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This ad (shown above) by Nivea For Men is being featured in the September issue of Esquire, and has drawn a considerable amount of negative attention.
Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers have taken to their laptops to attack the company, Nivea, and accuse them of racist advertising.
The issue revolves around the fact that they posted a photo of an African-American man throwing away a mask of himself with an afro-style haircut and beard, with the caption “Re-civilize yourself” in the advertisement. Readers attacked the racist nature of the advertisement claiming the ad portrays the natural hair of an African-American man as “uncivilized.”
Parent company Beiersdorf AG has subsequently withdrawn the ad and issued an apology. The question is - too little too late? Was this too large of a gaffe to be fixed with a simple apology?

Images courtesy of Adage and GOOD

This ad (shown above) by Nivea For Men is being featured in the September issue of Esquire, and has drawn a considerable amount of negative attention.

Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers have taken to their laptops to attack the company, Nivea, and accuse them of racist advertising.

The issue revolves around the fact that they posted a photo of an African-American man throwing away a mask of himself with an afro-style haircut and beard, with the caption “Re-civilize yourself” in the advertisement. Readers attacked the racist nature of the advertisement claiming the ad portrays the natural hair of an African-American man as “uncivilized.”

Parent company Beiersdorf AG has subsequently withdrawn the ad and issued an apology. The question is - too little too late? Was this too large of a gaffe to be fixed with a simple apology?

Images courtesy of Adage and GOOD

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Jeff Novich runs VocabSushi, an online service that scours the daily news from around the U.S. to find actual examples of specific words, in order to help students improve their vocabulary. Jeff was an SAT tutor in New York City before starting VocabSushi.

Jeff told us the story of how he came up with the idea

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Take The Leap - A blog profiling the stories of entrepreneurs

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Kirsten Winkler - Education 2.0 Blogger

VocabSushi was just featured in Kirsten’s latest post.  Here’s an excerpt:

I love Sushi. For me it’s one of the most perfect food creations of mankind. Pure, elegant, tasty. Everything you need.

VocabSushi transfers those features into a vocabulary learning tool. You see, I am already excited about this product and yes, I admit it impressed me right from the start. Like last year, when I discovered Mingoville (watch also the EDUKWEST interview with Stephan Stephensen).

Kirsten writes a blog about education and tech innovations in the education industry.  Her blog KirstenWinkler.com won best new blog by EduBlog in 2009.  She also runs EDUKWEST and (video) interviews lots of edu-tech entrepreneurs and will be interviewing me next week.  Stay tuned!

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From the post:

Powerful things, words.

They can be the difference between fame and obscurity, celebrity and notoriety, prosperity and destitution

Best to brush up on a few then.

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Basicall a cut and paste job here, but Ijaar seems like a nifty site.

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This is in Italian but here is the basic translation, care of Google Translate:

The idea behind VocabSushi is simple: the most effective way to improve your vocabulary is to see the words in their real context. With VocabSushi is possible to build your vocabulary, seeing the words in the news. 

The vocabulary may be specific to a test that we want to prepare. For example, if we prepare for the TOEFL, VocabSushi us twenty questions to test our level of knowledge in order to create a path for the custom of our TOEFL preparation.


Based on our level and the test to be addressed, there is provided an initial list of 300 words to learn: for every word we have a definition, an mp3 file that can acoltare online or download to our ipod, and a quiz to test l ’ learning of the word. If the test is passed, the word will be replaced by a new one.

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An interactive website that allows you to practice your vocabulary skills.

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Made it to what seems to be a top 5 list!

(5) VocabSushi – Free interactive vocabulary builder which lets build your vocabulary by seeing word usage in the daily news. You can practice words by filling out the sentence completion questions and learn the correct word pronunciations by playing the MP3 files. Read more:VocabSushi: The Easy Way To Build Your Vocabulary

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A little headnod from Fox Chicago.  Amusingly, “Icanhascheezburger” is up there too!

Nancy’s Cool Websites

Chicago, IL. - The internet is a big place - but here at Fox News Chicago, we’re trying to make it a little bit smaller.

7/15/09

www.vocabsushi.com - Build your vocabulary through word games!

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Seems we’re getting a fair amount of international traffic and some good press from the French!  Special thanks to Google Translate for its amusing text below:

The “automated” learning vocabulary is growing. Vocabsushi … I have already mentioned here Popling or Learn10, a new edge to the end of his nose: Vocabsushi

Let’s be clear, Vocabsushi is primarily to Anglo-Saxon, I would say the Americans, the service is formatted for the official tests of U.S. universities. But one French to learn English should be able to use it.

The tool is rather thought he must agree. 4 sections are proposed:

The first, Words, gives you access to the list of vocabulary you need to learn. A list issued by the site, depending on the chosen level, and test that you pass when you register. This list is managed by the department which deals with the change depending on your progress.

Each word has its own sheet, incorporating a definition, an example sentence (after items), which shows its use in context, an audio file for pronunciation, and a check mark that you can click to indicate that we consider learned this term.

The second section, Learn, provides access to selected articles on the net, using one or more words from the list. A method intended to help understand the definition of the word in context.

Definition Matching “, un quizz dans lequel il faut choisir la définition d’un mot au milieu de 5 réponses. The third section, games, will try to make us forget the rather abrupt appearance of this learning alone through Thursday Two game types are available: “Sentence Completions” where to find the missing term in a text of 5 proposals and “Definition Matching”, a quiz in which you must choose the definition of a word in the middle of 5 answers.

Finally, the last section, “My progress”, established a statistical evaluation of your learning.

Standard rates, a free test of the platform is available two weeks. Il en coûtera sinon 10 dollars pour un mois , 25 dollars pour 3 mois ou 50 dollars à l’année . Otherwise it will cost $ 10 for one month, $ 25 for 3 months or $ 50 a year.

(Quick note: The site is free.  We decided to drop the pricing.)

This type of tool can meet the needs of a student cramming American, because it adapts well to finally vocabulary tests. But then to say that we will master the use of vocabulary in this way, there is a margin. These machines to learn, rather cold and dehumanised, probably require a lot of motivation for use in time :-) . .

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I think an Australian version of VocabSushi would be pretty cool.  It would have a list of all those awesome Aussie words and abbreviations I heard when I went down under 2 years ago.  I love how efficient they are with English, chopping long words down to 1 or 2 syllables.

Cab Sav : Cabernet Sauvignon
Chewie :
chewing gum
Chokkie : chocolate
Doco : documentary

Tons more here.

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Tech Meetup coverage from France

This is from a French blog that covered the Tech Meetup! From Culture-buzz.fr

VocabSushi a créé un site hallucinant pour améliorer son vocabulaire (anglais) tout en s’amusant. Super personnalisé, avec de nombreuses fonctionnalités pour mettre chaque mot dans son contexte (via une base d’articles de presse mis à jour en live), les lister, pouvoir les écouter (mp3), c’est un peu le rêve d’un prof d’anglais… il ne manque que la version mobile à venir. J’ai été frappé de voir que chaque exemple présenté ce soir est vraiment très bien pensé avec un vrai souci de clarté.

Translated by Google, and then cleaned up by my good college friend Jesse, it reads:

VocabSushi has created an amazing site to improve your vocabulary (in English) all while having fun. Extremely customizable, with many features that put each word in its context (via a database of newspaper articles updated live), list them, listen to them (mp3), it is pretty much the English teacher’s dream… it is only missing the mobile version which is on its way. I was struck to see each example presented tonight is really well thought out with clarity in mind.

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Loved the marketing language used to describe it, but the meetup’s attendees all got a kick out of this “bento box for vocabulary.”  Users develop their vocabulary on this Web site based on quizzes pulled from the text of newspaper articles freely available online.

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Here’s a nice shout out about my presentation:

I also enjoyed Vocabsushi’s presentation. Vocabsushi works to revolutionize vocabulary learning.  Goodbye SAT prep using flashcards, hello using the web via Vocabsushi.  What interests me most is that  this business could be easily scaled. For example, law students could use the site when studying for the bar.  They should seek a partnership with BarBri.

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A nice post from a blog that specializes in ways to learn English.