game addiction

Every now and then there comes some sort of news article to do with the results of game addiction in Korea. People can even die as a result of game addiction. This one is horrible. I can't imagine ever even considering leaving a baby at home alone!!!! It's an older article but for some reason has been viewed a lot recently.

Infant Daughter Dies as Parents Play Online Game
June 14th, 2005 Chosun Ilbo
A thoughtless couple in their 20s who left their four-month old daughter at home while they played Internet computer games at a nearby PC café have been booked by police after the child died.
According to Incheon Police Station on Tuesday, a 29-year-old man husband identified by his family name of Yu and his wife put their four-month daughter in the bedroom of their home and went to a neighborhood PC café at around 4:00 p.m. on May 24 to play the online game "World of Warcraft.
Time flew by as the couple lost themselves in the game, and when they returned home at 9:00 p.m., their daughter was lying on her stomach, dead of suffication.
The couple told police, "We were thinking of playing for just an hour or two and returning home like usual, but the game took longer that day."
Police said an investigation turned up that the couple, who wed last year, used to play "World of Warcraft" whenever they had time.
Police said, "It's unfortunate, because the tragedy could have been averted if the couple had just left their daughter with Yu's mother-in-law, who lived upstairs from them... We booked the pair on criminal charges, judging that when you consider the situation, they were responsible for their daughter's death."
Major U.S. online game producer Blizzard, which grew famous with the game "Starcraft", produced the game to which Yu and his wife were addicted, "World of Warcraft." The game allows multiple players to form teams to fight battles and enjoy various adventures.
(Lee Yong-su, hejsue@chosun.com )

Update on Bill Kapoun

Unfortunately, Bill Kapoun wasn't able to overcome his injuries and passed away Saturday. So sad. Of course, the medical bills incurred still have to be paid.

Foreign Teacher Dies of Injuries From Fire
By Kang Shin-who Staff Report 03-09-2008
William Kapoun, 26, an American teacher who sustained severe burn injuries in a fire at his apartment, passed away Saturday.
He had been in intensive care at Hangang Sacred Heart Hospital, Seoul, since Feb. 24.
The young American’s parents asked for repeated cardiopulmonary resuscitation after concurrent cardiac arrests to be stopped.
His father Dan Kapoun, a retired soldier, plans to hold a memorial service at the U.S. Army Base in Yongsan as soon as his son’s body is conveyed to the family from the hospital after the settlement of treatment fees, estimated at 77 million won (about $80,000) in total.
Donators and supporters extended their helping hand to the Kapoun family through the blog site www.billkapoun.com. They also made direct donations to a bank account that was opened here under the name of Warren Franklin William Fund. The donations have reached about $60,000 in total, according to his friends.
"Thank you all of you, from our entire family for your support and good wishes. The Korean people have been very kind to us," Judy Kapoun, his mother told The Korea Times. His parents will return to the United States after the memorial service here.
On top of donations from various people around the world, his family found that part of treatment costs would be covered by South Korea’s National Health Insurance Corp. following a retroactive payment. About 30 million won was covered by the insurance.
His death has alerted other foreign teachers here about their working conditions and safety. "The unfortunate tragedy awoke me to the fact that foreign teachers should make plans for their own safety. They must make sure that they are covered by insurance," said Michale John Bodnar, one of William’s friends.
Meanwhile, police said it appears the fire was "accidental." But they said they have yet to officially determine the exact cause of the fire that killed Kapoun and his girlfriend.
"We have yet to determine the exact cause of the fire. But it appears the fire broke out accidentally and chances of arson are low," a police official said.
Kapoun, a graduate of Indiana University, had been teaching students English as a part-time teacher at Bulam Elementary School in Northern Seoul. The fire at his apartment left him with third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body.

faking it

This is intersting, but not all that surprising. I have heard several people claiming that they had studied in very famous American or English universities, but their English and other characteristics sort of made me wonder. Fake everything is a problem here. Fake/imitation products are everywhere. Some of the foreigners that come here to teach (of whom I've met a couple) come with fake degrees provided by recruiters (they started cracking down on that a couple of years ago).

Fake school records shame Korean figures
By Su Hyun Lee Tuesday, August 28, 2007
SEOUL: South Korea is being shaken by a series of scandals involving an art historian, a movie director, a renowned architect, the head of a performing arts center, a popular comic book writer, a celebrity chef, leading actors and actresses, a former TV news anchor, even a revered Buddhist monk. What binds them is that all falsified their academic records.
In an intensely competitive country that has long put a premium on impressive degrees, one prominent person after another is being exposed as having exaggerated, or even fabricated, academic accomplishments. The revelations of résumé fraud have created problems for South Korean corporations, which rely heavily on diplomas to assess job applicants.
Although companies attach huge importance to degrees, they have rarely bothered to check their authenticity. But if more people are cheating to gain an advantage in a fierce job market, more are also getting caught, thanks to the Internet.
Suspicions that academic records were falsified have circulated for years. But in July, a news report that an important art history professor had faked her credentials triggered a wave of similar allegations and confessions.
The exposés have prompted prosecutors, the police, the Education Ministry and regional education authorities to announce plans to combat academic record fraud. Legislators have introduced a bill calling for a verification system.
"Before, we struggled more with fake luxury goods," said Moon Moo Il, who is leading a nationwide crackdown of document forgery and misrepresentation at the Prosecutor-General's Office. "Now that we have entered the knowledge-based society, we have to deal with an overflow of 'fake knowledge.' "
The first bombshell exploded July 11, with news reports that Shin Jeong Ah, an art history professor at Dongguk University, Korea's top Buddhist university, had faked her credentials. Shin, who had claimed to have a Ph.D. from Yale and other degrees from the University of Kansas, had risen quickly in South Korea's art world. At the age of 35, she was appointed co-director of the Gwangju Biennale, one of the biggest art events in East Asia.
Her troubles began when a member of her university's board of directors questioned her academic record, and then brought it to the attention of the news media.
The university eventually fired Shin, who then lost her other positions and moved to the United States.
The Shin case was just the beginning. Questions were raised about other prominent figures' academic degrees. Some came forward to confess.
Among the dozen or so confirmed cheaters was Lee Chang Ha, an architect regularly featured on television. He was forced to give up his college teaching job after it became known that he lied about his degrees. Lee Hyun Sae, a popular comic book writer, claimed to be a college graduate when he had only completed high school.
One of the biggest shocks involved a well-known Buddhist monk named Jigwang, whose temple in an affluent district of Seoul had grown from seven members in 1984 to more than 250,000. Part of the respect he enjoyed arose from the widespread belief that he had attended Seoul National University, the country's top academic institution.
"People swarmed in because they heard that a monk who had gone to a distinguished university was teaching the scriptures in English," Jigwang said at a news conference Aug. 18. "I think that the Seoul National University title more or less helped in propagation."
The nationwide focus on academic fraud became so intense that it prompted Kim Ock Rang, the owner of a performing arts space, to avoid friends out of fear that her own lies about her academic record would be found out, she said in a television interview after her confession. Eventually, she resigned from her professorship at Dankook University in Seoul.
In South Korea, degrees from top universities at home and abroad, especially in the United States, have a profound impact on everything from one's career to marriage prospects.
South Korean children are pressured to study obsessively from an early age, often spending evenings and weekends in cram schools in preparation for entrance exams.
Cheating has probably always existed to some degree. But experts say it has almost certainly increased over the past decade as South Korean companies, squeezed between high-tech Japan and low-cost China, have cut back on hiring.
"Before the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, there were enough jobs for everyone," said Lim Min Wook, a manager at Saramin, one of the country's leading recruiting companies. "Graduates from first-tier schools landed top jobs and second-tier school graduates got the next best jobs and so on. But nowadays, there aren't many jobs, period."
Although some companies conduct their own aptitude tests to detect the best job candidates, the dependence on academic degrees persists.
Joo Tae San, the chief executive of Maxmovie, an online movie and performance ticketing firm, said he had no choice.
"There is no other way to verify a person's competence," he said. "Calling former employers or professors for comments and recommendation letters aren't helpful because they will either not comment or only praise the person."
Park Hyo Chong, professor of national ethics education at Seoul National University, agreed that personal recommendations were seldom useful. When Koreans talk about other people, especially for job recommendations, he said, "they tend to highlight their pros and hide their cons."
Despite the weight assigned to academic degrees, South Korean companies have never developed the practice of systematically verifying them. The problem becomes greater with foreign degrees.
This was underscored by the case of Lee Ji Young, who hosted a popular English-learning radio program for seven years.
The country's public broadcaster, Korea Broadcasting System, hired her without checking her degrees, which she said were from the University of Brighton, England.
But she pushed things a little too far. After landing the radio job, she kept playing up her fabricated academic background in interviews and in a book. Her luck ran out when an anonymous caller tipped off reporters.
Lee was forced to resign. In a farewell message posted on her radio show's Web site, she explained she had come to Seoul from her rural hometown and tried but failed to enter college.
Like many others whose lies unraveled recently, she said, "I wanted to stop, but a long time had passed."

X-rays etc

I'm getting so tired of this. I changed hospitals to be closer to where I work (and so that I could actually make appointments without having mess around with the school schedule, which doesnt' really work anyway). The new doctor seems very nice, and a bit more concerned about things than the other one. But it meant more X-rays. He said a few, only to help make a diagnosis. 20 X-rays is a bit more than a few. And I go in on Saturday for a full body bone scan. This is getting so expensive. I mentioned how much I was paying (since this whole problem started) and he is trying to help me as much as he can. He is a specialist, which means to see him it costs about about twice as much (or more) than a regular doctor. Well, he made it so that I am only paying the fees for a regular doctor. Nice. I also asked if he could suggest a good multivitamin. He reached into his own bag and pulled out a new box of vitamins and gave them to me, saying that his pharmacist had just dropped them for HIM. Many of the things that I mentioned that the other doctor had just shrugged his shoulders at, this one shook his head and said it was not good.
So, in the last year, I've had, I think, around 45 X-rays. YIKES!!! That includes the ones at the previous hospital and the X-rays at the dentists' offices that I've been to. I had one X-ray taken yesterday at the dentist, and then again today, as the machine malfunctioned and squished the picture up a bit so that you couldn't clearly see what was what (computer image xray). They had to readjust the machine and retake the X-ray.
It is getting quite expensive. The dentist is quite cheap here compared to back home. At least, some things are. To get a wisdom tooth pulled, it cost me less than $10, including the X-ray and medicine; about $25 when it was a bit more intensive and I had to have a couple of stitches. The problem I have now, is a bit more extensive. The dentist says it is probably due to the medication I've been taking, that my immune system is down and so I am more susceptible to things (which is what I had already thought of). Anyway, it is some sort of gingivitis or such. I needed a teeth cleaning anyway, so he is doing that at the same time. He is also doing a bit extra for me because he feels bad, he is charging me for the regular type of scaling, but using the laser scaling. It will cost me a total of $400, being done in 4 sessions - one quarter of my mouth at a time. Each takes about 30 minutes. He used the laser to clean my teeth and I think he was cauterizing my gums a bit, as I have been having a bit of problems with them bleeding. With my mouth numbed and my face covered, all I could do was smell the burning what ever. not nice. 3 more times I have to deal with that.
So anyway, this hasn't been the best day. 2 hours at the hospital and almost an hour at the dentist's office.

Chinese hospital scams

I wonder if these things (or similar things) happen in other countries.

Scandal brews over tea-for-urine switch
BEIJING (Reuters) - A group of Chinese reporters came up with a novel idea to test how greedy local hospitals were -- pass off tea as urine samples and submit the drink for tests.
The results: six out of 10 hospitals in Hangzhou, the capital of the rich coastal province of Zhejiang, visited by the reporters over a two-day period this month concluded that the patients' urinal tracts were infected.
Five of the hospitals prescribed medication costing up to 400 yuan ($50), the online edition of the semi-official China News Service (www.chinanews.com) said in a report seen on Wednesday. Of the hospitals, four were state-owned.
"It makes one shiver all over even though it's not cold," the China News Service said after its reporters and colleagues from Zhejiang Television tested the hospitals.
The Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper said in a commentary on Wednesday: "Healthy people are diagnosed with diseases. Small ailments are said to be serious problems. Patients have become automatic teller machines for the hospitals."
The failure of health reforms and rising costs of medical care have sparked social discontent and become flashpoints for unrest in the world's most populous nation, where millions cannot afford to consult doctors or buy medicine.
Health Minister Gao Qiang has accused greedy hospitals of charging excessive fees and prescribing unnecessary and expensive medication.
Market reforms in the past two decades have cut off state subsidies to many hospitals and left the health care system in need of life support.
State media have reported patients committing suicide because they cannot afford exorbitant medical costs.