That's from a recent Guardian article, which also says that in 2004 Russia's life expectancy was 59 years for men and 72 for women. Due to the low life expectancy and birthrate, the population in Russia is falling by 700,000 a year.
The Guardian, June 15, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2103841,00.html
"There is no place in the world with a high standard of English as a foreign language where a majority, or even a lot, of the teaching is done by foreign teachers.
Think of a few places you know where there's a high standard of English? It should be easy because there are a lot of them: places like Holland, Belgium, The Philippines, Switzerland, Sweden, to name a few. Not a single one of these countries has a significant number of foreign teachers. Probably every single one of those European and South American businessmen you know who speak flawless English was taught by a local teacher. The Filipino, Indian, and Malaysian students at you school were all taught by local teachers.
I know, I know, Dutch is very similar to English, and in the Philippines and India, English is the language of the professional class. Things like this make it much, much easier to learn a language. But not only is this not particularly true in some of the places where English is best spoken, but it's not even particularly important. What is important is that there are plenty of places where having been taught by a properly trained local teacher is not a significant handicap.
Let's look at the flip-side of this problem. Have foreign teachers made a big impact in the places where they are widely used? In Japan, virtually every school in the country is provided by either the JET program or other locally developed programs with a foreign teacher. The next largest foreign teacher programs are Korea and Taiwan. All of these countries are notorious for the poor standard of their English compared with, for example, Scandinavian countries. In fact, if you look at it this way, it's the countries with the worst record that have the most foreign teachers.
There are many excellent foreign teachers who have made a big difference to their students. But that's not the point. My point is that there is no place on Earth where English is spoken widely as a foreign language where most, or even a lot, of the teaching is done by foreign teachers. Being taught by competent and skilled local teachers will never be a disadvantage to a learner."
I would quibble with Scott that the standard of English in Switzerland is high (mainly because the Swiss have traditionally learned one or two of the four official languages as second and third languages in school). But other than that his point is well taken.
Source:
http://scottsommers.blogs.com/taiwanweblog/2007/06/are-native-spea.html
...Agnes has, in effect, a callus: the first time she was exposed to the virus, her body produced enough killer T cells to fight it off. This part isn't unique - the body of every person who is exposed to HIV mounts some level of response, and sometimes manages to fight it off; a single exposure does not guarantee infection. But Agnes's body, it seems, not only produced sufficient and strong enough cells to fight the virus off the first time, it then produced a whole raft of those killer Ts, flooding her system with guardians whose sole brief was to keep an eye out for cells infected with HIV. The infected cells have a distinct pattern of little bumps on them, called epitopes, which act like a red rose in the lapel as far as the killer Ts are concerned, letting them know just which cells they want to hunt down. Then every subsequent time - probably thousands of times - that HIV got into Agnes's body, her killer T cells drove it back. A person does not normally maintain a large number of killer T cells for a long period - just long enough to kill something off, then production drops. But in Agnes, fairly constant exposure to HIV kept her killer T cell count high.
This conclusion was reinforced when Plummer and his team noticed that women who take a 'sex break' - who make a trip home to the village for a few weeks, or save up a little money and leave sex work for a while to try selling shoes instead, or hook up with a regular who keeps them in cash for a year or two - were far more likely to get infected, almost immediately, if they returned to sex work, even though previously they had had years of apparent immunity. On the break, their bodies stopped making the killer T cells, leaving them vulnerable again...
From the moment it became clear that Agnes and a handful of other women in Majengo - about 100 to date - really could fight off the virus, the researchers in Nairobi hoped that their biology would hold the secret of an HIV vaccine. Soon a team from Oxford University was at work on a vaccine that used the epitopes (the tell-tale bumps on infected cells) that triggered Agnes's killer Ts. They hoped it would provoke other people's bodies to produce killer T cells in the same way that the real virus appeared to trigger production in the sex workers. Trials began in Nairobi in 2001, and a second trial was mounted by Pontiano Kaleebu and his colleagues in Entebbe a couple of years later. But despite high hopes, the Oxford vaccine didn't cause that explosion of killer T cells. And so it was back to the painstaking work of trying to figure out the secret of Agnes's immunity. 'Sometimes a vaccine feels impossibly far away,' sighed Keith Fowke. 'All our knowledge about these HIV-resistant people is interesting and I feel it's important... but it is frustrating.'
...
Today, the research strategy in Majengo revolves around intense study of Agnes and the other resistant women (who make up about five per cent of the cohort at any one time), from analysing their genome to breaking down the chemical components of the mucosal membranes in their vaginas, in an effort to figure out what may be protecting them. So far researchers have not found anything present in 100 per cent of the women, so it may be that the protection comes from multiple overlapping factors, including some that are genetic. There is a strong family correlation - people related to an HIV-resistant woman seem to be half as likely to get infected as people who are not related.
Agnes is aware that she is a fascinating specimen. 'Most of the people have been very interested in me,' she said matter-of-factly. But she has no understanding of the biological basis for her HIV resistance. 'No one has told me,' she said with a shrug. She gets good, free health care at the clinic for the occasional sexually transmitted infection and also for respiratory infections which plague residents of the polluted slum. So she is happy to give them her blood a couple of times a year, and to enjoy a sense of contributing something to her community.
But Agnes's survival has served to highlight a disquieting aspect of this research. She has come to the clinic for more than 20 years. In that time, more than $22m in scientific grant money has flowed through the project, and many of the researchers have earned reputations as the top experts in their fields. Yet Agnes and a handful of other women are still selling sex, to an average of eight clients a day, still for a dollar or two each time - although they say they would like nothing more than to get out of sex work. When I asked her what she would like to do instead, Agnes's broad face lit up. 'Any kind of job I could do. I could be a cleaner or anything. But it's very difficult to get a job - you have to know somebody to get a job.' And Agnes said she doesn't know anybody who could help. With only limited literacy after three years of primary school, and no other skills, Agnes said she sees no other options. 'It's embarrassing, this profession,' she said. She refuses to discuss what she does for a living with her children, although she is sure they know. 'I've never told them what I do, but I think they can see it. I think they know what I'm doing is not good but they know I do it to provide for them.'
Agnes's frustration with her life in sex work raises troubling ethical questions about research, the kind that bedevil investigations into Aids vaccines, prevention technologies and treatment, all of which, by definition, involve large groups of poor Africans, the people most at risk. What obligation does a researcher such as Plummer have to the women who have given him their blood for 20 years? What does this project owe Agnes?
...
Agnes's mysterious immune system has garnered her considerable fame in the world of Aids, but little else. She lives a life almost totally unchanged from her first days in umalaya 30 years ago. 'I can buy our daily food out of what I earn, and that's all,' she told me as we sat in the shade of her bustling alley. 'I don't feel famous. It's only that my problems push me to do sex work. If I could find something else, I would.'
The Observer, Sunday May 27, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,,2089312,00.html
"Studies have shown that people on plant-based diets tend to have significantly lower cancer rates than those on meat-based diets, according to a Cancer Project [a U.S. nonprofit health organization] handbook...
People in rural Asia and Africa, for example, where traditional diets are based on rice or grains and a mix of starchy vegetables, fruits and beans, generally avoid cancer, according to the handbook. When it does strike, they are more likely to survive.
Studies have also shown that diets rich in meat, dairy products, fried foods and even vegetable oils boost hormones such as estrogen, which is linked to breast cancer in women, and testosterone, which researchers suspect plays a role in prostate cancer in men, the handbook reports.
These hormone levels fall significantly in both men and women when they reduce the amount of fat in their diets.
If you're looking to trim fat, though, simply cutting beef and switching to low-fat dairy products won't do, Renideo said. Though the percentage of calories from fat is higher in beef than it is in chicken or fish, the difference is slight. The leanest beef, for example, derives nearly a third of its calories from fat, according to the Cancer Project, while white meat chicken and tuna derive nearly a quarter of their calories from fat.
And dairy products -- even fat-free or low-fat -- play a role in cancer growth as well, according to the Cancer Project. Studies have shown, for example, that drinking milk raises the levels of insulinlike growth factor in the bloodstream. IGF-I, the handbook says, is a powerful stimulus for cancer cell growth."
"Plant-based diet wages war against cancer"
Orlando Sentinel, May 27, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/36cpw4
New York Times, June 13, 2007
The Book of the Hundred Family names (百家姓), compiled during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), listed 408 single-syllable surnames and 30 double-syllable surnames. The introduction of more than a million surnames would be something of a cultural revolution. I don't see it happening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/world/asia/13briefs-names.html
In Coop and Migros, Switzerland's biggest supermarket chains, Max
Havelaar bananas are always numbered "1" on the scales used by buyers.
My guess is that their name recognition is higher than 78% by now. There
is another reason not to buy Chiquita. Kyle de Beausset, a Harvard
student who writes the Immigration Orange blog, reports that Chiquita
has been forced to admit to funding right-wing paramilitary groups in
Colombia:
<http://immigration.campustap.com/blog/entry/view.aspx?Iid=158956>
I wonder what you have to do to be Beijing correspondent for The Independent. In an article about (of all things) education published a few days ago, Clifford Coonan informed his readers:
"Education has been highly competitive in China ever since the
philosopher Confucius helped formulate the exam system for public
service in the T'ang dynasty AD618 to 907."
Speaking of "public service" instead of the civil service or bureaucracy in the context of imperial China is careless. Spelling Tang "T'ang" shows that Coonan hasn't learned the difference between the pinyin transliteration system (preferred by everyone these days, including himself in the rest of his article and The Independent in general) and the old Wade-Giles system. And saying that Confucius was around during the Tang although the proverbial school child could have told him that Confucius died in 479 B.C. shows that Coonan didn't read the first few pages of his Lonely Planet Guide.
Harrumph,
Paul Frank
Huemoz
Switzerland
P.S. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2631527.ece
"A newspaper in southwest China has fired three of its editors over
an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989
Tiananmen Square crackdown, a source with knowledge of the gaffe said on
Thursday....
Li Zhaojun, deputy editor-in-chief of the Chengdu Evening News in
Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu, and two other members of the
tabloid's editorial office had been dismissed, the source told Reuters
requesting anonymity...
On the 18th anniversary of the crackdown on Monday, the lower right
corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News ran a tiny ad reading:
'Paying tribute to the strong[-willed] mothers of June 4 victims.'...
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said on Wednesday a young female
clerk allowed the tribute to be published because she had never heard of
the crackdown....
She phoned back the person who placed the ad to ask what June 4 meant
and he told her it was the date of a mining disaster, the Post said.
It was unclear if the man who placed the advertisement had been
arrested.
The man also tried to place the same advertisement with two other
Chengdu newspapers, the source said.
'Staff at the other two newspapers also did not know what June 4 was,
but they phoned and asked their superiors and he walked away,' the
source told Reuters.
The Communist Party has banned references to the crackdown in state
media, the Internet and books as part of a whitewash campaign, meaning
most young Chinese are ignorant of the events...."
Reuters in The Globe and Mail, June 7, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yohuvb
"Die taz berichtet über die Bibel in gerechter Sprache, die im letzten
Jahr erschienen ist und deren vierte Auflage bevorsteht.
Presseschauwürdig ist das Übersetzungskonzept der gerechten Bibel:
>Die „Bibel in gerechter Sprache" hat drei fundamentale
>Übersetzungsprinzipien: Sie soll geschlechtergerecht formuliert sein,
>die Ergebnisse des jüdisch-christlichen Dialogs berücksichtigen und
>soziale Gerechtigkeit voranbringen.
Das ist schon ein sehr offenherziger Fall von „Was nicht passt, wird
passend gemacht". Eigentlich ist es ja die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,
einen zielsprachlichen Text zu schaffen, der den Inhalt des Originals
möglichst genau wiedergibt. Damit das gelingen kann, müssen natürlich
unterschiedliche Rahmenbedingungen in der Ursprungs- und der Zielkultur
berücksichtigt werden: wenn es Hintergrundwissen gibt, das bei den
Lesern des Originals als selbstverständlich vorausgesetzt werden kann,
das aber von den Lesern der Zielkultur nicht geteilt wird, muss dieses
Wissen in der Übersetzung mit vermittelt werden. Dadurch ist jede
Übersetzung natürlich ein Stück weit auch eine Interpretation des
Originals. Trotzdem: die Anpassung an die Bedürfnisse der Zielkultur
darf nicht so weit gehen, dass Unterschiede zwischen Ursprungs- und
Zielkultur einfach weggewischt werden. Sonst müsste man aus den Sklaven
in „Onkel Toms Hütte" tarifvertraglich bezahlte Angestellte machen
und aus den Frauen in der „Geschichte der Dienerin" Leihmütter, die
aus Idealismus kinderlosen Paaren helfen wollen."
"...La metáfora de la cebolla de la memoria, que al ser pelada revela
verdades que hacen llorar, no deslumbra precisamente por su sutileza.
Porque más que hacernos llorar, insisto, nos encandila su fibra
poética, hasta caer en la sensiblería de quien confunde el trabajo de
la memoria con el de la imaginación. Poético, sí; pero muchas otras
veces no es ni espléndido ni impactante. La narración está llena de
frases hechas, obviedades y expresiones trilladas. Todo está
edulcorado. Cuenta muchas cosas, pero le faltan muchas más. Es el gran
límite de esta confesión.
Cuenta Grass su vida, especialmente de los 12 a los 32 años, cuando
publica El tambor de hojalata, a través de un ejercicio literario que
consiste en ir pelando artísticamente la primera capa de la cebolla. De
ahí sale a veces un libro hermoso, a veces un recuento de melancolías
de la vieja Europa en crisis. Magníficas descripciones de la madre y de
la intensa relación materno-filial, relatos magníficos sobre los
compañeros de colegio y reencuentros felices a finales de los 80. Pero
nunca hallaremos la crítica histórica, menos todavía la autocrítica
impía que se anunciaba en las prepublicaciones. Tampoco la crítica a
una educación que lo llevó a militar en las filas del nazismo.
Nunca me ha gustado cómo juega Grass el juego entre deudas (Schulden) y
culpa (Schuld). Es tramposo, porque sólo revela intención, mala fe,
pero nunca se atreve en su obra, no hablo de sus declaraciones
ideológicas, a pasarle a contrapelo el cepillo a la historia, al modo
benjaminiano. Su trampa, engaño o añagaza estética me resulta
insoportable, sobre todo si pensamos en un hombre con tantos recursos
literarios como tiene él. Recurrir a la imaginación para hacer un
ejercicio de memoria, de reconstrucción crítica del pasado, es
sustituir la literatura, la gran literatura como racionalidad pública,
por la censura o la autocensura; y, lo que es peor, el arte, la
literatura, sale tocado de este híbrido, a veces monstruoso y a veces
bello, entre la imaginación y el memorialismo.
Muchas cosas importantes hay en esta obra, pero yo destaco los recuerdos
de su madre y, por supuesto, pero eso ya no es mérito de Grass, la gran
traducción, debida a ese gran escritor que es Miguel Sáenz."
Agapito Maestre, "Grass no es Mann", Libros, 7 de junio de 2007
http://libros.libertaddigital.com/articulo.php/1276233487
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular
And Geoff Nunberg's "Going Nucular":
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html
"You probably haven't heard of Swiss-born Nicolas Bouvier if you live in
the UK. Yet across the Channel he is as influential as Jack Kerouac and
Bruce Chatwin, a cult travel writer whose books sell by the pallet-load,
even though he died more than a decade ago. Yet this month's new
publication of The Way of the World is the most important event in
travel literature this year.
As a child Bouvier's reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne and Jack
London made him impatient for the world. He recalled at the age of eight
'tracing the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my
toast'. His father encouraged him to travel and in 1953, without waiting
for the result of his degree, he left bourgeois Switzerland with no
intention of returning. In a small, slow Fiat, he and his friend Thierry
Vernet - whose stark illustrations are reproduced in this handsome Eland
edition - travelled across Europe and Asia over nineteen unforgettable
months, pausing in Belgrade, Istanbul, Tabriz and Quetta to paint, write
and wait tables, taking longer than Marco Polo - as Bouvier proudly
pointed out - to reach Japan.
Along the road no sensational, headline-grabbing event befell them. They
were not attacked by Baluch bandits or held hostage by an Afghan
warlord. They did not climb the Hindu Kush in search of lost treasure.
Instead they journeyed humbly, honestly and in near-poverty, failing to
get jobs in Turkey, dossing down in a provincial prison in Iran,
teaching French in Tehran to raise funds, and finding sanctuary in
Quetta in a bar run by a distracted, kindly ex-Welsh Guards officer with
'an air of something both luminous and shattered'.
Ten years in the writing, The Way of the World is a masterpiece which
elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two
passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and
themselves. Racy and meditative, romantic and realistic, the book is as
brilliant as Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, but with its
erudition more lightly worn and as alive as Kerouac's On the Road,
though without a whisper of self-aggrandisement. The words of this
wandering poet have been lovingly and effusively rendered into English
by Robyn Marsack, his translator.
On every page a gem or two glitters, and the accumulation of colour,
detail and inspired metaphor produce an intensely hypnotic effect. Take
for example the description of young prostitutes in a Belgrade café who
had 'lovely, smooth, tanned knees, a bit dirty when they had just come
in from practising their trade on a nearby embankment, and well-defined
cheekbones where the blood throbbed like a drum'. Or the dancer who,
inclining his head 'listening to the keyboard as though it were a
stream'. Or the time spent on the road brewing tea and sharing
cigarettes, in the rare moments when intimacy borders on the divine. 'I
dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a
sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again. The bedrock of
existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and
think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a
transcendent power that is more serene than love.'
Martin Amis once wrote that young poets are forever taunted by subjects
which are no longer possible to write about in this ironic age: 'evening
skies, good looks, anything at all to do with love'. The fact that The
Way of the World is 40 years old works in its favour, coming fresh to
most English readers from a less cynical time. Through that distance
Bouvier enables us to rise above faddish celebrity and the sterility of
domestic despair, to remember that the world is a beautiful place and to
rejoice in humanity. He writes, 'Travelling outgrows its motives. It
soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but
soon it is making you – or unmaking you.' If you read any travel book
this year – or indeed in the next forty years – this should be it.
The Guardian, 6 June 2007
For the whole article, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/2z9p84
In Australia the Indigenous Affairs minister, Mal Brough, declared on
May 24 that "he was considering a plan to restrict welfare payments to
aboriginal parents in order to force their children to attend school and
learn English." As if the linguistically fascinating but severely
endangered Australian languages were not under enough threat already.
Brough is concerned that there are some aborigines in isolated areas who
"can only speak their own language, which perhaps is only known to 200,
300 or 400 other people." Quite: these languages are at the lower
threshold of size with respect to having a sustainable populations of
speakers. So his idea is to cut their welfare for not learning the
language of the dominant majority. Will Australia never change?...
More here:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004567.html#more
My own view is that everyone in Australia would benefit from learning
English but _forcing_ Aboriginals to do so, and threatening to cut off
welfare payments to poor people who don't speak English, is outrageous.
"Sie sagen: Ein guter Mensch wirft (auf andere Menschen) keinen zu
strengen Blick. Sie machen die Dinge nicht zur Voraussetzung der eigenen
Person. Sie halten das nicht für nützlich gegenüber der Welt. Sie
halten nach außen am Verbot von Angriffskriegen und an der Abschaffung
der Waffen fest, nach innen an der Besonnenheit gegenüber den
Leidenschaften. Das ist ihr Kleines und Großes, ihr Feines und Grobes."
Deutsch von Karl Albert und Hua Xue
曰："君子不为苛察，不以身假物。"以为无益于天下
者，明之不如己也。以禁攻寝兵为外，以情欲寡浅为
内。其小大精粗，其行适至是而止。
