What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

Finland's teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why.

By ELLEN GAMERMAN
February 29, 2008; Page W1

Helsinki, Finland

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.

Finland's students are the brightest in the world, according to an international test. Teachers say extra playtime is one reason for the students' success. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman reports.

The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value of graffiti.

The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.

Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it's done from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom.

Fanny Salo in class

Trailing 15-year-old Fanny Salo at Norssi gives a glimpse of the no-frills curriculum. Fanny is a bubbly ninth-grader who loves "Gossip Girl" books, the TV show "Desperate Housewives" and digging through the clothing racks at H&M stores with her friends.

Fanny earns straight A's, and with no gifted classes she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often helps lagging classmates. "It's fun to have time to relax a little in the middle of class," Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.

At lunch, Fanny and her friends leave campus to buy salmiakki, a salty licorice. They return for physics, where class starts when everyone quiets down. Teachers and students address each other by first names. About the only classroom rules are no cellphones, no iPods and no hats.

TESTING AROUND THE GLOBE

Every three years, 15-year-olds in 57 countries around the world take a test called the Pisa exam, which measures proficiency in math, science and reading.

• The test: Two sections from the Pisa science test

• Chart: Recent scores for participating countries

DISCUSS

Do you think any of these Finnish methods would work in U.S. schools? What would you change -- if anything -- about the U.S. school system, and the responsibilities that teachers, parents and students are given? Share your thoughts.

Fanny's more rebellious classmates dye their blond hair black or sport pink dreadlocks. Others wear tank tops and stilettos to look tough in the chilly climate. Tanning lotions are popular in one clique. Teens sift by style, including "fruittari," or preppies; "hoppari," or hip-hop, or the confounding "fruittari-hoppari," which fuses both. Ask an obvious question and you may hear "KVG," short for "Check it on Google, you idiot." Heavy-metal fans listen to Nightwish, a Finnish band, and teens socialize online at irc-galleria.net.

The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master's degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.

Ymmersta school principal Hannele Frantsi

Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show "Beverly Hills, 90210."

In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn't translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: " 'Nah. So what'd you do last night?'" she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely "glue this to the poster for an hour," she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.

At the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, school principal Helena Muilu

Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.

Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don't speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of students are learning English, according to the Education Department. There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments.

Another difference is financial. Each school year, the U.S. spends an average of $8,700 per student, while the Finns spend $7,500. Finland's high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding, unlike the disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland's best- and worst-performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA testing. The U.S. ranks about average.

Finnish students have little angstata -- or teen angst -- about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free. There is competition for college based on academic specialties -- medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don't have the elite status of a Harvard.

Students at the Ymmersta School near Helsinki

Taking away the competition of getting into the "right schools" allows Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood. While many U.S. parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented preschools, the Finns don't begin school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders.

Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.

The Finns enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, but they, too, worry about falling behind in the shifting global economy. They rely on electronics and telecommunications companies, such as Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, along with forest-products and mining industries for jobs. Some educators say Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters. Parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children, says Tapio Erma, principal of the suburban Olari School. "We are more and more aware of American-style parents," he says.

Mr. Erma's school is a showcase campus. Last summer, at a conference in Peru, he spoke about adopting Finnish teaching methods. During a recent afternoon in one of his school's advanced math courses, a high-school boy fell asleep at his desk. The teacher didn't disturb him, instead calling on others. While napping in class isn't condoned, Mr. Erma says, "We just have to accept the fact that they're kids and they're learning how to live."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

孟丽秋专访：“计划外经历”决定人生

社会 | 2008.02.27

孟丽秋专访：“计划外经历”决定人生

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: 后现代风格的慕尼黑工大：滑梯取代电梯

2月21日，慕尼黑工大在官方网站上发布消息称：该校航空摄影测量和地图研究所所长孟丽秋教授将从4月1日起成为慕尼黑工大的副校长，孟丽秋教授也因此成 为了首位跻身德国高校管理层的华人。德国之声中文网对孟丽秋教授进行了专访，孟教授也敞开心扉畅谈了自己目前面临的压力和挑战。

压力来自完全陌生的领域

孟教授是学地图学出身，从上大学到现在已经将近30年了，她从未离开过自己的本行，孟教授认为自己在这方面很幸运。在成为慕尼黑工大副校长之前，孟教授一直担任慕尼黑工大航空摄影测量和地图研究所所长，她的研究方向覆盖了地图学的所有方面，包括基础研究和应用研究。

在接受德国之声中文网采访时孟教授坦言，自己要 面对的压力主要来自马上要进入陌生的管理领域：“我目前在学术方面刚刚渐入佳境就马上要淡出，因为毕竟副校长是一个行政工作比较重的职位。我必须将研究所 的人士和科研工作重新调整，才有心思在新的平台上做事。这个新的平台对我来说非常的陌生，可以说之前我很少关心学校建设，国际关系等行政工作。离开自己所 熟悉的东西，去做陌生的工作，对我的压力也是很大的。”

之前合作过的同事，为孟教授突然淡出学术领域感 到若有所失，孟教授本人更是如此：“我唯一的希望就是将来有一天会回到自己的本专业，安安静静的做我的研究工作。为了能实现这样的目标，所以我现在正在重 新安排，希望能有人能暂时代替我管理研究所，这样研究所的工作才不会陷入瘫痪。”

“计划外经历”决定人生

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: 孟丽秋近影孟丽秋教授是拿了国家教委的奖学金在汉诺威完成博士学位的，原本她是想直接回中国的。而就在这个时候，她的导师表示希望孟丽秋能协助他申请一个自然科学基金的项目。项目顺利的批下来之后，孟教授也面临着新的抉择：是接着留在汉诺威再做7年的研究工作还是到第三国工作。

孟丽秋选择了后者，她去了瑞典。先是在瑞典皇家 理工学院任教，后来又进入了企业。虽然都是在欧洲工作，不过瑞典人和德国人的思维方式是截然不同的，这使得原本“一心只读圣贤书”的孟丽秋做出了很大转 变，这成为了其人生经历中宝贵的一部分，也为她今后在慕尼黑的成功埋下了伏笔。

正如“计划外”去瑞典工作一样，之所以能重返德 国并成为慕尼黑工大的副校长，同样是在计划之外的。在德国，想成为C4级教授（德国最高级别教授）是非常苛刻的，必须满足一些硬性条件：除了读过博士学 位，读过教授资格，有工业界工作过的经验外，理想条件下最好还有第三国工作的经验。孟教授说：“我恰好满足了这些条件，再加上我是一名女性，可能是我多了 一些积分。本来我没有这些想法的，但是我的导师亲自到瑞典鼓励我回德国来参加竞争。在这种情况下，我才回到了慕尼黑，如果不是我的导师去找我的话，也许我 就留在瑞典了，所以说我的很多经历都是计划之外的。”

我的面孔代表中国

在科研领域，出色的女科学家比较少，更少有女性 得到教授头衔。对此，孟丽秋教授表示：“我用平常的心态去看待这个问题。在我的日常工作中，我接触到了很多非常出色的女性，从学术质量上来说，她们做教授 是绰绰有余的，只不过每个人都有自己的价值观。有些女性之所以不愿意做教授，她可能把家庭放在了更主要的位置上，这些女性我非常尊重她们。如果她们要去竞 争教授位置的话，她们也有很多的优势。在这个意义上，我从来不觉得自己多么厉害，我只是平平常常一步步走到了这个位置上。对于我而言，家庭和学术生活可以 同步进行。”

如何掌握这种平衡是一种艺术，孟教授自己很好的找到了这个平衡点：“正因为有这个平衡点，所以不管我去做学术研究，还是协调大型的科研项目，那些苦都不算什么了，因为我觉得自己生活得比较平衡。”

作为一名华人科学家，“中国”两个字在孟丽秋教 授心目中有着特殊的意义：“那是无法通过语言来表达的。她是在我的血液中，或者已经硬件化到脑子中。不管是手持什么样护照，对我而言都是次要的，我的面孔 就代表着中国。因为我的所在国是德国，所以我义不容辞的责任就是为中国和德国同时做一些有意义的事情。就是在互惠互利的条件下，我肯定会尽我所能为两国的 友好往来，尤其是科研方面做一些微薄的贡献。这对我而言也是寻找平衡点的过程，我相信我能找到这样的平衡点。”

子江

randomized trials

Economic Scene

Making Economics Relevant Again

Published: February 20, 2008

It was only a decade ago that economics seemed to be an old and tired discipline. The field no longer had intellectual giants like John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman who were shaping public policy by the sheer force of their ideas. Instead, it was devolving into a technical discipline that was even less comprehensible than it was relevant.

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Related

More on the Jameel Poverty Action Lab: The Study on Textbooks The Study on Deworming Other Randomized Trials Abhijit Banerjee's Web Site Esther Duflo's Web Site Rachel Glennerster's Web Site Other Researchers at the Center Columnist Page: David Leonhardt 2007 Survey of Economists

Some Wall Street firms had become hesitant to hire Ph.D. economists, and the number of undergraduates majoring in the subject was plummeting. “A good deal of modern economic theory,” John Cassidy wrote in an article titled “The Decline of Economics” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, “simply doesn’t matter much.”

Over the last decade, however, economics has begun to get its groove back. Armed with newly powerful tools for analyzing data, economists have dug into real-world matters and tried to understand human behavior. Economists have again become storytellers, and, again, they matter.

They have explained why Americans don’t save enough money — and come up with clever ideas to increase savings. They have discovered that modest increases in the minimum wage don’t actually destroy many jobs — and thus made possible the recent state-by-state push to raise minimum wages. Since the mid-1990s, the number of undergraduates majoring in economics has risen sharply.

But there are more than a few economists who believe that the renaissance has come with a big downside. They argue that the new research often consists of cute findings — which inevitably get covered in the press — about trivial subjects, like game shows, violent movies or sports gambling. Economics may be popular again, but there still is no one like a modern-day Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes.

So when I recently set out to conduct my second annual survey of economists, I decided to try to uncover the next best thing. In its first incarnation, the survey simply asked for the names of the next generation of stars specializing in the economics of everyday life. This year, though, I went the other way — toward the big picture — and asked which economists were managing to do influential work on the crucial questions facing modern society.

Who, in other words, was using economics to make the world a better place?

I received dozens of diverse responses, but there was still a runaway winner. The small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, were mentioned far more often than anyone else.

Ms. Duflo, Mr. Banerjee and their colleagues have a simple, if radical, goal. They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics.

“Surely the most important societal question economics can help answer is why so many people are crushingly poor and what can be done about it,” David Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said. The macro issues (like how to build a democracy) remain maddeningly complex, Mr. Romer noted. But thanks in part to the poverty lab, we now know much more about how to improve daily life in the world’s poorest countries.

The basic idea behind the lab is to rely on randomized trials — similar to the ones used in medical research — to study antipoverty programs. This helps avoid the classic problem with the evaluation of aid programs: it’s often impossible to separate cause and effect. If aid workers start supplying textbooks to schools in one town and the students there start doing better, it could be because of the textbooks. Or it could be that the town also happened to hire a new school administrator.

In a randomized trial, researchers would choose a set of schools and then separate into them two groups. The groups would be similar in every respect except for the fact that one would receive new textbooks and one wouldn’t. With a test like this, as Vinod Thomas, the head of independent evaluation at the World Bank, says, “You can be much more accurate and much more clear about the effect of a program.”

The approach can sound cruel, because researchers knowingly deny help to some of the people they’re studying. But what, really, is the alternative? It’s not as if someone has offered to buy new textbooks for every child in the world. With a randomized study, you at least learn whether your aid money is well spent.

Ms. Duflo, who’s 35, and Mr. Banerjee, 46, came to economics from opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum. She was studying history at the École Normale Supérieure, one of the most prestigious colleges in France, when she decided that the more scientific approach of economics offered a better way to address global poverty. He dropped out of the similarly prestigious Indian Statistical Institute after two and a half months of studying math; he found the subject too abstract.

By 2003, they were both working on development at M.I.T. At the time, randomized trials were becoming more popular in the United States, but they were still fairly rare in the developing world. So along with Sendhil Mullainathan, a colleague, Ms. Duflo and Mr. Banerjee founded the lab. (It’s named for the father of an M.I.T. alumnus, who owned the exclusive right to sell Toyotas in Saudi Arabia.) Day to day, the lab is now run by Rachel Glennerster, who came from the International Monetary Fund, and it has become a magnet for some of the world’s best development economists, including Marianne Bertrand, Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel.

Mr. Kremer and two other economists, in fact, did the textbook experiment — and found that textbooks didn’t improve test scores or graduation rates in rural western Kenya. (The students were probably too diverse, in terms of preparation and even language, to be helped by a single curriculum.) On the other hand, another randomized trial in the same part of Kenya found that treating children for intestinal worms did lift school performance. That study has led to an expansion of deworming programs and, as Alan Krueger of Princeton says, is “probably improving millions of lives.”

Mr. Banerjee estimates, very conservatively, that $11 billion a year — out of roughly $100 billion in annual development aid worldwide — could be spent on programs that have been proved to work. Unfortunately, nowhere near $11 billion is being spent on such programs. “Right now, we don’t have a lot of things that have been taken up by the policy world,” he said. “But the policy lag is usually substantial. Now that we have a lot more results, I expect that in the next 10 years we will have a lot more impact.”

Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Duflo may not be a modern-day Keynes or Friedman. But they have still managed to do something rather profound. They have brought together the best of the new economics and the best of the old.

As has been the trend over the last decade, they have plunged into the world around them, refusing to accept the idea that economics is merely an extension of math. Yet no one can accuse them of working on some little problem that doesn’t matter.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

NHK的 cross media 英語教學新節目

cross media

短評"國立臺灣大學2007永續校園白皮書"

我是國立臺灣大學校園建設的旁觀者
雖然他們定期發行 "環保 安全 健康"刊物
不過 校園可能的問題相當多 不是發表白皮書就可解決的
首先 台大的飲食領域問題不小--並不只是"檢驗食品衛生"--每天數萬個餐盒之處理......
另外主要的問題 可能是台灣的教育預算制度問題
所以許多新增設的"教室"個別弄其"冷氣機" 可以說是聯合台灣所有品牌
他們的環保還沒考慮到"噪音" 尤其是實驗室的抽風設備.....
我認為應該培養"草根"的社團來作這些方面的規劃與檢討
而不只是"官方文章".....

國立臺灣大學2007永續校園白皮書 作者 : 國立臺灣大學環境保護暨職業安全衛生中心編著 定價：新台幣250元 ISBN： 978-986-01-2506-1 出版日期：2008年1月 出版：臺大出版中心

永續校園發展，也稱之為綠色大學運動， 與國家及世界之永續發展，有密切之關係。 聯合國世界環境與發展委員會(WCED) 對永續發展下了這樣的定義： 「永續發展是滿足當前的需求，但不危及後代滿足他們需求的能力」。 那麼校園的永續發展可以定義成 「校園永續發展是滿足當代師生及社會對於接受教育的需求，但不危及後代師生及社會滿足他們接受教育需求的能力。」 目次： 第一章　　永續校園之意義與目標 第二章　　建立永續校園管理系統 第三章　　環境品質 第四章　　能源使用 第五章　　節約用水 第六章　　危害減量及推動清潔實室 第七章　　減少廢棄物及污染排放 第八章　　安全衛生 第九章　　永續教育 第十章　　維護生態及人文環境 第十一章　總論

to Publish Free on Web

類似這種將所有論文公開給所有人自由/免費閱讀的方式
是一種"知識產權革新"
可影響整體社會的"生產-分配" 層面

At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 12, 2008

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an “opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard’s provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said.

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.

J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and African and African American studies at Harvard, said he sympathized with the goal of bringing down the sometimes exorbitant price of scientific periodicals, but worried that a result would be to eliminate a whole range of less popular journals that are subsidized by more profitable ones.

Art history periodicals, for example, are extremely expensive to publish because of the reproduction costs, and subscriptions pay for those as well as some of the discipline’s annual gatherings.

Professor Matory also pointed out that “any professor who wants to put his or her article up online can.”

Asked about the Harvard proposal, Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, said that mandates are what publishers object to, as when Congress required that any work financed by the National Institutes for Health be funneled through PubMed Central, an open-access repository maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

“As long as they leave the element of choice for authors and publishers,” he said, “there isn’t a problem.”

Supporters of open access say that the current system creates a different set of problems for academics. Expensive journals cut into a library’s budget for scholarly books and monographs, which hurts academic publishers, which hurts the coming generation of scholars who must publish to gain tenure.

Professor Shieber also doubts that free distribution would undermine the journal industry. “We don’t know if that would happen,” he said. “There is little evidence to support that it would.” Nearly all scholarly articles on physics have been freely available on the Internet for more than a decade, he added, and physics journals continue to thrive.

As for the vote, Professor Shieber said: “As far as I know, everyone I’ve ever talked to is supportive of the underlying principle. Still there is a difference between an underlying principle and specific proposal.”

向自行車愛好者致敬

向自行車愛好者致敬

2008/2/12

現在，每天拼命搞blogs ，碰到些新聞都會「想起過去與朋友之際遇」。譬如說，Blackberry Outage (黑莓系統故障 北美用戶遭殃)，想起上回該公司的烏龍OUTAGE，我在QRD與朋友交換大眾電信之事件品質成本。

新春回台中，當然會去看望我的初中導師謝立沛老師。他的兒子謝偉強博士在留德時經常從布萊梅出發，成單車往波昂 Bonn訪張旺山博士。他在新竹和苗栗市上班時，周末常乘單車回台中。

hc（56歲）年輕時：我的單車經驗是1968年（16歲）暑假，花200元，費時10天，路線：台中-墾丁-花蓮—橫貫公路-台中

壯舉

王晃三老師（67歲）的部落格； http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/wang-sundye

單車壯遊手扎- Day 5

產業

台灣的巨大公司（Giant）在2007年的自行車內銷增多16億台幣。

英國呢：

Trek recall MT220 girls bike
Bike Biz - Hertford,England,UK
The Trek MT220 girl's bicycle has been issued a voluntary recall by Trek Bicycle. According to the company, the frame can break during use.

Framing Production:Technology, Culture, and Change in the British Bicycle Industry 2008年1月29日 星期二

楊梅的董事長會談

Quote from W. Edwards Deming:
We must satisfy our customers.
Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line.

自行車學校

hc：「dave：

此信cc的人叫"吳國精"先生，我的老朋友， 現在是園區波若威公司負責人。

他們有一"巴塞隆納 至 巴黎" 自行車之旅 。行前要環島；我跟他說你們有一"訓練"計畫，很值得參考。

吳兄對此很有興趣，所以你們如果有這方面之資訊，可以轉給他父子知道。」

DHsu ：「吳先生您好,,

關於自行車學校的資訊 您可以先參考以下的網頁

http://www.khsbicycles.com.tw/html/school/history.htm

自行車學校的校長 謝先生是KHS自行車的董事長 朱政夫顧問是安大科技總經理 他們都是自行車的愛好者

自行車學校的設立在於推廣自行車運動 並且建立正確的自行車知識（有效率的踩踏方式 ﹑正確的熱身 ﹑正確的騎後運動以避免累積酸痛等）

您如果看了網站之後有興趣參加這樣的訓練 開春後可以替您安排

ps. 謝董事長乃性情中人 雖然設立低廉的收費標準 （只含便當及保險費） 但又常常不收費！！ 」

hc：「很巧， 吳先生剛提過折疊式自行車以KHS為最。」

david：「沒錯！ KHS的折疊腳踏車相當不錯 我也是用他們的F2 C/P值最高

但說到最高檔 仍為太平洋(林正義董事長您見過）的 Birdy http://www.birdybike.com/」

請參考 2007年11月27日 星期二

楊梅的董事長會談

Quote from W. Edwards Deming:
We must satisfy our customers.
Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line.

只有“高品質教育”才能守住崗位

韓國東亞日報的社論 至少以日文和中文等同時發行 何等用心

[社論]只有“高品質教育”才能守住崗位

FEBRUARY 11, 2008 03:08

去 年在美國最受矚目的世界級經濟論點就是“境外轉移（offshoring）”。指的是，諸多企業為了節儉經費將生產、領域及就業崗位派遣到海外的現象。由 於美國製造行業的境外轉移影響，自2001年後從美國遷移到中國和印度的就業崗位就達到180萬個左右。於是，在美國被解雇的人，大部分是低學歷工廠的工 人。

自上世紀90年代後半期開始，境外轉移這一巨大潮流正在改變著全球的勞動市場。韓國也不例外。另一方面，國內的資本和設備轉移到中國、東南亞等地，可隨之而來的是低學歷、未熟練的工人卻不得不失去自己的崗位。

據 經濟合作開發機構（OECD）委託韓國開發研究院（KDI）和日本一橋實施的“東亞地區的外包給韓日勞動市場帶來的影響”這一調查顯示，由於韓國的勞動集 約型產業大舉轉移到中國，國內的低學歷工人和高學歷工人的薪水差距進一步加大。2004年高中畢業生的薪水為大學畢業生的68%，比起1993年的70% 其差距較為嚴重。然而2004年中學畢業生的薪水為大學畢業生的58%，比起1993年的65%其差距更為嚴重。

KDI 的研究員安相勳表示：“我國低學歷工人的崗位減少幅度（相對）與薪水下降速度在OECD國家中是最為嚴重的。隨著世界化進程加快，單純勞動逐漸轉移到中國 和印度，而高學歷勞動者的身價逐步盤升是世界性的現場”。如果境外轉移現象進一步擴大，我們只能通過教育提高勞動品質，才能守住工作崗位和身價。

正 如微軟公司會長比爾蓋茨所說，全球經濟的根基就是超群的勞動力。具有競爭力的勞動力是出於具有競爭力的教育之中。一些發達國家為了本國的存亡，從小學到大 學都進行全方位的教育改革也是這個原因。一個國家的競爭力，在於培養出多少具有高度的專門知識、技術及創意性的人才。然而，具有競爭力的人才規模雖很重 要，但最為切實的是確保一少部分的世界頂尖人才。如果一個政府、教育界或國民不能從半斤八兩式的平均化誤區中擺脫出來，不僅是國家還是個人也很難找到希 望。

春節小記

Our children tested to destruction 英國教育問題


今年春節走過台中向上國中
發現校門口貼要成立資優班的"廣告"
因為規定約二五人才可成班 所以他們必須招他校之學生進入


台中的師專早已改成台中教育大學
不過英文校名只為 台中大學
它在市區也有一"第二校區"

访德国最年轻教授小提琴演奏家Julia Fischer

Julia Fischer

专访德国最年轻教授－著名小提琴演奏家

更多 參考
http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=evxjoxI44va89pI1

教育方面，德国尚存在哪些不足？
菲舍尔：啊，要做的实在是太多了。
德国之声：您能否具体地谈谈？
菲舍尔：音乐学院亟需有自制力、有耐心和爱心的教师

；要让学生们明白，音乐的意义究竟在哪里。另外就是德国缺乏促进儿童早期音乐教育的机构和经费。音乐理论教学水平在大学里也存在不足。就我而言，母亲花了很多时间，帮我在家里练习演奏，教给我相关的音乐理论和历史等知识。
勤奋与天赋缺一不可
德国之声：中国的朗朗和李云杰是两位出色的乐坛新秀，震惊了全世界，也因此产生了极强的经济效益。许多中国家长望子成龙，希望自己的孩子也能成为朗朗和李云杰。您有什么好的建议吗？
菲舍尔：首先是千万不要要求自己的孩子象别人一样。每个孩子都有自己的特点，不要让孩子们模仿它人。不然，这将是非常危险的。另外就是不要要求自己的孩子比别人更强，这在音乐上是无法做到的。因为音乐不是体育，一定要让孩子们明白，我们为什么需要音乐，对艺术家来说，重要的不是战胜别人，而是实现自我发展，战胜自我。
德国之声：在当今社会，尤其在音乐领域可谓新秀辈出，这是否确实与早期的音乐启蒙和教育有关？
菲舍尔：当然，教育扮演着非常重要的角色，剩下的10%是上天的恩赐，是个人的天分。至于这两者间的关系，我很难说清楚，因为我没有孩子。我只知道，在某种程度上，后天的勤奋非常重要，但没有天赋则是根本不可能的。