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Schools to rethink 'i before e' |
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The spelling mantra "i before e except after c" is no longer worth teaching, according to the government. Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren. The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools. But some people believe the phrase should be retained because it is easy to remember and is broadly accurate. Bethan Marshall, a senior English lecturer at King's College London, said: "It's a very easy rule to remember and one of the very few spelling rules that I can remember and that's why I would stick to it.
"If you change it and say we won't have this rule, we won't have any rules at all, then spelling, which is already terribly confusing, becomes more so." Judy Parkinson, author of the best-selling book I Before E (Except After C), told the Daily Telegraph it was a phrase that struck a chord. "There are words that it doesn't fit, but I think teachers could always get a discussion going about the 'i before e' rule and the peculiarities of the English language, and have fun with it. That's the best way to learn." The guidance is being issued as part of the National Primary Strategy for under-11s.
It says: "The i before e rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions. "There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words." These include receive, ceiling, perceive and deceit. The document recommends other ways to teach pupils spelling, like studying television listings for compound words, changing the tense of a poem to practise irregular verbs and learning about homophones through jokes such as "How many socks in a pair? None — because you eat a pear." Some education experts have supported the government and questioned the effectiveness of the rule. Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, said words such as vein and neighbour made it a meaningless phrase. "There are so many exceptions that it's not really a rule," he said. He added that it would be helpful if spelling was allowed to evolve. |
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I before E except after C when the sound is EE 
We had a meeting at work yesterday, and it was the usual yada, yada, yada. We have a few problems that need to be addressed, but for the moment they are being solved with band-aid solutions. One person suggested fluorescent Post-it notes, someone else suggested white-out, I don't remember what some of the other suggestions were. We will try them and they will work for a while. It's just the usual growing pains, of course, but trial and error... However, at one point in the meeting I glanced across the boardroom table at one of my co-workers, and she was sound asleep. She was sitting up straight, her hands folded in front of her on the table -- asleep. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.
Today she said to me, "Did you happen to notice that I nodded off during the meeting yesterday?"
"Yes, it did not escape me entirely..."
Today I found ten excuses folks can use if they get caught sleeping at work:
1. "They told me at the blood bank this might happen."
2. "This is just a 15 minute power-nap like they raved about in the last time management course you sent me to."
3. "Whew! Guess I left the top off the liquid paper."
4. "I wasn't sleeping! I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm!"
5. "This is one of the seven habits of highly effective people!"
6. "I was testing the keyboard for drool resistance."
7. "Actually I'm doing a "Stress Level Elimination Exercise Plan" (SLEEP). I learned it at the last mandatory seminar you made me attend."
8. "The coffee machine is broken."
9. "I was doing a highly specific Yoga exercise to relieve work related stress."
10. "Darn! Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out a solution to our biggest problem."
Number 4 is my favorite. Now it's late, and I'm off to get some sleep.
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Gene Zelazny - "Say It With Charts: The Executive's Guide to Visual Communication"
The world's top think tanks
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Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.
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PLENTY of firms are trying to profit from the gold rush towards so-called social networking sites after the success -or at least popularity- of Facebook, Linkedin, Hi5, and other such sites. And the cost of entry for new players is getting lower all the time.
Facebook may be one of the fastest-growing social network sites, but its technology is far from unique. Besides the existing entrenched competitors, small software firms are also selling scripts that allow anyone to start a Facebook look-alike site for three-digit figures. Of course, those new sites do not have the third-party applications nor any significant number of users when they start up, but those also help dilute the novelty appeal of the concept. Consider webmail: at one point all webmails were the same, until Google came along and reinvented the concept with its GMail.
And now, even Open Source software is getting into the game of offering anyone the ability to create their own social network. All bad news for Facebook which will continue to see competing sites mushrooming. In short, its underlying technology is not unique and, being a web service in the "cloud", can be easily copied. Copycat sites are appearing all over the place and targeting different market niches, whereas Facebook positions itself as the "one size fits all" of social networks.
A firm from India sells a script to run your own "face book" site for £210. Now Open Source software is offering similar abilities to create social network sites.
For instance, there's a handful of popular Facebook clones in operation in China, and those have been in operation for a long time, even before Facebook landed with its own site. About six months ago there was a good comparison of existing Facebook clones published over here.
In Russia, Facebook had to face Vkontakte, the locally-developed, Russian language social network site when it decided to land in the country with a Russian-language Facebook last year. And in Germany there was StudiVZ, sued by Facebook as it claimed it was a "counterfeit product" due to the similar look and feel.
But while most of the high-end Facebook clones already in operation were likely developed in-house, last year we saw plenty of small outfits trying to profit from the social networking gold rush by selling turnkey solutions - scripts written in PHP or other server side languages - for around $500 or even less. These allow anyone with a hosting account or server to create his own basic Facebook copycat. Of course, without the complexity and array of features of the real one - much less the user base.
What shocked this scribbler however is the sheer number of people who continue trying to create their own social network web site from scratch by hiring freelance programmers, and hoping to hit gold as if there were not enough Hi5s, LinkedIns and Facebooks in the webosphere already - see here or here. Of course, the availability of lots of search engines didn't stop a pair of clever guys from creating Google. But we can't help but think there's a bubble of sorts in this social network sites craze.
The only apparent reasons to start coding a new Facebook clone site from scratch seem to be, (a) if you have revolutionary ideas for new features -in other words you want to create the Facebook killer that doesn't resemble any of the existing sites. Or (b), you want to target a special market niche which requires special needs. For the rest, the small shops offering ready-made turnkey solutions can be enough to have a Facebookalike site up and running in a matter of hours or days rather than months. Why would anyone want to run a social site, well, that's a different question. Unless of course you have a very specific market niche.
Some commercial FB clone offerings
One such piece of code that claims to offer a "face book clone" - notice the very wise wording and spacing :) - is dubbed Kootali and sold by "Agriya info way" a firm from Chennai, India. The firm is selling its server side application for $297, £210 or €232 and for that you get "99.9% source code", whatever that missing 0.1 per cent means.
Another company that has been offering for quite some time its own social networking software "like Facebook" calls it "SocialGroupie" and it sells for $490, £345 or €384.
The CMS approach
Others build a "facebook clone" on top of existing Content Management System (CMS) back end software, like the popular Drupal. One such scripts is dubbed "Kickwork", and is listed over here. Ebizon charges between $900 and $3000 per project for customization.
Open Source enters the picture
And as if all this wasn't enough, and the barrier of entry wasn't already low enough with £200 scripts from India, there's now Joomunity described as "a facebook clone for Joomla" in other words, a community site and social network built on top of the popular Joomla CMS.
Joomunity, of which version 1.1.0 beta3 has been released two weeks ago is GNU/GPL Free Software, with no licence fees and all source code available for you to hack. Find it over here.
As some have noted, except for the use of the Facebook name, there's very little Facebook can do to sue copycat sites, unless they make an exact copy of the HTML or bitmaps, you don't have many chances of winning a trial on the U.S. on the grounds of user interface look and feel, at least after the landmark Lotus vs. Borland legal case.
So what are you waiting for? There is certainly room on the Net for a thousand more Facebook clones. Or is there? In any case, this scribbler hopes the open source project thrives and kills all the cheap for-profit knock-offs.
