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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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bright boy
An eight-year-old Scottish boy, Jack McEwen, has been accepted for an Open University course in astronomy and will spend his first year completing an introductory course toward a degree. Once competed, he will work on the same course as his adult peers. Interestingly, Jack is home schooled, with his mother his teacher. She says Jack was always hungry for knowledge, even badgering her to teach him on weekends.
no equality
A group of male students in a US high school have been given detention for wearing skirts to class. The students at Deptford High School in New Jersey complained that girls wearing skirts were not similarly punished. Previously, the boys had worn the skirts for fun on a casual day, but when they continued to wear them, found that they were being discriminated against for doing so. The group of boys contended that their skirts were of regulation length and caused no distractions.
student sell-out
Students are being targeted by a creative marketing agency that will pay them to turn their foreheads into billboards. Students are being offered up to £88 a week to wear a corporate logo (in vegetable dye) on their heads for at least three hours a day. “With student debt becoming such a massive issue, we thought we’d offer students maximum reward for minimum input‚” says Anna Carloss, managing director of the agency.
A+B=DOA
Some 35 per cent of male teenagers have drunk between nine and 30 alcoholic drinks in one day. The rate of binge drinking among teens has doubled in the past five years, and the age at which most begin has fallen below 14 years. Almost one in four truck drivers killed in road accidents tests positive to stimulants. Some 90 per cent of all drugged drivers were wholly or partly responsible for their own deaths, with almost 14 per cent under the influence of alcohol, and many alcohol plus drugs.
I can just imagine when they get home. They’ll be so happy. No cots. Real beds. Real food. A lawn. Rain. And no sand.—Lauren Richardson whose parents (USA) are both fighting in Iraq
In 2001 the US Patents and Trademarks Office (PTO) granted a patent to IBM for “an apparatus, system and method for providing reservations for restroom use” (#6,329,919). It is one of a flood of “business systems” that the PTO has approved since a 1998 court decision to allow such patents, reflecting the increased importance and value of “intellectual property,” such as computer software, to businesses. However, following a re-examination of the patent covering toilet queues was ordered by the Patent Commissioner, IBM relieved itself of its claim. “The company known as Big Blue does not also want to be known as Big Loo,” said a wag in the British Guardian. Over the past decade, IBM has had more patents granted than any other US company.—Scientific American
Extract from Signs of the Times, May 2003.
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