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if you're a senior scientist wanting to set up a lab in another institution, the first question you're going to ask is whether you're going to have good students (who of course do all the actual lab work). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to do a very good job of exporting its best students. They're sent overseas on fully-funded, prestigious scholarships to foreign institutions.
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if you're a senior scientist wanting to set up a lab in another institution, the first question you're going to ask is whether you're going to have good students (who of course do all the actual lab work). Unfortunately, Singapore seems to do a very good job of exporting its best students. They're sent overseas on fully-funded, prestigious scholarships to foreign institutions.
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If the best students do not stay in the country, then it is difficult to develop local institutions to higher levels. Worse still, we are not building confidence in our own institutions.
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No matter how hard we work at developing media literacy, we should not expect to be rid of all racially offensive speech online. There are two broad ways to respond to these breaches. We can reach out horizontally and together with our fellow citizens repair the damage by persuading others to reject harmful ideas. Or, we can reach up vertically to government, getting the authorities to act against irresponsible speech by using the law. The advantage of the latter is that it seems more efficient, punishing those who cross the line of acceptability and violate social norms, and deterring others from doing the same. The horizontal approach works through persuasion rather than the law, so it is slower and not foolproof.
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All societies use a mix of approaches to address offensive speech. In international law, like at the European court of human rights and more and more jurisdictions, there is growing feeling that the law should really be a last resort and only used for the most extreme speech – speech that incites violence in a very direct way, or that is part of a campaign that violates the rights of minorities to live free of discrimination. In contrast, simply insulting and offending others, even if feelings are very hurt, is not seen as something that should invite a legal response. Using the law to protect feelings is too great an encroachment on freedom of speech.
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Our laws are written very broadly, such that any sort of offence, even if it does not threaten imminent violence, is seen as deserving of strict regulation. This probably reflects a very strong social consensus that race and religion should be handled delicately. So we tend to rely on strong government. The state protects racial and religious sensibilities from offence, using censorship when there’s a danger of words and actions causing hurt.
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I was quoted in today's Today suggesting that prominent independent websites come together to develop a voluntary code of ethics. An equally important point I made to the reporter was not carried in Today's article: that there is no need for any tightening of government regulation of online political debate. It's important to see these as complementary ideas. Bloggers won't consider voluntarily modulating their voices as long as they feel the government's hands around their throats.
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we know instinctively and research evidence itself is beginning to emerge that particularly in the case of older persons individualized, medicalized, institutionally focused care may be precisely what is not needed and may have the effect over the span of the final decades of life to not only reduce the quality of life but even the length of life itself.
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individuals including or even especially older persons are happiest and healthiest and thus less likely to need interventions from the formal medical system if they are living surrounded by family and friends and firmly embedded in communities where they have support, friendship and love.
Bad design kills people.
That's right. It's not a matter of aesthetics, or of politics, or of opinion. It's a plain fact: When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.
Don't believe me? Well, let me refresh your memory about Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide, second degree -- but not for anything she did behind the wheel. No, she was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed.
You might have heard about the story of Raquel Nelson — nearly a year ago, her 4 year-old son was killed by a drunk driver as they crossed the street with the rest of their family. Nelson and her daughter were injured, too. The drunk driver ended up serving six months of prison, and was released, despite having two prior hit and run violations on his record — Nelson, meanwhile, was charged for manslaughter because she failed to use a crosswalk that was a third of a mile away. She faces up to three years in prison.
Outrageous absurdities abound in this case — punishing a mother more than the killer chief among them — but there’s one that hasn’t gotten due attention. And that’s the absurdity of building and maintaining communities in which it’s not only difficult to walk, but downright dangerous to do so — and then favoring the drivers within the legal system. As Grist’s Sarah Goodyear points out, bad city design literally kills.
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Nelson lived in the neighborhood right across the street, but that street happened to be a relatively busy four lane road. But the nearest crosswalk was a third a mile down the road — meaning they’d end up adding nearly an entire mile in order to circumnavigate the road as per the community’s design. The kids were tired, and it was getting dark — would you blame her for crossing that street, if you didn’t know what was going to happen next? She’d done it safely hundreds of times before.
But this time, a speeding, out-of-control driver (he was also on pills and legally half-blind), slammed into the family.
And yet our society still allocates an equal amount of blame to the mother.
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The system is penalizing a woman for failing to successfully evade a speeding car. Despite there being no good way for that woman to navigate her community without a car — the implication here is that you can be punished for not having one. All this despite the fact that we’re told to ingrain the mantra ‘Driving is a privilege, not a right’ into our heads when we apply for our drivers’ licenses. Our society indeed treats driving like a right.
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