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Korea is hip on attracting foreign investors and cultural creators to help add to the mix. They also realize the importance of learning English as a prerequisite in helping achieve this goal. The Korea Times recently held an essay contest. The winner and second place essay intro snippets are below.
Click on the writer's photo to read the rest of the essay
[Grand Prize] English Is Gateway to New Economy, Culture, Soft Power
Lee Dong-joon 
By Lee Dong-joon
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
"The importance of English in Korea is definitely on the rise ― there is no doubt about that. For Korea, which lacks in natural resources and is hugely dependent on foreign investment and trade, English is essential since it is what connects us to the world. So the role of English in the Korean economy is also definitely significant but we must be cautious when say this as the economy should not be examined alone since it is correlated with other sectors of a country. Paul Kennedy an American declinist argued in his book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, that the growth of a nation is a threefold one: simultaneously to provide military security, to satisfy the socioeconomic needs of its citizenry and to ensure sustained growth.
[Runner-Up] 'Proficient English Is a Must to Achieve Advanced Economy'
By Yang So-mang
Yonsei University
$15 billion. That's the GDP of Chad, a central African nation. It is also the amount that South Korean households spend a year on private education. A cursory glance at the "hagwon'' districts in Korea confirms that English instruction is at the heart of this private education fervor.
. . .
This technique of diagramming sentences is more than 100 years old, but it still is a neat way to visually represent the different levels of the sentence, and how a sentence is built from the core up (or out).
from here, uploaded on authorSTREAM by aSGuest4648
My arms are starting to stiffen and pain these days.
From the elbow to the wrist, including the wrist a bit.
I spend a lot of time typing, and I type quite fast.
Could this be straining the tendons and muscles in my arm and wrist?
Is this carpal tunnel syndrome?
Thus, I need a new chair, an ergonomic workstation, speech to text software and computer.
For fingertip navigation rather than mouse and keyboard, how about this one:
"The tx2 is the latest result of HP’s 25 years of touch technology experience, which began with the introduction of the HP-150, a touch screen PC that was well ahead of its time, in 1983.
Digital media powerhouse
The tx2 gives customers the choice to set aside the keyboard and mouse in favor of a more natural user interface – the fingertip.
HP’s multi-touch display delivers quick and easy access to information, entertainment and other social media. The tx2 recognizes simultaneous input from more than one finger using “capacitive multi-touch technology,” which enables the use of gestures such as pinch, rotate, arc, flick, press and drag, and single and double tap.
The convertible design with a twist hinge allows consumers to enjoy the TouchSmart in three modes: PC, display and tablet. With a rechargeable digital ink pen, users can turn the tx2 into a tablet PC to write, sketch, draw, take notes or graph right onto the screen – and then automatically convert handwriting into typed text."
Read the full review here.
I have to go to the Oriental medical center today.
from answers.com (blurb) and wikipedia commons (pix)...
Lomography, international vernacular-photographic movement founded by two Viennese students, Matthias Fiegl and Wolfgang Stranzinger. In the early 1990s they discovered the Lomo Kompakt Automat, a basic auto-exposure 35 mm camera made in Leningrad (St Petersburg) since 1983, and found it ideal for taking uncomposed, spontaneous snapshots, especially in the street and in low light. Subsequently they not only founded the Lomo Society International and organized exhibitions, but dissuaded the manufacturer from abandoning Lomo production and themselves took over distribution. Later, the society designed and marketed multi-lensed plastic cameras (‘samplers’) capable of taking several images on a 35 mm frame. But the Lomo ‘philosophy’—‘Shoot—don't think’—is independent of any particular equipment, film based or digital. Although Lomography's headquarters remained in Vienna, ‘embassies’ appeared worldwide. From 1997, however, it became a classic Internet phenomenon, with dozens of websites and thousands of pictures exhibited online."
Wikipedia adds: "Lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, "happy accidents," and alternative film processing are often considered part of the "Lomographic Technique." Users are encouraged to take a lighthearted approach to their photography, and use these techniques to document everyday life, as the Lomo LC-A's small size, simple controls, and ability to shoot in low light encourages candid photography, photo reportage, and photo vérité."
"...Similar to Eastman Kodak's concept of the "Kodak moment," the Lomography motto of "don't think, just shoot" presumes spontaneity, close-ups, and ubiquity, while deemphasizing formal technique (however to take a good 'from the hip' shot does take skill). Typical lomography cameras are deliberately low-fidelity and inexpensively constructed. Some cameras make use of multiple lenses and rainbow-colored flashes, or exhibit extreme optical distortions and even light leaks."
See sample snaps at the lomography.com website.
Offsite images:
minced meet(ings); a dearth of the worth and wealth of words (diglossia?)
I am writing this down now, in hopes that I will find more time later to come back to it.
The toning down or rephrasing of military terms in expressions or words with less offensive or less graphic words is part of the any modern government's strategy to justify its military expenditures. The public psyche becomes numb to the news when it hears such language in the news reports.
Is it war games or a military operation (Philippines)? Is it sectarian violence or civil war?
What is civil about war? When is killing and destruction a game?
Why is in an increase in the number of soldiers needed on a particular battle front called a "surge" (it's not electricity) or "augmentation"? Is that the same as a salary augmentation? Is a surge is needed to fight the insurgents? Are both sides surging, as much as their spilled blood is? Who are the intransigents? Who are the recalcitrants? What makes people have an urge to splurge on such a surge? What about the dirge of the mourning after? Does anyone need a mourning after pill? Who will utter as the bombs splutter and blood is splattered, the buildings shattered? Does it matter? Who mutters , looking at the assailants' clutter, with blood in the gutter? Who will gather the remnants of the shell-shocked, post-knock, culture shock, de-frocked, bone stock on the hinterland, cold winterland, of sub-atomic germ warfare (this word has no shared etymology with "welfare" or "bus fare" or "taxi fare")?
Isn't this glossied language that the read-my-carefully-scripted lips are carelessly articulating? Is this sweetening of steel boot press released walkie-talkie or talkie-talkie or taki-taki the nuanced parlance of laissez warfare, laissez tomber?
nuances... body count = collateral damage ... war zone = arena...
Buffy Ste Marie and Universal Soldier and the FBI Annie Mae Aquash
doublespeak link1 link2
"They went to war on a whim, they did." A must-read poem!
See Carol Lay's cartoon On a steep hill (honesty pill)
slow bleed & altspeak (gloatspeak, goatspeak)
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2934.html
http://xsofiles.blogspot.com/2007/02/little-prick-of-slow-bleed.html
embed
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html#2531193042556512033
accidental invasion
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2007/03/best-headline-ever.html
weapons everywhere
http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/03/weapons-weapons-everywhere.html
blandminds and landmines
http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/03/backtracking-on-narrative.html
verismo and civilians
Apparently, there is a style of opera called verismo that deals with the lives of common people and is usually characterized by violent or tragic situations and highly dramatic performances. Would the stories (or raw footage) of civilian tragedies from Afghanistan or Iraq be raw material for an opera on the tragic truths and cost of war?
Here's a thoughtful song by Bob Dylan, 'Cross the Green Mountain:
link
I cross the Green Mountain I sit by the stream Heaven blazing in my head I I dreamt a monstrous dream Something came up Out of the sea Swept through the land of The rich and the free I look into the eyes of my merciful friend And then I ask myself Is this the end? Memories linger Sad yet sweet And I think of the souls in heaven who we'll meet Altars are burning The flames far and wide The fool has crossed over from the other side They tip their caps from the top of the hill You can feel them come All brave blood do spill Along the dim Atlantic line The rapper's land lasts for miles behind the lights coming forward and the streets are broad All must yield To the avenging God |
(other lyrics not included in the video)
The world is old
The world is great
Lessons of life
Can't be learned in a day
I watch and I wait
And I listen while I stand
To the music that comes
from a far better land
Close the eyes
of our Captain
Peace may he know
His long night is done
The great leader is laid low
He was ready to fall
He was quick to defend
Killed outright he was
by his own men
It's the last day's last hour
of the last happy year
I feel that the unknown
The world is so dear
Pride will vanish
And glory will rot
But virtue lives
and cannot be forgot
The bells
of evening have rung
there's blasphemy
on the end of the tongue
Let them say that I walked
in fair nature's light
And that I was loyal
to truth and to right
Serve God and meet your full
Look upward beyond
Beyond the darkness that masks
the surprises of dawn
In the deep green grasses
and the blood stained woods
They never dreamed of surrendering
They fell where they stood
Stars fell over Alabama
And I saw each star
You're walking in dreams
Whoever you are
Chilled as the skies
Keen as the frost
And the ground's froze hard
And the morning is lost
A letter to mother
came today
Gunshot wound to the breast
is what it did say
But he'll be better soon
He's in a hospital bed
But he'll never be better
He's already dead
I'm ten miles outside the city
And I'm lifted away
In an ancient light
That is not of day
They were calm they were gloomed
We knew them all too well
We loved each other more than
we ever dared to tell
lyrics from here
row over textbooks in seoul: Members of a civic group burn what they call leftleaning history textbooks published by Kumsung Publishing in front of the publisher’ building in Mapo-gu, Seoul, Wednesday. They held the rally to demand the publisher stop publishing the textbooks. / Korea Times photo by Hong In-ki
skype stories
Another guy, a pro programmer, posted on 2008 March 30th an excellent bloggit called The Kingdom of Nouns.
I should admire the guy. Even because his name is almost the same as mine, Steve. (But he calls himself Stevey, which is pronounced the same as but spelled differently as in Stevie 
, one of the female leading characters in the great TV series from Australia called McLeod's Daughters.)
But, I am glad that at least one programmer notices that "architecture consists entirely of nouns"; he asks the penetrating questions "Object Oriented Programming puts the Nouns first and foremost. Why would you go to such lengths to put one part of speech on a pedestal? Why should one kind of concept take precedence over another?"; and continues "It's not as if OOP has suddenly made verbs less important in the way we actually think. It's a strangely skewed perspective. As my friend Jacob Gabrielson once put it, advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing."
This is true grit of a transcendally and linguistically aware programmer. The ecoLED lights are beginning to go on.
Congrats to Stevey on this excellent post. All programmers and students of linguistics should read the bloggit. It is humorous, and is not too technical at all.
He should read 1066 And All That 
(also here). It is a comic satire that uses malapropisms and more to describe the history of England. It was one of a first of its kind in humorous non-fiction that dared to be jocular when talking about things historical. It is an example of human consciousness get hip to the fact that all history is to some extent a fabrication, a fiction-to-an-extent, a polycasting flycasting fried tomatoes wide net drfit net fishing of scriptorial genres that cut across and through all genre barriers, blasting and tunnel through those sacred mountains like a North Korean work crew or robotic wormboring mining digging tools part of martian exploring vehicle/bots.
Inventive invocations of invective are usually not welcome, but this slap on the back of the hand by Stevey to his fellow pro-grumblers is very node-able and node-worthy. All of us here at the twohandsapproach ranch have maintained that the Verb wins hands up all the time. In normal human speech, verbs outnumber, outdistance, outpace, outreach, outlook nouns 365/24/7/60/60. Things are always happening, even molecularly. Even with moles in holes that they burrow and bore without the use of tunneling equipment.
Just to finish off with a battle scene, to kind of show technology destroying itself, I close off with this video from Japanese Ron:
Nouns are cumbersome; verbs, stodgy or willynilly or bolting along at light speed, as you like it, just like the wind. Hurricane winds can throw things around like cars or trees, even fan fires into raging infernos and make boats sail effortless across the oceans and gliders and blimps in the air.
Speaking of which, I just wrote this haiku today:
of ego
like Goodyear blimp
kisses blue sky
14 syllables
If I added goodbye as the next last line, it would refer to the power of nature to overcome doubt about the economic meltdown (Goodyear=corporate America). But then it would be 16 syllables. In Japanese, the standard haiku is 5+7+5=17 syllables. I could add the word glut in front of "ego" to get "glut" ego, or make it "bruised" ego, to fulfill the requirements for 17 syllables:
like Goodyear balloon aloft [7]
kissing sky goodbye [5]
Look at that! A noun ("Goodyear") do the descriptor role the same as an Adjective. Did anyone else notice that Nouns moonlight as Adjectives sometimes? And look at the 2 verbals: receding and kissing. They are helping those lonely Nouns, that only have their attributes, but hardly join up like Verbs do, scooting around like Korean coffee ladies on their scooters, teaming up with Nouns here and there and everywhere.
... improved version::
spirit like hot-air balloon 7
kisses a blue sky 5
Forget about corporate reference in haiku! Nature is the true solace. It must never be forgotten. A new environmental ethic is needed.
So, in our playing guidebook, Verbs win. They reverberate all over the place, in their "main verb" role and in the form of the 3 kinds of verbals: gerund, participle (past and present), and infinitive.
Mother nature wringing the sponge clouds, air drying laundry, countryside, hong kong balcony, fluttery laundry in the breeze.
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