Most common names in the UK

Meet Oliver, Jack, Harry, Alfie and Charlie, the five most common names in England and Wales according to the UK Office for National Statistics. The top names for girls are Olivia, Sophie, Emily, Lily and Amelia.

What really surprised me was the fact that Paul had fallen out of the top 100 along with Christopher, Simon, Jonathan and Steven. That really was a little disappointing and really unexpected for me personally.

Another interesting feature were the number of alternative spellings. #1 was Oliver while Ollie came in #63. Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohammad came in #17, #31 and #67 while Finley and Finlay were #35 and #68 respectively. I was also quite surprised to find Jayden, Harley, Kian, Reuben, Luca and Jude in the top 100. They must be popular names, but not really what I had expected. On the girls side, Ava, Poppy, Faith, Lexie, Niamh, Aimee and Tilly all managed the top 100.

Full list of top 100 names in England and Wales:

Simón Bolívar UWC [UPDATE]

Following on from my previous post, there has been a massive number of updates and new information appearing. I would suggest you visit the ‘Simon Bolivar UWC Possible Closure Appeal’ facebook group to get all the details. I will however repost the official UWC letter regarding the situation and the on-going Twitter campaign.

Twitter Campaign
Aims to raise the issue with Chavez which the board believes is the most effective way to address the situation.

Send your tweet on Thursday 29 or Friday 30 September ideally at 10:00 Venezuelan time (10.30 EST, 16:30pm CET, 22:30 Hong Kong) or any other time on Thursday or Friday.

Send the following tweet:

@ChavezCandanga AYÚDENOS, instituto #SBUWC internacional de agricultura Barinas está en peligro #SOSFUNDACEA

More details below from http://www.uwc.org/our_colleges/simn_bolvar_uwc_of_agriculture/background.aspx

Simón Bolívar UWC

Summary: Land belonging to Simón Bolívar UWC has been taken over by external groups. SB UWC has not yet started academic classes and only a skeletal number of students and staff are on campus. There has been competing claims over whether this is an issue at all. A twitter campaign will be run under #UWCSB to involve Hugo Chavez (@chavezcandanga). It seems that details of this twitter campaign will be released later once UWC SB and UWC IO have figured out the details.

Details from various sources reposted below including:

• Official UWC International office statement
• Unofficial summary of situation from Juan Carlos Soriano
• Unofficial Letter from the President of FUNDACEA
• Cautionary Response questioning the issue

Shenzhen University China Debate Academy [MOTION]

Motions used at the Shenzhen University China Debate Academy in Autumn 2011. For more details visit http://debateclub.cn/SZU-CDA2011Autumn-results

Demonstration Debate: THW give prisoners the right to vote in general elections

Practice Debates:
THW remove all restrictions on internal migration
THW allow minors to have sex-change operations without parental consent
THW allow the use of torture
THW require doctors to disclose the truth of the condition of patients who are terminally ill to the patient
THW pay university graduates in China not to move to megacities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou
THBT China should establish military bases abroad
THBT the Chinese government should require corporations to provide compensation to families of employees who commit suicide

Tournament:
R1: THW ban “shanzhai” products
R2: THW hold the passengers of cars driven by drunk drivers criminally liable
R3: THBT China should not buy European Bonds until EU lifts arms embargo on China
R4: THW ban websites that glorifies anorexia and bulimia
R5: THBT a woman who wears high heels is no more free than a woman who wears burqa
QF: THBT intellectual property from projects funded by public funding should be put in the public domain
SF: THW make prenuptial agreements a pre-requisite for marriage
GF: THBT the West should stop waging War on Terrorism

WSDC 2012 – Team Indonesia Coach

Dear Indonesia,

WSDC 2012 is approaching and this time it will be ridiculously exotic and thrilling as we are heading to South Africa !!
On behalf of DIKNAS, we are now seeking two excellent individuals to fill in the Indonesia Team Coach and Co-Coach position. The recruitment details are as follows:

Obama and the American Jobs Act

I’m a big fan of Obama’s latest attempt to gain the higher ground – The American Jobs Act. It is certainly a far cry from the caving and conceding he did on a large scale in previous negotiations with Republicans.

Let’s face it. Republicans just aren’t going to agree with Obama. It’s commendable that he has tried, offered compromise, even considered major entitlement changes, (although many of us consider it one to many tries) to get Republicans to agree to a compromise. He’s be rebuffed time and time again.

Thankfully, he’s finally grown a backbone and had the balls to challenge the Republicans. Polls show that a majority of voters agree with many of his proposals. So he’s got the public vote. Of course, that doesn’t make things sail through a Republican controlled House, but that should give him a good enough reason to stand his ground.

Touching entitlements might be opposed, but Republicans are going to be pushing for it anyways so they can just look bad. Raising taxes on high-income individuals is a political no-brainer and economically smart. Just as Boehner was trying to bin the idea of any tax increases, Obama dared to threaten to “veto any bill that takes one dime from the Medicare benefits seniors rely on without asking the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share.” Go Obama!

The American Jobs Act largely contains good ideas. Now we just need Obama to stand behind his own proposals and not to capitulate the next time Republicans show-up.

Insane Downhill Bike Race

This video is just insane. The best bit is that it’s just one video from the Valparaiso Cerro Abajo Race in Valparaiso, Chile. The rider must brave jumps, stray dogs, and flights of stairs along the steep downhill path. The first person perspective provided by the excellent helmet cam lets us take in every glorious and frightening detail.

Respects to the competitors. This is just insane. See for yourself.

UWC AC Sports Week 2011

So Sports Week at AC is where all the houses send teams to compete in different sporting events including Tug-of-war, Badminton, Basketball, Rugby, Football, Sprints etc. There’s at least one Sports Week held every year and although this year it lasted much longer than a week, it nevertheless still went ahead.

Morgannwg has had a history of success at Sports Weeks having own the last 4 sport weeks for the last 3 years consecutively (there were two sport weeks last year). Once again, Morgannwg won in what is now our 4th consecutive Sports Week victory. We had 27 points, with Pentti Kouri house in 2nd at 18.

Here’s an incomplete picture of Morgannwg at one of the events:

Credits to http://www.atlanticcollege.org/news-1/2011/09/16/uwc-atlantic-college-sports-week-results/

Nottingham Schools Debating Competition 2012

Nottingham Schools Debating Compeition 2012 will be on the 25th February 2012.

Hi,
I’m emailing to invite you to the University of Nottingham Debating Union’s 3rd annual Schools’ Debating Competition. The competition is quickly becoming one of the biggest competitions in the UK, aiming to provide both a platform for new teams to learn, and fierce competition for stronger, more experienced teams.

We can promise:

• One of the strongest core judging teams in the UK, comprising committee members and former alumni of the Debating Union, all with huge amounts of experience at top tier debating and able to provide comprehensive feedback to help teams improve
• Motions accessible to all abilities, yet with comprehensive and wide-ranging areas of argumentation for teams to develop
• A competition set in the most beautiful campus in England, providing an opportunity for students to see this prestigious university
• Strong co-operation with schools both locally and nationally. We’d welcome your suggestions to make the competition as accessible and enjoyable as possible
• 4-5 rounds of Debating, with a break to the Grand Final
• Prizes for the winning team, along with the best speaker and the best “Novice” team (a team who is doing their first competition)
• I am delighted to welcome Hasan Dindjer as our Chief Adjudicator this year.

About the Chief Adjudicator
This year, I’m delighted to be able to announce that Hasan Dindjer has agreed to be our Chief Adjudicator. Hasan is a 2nd year Jurisprudence student at New College, Oxford University, and a former member of the England World Schools’ Team. At Schools’ level, he most notably won the International Mace and was a World Schools’ Debating Championship Finalist. In his first year of University debating, he won the UCL President’s Cup, was a semi-finalist at the Universities’ Mace, and reached the Octo-finals of the World Universities’ Debating Championships!

About the Competition
The competition is in the British Parliamentary Debating format, with the motion and your position announced 15 minutes before each debate begins. If you’re unfamiliar with the format, we have a number of useful powerpoints prepared by our Training Co-ordinator which we’d be happy to share.

Our aim is to provide a competition that will encourage a lot of schools to attend, whether you’re a “battle-hardened” institution with a wealth of experience or a school that is relatively new to competitive debating. In this spirit, we’ve decided to set the registration fee as low as possible. Therefore, we’ll be charging £30 for your first team, and £25 per team thereafter. However, if you pay in advance, we’ll reduce your fee by a further £5 per team. A fee waiver system is also in place, so if a financial problem is making it hard for you to commit to bring teams to our competition, please get in touch and we’ll help in any way we can.

Registration is now open, and can be found here.

We’re planning to run 4 or 5 rounds of debating plus a final at the end. However, we’d value feedback and suggestions on the number of rounds you’d prefer the day ran. A provisional schedule giving an idea of the timings were we to run four rounds of debating can be found on our website at http://nottinghamdu.wordpress.com/nottingham-schools-2012/. One round of debating will feature a prepared motion, which will be sent to you closer to the time. We’d also encourage parents and coaches to attend, every debate is open to spectators; however, we’d ask you to let the students prepare the pre-announced motion themselves so they can get the maximum benefit from the day.

More information about the competition, about how the day will run and about our society can be found on our website. If you have any further queries, questions, suggestions or feedback, please get in touch with us at this email address. Similarly, if we can help with your preparation or any other aspect of British Parliamentary Debating just drop us an email.

Looking forward to seeing you in February.
Thanks

Nathan Chalk
Convenor NSDC 2012
Schools Co-ordinator

WSDC 2011 – Team India Report

An article by S. Pranav Kumar, captain of Team India on WSDC 2011 from http://psbbschools.ac.in/dundee.html

Debating Our Way To Dunde

Team India at the World Schools Debating Championship

I’d love to tell you what my first impressions of the city of Dundee were, but the regrettable truth was that I was in a sound sleep throughout what seemed a never-ending trip from Glasgow. But as I stumbled groggily from the bus and trudged to my room, the crisp air of Dundee woke me up, and with a burst of excitement I realized it was all true: I was really the Captain of the Indian debating team and we were going to participate in the World Schools Debating Championships in Dundee, Scotland from the 16th of August to the 26th.

The team, comprising of five members from four different Chennai schools (Siddarth and Sanchith from Bala Vidya Mandir, Sehr Raheja from Arsha Vidya Mandir, Dhruva Bhat from P.S. Senior and me, from PSBB KKN) devoted ourselves to the debating, putting in long hours of preparation before the debates. Under the tutelage of Mr. Andrew Fitch, an experienced Australian-English ex-debater, we came out victorious in 5 out of our 8 preliminary rounds (defeating Poland, Romania, Sri Lanka, Kuwait and Indonesia; but losing to England, South Korea and the UAE). At the end of the tournament (which was ultimately won by Singapore) we clinched the 20th place among 48 nations.

Aside from the debating, which was a brilliant experience by itself, we were also given ample opportunity to soak in the Scottish Culture. We were taken to the famed Edinburgh Museum, and to the supposedly haunted Glamis Castle (though much to my regret, I never saw a ghost) and were given an opportunity to learn Ceilidh, a traditional Scottish dance. This last one was particularly funny, as more than a hundred people from fifty nations danced awkwardly with each other, trying to imitate the instructor’s movements.

It was a fantastic experience where you not only debated and learnt from it, but also made friends with people of different nationalities and understood their culture.