Tasks for 24 Mar 2008

Dear 1508 & 0408,

As you will already know, I’ve taken ill today. (1508, I am switching your PW lesson with GP for today.) Here are the things that you will need to do before the next lesson:

Reps, print two documents for your class today

1) Check the file called “Deadlines”. Deadlines 2008 Sem 1

2) Read this article, GP Class Task, and answer the following question. Your reply need not be long. Do it on foolscap or the task-sheet itself so that you can file it up, but bring it along for the next lesson, which will be my presentation on Family.

3) FOR 1508 ONLY, work on your noticeboard in the homeroom. I will tell you more later this week, suffice to say here that you have $10 sponsored for it. (The boards at the side-wall belong to you.)

4) IT Reps of both classes: help me check to see if the projector and sound is working in the venue for your next GP lesson and email me at akbywerkz@hotmail.com or we’ll all be catching earthworms in the school-field instead.

That’s all, but if you have any queries, you can either leave a post here or email me at that same email address. I will be at the computer every now and then as I love to work.

Cheers,

Mr Kwok

Politics, Sports

Sports and politics: An indigestible mix
Spielberg’s pull-out from the Beijing Olympics shows how big sporting events can be politicised
By Teo Cheng Wee in Sunday Times

Feb 24, 2008

— ST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION 

LIKE oil and water. That is how Singapore National Olympic Council secretary-general Chris Chan describes sports and politics.
‘While sports aims to bring people together, politics pulls them apart,’ he notes. ‘The two cannot and should not mix.’

So it is clear where he stands in the latest political episode to hit international sports: The recent decision by American director Steven Spielberg to pull out as artistic adviser for the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies.

The director, who came on board in 2006, issued a statement more than a week ago saying he made the decision after failing to convince China to do more to help end the civil conflict in Darfur, Sudan. The violence there has killed more than 200,000 people since 2003.

China is believed to have influence over the Islamic regime that runs the country because it buys two-thirds of the country’s oil exports. In turn, it sells weapons to Sudan and defends it in the United Nations Security Council.

‘When he withdrew from the Games, he was taking a political stand on something not related to sports. It hurts the event, it’s a loss to the Olympics and it’s not something he should have done,’ says Mr Chan, referring to Spielberg.

That politics and sports should not mix is a statement echoed by many sportsmen and administrators.

Yet even the most idealistic of them must concede that to keep the two spheres completely apart in today’s sporting world is wishful thinking.

‘Oil and water’ is not the right analogy in this instance. Oil and water do not mix – but sports and politics are inextricably intertwined.

Athletes, after all, are mostly funded by their respective governments. Large-scale sporting events cannot be hosted if a country does not pledge funds. And infrastructure for sporting events cannot be put in place without political backing.

When Singapore hosted the 117th International Olympic Committee (IOC) session in 2005, as many politicians as sportsmen were in town. Then British prime minister Tony Blair and former US first lady Hillary Clinton rubbed shoulders with David Beckham and Alexander Popov.

But one should be careful to distinguish between governmental support for an event and political interference, Singapore’s IOC executive board member Ng Ser Miang points out.

‘It’s impossible to say that there can be absolutely no political involvement in sports. If a nation is investing a lot of money and resources, the government definitely needs to be involved.

‘But the country’s sports associations and National Olympic Council (NOC) should remain autonomous and not have to make decisions under political pressure.’

It crosses the line when, say, a new sports minister comes on board and unilaterally sacks the elected NOC members, replacing them with his own people. Such cases have happened before and are against the Olympic charter, says Mr Ng.

Political involvement does not mean there will be a political agenda, says Parliamentary Secretary (Community Development, Youth and Sports) Teo Ser Luck, who has been a key member of the Republic’s winning bid for the 2010 Youth Olympic Games (YOG).

He acknowledges that he is a politician drumming up support for a sporting event, but asserts that the bid was not for the ruling party but for the country – in particular, the social benefits it can bring in bonding its citizens.

‘We didn’t bid on the YOG for economic benefits. We didn’t bid on it for political mileage,’ he tells The Sunday Times.

‘If we really wanted to score political points, we won’t pick a project like this, where we have little experience and success is so uncertain.’

Politics on the podium

POLITICIANS aside, what should one make of individuals, groups or athletes who use sports meets to make a political point?

Spielberg’s stand on Darfur is neither the first nor the last time that such an event will be used to publicise political issues, particularly at the mother of all meets, the Olympics.

The mass appeal of sports and the resulting media focus make it a useful platform to publicise issues and concerns, says Singapore Management University law lecturer Eugene Tan.

Older sports fans will remember the two American runners raising their black-gloved fists at the rostrum in the 1968 Mexico Games in support of the Black Power movement in the United States; or the tit-for-tat boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Games, among others (see other story).

Since then, there has been relative quiet for two decades at the Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney and Athens Olympics.

But with China’s emergence on the global stage, the Beijing Games have proved to be a lightning rod for activists who want to take the country to task not just over Darfur, but also Tibet and Taiwan, among other issues.

Since the Spielberg incident, sports ministers from several countries have hit out at critics calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games, insisting it would be counter-productive.

They especially want the sportsmen to be kept out of it.

The Olympics are ‘about sport, not about human rights. It is up to politicians, NGOs and the like to pursue this matter, not athletes’, Slovenian Sports Minister Milan Zver points out.

The Olympic charter states that there should be ‘no kind of demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas’ from athletes.

For those who feel politically inclined, however, the charter does not forbid them from expressing opinions elsewhere – a point picked up by political analyst Terence Chong.

‘You can raise political issues and champion the purer ideals of sports at the same time. The two need not be mutually exclusive,’ he says.

Still, for the time being, athletes appear to have little interest in getting involved. Already, there have been reports of sportsmen resenting being called on to challenge China’s human rights record or even to follow Spielberg’s footsteps in quitting the Games.

Italian kayak champion Josefa Idem, who will be competing in her seventh Games in Beijing, was initially against the awarding of the Olympics to ‘an undemocratic country like China’.

‘But now that they’ve decided to go there, I’m against applying pressure for political goals using the skin of the athletes,’ she says.

Similarly, reigning Olympic tennis champion Justine Henin from Belgium reiterated to journalists that she was going to the Olympics ‘to play tennis, not play politics’.

What is most important to sportsmen like former national swimmer Ang Peng Siong is that politics should never hurt the sportsman.

When speaking to The Sunday Times, he brought up a name – Craig Beardsley – that most people would not have heard of.

The two met when Ang was training in the US in the early 1980s. A butterfly specialist, Beardsley was one of the American swimmers who did not get to go to the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the US boycott.

There is no way of knowing if Beardsley would have won the 200m butterfly gold in Moscow, but on July 30, 1980, he set a world record at the US Nationals. The time was more than a second faster than than that set by Sergei Fesenko of the Soviet Union, who won the Olympic gold 10 days earlier in Moscow.

Four years later, Beardsley missed making the 1984 Olympic team by 0.36 of a second.

‘For athletes like him, it was heartbreaking,’ Ang recalls.

So for the sake of unwitting victims like Beardsley, there may be another cause worth campaigning for in Beijing: If it is not possible to keep politics out of sports, we should at least keep it away from sportsmen.

When politics invades the arena

A LOOK at politics and the Olympics:1906: At the Athens Olympics, Irish athlete Peter O’Connor scaled the flagpole to tear down the British Union flag that was flown for his second place in the long jump. In its place, he waved an Irish flag.

1936: German dictator Adolf Hitler used the Berlin Olympics as a propaganda tool as well as to showcase what he believed was the supremacy of the Aryan race and the inferiority of ethnic Africans. Famously, he did not shake the hand of African- American runner Jesse Owens – who won four gold medals at the Games – although later stories surfaced that Hitler did not shake the hands of many other athletes as well.

1968: Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the gold and bronze medallists in the men’s 200m race, stood on the medal rostrum barefooted and wearing civil rights buttons.

As the national anthem played, they lowered their heads and raised a black-gloved fist each to protest against unequal rights for blacks in the United States. They were dropped from the team, packed home and banned from the Mexico Games.

1972: A group of eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September organisation broke into the Olympic Village in Munich and killed 11 Israeli athletes.

1976: Twenty-eight African countries boycotted the Montreal Games as they were upset with New Zealand for continuing to play rugby against South Africa, which was under apartheid rule.

1980: To protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US led a boycott of the Moscow Games. In all, 64 nations sat out the competition.

1984: In retaliation, 14 Soviet-led countries boycotted the Los Angeles Games.

2000: Australian and aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman celebrated her win in the 400m race in the Sydney Games by draping herself with the Australian and Aboriginal flags.

2008: Director Steven Spielberg pulls out as artistic adviser for the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies, saying that China has not done enough to stop the conflict in Darfur.

Politics, Words

When words – just words – won’t cut it
By Janadas Devan, ON WORDS in Sunday Times

Feb 24, 2008

HOW important are words in politics?
‘I do think that words are important and words matter, but actions speak louder than words,’ Senator Hillary Clinton said. She was implying that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, was just a grand speech-maker – all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.

‘Don’t tell me words don’t matter,’ Mr Obama retorted. ”I have a dream’ – just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ – just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words? Just speeches?’

Well, yes, as a matter of fact – especially in this instance, where Mr Obama’s words about words were borrowed. He had lifted them, almost wholesale, from a rift his friend and campaign co-chairman, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, had used to defend his own rhetorical gifts.

”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ – just words? Just words,’ Mr Patrick had asked in 2006. ”We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ – just words? ‘I have a dream’ – just words?’

Mr Obama’s words about words were actually an improvement on Mr Patrick’s, plagiarised though they were. For one thing, he used 14 fewer words to make the same point. For another, the cadence of his lines was vastly superior. Notice how he began with a simple quote – ‘I have a dream’; shifted to a rotund one – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’; and returned to a pithy one – ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’.

Mr Obama – or perhaps more accurately, his speech-writer – has a wonderfully precise ear. He has an unerring sense of the rhythmic possibilities of the English language. He is creative even when plagiarising.

As anyone who has marked plagiarised students’ papers, as I have, would know, that is a rare gift. ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better,’ the poet T.S. Eliot, no mean thief himself, wrote once. The same might be said of politicians. As rhetorical thieves go, Mr Obama is inspired.

But is he also a good historian of political speech? Did the figures he quotes – Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – value words as highly as he does? Were they great leaders because they could make great speeches, as Mr Obama seems to think? Or did their greatness inhere in their ability to weld speech to action, as Mrs Clinton suggests?

The record indicates Mrs Clinton is correct. Americans do not honour King because he once said ‘I have a dream’. Any number of snivelling, pimply 16-year olds have said the same. King also organised, marched, agitated; he was beaten and arrested; he paid his dues. His ‘I have a dream’ speech had the impact it did because long years of intense and courageous mobilisation preceded it.

Similarly, it is ridiculous to imply Roosevelt’s ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words – sufficed to end the Great Depression. His skills as a communicator – that confident, reassuring baritone; the ability to explain complex policy in simple terms; the gift of seeming to address his listeners individually, one-to-one, in his radio ‘fireside chats’ – were undoubtedly crucial.

But if he had just said there is ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ at his inaugural in March 1933, and left it at that, fear would most certainly not have been squashed. Americans honour him because that speech led up to, and was given substance by, a slew of measures in his famous first ‘one hundred days’ in office, when he displayed the purposefulness of government. He showed, not merely said, there was ‘nothing to fear’.

We – especially literary types, including journalists – tend to assume there is only one kind of effective political speech: oratory. Every example Mr Obama (and Mr Patrick) cited above was of that variety – the uplifting turn of phrase, the moving peroration that lifts eyes heavenward and sends the heart racing and leaves a lump in the throat, ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ sort of thing. But actually this is not the only – or even the most – effective kind of political speech.

Take Senator Obama: He is a great speaker – with a text before him on the teleprompter, standing behind a podium, looking out on delirious crowds. But he is not preternaturally as effective in debate. Ironically, Mrs Clinton (the self-described doer, not phrase-maker) is a more fluent off-the-cuff speaker.

Most of us speak in phrases, with frequent hums and haws; some of us speak in sentences; Mrs Clinton speaks in whole paragraphs – and hardly ever makes a grammatical mistake. I have often wondered, when listening to her, how she was going to end a particularly long and involved sentence, studded with about 10 sub-clauses and as many parenthetical digressions, feeling certain there was going to be a syntactical train wreck before long, only to hear her pull it all together and end with a perfectly grammatical and logical full-stop.

The impression TV audiences have that she has a greater command of policy than does Mr Obama derives in part from this uncanny ability of hers to speak in complex sentences and paragraphs.

Or take Mr Lee Kuan Yew: He is by common consent an effective communicator. But as his former press secretary Alex Josey remarked many years ago, he is not an orator. One can trawl through the thousands of speeches he has made over the last 50 year and not find a single ‘I have a dream’ or ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’, let alone a ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ moment. And yet, he was an effective public speaker. How so?

Mr Lee had a conversational style. He hardly ever appealed to the heart. He appealed instead to the head – and dragged the heart along by convincing the head.

‘Look, this is so, isn’t it? It has to be. You look at the facts – one, two, three…100. If we don’t do this, we are finished. Look what happened in A, B, C…Z. They thought they could get away with it. What happened? Total disaster. So let’s be realistic. There is no alternative. We have to do this. You tell me: What is the alternative? You can’t think of any, right? So this is the correct thing to do, no alternative. Let’s press on.’

The power of grand oratory should not be underestimated. ‘If we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have,’ Mr Obama said, and he’s not wrong.

The Sabbath exists for a similar purpose. Once a week, it does the soul good to be inspired. But then there are six other days in the week when perspiration would be more in order. Just saying, repeatedly, every day, ‘Yes, we can’, won’t cut it.

Ethics, Science, Nature, Choice

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24shubin.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=neil+shubin+dragons+don%27t&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

By NEIL SHUBIN
Published: February 24, 2008

DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.

Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion ― there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.

But these eggs ― two of which hatched a few weeks ago ― were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

Komodos ― like many fish, amphibians and reptiles ― have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.

Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.

The shark example is particularly striking because sharks are very primitive living fish, having shared a common ancestor with us over 400 million years ago. Biological cloning is not a recent invention of scientists; it is an ancient ability. And sharks, fish and lizards are probably only the tip of the iceberg. We know of virgin birth only in those rare instances when we’ve been lucky enough to see it. Nobody knows how common it is because there has been no systematic search for the phenomenon.

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes ― there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”