The Cost of University Education Around the World

All night long news has been blaring on CNN and BBC about the massive student protest going on near the Parliament in London with university students protesting the 300% hike in their tuition fees. I know I'm supposed to be doing research (which I am, actually, chapter by chapter) right now, but I'm verily tempted to look at how much a university education actually costs in other parts of the world.


(all calculations are for undergraduate tuition fees alone and does not cover other expenses; calculated for one year)


The Annual Cost of University Tuition in the Philippines: 

between PhP 700 (Polytechnic University of the Philippines) to PhP200,000 (University of Asia and the Pacific) per year...that's between $16 to $1,032  /year

University Tuition Fee in the United States:

from $876/year (Berea College in Berea, Kentucky) to $45,800/year (Landmark College in Putney, Vermont)

University Tuition Fee in the United Kingdom:

up to £3,290/year or $5,218/year

University Tuition in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Libya, Sri Lanka, Cuba and Venezuela:

Free! (libre!)

Of course, these are straight comparisons of numbers. Other factors like cost of living, annual income, and subsidies have to be considered...but I have to go back to my "real" research now. Lol.

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Getting This Blog Indexed...At Least Initially

I've noticed there's a couple of posts here already, so I guess this blog's decent (or, at least has some content) enough to merit being indexed in a search engine. No, I'm not talking about page rank and SEO and what have you...at least not yet. I'm talking about getting your blog indexed in the major search engines so that their creepy crawlers can start to trawl this site for content.

Submitting the Blog to Google
Okay...so there are actually 2 ways you can submit your blog to Google. First is through the "submit your site" option. This is how the page looks here:

It's pretty straightforward, actually. Just add the URL of your blog's home page and you're good to go.

The second way is through Blog Search, a blog-only version of the standard Google search engine on its beta stage. You can read more about Google Blogs here. Anyway, the submission page is just as easy peasy as the first one:

I'm supposed to add this blog to Yahoo and Bing too, but I do have to go back to reading the 368-page research proposals I have to mine valuable data from... (yeah, I'm procrastinating from procrastinating, duh).

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Made It to the Factoidz Article Spotlight!

An article I recently just made it to the Article Spotlight feature of the Factoidz site!

The article is about the different endangered species and subspecies of bears in the world. You can read the entire article here.

I'm meaning to write a decent writeup/review of Factoidz. I'll post one as soon as I reach the one-month-old mark at the site :-)

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How to Boost Your Cell Phone Signal - Quick and Easy

I used to live in an apartment where the cell phone signal was just horrible. I missed a lot of calls, didn't get important texts, and had to go out to the other side of the street to get a signal. It got to the point where some friends thought that I was ignoring their texts on purpose. The problem got solved when a more tech-savvy (okay, and yeah, rich) neighbor got a repeater for their unit - and voila! signal problem fixed. Not everyone has the same luck though, so here's something you might want to try:

5 Quick Ways to Boost Cellphone Signal Reception

No, I'm not in any way related or connected to the person who wrote this piece. I just found it really really useful and worth blog-bookmarking (yeah that's what I'm doing right now) in case I'll need it later :-)

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Fabulous Twin Names

Okay, so I was playing the Sims 2 while doing research for an article I'm writing (yeah Sims is one of my fave no-brainer games...more on that later) and the mommy sim I was playing gave birth to twins! And a boy-girl pair at that! The appearance of the twins made me think about twin boy-girl names like Samson and Delilah, Pebbles and Bambam etc... turns out I'm not the only one who's nutty about naming twins! A site I looked into has nifty twin names, my fave among these:

Anna and The King
Asterix and Obelix
Bo and Peep
Chili and Pepper
Virgil and Dante
Domino and Dominique
Ginger and Nutmeg
Harlequin and Pierrot

...and the list goes on. Here's a snapshot of mommy sim and bro sim with the twins just after mommy gave birth:

 Guess what names I picked for the twins? ;-) (Leave me note here if you really really want to know)

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Organizing Links in Blogger

I should be writing articles for this week's deadline...but I can't help tweaking this blog a little bit more. Now that the blog is up, I've made up my mind to fix the labels first before a-posting. I miss the 'categories' in old blogger, especially since the default label system has only one directory level. Turns out there is a tweak to making two-level directories for categorizing labels. Here's how I did mine:

[Read more]

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Leftover Pork Binagoongan (Pork with Shrimp Paste) Recipe

My aunt's coming over later, and I want to cook something special for her. I only have a half-full jar of bagoong I bought a few months ago, a piece of leftover breaded pork from last night, a few veggies (eggplant, sitaw or string beans, a lone tomato), and week-old frozen gata (coconut milk). The solution? Pork binagoongan.

I've never really tried cooking this particular dish before, but it's one of those viands I often buy when I'm eating carinderia (small food stall full of the sweet goodness of home cooking)-style. Here's how I made mine:

1. Add about a teaspoon cooking oil in a heated shallow pan. Add chopped onions (1 medium sized) and garlic (about 3-4 cloves). Add a bit of salt and pepper to get the seasoning started.
2. Add sliced tomatoes and bell pepper to the pan after the garlic has become slightly brown. Saute until the tomatoes start to become slightly more red (a minute or two will do)
3. Add cubed pork slices to the pan. Since I used previously cooked leftover pork, I didn't need to saute this for long. Add vegetables, starting with the ones that cook longer first (in this case, string beans). Mix a bit then cover and let sit for 5 minutes or until everything's decently half cooked.
4. Add the bagoong or shrimp paste. Mix well.
5. Add the coconut milk. Mix well until the milk boils a bit.
6. Lower the flame, add a chilli or two, then mix one last time before turning off the fire.

Voila! Leftver pork binagoongan done. My aunt actually liked the dish, and I didn't even tell her it's from leftovers lol. For pictures and more decent step-by-step instructions to making pork binagoongan, go here.

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Welcome to my Blog!

Welcome to my brand-new blog. Like the template? I had a blast (and spent a few hours) going through free CSS templates courtesy of BloggerStyles, BloggerTemplatesFree, BTemplates and FreeCSSTemplates.org. Shoutouts to BloggerStyles for this beautiful layout!

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