18 WEDNESDAY

FEBRUARY 13, 2008 COMMUNITY

Goodbye
beautiful
Sungnyemun
By Robert Koehler
On Talking Points

This writer spent Sunday

night staring in disbelief at
his TV.
Korea’s National Treasure
No. 1, the beautiful Nam-
daemun, was ablaze. Since the
gate was built in 1398, Korea
has seen many ups and downs. Expat living is a page dedicated
But, Namdaemun, also known
to the issues that affect expats'
as Sungnyemun, remained
the same — it was a rock of daily lives. It is your page,
stability in a rapidly changing where you can share stories about
world. your life in Korea. Send story
Sungnyemun, to this ideas to Matthew Lamers
writer, represented what was at mattlamers@heraldm.com
most beautiful in Seoul —
here, you could feel the dy-
namic contrast between old
and new that makes Seoul
such an interesting place to
live. It was a national icon,
an image beloved by broad-
casters worldwide to capture
the special energy of Korea.
And in a matter of mere
hours, it was gone.
It would be ludicrous, of
course, to somehow equate
the destruction of Sung- PHOTO CHALLENGE (CHILDREN) —
nyemun to the Sept. 11 ter- During the 2006 World Cup, this photo was
rorist attacks. Yet, upon taken in front of Seoul City Hall of a young
watching the gate collapse, girl decked out in red from head to toe.
the feeling was oddly similar. Reminiscing on the past, any international
The images were surreal — soccer tournament presents a great time to
this was not supposed to hap- be in Korea. Everyone is excited; the at-
pen. Over the course of 600 mosphere is great, people are outgoing and
years, Sungnyemun had everyone parties into the early hours of the
managed to survive the worst morning.
that Korean history could Photo by Stephen Wilson, stewilspaw.blogspot.com
throw at her, including the
brutal Japanese invasions of
the 16th century, the colonial
assault on Korea’s historical
and cultural heritage, the de-
struction of the Korean War
and forced-march economic
development that left much
of Korea’s traditional legacy
in tatters. Sungnyemun was
indestructible.
Until Sunday night.
To put some emotional per-
spective on the disaster,
Effective classroom correction techniques
By Sean Smith
imagine how Americans sation. It would be much better to use that others could use review on. typing into PowerPoint, learners have Students who fear correction will now
might feel if they witnessed On EFL explicit error correction to draw the A slight variation on this that I have no distraction and will continue on be able to talk without worrying about
the Statue of Liberty fall into student’s attention to the point in ques- found to be an improvement is to put whatever task the teacher has as- being corrected and those that want to
the ocean. Or how the French One common mistake new teachers tion. the errors and corrections on to a signed them. be corrected will be.
might feel if they watched make is to use recasts to correct mis- For error correction to be effective, PowerPoint slide while the students Many students are naturally reticent This also allows students to say
the Eiffel Tower collapse. takes. A recast is when the teacher re- learners need to know that they are be- are doing something else. Then when to speak in class for fear of making mis- “enough correction,” and turn it off by
Following the blaze, much peats the incorrect sentence or phrase ing corrected. The teacher, however, it’s time to review the mistakes, bring takes and having them corrected in flipping the card over.
of the news has focused, nat- back to the learner with corrections but may not want to interrupt a task to cor- them up one at a time on the board and front of their peers. On the other hand, Giving learners a sense of control
urally enough, on finger does not otherwise interrupt the flow of rect a student if the error is not nega- ask students for corrections. Getting some students complain that they are will also increase in-class motivation
pointing. Did the firefighters the conversation. For example: tively affecting communication or com- students to think about what the mis- not corrected enough. The following and confidence by a small amount. A
do their jobs properly? Has Student: Yesterday I watch movie. pletion of the task. One common solu- take is, rather than just giving them idea provided to me by my friend copy of these cards is available for
the Cultural Heritage Teacher: Yesterday I watched a movie. tion is to make note of errors and then the answer, results in more thinking Duane provides a solution to both of download on my blog.
Administration been doing Student: It was an action movie. later in class put those errors up on the and stronger learning. these problems: Give learners cards
all it can to protect the na- Unless the teacher explicitly points board. The advantage here is that stu- Students are actively involved in the that say “correct my vocabulary,” “cor-
tion’s cultural properties? out the error (in this case, tense) re- dents are not embarrassed in front of error correction. Additionally, when rect my pronunciation,” and “correct Sean Smith teaches English at
Why didn’t the police provide search indicates that students do not friends and classmates when the writing something on the board, stu- my grammar.” Learners then have the Hanyang University and may be con-
sufficient security for the notice the correction, but rather consid- teacher points out their mistakes. dents tend to stop their group work and option to display the card face up and tacted via his website http://efl-
monument? And why — as- er it to be a normal part of the conver- Additionally it helps highlight an error focus on what the teacher is doing. By be corrected, or to not be corrected. geek.com — Ed.
suming, as appears to be the
case, this was a case of arson

Profane expressions — fuggedaboudit

— would anyone willfully
burn down one of Korea’s
most important pieces of tra-
ditional architecture?
Truth be told, the blame
game is a tad depressing.
That’s not to say there
aren’t very important
lessons to be learned from
this tragedy. There certainly
are. But now is not the time
to fingerpoint. It’s time to
mourn.
Interestingly enough, the
suspect — an elderly man
by the name of Chae — was
the same individual respon-
sible for attempting to burn
down the Munjeong Hall in
Changgyeong Palace in
2006, supposedly to draw
attention to a land compen-
sation dispute involving
some property of his. His
punishment at the time? A
suspended sentence.
At any rate, the Cultural
Heritage Administration has
already announced plans to
By Jeffery Hodges
On Language
Although my old buddy Al
Termini, who drove the
Gutenberg Express between
the Stanford and Berkeley li-
braries back in the 1980s,
would litter his language with
profane expressions like
fuggedaboudit, I never expect-
ed to see a t-shirt with that
word unabashedly emblazoned
across its front, but the cursed
thing is available at
Amazon.com, which at least ad-
mits that this is an “Adult T-
Shirt.” Despite its adult status,
however, anyone can access the
site and order that shirt!
I hate to speak ill of the dead,
but I blame Norman Mailer for
initially popularizing the
basest form of this word in his
World War II novel, “The
Naked and the Dead.” Here is a
typical instance of a character
wantonly mouthing this term:
“Minetta was becoming irri-
tated. It was impossible ever
to win an argument with
Pollack. “Aaah, fug you,” he
said (60).
Could this word possibly be
more crudely spelled out?
Mailer’s trashy novel should
have been banned 60 years ago,
but that ship has long sailed
and returned with cargo.
Some of that cargo has re-
cently gotten unloaded in John
Green’s teenybopper novel, “An
Abundance of Katherines,”
which not only incessantly uses
the word but even depicts its
19-year-old main character
openly hailing Mailer’s book:
“(I)t’s 872 pages, and it uses
the word fug or fugging or fug-
ger or whatever about 37,000
times. Every other word is a
fug, pretty much” (120).
In homage to Mailer, this
character and his best friend
adopt the vulgar term for their
own use. Shocking, yes, but not
nearly so astounding as the
fact that Green’s book placed
as a finalist for the Michael L.
Printz Award in literary excel-
lence!
Literary? A word like that,
literary? Why, the word itself is
a gross misspelling, as the
renowned stage actress
Tallulah Bankhead acidly ob-
served upon first meeting
Mailer: “So you’re the young
man who doesn’t know how to
spell.”
Mailer’s crude misspelling
has spread even beyond the lit-
erary world and into popular
culture, where it has undoubt-
edly wreaked even more harm
by piercing the virgin ears of
any who have ever heard of
that rock band whose name
was coined in 1965 by the
band’s cofounder Tuli
Kupferberg as homage to
Mailer’s illiteracy: The Fugs.
Now, many may think me
alarmist, but consider the long-
term effect of Mailer’s illiterate
vulgarism. Language already
suffers from a deleterious ten-
dency toward semantic drift,
and I see no good reason to en-
courage this vagabond neglect
of proper English, so I’ve writ-
ten a poem, “Semantic Drift,”
to warn against Mailer’s mis-
use of our fine English lan-
guage and to graphically
protest his unorthographic in-
fluence:
“Wood” now no longer sounds
crazy,
While “stout” only scarcely
seems strong;
“Foul” connotes nothing of
lazy,
And “sin” suggests nothing
much wrong.
Words molt old meanings
like feathers,
Make speaking a spiel of
dumb luck,
Bring us all to the ends of our
tethers
Leave us all without giving a
f**.
This is my protest. I utterly
refuse to use Mailer’s three-let-
ter word. Fuggedaboudit.
Jeffery is a professor at
Kyung Hee University and can
be reached through his blog
Gypsy Scholar at gypsyscholar-
ship.blogspot.com — Ed.

Ask the photographer: The megapixel myth

rebuild the fallen gate exactly
as it was. The restoration pro-
ject is expected to take three
years and cost some 20 billion
won ($21 million). Of course,
the restoration project raises
its own issues, including
whether the rebuilt gate
would still classify as a
National Treasure. Previous
examples of restored cultural
properties, such as the
Jeokmukdang of Ssanggye-sa
(formerly Treasure No. 458;
one hall in the temple was de-
stroyed in a fire in 1968) and
the Bronze Bell of Naksan-sa
(formerly Treasure No. 479,
rebuilt after a forest fire de-
stroyed the temple in 2005)
suggest that it won’t.
Robert is the editor-in-
chief of SEOUL magazine,
and the administrator of The
Marmot’s Hole blog (www.-
rjkoehler.com). — Ed.
By David Smeaton
I want to upgrade my camera.
It’s not that old, but there’s a
newer model which has a lot
more megapixels. Is it worth the
money for that extra resolution?
— Jamie, Seoul.
To answer the question, we
should first understand what
exactly a pixel is. A pixel is a
tiny color square. Cameras,
TVs, computer monitors and
similar devices use millions of
pixels to create a picture. Most
importantly, the sensor in your
camera uses pixels to read and
interpret the image. A million
pixels is roughly a megapixel. 3
megapixels is 3 million pixels,
and so on.
The basic theory is the more
pixels, the better your image.
However, it doesn’t just come
down to a simple number repre-
senting a higher-quality image.
There are a lot of factors included.
Don’t be fooled into thinking
that 6 megapixels is twice as
good as 3 megapixels.
It depends on the resolution
of your camera, how your cam-
era’s software handles the data,
image compression, and
whether you use digital or opti-
cal zooms.
Megapixels are quite a talk-
ing point amongst photogra-
phers, and there’s one univer-
sally accepted truth — the race
for more megapixels is the sales
con of the decade. A good exam-
ple of megapixel tampering is
one big camera company’s inter-
polation method of guessing
megapixels. Their new
superCCD sensor arranges pix-
els in diagonal hexagons, rather
than rows of rectangles. As a re-
sult, there are gaps between the
pixels, and Fuji ‘guesses’ the
megapixel rate. For the
superCCD sensor, they double
the outcome to compensate for
missing pixels. So a true 6
megapixel sensor is called a 12
megapixel sensor. The images
are really 6 megapixels; howev-
er the camera stores 12
megapixels of data, half of
which is completely useless.
Another con nobody mentions
is that compressing your image
will result in lost quality. Some
cameras use very high compres-
sion when storing jpg files. All
that extra data is lost when the
camera writes the image to your
card. Compression and internal
software have a huge effect on
how the data from the camera’s
sensor is used. Compression es-
pecially can result in large drops
in image quality, negating all
the money you spent buying
megapixels. What’s the point of
having a 10 megapixel camera if
you’re only going to photograph
low resolution images?
Newer studies have also
shown that more than 6
megapixels is useless for point
and shoot cameras. The sensor
is so small that extra megapix-
els do not improve image quali-
ty at all. DSLR cameras, espe-
cially ones with cropped sen-
sors, are a bit better off. Only
full frame DSLR cameras can
enjoy the benefits of up to 20mp.
Pocket cameras with high
megapixels will naturally have
much higher noise, lowering im-
age quality. As a result, the cam-
era needs more complex soft-
ware to handle the image
Of course, megapixels do
make a difference when it comes
to printing, but unless you’re
professional, you will never print
high-quality images. A 6 x 4 im-
age (postcard size) only requires
a resolution of 2 megapixels
(1800 x 1200 pixels). Higher
megapixels have little impact on
the resolution, especially to the
naked eye. However, an 8 x 10
image would require closer to 8
megapixels (2400 x 3600 pixels)
without looking grainy. How of-
ten do you print 8 x 10 images?
If you do print an image that big,
5 to 7 megapixels will still look
just fine.
The final consideration is that
most images end up on the in-
ternet or e-mailed. Anything
over 200kb is going to cause
long download and upload
times, so there’s not much point
uploading 5mb photos to your
blog or flickr account, because
they’ll be resized to make them
more “web friendly”.
I think that if your camera
does everything you need, and it
has a few less megapixels, then
don’t worry. You’ll never notice
the difference. Keep the extra
money in your pocket and up-
grade your camera when it of-
fers much more useful features.
Happy shooting!
Send David a message at
davidsmeaton@gmail.com or
visit his website at www.david-
smeaton.com. If you want to be a
part of the weekly Photo
Challenge, join the “Seoul Photo
Club” group at flickr (flickr.-
com/groups/seoulphotoclub).