Facebook For Kids – Good or Bad?
Do you use Facebook? While it is officially banned for under 13 years, a survey last year showed that almost half of Britain’s pre-teens have a Facebook account. Joanna Bradey tells us what she likes about Facebook.
Facebook: What’s it all about?
Facebook is a website created in 2004 by a US college student Mark Zuckerberg. It started off as a way of college students to network with each other, which quickly spread throughout the world, and now has millions of members. Facebook works by people registering and creating a profile for themselves, and then becoming ‘friends’ with other people. A user can update their status to let their friends know what they’re up to, upload photos to share, send private messages to each other, and play games. You need to be at least 13 years old to be a member, and Facebook is banned in some countries altogether, like Syria and Iran.
The thing that I like about Facebook is that it is a quick and easy way to keep in touch with all those people I have met in real-life but don’t have time to write to or call them, like old workmates or family that have moved away. I can upload a photo and anyone I am friends with can see it, and comment on it. In the days before Facebook, if I wanted to share a photo with everyone, I would have to print out lots of copies and send them in the post, which is very expensive and time-consuming. Since I joined Facebook, I am better at communicating with people and I enjoy seeing what all my friends and family are doing. I think that I know them better and it’s easy to keep-in-touch.
Rock, Paper, Scissors… Robot???
The game rock-paper-scissors is well known around the world. We’ve all used it as a choosing method, or simply as a game! The easiest version is played between two people. Both players choose one of the three shapes for one of their hands, and reveal their choice at the same time, hoping their choice beats their opponent.
It’s nearly impossible to gain an advantage over your opponent, unless you wait long enough to identify their choice before you make yours, but the chances are that they will realise your cunning plan and call you a cheater!
This game is not simply a choosing game. There are mathematicians dedicated to constructing algorithms for the best strategy to win, and scientists devoted to creating unbeatable robots! In fact, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a rock paper scissors robot that wins at rock-paper-scissors 100% of the time.
What is The Point in Learning Maths?
Have you ever sat in a Maths class wondering when you will ever need to do long division without a calculator? Or silently cursed your Geography teacher while learning about the formation of oxbow lakes? And History? That’s all in the past and irrelevant, isn’t it?
In this series of articles, we will look at some of the subjects we learn at school, and try and answer the question: What’s the point in learning maths?
Let’s start with Maths. It is a fact of life that while some people are good at Maths, for others it is a daily trial. It is, however, along with English and the sciences the subject considered to be the most important. Why? Of course, we all know that it is important to be able to count, and do simple sums, but when, in real life, do we actually use it?
Do Earwigs Really Live in Our Ears?
There has long been a myth that earwigs use human ears either to lay their eggs or to live in and feed off our ear wax, or other similar things. It sounds pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? After all, who would actually like the idea of an insect living inside their ear? But do earwigs really live in our ears?
Fortunately for us, it is not true. Despite their name, earwigs don’t actually live in our ears and neither do they use them to lay eggs. They much prefer their normal habitat of nests under rocks and logs or in flowerbeds. So where does the earwig get its name?
Old English Origins
Yet the name itself suggests that this has been a myth for a long time, so let’s examine the name. It can easily be split into two parts: ear and wig. These two parts both come from Old English; which is what we call the language as it was spoken when it was first written down, right up to the tenth century. So this would include the period of Kind Alfred the Great; he of the burning cakes.
In Old English, the words were eare and wicga. The first part, which you can recognise quite easily, meant ‘ear’. But the second part, wicga, meant ‘insect, beetle, worm’. The interesting thing is that it came from a root that did not have anything to do with insects at all, but instead meant ‘wiggle’.
Think about how even today we say ‘wiggly worm’; or think about how you would describe the movement of a caterpillar. You can see how this word came to be associated with insects. So if we put the two parts of our word together again, we have ‘ear-insect’. It seems that our very early linguistic forebears did indeed believe that earwigs lived in the ear.
Blame it on the Romans
But where did this myth that they dwell in our ears come from? It is not unique to English; in German it is known as Ohrwurm, or ‘earworm’, and it is the same in Welsh with pryf clustiog; while in French it is perce-oreille, or ‘ear-piercer’.
To find the origins of the myth, we have to go back in time all the way to the days of the Romans. In around 77 CE, Roman naval commander and writer Pliny the Elder published his work Historia Naturalis, or Natural History.
In it he writes about a great deal of the natural world, including insects. It is here that the myth may have begun, as he writes about earwigs getting into the ear. Perhaps he saw one that had happened to go into the ear by chance, much as a fly or a spider might, and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The Pincer Insect
Other languages have taken the name from the apearance of the insect; in Italian it is known as forbicina, and in Spanish it is tijereta, while Greek has ψαλίδα [psalida] All three of these translate as ‘little scissors’, deriving from the pincers that the earwig uses to catch its prey.