Posts Tagged ‘attendance’
You’ve been to mass, this morning? Let’s check your prints!
A Polish priest has installed an electronic reader in his church for schoolchildren to leave their fingerprints in order to monitor their attendance at mass, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily said on Friday.
The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.
The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.
“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.
Not only is God watching you; but – Father Grzegorz is checking up on you.
Har!
Go to the right school in Japan – get a free iPhone
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
A Japanese university is giving away Apple’s trendy iPhone to students for free, but with a catch: the device will be used to check their attendance.
The project, which is being tested ahead of its formal launch in June, involves 550 first and second year students and some staff of a department at Aoyama Gakuin University, which is located just outside Tokyo in Sagamihara city.
The school’s iPhones are meant to create a mobile information network between students and professors, but they are also a convenient way for the teachers to take attendance in class.
As students enter the room, instead of writing their name on a sheet, they simply type in their ID number and a specific class number into an iPhone application.
To prevent students from logging in from home or outside class, the application uses GPS location data and checks which router the students have logged in to…
“With Japanese cellphones it’s possible that the location data is automatically sent. However, with the iPhone, you must always confirm before the GPS data can be sent,” Yasuhiro Iijima said…
“Up until now, we’ve been using little slips of paper to take attendance. But with a cell phone, you don’t have to spend time collecting all of those and so I think it’s quite nice,” 20-year-old student Yuki Maruya.
Bet the App Store gets some use, too.
Churchgoing Americans most likely to be in favor of torture
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations — such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians — categorized as “mainline” Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.
Is anyone surprised? The question is about believing in hate as much or more than love, retribution as much or more than forgiveness, bigotry over understanding and knowledge – every day of the week. It’s as American as mom and apple pie.
