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Tuesday, January 17, 2017

english usage- headlines



"english usage" headlines imply use of short words

The following is a list of common headline vocabulary



Reference: 
Practical English Usage by Michael Swan 
(Oxford University Press)

READ aloud and explain those 13 headlines.



  1. SIBLINGS  MAKE SUICIDE BID
  2. SIX DIE IN TEMPLE BLAZE
  3. GLOBAL WARMING: EARTH ON BRINK OF DISASTER
  4. AUSTRIAN PRESIDENT ACTS TO GAG PRESS
  5. INDIANS GRAB SHARES IN FOREIGN COMPANIES
  6. COLD WAVE GRIPS COUNTRY
  7. OPPOSITION LASHES GOVERNMENT REFORMS
  8. VAT ON FOOD: NEW ROW LOOMS 
  9. MALE MAYOR RE-ELECTED AGAINST THE ODDS
  10. DEMOCRATS OUSTED IN US ELECTIONS    
  11. MISSING TEENAGER RIDDLE: TWO MEN HELD
  12. LABOUR RIFT OVER DEFENCE POLICY
  13. BANK SEX SCANDAL ROCKS THE CITY
  14. NEW ROW OVER WAGE CUTS
  15. BUS DRIVER SPENDS MILLIONS IN CREDIT-CARD SPREE    
  16. QUAKE TOLL MAY RISE

FIND THE KEY AT THE WORD LIST ABOVE.

Friday, January 13, 2017

Orwell and Huxley: Brave new 1984, both worlds blended

it is not either or, it is ..... both! Below two images of these two wrtiters from www.topsynergy.com

Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932.
Aldous Huxley feels love and kinship for people everywhere, not only with his own family, nationality, or group. Finding similarities and making links between people from differing backgrounds or with different perspectives is a gift of his.
  • He is kindhearted and generous with both his money and his affections, and he is not happy if he has to budget or restrict himself in any way. 
  • Pettiness or stinginess is foreign to Aldous' nature. 
  • Gracious and charitable, he enjoys sponsoring social events or cultural activities. 
Aldous Huxley has an optimistic, friendly attitude towards others and tends to bring out the finer side of people. He is likely to fall in love with someone who is successful, noble and idealistic.
      === ==  === 
Orwell  wrote  1984  in 1948.

Orwell works well with the public and has an instinct for what the public wants and will respond to. 
  • Having a "nest" is not especially important to George, and he may invest more of his emotional energy into his career or public life than in his private life. 
  • Providing and caring for others, in a professional capacity is very likely. 
  • He is a sensitive soul and a dreamer who is very much attuned to the world of imagination and fantasy. 
George Orwell often retreats into his own inner world in order to escape the harshness of everyday living in the "real world". Gentle and often rather passive as well, he will not fight or assert himself, even when he needs to.



Some comments on the web:

They both kind of missed the mark a bit. 
They were describing a world distorted 
by government and technology. 
Orwell feared the government 
-1940s (right wing); 

 whereas Huxley feared corporatism 
-1930s (left wing).





Thursday, January 12, 2017

can not say NO with images -Society -1



State if the depiction of society in the SIX images below is ...........

                            optimistic 
                  neutral      or pessimistic.

PICs 1        curved change or crooked continuity?
             Hunchback learning breeds crooked expectations 
             (PLUS humpback feedback) 


PICs 2
   Hongshui experience

Walking on water? Giant 50 sq km floating walkway opens in China (VIDEO, PHOTOS)


Southwest 's  opens 50,000-meter floating walkway on river.  http://youtu.be/OYCI7oTp3A8


PICs 3   
Green-Eyed “Afghan Girl” From The National Geographic
Image result for the girl on the cover of national geographic


PICs 5   
 dark sides of the truth about BO's post-racial legacy
Related image


Image result for "The Ministry of Truth in 2017"

OBAMA HAS PRODUCED MORE RACISM THAN 200 YEARS OF SLAVERY Says .....






PICs 6    Orwellian futures









Hans Rosling: How much do you know -the world is doing better than you think

 Hans Rosling: 

YOUR TEST


Viewpoint: Five ways the world is doing better than you think




Hans Rosling asks: Has the UN gone mad?

The United Nations just announced their boldest goal ever: To eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, already by 2030.
Looking at the realities of extremely poor people the goal seems impossible. The rains didn’t fall in Malawi this year. The poor farmers Dunstar & Jenet, gather a tiny maize harvest in a small pile on the ground outside their mud hut. 
But Dunstar & Jenet know exactly what they need to break the vicious circle of poverty. And Hans Rosling shows how billions of people have already managed. This year’s “hunger season” may very well be Dunster’s & Jenet’s last. 
Up-to-date statistics show that recent global progress is ‘the greatest story of our time – possibly the greatest story in all of human history. The goal seems unrealistic to many highly educated people because their worldview is lagging 60 years behind reality.
Hans Rosling: How much do you know about the world?
BBC -2013 November 13
 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24836917


WATCH  this  VIDEO

https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/

Quizz me  

-->
We will check people at the venue there.

 OUR CLASS
1 - Globally, how many people out of ten have electricity at home?

-->                 say a percentage%:   20..... 40 .... 60 ....80 %    
2 -How many children out of ten are vaccinated against measles?
                say a percentage%:   20..... 40 .... 60 ....80 %
3- How many girls out of 10 go to primary school.     

-->               say a percentage%:   20..... 40 .... 60 ....80 %


Check your answers at 35:33.... 37.30

Then

GDP in different nations since 1800.


(38:10 - 41:34)  .... CHILD MORTALITY VIDEO 





people at the venue there.
Q1....   42%
Q2 ...   36%

-->
Q3 .... 45 %




-->

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Brreaking news-3 - Persectives. From heroes to traitors to heroes







Image result for hoax truth lies

A liquid world with great changes ahead: from Roman wars, Dark Ages or Wall Street

revisionism advocacy of revision (as of a doctrine or policy or in historical analysis)
      hoax   a deliberately fabricated falsehood               made to masquerade as the truth.
Image result for ā€œOnce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.ā€ Arthur Conan DoylePost-truth politics is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy.


Critical thinking on ONE of the biggest lies taught. 

=== News ====
Uncertainties 
        in a postmodern era.


Piece 1.   Colonialism. Asian controlled shores
           Guardian news - 9 December 16
 From traitors to heroes 
President revokes colonial-era order and declares 19 leaders of 1818 uprising ‘patriotic war heroes’ who fought for freedom in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon.
     The Great Rebellion of 1817–1818, also known as the 1818 Uva rebellion, was the third Kandyan War with the British.

Image result for Keppetipola Disawe heroeA group of Sri Lankans who rebelled against British colonial rule in India have been celebrated as war heroes, almost 200 years after they were condemned as traitors and executed.  Ceylon was ruled by Britain from 1815 to 1948, when it regained independence. 

The group of 19 included one of the leaders of the 1818 rebellion, Keppetipola Disawe, who was beheaded. His unusually shaped skull was then brought back to the UK and placed in a medical museum in Edinburgh, and only returned after official requests in 1954.
  • Keppetipola Disawe  was surrounded by British troops: he came out to meet them, identified himself, and surrendered. He and other leaders of the rebellion were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. Keppetipola is now regarded as a national hero, and when his skull was finally returned it was enshrined in an urn and buried marked by a memorial pillar in Kandy.



Piece 2.
    truth lies ahead of our mental abilities
       NYTimes news - 1st January

Czech Fake News Watchdog Kicks Off Operations
PRAGUE — A Czech unit set up to combat fake news ahead of the country's two crucial elections starts operations on Sunday.
The Center Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats, an analytical section of the Interior Ministry, plans to rebut disinformation that could be spread with the aim of manipulating elections.
Czechs will likely pick their lawmakers in October. The presidential election is coming up in early 2018. President Milos Zeman, known for his pro-Russian stance, aged 72, has yet to announce whether he plans to run for re-election.
Interior Ministry says that its new section has neither "a button to turn off the internet" nor the right to remove content from the cyberspace.

A Czech-language hoax alleging that a terrorist attack had happened in Prague made the rounds online in July 2016 using this image.
A Czech-language hoax alleging that a terrorist attack had happened in Prague made the rounds online in July 2016 using this image.

Piece 3.  potentially mind-controlled “shooters.” 
      Alaska Adn news - 9th January
Anchorage police returned gun to Florida shooting suspect after his ‘mental health crisis’
FBI Special Agent Marlin Ritzman addresses the media Saturday at Anchorage Police Department headquarters about the investigation into Florida airport shooting suspect Esteban Santiago, who is an Anchorage resident. (Loren Holmes / Alaska Dispatch News)FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The Iraq war veteran was accused of killing five people at Fort Lauderdale airport.  The 26-year-old suspect, Esteban Santiago, had a history of acting erratically (four misconduct acts in 2016) and investigators are probing whether mental illness played a role in America's latest mass shooting. 
  • Santiago was deployed to Iraq with the Puerto Rico National Guard from April 2010 to February 2011.
Authorities have said Santiago walked into an FBI office in Anchorage in November last year behaving erratically, and that he was turned over to local police who took him to a medical facility for a mental evaluation. A federal law enforcement official told Reuters that Santiago told the agents in Alaska his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency, and that it was ordering him to watch videos made by the Islamic State militant group.
When city police officers arrived at the FBI building downtown, they were told by agents that Santiago was "asking for help" and was having "terroristic thoughts and believed he was being influenced by ISIS."
Santiago "had a loaded magazine on him" but left his firearm in his vehicle before contacting agents

statistician Hans Rosling -END poverty -United Nations



Don’t Panic — End Poverty

 Swedish celebrity statistician Hans Rosling has criticized the UN and policy makers for using 'fourfold inaccurate' figures to make decisions on how to distribute aid money in a new, myth-busting article.
Rosling, who has given TED talks, became an unlikely global phenomenon in recent years and videos of his lectures have chalked up millions of views on Youtube 

His new piece, written with Karolinska University public health assistant professor Helena Nordenstedt for medical journal The Lancet, examined a claim that 60 percent of maternal deaths today come from “humanitarian situations like refugee camps”.
 
According to Rosling and Nordenstedt, the figure first gained prominence in aid advocacy in late 2015 when the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) cited it, and it has since been quoted in a report by the UN’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health, and even made its way into policy documents.
But after investigation, Rosling and Nordenstedt discovered that the stat, which originated in The Lancet, was based on poorly carried out calculations. According to the writers’ own calculations, it is a “fourfold” inaccuracy.
Nordenstedt told The Local that the continued use of the “60 percent” figure by major organizations could even be considered a lie.
“If it had been two times wrong you could perhaps call it carelessness, but the figure is at least four times too high, and I think that has crossed over into the boundaries of lies, regardless of whether it was negligent or deliberate,” she said.
“The effect is still the same: aid money designed to reduce maternal mortality is wrongly directed to refugee camps and crisis areas instead of the grey, boring, extreme rural poverty in areas in sub-Saharan Africa or in India.”
The article noted it is “surprising” that the inaccurate figure managed to make its way into a highly qualified panel at the UN, and warned that global health has entered a “post-fact era”, “where the labeling of numerators is incorrectly tweaked for advocacy purposes”.
Nordenstedt reiterated that sentiment in her comments to The Local:
“The strange, scary thing is how the figures, just by slipping into The Lancet and being given credibility, then spread and spread because it suits the narrative we see much of today in newspapers around the refugee crisis and migration, and the hope is that through connecting maternal mortality to humanitarian crises it can attract more money.”

Rosling and Nordenstedt’s article concluded that the use of inaccurate numbers in global health advocacy “can misguide where investments are most needed”, and on Friday, the Karolinska assistant professor advised that more fact checking is needed in the area:
“This example shows that there is a need for fact checking within global health to guide the right prioritization. A lot of aid money is going around, and to achieve the best result (in this instance to reduce maternal mortality as effectively as possible) that aid money must be distributed correctly.”






PART II: 

Hans Rosling asks: Has the UN gone mad?

The United Nations just announced their boldest goal ever: To eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, already by 2030.


https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/ 

Sunday, January 8, 2017

we DO believe in post-truth news -not much left to explain.

Trump's Russian hacking story. 
It is as good as it gets. 

hacking  Practice of modifying or altering computer software and hardware to accomplish a goal that is considered to be outside of the creator's original objective

El mensajero del miedo Poster THE COLD WAR and the IRON CURTAIN:
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) 

Have you heard of a timeless thriller  based on a 1959 novel? There are parts of this film noir that are so perceptive and prophetic that it can be shocking. The satire of political campaigns and the influence of political wives feels very fresh. The movie is also an excellent spy thriller and foretells the many political assassinations in the 60's.

  • Senator Iselin raises his political profile when he claims that varying numbers of communists work within the US Defense operative lines. 

  • Mrs. Iselin herself is actually a Communist agent with a plan intended to secure the US presidency under Communist influence.

Quotes:
Senator Iselin:   I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party...I demand an answer, Mr. Secretary. There will be no covering up, sir, no covering up. You are not going to get your hands on this list. And I deeply regret having to say...

Mrs Iselin:  It's been decided that you will be dressed as a priest to get away in the pandemonium afterwards. Chunjin will give you a two-piece Soviet Army's sniper's rifle that fits nicely into a special bag. There's a spotlight booth that won't be in use. It's up under the roof on the 8th Avenue side of the Garden. (...) You are to hit him right at the point that he finishes the phrase, "nor would I ask of any fellow American in defense of his freedom that which I would not gladly give myself - my life before my liberty." Is that absolutely clear?
The Manchurian Candidate Movie Review

 FOUR reviews:

 the idea of a glorified cue-card reader playing president -- resonates today like never before. (2000)

alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying. (2007)



Set the standard for cinematic paranoid thrillers. (2011)

It feels modern and salient today. There is something universal about the insidious mistrust of those in power. (2016)

Image result for The Manchurian Candidate


FOOTNOTE: there was  a remake in 2004 with M Streep and D. Washington.

TASK1. How much can you develop on these headlines?

Following the Links From Russian
Hackers to the U.S. Election NYTimes 6 Jan 17


n1) The Battle Over Russian Hacking Is Over The Legitimacy Of The Trump Presidency

n2)   Something About This Russia Story Stinks


 n3)  How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the US. (NYTImes)



TASK 2. Which of the three Calvin and Hobbes comic strips dealing with newspapers headlines is related to
the CLAY satirical cartoon on TRUMP election here?


Image result for sketch cartoon putin trump puppet




CALVIN and Hobbes


        BIT 1      -   30 December 1986 





        BIT 2       -  13 October 1986



        BIT 3      -  21 March 1991



          BIT 1      -  30 December 1986

It says here that by the age of six ... most children have seen a million murders on television. I find that very disturbing! It means I've been watching all the wrong channels.

Hobbes is reading a newspaper while Calvin watches TV. Hobbes reads that by age 6, children have seen a million murders on TV. Calvin finds that very disturbing. He believes he's been watching all the wrong channels.


        BIT 2       - 13 October 1986
Tomorrow we're going to discuss "current events" in school. Each of us has to find a newspaper article, read it to the class, and explain it. What article did you choose? This one. "Space alien weds two-headed Elvis clone." Actually, there's not much left to explain.

Calvin tells Hobbes they are going to discuss current events at school. He tells Hobbes each student had to pick an article, read it to the class, then explain it. Hobbes asks which article he chose. Calvin tells him "Space Alien Weds Two-Headed Elvis Clone". Calvin comments that there's not much left to explain.

        BIT 3      - 21 March 1991
Mom! Mom! I just saw the first robin of spring! Call the newspaper quick! Ha ha! A front page write-up! A commemorative plaque! A civic ceremony! All for me! Hooray! Hooray! Oh boy! Should I put the prize money in a trust fund or blow it all at once? Ha ha! I can't believe I did it! Calvin... It's a hard, bitter, cruel world to have to grow up in, Hobbes. Cheer up! Did I tell you I saw a robin yesterday?
Calvin runs around happily, saying he saw the first robin of spring. He figures he'll get a front-page write up in the paper, a commemorative plaque, and a civic ceremony. He wonders if he should put the money in a trust fund or spend it all at once. Mom gets his attention. Calvin is sitting under a tree with Hobbes. Calvin tells him it's a hard, bitter, cruel world to have to grow up in. Hobbes tells him to cheer up. He asks if he told Calvin that he saw a robin yesterday.



BONUS TRACK:

Angela Lansbury's iconic Oscar nominated performance in The Manchurian Candidate



It's been decided that you will be dressed as a priest to get away in the pandemonium afterwards. Chunjin will give you a two-piece Soviet Army's sniper's rifle that fits nicely into a special bag. There's a spotlight booth that won't be in use. It's up under the roof on the 8th Avenue side of the Garden. You will have absolutely clear, protected shooting. You are to shoot the Presidential nominee through the head. And Johnny will rise gallantly to his feet and lift Ben Arthur's body in his arms, stand in front of the microphones and begin to speak. The speech is short, but it's the most rousing speech I've ever read. It's been worked on here and in Russia on and off for over eight years. I shall force someone to take the body away from him. And Johnny will leave those microphones and those cameras with blood all over him, fighting off anyone who tries to help him, defending America even if it means his own death, rallying a nation of television-viewers into hysteria to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy. Now this is very important. I want the nominee to be dead about two minutes after he begins his acceptance speech, depending on his reading time under pressure. You are to hit him right at the point that he finishes the phrase, "nor would I ask of any fellow American in defense of his freedom that which I would not gladly give myself - my life before my liberty." Is that absolutely clear?