Views: Why Are SMart People Usually Ugly?

	By Daniel Engber | Posted Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, at 6:52 PM ET Slate.com Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly? An answer to the Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year. Jean-Paul Sartre and Socrates were known for their brains and not their looks—at least not the good kind. Illlustration by Charlie Powell. It's been a few weeks since we posted the questions that the Explainer was either unwilling or unable to answer in 2011. Among this year's batch of imponderables were inquiries like, Are the blind sleepy all the time? and Does anyone ever get a sex change back? We asked our readers to pick the question that most deserved an answer in the Explainer column. Some 10,000 of you were able to register a vote, and the winning question is presented below. But first, the runners-up: In third place, with 6.6 percent of the total votes, a bit of speculative evolutionary biology: Let's say that a meteor never hits the earth, and dinosaurs continue evolving over all the years human beings have grown into what we are today. What would they be like? In second place, with 7.5 percent, an inquiry into pharmacokinetics: Why does it take 45 minutes for the pharmacy to get your prescription ready—even when no one else is waiting? And in first place, with the support of 9.4 percent of our readers, the winner by a landslide and Explainer Question of the Year for 2011: Why are smart people usually ugly? I get this isn't always the case, but there does seem to be a correlation. Attractiveness doesn't predict intelligence (not all ugly people are smart), but it seems like intelligence can be a good predictor for attractiveness (smart people are usually on the ugly side). Keep in mind, I have nothing against people who are really brilliant, I've just always wondered. The answer: They’re not. Oh, how the Explainer loves a false premise. When it comes time to assemble the year-end list, he'll always give extra credit to questions that are predicated on blatant untruths. In 2010, for example, someone wanted to know why athletes never sneeze. In 2009, a reader asked, Why is it always funny to put something on your head as a pretend hat? But this year's winning question isn't merely ill-posed; it gets the truth exactly backward. The idea that an ugly face might hide a subtle mind has attracted scientific inquiries for many years. At first, scientists wanted to know whether it was possible to read someone's intelligence from the shape of his face. In 1918, a researcher in Ohio showed a dozen photographic portraits of well-dressed children to a group of physicians and teachers, and asked the adults to rank the kids from smartest to dumbest. A couple of years later, a Pittsburgh psychologist ran a similar experiment using headshots of 69 employees from a department store. In both studies, seemingly naive guesses were compared to actual test scores to see if they were ever accurate.* Many such studies followed, and with consistent results: You can learn something about how smart someone is just by looking at a picture. But scientists couldn't figure out where that information might have been hiding in the photographs. The Ohio researcher said that some of his subjects were "greatly influenced by the pleasant appearance or smile, but for some the smile denotes intelligence and for others it denotes feeble-mindedness." The author of the follow-up in Pittsburgh wondered if the secret of intelligence might not be lurking in "the lustre of the eye." While some researchers pondered this question, a Columbia University psychologist named Edward Thorndike made another, related discovery. In 1920, Thorndike published his theory of the "halo effect," according to which subjects, when asked to describe someone's various qualities, tend to "[suffuse] ratings of special features with a halo belonging to the individual as a whole." If they were describing the person's physique, for example, along with his bearing, intelligence, and tact, they would assign high or low ratings across the board. Later studies confirmed that the halo effect could arise from a simple photograph: If someone looks handsome, people tend to assume that he's smarter, more sociable, and better-adjusted, too. Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone's intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent? Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests. When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size. From this, Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion, as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they are. The story does have some caveats and complications. First, a few other studies have come up with different results. A recent look at yearbook photos from a Wisconsin high school in 1957 found no link between IQ and attractiveness among the boys, but a positive correlation for the girls. Another researcher, Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University, noticed that the looks-smarts relationship applies only to the ugly side of the spectrum. It's not that beautiful people are especially smart, she says, so much as that ugly people are especially dumb. Then there's the fact of Kanazawa's having gotten into trouble last spring for asserting—using the same dataset and similar methods to those described above—that African-American women are objectively "far less attractive" than whites, Asians, or Native Americans. (He later acknowledged some flaws in his analysis.) So, getting back to the original question, the bulk of the evidence suggests that smart people are not "usually ugly." In fact, the opposite seems to be true: Either smart people are more beautiful than average, or dumb people are more ugly (or both). And while no facial features within the normal range could ever be that useful as a predictor of intelligence, people can perform better than you’d expect from random chance using nothing more than a head shot. All of which leaves one great, unanswered question. If smart people tend to be good-looking, that might explain the halo effect. But what led our questioner to get things backward and assume that smart people were ugly? And why are there so many like-minded others, asking the same question—or its inverse—around the Internet? (Here's one, and one more.) Aren't we all familiar with the archetypical nerd, who is both ugly and smart? At the opposite end, what about all those beautiful, airheaded women and beefy, brainless men we see on television? Could the person who wrote in with the 2011 Question of the Year be succumbing to a bias that hasn't yet been documented in the lab—a sort of halo effect in reverse, a "horns effect," perhaps? French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 1957 STF/AFP/Getty Images. Ugly geniuses aren't uncommon in history, of course, and while these anecdotes tell us nothing about the population as a whole, the memory of people who were famously hideous and brilliant might have an outsize influence on our judgments. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was short, bespectacled, and wall-eyed. ("I cannot even decide whether [my face] is handsome or ugly," says one of his characters in Nausea. "I think it is ugly because I have been told so.") Ancient sources tell us that the great philosopher Socrates had thinning hair, flared nostrils, widely-spaced eyes, a thick neck, slobby shoulders, and a pot belly. Ludwig van Beethoven was ugly and smelled bad; Abraham Lincoln's face struck the poet Walt Whitman as being "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful." In addition, Kanazawa points out that a closer look at the data reveals an interesting fact: The very ugliest people in his dataset are dumber on average, but they also tend to be the most diverse when it comes to intelligence. That means that if you're at the low end of the spectrum for looks, you're more likely than anyone else to be at one extreme end for IQ (either very dumb or very smart). If that's the case, then it might provide another reason why Sartre and Socrates types stick out in our minds. We know (consciously or not) that ugly people tend to be a little dim; but at the same time, there are more brilliant brutes running around than we might expect. For his part, Kanazawa rejects the notion of the horns effect—he doesn't believe the smart-and-ugly stereotype exists at all. (Indeed, it has never been shown in the lab.) Instead, he says, we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy, and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills. Since people with social skills are attractive, there could be an indirect link between at least one kind of "attractiveness" and intelligence. But if you're looking at pure "beauty," as measured by rating photographs or measured facial features, then intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand. Bonus Explainer: Why might intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand? There are a few different theories. First, it might be that some common genetic factor produces both smarts and beauty. Or maybe there's a combination of genes that make people both dumb and ugly. Kanazawa thinks it's the former, arguing that intelligent men have tended to rise to the top of the social hierarchy and select beautiful women as their mates. Their offspring, contra George Bernard Shaw's supposed quip, would have had both traits together. Another theory holds that certain environmental factors in the womb or just after birth can produce both facial disfigurements and cognitive impairments on one side, or facial symmetry and high intelligence on the other. A third suggests that attractive children are treated better, and receive more attention from their caretakers and teachers, which helps to nurture a sharper mind. It's also possible that smart people are better able to take care of themselves and their looks. Explainer thanks Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, Joshua Knobe of Yale University, Alina Simone, author of You Must Go and Win, and Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University. * * * Good news: After years of hiding out in the Explainatorium like a banished superhero, answering submitted questions from deep inside the fortress, the Explainer has decided to soar out into the world, pen in hand, to spread peace and understanding among the column's faithful. And so we present a new, occasional feature on Slate: the Explainer House Call. Do you have a family disagreement over some fact or pseudo-fact? Are you stuck in an endless argument with an annoying co-worker or a friend? Have your attempts to Google your way out of it only pushed you both into the filter bubbles of the Internet? Worry no more: The Explainer will be your arbiter and your savior, an avenging angel of argument, slinging thunderbolts of pure reason and drenching your squabbles in the heavy rain of explanation. How does one qualify for this personal Explainer service? To get a house call, and have the Explainer resolve your special beef in Slate, you must first gain the support of your peers. What factual matter has been driving you and your friend/spouse/coworker bonkers in recent weeks? Post a short summary on or with the hashtag #ExplainerHouseCall. Then we'll ask the members of Explainer Nation to vote for the dispute that's most deserving of the Explainer's attention.      (Winners: Please note that the Explainer will not actually visit your house.) Correction, Jan. 12, 2012: The original overstated the magnitude of the results of the Ohio and Pittsburgh studies.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2012/01/are_smart_people_ugly_the_explainer_s_2011_question_of_the_year_.html

News: Singapore's Language Battle - British ENglish or American English?

Dear All,

Singapore is in a dilemma: to continue to use the Queen's English which  the citizens have been taught all this while or to adopt the American English which is so prevalent in the business and entertainment world.

Lee Kuan Yu seems to have have his mind made up to go along with the current trend of adopting the American style of the English language for all its citizens.

My personal view is Singapore such stick with its British English. The reason being is that Singapore English (and also Malaysian English) is accent less or spoken English which is relatively clear of accent. This has been verified when I meet foreign speakers of the English language who can identify from which part of the world we are from and they will compliment us on the clarity in our speech and communication.

Anyway, here's the write up on this issue.

Rodney Tan
--------------------------------------

Singapore’s language battle: American vs ‘the Queen’s English’

By reddotrevolver Sep 07, 2011 10:23PM UTC

Known as a country in Southeast Asia with a highly educated workforce, Singapore is also one of the only countries in the region that uses English as a working language, and as a medium of instruction in schools. The ease of communication has established the country as the headquarters in Asia for many multinational companies.

A report by the Educational Testing Services (ETS) based on data from Jan-Dec 2010 shows that Singapore came in third in TOEFL (The Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores out of 163 countries. It is the only Asian country in the top three.

However, students in Singapore are taught in British English, or ‘the Queen’s English’, since elementary school. To Singapore’s former Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, this poses a serious and imminent challenge.

According to Channel NewsAsia, Lee said:

“There is an intense worldwide competition for talent, especially for English-speaking skilled professionals, managers and executives. Our English-speaking environment is one reason why Singapore has managed to attract a number of these talented individuals to complement our own talent pool.

“They find it easy to work and live in Singapore, and remain plugged into the global economy. Singapore is a popular educational choice for many young Asians who want to learn English, and they get a quality education. This has kept our city vibrant.”

Mr Lee said one of the challenges ahead is to decide whether to adopt British English or American English.

He said: “I think the increasing dominance of the American media means that increasingly our people, teachers and students will be hearing the American version, whether it is ‘potatoes’ or ‘tomatoes’. They will be the dominant force through sheer numbers and the dominance of their economy.

“I believe we will be exposed more and more to American English and so it might be as well to accept it as inevitable and to teach our students to recognise and maybe, to even speak American English.”

Lee added that “communication skills” will be one of the most valuable qualities to possess in the twenty-first century.

Be it fashion, music, food or movies, American popular culture has had a pervasive influence on Singaporean society, as the adoption of the American slang has made its way to the lexicon of Singapore English. However, in official documents, and even in text messages, British spelling is used. Yet, a good command of English is a good command of English, regardless of whether it is written in British spelling or spoken with an American accent. Perhaps American investors will appreciate an American accent when speaking to Singaporean businessmen, but Americans have long done business with their British counterparts who have thick British accents. To be able to be understood by the other party is still what remains the most imperative.

Source: http://asiancorrespondent.com/64353/singapores-language-battle-american-vs-queens-english/#disqus_thread

 

News: Falser Words Were Never Spoken

Dear All,

This short article warns us that many pithy sayings which were attributed to well-known personalities may not be what they had actually said.

So, we need to take such sayings with a pinch of salt. They may be relevant and wise but may not be what was actually said by the attributed contributor.

Rodney Tan
--------------------------------

Falser Words Were Never Spoken

By BRIAN MORTON  August 29, 2011

Bronxville, N.Y.

IN a coffee shop not long ago, I saw a mug with an inscription from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

At least it said the words were Thoreau’s. But the attribution seemed a bit suspect. Thoreau, after all, was not known for his liberal use of exclamation points. When I got home, I looked up the passage (it’s from “Walden”): “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Now Thoreau isn’t quite saying that each of us can actually live the life we’ve imagined. He’s saying that if we try, we’ll come closer to it than we might ordinarily think possible. I suppose that the people responsible for the coffee mug would say that they’d merely tweaked the wording of the original a little. But in the tweaking, not only was the syntax lost, but the subtlety as well.

Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug.

Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.

When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

My favorite example of the fanciful quotation is a passage that’s been floating around the Internet for years. It’s frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and said to be an excerpt from his 1994 inaugural address.

“Our deepest fear,” the passage goes, “is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others. It’s hard to imagine it without laughing. Of course, it turns out it’s not actually an excerpt from this or any other known address of Mr. Mandela’s. In fact, the words aren’t even his; they belong to a self-help guru, Marianne Williamson.

Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.

But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Brian Morton, the director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of the novels “Starting Out in the Evening” and “Breakable You.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html?_r=1&smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=OP-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-FWW-083011-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

News: Discarding the Salutation "Dear" in Emails.

Dear Readers,

The salutation "Dear" which is usually used in writing letters whether formal or informal is slowly being discarded in electronic communication such as SMS, emails and Twitter.

There are reasons for discarding but there are others who would maintain the convention.

Read the article below to come to our own conclusion.

As for me, I'm slowly discarding the use of the salutation "dear" for the sake of brevity.

But there are times, because of  what I was taught and for reasons of uncertainty, I will still use that salutation.

What do you think dear readers?

Rodney Tan
-----------------------------------------------

THE A-HED

JANUARY 6, 2011

Hey, Folks: Here's a Digital Requiem For a Dearly Departed Salutation


Writers of Emails and Texts Find a Too-Tender Greeting a Comedy of Manners

By DIONNE SEARCEY

When Abraham Lincoln wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, after a key victory during the Civil War, he began his letter, "My dear General."

When Giselle Barry emailed a throng of reporters recently to tell them about an important development regarding her congressman boss, she started the message, "Hey, folks."

Like many modern communicators, Ms. Barry, a spokeswoman for Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has nixed the salutation "dear" in her emails.

"Dear is a bit too intimate and connotes a personal relationship," she said.

Ms. Barry said she wants to keep her business communications with the press at "the utmost and highest level of professionalism."

Across the Internet the use of dear is going the way of sealing wax. Email has come to be viewed as informal even when used as formal communication, leaving some etiquette experts appalled at the ways professional strangers address one another.

People who don't start communications with dear, says business-etiquette expert Lydia Ramsey, "lack polish."

"They come across as being abrupt," says Ms. Ramsey, who founded a Savannah, Ga., etiquette consultancy called Manners That Sell.

"It sets the tone for that business relationship, and it shows respect," she says. "Email is so impersonal it needs all the help it can get."

But to Kevin Caron, the word dear seems girlie. While he may begin an occasional email to a female family member with dear, Mr. Caron, a sculptor in Phoenix, would never use it when writing a man, even a client.

Kevin Caron

"Guys talking to guys—I'm sorry, that's against the code," says Mr. Caron, a 50-year-old former trucker and auto-repair-shop worker.

Dear isn't in Mr. Caron's business lexicon at all, he says. He begins an email to a client with "salutations" or "good morning" or sometimes "to whom it may concern."

"I feel dear is a little intimate for someone I don't know," says Mr. Caron.

The art of proper salutations in communications has been debated through the centuries.

In his 11th-century "Flores Rhetorici" (or Flowers of Rhetoric), the Italian cardinal Alberic of Monte Cassino implored his students to use this guide for a salutation in letters:

"First we must consider the identity of the sender and of the person to whom the letter is sent; we must consider whether he is noble or common in rank, a friend or an enemy, then what kind of person he is and of what background."

The same guidelines apply in business email today, says Joyce Walker, an English professor at Illinois State University in Normal.

Rarely would anyone use dear when writing a friend, but it might be appropriate when applying for a job or emailing a boss, she says.

The salutation 'Dear' is going the way of the hand-written letter. WSJ's Dionne Searcey and Digits' Lauren Goode talk about the phenomenon.

"How formal you are in your email might be based more on the actuality of the writing situation," Ms. Walker says.

On her blog, the author Amy Tan has mused about evolving salutations she has noticed in her inbox.

"Dear Amy Tan" is from eBay or PayPal, telling me I have either paid for something or should pay for it. 'Hey Amy' is only from someone I know well enough to hug," she wrote. "No salutation is from my husband, my assistant, my friends I am in touch with everyday. Familiarity breeds lack of hello, hey, and dear."

Etiquette experts, knowing that salutations set the tone for correspondences, say that dropping a greeting and using only a name can seem cold.

Using "hey" can seem too familiar.

Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, who runs the Syntax Training business writing school in Seattle, says she tells clients they can forgo dear in email but must keep it in business letters.

"We don't use dear because someone is dear to us," she says, "but because we understand the standards of business writing and recognize the standards of intelligent business people."

The Emily Post Institute says it's OK in general to drop dear but advises using it in particularly formal email.

"I don't think it's as important as it used to be," says author and institute spokeswoman Anna Post, the great-great granddaughter of etiquette guru Emily Post. "You can still certainly use it. If you don't know someone well, or for a new client, I would absolutely use dear."

Chris Allison, a 36-year-old international-trade analyst, says he uses dear only when he doesn't mean it.

"I find that I am most likely to start a letter with 'dear' exactly when the recipient is least dear to me, probably because I have never met the person," says Mr. Allison, who lives in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, he is more familiar, starting an email with "Hi."

For Hal Reiter, chairman and chief executive of headhunter Herbert Mines Associates, abandoning dear is all about speed.

------------------------------------------------------------
Discuss

“ Dear Sir or Madam, Generally speaking, I'd like to offer my sincere apologies for attempting to confer a basic level of respect for you. In deference to the changing times, I have now adopted Fozzie bear's trademark "How a'yaaaaaaaaaaaaa?" ”

—Charles Mc Manus

If he uses the word at all when corresponding with clients, he drops it after the first email in the chain.

"It has to do with how fast we want to type and get it done," says Mr. Reiter, who also uses an auto signature that automatically types "Thanks a lot, Hal" at the end of each email.

Some people prefer to stick to the old niceties. Lynn Ducommun, of Manhattan, says she usually uses dear in her email communications. "Probably because I'm a dinosaur, my emailing to me is equivalent to writing a letter or a note," she says.

She admits to sometimes signing off with "xo," meaning "hugs and kisses."

These days, even the current Dear Abby rarely uses dear. When writing a friend, she says, she is more inclined to write, "Hi, sweetie."

"We live in an age of technology, and things are going to evolve, and it's a good thing," says Jeanne Phillips, who writes the advice column founded by her mother.

It especially strikes Ms. Phillips as being disingenuous to use dear when writing someone you don't particularly like. "Sometimes it's polite to refrain from saying everything you're thinking," she says.

Write to Dionne Searcey at dionne.searcey@wsj.com

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved


This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit


www.djreprints.com

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576060044212664436.html?KEYWORDS=requiem



President Abraham Lincoln writing to his wife.
Correspondence styles have changed since 1860, when
Abraham Lincoln addressed this letter to
Mary Todd Lincoln 'Dear Wife.'

 

Views: Importance of Grades Overshadows Social Competence

Dear All,

This letter below from an undergraduate shows a maturity of thought that is not often observed by high scoring CGPA students in the collegesor even universities.

In our nation's rush to elevate such individuals, we often forget the "soft skills". Even at the selection and interview level, many prospective employers will like to see how the individual is able to communicate and sell himself or herself. Such ability would indicate the ability of the person to also promote the company, a project or a policy.

Read the letter below to appreciate the wisdom of emphasizing soft skills besides having a decent CGPA average.

As an educator, I wish my students would be able to understand this and to also strive for good results in their exams and assignments. Many times I have to push and to spoon feed them because part of the reason is they view the teacher as a knowledge giver instead of a facilitator.

Rodney Tan Chai Whatt

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Importance of grades overshadows social competence



THU JAN 27, 2011

My whole life, all I've ever heard is how important it is to get good grades for that all-important Grade Point Average in college. In high school, my grades would affect my high school GPA, giving me the opportunity to not only apply to certain colleges, depending on the strength of my GPA, but to also receive money from scholarships. However, I feel the need to mention that the GPA isn't necessarily as important as everyone makes it out to be.

Do not misunderstand me, please. A student's GPA is very important to overall academic success. A higher GPA grants awards and honors, and many scholarships require certain levels of GPA. These two facts alone make the GPA very important.

Yet I can't seem to feel like this becomes the sole focus of many students, and they forget how important other aspects of growing up in this world can be, such as developing personality, skill, organization, and pride, or simply living life in

In one of my classes, we were required to prepare a short speech, selling ourselves to the class as a worthy team member for a group project: an "Elevator speech." It was not a hard assignment — it had no written portion, was only two minutes in length and included a resume we had to hand out. However, I couldn't help but feel that several students in the class faltered with their speeches, bringing me to my current assessment on the importance of GPA.

More than once, a student would stand up, pass out the glowing resume (which usually had a wonderful GPA on it), and present a considerably short speech that was clearly improvised and not prepared in the slightest. The speech barely described the student's ability and made it clear that, since the speech was not for a grade, the student did not care to represent him/herself well.

At this point, a contradiction enters my mind: why would a student with such a high GPA prepare a lackluster speech on such an easy topic as telling people what kind of person he/she is? My own GPA is nothing to be proud of (2.9), yet I presented a fully prepared speech to tell the other students I'm competent, sociable, able to converse, creative, and have some general common sense. Why the drastic difference with these "smarter" students?

While not the most neutral example, this situation represents to me the overrated altar the Grade Point Average has been placed upon. It is important to do well in school and achieve high grades, however these students showcase a disregard in personal pride, preparedness, enthusiasm, and overall personality when a grade is not a concern. While some of these qualities are arguably important to a high GPA, clearly they get lost in the struggle for good grades.

Life is so much bigger than a Grade Point Average. After college, it's hardly going to matter outside the scope of one's career. There is so much more to enjoy: family, friends, hobbies, love, mistakes, and everything else the world has to offer. It's important not to forget about these things, or you may lose yourself in the process.

It seems that it can be very easy to get soaked up into your GPA and all the hard work it requires to get that wonderful job and career, but try to not lose yourself, and all that you have to offer the world, in the process.

Mitch Harp

junior in marketing

mharp@utk.edu


Source: http://utdailybeacon.com/opinion/letters/2011/jan/27/importance-grades-overshadows-social-competence/

 

Punctuation: To double space or not? That is the question

Dear All,

The issue of whether to single space or double space after a fullstop has become a debatable issue after an article appeared in The Globe and the Mail.

I've just been made to realise that the old school of typwriting would double space after each fullstop. But with the advent of computers, a single space would be sufficient.

For reasons why both conventions have been adopted, please read the article below and if you want to hear the many comments about this issue, please go to the link after the aticle.

Rodney

P.S.  I normally single space after each fullstop. Saves one less stroke and a single space stop does not look much different than a double spaced stop.
------------------------------------------------------
Russell Smith: On Culture

To double space or not? That is the question

RUSSELL SMITH
Columnist profile
E-mail

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011 4:30PM EST
Last updated Friday, Jan. 21, 2011 4:40PM EST


Why there is an Internet, reason No. 3579: Where else could a passionate debate about how many spaces to type after a period grow to occupy hundreds of pages of text? It would simply be too costly to print and distribute these polemics on paper, but the level of detail and passion in the argument is still fascinating and revealing. I wonder how we ever got on without nerd blogs.



Why is every typographer in North America arguing about spaces and periods online right now? The fire was lit by Farhad Manjoo, a writer for Slate.com, who recently wrote an essay complaining that some people still do what they were taught in 1970s typing classes, and insert two spaces after every period. Manjoo says, with a strange fury, that this practice is not only aesthetically unattractive, but “totally, completely, utterly and inarguably wrong” (whatever “wrong” means – it appears he is making the leap, for unarticulated reasons, from the aesthetic realm to the moral).



Why the sudden fixation with archaic typography? Because of the WikiLeaks scandal, of course. Manjoo was reading some of Julian Assange’s recently leaked e-mails to a young lover. And he was struck not only by the gooey poetry of them, but also by the now strange convention of double spacing after a period. Manjoo was incensed that a guy so familiar with computers would cling to an obsolete tradition.



To remind you of what that tradition looks like, the following paragraph embraces it.



Manjoo is right, of course, that current convention has abandoned the double space after a period. And it is because of computers.  When we typed on typewriters we had to use monospaced type – that is, type that allocated the same space for every letter.  That type ends up looking loose – a word with i’s in it, for example, will look a bit spaced out.  So an extra space is added just to make the ends of sentences more clear.  But computers are able to use proportional fonts – fonts that automatically adjust their spacing depending on the letters.  (The exception is Courier.)  Double spaces after periods are no longer necessary, and they break the text up with holes.   They also take up valuable space in a tight medium such as this.  They are no longer taught as imperative to writing business letters or anything else.  In fact, HTML automatically reformats text for browsers to remove the double spaces.  (See how funny this looks?)



It turns out, however, the debate is far from simple. People – especially those over 40 who were taught to type in high school – feel emotional about the past. Thousands of comments followed the post. Some of them said they added two spaces – or even taught their innocent high-school students to do so – simply because that is how they learned, and they couldn’t change now. The debate even made it to the online pages of The Atlantic. The most articulate and eloquent dissent came from a technology blogger called Tom Lee, who waxed poetic about Manjoo’s “bullying” prescriptions: “It’s disrespectful to let writing’s constituent elements bleed into one another through imprecise demarcations.”



What is beautiful about these debates is that they evolve, almost always, from minutiae into larger issues. At stake here is really the arbitrariness of so many rules of writing. We respect most of them merely for the sake of consistency. Think, for example, about the vexed question of the serial comma – that’s the comma that you might or might not put before the last element in a list (“we bought apples, cheese, and machine guns”). It is sometimes accepted by journals and sometimes not. There is no good reason, other than tradition, to put it in or to omit it.



Tom Lee also attacks, amusingly, the authority that typographers attempt to impose on lay people: Typographers are “... drunk on the awesome power of their proportional fonts, and sure of the cosmic import of the minuscule kerning decisions that it is their lonely duty to make.” This is the kind of intelligent obsession with the microscopic that can only flourish in cyberspace.



I am curious about how many readers also want to rebel against the typographers. Do you still use two spaces after a period (and what do you think of the serial comma, too)? Tell me at rsmith@globeandmail.com.



© 2011 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/russell-smith/to-double-space-or-not-that-is-the-question/article1876000/

After the original article appeared, it provoked national interest in Canada and the author of the article summarised his findings in this next article. To read it, please go to:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/russell-smith/a-nation-of-language-obsessives-has-roared/article1883391/

News: Abuses of Facebook by Students Towards Their Teachers and School

Many teachers would have a Facebook account to stay in touch with family and friends.

Some Facebooks are created for the sole purpose of interacting with students and for ELT purposes.

These would be the positive aspects of using Facebook.

However, there are times that this wonderful innovation is abused by students who are out to put down teachers, administrators and the school. What should an educator do then?

Already such abuses have been reported in the Malaysian media.

Below is an article about the negative experiences that actually occured in a Middle East country.

Rodney Tan

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The writing on the wall


For disgruntled students, Facebook has become a forum for expressing their frustrations with teachers - but many argue the insults go too far.

By Dafna Arad

These days, it isn't only classmates attacking each other on the Facebook social networking site. Schoolchildren have also discovered that juicy virtual lemonade can be squeezed out of any sourpuss teacher. The increasing levels of disrespect and violent behavior seen in classrooms are now reinforced via targeted attacks on Facebook.

Even if the vitriol expressed on the site doesn't warrant a panic attack, it's impossible to look the other way given the extent of the phenomenon.

"Apparently one of the students filmed me during the course of a lesson and uploaded it on Facebook. I felt humiliated," relates a junior high school teacher form the center of the country.

Teachers who find out about these hurtful Web pages generally choose one of two reactions.

The standard, educational course involves a reprimand, a meeting with parents and the suspension of any students involved.

The more extreme response: contacting the police and filing a suit. The Education Ministry has not yet formulated procedures for addressing the problem.

Dr. Carmel Weissman of the SMART Family Foundation Communications Institute, who specializes in the connection between media and culture and wrote her doctorate on the blogs of teenage girls, explains that the repercussions of such behavior do not end in the school.

"When speech becomes written publication, it comes under the law prohibiting slander, but go try to apply the law to blogs, online comments or Facebook pages," she says. "The legal reality will have to deal differently with the implications of an [online social] network, and we will also have to get used to speech no longer being temporary or evanescent."

Just before the start of the current school year, veteran Nes Tziona high school teacher Merav Amdursky discovered that her students had opened a Facebook group called "Merav Amdursky - Wait for June 20."

The page included harsh posts put up by her students - posts containing death threats and virulent language.

The agitated teacher first contacted the police and subsequently decided to sue 10 of her students for slander, for the sum of NIS 30,000 each.

"We are living in a very violent society. As part of my educational work and as part of my civic [duties] I contacted the police, because I too am afraid," Amdursky said worriedly during an interview with Channel 2 News, explaining why she had taken such stringent steps. "There have already been cases abroad in which children have gone into their school and sprayed students and teachers with submachine guns."

The specific Facebook page in question has of course been deleted, but research conducted for this article revealed that there are still traces of activity against Amdursky on the website.

The recipe: Acetone + a lighter

For administrators, who try to quell discipline problems and maintain a positive environment for students, the school's image is one of their top priorities. But the battle to improve the image of a school has its limits.

Teachers say they refrain from joining Facebook, despite their curiosity, because they are not interested in revealing their private lives to the plethora of students on the site.

However, this reluctance also keeps them in the dark in terms of exposure to the extensive and unhindered activity conducted against them.

As of last week, 120 students were members of the group "I also Think it's Necessary to Burn Sha'ar Hanegev School!!!" One recommended the following recipe: "Acetone + a lighter + school = No school!!!"

The principal of Sha'ar Hanegev High School, Aharon Rothstein, was surprised to hear that such abusive activity was still going on.

"This is at least the third time I've encountered an invective page on Facebook directed against the school or related parties," he said. "On the previous occasions, the things said were even harsher and more targeted, but were done on a smaller level. As a means of punishment we brought in the police, we called in the students' parents and at a certain point we halted studies."

'Like' as therapy

There are many examples on Facebook of active, public groups one can join, where members can add fuel to the fire by uploading pictures and videos or writing cruel comments and curse words. For members of a group that bashes one high school gym teacher, the Facebook "Like" feature serves as therapy.

"Aren't you fed up with her yelling at you for no reason?! Insulting you?! I'm fed up with her fitness and her butt-face... It's time to resist and join the group," wrote one girl. "I feel like making her run around the school until she dies, the carcass."

Another group called "If we Reach 1,000 People, the Gym Teacher Buys Normal Clothes!!!" has 630 members. Endless discussions about a certain teacher's clothing take place on this page. For example: "He is improving, he has started coordinating colors," wrote one girl.

"His ugly clothes are simply in the laundry, so this week he came dressed alright," another commented.

"He improved after he saw that, compared to the number of Facebook friends he has, four times as many people want him to change his outfits," another student posted.

'May the school burn down, amen'

It is not only students in the public school system who go home in the afternoon to the bosom of Facebook. Many students in the religious sector, too, have found the site to be an effective forum on which to express their dissatisfaction with the academics and authority figures at school - in this case, the rabbis.

In a group opened under the name of a religious school in Ashdod, members wrote a collection of comments like "May the [school] shut down," and "What do you mean, shut down? May it burn down. Amen!"

"May the son of a bitch principal be burned and die," another student wrote.

"Hahaha .. He is seeing this now, you jerk," one friend replied, but the first boy does not let up: "Let him see it, the son of a bitch."

On the Facebook "Wall" of another group created by students at a religious elementary school, members list reasons why the teacher should be thrown in jail.

"A ) He abuses us. B ) He steals watches. C ) He hits children. D ) He was born," one student posted.

Another student invites his classmates to come to Room 2B and sign a petition for the teacher's dismissal.

For the profile picture of the group, which has 69 members, the children chose the image of a small red devil.

Lecturers at Israeli institutions of higher education are also at the mercy of embittered students, who just like the elementary schoolchildren have opened disparaging pages.

A lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, for example, found out one day that she was a member of Facebook.

Because she had never signed up to join the social network herself, she looked into the situation and found a profile in her name that depicted her in an unflattering way.

A moment after making the chilling realization that her identity had been stolen, she discovered a Facebook group called "The Association for the Cancellation of Typography," where she found extensive correspondence between some of her students after they had received their course grades.

Harsh words against the lecturer were published on the page, with curses and particularly creative images, as one might expect from design students.

The students who had posted insults were called before the school's disciplinary committee and punished in accordance with their contributions to the page. Three students were suspended for a semester; other students were suspended for four weeks. The less active members of the group received various punishments or warnings.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/the-writing-on-the-wall-1.337642

Poem: Are You Still Playing Your Flute? (original Malay version)

Dear Readers,

Below I have included the original Malay version by the poet, Zurinah Hassan.

A controversy has been brewing recently. The final 4th verse with 3 lines of the English version was NOT included in the school textbook edition. Why this was left out is unknown. 

Another controversy is the gross discrepancy between the English and Malay version in Stanza 3 Line 4. The poet herself says that it was not her fault. It was a typo error by the publisher.

For more details of this second controversy, go to: http://engoasis.blogspot.com/2010/12/are-you-still-playing-your-flute.html?showComment=1294966417455#comment-c7365098025520691004

and also the poet's own comments about this latest controversy: http://zahuren.wordpress.com/poems/are-you-still-playing-flute/
in the hazard of you   (stanza 3 line 4)
should be

in the hazard of this city
(di kota yang semakin kusut dan tenat)


Teachers, please correct and add this to the poem.

For an interpretation and comments about this poem by the poet herself, please go to the poet's blog at http://zurinahhassan.blogspot.com/ and look for the topic blogged on Monday17th May 2010.


MASIHKAH KAU BERMAIN SERULING


Masihkah kau bermain seruling

walau waktu telah terlewat untuk kita bercinta

aku semakin terasa bersalah

melayani godaan irama

lagu yang tersimpan pada lorong halus buluh

dikeluarkan oleh nafas seniman

diukir oleh bibir

diatur oleh jari

dilayangkan oleh alun angin

menolak ke dasar rasa.

Masihkah kau bermain seruling
ketika kampung semakin sunyi
sawah telah uzur
waktu jadi terlalu mahal
untuk memerhatikan hujan turun
merenung jalur senja
mengutip manik embun
menghidu harum bunga.



Masihkah kau bermain seruling
ketika aku terasa mata bersalah
untuk melayani rasa rindu padamu
di kota yang semakin kusut dan tenat
adik-adikku menganggur dan sakit jiwa
bangsaku dipecahkan oleh politik
saudara diserang bom-bom ganas
dunia sudah terlalu tua dan parah.



Di sinilah berakhirnya percintaan kita
kerana zaman sedang menuntut para seniman
hidup di luar dirinya.




(Zurinah Hassan)

English Version (4th verse that was left out)

Is this the end of our love
time is forcing us, as artists
to live outside ourselves

Note that this poem is NOT a romantic poem but it is a poem about poets and writers being social activists.