Humor4u

Photo by Sandy Millin via eltpics A bit less heavy on political news this year and featuring more sports, showbiz and gossip items, here is my traditional annual news quiz. As in the previous years, it is available in two levels: upper-intermediate/advanced and lower intermediate, and comes complete with 7-page teachers notes (scroll all the way down). The notes contain ideas on how to use the quiz in class and, no less importantly, how to explore the language. Check back in the first days of the New Year for vocabulary review activities ( update - click here ) Quiz The London Olympics kicked off with a spectacular and at times peculiar Opening Ceremony directed by the acclaimed British director Danny Boyle. Who jumped from a helicopter as part of the Opening Ceremony?  In October 2012 the New York Stock Exchange was closed for two consecutive days for the first time in over a hundred years. What caused the shutdown? The music video for "Gangnam Style" by the Korean singer P

Much is written about the pending "fiscal cliff..." mostly the conversation revolves around how to avoid the automatic increases in taxation coupled with the slashing of government spending, solution is seldom mentioned. There are exceptions however... Pay Raise For Congress, Federal Workers Even though the deficit and debt issue has been on the radar for years, nothing has been done to address the issue and now the time has expired... in politics it seems if not for the last minute... nothing would ever get done. Both significant tax increases and deep spending cuts are entirely necessary if sovereign debt slide is to be arrested and slowed to a manageable place, this truism may set the stage for 2013 as doltish world leaders face the unsolvable problem of shrinking income and burgeoning costs of operation, this is a global issue and so carries global impact. Amazingly the cast of characters who manufactured this obscene situation remain in place and profess to hold the solu

INTERLUDE Stay tuned..

We are all familiar with the standard news sections, typically we flip to our personal area of interest... be it sports, travel, entertainment, business or world events and so forth, never did I ever imagine a mainstream newspaper would feel the need to add a section devoted specifically to the genre of Financial Crime. Yet, here it is in black and white. So corrupt has the world of finance become... financial crime now commands a specific section in the Telegraph newspaper. Such is the volume and degree of daily and weekly financial crime it now commands a "section" all its own. Financial Crime The latest news on financial crime, insider trading, fraud and financial crime security. The cost of such fiscal felony crime is almost incalculable since it comprises personal ruination for the victims and contributes to the imbalance of the capital system, which even without such criminal interference is teetering on the edge of demise with little hope of sustainability. Unfortunate

and tips for new bloggers Photo by aclil2climb via eltpics This post is written in response to Adam Simpson's blogchallenge , which, he admits himself, is an act of "shameless self-promotion". And this is a man who urged us not to vote for him when he was recently  nominated for annual Edublog Awards and who was also the winner of last year's TeachingEnglish blogathon ! Anyhow,   here is my Top 12 of 2012. There is, however, one difference. Seeing that it was really difficult for me to decide which posts are MY personal favourites, the list below, unlike that of Adam's, is a list of the most viewed posts of 2012. 1. In response to Hugh Dellar's Dissing Dogme: In Defence of… TBL Hugh Dellar's anti Dogme series were enlightening and hugely entertaining but there was one particular argument which I didn't quite agree with and addressed in this post which has had the highest number of clicks this year. I don't know if it's down to an increased in

It all started with a single category in the 1840 US Census: "idiocy/lunacy", with the first DSM appearing in 1952 ( Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders ). Now there are hundreds of ways for us not to be 'normal'. Frances Allen, the psychiatrist who led DSM-4, has written a scathing critique of DSM-5 that has even more diagnoses: meet Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, folks (formerly known as temper tantrums). Read more about psychiatric over-diagnosis in my guest blog at Scientific American: "Is anybody sane here?" said the psychiatrist to the journalist .  Find out more about tackling this problem in medicine generally at Preventing Overdiagnosis: Winding back the harms of too much medicine .  More of my cartoons on over-diagnosis: You have the right to remain anxious and The over-abundance of over-diagnosis . [Update] In 2016, another look at the history of the DSM, with another call for the next one to be based on an objective as

INTERLUDE Stay tuned...

Just what the world needs.... another inadequately discoverable journal! The number of medical journals is doubling every 20 years - and trials are scattered across so many , that it is becoming ever harder to track them down. Just how many journals do you need to read?, blogs Paul Glasziou .   Richard Smith and Ian Roberts argue that trials shouldn't even be published in journals any more. And in case you were wondering what an n-of-1 trial is: it's a trial with one person in it (number = 1). It means the patient is their own control in a structured experiment. For example, an "n of 1 trial" of a particular drug would mean taking it for a pre-specified time, stopping for a pre-specified time, and so on. You can read more about this kind of trial here . (Or you could ponder how a trial on "n of 1"s had to be terminated because of lack of enrollment - and I thought I had a tough week!) [Update 12 April 2016] Salima Punja studied meta-analysis of n-of-1 tria

A summary of the closing plenary (Mis)-Applied Linguistics at the TESOL France colloquium on 18 November 2012 Chia explaining 'stealth pair work' Chia Suan Chong started her plenary at the 31 st annual TESOL France colloquium by warning us there would be 65 slides in her PowerPoint and introducing the concept of stealth pair work – speaking quietly, in a muted voice with a person sitting next to you. Considering the fact the audience consisted of about 200 ELT teachers, this wasn't an easy task. I had been really looking forward to this talk, so I was prepared to shut up for 60 minutes. I had expected Chia to debunk ELT myths and show how certain findings of applied linguistics research have been misapplied in ELT. Instead, the talk went in a different direction as Chia took us on a journey through the history of ELT. From all translation to no translation Her colourful account of different methodologies started from the Grammar Translation method. According to this oldes

I'm pretty happy...I was thinking I wouldn't be able to make it to CTNX this year, but it turns out I can! Also, I will be there selling the Skadi book , which is finally done!  It feels really exciting to hold a finished book in my hands.  Pretty neat.  SO!  About the book...it's pretty big, magazine size, 128 pages, and is in full color.  It's mostly made up of the comics from the first two years that Luke and I did Skadi, though there are a couple newer comics thrown in, as well as a bit of new art.  You can pre-order the signed book for 20 bucks plus shipping and handling at the new SKADI STORE , or you can wait and pick one up at CTNX.  I'll be sharing a booth HERE with Luke Cormican and Gabe Swarr. Besides the 100 pages of comics, there are also nine beautiful pinups from art heroes Bill Pressing , Brianne Drouhard , Emmy Cicierega , Pedro Vargas , Becky Dreistadt , Alex Kirwan , Kristen McCabe , Shawn Dickinson , and Seo Kim .  There's even two bonu

If nothing else we have learned one thing, when disasters strike there is an initial onslaught of coverage, intense and dramatic coverage with much slick "mainstream" presentation and of course saturation of advertising opportunity. Disaster coverage has a shelf-life though.... and it seems any particular chronic incident drops off the radar once perceived it has no further promotional juice. This is a terrible pattern because the real news is always in the months and years subsequent to the initial circumstance. I'm always amazed how quickly the spotlight shifts away from the ongoing daily miseries of the victims and afflicted and often crass "recovery" mismanagement is a mainstay of any later followup "news"... rather than the uplifting words of comfort one would hope for or even expect. It seems the criminal element is drawn like flies to a rotting carcass when emergency "funds' are made available. It is here I should list examples of both

The age of suspicion, NOT paranoia. A few decades ago... record storms could be wholly attributed to natural events and circumstances. Since the advent of extreme technology and demonstrated ill-advised use of it... we now live in a period where the waters of understanding are thoroughly murky and clarity of cause and effects is blurred. As our world spirals into a state of chaos and overwhelming changes, we can never deduce the causal patterns since government has succumbed to the desires of corporate interests and routinely approves insane implementation of horrendous practices which are known to carry risk far beyond the sensibility of any good purpose. We have lost all semblance of established baseline, a must if one is to understand what is going on and why. The crime scenes are so trampled with self-anointed elitist boots that we may never know the extent of their culpability. Who knows what impact insane application of technology has contributed to the ever escalating phenomena

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating between near-synonyms. I repost here my reply alongside the original email with the author's kind permission. Hi Leo, I wonder whether you can help me. Do you know any place on the web where I can compare the meanings of near synonyms? I've used the concordance type sites which give me lots of collocations, but that isn't what I want. It doesn't help my pupils to give them 10 collocations for each word (e.g. regular, usual, routine ) some of which are identical. I need to be able to put my finger on a general rule(s) like, one is for people and the other is for abstract ideas (I know this example is irrelevant to those particular words) Thanks for any help you can provide. Renee Wahl Dear Renee, First of all, it's great to know that you use concordance software. I wouldn't give pupils 10 collocations for each word as it is a bit

Sometimes, people combine data that really don't belong together - conflict all over the place! The I-squared statistical test in a meta-analysis can pin it down. It tests the amount of variance between results of different studies to see if there is more difference than you would expect just because of chance. The test measures how much inconsistency there is in the results of trials (technically called heterogeneity). Cochrane includes a (very!) rough guide to interpreting the I-squared : 75% or more is "considerable" (read, an awful lot!). Differences might be responsible for contradictory results - including differences in the people in the trials, the way they were treated, or the way the trials were done. Too much heterogeneity, and the trials really shouldn't be together. But heterogeneity isn't always a deal breaker. Sometimes it can be explained. Want some in-depth reading about heterogeneity in systematic reviews? Here's an article by Paul Glasziou