Study of multiplication tables to be introduced

by Ananda KANNANGARA

The Ministry of Education proposes to make it compulsory for school children to study the multiplication tables from 1-15 in the near future.

The Education Minister Bandula Gunawardane said that school children from Grade One should be encouraged to memorize the multiplication tables to enable them to solve mathematical problems without the help of a calculator.

According to a survey conducted by senior educationists, it has been found that a majority of school children in the country are in the habit of using calculators to even solve simple mathematical problems without doing so by memory. Minister Gunawardane told the Junior Observer that this situation should be changed, and accordingly a programme will soon be implemented to teach children from Grade One onwards the multiplication tables".

He said memorizing the multiplication tables will immensely help students who are expected to follow mathematic related higher education courses such as Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Commerce and Economics.

The Minister said it is compulsory for school children in neighbouring India to memorize the multiplication tables and asked why our children are not competent in this area.

The Minister urged teachers and parents to encourage children to memorize the multiplication table and solve simple maths without the aid of calculators.

The Education Minister also focused on the proposed 1000 secondary schools development programme and said more teachers will be recruited to these schools to teach mathematics.

A principal of a leading school in Colombo said the proposal to teach multiplication tables is vital and it will discourage children from using calculators in the future.

He said it is pity that due to lack of knowledge of multiplication tables, calculators are permitted to be used at some examinations even among university students.

He said as an initial step of this novel programme, the Department should also direct school children to refrain from bringing calculators to schools.

Scientists reconstruct extinct giant penguin

It has taken 26 million years, but scientists say getting the first glimpse at what a long-extinct giant penguin looked like was worth the wait.

Experts from New Zealand and the United States have reconstructed the fossil skeleton of one of the giant sea birds for the first time, revealing long wings, a slender build and a spear-like bill that have them describing it as one elegant bird.

In research published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the scientists say the bird they have dubbed Kairuku - Maori for "diver who returns with food" - stood about 4 feet 2 inches (1.3 metres) tall and had a body shape unique from any previously known penguin, living or extinct.. Kairuku lived in the Oligocene period, about 26 million years ago.

The first Kairuku bones were discovered 35 years ago in New Zealand by Ewan Fordyce, a professor of geology at New Zealand's University of Otago. He recently teamed up with Dan Ksepka, a research assistant professor at North Carolina State University, to reconstruct a skeleton from multiple sets of fossils, using a king penguin as a model.

"It's pretty exciting," Fordyce told The Associated Press. "We've got enough from three key specimens to get a pretty reliable construction of its body size."

Fordyce said the bird's elongated bill may have been useful in catching swift prey and its large body size likely helped it swim longer distances and dive deeper than modern-day penguins.The bird is about a foot (30 centimetres) taller than the largest modern-day penguin, the emperor. It would have weighed about 132 pounds (60 kilograms), 50 percent more than an emperor.

When Kairuku was alive, most of modern-day New Zealand was submerged beneath the ocean. -AP

Destruction of ground cover a threat to tigers

The elimination of ground-level vegetation is bringing another of the world's tiger subspecies to the brink of extinction, according to Virginia Tech and World Wildlife Fund researchers. The Sumatran tiger, native to Indonesia, could be the fourth type of tiger to disappear from the wild. This is due, in part, because of deforestation and the loss of thick ground cover, also known as understory cover, said Sunarto, lead scientist in a study that is the first to systematically investigate the use of both forests and plantation areas for tiger habitat.

Although tiger's prefer forest to plantation areas, the study found that the most important factor was that availability of thick ground-level vegetation which apparently serves as an environmental necessity for tiger habitat, regardless of location.

"As ambush hunters, tigers would find it hard to capture their prey without adequate understory cover," said Sunarto, who earned his doctorate at Virginia Tech and now is a tiger expert for the World Wildlife Fund-Indonesia (WWF-Indonesia). "The lack of cover also leaves tigers vulnerable to persecution by humans, who generally perceive them as dangerous."

Within forest areas, tigers also strongly prefer sites that have low levels of human disturbance as indicated by their preference for areas closer to forest centres and farther from human activity centres such as bodies of water and areas bordering plantations and towns.Tigers occupy only around 7 per cent of their historic range. Estimates place the current wild tiger populations at as few as 3,200 tigers, including only about 400 Sumatran tigers, which are listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species

- ScienceDaily