Lodestone

Also Bangkok rinks at Esplanade Mall (near Thailand Cultural Center MRT station) and Imperial World Lat Prao (Big C) mall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mGoGYHA4-0

Hub of liver flukes.

A Thai cancer doctor told me that liver cancer is one of the three most common cancers she treats (the other two being breast and cervical) and that most was traced to the liver fluke parasites in pla ra somtam. Here's a somewhat recent NY Times story on it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/world/asia/26iht-thailand.html

I had no idea going through a solid object (the roof) can be ignored when calculating a bullet's acceleration and final velocity. The things you learn reading ThaiVisa...

police set up a checkpoint in tambon Ban Chan following a tip-off

the driver fled.

And then likely money changed hands for another successful drug "seizure."

...Lt Gen Preecha Chan-o-cha, a younger brother of Prime Minister Gen Prayut,with more than Bt79 million.

So Prayuth's younger brother, only a three star general, has assets of more that US$2.4 million. I wonder how much Prayuth himself has, and for that matter how an army general happens to be a multi-millionaire?

today shaking down tourists a few hundred baht for littering. Swept away by the coup?

The greatest cover band in rock n roll history.

It was all about personal and national pride, to show that one guy alone with the expertise and experience was smart enough to fool the entire world and create the perfect crime that could never be solved.

Is there some reason the French girl wasn't stripped naked for the photograph?

USA number 5? I through you Brits hate us Americans and are "we are number 1" attitude.

Christ I don't hate you, you've given us Breaking Bad and now True Detective

14 straight hours of staring at DBs,

these are the things you think of.

You ever done that? Hmm?

You look in their eyes,

even in a picture.

Doesn't matter if they're dead or alive.

You can still read them,

and you know what you see?

They welcomed it,

mm-hmm, not at first,

but right there

in the last instant.

It's an unmistakable relief,

see, because they were afraid

and now they saw

for the very first time

how easy it was to just let go,

and they saw--

In that last nanosecond,

they saw what they were,

that you, yourself,

this whole big drama,

it was never anything

but a jerry-rig

of presumption and dumb will

and you could just let go

finally now that you didn't have

to hold on so tight...

to realize that

all your life--

you know, all your love,

all your hate,

all your memory, all your pain--

it was all the same thing.

It was all the same dream,

a dream that you had

inside a locked room,

a dream about being a person...

and like a lot of dreams...

there's a monster

at the end of it.

One of the most striking commentaries on the crisis in recent days was offered by Veerapong Ramangura, an economist who has served many governments, including the present one and those installed after military coups.

Mr. Veerapong, who rarely appears on television, lashed out at the protest movement during an hourlong interview, calling the leaders’ plans “nonsensical.” Without mentioning names, Mr. Veerapong said that there had been “an agreement to stage a coup d'état” and install a former general as leader, but that the plan had been scrapped because the head of the army had refused to go ahead with it.

“The protest leaders are now stuck,” he said. “They don’t know how to back out of this.”

The comments were especially notable because Mr. Veerapong has worked closely with the military and other establishment figures over the years, and because, while he has advised the current government, he has also been sharply critical of it, especially its management of the rice subsidy program.

Mr. Veerapong said he believed that some judges and members of state agencies were now hoping to remove the government and install their own government.

“It’s not doable because these organizations cannot tear up the Constitution,” he said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/world/asia/petition-to-nullify-thai-election-is-rejected-in-setback-for-opposition.html

Aristocrat caught between her class and Thai upheaval

Great article by the New York Times last week

Although as this does not follow The Nation and TV's storyline, you have to find it yourself

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/world/asia/thai-aristocrat-sides-with-the-poor.html

Went there today -- Thursday afternoon. Took the MRT to Lat Phrao, went out Exit 3, caught the just passing 122 bus, and got off just after Soi 81 in front of Big C. Entered and walked to right end where the elevators are and took one to the fifth floor. Then walked back to the far side to Immigration. There are two steps here for 90 day reporting. First you go to an open area with lettered counters and wait in line to have your form quickly perused, your visa expiration date noted, and be given a queue ticket stapled to your form. Then you go to the main area and, after your number is called, hand in your form and passport to a plainclothes immigration officer behind a window. The checking and return of your passport with the next reporting date slip is done while you're at the window.

According to my ratty six year old Bangkok bus map any of these buses ought to get you from Lat Phrao to Imperial World and back:

Non Air: 8, 27, 44, 92, 96, 122, 145

Air: 92, 502, 545

is there a Thai Mattel outlet store ?

or even an official Mattel store in one of the malls ?

if you have been there what do they have?

thanks for the info.....

Certainly Hot Wheels, Barbie (and likely other) Mattel products are widely sold in department stores and malls. However, my mia noi used to work at Mattel in Samut Prakan and according to her all Mattel toys made in Thailand (and stamped as such) are for export only and all Mattel toys sold in Thailand are imported (for example from Mattel factories in Malaysia). This is supposedly done to control/reduce the theft and sale of stolen goods.

Compare that with another agency... Like QS..

http://www.iu.qs.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/

40% based upon academic reputation

10% based upon Employer Reputation

20% based upon faculty to student ratio

20% based upon citations per faculty

5% based upon proportion of international students

5% based upon proportion of international instructors

In an article titled The Globalisation of College and University Rankings and appearing in the January/February 2012 issue of Change magazine, Philip Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College and also a member of the THE editorial board, said: “The QS World University Rankings are the most problematical. From the beginning, the QS has relied on reputational indicators for half of its analysis … it probably accounts for the significant variability in the QS rankings over the years. In addition, QS queries employers, introducing even more variability and unreliability into the mix. Whether the QS rankings should be taken seriously by the higher education community is questionable."

The QS World University Rankings have been criticised by many for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40 percent of the overall score. Some people have expressed concern about the manner in which the peer review has been carried out. In a report, Peter Wills from the University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings:

But we note also that this survey establishes its rankings by appealing to university staff, even offering financial enticements to participate (see Appendix II). Staff are likely to feel it is in their greatest interest to rank their own institution more highly than others. This means the results of the survey and any apparent change in ranking are highly questionable, and that a high ranking has no real intrinsic value in any case. We are vehemently opposed to the evaluation of the University according to the outcome of such PR competitions.

QS points out that no survey participant, academic or employer, has been offered a financial incentive to respondents. And academics cannot vote for their own institution.

THES-QS introduced several changes in methodology in 2007 which were aimed at addressing these criticisms, the ranking has continued to attract criticisms. In an article in the peer-reviewed BMC Medicine authored by several scientists from the US and Greece, it was pointed out:

If properly performed, most scientists would consider peer review to have very good construct validity; many may even consider it the gold standard for appraising excellence. However, even peers need some standardized input data to peer review. The Times simply asks each expert to list the 30 universities they regard as top institutions of their area without offering input data on any performance indicators. Research products may occasionally be more visible to outsiders, but it is unlikely that any expert possesses a global view of the inner workings of teaching at institutions worldwide. Moreover, the expert selection process of The Times is entirely unclear. The survey response rate among the selected experts was only <1% in 2006 (1,600 of 190,000 contacted). In the absence of any guarantee for protection from selection biases, measurement validity can be very problematic.

Alex Usher, vice president of Higher Education Strategy Associates in Canada, commented:

Most people in the rankings business think that the main problem with The Times is the opaque way it constructs its sample for its reputational rankings - a not-unimportant question given that reputation makes up 50% of the sample. Moreover, this year's switch from using raw reputation scores to using normalized Z-scores has really shaken things up at the top-end of the rankings by reducing the advantage held by really top universities - University of British Columbia (UBC) for instance, is now functionally equivalent to Harvard in the Peer Review score, which, no disrespect to UBC, is ludicrous. I'll be honest and say that at the moment the THES Rankings are an inferior product to the Shanghai Jiao Tong’s Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Academicians have also been critical of the use of the citation database, arguing that it undervalues institutions which excel in the social sciences. Ian Diamond, former chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council and now vice-chancellor of the University of Aberdeen and a member of the THE editorial board, wrote to Times Higher Education in 2007, saying:

The use of a citation database must have an impact because such databases do not have as wide a cover of the social sciences (or arts and humanities) as the natural sciences. Hence the low position of the London School of Economics, caused primarily by its citations score, is a result not of the output of an outstanding institution but the database and the fact that the LSE does not have the counterweight of a large natural science base.

The most recent criticism of the old system came from Fred L. Bookstein, Horst Seidler, Martin Fieder and Georg Winckler in the journal Scientomentrics for the unreliability of QS's methods:

Several individual indicators from the Times Higher Education Survey (THES) data base the overall score, the reported staff-to-student ratio, and the peer ratings—demonstrate unacceptably high fluctuation from year to year. The inappropriateness of the summary tabulations for assessing the majority of the “top 200” universities would be apparent purely for reason of this obvious statistical instability regardless of other grounds of criticism. There are far too many anomalies in the change scores of the various indices for them to be of use in the course of university management.

Subject rankings reliability

The QS subject rankings have been dismissed as unreliable by some critics, including most notably Brian Leiter, who points out that programmes which are known to be high quality, and which rank highly in the Blackwell rankings (e.g., the University of Pittsburgh) fare poorly in the QS ranking for reasons that are not at all clear.

In other areas, QS has highly ranked programmes which do not exist, as in Geography, in which 5 of the top 10 did not actually have graduate programmes in geography. In Linguistics, the QS rankings are entirely out of step with the most recent NRC rankings; NRC ranks the doctoral programmes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Maryland at College Park among the very best in the U.S.A. (tied for #3 in S-Rank), while QS ranks them 29th and 49th in the world, respectively.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QS_World_University_Rankings#General_criticisms

I could find no indication of origin except the name.... no institution or whatever.

The ranking has been produced for the past 10 years by the Center for World-Class Universities:

http://gse.sjtu.edu.cn/EN/centers.htm

which is a part of

Shanghai Jiao Tong University:

http://en.sjtu.edu.cn/about-sjtu/overview

hence the informal name Shanghai Rankings.

These World Universities Rankings just came out in the last few days. I didn't see a Thai university in the top 500. The top Asian one was the University of Tokyo (21).

Top 20:

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 University of California, Berkeley
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5 University of Cambridge
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 Columbia University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford
11 Yale University
12 University of California, Los Angeles
13 Cornell University
14 University of California, San Diego
15 University of Pennsylvania
16 University of Washington
17 The Johns Hopkins University
18 University of California, San Francisco
19 University of Wisconsin - Madison
20 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Full list: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2013.html

The existing high-so wealthy elitist clique does NOT want such an intelligent free-thinking work force to come into existence,

Because the existence of such a group might endanger the survival of their wealthy high so elite, and endanger there control of Thai society,

Don't look for help from the politicians in any of the current political parties, they area all of one wealthy billionaire or another.

(That includes one ex Prime minister billionaire currently living in the middle east.)

That's why that elitist clique goes out of it's way to work hard to KEEP the Thai education system, public education, a system designed to produce healthy but brainless drones who do NOT think or innovate, but simply learn to copy the "correct" answers and regurgitate them on command.

And no matter what politico-babble nonsense the authorities say, they will not and do not wish to produce Thai workers who think for themselves or make independent decisions.

No, that would be to dangerous for the wealthy elitist clique at the top who actually controls Thailand.

I've been hearing some variation of this for years and years on ThaiVisa. Could you please give a source showing that such attitudes are prevalent among the "high-so wealthy elitist clique." Thanks!

"He has urged the public to be cautious while shopping for plastic-ware and to check all details that can convince them of the safety for use".

This article would have been useful if the reader was told how to check the details.

How to check:

Avoid plastic containers with recycling codes #3 #6 #7

#3 or "v" (PVC or vinyl) Polyvinyle Cloride

#6 or"PS" (Polystyrene)

#7 or "other" (Polycarbonate) Bisphenol A (BPA)

Do not use plastic or plastic wrap in the microwave (food and beverages)

Geez, and I've been microwaving with M Wrap for years.