American Buddhist Net

ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2008) — A new Carnegie Mellon University brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are given 100 hours of intensive remedial instruction.

...The research's implications may reach far beyond improving literacy skills. Just noted that the brain's capacity to adapt as the result of targeted instruction has the potential to influence the remedial learning process in other subject areas, as well.

"Any kind of education is a matter of training the brain. When poor readers are learning to read, a particular brain area is not performing as well as it might, and remedial instruction helps to shape that area up," he said. "This finding shows that poor readers can be helped to develop buff brains. A similar approach should apply to other skills."

Additionally, the concrete evidence of improvement demonstrated in this study may be valuable in evaluating the effectiveness of a teaching approach or curriculum, or could even be used to shape education policy. "We are at the beginning of a new era of neuro-education," Just said.

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If I had more faith in real degrees, I might be more bothered by this. The average "real" degree is purchased. It generally does require some attendance and some work, but that can either be fudged or drawn out over such a long period of time, there is no great certainty the recipient is especially qualified. The most you can say for many is they had the time and money to spend a few extra years in school. Real degree-holders commit crimes, fake research, take money from compromising sources, lie, cheat, and so forth. One of the brightest and most capable people I know is a janitor with a high school equivalency certificate. In today's USA, many/most degrees have become little more than certificates of guild membership where "colleagues" quickly learn how to cover for each other while they all play the "expert" game with themselves and the uninitiated. Sorry for the cynicism, but having seen academia up-close and from several different angles, I am well-aware of how much academic "accomplishment" depends on kissing the right booty. ABN
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Bill Morlin and Jim Camden
© The Spokesman-Review
July 30, 2008

Hundreds of people working in the military, government and education are on a list of almost 10,000 people who spent $7.3 million buying phony and counterfeit high school and college degrees from a Spokane diploma mill.

The complete list of buyers, which the U.S. Department of Justice has refused to release to the public, has been obtained by The Spokesman-Review.

"There are people in high places with these degrees, and only one of them has been charged with a crime," a source familiar with the list said Monday.

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Monks from the Viet Nam Buddhist Sangha’s Giac Ngo newspaper have taken students from around the country on an annual camping trip.

29/07/2008

Last weekend’s visit to the Giang Dien Waterfall in Dong Nai featured 1,200 students from 12 provinces and some foreign countries who learnt about Buddhism, including meditation.

The young campers were divided into four sub-groups named after Buddhism’s major doctrines – tu bi (compassion), tri tue (intelligence), tinh tan (industriousness), and thanh tinh (tranquillity).

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By STEPHANIE SAUL

A growing number of American children are taking drugs for a wide range of chronic conditions related to childhood obesity, according to prescription data from three large organizations.
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The numbers, from pharmacy plans Medco Health Solutions, Express Scripts and the marketing data collection company Verispan, indicate that hundreds of thousands of children are taking medication to treat Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and acid reflux — all problems linked to obesity that were practically unheard-of in children two decades ago.

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Rebecca French will become the new director of the University at Buffalo's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the law school Aug. 16.

French succeeds Lynn Mather, a UB law and political science professor, who headed the Baldy Center since 2002.

An international authority in law and anthropology, French has done research on the Buddhist legal system of Tibet and was instrumental in bringing the Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader in Tibet, to UB in September 2006.

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It is clear to me, and I am sure many others, that representative democracy as practiced in the USA is a horribly wasteful and inefficient system. It has been entirely compromised--taken over--by big money, greed, secrecy, blackmail, and corruption. Mainstream media has long been folded into the mess and has long been incapable of offering any relief. Ordinary voters can NEVER be expected to understand the in-and-outs of the system or to vote wisely (on rigged machines) for candidates who almost never fulfill their promises anyway. I believe this basic state of the nation must be taken as a given. It is square one. Once this is fully accepted as being more or less the way things are, we will be able to move on to square two--figure out ways to change the system. The website described below can give some insights into how we might go about doing things differently. Basically, politics is an information system. If the system is well-made and well-controlled, and if good information is input, the output will be good. If the system is clogged with corruption, bottlenecks, and special interests as the US political system now is, we will ALWAYS get bad output; that is, bad government, mismanaged resources, bad laws, stupid policies, and so on. Please take a moment to consider the position we are in as a nation. Then consider how it is simply IMPOSSIBLE for this system to fix itself through "better leadership" or whatever. The biggest problem we face today is our system of government does not and cannot work unless it is modified. I have made a few preliminary proposals for ways we might consider changing the US system by making a few changes in the Constitution--basically greatly expanding the size of Congress by replacing fake "representatives" with millions of QUALIFIED citizens. I do not expect everyone to agree with the changes I have proposed, but I do hope that people will consider the basic idea of changing our present system of government by amending the Constitution so that Congress can be expanded enough to allow for much better information input and output. ABN
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By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: July 22, 2008

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea.

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July 22, 2008

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) _ A South Korean court on Tuesday upheld an earlier ruling sentencing a former university professor to 18 months in jail for faking a Yale doctorate and embezzling museum funds.

The Seoul Western District Court said its appellate court affirmed its sentence against Shin Jeong-ah for using the fake degree to become an art history professor at a Seoul university and win financial sponsorship for a museum where she worked. The court handed down the first ruling in March.

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In a sane nation with a reasonable government, this would be a fine idea. It is surely something sorely missing in the corridors of power where neocons still lurk and rule. But in this nation, which seems overrun with psychotic personalities, one can only wonder which academics they will listen to and which of their ideas will be applied to what. In the recent past, psychologists have been used to amp up torture sessions or do mind-control experiments. Sociologists have made disturbing "contributions" to crowd-control and the mass psychology of propaganda and fear. Historians have been used to distort history, linguists hounded into silence (Sibel Edmonds), scientists forced to fudge research (FDA, EPA, NIST, FEMA), journalists muzzled, and so on and on. We do need something like this, but with this administration it is always the same--we do not need to have them do it because they will twist it so much it will hurt. ABN
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By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 18, 2008

Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

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Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones

STANFORD (BCN)

The Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies has received $5 million from the Hong Kong-based philanthropic organization Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, university officials announced Monday.

The money will fund graduate fellowships in Buddhist studies and will help support faculty and student research, visiting fellows, curriculum development and academic and public events.

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Sunday, 22 June 2008

A charitable trust is planning to build the UK's first Buddhist state primary school in Birmingham.

The Birmingham Buddhist Vihara Trust, which set up the Peace Pagoda in Edgbaston 10 years ago, wants to built the school within five years.

State funding would be sought for the scheme, which would mainly serve the city's 3,000-strong Buddhist community.

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By DOUG WHITEMAN

COLUMBUS, Ohio—The school board of a small central Ohio community voted unanimously Friday to fire a teacher accused of preaching his Christian beliefs despite staff complaints and using a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.

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If they did make the pact, and since they broke no laws, maybe the good people of Gloucester should help them do just what they want to do--raise their children together. This is really unusual behavior and can and will be viewed largely as a "problem." But maybe it was a brilliant, creative act as well. Why not help them do what they want to do? The alternative will probably be counseling, drug therapy, keeping the girls apart, making an example of them, and so on. By this single act, the girls have shown their desire--indeed forced it upon the world--to live differently from the rest of society, which itself has more sins than this to contend with. There are surely many aspects of this case that I do not understand, but the general outline seems clear enough, if the reports are true. The girls want to live not as atomized individuals in a rough-and-tumble world, but as a group of loving friends and mothers in a community they conceived of themselves, in both senses of the word.

As for the fathers who broke the law, the strength of the girls' will and bond should a consideration when judging them. ABN
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By Tania deLuzuriaga
Globe Staff / June 19, 2008

Gloucester school officials have discovered at least part of the reason that their high school pregnancy rate has more than quadrupled over the past year, according to a Time magazine story that hits newsstands today.
more stories like this

"Nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together," the magazine's story said, after reporters talked with Joseph Sullivan, Gloucester High School principal.

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Worth reading if China or the Olympics interests you. ABN
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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 20, 2008

SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.

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By Jane Rochstad Lim • June 18, 2008

A secondary school in north eastern Thailand has designed a new bathroom for its growing community of transvestites.

The "transvestite toilet", designated by a human figure split into half man in blue and half female in red, has since been used since class started last month.

"I am so happy about this," student Vichai Sangsakul told Thailand's PBS news channel on Tuesday.

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Prison Dharma Network (PDN) was founded in 1989 by Fleet Maull, a federal prisoner then serving a 14-year sentence for drug trafficking. Since its founding, PDN's Books Behind Bars program has provided books on meditation and contemplative spirituality to over 25,000 prisoners in over 900 prisons around the world.

We have connected hundreds of prisoners with pen pal mentors. Our network now includes over 75 member organizations and prison dharma groups of various faiths and over 2,500 individual members and supporters, many of whom are active prison dharma volunteers.

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Well-said! ABN
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Reflections of a frustrated graduating student

By: Jay Dyer

...So, I learned fairly early on that the system was about promoting and sustaining the system, a form of Weberian "rationalization." The beast has no other end than the perpetual existence of the beast itself. The only students who generally excel in this system are the one's who jump through all the hoops, bowing before big brother. Granted, many of the more intelligent "rebellious" sophomores and juniors end up wanting to "fight the system," but they've already been brainwashed into accepting moral relativism, so why does it really matter? In this worldview, there is no objective moral reason to "fight the system." So, by the time they are in grad school, they have abandoned the phony, elite-controlled left, become apathetic, and are reduced to occultists or nihilists, concentrating on their thesis concerning the reliability of the gnostic Gospels and the unreliability of the synoptics. Elite objective achieved: new recruit fully brainwashed, taking his seat as the incoming professor in place of the previous zombie.

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Sirikul Bunnag

The good news is that more high school graduates are furthering their studies in universities. The bad news is that some are committing suicide because they lack the money to pay the fees.

The situation is "very unexpected", said secretary-general of the Office of the Higher Education Commission (OHEC), Sumeth Yamnoon.

One of the cases which highlighted the tragedy of student suicides happened in Sing Buri on May 17.

An 18-year-old girl and a prospective student at Silpakorn University, Sukchaya Kaewsomchart, hung herself at her house. She was supposed to report to the university that day, but decided not to go, simply because her family was poor and could not afford to pay the tuition fees.

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Calif. high school paper shut down after running flag-burning photo granted reprieve

AP News
Jun 14, 2008 18:33 EST

Officials at a Northern California high school have reversed their decision to shut down a school newspaper that published a front-page photo of a student burning an American flag.

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Is it possible that Bush and Cheney have been doing something like this to us for seven years? ABN
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By ALLISON HOFFMAN – 7 hours ago

OCEANSIDE, Calif. (AP) — On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax — a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

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June 12, 2008

Seven Buddhist teachers in a public school in Banang Sata district have requested for transfer out of the restive region, citing security concern, their director said.

Director of the Ban Tharnthip School in Tambon Banang Sta, Abdulloh Ja-oh, said the June 11 shooting death of a fellow teacher, Harit Sa-I, have jolted all 27 teachers and added that seven Buddhist teachers have put in for transfer.

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Lisa Miller
Jun 16, 2008

...Now, even on very conservative Christian campuses, there are gays who are "out" and who want their authority figures to recognize them—and their sexuality—as deserving of God's love. Thanks largely to the efforts of Soul Force, which encourages dialogue between gays and Christians on campus, these students are trying to get organized.

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With only six million university places at stake, the results can spell the difference between poverty and plenty, reports Jason Burke in Beijing

Sunday June 8, 2008

AT 11.31 yesterday morning, Xu Ziwen strode through the gap the police had forced in the ranks of waiting parents and said the words that, even if no one believed him, everyone wanted to hear: 'No problem. It was easy.'

Behind him a horde of track-suited teenagers poured out of the examination halls into the pale sunshine of Beijing.

Xu had just done the first part of an exam taken by the most people ever at one sitting, the Chinese equivalent of A-levels or gaokao. This weekend more than 10 million 18-year-olds across China sat through four critically important papers. Tonight they will celebrate - or simply sleep. 'A piece of cake,' bragged Xu Ziwen as he cycled off.

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By Buzz Ball
Carthage Press
New! Sun Jun 08, 2008

CARTHAGE, Mo. -

For the first time in more than three years, the Mark Benz family has returned to Carthage from its High Tower Ministries work in Cambodia.

But they have returned with a lot more than what they had when they left in 2004.

• Established is the Cambodian Orphan Aid;

• The Bykota House, a Christian Children’s Home, is in full operation with 16 kids;

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6 Jun, 2008

BEIJING: In a rare gesture, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee today personally presented India's coveted civilian award Padma Bhushan to Ji Xianlin, renowned Chinese Indologist who has inspired love for Indian culture and literature among generations of his countrymen.

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DC checkpoint plan latest 'police state' tactic: Councilman