(identity 'myron)

Wed, 15 Oct 2003

Japan Today Pop Vox [/Japan]

Interesting opinions on a boy beaten and verbally abused by a teacher in Fukuoka. In case you're not acquainted with the incident, the long and short of it is that a teacher repeatedly told a 9 year old boy of partial american ancestry to go kill himself, using quotes like this:

"You have filthy blood. Go jump off from your condo building and die."

"You haven't died yet. Do it today, OK?"

The family is claiming post-traumatic stress disorder, and rightly so, given the child is quoted as having said, "I'd like to have my blood replaced. I don't see any sense in living."

The pop vox opinion page shows some rather interesting views, some rather scathing and somewhat cynical:

In the Fukuoka case, I also note that Japanese lawyers are supporting the boy, which I suspect is only because he actually has Japanese nationality. If he were Chinese or Korean, I bet there would be no support group to defend his case. The lawyers smell money and believe they can win if it's an America-related issue, involving a Japanese.

This view is echoed again by another Japanese:

Since many Japanese people do not experience much discrimination, the law against discrimination is almost meaningless. In fact, there are many second and third-generation Chinese, Koreans and other nationalities in Japan today who get discriminated against all the time. [...] On the one hand, it is good to hear 503 lawyers are willing to protect the boy but why can't they stand up for Chinese and Korean kids as well? I guess the boy does not need more than 10 lawyers to win. Anyway, we all have to learn to live with one another.

Of course, none of the opinions expressed support the teacher.

// posted at 18:18. permalink   comments

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Critique of OOSC2 [/tech]

A Critique of OOSC2 by Betrand Meyer. Picked this up in Slashdot comments today, and I'm skimming through it. A nice quote:

In my opinion, strong typing tends to result in conversion and adapter clutter to the code. It is harder to work with code that has more clutter not directly related to the problem solution at hand. Strong typing is sort of like a crash helmet that blocks part of your view. On the one hand it might protect you from injury, on the other, it distracts and detracts from you "reading the road".

Better than I could ever say it.

// posted at 01:39. permalink   comments

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