Buckingham Palace is one of the most important landmarks of London, and it attracts thousands of people all over the world every year. There is a famous sentence to describe the importance and beauty of Buckingham Palace. “The journey to the UK is not complete without a visit to Buckingham Palace.”

George III bought Buckingham House for his wife Queen Charlotte to use as a comfortable family home in 1761. Then at the end of 1826, the famous architect, John Nash, transformed the house into a palace. The main shape of Buckingham Palace today is based on his design. But at that time, the Kings never moved into the palace until Queen Victoria in July 1837, just three weeks after her accession. From then on Buckingham Palace has served as the official London residence of Britain’s sovereigns. Now in the political function, it’s just like the White House of America.

Buckingham Palace is a huge 3 – floor building. It has 775 rooms, including 19 State rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms and 92 offices. And the famous senses of Buckingham Palace are the Grand Hall, the Throne Room, the Ballroom, the East Gallery, the West Gallery, the State Dining Room and so on. In measurements, the building is 108 metres long across the front, 120 metres deep and 24 metres high. For the people who visit it, Buckingham Palace is sumptuous, spectacular, elegant and ornate at the first eye.

The palace is also the best choice to hold great Royal ceremonies, State Visits and Investitures, all of which are organised by the Royal Household. Buckingham Palace is full of priceless works of art that form part of the Royal Collection. It is one of the major art collections in the world today. Famous paintings, antiques, as well as the Queen’s dresses and jewellery, all of them are shining. Visitors are always shocked by the Royal Collection. But Buckingham Palace is not a public museum.

Buckingham Palace is only regularly been open to the public in the summer, during August and September. And that’s when the Queen is away from London. Wherever the Queen is, her own flag, her personal royal standard will be flying, so if the Queen’s flag comes down and the Union flag, the national flag is in place, that means the Queen is not in the palace.

Buckingham Palace is so huge and beautiful that I can’t say more details about it. If you are lucky enough to go to London in the future, don’t forget to have a visit to Buckingham Palace. You will enjoy it.

Weather in Dalian’s improving somewhat, but it still snowed the other day, so I don’t really know what’s going on with it being so changeable. On a nice day recently I went out and took some photos in Lushun. They’re to be found on my flickr account and on my facebook page.

I’ve been using Twitter recently and it has become a useful connection and communication tool. As a result of spending some time on it, I’ve so far developed relationships with 2 people.

One is coincidentally here in Dalian, and has become someone that I occasionally drink with. He is the adminsitrator of a local Dalian website, and is a nice, intelligent bloke who speaks good Mandarin.

The other connection is a someone I was connected to via the philosophy school that I attended in my spare time when I was at university in London. He’s living in London, has a Chinese wife, works in the IT industry and is also learning Mandarin.

Flickr to me trumps Zooomr and Picasaweb for a few reasons. The community is the largest and most active of the three, this means that it attracts the most searching and commenting. The large community attracts more developers and thusly more end user tools and integration with other platforms.

The interface is more polished than Zooomr, and although not as good as Picasaweb it does provide access/view/search statistics. Yahoo picture search links to a lot of flickr pictures which drives traffic to my photos, and Google image search is very inclusive.

Flickr being owned by yahoo, you can be fairly confident that it’s going to be reliable and not going to go out of business any time soon. Lastly for a small yearly fee, you can store as many gigabytes of photos without loss of fidelity on Flickr, and although Zooomr provides this for free, I don’t trust that it will exist into the future in the same way that Flickr will.

I’ve finally completed my Linkedin profile by getting a further 2 recommendations. One from Dr. Papavasiliou and one from Dr. Gelenbe which I’m hoping will give it some legitimacy as they’re both very qualified and respected lectureres/professors in the EEE dept at IC.

I’m still waiting for a recommendation from where I used to work, but they’re busy so it’s forgiveable, so I should write them another email asking again. I managed to persuade a couple of my bosses at university here in China to sign up and give me a recommendation, which was very nice of them.

I have also renewed my IEEE membership email address so that I could enter the IEEE group on Linkedin.

“An Insight Into Britain”, the course that I’m teaching this term, has so far been a bit of a failure from my point as a teacher. I can see that my lessons have been rather dull, too difficult, and I haven’t managed to get the timing right for talking vs activities. It takes along time for me to prepare, as I’m just not that good at it. Feeling pressured to do better, and I know there will be some negative feedback waiting for me at the end of the semester.

One of the main issues is that for Chinese students, they are very strong at reading comprehension and some technical aspects of English, but challenge them in a new way and they don’t like it. They’ve become very practiced at American accents, and usually get graded listening exercises based on their level. When they’re presented with ungraded, original British radio it’s a bit difficult, and if I presented them with something more fun and visual by way of British TV, I believe college wouldn’t be so approving. I guess it would depend on how I presented it.

My gym membership expired on Monday, so I now need to consider how I will continue being slim and not getting fat again. As apparently once you’ve been fat, it beomes much easier for your body to get fatter again. This is down to the fact that the usual process is that the exsisting fat cells in your body get bigger and smaller depending on circumstances, but the number doesn’t change unless the fat cells get so big that it becomes easier to make new ones. I won’t be continuing with Bally Fitness in ZhongShan Square because they’re too expensive. The search begins.

• Pair Debate 1 Student Agrees, 1 Student Opposes
• 10 minutes before your test your topic will be drawn from the list.
• Prepare your 2 minute speech and points for use in the discussion and conclusion.

Second Year Grading Standards

1. A: (17-20): can fluently talk about the chosen topics without much diction and grammar mistakes. pronunciation is natural and easy to understand.
2. B: (12-16): can basically fluently talk about the chosen topics with some diction and grammar mistakes but won’t affect the communication. pronunciation is generally easy to understand.
3. C: (6-11): can talk about the chosen topics with the help of partners or teachers with some diction and grammar mistakes. only a few pronunciation is hard to understand.
4. D: (0-5): cannot talk about the chosen topics even with the help of the teacher or partner. can only speak some broken words.

Topics and Suggestions

1. End of year examinations for students should be abolished.
   • Agree
     1. Causes too much pressure and stress
     2. Pressure and stress can cause you to under-perform
     3. Not comprehensive test of ability
     4. Exams test memory more than analysis
     5. Continuous assessment is a much more genuine assessment
     6. Content not necessarily practical
   • Oppose
     1. Efficient and fair grading of a large number of students
     2. Not dependent on teacher’s ability to test, because of exam moderation.
     3. Continuous assessment allows outside assistance which gives a false score.
     4. Students need experience of pressure, so they can cope in the real world.
     5. Encourages students to work hard.
2. It is better for society that women stay at home and bring up children rather than going out to work.
   • Agree
     1. Women’s nature to look after children and husband
     2. Husband’s nature to provide.
     3. Much childcare is poor quality, many children, few adults.
     4. Traditionally the case, people would be different if brought up by father
     5. Men and women are physically, mentally and emotionally different.
   • Oppose
     1. Women should have freedom to choose
     2. Woman’s ability is not necessarily good, maybe the husband is better.
     3. Sometimes the family needs money, so the woman has to work.
     4. Woman could contribute more to society by working.
3. Public figures should learn to live with their loss of privacy.
   • Agree
     1. Have the right to know about the people who effect our lives (politicians).
     2. If you want to be a public figure, you must know that your privacy will be invaded.
     3. Politicians and businessmen often make it public that they are “family men” and have good morals. How would we know it’s true?
     4. Where can we draw the line between public and private? Its too hard
   • Oppose
     1. Privacy is a right.
     2. Very few people have perfect lives.
     3. Whatever your character, it may not relate to how well you can do your job.
     4. Some people have not chosen to make their private life public.
4. College students should not consider love until they have a full-time job.
   • Agree
     1. Passions in young people can be hard to control, leading to unexpected births.
     2. Students should only focus on study, make the best of the opportunity that school and university offer.
     3. Students do not yet have jobs, so cannot yet support a family. The ability to support a family should come first.
     4. Students are too young to make a realistic decision.
     5. Break ups, and the bad emotions will effect your study.
     6. Relationships take time and are a distraction.
   • Oppose
     1. University is a good place to find partners who would suit you.
     2. Students have more time at university than at work to discover whether a relationship is good or not.
     3. A relationship at university can benefit you by the support and confidence your partner gives you.
     4. Both young, and changing, you can grow together, make your marriage stronger.
     5. Self-control is down to the individual and couple.
5. College students should be allowed to live off-campus.
   • Agree
     1. Experience more independent life.
     2. More space than dormitory.
     3. More privacy, single rooms.
     4. Better living facilities.
   • Oppose
     1. Not as safe.
     2. More expensive.
     3. Less focused on study.
     4. Not as close as dormitory.
     5. Parent’s wouldn’t be happy.

Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are hardly new subjects on the human agenda. Though the profession of medicine has long condemned such practices – all the way back to Hippocrates – and even though opposition to them has been ratified time and again in different eras and diverse societies, they have persistently lurked behind the scenes. Physicians have probably always, to some slight degree, practised both of them – at least there have always been rumours to that effect – and, from time to time, public debate has broken out. In Great Britain, one can find efforts to change the law or medical practise going back half a century, and in the United States legislation was pursued in various states as long as 50 years ago to change the laws that forbid euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Despite those efforts, and despite a long-standing minority of physicians and lay people interested to see a legal change, nothing much has happened as a result of the earlier skirmishes. The laws remained unchanged and the medical profession continued to condemn such practices.

This time the agitation is different. Public opinion polls in the United States and Great Britain indicated a growing willingness on the part of both physicians and lay people to see a change in the law. Holland has already made euthanasia legally acceptable, and the state of Oregon, on the basis of a voter initiative referendum, has now legalized physician-assisted suicide (though no euthanasia). A voluntary euthanasia bill was passed in Northern Territory, Australia. No longer are the agitators a small minority, the usual reformist suspects, but a larger, more influential group of academics, physicians, legislators, judges, and well placed and well-organised lay people.

The report of a presidential commission sets the stage for an American debate on human cloning. Source – Time Magazine via CNN or the Time Magazine Website. However I did type this into my blog from my Chinese English Text book.

Call it the Dolly Dilemma. The surprise announcement in February that a sheep had been cloned from a mammary cell of an adult ewe immediately raised the question of whether the same technique could be used to clone people. While the possibility of cloning opens up a new and exciting line of scientific study, it also seems to violate ancient taboos. To help sort out the issues – and to get the jump on a conservative Congress – President Clinton took two swift steps: he called for a moratorium on the use of U.S. government funds for human-cloning research, and he asked his National Bioethics Advisory Commission to let him know within 90 days whether the new technology should be even more tightly controlled.

Late last week, having already missed one deadline, the Commission finally issued its report. As expected, it recommended that the cloning of a human being, no matter who pays for it or for what reason it is done, should be made a criminal offence in the U.S. The White House is expected to quickly propose legislation that will codify that recommendation and gice it the force of law.

That was the easy part. Nobody, not even the biotech industry expects Washington to give the green light to human xerography. What is much more difficult – and what preoccupied the committee in six marathon sessions and countless e-mail messages – is where to draw the line on cloning research.

The fact is that the cloning of that Ewe was, at heart, a triumph of human embryology. Before Dolly, scientists believed that DNA of a mature mammalian cell, although it contained all the genetic information required to build an entire organism, locked the cell into being what it already was – skin or bones or soft tissue. The discovery that the DNA of a differentiated cell could be coaxed into behaving like an embryo was a breakthrough of the first order. Scientists are eager to examine that process more closely, hoping they might discover by what mechanism individual genes are turned off and on. They might even tease out a few clews about the origins of cancer and hereditary diseases.

But in the U.S. today, research like this is a hot-button issue. The use of federal funds for research on human embryos is already prohibited, although that ban does not extend to work done in privately funded research labs. That’s why private in-vitro-fertilization clinics flourished in the 1980s with almost no federal regulation. What some commission members feared was that the same could happen with research on human cloning.

The research question proved so divisive, however, that the Commission ultimately decided to duck it. The final 107-page report, “Cloning Human Beings”, urged the president to keep in place the current moratorium on federally-funded human-embryo research while requesting (but not requiring) that the private sector honour it.

The Commission’s recommendations will disappoint many, including supporters of in-vitro fertilization. Several experts told the Committee that cloning might be the only chance for many infertile parents to have their own genetically related children. That argument did not persuade the commissioners, however. Their report concluded that “these cases are insufficiently compelling to justify proceeding wit the use of such techniques.”

But the Commission didn’t entirely shut the door. The members recognized that if further research made cloning safer and more familiar, society might one day change its mind. So they recommended that any legal ban be re-evaluated after three or five years. If Congress agrees, the cloning debate could continue well into the next century.