, the second caste, the administrators, rightly stood supreme; in honor and psychological power, the brahmins. But only (according to the ideal) because their responsibilities were proportionately greater. In precise reverse of the European doctrine that the king could do no wrong, the orthodox Hindu view came very near to holding that the shudras, the lowest caste, could do no wrong, its members being regarded as children from whom not much should be expected. Classical legal doctrine stipulated that for the same offense "the punishment of the Vaishya [producer] should be twice as heavy as that of the shudra, that of the kshatriya [administrator] twice as heavy again, and that of the brahmin twice or even four times as heavy again." In India the lowest caste was exempt from many of the forms of probity and self-denial that the upper castes were held to. Its widows might remarry, and proscription against meat and alcohol were less exacting.
Stated in modern idiom, the ideal of caste emerges something like this: At the bottom of the social scale is a class of routineers - domestics, factory workers, and hired hands - who can put up with an unvaried round of duties but who, their self-discipline being marginal, must punch time clocks if they are to get in a day's work, and who are little inclined to forego present gratification for the sake of long-term gains. Above them is a class of technicians. Artisans in preindustrial societies, in an industrial age they are the people who understand machines, repair them, and keep them running. Next comes the managerial class. In its political wing it includes party officials and elected representatives; in its military branch, officers and chiefs-of-staff; in its industrial arm, entrepreneurs, managers, board members, and chief executive officers.
If, however, society is to be not only complex but good, if it is to be wise and inspired as well as efficient, there must be above the administrators - in esteem but not in pay, for one of the defining marks of this class must lie in its indifference to wealth and power - a fourth class, which in our specialized society would include religious leaders, teachers, writers, and artists. Such people are rightly called seers in the literal sense of this word, for they are the eyes of the community. As the head (administrators) rests on the body (laborers and technicians), so the eyes are placed at the top of the head. Members of this class must possess enough willpower to counter the egoism and seductions that distort perception. They command respect because others recognize both their own incapacity for such restraint and the truth of what the seer tells them. It is as if the seer sees clearly what other types only suspect. But such vision is fragile. it yields sound discernments only when carefully protected. Needing leisure for unhurried reflection, the seer must be protected from overinvolvement in the day-to-day exigencies that clutter and cloud the mind, as a navigator must be free from serving in the gallery or stoking in the hold in order to track the stars to keep the ship on course. Above all, this final caste must be protected from temporal power. India considered Plato's dream of the philosopher king unrealistic, and it is true that when brahmins assumed social power, they became corrupt, for temporal power subjects its wielder to pressures and tempations that to some extent refract judgment and distort it. The role of the seer is not to crack down but to counsel, not to drive but to guide. Like a compass needle, guarded that it may point, the brahmin is to ascertain, then indicate, the true north of life's meaning and purpose, charting the way to civlization's advance.
Caste, when it has decayed, is as offensive as any other corrupting corpse. Whatever its character at the start, it came in time to neglect Plato's insight that "a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale; for an oracle says 'that the state will come to an end if governed by a man of brass or iron.'" As one of the most thoughtful recent advocates of the basic idea of caste has written, "we may expect that the coming development will differ chiefly in permitting intermarriage and choice or change of occupation under certain conditions, though still recognizing the general desirability of marriage within the group and of following one's parents' calling." Insofar as caste has come to mean rigidity, exclusiveness, and undeserved privilege, Hindus today are working to clear the corruption from their polity. But there remain many who believe that to the problem no country has yet solved, the problem of how society ought to be ordered to insure the maximum of fair play and creativity, the basic theses of caste continue to warrant attention.
--- Smith, Huston, (Excerpts from the chapter "Hinduism" in) The World's Religions, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.
