Rotundus.com

In an article on the recruitment of foreign teachers to serve in U.S. schools there was the following interesting comment:

He acknowledges that there can be clashes over teachers' accents and cultural differences. Filipino teachers, for example, come from a culture where teachers are revered, he says. "When they come here, they have to learn about our culture and the urban culture and the culture of poverty and the challenges our children have," he says.

Ah yes... a teacher from the Philippines would know nothing about "challenges" or a "culture of poverty". After all, the average income in the Philippines is a whopping 1/30th of the average income in the U.S.

Les Stroud, better known as TV adventurer "Survivorman," was chased by a jaguar, nearly dropped dead due to heatstroke and spent a sleepless night among lions. But now, he's tired of it all and ending his popular series about living in the wild.

...

"It takes a lot out of me as I really do what I do for real, with no camera crew, no nights in hotels like others do, and it takes a toll on my body," Stroud told Reuters.

"You can only do seven days surviving without food a certain number of times a year. I'm pleased with what I have done, I've been copied around the world, but 25 times I've not eaten anything for a week while sleeping on rocks. I need to move on."

(In the Calgary Herald)

The article goes on talk of some of the specific happenings on the show. Consider being out in the Kalahari Desert in 61 degree Celsius heat (142 degrees Fahrenheit) - and I thought that Egypt at 45 celcius was bad! I've said - only half jokingly - that they should try to do something like this as a show on the Food Network. One of the things that I find amusing about this show is the stuff that gets eaten on it. Ever wanted to watch a show wherein someone demonstrates how to catch scorpions and what parts of them can be eaten?

If readers hear a strange noise inside a normally quiet branch of the Ottawa Public Library, they shouldn't worry, it's likely just the sound of a video game in action.

The library is hoping to get more people, especially teens, through its doors by introducing miniature, arcade-like machines.

The initiative, aided by a $30,000 donation from Ottawa developer Urbandale Corp., is part of the transformation of quiet reading rooms into high-tech interactive centres of learning. Thousands of libraries in Canada and the United States are introducing video games to engage the digital generation.

- Vancouver Sun

I'm inclined to call this a bad idea. Is this educational? (Should it be?) Does it detract from the other users of the library?

Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are often socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay a price of anarchy for the lack of coordination among its members. Here we assess this price of anarchy by analyzing the travel times in road networks of several major cities. Our simulation shows that uncoordinated drivers possibly waste a considerable amount of their travel time. Counterintuitively, simply blocking certain streets can partially improve the traffic conditions.

- The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control

Game Theory in action...

(HT: Bright Green @ Christian Science Monitor)