Ceasar talks too much!

(This story was created in class by students from 508. I was delighted by the imagination they showed and their willingness to play the game with me.)

Ceasar talks too much. He talks all the time. He talks about video games and horror movies and he talks about pen spinning. Ceasar is a champion pen spinner.

In biology class with Mr. Azemat, Ceasar talks too much. Mr. Azemat says, “Stop it!” But Ceasar doesn’t stop talking. He talks the whole time. Mr. Azemat says,”Get out!”

Ceasar goes out of his biology class and he goes to the movie theater to see Shining. He sits next to Stephen King. Ceasar talks to Stephen King the whole time. He talks about horror movies, but Stephen King wants him to stop talking. He wants to listen to the movie, but Ceasar talks too much. Stephen King says, “Stop talking! Stop it!”

Ceasar doesn’t stop talking. He talks all the time. So Stephen King says, “Get out!”

Ceasar walks out of the movie theater and he goes to Bordeaux. The trip lasts one hour and eighteen minutes and thirteen seconds. He gets on a ship, “New France,” and he goes to Japan. The trip lasts eighteen days and five hours and sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds. He gets off the ship in Yokohama and he gets on a high speed train to go to Tokyo. The trips lasts forty-three minutes and eleven seconds.

Ceasar is in Tokyo for the World Pen Spinning Cup. Ceasar is a professional pen spinner. He wins the quarter finals and then he meets Vincent. Vincent is an amateur pen spinner, but he’s very good. Ceasar spins his pen for three hours forty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds, but he talks too much. He talks all the time and he doesn’t concentrate. Ceasar drops his pen. The judge says, “Get out!”

Vincent spins his pen for five hours and sixteen minutes and one second. Vincent wins. Vincent qualifies for the final match.

The final match is against Nicolas Sarkozy. Angela Merkel is his coach.

Ceasar is Vincent’s coach. Ceasar tells Vincent to sleep twelve hours. He tells him to eat sushi and maki and lots of wasabi. He tells him to drink Red Bull.

Angela tells Nicolas to sleep twelve hours, but the baby cries too much. The baby cries all the time. Nicolas sleeps for four hours, but the baby wakes him up. Nicolas says, “Stop it! Stop crying!” The baby stops crying and Nicolas can sleep two more hours, but Nicolas is tired.

Angela tells him to eat soup. He needs to eat a lot of soup, but Nicolas doesn’t like soup. Angela tells him to drink champagne. Nicolas likes champagne and he drinks a lot of champagne.

The final match begins. Nicolas and Vincent spin their pens. They spin their pens all the time. After eight hours they are still spinning their pens. Ceasar talks all the time, but Vincent doesn’t listen. He spins his pen.

Ceasar talks too much, and Nicolas Sarkozy can't concentrate. He says, “Stop it! Stop talking!” But Ceasar doesn’t stop talking.

Nicolas gets angry. He calls Claude Guéant. “Arrest this boy,” he says. “He talks too much! He talks all the time.”

Claude Guéant says, “Get out!” But Nicolas drops his pen and Vincent wins the final match. He is the new World Champion Pen Spinner.

The End

Helping to learn. You can't teach anyone something they don't want to learn. So all a teacher can do is help students to learn. They're the ones doing the learning. If there was a way to open their brains and pour the knowledge in, life might be easier, but maybe a little more boring. I've always worked at motivating my students, trying to find ways to make my lessons interesting, building on their interests whenever possible. But TPRS, "Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling", has made a tremendous difference in the way I teach. It's based on Comprehensible Input, and this concept alone should be at the heart of any method used to teach languages. In order to learn, students need to understand, and it's the teacher's responsibility to remain in bounds at all times, to input only what they can understand. The student's responsibility is to let the teacher know whenever she is out of bounds. It's interaction and interaction implies mutual comprehension.

Musing

Starting over .... Starting over is something I do often. I do something for a while, then things happen, life goes on and on, the world turns, as the song says, and then I find that it's been a long time, a few months, a few years, quite a few years, and I decide to start over. I rode my first horse when I was seventeen, while I was living in Africa I had my own horse for a few years, then the children needed my attention, I lost wonderful Bodeo to old age and never really bonded with the horse I bought after him, so I stopped, thinking I'd get back to riding some day. And then realized that I was fifty-six and if I didn't do it then, I'd better stop kidding myself. So I started over and today I have a lovely little French trotter mare who's so willing and kind that I immediately called her Sweetie Pie. She's young and just learning to canter. Which means that I have to stretch my abilities to ride in a way that helps her learn.

New Planets

February 2, 2011

Kepler Planet Hunter Finds 1,200 Possibilities

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all.

In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets.

Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller — smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water.

Astronomers said that it would take years to confirm that all of these candidates were really planets — by using ground-based telescopes to measure their masses, for example, or inspecting them to see if background stars are causing optical mischief. Many of them might never be vetted because of the dimness of their stars and the lack of telescope time and astronomers to do it all. But statistical tests of a sample suggest that 80 to 95 percent of the objects on it are real, as opposed to blips in the data.

“It boggles the mind,” said the Kepler team’s leader, William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California.

At first glance, not one of them appears to be another Earth, the kind of cosmic Eden fit for life as we know it, but the new results represent only four months’ worth of data on a three-and-a-half-year project, and have left astronomers optimistic that they will eventually find Earth-like planets.

“For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets,” said Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with Kepler. “This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, ‘How common are other Earths?’ ”

At a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Borucki noted that the Kepler telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky. If it could see the whole sky, he said, “we would see 400,000 candidates.” He is the lead author of a paper describing the new results that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

In a separate announcement, to be published in the journal Nature on Thursday, a group of Kepler astronomers led by Jack Lissauer of Ames said it had found a star with six planets — the most Kepler has yet discovered around one star — orbiting in close ranks in the same plane, no farther from their star than Mercury is from the Sun.

This dense packing, Dr. Lissauer said, seems to violate all the rules astronomers have begun to discern about how planetary systems form and evolve.

“This is sending me back to the drawing board,” he said.

Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, “There are so many messages here that it’s hard to know where to begin.”

He called the Borucki team’s announcement “an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed.”

Debra Fischer, an astronomer at Yale who is not part of the Kepler team, said, “This is an amazing era of discovery for astronomy.” Kepler, she added, had “blown the lid off everything we thought we knew about exoplanets.”

Kepler, launched into orbit around the Sun in March 2009, stares at a patch of the Milky Way near the Northern Cross, measuring the brightness of 156,000 stars every 30 minutes, looking for a pattern of dips that would be caused by planets crossing in front of their suns.

The goal is to assess the frequency of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. But in the four months of data analyzed so far, a similar telescope looking at our own Sun would have been lucky to have seen the Earth pass even once. Three transits are required for a planet to show up in Kepler’s elaborate data-processing pipeline, which means that Kepler’s next scheduled data release, in June 2012, could be a moment of truth for the mission.

For dimmer and cooler stars, the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone, would be smaller, however, and planets in it would rack up transits more quickly.

Scientists had eagerly anticipated Wednesday’s data release since June, when Kepler scientists issued their first list of some 300 stars that were suspected of harboring planets but held back another 400 for study. In the intervening months, Mr. Borucki said, some of those candidates have been eliminated, but hundreds more have been added that would otherwise have been reported in June.

One of the 400 was a Sun-like star about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus that went by the name of KOI 157, for Kepler Object of Interest. In the spring of 2009, astronomers noticed that it seemed to have five candidate planets, four with nearly the same orbital periods, and in the same plane, like an old vinyl record, Dr. Lissauer said. Two of them came so close that every 50 days one of them would look as large as a full moon as seen from the other, Dr. Lissauer calculated.

“I got very interested in this system,” Dr. Lissauer said. “Five was the most we had around any target.” Moreover, the planets’ proximity to one another meant that they would interact gravitationally, allowing them to be weighed. In the fall, a sixth planet — the innermost — was found.

By measuring the slight variations in transit times caused by the gravitational interference of the inner five planets with one another, Dr. Lissauer and his colleagues were able to calculate their masses and densities. These measurements confirmed they were so-called super-Earths, with masses ranging from 2 to 13 times that of the Earth. But they were also puffy, probably containing mixtures of rock, water and gas, rather than being pure rock like another super-Earth, Kepler 10b, a hunk of lava whose existence was announced last month at a meeting in Seattle. Dr. Lissauer described them as “sort of like marshmallows with a little hard-candy core.”

As a result, Dr. Lissauer said, “super-Earths might not resemble Earth at all. They may be more like Neptune than Earth-like.”

Alan Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the Kepler 11 system, as it is now known, should “keep theorists busy and off the streets for a long time.”

Mr. Borucki said the growing number of small planets revealed by Kepler was a welcome change from the early days of exoplanet research, when most of the planets discovered were Jupiter-size giants hugging their stars in close orbits, leading theorists to speculate that smaller planets might be thrown outward from their stars by gravitational forces or dragged right into those suns.

“Those little guys are still there,” he said, “and we’re delighted to see them.”

From the New York Times

A Parable

A man dreamed that he was taken on a trip to the afterlife. First, he went to hell. There he saw a lot of people gathered around a large kettle. A delicious smell emanated from the kettle, it was full of a delectable stew. But everyone was starving and unhappy. You see, each person had a spoon attached to his hand, but the handle of the spoon was too long, and no one could put the spoon to his mouth. So everyone was moaning and complaining and unable to get anything to eat. It was sheer torture.

Then the man went to heaven. He saw exactly the same situation with the kettle and the spoons, but this time everyone was happy and obviously well fed. The man asked one of the people how they could be happy when they couldn’t put the spoon to their mouths. The person replied, “It’s easy. You see, we feed each other.”

Robert Farrell

What's your level in English?

What is your level in English? No one but you really knows what you are capable of doing, so the best way to determine your level in English is to go to :
http://www.emea.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Other/2010/03/WC500075218.pdf
Answer the questions honestly and you will have a good idea of your level in the four skills:
Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. When preparing a CV, use the European standards to designate your level.

How do you improve your level? Your level in Writing depends upon your level in Reading. If you read frequently, choosing texts that are easy to read, your level will improve and your Writing will improve. If you listen often to songs in English and to films in VO, your speaking will improve.

The secret to learning a language? Comprehensible input. Which means listening to and reading things that you understand at least 90% of. When teachers ask you to produce, that is to speak and to write, we are measuring what you have learned, but we are not teaching.

November 13, 2010

Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, LAHORE, Pakistan

An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you’d pray it was unloaded. Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.

Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists. “Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.

Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation. Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn’t repay their loans. But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.

Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it’s not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest. Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they’re incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.

Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that’s what I’ve seen over the years as I’ve visited Kashf borrowers.

On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died. Ms. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family’s only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment. “One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you’ve become a beggar,’ and refused.”

Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn’t read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses. Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.

Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job. Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.

That’s an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism. We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity. The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”

Taken from The New York Times

A Gap Year

A gap year is a time out, a breather, a chance to recharge your batteries or to try out a different way of living and maybe a different way of learning. Students have many reasons for temporarily wishing to stop their studies.

Sometimes they just want to hit the pause button. After years of studying hard and feeling the stress of exams that seem never-ending, some students just want to have a year to relax, reflect and think about the future.

Others may not be certain that they are on the right track. They want time to look at other possibilities and decide what is the best future for them.

Other students may feel that their chosen path requires skills and experience that can be learned better through hands on training than in a classroom. A year spent living in a different culture, speaking a different language is always a plus on a cv.

If you are interested in taking a gap year, here is a link that may interest you: http://www.gapyear365.com/activity/art-drama-music

"When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir ? »

“It has begun,” said Ogion.

There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it, “But I haven’t learned anything yet!”

“Because you haven’t found out what I am teaching,” replied the mage.

A contest!

MAKEBELIEFSCOMIX.COM lets you make your own comic strip. They are sponsoring a contest. If you are one of the winners you will receive a free book.

What goes around, comes around

Very easy

A poor farmer heard a cry for help. He ran and there was a terrified boy in the bog*. The farmer saved the boy from death.
The next day a nobleman introduced himself as the father of the boy the farmer had saved.
"I want to repay you," said the father. "You saved my son's life."
"I can't accept payment," said the farmer.
The nobleman saw a boy.
"Is that your son?"
"Yes."
"Let me give him the same education as my son."
The farmer's son attended the best schools and graduated from medical school. He became Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.

Many years later, the nobleman's son had pneumonia. He was saved by .... penicillin.
The nobleman's son was Sir Winston Churchill.

**************

The same story

His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools
and ran to the bog.

There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father
of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved.
'I want to repay you,' said the nobleman. 'You saved my son's life.'
'No, I can't accept payment for what I did,' the Scottish farmer replied waving off the offer. At that moment, the farmer's own son came to the door of the family hovel.'Is that your son?' the nobleman asked.
'Yes,' the farmer replied proudly.
'I'll make you a deal. Let me provide him with the level of education my own son will enjoy If the lad is anything like his father, he'll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of.' And that he did.
Farmer Fleming's son attended the very best schools and in time, graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of
Penicillin..

Years afterward, the same nobleman's son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia.

What saved his life this time? Penicillin. The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill .. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill.
Someone once said: What goes around comes around.

Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Sing like nobody's listening.
Live like it's Heaven on Earth.
It's National Friendship Week.

*bog = marécage

The Strike

Yes, I am on strike. I am on strike because it seems to be the only way I can protest the government's action in education. Where other governments are attacking the economic crisis by investing in education with more and better paid teachers, France is reducing the number of teachers, policemen and hospital personnel. Five years ago in our lycée we arranged for all the English classes in "seconde" to be taught in small groups. Students got more attention from their teachers and more opprotunities to practice and progressed. But year after year the number of hours diminished and the program could not be continued. Is it honest to call reducing the numbers of teachers and increasing the numbers of students a "reform"?

Right brain or left brain?

If you use your left brain more than your right brain, you are good at mathematics and very verbal. You act with logic and are well-organized. You understand grammar rules and enjoy doing excercises.

If you use your right brain more, you are visual and creative. You hate grammar exercises because they seem pointless to you, but when you are in a foreign country, you quickly pick up the language. You are often guided by your emotions.

Of course these are generalizations and very few people are extreme cases of right or left brain dominance. Most people switch sides depending on the situation. Knowing which side of your brain is dominant can help you find the most efficient way to study a foreign language.

If you google "Right Brain Left Brain" you'll find questionnaires to help you discover which side of your brain you use the most.

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

illustration pour vos t-shirts

Bonjour,

j'ai été chargé par Madame Judith Dubois de faire une illustration pour les t-shirts réservé à la vente afin de récolter des fonds pour accueillir les américains.
Étant donné la masse de travail que j'ai à effectuer dans mon école, je n'ai pas pu fournir un travail convenable dans les temps, j'ai donc demandé à Nicolas Werbrouck, un ami illustrateur, de vous prêter une illustration qu'il a déjà réalisé pour le magazine Esprit Métis dédié au USA.

Je vous laisse apprécier son travail. Pouvez vous en mettre un t-shirt de coté pour Nicolas?
Merci! bon courage pour la suite!

Kellie
(je vous invite à venir voir le court métrage que j'ai réalisé en équipe sur mon blog)

What an amazing view!

Not content with having the tallest building in America , the owners of Sears Tower in Chicago have installed four glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up. The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and just out four feet from the building's Skydeck.

Floating on air: Visitors get their first view from The Ledge, four glass balconies suspended from the 103rd floor of Chicago 'S Sears Tower .

Designers say the platforms - collectively dubbed The Ledge - have been purposely designed to make visitors feel as they are floating above the city. The reward is unobstructed views of Chicago from the building's west side and a heart-stopping vista of the street and Chicago River below - for those brave enough to look straight down. 'It's like walking on ice,' visitor Margaret Kemp from Bishop, California said. 'The first step you take you think "Am I going down?"'

Long way up: Even the floor of the platforms are glass - few were
Brave enough to look straight down.

Fearless: Anna Kane, five, spreads out on the floor of the 10ft square box which is 1,353ft up.

Spectacular: She also enjoyed amazing views out across the city

Unfazed: Although some adults felt dizzy after experiencing the Ledge,
Children seemed to take it in their stride.

'At first I was kind of afraid but I got used to it,' 10-year-old Adam Kane from Alton , Illinois , said as clouds drifted by below. 'Look at all those tiny things that are usually huge.' John Huston, one of the owners of the Sears Tower, even admitted to
Getting 'a little queasy' the first time he ventured out on to the balcony. However, after 30 or 40 trips, he seems to have gotten used to it.

Thrill seekers: The boxes jut out four feet from the building and were specifically designed to make visitors feel as if they are floating 'The Sears Tower has always been about superlatives - tallest, larges t, most iconic,' he said.
'The Ledge is the world's most awesome view, the world's most precipitous view, the view with the most wow in the world.' The balconies are 10ft high and 10ft wide, can hold five tons, and have glass which is 1.5 inch thick.

Inspiration came from the hundreds of forehead prints visitors left behind on Skydeck windows every week. Now, staff will have a new glass surface to clean: floors.

Architect Ross Wimer said: 'We did studies that showed a four-foot-deep (1.2 metres) enclosure makes you feel like you're floating since there's only room for one row of people, not two.'

The Skydeck attracts 25,000 visitors on clear days. They each pay $15 to take an elevator ride up to the 103rd floor of the 110-story office building that opened in 1973

My name is Jeff, Jeff Bond.

I'm forty-two years old. I live in London. My unique childhood memory is when one morning when I went to my high school, I saw nobody. Finding this strange, I went to look in the classrooms to see if there was somebody. In the room, I saw students held hostage by a man wearing a cowl and carrying a gun. It was in this way I discovered that the high school had been taken hostage by gangsters. I learnt that the leader of the band was in the staff room because one gangster who called him told him that he controlled the first floor. By learning it, I skipped into the air duct which goes to the staff room. The exit of the air duct was above the leader of the band. I opened the ventilation cover and I jumped on him from above, knocking him out. With his talky-walky I told all the gangsters to come to the staff room. When all the band was in the staff room, I locked the door and I called the police. This is how I saved my high school from the gangsters.

Neville Brothers - Sister Rosa: Relaid Audio

watch the video on youtube

Rosa Parks

Photograph of Rosa Parks with Dr. Martin Luther King jr. (ca. 1955)

Source: Ebony Magazine

Mrs. Rosa Parks altered the negro progress in Montgomery,
Alabama, 1955, by the bus boycott she unwillingly began.

Wind Power Animation

The Pink Recovery

Men are paying a higher price in this recession than women. Perhaps that's fair.

by Christopher Caldwell

A week ago, President Obama touted a newly published report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that showed the country had lost 247,000 jobs in July. It seemed an odd thing to boast about, but you have to consider the context. The economy was losing jobs at three times that clip when Obama took office in January. So it is possible that the U.S. is emerging from the most frightening economic downturn since the Depression. It won't be the same country when it does.

One thing that seems bound to change is the relationship between the sexes. Since the recession began in December 2007, the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men. About half are in the heavily male domains of construction and manufacturing. At one point last winter, there were four men being laid off for every woman. The male unemployment rate is 9.8%, the female rate 7.5%. What constitutes "women's work" today? Well, health care, for one; 81% of the workers are female. According to the report Obama cited, 20,000 health care jobs were gained in July, while 76,000 construction jobs and 52,000 manufacturing positions were lost.

A job is a claim on a certain amount of society's resources and esteem. As men lose that claim, they lose the instruments by which they have traditionally controlled society. A lot of people see that as fitting punishment. There weren't any women among the high-profile malefactors in last fall's financial meltdown. Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk. Journalists have lately been having a field day with a study by two Cambridge University professors, J.M. Coates and J. Herbert, who sampled the testosterone levels of London traders and found they positively correlated with high profit trading days. Of course, nobody harped on this research back when housing prices were doubling and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars. But to paraphrase Richard Nixon's comment about Keynesians, we are all feminists now.

In Foreign Policy this summer, journalist Reihan Salam predicted that the "macho men's club called finance capitalism" would not survive the present economic ordeal. Provocatively -- but correctly -- he claimed that this male order rests on foundations considerably older than Ronald Reagan's supply-side revolution. The economic system that FDR shored up was a male one. The New Deal focused on infrastructure at a time when there were not a lot of lady dam builders around. (Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill, the most effective instrument ever devised for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.) Salam sees Obama's $787 billion stimulus package as a break with the New Deal. It spends relatively little on infrastructure and relatively much on female-friendly sectors like health care and education. Not to mention aid to state and local governments, where 3 in 5 employees are women.

Although clichés about the "vulnerability" of women in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them. When women lose jobs, the victims are women. when men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women, because they have to make up for that lost male income. The scale of male job losses was evident even when the stimulus bill was passed. That did not stop incoming Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, from warning Obama that "gender imbalance in occupations related to physical infrastructure development means that the direct job creation will benefit mostly men."

Men still make up 53% of the workforce, and the percentage of society's work they do is considerably higher, owing to women's shorter hours and more frequent sabbaticals for child-rearing. In prosperous times, women may yearn for more time at home. But economic realities have a way of washing away these yearnings. One such reality is the recession.

Another is that women receive 58% of the bachelor's degrees in the U.S., along with half the professional degrees.

Should we expect men to cede some control over an economy that they have so thoroughly messed up? No. We have no examples of that ever having happened. What we have plenty of examples of -- you can see variants of it all over the developing world -- is economies in which women do all the arduous work while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics -- and their attention remains fixed on it. Whether or not that model dominated American society as much as its critics claimed, it is now being left behind. Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it. It hasn't been found yet.

Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard

A Stove that Runs on Straw instead of Coal

The problem: poor mountain families in China have to haul huge loads of firewood for their cooking stoves. The solution: a new type of stove that runs on straw and other crop waste -- first by heating them, then burning the resulting gas. And since Beijing Shenzhou Daxu Bio-energy Technology's $50 stove emits eight fewer tons a year of carbon dioxide than a coal stove does, the device is easing deforestation while helping China, the world's largest greenhouse gas producer, reduce its heavy carbon load. by Austin Ramzy, Time magazine, Sept. 21st, 2009

Beach Soccer's World Champion

A Crazy Vacation

This summer Léa went to Biscarosse on vacation, because she enjoys swimming. She went there on a pink scooter. Every day she ate crab sandwiches and she drank pink Orangina. In the morning she went swimming and in the afternoon she played beach soccer.

One day Eric Cantona saw Léa playing beach soccer. She was playing like a champion. He asked her to join his team. Léa said no because she doesn't like men with beards.

Another day Raymond Domenech saw Léa playing beach soccer. He asked her to help his team qualify for the European Cup. Léa said no because she doesn't like Raymond Domenech.

Then one day Zac Efron saw Léa playing beach soccer and he invited her to a Japanese restaurant. They ate thirty-seven sushi and drank green tea. Zac asked Léa to join his team. Of course Léa said yes. Now Zac's team has won the Beach Soccer World Cup.

In the Ghetto

You can listen to the song :

Audrey's Vacation in Spain

Audrey went to Spain in a red helicopter with her boyfriend, Zac Efron. In Madrid they had afternoon tea with King Juan Carlos. Then they went to Barcelona to see the beautiful monuments. They climbed to the top of the Sacra Familia and they could see the sea and the mountains. Zac wanted to buy the Sacra Familia for 5,086,021,070 dollars and 60 cents. But he only had $5,086,021,060.60. So he sold his Rolex to Thierry Henry for ten dollars. Thierry Henry was very happy. But Zac changed his mind. He didn't buy the cathedral because it isn't finished. He is going to buy it in 2030, when it's finished.

Something to think about ...

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes, a middle- aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule. 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. 6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell had sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.... how many other things are we missing?