News Stories

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by GDB

Sexuality and gender identification are not the same.

My bad. I was referring to gender identity.

That being said, I was wondering if Coy actually wanted to be a female, or was he just playing around with those dresses and that got too real. Cosplayers get that in-character effect too where it sometimes carries over to their responses to human interaction outside of their costumes.

[SeijiSensei]

I think you need to do a little reading about gender identity issues rather than continuing to engage in what is, to be honest, offensive speculation about a complex and difficult matter.

This has nothing to do with cosplaying or anything like that. I usually ignore your attempts at humor about "lolis" and the like, but if you want to talk about gender identity at least learn a little about it first.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

I think you need to do a little reading about gender identity issues rather than continuing to engage in what is, to be honest, offensive speculation about a complex and difficult matter.

This has nothing to do with cosplaying or anything like that. I usually ignore your attempts at humor about "lolis" and the like, but if you want to talk about gender identity at least learn a little about it first.

I always thought that gender identity is about whether one thinks of itself as a male or female, regardless of the physical gender he/she is born with. Would appreciate it if you could point me in a direction to read about it; because it seems more of a simple personal belief of what oneself is, or what one feels strongly about rather than anything complex.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by GenjiChan

Six-year-old transgender Colorado girl gains the right to use the girls' bathroom

...if she's really a girl.... no problem.... Thinking if had a transgen urinating with me at the men's bathroom.....

you are the embodiment of this image:

[Dr. Casey]

Originally Posted by Hasumi

They're everywhere, if anything they're the majority.

Endless "Fear the Believers" Soul

Threw me for a loop. Oh, Hasumi.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

I always thought that gender identity is about whether one thinks of itself as a male or female, regardless of the physical gender he/she is born with.

Yes, but you seem to view it as something of a choice one makes, rather akin to people who believe homosexuality is a choice. Wikipedia presents a rather long list of factors that are considered to influence gender identity with links to the medical literature:

Biological factors that may influence gender identity include pre- and post-natal hormone levels and genetic makeup.

Social factors which may influence gender identity include ideas regarding gender roles conveyed by family, authority figures, mass media, and other influential people in a child's life.

Another factor that has a significant role in the process of gender identity is language.... [C]hildren while learning a language learn to separate masculine and feminine characteristics and unconsciously adjust their own behavior to these predetermined roles.

One's gender identity is also influenced by the social learning theory, which assumes that children develop their gender identity through observing and imitating gender-linked behaviors, and then being rewarded or punished for behaving that way.

Now you might want to dismiss the last three of these as coming from fuzzy social science, but the first reason is a physiological one. The process of gender determination while in the womb is complex and strongly influenced by hormones during development. In some cases the fetus may develop external sex organs that are not consistent with nervous system development. Some cases reflect uncommon chromosomal patterns like XXY.

Regardless of the origin, gender identity is clearly not a choice.

[synaesthetic]

^ This.

Our brains are "gendered" to an extent, and therefore, you can quite literally have a female brain in a male body or a male brain in a female body. This happens a lot more often than people actually realize, but societal pressures ensure that the vast majority of people with mismatched brains and bodies don't ever speak up.

Or they just kill themselves. The suicide rate among transgender and genderqueer individuals is much, much higher than the general population and it's not at all difficult to understand why. There are tons of people on this planet who seem to derive sick pleasure out of tormenting those who are different than they are.

[Shyni]

I doubt transgenderism's got anything to do with "get[ting] that in-character" effect. If we go by that analogy, it's different from accidentally acting out the mannerisms of a character you played, but more like being convinced that everything about said character from appearance to lifestyle is your "true" self, and deciding to live it out despite the inherent risks.

[ganbaru]

Justices Send Affirmative Action Case to Lower Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/us...n.html?hp&_r=0

Courts must take a skeptical look at affirmative-action programs at public colleges and universities, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, in a decision that is likely to set off a wave of challenges to race-conscious admissions policies nationwide.
The 7-to-1 decision avoided giving a direct answer about the constitutionality of the program, from the University of Texas at Austin, which will allow it to continue for now. But the justices ordered an appeals court to reconsider the case under a demanding standard that appears to jeopardize the program.

[PzIVf3]

Only in China. Gee no wonder they have no sense of right or wrong.

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-cheating.html

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by PzIVf3

Only in China. Gee no wonder they have no sense of right or wrong.

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-cheating.html

- I found out that the May SAT test had been canceled across the whole of South Korea just a couple of hours after teachers were told. A chance conversation with a friend, who is a teacher at an international school here, revealed the scramble to organize alternative tests in other countries for young students hoping to get into elite U.S. universities.
The decision was taken after a widespread cheating scandal was uncovered -- a number of scams were being employed to give some unscrupulous students and their parents advance warning about the questions to be included in the test.


http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/09/world/...a-exam-scandal

didn't know Koreans are Chinese.

[synaesthetic]

It's that kyouiku-mama mentality. The exam. The test. It's everything. It's your entire life. It's your raison d'etre. It determines the success and prosperity of your life, your family's lives, your children's lives.

If you fail, you're dead, even if your body is still alive.

So yeah, of course they try to do everything (including dishonest things) in order to pass the test. Failure isn't an F and a drop in your GPA, that you can retake next semester and it's as if it never happened. Failure is death. There are no second chances.

Becomes a lot more understandable when you look at it that way, doesn't it?

[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

Yes, but you seem to view it as something of a choice one makes, rather akin to people who believe homosexuality is a choice. Wikipedia presents a rather long list of factors that are considered to influence gender identity with links to the medical literature:

From experience, public debate about sexuality quickly descends into chaos. Ledgem and I took the discussion to our visitor message boards instead.

We did not touch on gender identity. But we did explore the issue of choice versus biology fairly thoroughly. I believe the conversation is accessible to any registered AnimeSuki member.

Feel free to browse. I've long since moved on, so I'm highly unlikely to reprise the debate, but I welcome any other opinions on my visitor board.

[Shay]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

^ This.

Our brains are "gendered" to an extent, and therefore, you can quite literally have a female brain in a male body or a male brain in a female body. This happens a lot more often than people actually realize, but societal pressures ensure that the vast majority of people with mismatched brains and bodies don't ever speak up.

Or they just kill themselves. The suicide rate among transgender and genderqueer individuals is much, much higher than the general population and it's not at all difficult to understand why. There are tons of people on this planet who seem to derive sick pleasure out of tormenting those who are different than they are.

I'm starting to like you more and more.

[TinyRedLeaf]

In Asia, ancient writing declines amid the digital age

Tokyo (June 25, Tue): As a schoolboy, Mr Akihiro Matsumura spent hundreds of hours learning the intricate Chinese characters that make up a part of written Japanese. Now, the graduate student can rely on his smartphone, tablet and laptop to remember them for him.

Like millions of people across East Asia, 23-year-old Matsumura is forgetting the pictographs and ideographs that have been used in Japan and Greater China for centuries.

While some bemoan what they see as the loss of history and culture, others say the shift frees up brainpower for more useful things, like foreign languages, and even improves writing as a whole.

"The skill of handwriting kanji (Chinese characters) perfectly is becoming less necessary compared with earlier times," said Professor Naoko Matsumoto, who heads international legal studies at the prestigious Sophia University near Tokyo.

In both Chinese and Japanese, computer and smartphone users need only to type the pronunciation of the kanji from the constituent sounds using either the syllabary or the alphabet. They then choose one of several options offered by the device.

"It's easy to forget even the easiest of characters," said Mr Zhang Wentong, an assistant at a calligraphy centre in Beijing.

"Sometimes I've got to think for ages. Occasionally, I'll repeatedly type the character out phonetically in my phone" until the right one pops up.

Traditionalists fear that forgetting kanji means the irrevocable loss of a fundamental part of culture.

In Hong Kong, Ms Rebecca Ko said her 11-year-old daughter uses the computer more and more, but she insists the child learn traditional characters, and sends her to a Chinese calligraphy class.

"We cannot rely too much on computers, we should be able to write... (and) we should be able to write neatly. It's a basic thing about being Chinese," she said.

Mr Yusuke Kinouchi, a 24-year-old graduate student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, thought children should keep learning the characters in the way they have done for hundreds of years.

Kanji provide a certain economy, he said, where one character can stand in for the sounds made by several letters in a language such as English — something particularly useful on Twitter, for example, with its 140-character limit.

But beyond the economy, there is one other good reason to keep them alive, he said.

"They are beautiful."

AFP

Arabic: A language with too many armies and navies?

THE ECONOMIST: JOHNSON

(June 21, Fri)

JOHNSON has touched on Arabic and its variety quite a few times over the years, but we have never really addressed a critical question directly: What is "Arabic" today, and is it really even a single thing?

A short and simplified version of the story follows: the prophet Muhammad wrote (or received from Allah directly) the Koran in the seventh century. He then conquered nearly all of Arabia as a political and military leader. His successors spread Islam further still, until the Islamic world stretched from Spain to Pakistan.

Arabic-speaking soldiers and administrators settled in all of these places, and their language gradually took root among local populations, who up until that point spoke languages from rustic Latin to Berber to Coptic to Persian.

That was almost 1,400 years ago. The Arabic of the Koran remained a prestigious and nearly unchanging standard throughout the Islamic world. This is what most Arabs consider "Arabic".

But all spoken languages change and the Arabic people actually used on the streets and in their homes, predictably enough, changed quite a lot in those 1,400 years. Today, the Arab world is sometimes compared to mediaeval Europe, when classical Latin was still the only "real" language most people wrote and studied in.

Today, we recognise that French and Portuguese are different languages, but Arabs are not often sure (and are sometimes at odds) about how to describe "Arabic" today.

The plain fact is that a rural Moroccan and a rural Iraqi cannot have a conversation and reliably understand each other. An urban Algerian and an urban Jordanian would struggle to speak to each other, but would usually find ways to cope, with a heavy dose of formal standard Arabic used to smooth out misunderstandings. They will sometimes use well-known dialects, especially Egyptian (spread through television and radio), to fill in gaps.

All educated Arabs learn the Koranic-based language that linguists call "modern standard Arabic". It is used in political speeches, news broadcasts and nearly all writing. But nobody speaks it spontaneously in the marketplace or over the dinner table. Most people struggle to write it correctly.

For those who revel in linguistic diversity, this is all good fun. For those who want languages in general to "behave", and for those in particular who want Arabic to be a single, graspable thing, this is a mess.

For the language learner, it's a daunting task. To be competent in "Arabic" means to learn one language to read and write, and a related but rather different language (like Latin and then Italian) to be able to speak.

On top of that, the poor foreigner will be limited to understanding only a fraction of the Arab world.

[Tom Bombadil]

Originally Posted by PzIVf3

Only in China. Gee no wonder they have no sense of right or wrong.

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-cheating.html

Hacking or breaking into the teacher's office to steal tests, shooting on campus, not being able to walk safely after 5pm around certain campuses..... Should I list more?

[HasuMasu]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

In Asia, ancient writing declines amid the digital age

I say, if a machine can do it better it's not important.

There are other things we cannot normally rely on machines for, it is more efficient to devote time to those things rather than something that a calculator or a keyboard can do better.

[JokerD]

Originally Posted by Tom Bombadil

Hacking or breaking into the teacher's office to steal tests, shooting on campus, not being able to walk safely after 5pm around certain campuses..... Should I list more?

You mean they have mobs of people doing this where you describe and they think they are in the right?

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by Chaos2Frozen

Actually Cosmic, I'm the CBRD guy with the Mopp suits

Our coys in the main camp have them too...

Originally Posted by GenjiChan

Six-year-old transgender Colorado girl gains the right to use the girls' bathroom

...if she's really a girl.... no problem.... Thinking if had a transgen urinating with me at the men's bathroom.....

Errm...what? So when you could just pee and mind your own business, you would actually peer closer and try to start something if she is transgender?

<__<

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

In Asia, ancient writing declines amid the digital age

Voice recognition technologies seem likely to undermine all written languages in the years to come. I was surprised at how well Google Voice could convert spoken queries into English text. How well do they do with Asian languages? Is there a Siri for Asian iPhones?