ORAL PRESENTATIONS

I've tried to send each of you the recording of your oral presentation several times but unfortunately they are too big and I cannot find the way to encode them reasonably. I sent the first one to Marta Rello but I'm afraid it'll be stopped after 5 minutes.

Next week I'll talk to each of you personally (comments and mark). If you want to copy your presentation, bring your pendrive and we'll do it in the classroom's laptop.

Sorry about that!

Can dreams predict the future?

When disaster strikes, people often claim that they foresaw the tragedy. But are such premonitions really possible? In an extract from his new book Paranormality, psychologist Richard Wiseman explains how our sleeping minds can trick us

• Richard Wiseman
• The Guardian, Tuesday 22 February 2011

 

Many people report that they have had premonitions of disasters in their dreams. Photograph: Gaetan Charbonneau/Getty Images

Aberfan is a small village in south Wales. In the 1960s, many of those living there worked at a nearby colliery that had been built to exploit the large amount of high-quality coal in the area. Although some of the waste from the mining operation had been stored underground, much of it had been piled on the steep hillsides surrounding the village. Throughout October 1966 heavy rain lashed down on the area and seeped into the porous sandstone of the hills. Unfortunately, no one realised that the water was then flowing into several hidden springs and slowly transforming the pit waste into soft slurry.
Just after nine o'clock on the morning of 21 October, the side of the hill subsided and half a million tonnes of debris started to move rapidly towards the village. Although some of the material came to a halt on the lower parts of the hill, much of it slid into Aberfan and smashed into the village school. A handful of children were pulled out alive during the first hour or so of the rescue effort, but no other survivors emerged. One hundred and thirty-nine schoolchildren and five teachers lost their lives in the tragedy.

Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide. Barker had a longstanding interest in the paranormal and wondered whether the extreme nature of events in Aberfan might have caused large numbers of people to experience a premonition about the tragedy. To find out, Barker arranged for a newspaper to ask any readers who thought they had foreseen the Aberfan disaster to get in touch. He received 60 letters from across England and Wales, with over half of the respondents claiming that their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream.

To read more, click here:
the guardian

New Zealand quake kills at least 65 people

 

Photograph: Mark Mitchell/AP

Earthquake topples Christchurch Cathedral's spire, one of many collapsed buildings across New Zealand's second largest city.

In the comments section some people describe how they felt the quake.

- Im in Wellington and felt it at my desk. A colleague of mine was on a day work trip, though she is safe as are friends I have there and the friends and families of others I know. Of course others again have not been so lucky. The news coverage is just so surreal looking at the damage, especially to a landmark building like the cathedral. September's quake was bad enough and it was a miracle there wasnt loss of life. This second blow is scarcely believable.

- It's been so surreal - spread by text news here in Auckland what had happened. In the space of about 10 minutes it went from one confirmed death, to 17, to 64, and now 65. Biggest disaster in living memory - unconfirmed report just announced that deathtoll is now at 2-400. The newsreaders are having such difficulties presenting the news without their voices shaking, and eyewitnesses, even now, 9 hours on, are shaking and traumatised. Wish that I lived closer so I could give a hand, or lend my place to stay at, or anything. Theres just so much rubble everywhere, and dust and distress. And new aftershocks every hour of a high magnitude. It's just surreal.

LECTURE: SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

You are cordially invited to attend this lecture:

Thursday 17th February
10.15 - E.O.I.
16.30 - Instituto el Burgo (II)

Lecturer: BRENDAN SMITH

LECTURE about INDIA

Thursday 17th February
12.15 - E.O.I.
18.30 - Instituto el Burgo (II)

Lecturer: MANJULA BALAKRISHNAN

You are cordially invited to attend any of the sessions.

The senses and verbs of seeing

Here you have the vocabulary we have seen in the class concerning the senses and also the verbs of seeing. I've added a few examples for you to know how to use these verbs correctly.

verbs of seeing

Baftas 2011: The King's Speech sweeps the board

The King's Speech was nominated in 14 categories and won in seven, including best film and best British film

The Guardian, Monday 14 February 2011

It was never the most obvious subject for a thrilling, gets-you-there drama – a reluctant king's treatment for his wretched speech impediment – but the story worked to spectacular effect with The King's Speech last night, triumphing at the Baftas.
To read more, click here: The King's Speech

The King's Speech wins seven awards including best actor for Colin Firth .

The King's Speech was nominated in 14 categories and won in seven, including best film and best British film. Not quite a record – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has nine, The Killing Fields eight – but equal to Slumdog Millionaire's seven.
But it is the subject matter – "two men in a room," said the winning writer David Seidler last night – that makes its global success remarkable. The dialogue-heavy film tells the story of stuttering George VI, who became king reluctantly because his brother abdicated.
It is also something of a sour-tasting pleasure for the scrapped UK Film Council which helped get the film made in the first place, giving it a returnable £1m. Tanya Seghatchian, head of the council's film fund, said its success "represents a great validation for the UK film industry as a whole and an amazing legacy for the UK Film Council". The producers used the ceremony to highlight the importance of public subsidy for film.

Probably the least surprising winner of the night was Colin Firth, who was named best leading actor: his second consecutive Bafta. Last year it was for his role as a bereaved gay lecturer in A Single Man.

His co-stars were also victorious. Helena Bonham Carter won best supporting actress from a strong shortlist including Amy Adams, Barbara Hershey, Lesley Manville and Miranda Richardson.

In one of the longer thank you speeches, Bonham Carter, who played the future Queen Mother and has also recently portrayed the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, thanked the royal family. She said: "I seem to be playing queens with ever decreasing head sizes," adding: "I'm so used to losing, this feels very nice." She dedicated her Bafta to supporting wives everywhere.
Geoffrey Rush completed The King's Speech's acting honours as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. He won against Christian Bale, Andrew Garfield, Mark Ruffalo and the late Pete Postlethwaite.
From humble beginnings and a budget of around £10m, the film has earned eye-spinning amounts at the box office, expected to reach £125m by the time of the Oscars, later this month.
The film's writer, London-born David Seidler, won for best original screenplay. He had wanted to write it 25 years ago, but the Queen Mother asked him "not in my lifetime". He wasn't quite expecting her to live to 101.
To read more, click here:
The King's Speech

The more we have, the less we need

Interesting article. 

Less is more: the age of minimalism

Who needs books, DVDs or photos now that our lives are increasingly digitised? There are some things we  can never let go.

• Stuart Jeffries
• The Guardian, Friday 11 February 2011
• Article history

 

 

Farewell then to paperbacks, CDs, DVDs, LPs, camera film. In principle, anything that can be digitalised is expendable. Photograph: Lorna Roach for the Observer

In Poussin's painting Landscape with Diogenes, the ancient philosopher is depicted casting away his last possession, a drinking bowl. He realises he doesn't need it after seeing a youth cupping a hand to drink from a river. True, he seems to be keeping that grubby-looking over-the-shoulder blue sheet, but let's not spoil the story.

Diogenes's spiritual descendants are everywhere, if not as radically possession-free as he was. "I can carry everything I own," says Jason Edwards. "I have a few changes of clothing, laptop, two pots, bowl, spork, futon and flask. I like sitting on the floor eating fruits, nuts, vegetables and rice."

You're probably now hating Jason, but stay with him. "The nice thing about a bare room is that you begin to notice the space around you in a physical sense and you begin to notice other things like the changing sunlight during the day . . . Many possessions tend to tie one down mentally and physically – seeing too much permanence in inanimate objects rather than being aware of the vitality of the outside world of nature."

Then there is Robby who, in 2001, had a revelation. As he drove away with his girlfriend and dog from his flooding house in Austin, Texas, he realised: "Everything we owned was back there. And it didn't matter. There was nothing in that truck that I would trade for anything else in the world, no possession left behind for which I would risk our lives. It's a shame that it took a natural disaster to teach me what was truly worth valuing in my life."

These stories came from missminimalist.com and becomingminimalist.com respectively. There are hundreds of similar sites, clogging the internet like stuffed toys in a spoiled toddler's cot. My favourite is tinyassapartment.blogspot.com: "Wish you had a five-bedroom mansion in the hills and enough money to decorate it with stuff from Anthropologie that's NOT on sale? Face it – you live in a tiny-ass apartment with only enough cash to buy . . . nothing. Here's how to still be fabulous."

If you want to read the whole article, click here:

The Guardian