A game to teach kids how to solve financial problems
Wed, Jan 14 05:50 AM
London, : From now on, dealing with financial problems will be child's play, for a Scottish headmaster has created a new game called Debt Busters, which will help school children learn how to avoid the pitfalls of debt.
Peter Hogan, the headmaster of private school Loretto in Musselburgh, had earlier created a stock market game called Student Investor.
Launched 15 years ago, Student Investor introduced a generation of children to the stock market by allowing them to trade in real stocks and shares.
And now, because of the global economic slowdown, Hogan has devised Debt Busters, which deals with personal finance.
The game chiefly caters to 13-year-old kids in solving real-life debt problems, to help them understand borrowing before they are faced with student loans, in-store credit cards and mortgage repayments.
Debt Busters is to be launched at Loretto next term, and may be rolled out across Scottish schools from September.
The game will see youngsters help people to escape the problems of the credit crunch by investigating offers on the market week by week and could encourage young people to take an interest in the realities of finance.
"The Student Investor helped thousands of children understand more about the City and I know pupils in my care switched university courses as a result of getting excited about money and investments," the Scotsman quoted Hogan as saying.
"I hope Debt Busters will have the same impact. If we can persuade children to get involved with a bit of fun about debt, instead of it being a pretty miserable subject, they will engage with it," he added.
Teasing is 'good for building character'
Tues, Jan 12 10:30 AM
Melbourne, Jan 12: Playful teasing and being called names can be good for building character, a new study says.
The surprising research found that calling names such as "ranga" could be good for young people because it helps them bond and develop social skills.
It may even make "victims" more likely to take on leadership roles in the long term, reports News.com.au.
To reach the conclusion, Dr Erin Heerey, of the University of Bangor in North Wales, studied a group of university students in California and found that their "playful humiliations" led to them becoming better friends, The Daily Telegraph has reported.
In the study, boffins visited the group again a couple of years later and found that students who had been the butt of jokes were in leadership positions and now playing the same role in passing on these social norms.
According to Heerey, playground teasing was a normal part of school life and should not be stopped by politically correct teachers.
She said: "Teasing helps children to discover how to use their bodies, voices and faces to communicate nuances of meaning."
Someone Who Understands
"How much are you going to sell the puppies for?" he asked.
The store owner replied, "Anywhere from $30 to $50."
The little boy reached in his pocket and pulled out some change.
"I have $2.37," he said. "Can I please look at them?"
The little boy became excited. "That is the puppy that I want to buy."
Don't we all need someone who understands?
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Trust Is Relationship
It's most difficult to restore trust if broken early in relationship
Sat, Jan 10 03:20 AM
Washington: Trust, they say, once broken can never be built again, but researchers have now said that if the breach of trust happens in the beginning of a relationship, it is more difficult to overcome than a betrayal that occurs after ties are established.
According to the results, early violations can be particularly devastating, and plant seeds of doubt that may never go away
"First impressions matter when you want to build a lasting trust. If you get off on the wrong foot, the relationship may never be completely right again. It's easier to rebuild trust after a breach if you already have a strong relationship," said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.
He said that the results defy the popular notion that suggests many great relationships start off on a bad note.
"Our results fly in the face of this Hollywood notion of hating someone at first sight but then developing a wonderful, passionate relationship. The likelihood of that happening in real life is pretty low," he said.
For the study, the researcher conducted two related experiments, where college students participated in a game in which their partners violated their trust either right at the beginning of the game or somewhere in the middle.
Using a famous game in psychology called the prisoner's dilemma, the researchers aimed at determining how much the students were willing to cooperate with the partner after trust was breached.
In the first experiment, 138 students played multiple rounds of the game on a computer, which they thought they were playing with a student via a computer in another room. However, they were actually playing with a computer that was programmed to defect at specific points during the more than 30 rounds of the game.
The results indicated that participants who experienced the immediate breaches of trust had the most negative evaluations of their partners.
It was found that participants who experienced a breach of trust during the first two trials of the game were also the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game, suggesting they had the least trust in their partners.
On the other hand, participants who experienced a trust breach latest in the game showed the most cooperation at the end of the game.
Lount pointed out that in all cases, the computer defected against the participants the same number of times, but the timing of the breaches was key.
"An immediate breach of trust is particularly difficult to overcome, and later breaches are considerably less harmful," he said.
After the experiment, the participants filled a questionnaire and it was found that those who experienced the immediate breach rated their partners as less trustworthy than did those whose partner defected later in the game.
In a second experiment, the researchers essentially repeated the first experiment with 108 students, but this time the students answered a short set of questions concerning their perceptions and feelings about their partner immediately following a breach and every 10 trials thereafter.
"Our results suggest that immediate breaches are especially costly because they seriously damage the impressions people have about their partner, and that's hard to repair," he said.
Men find women driving 'Mini' sexiest
Thu, Jan 9 04:00 AM
London, : Want to impress the man of your dreams? Well, then get yourself a Mini, for according to a new poll, female owners of the classic cars are the sexiest.
The poll of 2,000 men asked blokes to pick out vehicles favoured by the sexiest girls, and Mini drivers came at the top.
Three-quarters of the participants said "fit girls" had Minis and 68 per cent said they always did their best to get a glimpse of a Mini driver if they passed one in traffic.
The second spot was nabbed by BMW 1, followed by the Peugeot 206 in third and the Ford Ka in fourth.
Also in the top five was the Vauxhall Corsa, reports the Mirror.
Other cars "always driven by good-looking girls" were the Citroen C1, the VW Polo, Fiat 500, the Ford Fiesta and Nissan Micra.
A spokesman for internet market research company www.onepoll.com, which did the survey, said: "It seems the Mini is the car of choice for great-looking ladies."
Thu, Jan 9 04:00 AM
London, : Want to impress the man of your dreams? Well, then get yourself a Mini, for according to a new poll, female owners of the classic cars are the sexiest.
The poll of 2,000 men asked blokes to pick out vehicles favoured by the sexiest girls, and Mini drivers came at the top.
Three-quarters of the participants said "fit girls" had Minis and 68 per cent said they always did their best to get a glimpse of a Mini driver if they passed one in traffic.
The second spot was nabbed by BMW 1, followed by the Peugeot 206 in third and the Ford Ka in fourth.
Also in the top five was the Vauxhall Corsa, reports the Mirror.
Other cars "always driven by good-looking girls" were the Citroen C1, the VW Polo, Fiat 500, the Ford Fiesta and Nissan Micra.
A spokesman for internet market research company www.onepoll.com, which did the survey, said: "It seems the Mini is the car of choice for great-looking ladies."
Now, mobile phones that can tell you where your friends are
Thurs, Jan 8 02:40 AM
London, : A team of Scottish scientists has developed mobile phones that can tell you where your friends are or can warn you if it is going to rain.
Professor Roderick Murray-Smith of the University of Glasgow is working for Nokia on the point-and-find software.
Murray-Smith has already created prototypes of the 'magic wand' phones, and he predicts they will be on the shelves by end of this year.
As far as the using the new technology is concerned, users will simply have to wave the mobile phone in the air to get information about the world around them, as the next generation of phones adopt the technology of the Nintendo Wii to make them easier to use than ever.
While the basic technology is already in iPhones and some Nokia handsets, Murray-Smith is developing a host of applications to help people access information from the World Wide Web in the real world.
"We are working on linking people on to the world wide web in the real world, so they can use social networking sites to locate their friends in the real world, or point their phone at a building or a bus stop and find out the right information," Scotsman quoted Murray-Smith, as saying. on
Five Reasons Why India Can't 'Do A Gaza' On Pakistan
Israel has far fewer restrictions.
Over the last week, many Americans (and not a few Indians) have asked me why India does not "do a Gaza" on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel's punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness ... but that is not for want of Hamas intent).
My answer, given with the heavy heart that comes always with a painful grip on reality, is simple: India does not because it cannot.
Here are five reasons why:
1. India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories. India does not have the immunity, the confidence and the military free hand that result from an overwhelming military superiority over an opponent. Israel's foe is a non-sovereign entity that enjoys the most precarious form of self-governance. Pakistan, for all its dysfunction, is a proper country with a proper army, superior by far to the tin-pot Arab forces that Israel has had to combat over time. Pakistan has nukes, to boot. Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it an apocalyptic risk for India. This is, in fact, Pakistan's trump card. (This explains, also, why Israel is determined to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.)
2. Even if India could attack Pakistan without fear of nuclear retaliation, the rationale for "doing a Gaza" is, arguably, not fully present: Israel had been attacked consistently by the very force--Hamas--that was in political control of the territory from which the attacks occurred. By contrast, terrorist attacks on India, while originating in Pakistan, are not authored by the Pakistani government. India can-- and does--contend that Pakistan's government should shut down the terrorist training camps on Pakistani soil. (In this insistence, India has unequivocal support from Washington.) Yet only a consistent and demonstrable pattern of dereliction by Pakistani authorities-- which would need to be dereliction verging on complicity with the terrorists--would furnish India with sufficient grounds to hold the Pakistani state culpable.
3. As our columnist, Karlyn Bowman, writes, Israel enjoys impressive support from the American people, in contrast to the Palestinians. No other state--apart, perhaps, from Britain--evokes as much favor in American public opinion as does Israel. This is not merely the result of the much-vaunted "Israel lobby" (to use a label deployed by its detractors), but also because of the very real depth of cultural interpenetration between American and Israeli society. This fraternal feeling buys Israel an enviable immunity in the conduct of its strategic defense. India, by contrast--while considerably more admired and favored in American public opinion than Pakistan--enjoys scarcely a fraction of Israel's "pull" in Washington when it comes to questions of the use of force beyond its borders.
4. Pakistan is strategically significant to the United States; the Palestinians are not. This gives Washington scant incentive to rein in the Israelis, but a major incentive to rein in any Indian impulse to strike at Pakistan. However justified the Indian anger against Pakistan over the recent invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists, the last thing that the U.S. wants right now is an attack--no matter how surgical--by India against Pakistan-based terror camps. This would almost certainly result in a wholesale shift of Pakistani troops away from their western, Afghan front toward the eastern boundary with India--and would leave the American Afghan campaign in some considerable disarray, at least in the short term. So Washington has asked for, and received, the gift of Indian patience. And although India recognizes that it is not wholly without options to mobilize quickly for punitive, surgical strikes in a "strategic space," it would--right now--settle for a trial of the accused terrorist leaders in U.S. courts. (Seven U.S. citizens were killed in Mumbai: Under U.S. law, those responsible--and this should include Pakistani intelligence masterminds--have to be brought to justice.)
5. My last, and meta-, point: Israel has the privilege of an international pariah to ignore international public opinion in its use of force against the Palestinians. A state with which few others have diplomatic relations can turn the tables on those that would anathematize it by saying, Hang diplomacy. India, by contrast, has no such luxury. It is a prisoner of its own global aspirations--and pretensions.
Yaad-E-Ishq
"Sirf" Is Baar Mera Ek Kaam Karna, Har "Dopehar" Se Pehle, Har "Subha" K Baad, Har "Raat" Se Pehle, Har "Sham" K Baad, "Sirf" Apni Dua K Chand Alfaaz Mere Naam Karna. Acha Lagta Hai Us Ki Yaad Mein Jalte Rehna, Yaad-E-Ishq Mai Gir Gir K Sambhalte Rehna, Yaad Karna Usay Alam-E-Tanhai Mai, Aur Mehfil Mai Usay Dur Se Taktey Rehna. Kabhi Wafa Ki Roshni Madham Nahe Hoti, Lakh Gham Mile Per Aankh Nam Nahe Hoti, Yeh Kaisa Silsila Hai Tumhare Mere Darmiyan, Faslein Jitne Bhi Ho Chahatein Kam Nahe Hoti. Hum Jab Boolna Nahe Jante Thay, To Humare Booley Bina Maa Humari Baatoon Ko Samajhti Thi, Aur Aaj Hum Har Baat Per Kehte Hain, "Chorein Ammi Aap Nahe Samjheingi" Its Fact But True Think About It |
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