Education blog

Archive for June, 2010

Hub is an important part of the car, different cars use different wheels, generally used for small car wheel diameter is relatively small, while heavy vehicles are using large diameter wheels. Read the rest of this entry »

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping Tuesday continued a five-day visit to Australia which began Saturday.

The following are highlights of Xi’s visit.

CANBERRA — Visiting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping was at the Australian National University (ANU) Tuesday, donating books to the university’s new center on China education and research.

Xi congratulated on the establishment of the Australian Center on China in the World. He said the ANU has strong academic achievements on China study, which played a positive role in enhancing all-round understandings of China by all walks of life in Australia and promoting more cultural exchanges and cooperation between the two countries.

Xi said the Australian government’s decision in establishing such a center on China study and dedicating a huge amount of money for the research work has demonstrated Australia’s strong desire to learn more about China. He said he believes the new center will become a brand new platform at a higher level to promote communications and exchanges.

DARWIN, Australia — Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping met here on Tuesday with Paul Henderson, Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory, hailing the economic cooperation between China and the region.

During the talks, Xi said he is pleased to visit Darwin, the nearest Australian city to China.

He said his visit is aimed at boosting China’s relations with the Northern Territory, proposing both sides should deepen trade and economic cooperation, expand people-to-people and cultural exchanges and enhance the exchanges between the Northern Territory and Chinese provinces.

CANBERRA — Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping met here on Tuesday with Australian Governor-General Quentin Bryce.

During the talks, Xi said he had exchanged views with a wide range of leaders and entrepreneurs in Australia during his trip, reaching comprehensive consensus on deepening cooperation on politics, trade, science and technology, education and tourism.

Earlier this month, Bryce herself had paid a visit to China, attending the ceremony of “Australian Pavilion Day” at the Shanghai Expo and hosting the opening ceremony for “Australian Culture Year.”

Xi said such moves showed the Governor-General attaches great importance to developing relations with China.

The Zambian government has said children will be required to take a local language alongside English from grade one to four to help them learn initial basic skills of reading and writing local languages, local media reported on Wednesday.

Recently, traditional leaders said there was need for the use of local languages foe teaching purposes in schools. Currently, the teaching of local languages is not compulsory in Zambian schools.

Minster of Education Dora Siliya said when she made a presentation to the traditional leaders that the local languages the pupils will be taking will not necessarily have to be their mother tongue but ones spoken by the vast majority of people in a given area of the country, the Zambia Daily Mail reported.

According to the minister, the government introduced a primary reading program to foster initial literacy and numeracy skills of learners in grade in a local language, adding that the program was a success with a huge impact on reading levels among pupils following its evaluation in 2003.

The program was scaled up in 2003 because of its success and was implemented in more than 4, 000 government schools and 74 community schools. The program also saw the development of literacy books in seven local languages, according to Daily Mail.

She however said the use of all Zambian languages will be impracticable as the country was multi-lingual, adding that apart from the country being a multi-lingual society, teaching all local languages will have cost implications. Zambia has 72 local languages.

She further said the problem will even be compounded by the lack of teachers who were able to teach in a variety of languages but she pointed out that English would continue to be the country’ s official language.

Visiting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping Tuesday respectively met Australian Governor-General Quentin Bryce and Paul Henderson, Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory.

During the talks with Bryce here, Xi said he had exchanged views with a wide range of leaders and entrepreneurs in Australia during his trip, reaching comprehensive consensus on deepening cooperation on politics, trade, science and technology, education and tourism.

Earlier this month, Bryce herself had paid a visit to China, attending the ceremony of the “Australian Pavilion Day” at the Shanghai World Expo and hosting the opening ceremony for the “Australian Culture Year.”

Xi praised that such moves showed that the Governor-General attaches great importance to developing relations with China.

Xi said both China and Australia are two important nations in the Asia-Pacific region, and both share common interests in safeguarding the peace and stability in the region and pushing forward the regional and global economic growth.

The vice president said the Chinese government is willing to join hands with Australia to enhance dialogue, expand consensus, increase mutual trust and explore cooperation, so as to achieve more progress in developing bilateral relations and bring more blessing to people in the two countries.

Bryce said Xi’s current visit has conveyed an important signal that the Chinese people attach importance to the relations with Australia, demonstrated the depth of bilateral relations and set the direction for future efforts.

The U.S. News Corp.’s Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other people criticized U.S. President Barack Obama’s policies at the New York Forum, which opened Tuesay.

At the first plenary session of the Forum: Reinvention: the Corporate Imperative, Murdoch said the United States is losing its global footing and the situation must be reversed.

“This has got to change,” he said, adding that the United States has a big tax increase coming next year that will discourage growth.

The United States needs less government and less taxes, he said. “At the moment there’s a committee discussing regulations in Washington and its thinking of punishing businesses in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the financial crisis.”

Murdoch, Tishman Speyer Properties Chairman and CEO Jerry Speyer, President of Hearst Magazine Cathleen Black and Chairman of Alcatel-Lucent Philippe Camus discussed a wide range of issues on a panel moderated by CNBC’s noted anchor Maria Bartiromo.

“People vote with their feet,” said Speyer, adding that one of the big dangers facing the United States is that people will take their businesses elsewhere if the government over-regulates banks and other industries.

Employment in the U.S. is led by small and medium-sized businesses and right now these businesses can’t get a loan, he said.

Urban slums in Bangladesh have the worst performance regarding to women and children’s well-being and access to basic services compared to rural and non-slum urban areas, an official survey revealed here Wednesday.

The results of the 2009 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) , conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the situation of women and children, were published on Wednesday in capital Dhaka.

For the first time, according to the survey, all the 481 sub- districts of Bangladesh have been ranked according to their performance on 23 key social indicators. This rich set of data shows clearly the geographical areas which are lagging behind in achieving some of the Millennium Development Goals.

The survey points at huge disparities between districts and even between sub-districts within a given district. But it also reveals that urban slums are generally worse off than most of the low-performing rural areas.

For example, the survey reveals, the proportion of pupils who reach Grade 5 is 48 percent in urban slums against 54 percent in Kushtia district, about 183 km west of capital Dhaka, – the worst performing district for this indicator. The national average is 79. 8 percent.

The highest drop-out rate from primary school is also recorded in slum areas where it is six times higher than the national level.

“Evidence exists that mitigating socio-economic inequalities is a powerful strategy to accelerate both economic growth and poverty reduction. The survey gives us an exact picture of geographic inequalities in Bangladesh which the country needs to address”, Carel de Rooy, UNICEF representative in Bangladesh, was quoted as saying in a statement of UNICEF Wednesday.

He said, “Children who do not have access to basic services cannot get out of the vicious cycle of poverty if specific programs are not put in place to address their basic needs.”

This UNICEF-BBS survey, however, confirms the improvements made by Bangladesh in child survival and education, showing clear progress in timely initiation of breastfeeding, reduction of child and infant mortality, pre-school attendance rate and school retention rate.

A major improvement is found in birth registration with 53.6 percent of children under five being registered against 9.8 percent in 2006. It also shows some 85.2 percent of the population has access to improved sources of water.

A total of 7,683 interviewers collected data from 300,000 households from April to May 2009.

According to the UNICEF representative, the survey can serve as a very important tool for elected and administrative officials to assess and compare their performance on the human development front, and similar surveys will be conducted in 2012 and 2015 in order to assess progress.

Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) said on Monday that it will debut OLIVIA and LUCAS, the first social robots in Singapore at Robocup 2010.

Developed under A*STAR’s Social Robotics Program, a social robot is an autonomous robot that interacts and communicates with humans by following social behaviors and rules.

The program develops innovative and unique robotics technologies that will benefit both the industry and the community, targeted at various sectors including entertainment, education, security, healthcare, and home assistance.

As one of the first in this area, OLIVIA displays its ability of social interaction with human in performing daily tasks such as playing music, controlling electrical appliances and making calls.

LUCAS was designed to provide information to visitors, to carry drinks, to patrol, and for tele-presence and tele-operation.

The RoboCup 2010 kicked off here on Sunday with close to a record 500 international and local participating teams from over 40 countries and regions.

The forgotten scientists who ran one of China’s largest Cold War-era projects.

When Baitao was chosen as the site for a top-secret nuclear base in 1966, authorities literally wiped it from the map.

Over the following two decades, more than 60,000 soldiers and scientists were sent to this remote town hidden in the mountains east of Chongqing to work on one of the largest Cold War-era projects.

The project resulted in the construction of the world’s largest man-made cave – 104,000 square meters, the equivalent of 20 football fields – but the military base was scrapped in 1982 before it was ever finished.

Today, Baitao is a major tourist attraction and is firmly back in the public eye. The same cannot be said for the experts who dedicated their lives to the multibillion-yuan mission.

Total employment in Hong Kong’s private sector grew 2.8 percent in March, or by 68,100 people, compared to the same month last year, the city’s Census and Statistics Department said Monday.

According to a release by the agency, there were 45,960 vacancies from the private sector during the month, up 65 percent or by 18,180 vacancies year on year.

Increases in employment were recorded in the cleaning and similar services, arts, entertainment, recreation and other services, education and real estate industries.

Meanwhile, employment fell in manufacturing and accommodation services.

Vacancies rose in all selected industries in March over a year earlier.

Russian and Chinese macro-economic fundamentals are among the best in the world, head of Global Markets in Troika Dialog investment company, Peter Ghavami, told Xinhua during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

“There are several reasons for that,” Ghavami, also a partner of the famed Troika Dialog, explained.

“First, Russia has very low debt level, either private debt or public debt. In the second instance, inflation in Russia year-by- year has been lower than six percent, which has not happened for the last 20 years,” he reminded. The low-level debt, combined with low-inflation environment, helped Russian economy to recover mush faster than it was expected.

“We expect this year Russian economy to rise by over five percent. Of course, on the negative side, we are coming up with the very low base level. In other words, there are still a lot of things to do and there is an insufficient rate of bonds for corporations that needed. We expect there will be positive loan growth in the third and fourth quarters of this year,” the economist said.

Russia has successfully gone through the crisis and it must secure its modernization prospects now, he added.

“The most challenging thing for Russia is to make sure that modernization will not happen from the top to down. The process should be organic — in the way China does. That’s why investing in education is a real key to future modernization,” he said.