China considers banning teachers from sexual relationships with young students

China is considering following Western countries in banning teachers from dating young students, according to a circular released to solicit public opinions.

The draft of School Protection Order for Juveniles was issued by the Ministry of Education on Tuesday and, if passed into law, requires primary and middle schools to prohibit teachers from dating students or having sex with them. The current age of consent in China is 14 years of age.

Other predatory behaviours that “hurt students’ physical and mental health” listed in the document include molesting students by groping or intentionally touching particular parts of their body, flirting, teasing, or making sexually suggestive comments.

Teachers are also banned from displaying or circulating messages, books, magazines, films, videos, or pictures that contain pornographic information to students.

The order also contains specific clauses on sexual harassment, by asking schools to establish safe management of dormitories, camera surveillance, and mechanisms for preventing, reporting, and dealing with sexual harassment incidents.

Among other regulations being proposed is a ban on schools revealing students’ rankings in tests and from publicising previous graduates who were enrolled by prestigious higher-level schools.

Teachers found violating the rules would receive disciplinary punishment and prevented from joining any award competitions for a period of one to three years. If the schools’ principal is responsible for an incident or found to have failed in their duty of care, they could be removed from their job for up to five years, the document said.

The public can send feedback about the order before April 23. It’s unclear if the order will be passed or when it would be put into effect.

Xiong Bingqi, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said the latest order is to make clear to schools their duties as a way to support the country’s revised Law of the Protection of Juveniles that will be implemented in June.

A 2014 regulation governing teachers’ ethics has outlawed 10 specific activities, including sexual harassment or having an “inappropriate relationship” with students.

But regarding the definition of “inappropriate relationship”, different people have different ideas, Xiong told the South China Morning Post.

As a result of the absence of a clear definition of this term, it’s difficult for schools and the education department to deal with the case if the teacher involved is single, he said.

“In some cases, teachers accused of sexual harassment claimed this was an injustice by arguing the relationship had been consensual, Xiong said.

“Normally the teacher will be assigned to other schools, instead of being punished for an ethics error,” said Xiong.

“With the future implementation of the teacher-student dating ban, this kind of thorny issue will be treated smoothly since it’s not right for them to date in the first place,” he said.

Some people objected to the banning of teacher-student dating, arguing that dating is every person’s legal right.

“But they don’t understand that a teacher can use the power from his position to induce or force students to date with him or her. If a teacher is dating a student, he or she would often give privilege to the student. This is unfair for other students,” said Xiong. “So banning teacher-student dating is essentially to avoid interest exchanges.”

He urged the state authority to extend the ban to universities.

Maggie Yang, a Shenzhen mother of a 15-year-old girl, said she agreed with the teacher-student dating ban.

“I think dating is the business of adults. How can we tolerate that a teacher dates a minor student?” she asked. “This rule should have been made earlier.”

-South China Morning Post

WATCH: High tech mattress can detect cheating partners

Cheats between the sheets, beware—there’s a new detective in town.

Men and women have a new way of finding out if their partner is being unfaithful, as Spanish firm Durmet has come up with a high-tech mattress that can monitor “suspicious movement” in the bed.

The ‘Smarttress’, a normal looking-mattress, offers a one-of-a kind “Lover Detection System”  that uses 24 ultrasonic sensors to detect when it’s in motion and how many occupants are using it.

Citing reports from the Huffington Post, the slick invention generates a 3D map to show which areas of the mattress are receiving greater pressure and what movement is taking place.

It gets better, the deception-detecting device also measures frequency, intensity, time of use and speed—which then sends an alert via a smartphone app, informing the worried party that their bed is being used.

The 1-minute and 41-seconds promotional video shown , also gave a glimpse of the company’s hilarious tag-line “If your partner isn’t faithful, at least your mattress is.”

According to Durmet, the idea behind ‘Smarttress’ stems from studies showing that men and women in Spain are the most unfaithful bunch in Europe.

“We came up with an idea that could reassure men and women not only during the night, but also during the day when they leave their home to go to work,” said company spokesperson Jose Antonio Muíño.

“Smarttress isn’t the type of product you’d go shopping for at the weekend with your partner if you suspected them of cheating, so it will only be available on request,” he added.

The infidelity-exposing mattress comes in four different sizes and buyers can expect total confidentiality with every purchase.

Those who seek to catch their partner red handed, however, must be prepared to shell-out a hefty $1,350 (P62,565). Khristian Ibarrola, INQUIRER.net

source: technology.inquirer.net

Love at first click

After two years of unsuccessfully dating the conventional way, Hong Kong-based writer Wendy Tang finally decided to give dating apps a try.

“I used Lovestruck, OKCupid and Tinder. On OKCupid, there were always guys sending me weird messages. I paid for Lovestruck and went out on two dates, but there was no chemistry,” said Tang—now 30 and still single.

She found someone she liked on Tinder and they dated for three weeks. He was visiting Hong Kong at the time and had been trying to find new friends on Tinder. But the relationship did not work out.

Tang quit Tinder after about a year. “It’s quite boring,” she said. “I had to constantly swipe and look for possible matches and, even if we both liked each other, the conversation was always the same and meaningless, with a boring start and boring exchanges.”

Tinder is among the hottest dating apps nowadays, with an estimated 50 million active users worldwide.

Users get a limited number of matches sent to them every 12 hours and can swipe right to indicate they like the proposed match or left to reject. A private chatroom will be initiated if a mutual like happens.

In April, Tang followed a friend’s recommendation and started using Coffee Meets Bagel, which only delivers one “high quality” match—the “bagel”—each day. The app was founded in New York three years ago, and launched in Hong Kong last March after becoming hugely popular in the US.

Tang said she trusts the app more, as it refers to mutual friends on Facebook in proposing matches and constantly learns users’ preferences and alters the algorithm accordingly.

She went out on two dates recently with men she met through the app. “So far it’s not bad, but I have to wait and see,” she said.

Dawoon Kang, one of the three founders of Coffee Meets Bagel, feels the dating app market has become a frustrating place.

“Millennials are extremely busy, and no one wants to dedicate time to meeting some strangers—and if the date doesn’t work out, you feel like you’ve wasted a lot of time,” she said.

“Very often you spend a lot of time swiping on apps that never end up in fruition, which is an actual meet-up.”

In its three years, Coffee Meets Bagel claims to have facilitated over 25 million matches in the US, with more than 20,000 couples starting a relationship and 200 getting married or engaged. It also generated nearly 10,000 downloads in Hong Kong in three months.

Let’s do lunch

Another app with a similar “one match per day” approach, LunchClick, made its Hong Kong debut in June.

Its Singapore-based founder and a matchmaker, Violet Lim, set up matchmaking company Lunch Actually in 2004 in Singapore, and her company is now Asia’s premier dating agency.

Unlike Coffee Meets Bagel, there is no chat function on LunchClick. Instead, if both sides click to “like” each other, they will be interacting through a Q&A session, choosing from a question bank with more than 100 multiple-choice queries covering topics such as values, opinions, interests and aspirations.

The app has so far paired over 15,000 singles in Hong Kong, who have exchanged more than 32,000 Q&As, Lim said. “My experience in the matchmaking industry tells me singles don’t need chatting. They need to meet. So we designed an app that’s only for meeting. Chatting will never reduce the time before the final meet-up but only increase it,” she said.

Specially developed computer algorithms at the foundation of both apps help propose matches for users.

Studies by Coffee Meets Bagel in the US have found that if the two sides share mutual friends on Facebook, there is a 37 percent greater likelihood that they will end up meeting.

Its research also shows that Coffee Meets Bagel users based in Hong Kong have as many as 768 Faceook friends on average, compared to a global average of over 200. Other factors such as the member’s age, education level, religious and other preferences are also taken into account in Coffee Meets Bagel’s algorithm.

For LunchClick, it is mutual values that matter most. Lim said the matchmaking industry is never about just matching interests or ensuring business complementarity, or working on the principles of opposites attract—such as matching introverts with extroverts.

Instead, it is similar perspectives on issues such as family and money that lead to a happy and lasting relationship or marriage, she noted.

The computer algorithms are constantly modified and updated based on user feedback and reactions toward proposed matches.

This way, the apps are more likely to get a precise idea of individual preferences and pick matches based on the choices they actually make instead of what users may say they like.

However, can big data really help people find their significant other on a mobile platform? Denise Tang Tse-shang, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out that in the final analysis computers can never make decisions for people.

“Technology has enabled us to chat with strangers online without any emotional boundaries. But speaking of meet-ups, there should be no direct judgment on whether different apps are effective or not—as the users themselves will have to make the final decision while taking into account any possible risks,” she said.

That is probably why both apps have labeled themselves as “female-centric,” and they use multiple approaches to filter out fake accounts by verifying every new registration case by case.

Hong Kong’s lopsided gender ratio of 858 men to 1,000 women might have had an impact on the dating dynamics of the city, with Coffee Meets Bagel’s survey revealing 62 percent of women find dating in Hong Kong difficult, compared to only 45 percent of men.

It also found that in general users of both genders in Hong Kong will like one out of three matches they get.

LunchClick, on the other hand, spotted that while there are more women customers for Lunch Actually’s offline services, the app ended up showing a reversed gender split.

As technology progresses and more new ideas appear, Kang predicts an eventual transformation of the matchmaking industry.

“Several types of dating services are about to be eliminated, as there will be greater proliferation of quality matchmaking. One is the subscription model. There is no reason to pay 60 dollars a month for a service that doesn’t guarantee any results,” Kang forecast.

“Besides, although I still can see value in the traditional matchmaking services because they’re more discreet, eventually technology will replace them.” But traditional matchmakers are not intimidated by the high-tech competition.

“The human relationship between men and women is far more complicated and unpredictable than we think,” said Rachael Chan, founder of Rachael and Smith Matchmakers, a local agency.

“Those who claim to have no time to look for dates, and those who are truly buried in their work, which leads to their remaining single, won’t spend one hour on apps after they get off work.”

Either way, love is not found in a rush. Wendy Tang said she would rather spend more time on having a healthy work-life balance, which she considers the most effective way to meet new faces. To her, apps are no more than just another ordinary platform to find love.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Jennifer Lopez shares journey to self-acceptance

NEW YORK—Jennifer Lopez wants to share a life lesson with her fans: Learn to love yourself first. “I promise that if you tap into it, it’s going to make your life better,” she assures.

The actress, singer and producer sat down for an interview about “True Love,” her new book that was originally intended to be a piece of memorabilia about the 2012 Dance Again World Tour that she embarked on in the wake of her split from husband Marc Anthony. Then, it became much more.

“It became evident that my songs were so autobiographical—it isn’t just the story of my relationships, but the story of my career, as well.”

Lopez, 45, recently kicked off her heels, got comfy on a couch and opened up about her own journey to self-acceptance.

You say early in the book that this is not a tell-all.

I don’t feel that it’s my responsibility to share all the intimate details of my relationships. As an artist, I do feel that it’s my responsibility to bare my soul, use my experiences and share the lessons I’ve learned through my art—that’s what this book does!

You also discussed confidence issues.

Being successful caused me to have low self-esteem. When you hear negative things about yourself, it becomes a mantra in your head: ‘You’re not good enough. You’re not a good actress, performer, person—you want candles in your room’—things that aren’t true!’ It’s the tape that plays in your head that’s dangerous, and what you want to do is reprogram that tape.

Does being called ‘Most Beautiful Person in the World’ make you feel like you need to always be on your game?

No, I don’t take it seriously. It’s flattering, but it’s going to be tomorrow’s trash. I don’t let that feed my ego in the way that some people could.

Are you gun-shy now about having a relationship in the public eye?

Right now, I just want to be on my own, have friends and get to know myself better. I have to love myself before I can love somebody else! And, if somebody comes along, that person can add to that happiness.   AP

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Mariah Carey, Nick Cannon headed for splitsville?

MANILA, Philippines – Singer Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon are living separately, Cannon himself said in an interview.

“There is trouble in paradise.  We have been living in separate houses for a few months,” Cannon told Yahoo’s The Insider.

Cannon, however, insisted that his infidelity was not the reason for their split. 


He said their utmost duty now was not to put their three-year-old twins in the middle of their personal issues.

Meanwhile, in a separate report by E! Online, Carey was reportedly devastated about the comments Cannon told Yahoo since they had agreed to work on a statement together.

“A joint statement was being prepared when he went and gave those quotes to The Insider,” The E! Online report said.

After Cannon went public about the state of their marriage, Carey posted in her Instagram account a photo of their three year-old twins hugging each other.

(Insert Instagram Photo saved in images folder)

The singer and former American idol judge, however, neither confirmed nor denied her husband’s statement and kept mum on the status of their relationship.

Carey and Cannon got married in 2008.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Lover’s quarrel linked to hunger – study

MANILA, Philippines—Irritated with your lover? Grab a sandwich first.

In a study that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hungry people are more likely to unleash a maelstrom to their partners due to low glucose levels in the bloodstream.

Scientists found out that glucose levels in the blood could directly influence the anger levels of someone towards his or her spouse and stick pins to a voodoo doll.

Hungry people are also more likely to lambast their partners with loud noises after defeating them in a game.

“People can relate to this that when they get hungry, they get cranky,” Professor Brad Bushman of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio told The Independent. “We found that being ‘hangry’—hungry and angry—can affect our behavior in a bad way, even in our most intimate relationships.”



According to the report, the study encompassed three years and had 107 married couples who were assessed for their general relationship satisfaction to determine their happiness levels.

Over a 21-day period, each couple monitored their blood glucose levels in the morning and was given a voodoo doll and 51 pins that they could stick to the plushy depending on how angry they were.

“When they had lower blood glucose, they felt angrier and took it out on the dolls representing their spouse,” Bushman said.

He said that even those couples who enjoy a satisfactory relationship let out their inner Hulk whenever they were hungry.

After the 21-day period, the couples participated in a laboratory test where they were asked to play a computer game against their partners where the victor could do any conceivable and possible noise to the loser through headphones.

Unknown to the respondents, the couples played against the computer and not against each other so that they would lose half of the matches and win the other half.

“Within the ethical limits of the lab, we gave these participants a weapon that they could use to blast their spouse with unpleasant noise,” Bushman said.

Again lower glucose levels, and intensified hunger, resulted in louder noises.

Bushman deduced that food is required to maintain self-control as lower glucose levels do not produce much energy for the brain to keep a person sane.

“It’s simple advice but it works; before you have a difficult conversation with your spouse, make sure you’re not hungry,” Bushman said.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Even ugly people can find love on the Internet

You, yes, you: what if I ignored your call? Or we passed each other by in a crowded room? Isn’t it disturbing that Cupid’s arrow could be so hit-or-miss?

And yet these days, two complete strangers could be thousands of miles apart, but with a click of a mouse, light a flame of love. They could be fat, old, disabled and have STD; they could be anyone they want to be—married, single or widowed—and embark on journeys of love.

“There’s a saying old, said that love is blind, still we’re often told, seek and you shall find,” so the song goes. Searching for love (heck, looking for sex)—if it isn’t yet an epidemic, it will soon be.

Sometimes I let myself out of the 19th century and wonder: what’s happened to serendipity, the preambles of courtship?

Remember the thrill of getting ready for dates: the outfit, the movie, the restaurant; the chaste kiss at the end of an evening which was never really long enough for falling in love; so, you, breathless with bewitchment, arrange to meet again.

That was then. Today we’re in a postdating world of infinite opportunities. Maybe it’s all the same. Maybe the past was better, just slower. Maybe today is better, just faster.

Sure, couples from well-matched castes can find happiness in traditionally arranged marriages, complete with eye-watering dowries. In the time-honored fashion of dynastic alliances and endogamy, couples still court and marry within their tribes: an Astor marries a Churchill; a Marcos an Araneta; a Fariñas a Singson.

What if you go off-grid? Today, no longer is there a stigma attached to online dating, a multibillion-dollar industry which has opened up many ways for meeting new people.

More satisfied

In the United Kingdom, one in five relationships now starts online, with more than 10 million Britons registered on dating sites.

A recent University of Chicago research found that more than a third of couples who married in the United States, between 2005 and 2012, met online, and that they were more satisfied and less likely to break up than couples who met in the traditional manner.

Oh, the mass and volume! Match.com (17 million users a month); MatchAffinity; eHarmony; thegaggle; craigslist; DatingDirect, to name a few. Because the Internet is a vast and transgressive market catering to all kinds and kinks, it even has a site for ugly people—theuglybugball.com. “Ugly people,” said the site’s founder, Howard James, “are easier to please; they have lower expectations.”

Surprisingly, people in their 50s and 60s are the fastest-growing demographic in the online dating pool. Retrosexuals—fleeing loveless beds and carcasses of sex-drought, failed or stale marriages—are logging on to reheat relationships with childhood sweethearts, first loves or old flames.

Beware, for as many as there are sites, so, too, are the risks. Many have been duped and fleeced of their money by online fraudsters creating fictitious profiles with photos of attractive men and women. A spark is ignited and a scam usually starts with a request for a small sum of money—to pay off a debt, or for a relative’s medical treatment.

Philip Hunt, 58, went online for love after two failed marriages. He met Rose, a “young and beautiful woman living in Nigeria.” Over eight months, through e-mails and texts, Rose bled Philip dry. He remortgaged his house, took out loans, and when he put himself on the path of an express train that killed him instantly, he had debts of £82,000.

Millionairess Carole Waugh, 49, described herself in her online profile as “posh totty fun,” promising “true girlfriend experience.” Two gambling addicts hooked up with her, stole her identity, sold her home and stripped her of her bank accounts and assets. She was fatally stabbed in the neck, her body stuffed in the boot of a car.

Leaky sieve

You could find yourself in a fever of love with Emma, a hot doctor practicing in Toronto; only it turns out Emma’s an Uzbek tosser with a mustache. And he wants your credit card details.

Websites, always in danger of being hacked into, often fail to protect their customers, with information about them falling into the hands of stalkers, convicted rapists and sex offenders. “The Internet is a leaky sieve, so keep your emotional credit balance low,” warned psychotherapist Phillip Hodson.

Personal ads and lonely hearts columns in newspapers and magazines still hold their charm. “Fifty from the neck up and 14 from the waist down”; “sixty but still rather nifty.” Sometimes you have to view lies as the building blocks of good manners, but people who crow like cocks for all they’re worth usually hide something.

People have forgotten so much about wooing that they’re paying dating coaches to teach them the art of courtship—flirting with intent, chat-up lines, flowers and small gifts, what to say on a date. In Vegas, coaching from Same Night Seduction Bootcamp will set you back £2,000.

But it’s elite matchmakers which are creaming off the dating scene. These are go-to agencies for highly educated, professional men and women who do not have the time or the inclination to indulge in traditional courtships.

For huge fees, high net worth individuals with specifications of their ideal would-be partners brief exclusive dating agencies who search and screen candidates, and enable introductions and dates.

Duncan Cheatle is a successful entrepreneur who has been on several agency-enabled dates. He told The Times: “Why would I not invest eight grand in someone I trust to help me find connections when I’m busy?”

Eight grand? Peanuts! Berkeley International, with offices in key global cities (i.e., where the money’s at), has 3,000 crème de la crème members who think nothing of paying $75,000 for a one-year membership. This is “headhunting” for trophy wives and husbands on a rarefied scale.

Stubbornly single

Have a heart then for China’s “leftover” men—so-called because, in their advancing years, while desperate to get married, they remain stubbornly single. Every Sunday at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park, hundreds of parents hawk their sons’ CVs to potential wives who, because of their scarcity, can afford to be picky: does he have an apartment, a car, a permit to reside in Beijing?

The gender imbalance is marked, with an average of 150 men to 100 women. China’s Academy of Social Sciences predicts that, by 2020, there will be some 24 million marriageable men without wives or partners.

This is not a problem for very wealthy Chinese alpha males who outsource their search for brides to exclusive marriage bureaus with their armies of “love hunters.”

Before you sally forth into your amorous adventures, remember that nobody’s perfect, not even you.

Don’t hope for too much, but don’t settle for less

Don’t settle for someone with the personality of a bread mold, the IQ of a pot plant, or the manners of a lowlife bottom-feeder. Private lives can be rumpled and messy, and some of us are damaged goods carrying heavy emotional baggage.

Don’t be an intellectual slouch, but don’t be a howitzer, either. Don’t frighten them away on your first date with talks about having children or the diagnosis of a disease, or launch into boastful sexploits. Desperation is like body odor: it is rank, unpleasant and unsexy.

Agree to split the bill. And take care of your personal safety.

What an utter desert, Charles Darwin said, is life without love. That we can ache and fret in places of our hearts we didn’t know existed.

So, maybe, go, give it a whirl. A low-expectation encounter might just result in fireworks and a ring on your finger.

But, it’s not always simple; if it were, everyone would be doing it. Margie David Collins

Apps to meet your match

A free app for iPhone and Android, Tinder is the 21st century’s take on “cruising.”

It’s a matchmaking service linked to a Facebook account. The app registers your current location, asks who you’d like to meet and then flashes up photos of potential matches near you.

You swipe “Like” and, presto, you could meet more people in one evening than in a week or year of waiting to hook up with someone. Ditto Foursquare.

Facebook’s new Graph Search helps you find your “perfect match” and sets up potential dates. For example, type in “Who are single in Metro Manila and graduated from The Wharton School?” Boom! Margie David Collins

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net