Universities urged to teach ethics, values

Pedagogy universities and colleges should offer courses in ethics and values as well as more professional training, speakers at a Ho Chi Minh City City workshop said on Dec. 21.

At the workshop, Nguyen Thi Ha Lan of Hong Duc University in central Thanh Hoa province said teaching of values was very important in the educational sector, especially at the kindergarten level.

If teachers did not receive the proper training in this area, they could be cruel to students, even causing physical injury, Lan added.

Nguyen Thi Hang Phuong of N-T Foundation in Hanoi, a research centre that specialises in children\'s psychology, said the centre had seen and treated many students who were afraid to return to kindergartens.

More programmes at pedagogy universities and colleges should emphasise that their students\' behaviour will often mirror the conduct of the teacher.

Lan said authorities of local education offices and leaders of kindergartens as well as nursery schools should promote the teaching and application of values.

She said the ministry and local education and training departments should also offer more refresher training courses for existing teachers to improve their skills.

Dr. Mai Thi Lien Giang of Quang Binh University said the ministry should ask pedagogy universities to review and amend training programmes, and offer more courses in values and ethics.

Currently, Vietnam has 52 educational institutions nationwide that train kindergarten teachers, but programmes vary considerably from one place to another.

Some content in the training programme was still not practical, Giang said.

Nguyen Tuyet Lan of the National College of Pedagogy in Nha Trang City, added that the number of poor qualified lecturers at some pedagogy universities and colleges made it difficult to train teachers.

Another speaker, Dr.Vo Phan Thu Huong of Sai Gon University, suggested that pedagogy universities and colleges invite experienced lecturers in teaching kindergarten education.

She said that Vietnam should learn from Japan\'s training of kindergarten teachers.

In addition, the State should create policies to encourage kindergarten teachers to work with experts in research and development of kindergarten education, she added.


http://www.dtinews.vn/en/news/020/6635/universities-urged-to-teach-ethics--values.html

Vocational training in a mess

There are 1,700 vocational training schools in Vietnam which annually provide more than 1.6 million technical workers but the market is still running short of highly skilled workers. 

At a recent seminar on improving Vietnam’s vocational training system held by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) and the Scientific Institute for Vocational Training, experts portrayed a gloomy picture of the real situation in the country.

Overlap in training management

1,700 vocational training schools are ideal for many economies but not enough for Vietnam which badly needs high-quality workers in the current process of international integration. Many experts say that Vietnam’s lack of high-quality workers in different levels will negatively impact on its sustainable economic growth.

Basic and advanced vocational training programmes are still far from meeting the urgent requirements of the country when both the Ministry of Education and Training and the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs are assigned the same task.

No doubt, the overlapping management by the two ministries has prevented graduates from colleges from continuing their studies at higher levels.

Unbalanced demand-supply

The Government plans to raise the number of trained workers from 26 percent in 2010 to 50 percent by 2020. The adoption of the Education Law in 2005 and the Vocational Training Law in 2006 has created a firm foundation for building regulations on managing the education and vocational training system in the framework of the national economy.

However, it is not an easy task. The crux of the matter is how to choose a proper training model.

Judging from the results of different training models they sound as if the training centres are better aware of businesses’ urgent requirements for highly-skilled workers. But how to apply the models effectively in the long run is another matter.

In order to maintain its high economic growth, Vietnam needs to develop a contingent of highly skilled workers who can improve labour productivity and produce high value- added products and services.

However, most vocational training centres in Vietnam are yet to pay due attention to the training of human resources when a large number of workers are facing redundancy.

Proper institutions needed

According to a recent CIEM survey in Thai Nguyen and Vinh Phuc provinces, the quality of local human resources is a decisive factor behind every decision on investment projects in the localities.

Nguyen Manh Hai, a research group leader says that State management agencies in charge of vocational training should find a way for the vocational training system to get out of a mess.

http://www.dtinews.vn/en/news/020/22634/vocational-training-in-a-mess.html

Facebook's

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- After four months of paperwork, hype and speculation, the last piece of the Facebook IPO is in place: Facebook said it has priced its IPO at $38 a share.

At that price, Facebook's IPO will raise $16 billion, making it the largest tech IPO in history. It's the third largest U.S. IPO ever, trailing only the $19.7 billion raised by Visa (V, Fortune 500) in March 2008 and the $18.1 billion raised by automaker General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) in November 2010, according to rankings by Thomson Reuters.


There are still a few more steps before Facebook's shares are ready to trade. The company is waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to declare its IPO effective -- the formal green light Facebook and its underwriters need before they can sell shares to outside buyers.

The $38 IPO price is the rate at which Facebook's underwriters (including lead banker Morgan Stanley) will sell shares to their clients, which typically include large institutional investors, mutual funds and hedge funds.

Shares will be released Thursday night to those buyers, who can resell them on the open market beginning on Friday.

Some shares were made available to individual investors, but getting them typically requires either a lot of money or a lot of trading experience. It also required moving fast. Many brokerages offering pieces of Facebook's IPO allotment "closed their books" on Tuesday, meaning they stopped taking orders.

When can I buy? Ordinary investors looking to get a piece of Facebook will have to wait until Friday morning.
Live blog: CNNMoney tries to buy Facebook shares

Unlike Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), whose IPO used a "Dutch auction" to allow direct bidding by investors, Facebook's setup doesn't give regular folks access until shares begin trading publicly on the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange.

While the market opens at 9:30 am ET on Friday, Facebook's shares won't start trading instantly. It typically takes time -- sometimes an hour or more -- for newly listed shares to begin actively trading on the day of their public debut.

How much Facebook is worth: Facebook's (FB) market capitalization will hover around $81 billion on the day of its IPO.

Many Facebook employees and executives hold unexercised stock options. If all of those shares were exercised, Facebook's outstanding share count would rise to around 2.8 billion -- pushing the company's total valuation closer to $107 billion.


Who's selling shares: Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg plans to sell 30.2 million shares in the IPO offering. That will net Zuckerberg about $1.1 billion.

But Zuckerberg won't be hanging on to his cash. Facebook said he will use the "substantial majority" of the windfall to cover the massive tax bill he'll be hit with, thanks to his plan to exercise a large stock-options grant that will increase his ownership stake in the company he founded.

After the offering, Zuckerberg will hold 503.6 million shares, or about 31% of the company. That stake is worth $19.1 billion.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners, which is the largest shareholder outside of Zuckerberg, is selling 49 million shares in the offering. That's about a quarter of its Facebook holdings.

-- CNNMoney's Chris Isidore and Maureen Farrell contributed reporting.

cnn.com

Siri

Is Apple purposely tweaking Siri to stack the deck in favor of the iPhone? Nokia certainly thinks so.

Siri stirred up some controversy late last week in voicing its view on smartphones. When asked its recommendation of the best smartphone, Apple's voice assistant named Nokia's Lumia 900 the top dog.

However, it didn't take long for Siri to change its mind. As of yesterday, the voice assistant is firmly back in Apple's camp. When asked the same question, Siri now responds: "The one you're holding," or "You're kidding, right?"

Apple can rest easier now, but Nokia is none too happy, accusing the company of playing with Siri's programming to control its responses.

"Apple position Siri as the intelligent system that's there to help, but clearly if they don't like the answer, they override the software," Nokia spokeswoman Tracy Postill told the Sydney Morning Herald.

A Nokia spokesman told CNET that Postill's remark was a "tongue-in-cheek comment that may have been taken a bit too seriously."

But either way, is it a fair accusation? No, not quite, says Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who also writes for CNET.

Siri doesn't come up with such responses on its own; rather it relies on third-party sites and services, such as Wolfram Alpha, to conjure up the answer. Wolfram Alpha itself taps into reviews from Best Buy and other sources, according to Sullivan.

"The bottom line is that Wolfram has ratings from Best Buy, and it's not trying to weight those in any particular fashion such as number of reviews or number of purchases," Sullivan wrote last week. "The Lumia rates tops on Wolfram because four people gave it 5 stars, versus 86 people who give the AT&T 16GB version of the iPhone 4S an overall rating of 4.7."

So does that mean the Lumia 900 is no longer top dog at Best Buy or other sites, or did Apple tinker with the odds to better ensure Siri's tongue-in-cheek response to the question?

I tried phrasing the question a variety of ways, such as "What is the best smartphone according to Wolfram Alpha?" and "What is the best smartphone according to Best Buy?"

Yet no matter how I asked the question, I still received the same jokey replies favoring the iPhone. But Sullivan says that he and other users were receiving the same answers touting the iPhone even last week.

CNET contacted both Apple for comment. We'll update the story if we get more information.

Updated 10 a.m. PT with response from Nokia spokesman.

WP7

LinkedIn added a new mobile app to its repertoire today: the Windows Phone 7.5 application.

"We know professionals rely on their mobile devices every day to conduct business and to stay prepared for their work day," a mobile product manager at LinkedIn, Tomer Cohen, wrote in a blog post. "We've been working hard to make this new LinkedIn app best-in-class in the Windows Phone marketplace."

The job-based social network already has apps for iPhone and Android, but the company is saying that the Windows Phone app is the most sophisticated app it's developed yet. "You'll find that in some cases (hint: companies and jobs), the Windows Phone app offers even more functionality than its iOS and Android siblings," Cohen wrote.

With this app, which is smaller than 1MB and is free, LinkedIn aims to let Windows Phoneusers be able to find and connect with other professionals. The app's features include access to a real-time update stream with news and information from connections and groups, news about the jobs industry, a search function for employment, and the ability to follow favorite companies' news.

LinkedIn has more than 150 million members worldwide, which is nothing to scoff at, but the company is still dwarfed by other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Over the past few months, LinkedIn has been updating its site and mobile apps to show its users information they can use them even when they're not looking for a new job.

Sweet

Sweet Home 3D offers users a chance to see a remodeled room or a brand new home before a single nail has been driven. With a fairly simple premise and impressive results, this slightly flawed program is certainly something to get the imagination going.

The program's interface is very easy to use. The left side of the screen contains a file tree for every room in the house, and clicking on each room presents a list of all appropriate furniture you can drag into the adjacent box. The area is a grid with measurements corresponding to room size. Below the file tree is a space for each item in the room and its approximate size. At the bottom of the screen is a small box that provides the 3D view. Designing a room is very simple. By dragging furniture into the grid and positioning it as you envision your redesigned room, a clear picture appears below, providing an impression of space that two-dimensional sketches cannot. In addition, there is an exciting Virtual Visit option that lets you walk through your home and its rooms.

While the results of Sweet Home 3D were impressive, we were slightly disappointed with its control. Placing items in the room will take some patience, as it feels rather clunky. However, with a little practice, we are certain users will be able to use this free program to design something impressive.

Read more: Sweet Home 3D - CNET Download.com

iClone

iClone5 is real-time 3D animation for digital actors, environments & visual effects with drag & drop editing, powerful physics and Microsoft Kinect-ready motion capture designed for creativity in broadcast production, education & previzualization. Professional and beginners can take advantage of tons of pre-made content and smart interactivity between actors, vehicles and props that make animation fun and logical. Easily create, customize and direct actors, props, scenes, vehicles, lighting, cameras and material channel settings. Plus, users can create in-house animations by moving their bodies in front of any Kinect Motion Capture system to produce customized motions right alongside your PC in minimal space. 3D facial puppeteering also allows for detailed facial animation with presets and a library of physics-ready content for dynamic interactivity with scenes, actors and objects. iClone's versatile engine enables on-the-fly video compositing with real-life actors combined with virtual sets, video footage and world of high dynamic range visuals. Users can employ a vast library of pre-made motions, characters, props and special effects found in iClone's built-in library or in Reallusion's online marketplace which is the largest online catalog of real-time ready assets. iClone5 empowers students, professionals and independent filmmakers worldwide into the real-time art of 3D animation, digital storytelling and digital content creation. Explore the speed and time-saving productivity of visual computing with iClone's real-time 3D innovation.

What's new in this version: Version 5.21 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

Read more: download.com