A peach of an opportunity

“HEY first peaches of the season are here. Come and get your peach pie @10am.” Simple tweets like that have helped Mission Pie, a small shop in San Francisco, drum up interest in its mouth-watering array of sweet and savoury pies. As well as twittering about its wares, the store also alerts customers to poetry readings and other events it organises. Krystin Rubin, a co-owner of Mission Pie, says the business had just 150 or so followers for a while after one of its bakers started sending out tweets almost a year ago. Then that number suddenly shot up to over 1,000. Over the past few months business has been very brisk and Ms Rubin reckons Twitter deserves part of the credit. “It has a sort of street credibility that’s not there with traditional media,” she says.

Other companies have discovered the same thing. Kogi BBQ, which has several trucks serving Korean food in Los Angeles, now has over 52,000 followers on Twitter and uses the service to tell customers where they can find its vans each day. Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery with stores all over America and nearly 94,000 fans of its Facebook page, posts a password to that page each day which can be redeemed for a free cake by a certain number of visitors to its shops. Such offers can attract a lot of attention. A survey of 1,000 heavy users of social networks and other digital media conducted in August 2009 by Razorfish, an advertising agency, found that 44% of those following brands on Twitter said they did so because of the exclusive deals the firms offered to users.

As Kogi BBQ and Sprinkles show, social networks are arguably having an even greater impact on small businesses than on the big league. By giving entrepreneurs free access to their audience, services such as Twitter and Facebook are putting corporate tiddlers on a par with behemoths such as Starbucks and Dell when it comes to broadcasting messages to a mass market. They have also created what Steve Hasker of Nielsen calls “the world’s biggest, fastest and most dynamic focus groups”, which can be a boon to entrepreneurs without fat research budgets.

Some small businesses are already using social networks to generate new ideas. After spending time on Twitter, employees at Cordarounds.com, a small American clothing company, noticed that many folk twittering in their area were using bicycles to get to work. So the firm produced a new line of trousers, dubbed “bike-to-work pants”, with built-in reflective materials that make wearers more visible to traffic while cycling at night. And of course it used tweets to get the word out about its new creations.

“Follow me on Twitter” signs are appearing on the doors and windows of small businesses in other countries too. A survey last year by O2, a mobile-phone operator, found that some 17% of Britain’s small businesses were using Twitter. Many of the firms that responded said they were doing this to attract new customers. Some reckoned they had been able to save up to £5,000 (over $8,000) a year by cutting out other forms of marketing in favour of the networking service.

Charging for batteries
The connections made possible by social networks are helping to create new businesses as well as promote existing ones. When Henk van Ess, a Dutch technology consultant, posted a complaint about the short lifespan of his iPhone’s battery on LinkedIn a couple of years ago, one respondent suggested that he contact China BAK Battery, which produces a small, plug-in battery for the iPhone. Impressed with the product, Mr Van Ess told members of his online network about it and was soon handling orders for them. After a while he formed his own company, 3GJUICE, to produce a plug-in unit for the iPhone that incorporates the Chinese firm’s battery.

Mr Van Ess’s firm is tiny, but social networks such as Facebook and MySpace have also served as launching pads for much bigger outfits. Among the largest of these are companies such as Zynga, Playfish and Playdom, whose popular online games run on the big networks’ platforms. Some of these games, such as Zynga’s “FarmVille”, have attracted millions of players and produced mountains of money for their creators. Zynga says it has been profitable almost since it opened in 2007, and last month the business attracted an investment of $180m from a bunch of prominent financiers convinced of its potential. Many of the social-games companies are on a hiring binge, creating hundreds of new jobs at a time when the economy around them is in the doldrums. Their experience provides an insight into how social networks can help propel small businesses to much bigger things.

Like most games, the ones produced by Zynga and its peers appeal to people’s natural competitive instincts. Leader boards and a host of other features allow players to show off their status within a game to their friends. But the games also encourage lots of co-operation among players, who can build rapport by, say, sending virtual gifts to each other or handing virtual currency to new players when they join a game. “The best virtual goods have real currency,” says Mark Pincus, Zynga’s boss. He reckons that the games have become so popular because they combine fun with the various ways to strengthen relationships that Facebook and other networks have brought online.

Better than the real thing
Social games have also become extraordinarily popular because they cleverly exploit those relationships. Once someone has signed up for, say, “Mafia Wars”, another Zynga invention, they are urged to invite their friends to join too. And players’ gruesome successes in such games are regularly posted to their personal page on Facebook, which can be seen by all of their friends. Thanks to such wheezes, online games benefit from a powerful network effect. “Café World”, which gives users the opportunity to run their own virtual restaurant, launched on Facebook at the end of September and within a week had attracted a mind-boggling 10m players.

This astonishing growth has been helped by the fact that social games are free to play. The companies make their money by selling digital goods in the games, by carrying advertising and by getting players to sign up for marketing promotions. Surprising though this may seem to some, virtual goods such as swords, tractors and even digital boyfriends are much in demand. After users of its “Sorority Life” game complained in an online forum that the game lacked virtual men they could date, Playdom quickly introduced some last November. Over 10m of the boyfriends were promptly snapped up, with a few players buying as many as 500 each. Some paid for their digital darlings with virtual credits won in the game, but others stumped up over $5 a time for their beaux.

The rise of the social-gaming firms has not been without controversy. Last year Zynga came under fire from TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley blog, for allowing misleading marketing offers to run on its site. The firm subsequently removed them. But such hiccups have not dented interest in social gaming: last November Playfish was snapped up by Electronic Arts, a big video-game publisher that thinks the business is going to be huge. It may well be right. ThinkEquity, an investment bank, reckons that revenues in America from social games could hit $2.2 billion by 2012, a big leap from last year’s $375m.

Admittedly this is an extreme example of the benefits social networks can bring to small businesses. Rewards for outfits such as Mission Pie will be far more modest. But if they were added up across an entire economy, they could have a significant effect on growth. What a pity, then, that many small firms are reluctant to take the plunge into the social-networking world. A survey of 500 small businesses in America conducted by Citibank last October found that most of them had not used online networks at all because they thought they would be a waste of time.

Privacy 2.0

IF THERE is one thing that could halt the ascent of social networks, it is the vexed question of privacy. This is controversial because it goes right to the heart of the social-networking business model. In order to attract users, sites need to offer ways for members to restrict the information about themselves that gets shared with a wider public. Without effective controls people would be reluctant to sign up. But if a site allows members to keep too much of their information private, there will be less traffic that can be turned into profit through advertising and various other means, so the network’s business will suffer.

“There is a tension here because these networking sites are based on the idea that people will share information about themselves,” says Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Institute for the Internet & American Life, a non-profit research group. “If people stop swapping content then the sites will fade away.” There is some evidence that people are starting to become more sophisticated about the way in which they manage their data, which could have longer-term implications for the networks’ growth.

Research published last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the institute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teenagers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online information about them. Nicole Ellison, a professor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share information with.

As it happens, the social networks have partly brought this on themselves. In order to offer a better service, many have created extensive sets of privacy controls that allow users to toggle between different levels of protection to shield their online data. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, says the site now offers 65 different features that people can use to determine what, if anything, can be seen by other users. Facebook also has a plethora of controls that can be adjusted to create different levels of confidentiality. Default settings for younger people on social-networking sites are often more restrictive than those for adults to ensure they are protected from unwanted attention.

Social networks deserve applause for developing these fine-grained controls, and for their efforts to educate youngsters in the appropriate use of social-networking sites. But their desire for profit can put them on a collision course with privacy activists, regulators and their users.

One bone of contention is social networks’ reluctance to draw attention to their privacy statements. A study published last year by two researchers at Cambridge University, Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch, looked at 45 networks and found that many of them buried their privacy statements in obscure corners of their sites. Speculating about the reason for this, the researchers thought it might be concern about “privacy salience”: the worry that alerting people to privacy as a potential issue will make them less inclined to share things, even if robust privacy controls are available.

That matters, because networks are doing their best to lock in users. Messrs Bonneau and Preibusch found that none of the sites they looked at made it easy for people to export their profile data, friendship links, photos and other material. The more content that a user produces, the more likely he or she is to remain on a particular site because moving becomes too much trouble. That explains why most sites like to play up the benefits of content-sharing and play down talk about privacy.

We’d like to see more of you
Some of the tactics employed to encourage greater sharing are more blatant. Last month Facebook caused a storm of protest from privacy groups and users when it unveiled plans to simplify its privacy settings. Critics welcomed some of the changes, including one that allows users to specify who can see an individual piece of content—a level of detail not available before. But privacy activists are deeply unhappy with the site’s decision to make more data from individuals’ Facebook profiles available by default to anyone with access to the internet.

Earlier this month Mr Zuckerberg told an audience in California that he believed social norms had shifted and that people had become willing to share information about themselves more widely. On this view, what Facebook did was simply a reflection of a new social reality. But the firm’s critics argue that Facebook is trying to drive change on privacy rather than react to it.

Some privacy groups have filed a complaint against Facebook to America’s Federal Trade Commission, arguing that the recent changes to its privacy policies and settings violate federal law. The complaint notes that before Facebook’s latest move the only data about individuals that were publicly available were their names and the regional or national network within Facebook that they belonged to. Now far more information is being put on show automatically, though users can change their default privacy settings to restrict access to some of it. Critics argue that Facebook has loosened privacy protections in order to increase traffic and to compete with upstarts such as Twitter.

There may well be more clashes with privacy regulators and privacy groups. Facebook made a number of changes to its privacy policy last year after Canada’s privacy watchdog raised several concerns with the firm. In particular, the watchdog wanted Facebook to give members more control over the way their information is used by apps, which the firm agreed to do. Privacy bodies in Europe are also looking into social networks, hoping to establish pan-European guidelines.

Sharing information with apps developers is an especially sensitive issue. If severe restrictions are placed on networks’ ability to pass on data, both they and the developers could end up making less money than envisaged. Advertising is another touchy subject. Jeffrey Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy, a privacy group, sees social networks as part of a broader set of companies that are trying to track individuals’ behaviour online to gather data that can be used by marketers for precisely targeted advertising.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of public policy, sees things differently. He points out that companies engaged in so-called “behavioural advertising” are tracking individuals’ activities on the web without their knowledge, whereas Facebook seeks its members’ explicit permission when they sign up to the service to let it use their data for ad-targeting purposes. He also stresses that the company provides advertisers with data only in aggregated form so that individuals’ personal information is not divulged to anyone.

How much is a free lunch?
Most people who use Facebook and other social networks seem prepared to accept the idea of targeted advertising as the price of getting free access to the service. It is less clear whether they are prepared to go along with Facebook’s attempts to persuade them to share ever more information about themselves. But Mr Zuckerberg and his colleagues clearly believe that people are happy to do so.

Twitter’s Mr Stone also sees a longer-term trend towards greater openness, and claims that his service’s users are quite happy to share more information about themselves. The network has recently changed its own terms of service to give it greater leeway to add data about users’ physical location to its traffic. Mr Stone says this is critical because the next big wave of social networking will revolve around mobile phones and the places that people take them to. A new crop of networking firms has already sprung up to capitalise on the opportunities offered by mobile phones. That opens up the prospect of even broader changes in the social-networking landscape.

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High-Impact Celebrities

When you think of celebrities and charities, what’s the first name that comes to mind? Angelina Jolie? Bono? Brad Pitt? Chris Martin? Well it turns out they’re not even close to being the most high impact celebrities when it comes to raising money.

Believe it or not when it comes to raising some serious cash, Justin Timberlake is the man! According to The Daily Beast, JT raised over $9 million dollars for the Shriners Hospital for Children in 2009 alone. He even beat out Oprah! Go JT!

Check out the list of celebrity endorsed charities below…

1. Justin Timberlake
Charity: Shriners Hospital for Children
Annual Impact: $9,262,381

2. Madonna
Charity: Raising Malawi
Annual Impact: $5,540,068

3. Pamela Anderson
Charity: PETA
Annual Impact: $4,840,168

4. Oprah
Charity: Oprah’s Angel Network
Annual Impact: $3,973,870

5. Bono
Charity: ONE Foundation
Annual Impact: $3,598,313

6. Angelina Jolie
Charity: UNHCR
Annual Impact: $3,015,070

7. Rihanna
Charity: UNICEF
Annual Impact: $2,305,743

8. George Clooney
Charity: United Nations
Annual Impact: $2,184,500

9. Salma Hayek
Charity: UNICEF
Annual Impact: $1,620,959

10. Shakira
Charity: UNICEF
Annual Impact: $1,284,431

Source: Hollyscoop

Celebrity Power

By David Robinson
From the January/February 2007 Issue of The American
Filed under: Big Ideas, Science & Technology

Information overload makes our attention the next hot commodity, writes DAVID ROBINSON. An endless variety of niche sources could leave us absorbed—and isolated—if not for the big-name celebrities who bring us back together.
The Internet is often billed as a radical equalizer. Anyone with a keyboard can, we are told, compete for the readership of the largest magazines and newspapers. Anyone with a camera and a clever idea can, through YouTube, reach more viewers than MTV does.

There is a new meritocracy in the race for atten tion, and it seems to threaten the establishment. Dan Rather, who spent much of his career shaping the official versions of news events, was edged into early retirement after bloggers exposed the doc uments underpinning a major story as forgeries. Encyclopedia Britannica had to issue a defensive press release after a study in Nature suggested that Wikipedia, a user-created and free online encyclo pedia, covers science just about as well as Britannica does. On rottentomatoes.com, movies are rated by the collective judgment of the large and anonymous viewing public, and famous reviewers sometimes find themselves in the back seat: how prominently a review is featured depends on how many people commend the review, not on who wrote it.

In each of these cases and many more like them, institutions that have traditionally derived their power from one-to-many communication are under mined by the new ease with which regular people, acting independently, can reach a large audience.

The traditionally dominant media are losing our attention. The total audience of the network TV news shows has dropped by half since 1980. Because of all the new competition, our attention is becoming a more important commodity than ever. Several astute observers, including Michael Goldhaber and Richard Lanham, have pointed out that the phrase “information economy” is a misno­mer—information is not naturally scarce. Rather, we are drowning in it. The thing that is scarce, and that becomes more valuable the greater the deluge of information, is our capacity to absorb and process information—or, our intrinsically finite supply of attention. Attention is the crucial ingredient that allows information-driven goods such as music, writing, and expert advice to find their value in the marketplace.

Celebrities—people who are, as Daniel Boorstin put it, “well known for their well-knownness”—are more celebrated than ever. Once they rise to national or global renown, whatever the reason, their fame becomes a kind of capital that can be converted into money or political influence.

Bono’s allegiance to the “Make Poverty History” campaign has influenced the public mood enough that Western governments are now pledging to shovel more money into aid programs that have been spectacular failures. The Dixie Chicks, Whoopi Goldberg, and a crowd of other entertainers raise funds and votes for Democrats, while Nashville turns out patriotic anthems that rustle up support for Republicans. Tom Cruise may have done more to spread skepticism about psychiatry than Thomas Szasz has. (Haven’t heard of Szasz? He wrote The Myth of Mental Illness, the most widely read intel lectual critique of the mental health establish ment.) Madonna’s efforts to adopt a Malawian child have brought Africa into America’s public conversation, surpass ing, at least for a time, the attention that actress Angelina Jolie has attracted as a spe cial United Nations ambassador to refu gees in Darfur.

The logic of the Internet was supposed to wash away celebri ties in favor of what Yochai Benkler and others call “crowdsourcing,” where we all collaborate to replace the experts or the divas. How is it that the star power of many big celebrities is still growing, and at the same time a stampede of new ones arrives—bloggers or musicians with cult follow ings, talking heads on new cable networks, and community leaders like Jim Wales of Wikipedia? If big celebrities aren’t losing mindshare, and lots of new ones are gaining it, then what gives? What are all these celebs distracting us from?

The answer lies in what all celebrities have in common: they create a community of watch ers who, by paying attention to the same subject, come to share knowledge and experiences with one another. The Internet opens up a risk of “data smog,” with each of us lost in his own self-selected haze of idiosyncratic interests. Celebrities furnish a cure, supplanting more time-consuming social platforms like churches and civic clubs. One major reason people watch Oprah Winfrey or Katie Couric is the brute fact that so many others are watching. Andrew Shapiro and David Shaw have pointed to these shared expe riences as “social glue” that holds us together.

New technologies give us a wide range of ways to amuse ourselves in solitude. Tivo, the Web, and most notably the iPod provide solo experiences that are at least as enticing as traditional socialization. They are, if anything, too good—they cater to our individual tastes so well that we need not devote as much time to communal pursuits.

Historically, people have usually shared geo graphic proximity and cultural ties with their most immediate social contacts. But many technology-watchers have noticed this changing. It’s hard to chat about the weather with a Facebook “friend” who lives in a foreign city, and church attendance is on the decline. Core curricula in universities are out of fashion. Daily papers, which once gave everyone in town something to talk about, are rapidly losing market share to more specialized sources.

Celebrities have retained their “convening power” as a basis for shared conversation even as more tra ditional sources have eroded. Daniel Boorstin wrote with eerie prescience in 1961 that modern celebrity-driven media “provide that ‘common discourse’ which some of my old-fashioned friends have hoped to find in the Great Books.”

It’s not that we Americans are letting our brains rot; to the contrary, we are happily ensconced in an ever-expanding range of specialized pursuits. By eliminating the barriers of distance and allowing people to announce their most obscure predilec tions to the world, the Internet has allowed far-flung aficionados of Brazilian jazz, South African wines, or Japanese cartoons to find one another and sus tain communities of interest that simply would not have coalesced, given the higher search costs, in the pre-Internet era. But with so many niche interests, the common core has eroded, leading to an increase in the importance of celebrity.

America is constantly becoming more diverse, and has been advised by the Supreme Court that diversity should be regarded as a cardinal virtue. But this outlook—which could be encapsulated as “the less we have in common, the better”—is costly. It obscures the inevitable importance of common ground in social interactions. Part of the reason celebrities are so important is that we have refused to make a national commitment to a canon of great books, the rigorous study of American history, or anything else that might provide a sturdier plat form for civic discourse than last night’s intrigue on “Survivor” or “Real World.”

B-list celebrities, such as the athletes known to sports buffs, the actors on “Star Trek,” or the talking heads on cable news, do the same thing for smaller groups that Tom Cruise does for the nation. Policy wonks from opposite coasts and different schools of thought can bond through critiquing the interviews they saw on “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation.” “Star Trek” buffs can bond over Shatner re-runs.

Celebrity watching is the perfect common pursuit in our mediated, isolated information landscape. It holds us together. The further we venture into the individualized world of high technology and niche interests, the more important celebrities—for bet ter or worse—will become.

The Youngest Headmaster in the World

From BBC

Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying change that. In the first report in the BBC’s Hunger to Learn series, Damian Grammaticas meets Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children.

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He’s a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family’s backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

The story of this young man from Murshidabad in West Bengal is a remarkable tale of the desire to learn amid the direst poverty.

Babar Ali’s day starts early. He wakes, pitches-in with the household chores, then jumps on an auto-rickshaw which takes him part of the 10km (six mile) ride to the Raj Govinda school. The last couple of kilometres he has to walk.

The school is the best in this part of West Bengal. There are hundreds of students, boys and girls. The classrooms are neat, if bare. But there are desks, chairs, a blackboard, and the teachers are all dedicated and well-qualified.

As the class 12 roll-call is taken, Babar Ali is seated in the middle in the front row. He’s a tall, slim, gangly teenager, studious and smart in his blue and white uniform. He takes his notes carefully. He is the model student.

Babar Ali is the first member of his family ever to get a proper education.

“It’s not easy for me to come to school because I live so far away,” he says, “but the teachers are good and I love learning. And my parents believe I must get the best education possible that’s why I am here.”

Raj Govinda school is government-run so it is free, all Babar Ali has to pay for is his uniform, his books and the rickshaw ride to get there. But still that means his family has to find around 1,800 rupees a year ($40, £25) to send him to school. In this part of West Bengal that is a lot of money. Many poor families simply can’t afford to send their children to school, even when it is free.

Chumki Hajra is one who has never been to school. She is 14 years old and lives in a tiny shack with her grandmother. Their home is simple A-frame supporting a thatched roof next to the rice paddies and coconut palms at the edge of the village. Inside the hut there is just room for a bed and a few possessions.

Every morning, instead of going to school, she scrubs the dishes and cleans the homes of her neighbours. She’s done this ever since she was five. For her work she earns just 200 rupees a month ($5, £3). It’s not much, but it’s money her family desperately needs. And it means that she has to work as a servant everyday in the village.

“My father is handicapped and can’t work,” Chumki tells me as she scrubs a pot. “We need the money. If I don’t work, we can’t survive as a family. So I have no choice but to do this job.”

But Chumki is now getting an education, thanks to Babar Ali. The 16-year-old has made it his mission to help Chumki and hundreds of other poor children in his village. The minute his lessons are over at Raj Govinda school, Babar Ali doesn’t stop to play, he heads off to share what he’s learnt with other children from his village.

At four o’clock every afternoon after Babar Ali gets back to his family home a bell summons children to his house. They flood through the gate into the yard behind his house, where Babar Ali now acts as headmaster of his own, unofficial school.

Lined up in his back yard the children sing the national anthem. Standing on a podium, Babar Ali lectures them about discipline, then study begins.

Babar Ali gives lessons just the way he has heard them from his teachers. Some children are seated in the mud, others on rickety benches under a rough, homemade shelter. The family chickens scratch around nearby. In every corner of the yard are groups of children studying hard.

Babar Ali was just nine when he began teaching a few friends as a game. They were all eager to know what he learnt in school every morning and he liked playing at being their teacher.

“ Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate ”
Babar Ali
Now his afternoon school has 800 students, all from poor families, all taught for free. Most of the girls come here after working, like Chumki, as domestic helps in the village, and the boys after they have finished their day’s work labouring in the fields.

“In the beginning I was just play-acting, teaching my friends,” Babar Ali says, “but then I realised these children will never learn to read and write if they don’t have proper lessons. It’s my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future.”

Including Babar Ali there are now 10 teachers at the school, all, like him are students at school or college, who give their time voluntarily. Babar Ali doesn’t charge for anything, even books and food are given free, funded by donations. It means even the poorest can come here.

“Our area is economically deprived,” he says. “Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate.”

Seated on a rough bench squeezed in with about a dozen other girls, Chumki Hajra is busy scribbling notes.

Her dedication to learning is incredible to see. Every day she works in homes in the village from six in the morning until half past two in the afternoon, then she heads to Babar Ali’s school. At seven every evening she heads back to do more cleaning work.

Chumki’s dream is to one day become a nurse, and Babar Ali’s classes might just make it possible.

The school has been recognized by the local authorities, it has helped increase literacy rates in the area, and Babar Ali has won awards for his work.

The youngest children are just four or five, and they are all squeezed in to a tiny veranda. There are just a couple of bare electric bulbs to give light as lessons stretch into the evening, and only if there is electricity.

And then the monsoon rain begins. Huge big drops fall as the children scurry for cover, slipping in the mud. They crowd under a piece of plastic sheeting. Babar Ali shouts an order. Lessons are cancelled for the afternoon otherwise everyone will be soaked. Having no classrooms means lessons are at the mercy of the elements.

The children climb onto the porch of a nearby shop as the rain pours down. Then they hurry home through the downpour. Tomorrow they’ll be back though. Eight hundred poor children, unable to afford an education, but hungry for anything they can learn at Babar Ali’s school.

Last Min Reminders

Summary

• Don’t substitute word-for-word. This will not work. Trying to understand what it is being said is not that difficult. Really!
• There MAY SEEM TO BE a lot of overlap but you should generally try to include all the points within the specified paragraphs… that is relevant
• If you find your answer is TOO SHORT, you may be “answering the question” too strictly. Include some other points in the paragraph that can be put in. (i.e. it’s not an example or 100% irrelevant)

AQ

• Please revise your basic structure! Make sure you have a FOCUS STATEMENT and discuss Singapore / Singaporean youth (whichever the question demands)
• Write at length! This is not MCQ or a structured question!

Essay

• Philosophical questions can be tricky, so tread carefully
• Make sure you discuss ALL THE TOPICS and don’t try to just split the question up (eg. relationship between conflict and progress, not just conflict first, and progress second)
• Identify the KEY TERMS and negotiate accordingly. Modals such as will, can, should can help you shape your essay (eg. by challenging the level of certainty).
• Use these KEY TERMS throughout your essay. If you find that you are writing a general essay about for instance, the death penalty or the environment WITHOUT USING THE KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS, chances are you are going out of point.
• THESIS, THESIS, THESIS!
• BALANCE = COUNTER-ARGUMENT WITH REBUTTAL

Germany has a Gay Minister – Yäwn!

Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s new vice-chancellor and foreign minister, is very popular and openly gay. And nobody in Germany cares.

For more than 50 years, the tabloid daily Bild — currently Europe’s best-selling newspaper — has served as both a reliable barometer of Germany’s conservative movement and a steady vent of its populist id. The editors have never felt compelled to question their winning formula: The conservative parties’ current talking points go above the fold, the naked “Page One Girl” below it. The self-appointed guarantors of all that is traditionally Deutsch aren’t much interested in the finer points of sensitivity training.

And in that way, the tabloid might have been expected at some point this week to express ambivalence, if not disapproval, of the fact that the country’s newly elected vice-chancellor and foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is gay. Instead, though, Bild waved a white flag on one of the fronts of the country’s decades-long culture war. As part of its gleeful coverage of the victory of the country’s two main conservative parties in Sunday’s election, the newspaper paid its respect to Westerwelle in the form of a sentimental page-one profile of his boyfriend, complete with a trashy headline: “His Boyfriend Makes Him Strong!”

Taking its cues from voters, Bild’s editors didn’t wring their hands over Westerwelle’s sexual orientation, nor did they sensationalize it as a novelty. For one thing, it wasn’t news: The chairman of the FDP, the free market Free Democratic Party, hadn’t hidden his sexual orientation during the campaign — his partner, event manager Michael Mronz, was often on stage with him at his rallies — and no one he encountered on the trail seemed inclined to make an issue of it. Being a gay politician in Germany, it seems, is well on its way to being utterly normal, even banal.

Germany’s ready public acceptance of homosexuality is the product of recent sea changes both in the character of society and in the letter of national law. For much of western Germany’s history, neither the CDU, the Catholic-dominated Christian Democratic Union, nor the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), with its focus on the industrial working class, had much interest in setting up protections for gays. In eastern Germany, the ruling communist party dismissed homosexuality as “contrary to the healthy mores of the people.” Nazi-era laws that criminalized homosexuality remained in force in East Germany until 1958 and in West Germany until as late as 1969.

Change didn’t come easy. The gay-rights movement that began organizing in earnest in West Germany in the 1960s — part of the student-driven backlash that wanted to interrogate and overcome the country’s Nazi past — elicited strong conservative resistance. For decades, the polarized camps faced off in homes, universities, and city streets in a tense stalemate. When Helmut Kohl took office as chancellor in 1982 at the head of a “black-yellow” coalition between the CDU and the FDP, he promised a “moral-spiritual revolution” that would return the country to its traditional understanding of public morality and decorum. What that amounted to, during his 16 years at the head of German government, was periodic populist agitation against politically correct cultural liberals in the arts and academia. Certainly, it was unthinkable that a gay man would gain a major portfolio in the Kohl-led coalition that governed until 1998. (Westerwelle, as a high-ranking FDP official, was involved in the Kohl government, but didn’t come out of the closet until 2004.)

How, then, has the tide turned so dramatically in Germany in favor of acceptance of homosexuality? On the legal and political side, the gay-rights movement was fortunate to have found an amenable political home in the late 1970s in the fledgling Green Party. Although dismissed by the establishment in their early years, the Greens came into power in 1999, together with the SPD, with a clear and focused agenda to update German law to better reflect society’s present-day values.

In addition to reform of immigration and citizenship statutes, the Greens pushed through a law recognizing same-sex partnerships and also rooted out the final remnants of legalized discrimination against gays in the German military. These efforts were passed with the support of the left-leaning SPD and Westerwelle’s free market, culturally liberal FDP. Westerwelle, for his part, blasted the Catholic Church for its “19th-century worldview” in response to a call by the Vatican to campaign against the gay-marriage law.

Germany’s religious landscape also factors into the relative serenity with which its society addresses homosexuality. In a country where 30 percent of the population considers itself atheist, it is hard to drum up fervor against sexual orientation: To that extent, reunification with East Germany — which was predominantly atheist, according to communist ideology — has made the country, as a whole, a friendlier place for gays. Moreover, Germany’s institutionalized Lutheran Protestant church, to which another 30 percent of the country adheres, is considerably more liberal than most evangelical Protestant denominations in the United States. Germany’s Lutheran church allows gays to become priests, and in some instances, blesses same-sex marriages.

Even the CDU, the traditionally Catholic mainstay of conservative West Germany, isn’t as obeisant to Rome as it once was. Chancellor Angela Merkel — head of the CDU, albeit one who was raised by a Protestant pastor in East Germany — did not hesitate to criticize German-born Pope Benedict XVI when he reinstated excommunicated bishops who had denied the Holocaust. No one in the CDU felt inclined to agitate against fellow party member Ole von Beust when he outed himself during his first term as mayor of Hamburg. And the last CDU candidate to run for mayor of Cologne saw no contradiction in referring to himself both as a gay man and a “serious Catholic.”

Indeed, once politicians come out of the closet, German voters tend to be concerned less about their private lives than about their other personal qualities. It’s no coincidence that those who have unabashedly staked claim to their sexual preferences have usually earned bonus points among the public. “When a politician deals openly with his homosexuality, he comes across as more authentic,” says Werner Patzelt, a political science professor at Dresden Technical University.

There’s still a city-country divide in Germany when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality. Gays still have a harder time in Bavaria, where traditional adherence to the Catholic Church in small towns is very strong. It’s not surprising then that the first major public official to come out of the closet was Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, the city where Germany’s live-and-let-live ethos is strongest. Wowereit didn’t mince words in his unabashed 2001 coming out. “I’m gay,” he declared, “and that’s a good thing!” He has also earned admirers for the way he has managed to fend off political rivals who have tried to make an issue of his homosexuality. When his latest CDU challenger, Friedbert Pflüger, suggested Berlin deserves to have “a first lady,” Wowereit shot back that at least he was in a steady relationship, whereas Pflüger was in the midst of a divorce.

It’s not for nothing that, after charming the capital city, Wowereit is being handled as the potential next chancellor candidate from the SPD. Bild, of course, likely won’t be extending him an endorsement. But, it won’t be his sexual orientation that’s standing in the way — just the fact that he’s a Social Democrat.

Common Errors

Cooperation will benefit the society
Use “society” and not “the society” when referring to society in general / the world in general. When you use the definite article (“the”), you are referring to a specific society (eg. Singapore) which is often not the case. This incorrect use of “the” is very common and should be duly noted.

They are naturally smart and they will achieve…
As you have already used “they” as the subject of your sentence, you do not have to use “they” after “and”.

Technological advancement has led to a lot of benefits, for example cure illnesses..
Start a new sentence with subject, verb and object – “For example, illnesses have been..”. This is a classic case of the run-on sentence – connecting a new clause to a previous clause when you really should be starting a new sentence.

Lewis Hamilton won the Singapore Grand Prix, he is a deserving winner.
Another run-on sentence that can be corrected by the use of the semi-colon (Lewis Hamilton won the Singapore Grand Prix; he is a deserving winner). Alternatively, start a new sentence OR use a conjunction (“and”).

For instance, Fernando Alonso.
Firstly, social aspects.
These are fragments and not proper sentences. Proper sentences have at least a subject (Fernando Alonso) and a verb (finished… third).