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S Korean paper says A-bombs on Japan were 'divine punishment'
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Korean 'comfort women' cancel meeting with Hashimoto
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Gov't considers setting clock ahead by two hours
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Boy Scouts approve plan to accept openly gay boys, but not leaders
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Germany most popular country in the world; Japan No. 4: BBC poll
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- IT機器のテクニカルサポート
- ハイパーツールズ株式会社, 愛知県
- Salary: 年収 300万円 ~ 600万円 相談可
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- バイヤー
- ハイパーツールズ株式会社, 愛知県
- Salary: 年収 300万円 ~ 600万円 相談可 試用期間あり
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- バイヤー(中国語圏担当)
- ハイパーツールズ株式会社, 愛知県
- Salary: 年収 300万円 ~ 600万円 相談可 試用期間あり
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- 店舗スタッフ（タイ・バンコク店＆中国・香港店オープニングスタッフ候補）
- 株式会社セドナエンタープライズ, その他
- Salary: 月給 11万8883円 ~ 33万9665円 相談可 研修期間3か月（30,000バーツ／月）
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- メディカルコーディネーター/ Medical Coordinor (ハワイ、タイなどへの出張あり)
- 株式会社メディブリッジ, 東京都
- Salary: 月給 25万円 ~ 45万円 相談可 マネージメントポジションは給与が高くなります
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Triumvere
Eh. Bustling stations crammed with little shops are part of the fun of traveling. Kinda takes a lot of the charm out of it.
Everything is better than Amtrak.... and probably less expensive.
Posted in: New shinkansen to use revolutionary simple stations
1
Triumvere
Messy.
Posted in: Man shoots himself dead in front of children at primary school in Paris
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Triumvere
I won't argue with the last bit, but fact is when a police officer tells you to do something, most people do it. If anyone is going to make a convincing fake cop, my money is on an ex-cop.
Posted in: Ex-cop arrested for attempting to abduct 15-year-old girl
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Triumvere
10 minutes?!
God, that must have been the train ride from hell for that poor girl.
I am generally loathe to second guess the actions of sexual assault victims; she was probably terrified. From the article it sounds like she did call for help the moment she saw a that there was some authority figure that could help her.
Posted in: Assistant police inspector arrested for groping 15-year-old girl
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Triumvere
Overreach much?
Posted in: China should reconsider who owns Okinawa: People's Daily
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Triumvere
The business of any judicial system is the interpretation of laws. There are no laws, religious or secular, that do not require interpretation. If it were otherwise, there would be no need for lawyers, judges, or legal scholars.
Posted in: Most Muslims want sharia law, but divided on interpretation
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Triumvere
Oh god not another one...
Posted in: 4-year-old Indian girl dies after rape attack
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Triumvere
It's an assassination attempt, not terrorism - targets are different. Whether you find them morally equivalent is up to you.
Posted in: Syrian prime minister escapes assassination attempt; 6 killed
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Triumvere
By training foreigners for executive positions? Huh?
Posted in: Aeon's non-Japanese employment marks highest ever
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Triumvere
Ok, but you are already cutting the applicant pool drastically with even this sort of basic qualification.
Most JET types, I'd imagine, are straight out of college types looking to spend a year or two abroad. That might not produce the highest quality teachers, but it's a pretty reasonable model for what ALTs are expected to do in the classroom. Again, this is the TFA kind of model; its a model that relies heavily on the enthusiasm of younger participants. (With TFA this is an enthusiasm or teaching and/or public service; JET, by necessity, relies on enthusiasm for Japan and/or cultural exchange. The unfortunate side-effect is that you will always have a percentage of "woohoo-paid-vacation!" types that don't really care about teaching, but I think overall the model works.)
Now, insert a qualification - even a minor one - into this equation and you get a serious problem: people who have spent the time and money to obtain such a qualification have made at least a partial commitment to a teaching career. Now, that is a very different applicant pool than the current one. It's also a much smaller pool. Furthermore, it's not clear to me what percentage of this pool is going to want to spend, say, 2+ years teaching in Japan, or even oversees at all. I think that many here are used to the idea of JAPAN as being a motivator in itself - certainly, you will still have some of those type of people in the new applicant pool. However, most people do not seriously consider living/working abroad for any length of time. Furthermore, the older and more committed they get to a single life path, the less likely they are to take a year or two off and move halfway around the world just for the experience.
So, what is the motivation here? Unless there is a serious overlap between the Certified teacher pool and the Japanophile population, your going to need more than the concept of a year in JAPAN to draw people in. The money, as you mention, is good for the level of work being done - but it isn't going to make you rich, and you could potentially make more, say , teaching in South Korea for example. Furthermore, what is the benefit to a person who has committed to a career in education? There aren't a lot of career advancement opportunities in an ALT position, are there? And even if there were, they would only appeal to the small portion of people who are interested in staying long term. How valuable is the experience gained as an ALT for one's future career, exactly, if one intends to return home? Or even if one intends to work at an international school in Japan? And how satisfied is a qualified teacher going to be doing the sort of work that ALTs currently do?
I don't have any objection to attempting to improve the quality of incoming ALTs. However, even disregarding the various systematic problems with English Language curriculum in Japan, you'd need to make a sort of cultural shift to attract and retain qualified teachers for these positions. It would require an entirely different model - everything from the nature of work done, to the interactions with Japanese teaching staff, to exit options would have to change. I don't think you can just insert a teaching qualification requirement and expect the system to continue to function.
In the end, such a program might indeed better serve the Japanese population. But it would take enormous investment and require radical change - neither of which are easy to come by.
Posted in: Gov't plans to increase number of foreign English teachers to 10,000
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Triumvere
I'm not sure this is true, but assuming it is, swapping out the current crop of ALTs with ones holding teaching qualifications isn't really going to fix any of the major problems with the system.
Posted in: Gov't plans to increase number of foreign English teachers to 10,000
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Triumvere
Hah. Remember that whole "jocks vs. nerds" thing back in the 80's? Nerds won.
Posted in: Beta males rejoice! 77% of women say geeky 'otaku' A-OK
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Triumvere
How different is this from Teach For America - I very highly regarded program that utilizes a similar demographic as teachers -?
I suspect the main difference lies in the utilization of human capital; I think increasing the number of ALTs is a good idea, but it won't change much if the underlying problems in teaching methodology are not addressed. Requiring, say, every ALT to have an Education degree sounds like a good thing, but what it really means is that you are reducing the pool of available applicants, the remainder of which you will have to pay more for. Instead, why not get veteran English teachers from English speaking countries to work with veteran Japanese teachers of English, to come up with training and educational materials which can then be utilized by incoming ALTs and their Japanese partners...? (Disclosure: I was an ALT, but never a JET - I don't know what sort of support the JET guys get, but I was pretty much on my own. I had some teaching experience, though and the enthusiastic support of my Japanese counterparts.)
Lack of native Japanese with fluency in English language (and anglo-sphere culture) make the continued presence of foreign ALTs a necessity. However, that presence alone is insufficient to solve the problems with Japanese English instruction...
Posted in: Gov't plans to increase number of foreign English teachers to 10,000
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Triumvere
Answer your own question?
They are cowards who only attack people that they perceive as weaker than themselves. The ones that target little kids and school girls are especially despicable.
Posted in: Woman slashed on Yamanote line
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Triumvere
I thought SA was the holder of that title...
Posted in: Police arrest suspect over rape of 5-year-old girl in India
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Triumvere
Got his ass. Alive, apparently - at least for the moment.
Posted in: Second Boston bombing suspect in hospital after being captured
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Triumvere
I don't know, sounds like he got what he paid for...
Posted in: Woman, 77, ordered to repay Y400 mil she got from 79-yr-old man for sex
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Triumvere
...and this anecdote proves what, exactly?
No one said that torture never produces useful information. Rather, the point was that, in aggregate, the costs - both moral and practical, are too high to justify it as a policy. I don't see any real refutation of that from your singular data point. What makes you think that, ahem, "enhanced interrogation techniques" were the only way to secure such information?
Then, you seem to view "terrorists" as all being some sort of hard-core, hyper-trained black-ops types with nerves of steel and ultra-fanatical religious zealots. What I think you'll find is an abundance of duped / brainwashed, angry young men on one end, and a lot of hypocritical, self-serving demagogues on the other. Its not at all clear to me that "these guys don't talk" and that torture is pretty much a necessity, as you seem to think.
Posted in: 'Indisputable' that U.S. practiced torture after 9/11: panel
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Triumvere
Ugg. Auto-correct fail. That should be "conscientious" not "unconscious"
Posted in: 'Indisputable' that U.S. practiced torture after 9/11: panel
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Triumvere
Wasn't I clear?
It's a rather simple slippery slope argument: 99.9% percent of the time, you don't have a situation where you have a known bad guy and a known imminent threat - especially one with huge potential damage. So, what I'm saying is, if you get that sort of situation then torture makes sense from a purely practical viewpoint (whether it makes sense morally is another argument - I'll leave you to make your own judgment on that) - but only as a last resort where other, more efficient techniques have failed.
The problem, again from a practical perspective, is that those scenarios come up 0.1% of the time. The other 99.9%, you don't have such a clear cut scenario. Apparently you are cool with torturing people as long as they are "bad guys"; That ignores 2 major problems:
First, you don't always know who the bad guys are - even if you are unconscious about it, you are going to make mistakes. Worse, once the cat is out of the bag, there's no stopping it - you can make guidelines and rules about who gets tortured and who doesn't, but those rules will get broken - especially given this stuff is largely done in secret to people who don't have access to any sort of legal recourse - and it will devolve in to a policy of torturing suspected terrorists because they might have info that saves lives.
Second, as I said, its an ineffective method. You lose more useful information (and gain more false leads which waste your time) than you would with other methods. So why would you use it at all, even without the moral and reputational damage?
Again, the only scenario that it makes any sort of practical sense is one where there is a high level of certainty regarding the threat and the withholding of pertinent information AND you have exhausted your other - generally more effective - options. But those situations are too rare to justify the use of torture as an operational policy.
A final thought for you: it might be possible to get "life-saving information" out of potential terrorists by, say, raping them or threatening to do so. In my mind, that seems roughly equivalent, morally and practically speaking, to torture - indeed, in certain countries armies and security forces make systematic rape a tool in there interrogation processes and intimidation campaigns. So, would you endorse government sponsored rape as an element of torture, or is that somehow over the line to you? And if so, why?
Posted in: 'Indisputable' that U.S. practiced torture after 9/11: panel