Letter of the week: Judge's creative use of words lauded - "As a retired journalist and former court reporter, I applaud senior law correspondent Selina Lum for picking up this judicial gem by Justice Aedit Abdullah (Judge: Drug trafficker who escaped gallows trying to delay caning, June 4). He was quoted as saying: "Given the absence of any semblance of a shadow of a phantom of a minuscule, ephemeral mote of any merit in the present application, the applicant could not have had any expectation or genuine belief in the possibility of a successful claim.""
Doctor responds to council after amputee denied Blue Badge - "Ben Perry shared the email his doctor sent to the Worcestershire County Council, in England, on Twitter after it informed Mr Perry he didn’t qualify for a disability parking permit. That was despite Mr Perry’s leg being amputated by a car that struck him in 2018 after he pulled over to help at the crash site of another vehicle... “I was most surprised to be asked for a statement of fact regarding Ben’s disability. I can assure you that he has indeed had a traumatic amputation of his right lower leg in a road traffic accident,” the letter read. “This has left him severely debilitated with chronic phantom limb syndrome and perpetual pain in his stump, which on some days allows him to be independently mobile, and other days leaves him unable to walk independently. “I would be grateful if you could take this into account when dealing with his requests for Blue Badges in the future. “It is of course unlikely that this situation will change unless medical science allows us to regrow a new leg for him.”"
Meme - "So in my roommates lab, one of her classmates has a service dog and apparently service dogs also have to wear lab gear Y'all... just look how cute this is:"
Meme - "Isn't it weird how we pay money to see other people?"
"you mean prostitution, concerts or the movies?"
"glasses"
Meme - "Oregon man driving stolen car crashes into woman driving another stolen car"
"This is the romantic comedy want to see this summer"
Dr. David S. Anderson on Twitter - "I am once again asking for you to understand that children exist."
*Sumerian bas relief depicting adults and children, with the adults labeled as giants*
Geico must pay $5.2 million to woman who got HPV from sex in man's insured car, court rules
Gravestone With Profane Hidden Message Enrages Board - "A headstone in Warren-Powers Cemetery in Polk County, Iowa, was meant to memorialize Steven Owens, but its hidden message sparked anger. "Forever in our hearts / Until we meet again / Cherished memories / Known as / Our brother, / Father, papa, uncle, / Friend, and cousin," reads the engraving on one side of the headstone for Steven Paul Owens... because of how the words were spaced, the phrase "F**k Off" is spelled out vertically on the gravestone in an obscene acrostic... Lindsay Owens, Steven Owens's daughter, said her father often said, "F**k off" in a joking manner. "It was definitely his term of endearment," Lindsay told KCCI. "If he didn't like you, he didn't speak to you. It's just who he was.""
Meme - Omniscient Orb of Pancakes @OmniscientOf: "renting and returning ten books a day from my local library while subtlety increasing the size of my cranium with latex and makeup until they say something"
Why the Music in the Live Action Disney Remakes is Worse than you Thought - YouTube
The effects of exercise variation in muscle thickness, maximal strength and motivation in resistance trained men - "Varying exercise selection had a positive effect on enhancing motivation to train in resistance-trained men, while eliciting similar improvements in muscular adaptations."
Kobe Bryant, Wife 'Would Never Fly on Helicopter Together': Source - "Bryant previously shared that he began using helicopters while he still played for the Los Angeles Lakers as a way to spend more time with his family — and less time stuck in traffic."
The Ideal Iceland May Only Exist in Your Mind
This is so American, down to the dissing of Americans
Man hires woman to slap him every time he's on Facebook - "Maneesh Sethi, a San Francisco blogger who believes that he needs to be less socially networked and more capitalistically productive. So, as he says on his own Hack The System blog, he went on Craigslist and hired someone who would slap him every time he veered toward Facebook... He felt he was spending too much time on Facebook and Reddit -- some 6 hours a day, it seems"
Zombie Ideas in Education - "(Un)Dead Idea #1: Students Have Different Learning Styles
(Un)Dead Idea #2: Students Learn Best Through Unguided Discovery
(Un)Dead Idea #3: Students Should Learn to Read Through Authentic Reading
(Un)Dead Idea #4: Students Don't Need Facts, Just Critical Thinking Skills
(Un)Dead Idea #5: If It's Worth Teaching, It's Worth Grading
(Un)Dead Idea #6: Smaller Classes Are Better
This last zombie idea is hard to kill because it's true—at least in theory. Students are better off in small classes. A comprehensive review of class-size research (Whitehurst & Chingos, 2011), for example, concluded that significant reductions in class size (shrinking classes by as much as 7–10 students per class) can result in significant, positive effects on achievement—equivalent to three months of improvement in learning over a nine-month school year. The trouble lies, though, in applying this finding in the real world. California learned that the hard way in the late 1990s when it spent $22 billion to reduce average K–3 class sizes from 30 to 20, hiring 25,000 new teachers and constructing thousands of new classrooms. The results? Students benefitted from smaller classes, but the benefits were wiped out by an influx of seemingly less capable teachers (Jepsen & Rivkin, 2009). In the end, teacher quality has far more effect on student learning than smaller class sizes. Students can gain as much as a year's worth of additional learning in a classroom with a highly effective teacher than with a highly ineffective one (Hanushek, 2011). In fact, school systems might actually be better off increasing class sizes to be able to recruit and retain great teachers with higher pay"
What I learned eating at 8,000 Chinese restaurants - "Mr Chan, a 72-year-old former tax lawyer based in Los Angeles, claims to have dined at nearly 8,000 Chinese restaurants across the US and counting. Each is archived in a spreadsheet that he has maintained for four decades, along with thousands of restaurant business cards and menus... Though he is the descendant of grandparents who immigrated to California from China's Guangdong province, Mr Chan did not eat Chinese food as a child. And when he first tried Chinese fare, he was not impressed at all. "The food was not sophisticated," Mr Chan recalled of his first Chinese meals in the 1950s. "We would go to banquets, I'd eat soy sauce on rice, and nothing else."... Cantonese food, which is known for its bite-sized dim sum dishes, uses light seasoning so that the natural flavours of ingredients can sing. Fujianese cuisine often features seafood served in a broth - the province lies on a coast. Sichuanese food, meanwhile, is famous for dishes heavy on numbing peppercorns and fiery red chillies... Today, there are more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants across the US, more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy's outlets combined, according to an estimate by the Chinese American Restaurant Association."
China: Man banned from all-you-can-eat BBQ for eating too much - "The man, known only as Mr Kang, told Hunan TV that he was banned from the Handadi Seafood BBQ Buffet in Changsha city after a series of binges. He ate 1.5kg of pork trotters during his first visit and 3.5kg to 4kg of prawns on another visit... "Every time he comes here, I lose a few hundred yuan," he said. "Even when he drinks soy milk, he can drink 20 or 30 bottles. When he eats the pork trotters, he consumes the whole tray of them. And for prawns, usually people use tongs to pick them up, he uses a tray to take them all." He added that he is banning all live-streamers from the restaurant... the Chinese government started cracking down on eating influencers, and such videos may be banned altogether in the country. It came after President Xi Jinping called on people to "fight against food waste" amid rising concerns over food shortages."
I sound like what in Japanese? - "Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang – the things not taught in the classroom – by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend. I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman. Grammar and syntax aside, Japanese men generally speak in shortened huffs, while women tend to speak in artificially high octaves, elongating their word endings in an almost coquettish attempt to flatter the listener. I didn't realize this at the time, though, because my contact with Japanese men was fleeting... Japanese acquaintances, eager to compliment anyone who can say a few words in their language, would constantly say "Josu dane!" or "Your Japanese is really good!" With this frequent flattery, which the Japanese, especially the women, have mastered, my ego eventually became airborne. But what I didn't know was that people around me were actually laughing. Not maliciously, but sort of as if I were a gaijin peto, or foreign pet... Because the Japanese tend to avoid any form of confrontation, my girlfriend would never correct me. That is, until one day in an ice-cream shop when she couldn't take it anymore. She snapped, "Don't say it that way – you sound like a girl!" referring to my choice of words to describe the ice cream we were sharing... her friends had often snickered when I referred to myself in the third person, as many Japanese women and girls do, and when they heard me end sentences with the particle "wa," which is usually used by women to soften the tone of a sentence. Most of all, she said, I needed to take the pitch of my voice down several notches from the tone I had learned. The solution, of course, was to hang out with more Japanese guys. But for me, a freelance journalist with a part-time job and daily Japanese classes to attend, I had little time for new friends. Besides, Japanese men, unlike their friendly female counterparts, are often inaccessible. They generally work 12 hours at a stretch and afterward go out in tight-knit, impenetrable groups. My girlfriend once tried to recruit a few male coworkers to teach me better Japanese but had little success. They were either too busy or just too exhausted. No help came from my teachers – they were all women and were hesitant to correct me anyway. There were no Japanese men working at my baito, or part-time job, either. And textbooks do not often clarify the difference between men's and women's vocabulary. Some teach a few things, but most do not get into the finer points or advanced terminology used separately by men and women... Some people would be honest, but many weren't, telling me my Japanese was fine. I asked some people point blank if my Japanese was joseiteki, or girlish. Some giggled knowingly, but no one would come out and say it."
Language Log: The perils of mixing romance with language learning - "'one of the reasons I finally gave up speaking to my (Japanese) wife in Japanese was that she found my speech mannerisms too effeminate and eventually--after a couple of years of marriage--told me that those mannerisms lessened her respect for me. Only toward the end of my eight years there did I finally achieve the level of competence in the language--and the familiarity with its idioms and nuances--that allowed me to appreciate just how jarring and childish my own speech often sounds.'"
Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education. - "“universities see master’s degree programs as largely unregulated cash cows that help shore up their bottom line”...
Probably the biggest scam in higher education remains one-year certificates offered by shady for-profit colleges that cost, like, $25,000 and don’t lead to a job. Master’s degrees are probably No. 2... One of the reasons that universities are able to be exploitative in the master’s degree market is because they’re not constrained in the same way that they are in the market for bachelor’s degrees. If you’re offering bachelor’s degrees, they all have to be four years long. You don’t have a two-year bachelor’s degree or a six-year bachelor’s degree. You have to publicly publish your acceptance rates, your average SAT scores, so to the extent that you’re selling selectivity, you actually have to back it up with data, whereas in the master’s degree market, you can call almost anything a master’s degree. Master’s degree programs do not have to publish their admission statistics, which creates, I think, an enormous temptation for institutions that have very attractive brand names, that are attractive in no insignificant part because their undergraduate programs are very selective, to open up the floodgates on the master’s side and pay no penalty in the market because people don’t know they’re doing it... The Obama administration promulgated these regulations called the gainful employment rule, which only applied to for-profit colleges or programs that were specifically job-oriented at nonprofit schools. It’s pretty simple. It just looks at how much money people borrow from a program and how much they earn after they finish. If the debt is so much bigger than the earnings that students could never pay their loans back, that’s bad. Harvard University, when this regulation was first put in place, had an MFA program that showed up as being bad under the gainful employment regulations. I wrote about it in the New York Times. Only because the program happened to be affiliated with a drama school that was sort of Harvard-adjacent, because of this quirky legal status, they were subject to these new regulations and the numbers looked just as bad as the ones from Columbia that we saw last week: Lots and lots of debt for very little earnings because, news flash, there’s not a lot of money in being a stage actor, particularly early in your career, or probably any point in your career... Anyone who reads about how we have $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loan debt should always keep in mind that almost half of all new student loans in particular are for graduate school, not for undergraduate. You hear somebody that’s got $200,000 or $300,000 in debt, they almost surely went to graduate school... We need a stronger regulatory hand in the master’s degree market. One, I would put a cap on how much money you can borrow to go to graduate school. I would put a cap on how much of your graduate school loans can be forgiven under any kind of loan forgiveness program, so we’re not in this situation of unlimited money, because I think unlimited money is a moral hazard. We need more transparency around how selective are graduate programs, how effective are they in helping people get jobs in their field and pay their loans back, and we need to regulate programs around their effectiveness. We can’t just rely on the market to provide all of the quality discipline that master’s programs need. I think it’s completely reasonable to say that if a master’s degree program consistently induces students to borrow far more money than they can ever afford to pay back, the federal government should not be in the business of lending those students money."
Liberal logic is going to be that education benefits society, so graduate school must be free too
Of course libertarians will blame government regulation for all of this
Who Says No Tutors and Less Homework Is Bad? Many Chinese Parents - WSJ - "Nannan had to say goodbye to his tutors after China overhauled the industry in July as part of a wider campaign to rein in private businesses that leaders saw as exacerbating inequality. Authorities said they didn’t want parents spending so much money on tutoring and wouldn’t tolerate what in effect was becoming an alternative education system. The new regulations are known as “double reduction” because they are aimed at lessening the amount of tutoring and homework. They banned tutoring as it was practiced and set up new rules—including requiring any remaining tutoring programs to register as nonprofits—that made it impractical for them to continue. The rules also ordered primary schools to stop assigning homework for lower grades and eliminate some exams to reduce worrying among students and parents. Yet for many Chinese parents, the new rules have only created more anxiety. With or without tutors, children must still pass demanding tests for admission into top secondary schools and universities, leaving many parents unsure what to do now to help their children succeed. Richer families are finding workarounds for the new rules, including hiring teachers to move in with them full time as nannies, raising the risk that middle-class children whose parents can’t afford such luxuries will fall further behind... One advertisement, now banned alongside all academic tutoring promotions, read, “Let us cultivate your child; or else we’ll only cultivate your child’s competitors.” Some parents spent the equivalent of about $16,000 a year for outside tutoring... Known in the academic world as “shadow education,” private tutoring has also troubled other governments. South Korea banned its tutoring industry for two decades in hopes of easing family burdens and promoting equality, but it lifted the ban in 2000 after its policy failed to significantly curb demand... Some parents arranged informal underground networks, sending their children to tutoring sessions in which only one family at a time knew the location of the meetings to reduce the risk for the tutor."
Meme - "I'VE EATEN YOUR HOMEWORK
AND NO ONE WILL BELIEVE YOU
NO ONE."
Duke Study: Homework Helps Students Succeed in School, As Long as There Isn't Too Much - "Duke University researchers have reviewed more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and concluded that homework does have a positive effect on student achievement. Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology, said the research synthesis that he led showed the positive correlation was much stronger for secondary students --- those in grades 7 through 12 --- than those in elementary school... Cooper said the research is consistent with the "10-minute rule" suggesting the optimum amount of homework that teachers ought to assign. The "10-minute rule," Cooper said, is a commonly accepted practice in which teachers add 10 minutes of homework as students progress one grade"
This won't stop people continuing to claim it is useless. Maybe they just hate work, period
Study finds parental help with homework has no impact on student achievement - ""There is no statistically significant association between parental help with homework in elementary school and children's achievement, period," said Katerina Bodovski, professor of education (educational theory and policy). Bodovski is lead author of a new paper, "Parental Help With Homework in Elementary School: Much Ado About Nothing?" that was recently published in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education. The study, which draws on two nationally representative datasets, showed no statistically significant association between parental help with homework and student achievement. Further, the association between parental help with homework and achievement did not vary by parental level of education or child's achievement level... a number of studies, including an article by University of Delaware Professor Laura Desimone, have demonstrated a negative impact of parental help with homework on children's achievement. The negative relationship has been explained by the fact that parents tend to help struggling children and that their efforts were not enough to overcome the students' deficiencies... the researchers suggest three possible mechanisms that may negate the potential benefits of parental help with homework: cognitive loss, adverse effects on home emotional climate and deferred responsibility."
Damn advantages that rich kids have over poor ones that are purely due to SES!
School bans teachers from using 'good' or 'bad' to describe pupil behaviour - "A school has banned teachers from using the words “good” and “bad” to describe pupil behaviour in a bid to “take the emotional heat” out of managing discipline. Instead, teachers at Loughborough Amherst School – an independent school in Leicestershire for children aged four to 18 – are asked to describe behaviour as “skilful or unskilful”... In 2017, Dr Murphy scrapped traditional school reports because he felt “emotive” effort grades made some pupils feel insecure, while the reports themselves were filled with dishonest “politician’s speak”. He also banned the use of “inspirational” messages and posters in school with phrases such as “you can do anything”, claiming they put too much pressure on young people."
Popularity at school linked to age position in class – study - "Researchers surveyed more than 13,000 teenagers aged 14-15 in England, Sweden and the Netherlands on who they thought was the most popular in their class and compiled a popularity score for each pupil in the classroom linked to their birth month (“past relative age”) as well as their age position in their class (“current relative age”). The analysis found that relative age – on either measure – affects popularity... these gaps can strongly affect educational outcomes: children who are relatively young when they enter school do not tend to go to university as much as their older peers. Other studies have also linked relatively younger children to lower rates of self-esteem and higher mortality rates by suicide."
'Total failure of our education system' — The far left is winning the hearts and minds of today's youth, poll shows - "The survey also showed increasing concern about a potential second term for President Donald Trump in the November elections, with 34% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials viewing him as the greatest threat to world peace, up 8% and 7% from 2019, respectively. “It shocks the conscience that more Americans today believe the U.S. president is a bigger threat to world peace than the most brutal dictators in the world, and that four-in-ten Americans believe that their country is a ‘racist’ nation,” Smith said. As for as the coronavirus pandemic, 39% of Gen Z and 32% of millennials believe that Trump is more responsible than China’s president Xi Jinping."
Cornwall pub receives framed apology from Vogue magazine - "The Star Inn at Vogue pub in Cornwall had been asked to change its name by Vogue magazine's publishers as it might "cause problems""
Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny - "Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug. The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do". "Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said... The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago."
The Effect of House Prices on Fertility: Evidence from Canada - "The price of housing is an important and under-studied candidate for consideration in fertility decisions. Theoretically, higher housing prices will cause renters to have fewer additional children, and home owners to have more children if they already have sufficient housing and low substitution between children and other “goods”, and fewer children otherwise. In this paper, we combine longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour Income and Dynamics (SLID) and housing price data from the Canadian Real Estate Association to estimate the effect of housing price on fertility. We follow non-moving women aged 18-40 (with their associated families) over time to ask whether changes in lagged housing price affects marginal or total fertility. For home owners, we find that lagged housing prices are positively associated with marginal fertility using pooled cross section or fixed effects, negatively associated with total fertility under pooled cross section, but positively associated using fixed effects. For renters, lagged housing prices are not significantly negatively associated with either total or marginal fertility measures."
House Prices and Birth Rates: The Impact of the Real Estate Market on the Decision to Have a Baby - "This project investigates how changes in Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)- level housing prices affect household fertility decisions. Recognizing that housing is a major cost associated with child rearing, and assuming that children are normal goods, we hypothesize that an increase in house prices will have a negative price effect on current period fertility. This applies to both potential first-time homeowners and current homeowners who might upgrade to a bigger house with the addition of a child. On the other hand, for current homeowners, an increase in MSA-level house prices will increase home equity, leading to a positive effect on birth rates. Our results suggest that indeed, short-term increases in house prices lead to a decline in births among non-owners and a net increase among owners. The estimates imply that a $10,000 increase leads to a 5 percent increase in fertility rates among owners and a 2.4 percent decrease among non-owners. At the mean U.S. home ownership rate, these estimates imply that the net effect of a $10,000 increase in house prices is a 0.8 percent increase in current period fertility rates. Given underlying differences in home ownership rates, the predicted net effect of house price changes varies across demographic groups. In addition, we find that changes in house prices exert a larger effect on current period birth rates than do changes in unemployment rates. This project investigates how changes in Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)- level housing prices affect household fertility decisions. Recognizing that housing is a major cost associated with child rearing, and assuming that children are normal goods, we hypothesize that an increase in house prices will have a negative price effect on current period fertility. This applies to both potential first-time homeowners and current homeowners who might upgrade to a bigger house with the addition of a child. On the other hand, for current homeowners, an increase in MSA-level house prices will increase home equity, leading to a positive effect on birth rates. Our results suggest that indeed, short-term increases in house prices lead to a decline in births among non-owners and a net increase among owners. The estimates imply that a $10,000 increase leads to a 5 percent increase in fertility rates among owners and a 2.4 percent decrease among non-owners. At the mean U.S. home ownership rate, these estimates imply that the net effect of a $10,000 increase in house prices is a 0.8 percent increase in current period fertility rates. Given underlying differences in home ownership rates, the predicted net effect of house price changes varies across demographic groups. In addition, we find that changes in house prices exert a larger effect on current period birth rates than do changes in unemployment rates."
Facebook - "the hipsterification of Singapore hawker food is complete - there is now an option to add smoked salmon to one’s rojak. 🤦🏻♂️ mind, the basic rojak was excellent. crunchy goodness!"
Meme - Guy: "I beat women, rob banks.and do drugs!"
Everyone: "What's wrong with you?"
Guy: *turns it into a rap song*
Everyone: *moving body along*"
Meme - "If you're anti gun, you don't get to celebrate the 4th of July. You would have never fought back. Enjoy pride month. Pussy."
Best comment I saw: "If you’re a conservative you don’t get to celebrate the 4th of July. You would never have gone against traditional values of loyalty to the King."
How could JKR have ended the Harry Potter books that would have most pissed you off? : harrypotter - "The final scene is Harry sat in a therapists office, in a psychiatric ward. The therapist tries to convince Harry, yet again, that he needs to face the reality that his parents died in a car crash. That watching it happen and then being raised by his cruel aunt and uncle who locked I'm in a cupboard under the stairs often, gave him severe mental illness, delusions of grandeur and hallucinations. That this whole 'wizard school' doesn't exist, and he needs to face the truth. Harry stands, shouts 'stupefy!' while pointing a pen at the therapist, before grabbing the broom in the corner of the room, leaping out of the window with it between his legs, and plummeting 40 feet to his death."
JK Rowling’s battle to make the Harry Potter films ‘100 per cent British’ - " It's a well-worn muggle joke – that every British actor will eventually get a part in the Harry Potter films. But 20 years after the first movie – marked last weekend by a reunion special – Britishness feels absolutely essential to the series’ $7.7 billion success. JK Rowling may have been largely absent from the reunion, but fans can thank her for maintaining the books’ integrity on the big screen. Ahead of the first film – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, released in November 2001 – fans of the books feared they wouldn't recognise the version of Harry Potter seen on screen. But the author insisted on a Brits-only casting rule and valiantly saw off attempts to Americanise Harry Potter. Even the mighty Steven Spielberg dropped out, reportedly due to Rowling's “steely grip over the movie”... she wanted assurances that any sequels would follow her own books – she feared a “Harry Does Las Vegas” style spin-off... Rowling sold the film rights for a reported £1 million. She was protective from the outset, admitting that she was “ready to hate” screenwriter Steve Kloves: “This was the man who was gonna butcher my baby.” Kloves, however, thought Rowling was “the greatest asset”. She sat in on pre-production meetings and read every draft of the script... Rowling insisted that the cast was British or Irish and that the film was made in Britain. British film industry representatives flew out to the US for talks – to negotiate and ensure the film’s production here... The “Brits only” rule was so steadfast that Columbus turned down major Hollywood stars. Robin Williams – a self-confessed Potter fan – called Columbus and lobbied to play Hagrid... One American did get a role: the director's daughter, Eleanor Columbus. But she was banned from talking. “She worked about 80 days,” Columbus said. “But she never spoke because you know the rule was if you’re not British, you can’t speak.”... Tilda Swinton was rumoured to play Professor Trelawney, a role that went to Emma Thompson. Swinton later let her feelings known about boarding schools – including Hogwarts. “I think they are a very cruel setting in which to grow up and I don't feel children benefit from that type of education,” Swinton, who boarded at West Heath Girls' School, told The Scots Magazine. “Children need their parents. That's why I dislike films like Harry Potter, which tend to romanticize such places.”"