At Home: Demand rises for Canadian-made shelters in Haiti
When last year’s crisis hit the auto industry, the owners of Canadian company Ground Effects Ltd. had to shift gears to stay in business. They slowly began making modular shelters alongside the auto parts they’d been producing for nearly 25 years.
As the CBC reports, the company had already ?sent test units to Haiti to serve as school classrooms and residences? before the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January 12.
Following the massive quake, all eight of the company’s pre-fabricated shelters were still intact. Now the shelters are in high demand, with aid organizations placing urgent orders for them.
James Scott, president of Ground Effects, told reporters that one of the benefits of the shelters is that no power tools are needed to erect them. That makes the shelters especially well-suited to the conditions faced in Port-au-Prince, where it may be weeks before essential services are fully restored.
Scott explained to the CBC that ?a lot of it goes together with wing nuts on the interior of the unit, so really you can do things by hand, for the most part.?
Demand will likely continue as Haiti slowly rebuilds but the need is especially high right now, with aid agencies requesting at least 400 shelters a week, ?to be used for housing, hospitals, offices and schools.?
In Foreign News: More students using cell phones to cheat on SQA exams
Most students find cell phones and the Internet can be valuable resources for studying. But figures released by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) show that rising numbers of students in Scotland are also using those tools to cheat on exams.
As the BBC reports, there was a 22 per cent overall rise from 2008 to 2009 in students caught cheating on exams. Incidents of cheating include things like students exchanging information or using crib sheets, but cases involving mobile phones, some with Internet capability, have ?more than doubled.? They rose from 49 in 2008 to 113 last year.
In 2009, some 160,000 candidates took National Qualification tests. Of those, 506 were investigated for cheating and penalties were ?applied to 314 candidates.? Penalties can range from a failing mark on individual exams to being disqualified from all further exams.
All students are warned prior to taking exams of the consequences of cheating, and Dr. Janet Brown, Chief Executive of the Scottish Qualifications Authority, told reporters that the numbers need to be kept in perspective. ?If you look at the percentage rises, yes it sounds a lot, but the numbers that are cheating are very low and I think we need to understand how we can prepare pupils better for examinations,? she said.