new seven wonders of the world

Editorial from the Philippine Panorama- July 15, 2007




Christ the Redeemer



Great Wall of China


Roman Colosseum


Petra


Macchu Picchu


Taj Mahal


Chichen Itza


Two thousand years on, the Seven Wonders of the World are chosen again- this time through a global poll.

The Original Seven Wonders were chosen by Antipater of Sidon, who drew on the authority of such learned travellers as Herodotus and Callimachus. The list included the Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and were found only around the Mediterranean, the limits of the Western World.

Four Wonders were destroyed in earthquakes and two in fires. Few can list them today. To find their modern successors, 21 finalists were drawn up from submissions.

The winning list wad revealed in Lisbon, Portugal, on Saturday, July 7. The ranking of the top seven wonders is kept secret.

The Great Wall of China, Rome’s Colosseum, India’s Taj Mahal, Peru’s Macchu Picchu, Brazil’s Statue of Christ the Redeemer, and Mexico’s Chichen Itza pyramid were among the new Seven Wonders of the World chosen. Jordan’s Petra was the seventh winner.

About 100 million votes were cast by the Internet and cell phone text messages, said New7Wonders, the nonprofit organization that conducted the poll.

The seven beat out 14 other nominated landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island in the Pacific, the Statue of Liberty, the Acropolis, Russia’s Kremlin, and Australia’s Sydney Opera House.

The Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, were assured of retaining their status in addition to the new seven after indignant Egyptian officials said it was a disgrace they had to complete.

The campaign to name new wonders was launched in 1999 by the Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. Almost 200 nominations came in, and the list was narrowed to the 21 most-voted by the start of 2006. Organizers admit there was no foolproof way to prevent people from voting more than once for their favorite.

A Peruvian in national costume held up Macchu Picchu’s award to the sky and bowed to the crowd with his hands clasped, eliciting one of the biggest cheers from the audience of 50,000 people at a soccer stadium in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon.

Many jeered when the Statue of Liberty was announced as one of the candidates. Portugal was widely opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Another Swiss adventurer, Bertrand Piccard, pilot of the first hot-air balloon to fly nonstop around the world, announced one of the winners- then launched into an appeal for people to combat climate change and stand up for human rights before being ushered off the stage.

The Colosseum, the Great Wall, Macchu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, and Petra had been among the leading candidates since January, while the Statue of Christ Redeemer received a surge in votes more recently.

The Statue of Liberty and Australia’s Sydney Opera House were near the bottom of the list from the start.

Also among the losing candidates were Cambodia’s Angkor Watt, Spain’s Alhambra, Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, Japan’s Kiyomizu Temple, Russia’s Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle, Britain’s Stonehenge, and Mali’s Timbuktu.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria have all vanished.

Weber’s Switzerland-based foundation aims to promote cultural diversity by supporting, preserving, and restoring monuments. It relies on private donations and revenues will be used to fund restoration efforts worldwide, including recreating the Bamiyan Buddha statue in Afghanistan.

The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also keeps a list of World Heritage Sites, which now totals 851 monuments.

With these new set of Seven Wonders of the World, we will have new global cultural icons to treasure and admire in the next century or so.

For future financial analysts and accountants

Five Basic Investments Types
from the book Learn to Earn by Peter Lynch

1. Savings Accounts, Money-Market Funds, Treasury Bills and Certificates of Deposits. – All of the above are known as short-term investments. They pay you interest while getting your money back in a relatively short time. In savings accounts, T-Bills and CDs , your money is insured against losses , so you’re guaranteed to get it back. But short term investments pay you a low rate of interest. Sometimes the interest can’t keep up with inflation. Inflation is a fancy way of saying that prices of things are going up and your buying power is going down.

The first goal of savings and investment is to keep ahead of inflation. If your bank savings account is paying you 2% interest per year and you see in the newspaper that inflation rate now is 3% , this means your savings account is not a good investment and maybe a losing proposition. Then you have to pay the government taxes for 20% of your earned interest per year. Meaning if your savings account earned you Php 100.00 per year, the government will take Php 20.00 as tax payment. This is the problem with leaving money in a bank or savings account. The money is safe in the short run, because it is insured , but in the long run, it’s likely to lose ground against taxes and inflation. Here’s a tip – when the inflation rate is higher than the interest rate your’re getting , you’re investing in a lost cause.

Savings accounts are great places to park your money so you can get at it quickly, whenever you need to pay bills. They are great to store cash until you’ve got a big enough pile to invest elsewhere. But over long periods of time, they won’t do you much good.

2. Collectibles – Can be anything from antique cars to stamps, old coins, baseball cards, paintings, furnitures, vase, or Barbie dolls. When you invest your money in such things, you are hoping to sell them at a profit in the future. The trouble with investing in things is they can get lost, stolen, warped, stained, ripped or damaged by fire, water, wind. There is insurance for some of this, but is expensive.

Collecting is a very specialized business, and successful collectors are experts not only in the items they collect , but also in the market and the prices. There’s a lot to learn. Some of it you can pick up from books or the internet and the rest you get the hard way , by experience.

3. Houses or Apartments - Buying a house or an apartment is the most profitable purchase most people ever make. A house has two big advantages over other types of investments. You can live in it while you wait for the price to go up, and you buy it on borrowed money. Houses have a habit of increasing in value at the same rate as inflation. On that score, you’re breaking even. Buy you don’t pay for the house all at once. Usually you pay only the 20% downpayment and the borrow the 80% from the bank. You can then sell the house later , usually on a 3 or 4 times the original value after your loan has been fully paid.

4. Bonds – A bond is a glorified IOU ( I owe you ). It’s printed on fancy paper with doodles around the border and artwork at the top, but its purpose is no different from the purpose of the IOU that’s written on a piece of table napkin. It’s a record of the fact that you’ve loaned your money to somebody else. It shows the amount of the loan and when you should pay it back plus the fixed interest the borrower has to pay.

The seller of the bond , also called the issuer, is borrowing your money, and the bond is the proof that the deal happened. The government is usually the seller of bonds, but other businesses can sell as well. T-bills and CD’s are similar to bonds, the only difference is the length of time to get the payment. Usually bonds take longer times or has longer maturity periods than T-bills or CD’s. There are risks in buying bonds because if the company or business who issued the bond went bankrupt, you won’t know if you can still get your money back. It is safer to buy bonds issued by the government, because the government will never go bankrupt, it can print more money whenever it wants to pay you.

5. Stocks – are shares sold by a company that goes public. A “public”company is owned by the shareholders while a “private” company is usually owned by a small number of individuals or a family owned company. Stocks are used to increase the company capitalization to be able to produce more services and products . You don’t have to be millionaires to invest in one. Anybody can be a shareholder as long as you have the money to buy the stocks: teachers, bus drivers, doctors, carpenters, students etc. They don’t care about your religion, race, nationality , social status, academic achievements , etc. The playing field is levelled here for all those who have the capacity to buy.

Stocks are likely to be the best investment you’ll ever make, outside of a house. You don’t have to feed stock, the way you do if you invest in horses or prize cats. It does not break down the way a car does, nor does it leak the way a house can. You don’t have to keep it moved the way you do it with real state. You can lose a baseball card collection to fire or theft but you can’t lose a stock. You can lose the certificate that proves you own a stock but the company will send you another one.

When you buy a bond, you are making a loan, but if you invest in a stock, you are buying a piece of the company. If the company prospers, you will share in the prosperity. If it pays dividends, you will receive it and if it raises the dividends, you will reap the benefits.

Buying stocks is not similar to gambling . When people consistently lose money in stocks, it’s not the fault of the stocks. You just need to do your homework and have a plan if you want to invest in stocks. Due diligence is needed, to study the financial status of the company you want to invest in and because they are a public company, financial records are publicly available , in the internet in publications, in company offices. You don’t need to be a math wiz to be a successful investor in stocks. You don’t need to be an accountant although the basics of accounting may help.

If you want to have a better financial future , long term stock investment is the best thing to do. Ten, fifteen or twenty years is a good time frame. Buy shares in solid companies with earning power and don’t let go of them without a good reason. The stock market usually goes up and down , but stocks in general goes up in value over time. You would be surprised to know that your P10,000 stocks investment now will have multiplied in a much higher value 10,15, 20 years from now.

Why State Universities?

OUR oldest government tertiary institutions are the Philippine Normal School and the Manila Trade School (now the Technological University of the Philippines), both established in 1901. The Manila Business School (now the Polytechnic University of the Philippines) was established in 1904. The University of the Philippines was actually a latecomer, starting out as the American University of the Philippines in 1908.

It took years to build up a nationwide network of public tertiary educational institutions that were seen as the best in the country. Yet today, we see the quality of these schools deteriorating, as national and provincial governments cut back on their budgets.

This trend runs counter to what’s happening elsewhere. Even in this era of privatization, most countries in the world continue to emphasize public education, with substantial government subsidies, so their state universities have continued to improve, and are climbing up to join the ranks of the world’s best.

In future columns, I’m going to write more about different models for state universities, including corporatization, but today I wanted to run through three main reasons why our government needs to reverse the trend of abandoning public tertiary education.

Fairness

The main and overarching reason we need public education is fairness. Even in developed countries, there will always be families that need subsidized education. When it comes to tertiary education, it’s not just a matter of taking in “bright but deserving” students. State universities should be giving a chance to those who thrive in the most adverse of conditions, and who would be better suited for that than those who come from disadvantaged families? These survivors of hardship are bound to become the trailblazers and innovators.

This takes us to the second reason we need public education: niche courses that encourage alternative thinking. Because private schools need to make money, they tend to cater to short-term market demands. That’s why we have all these private schools offering computer courses (or facsimiles thereof) and why some of these computer schools are also now offering nursing.

State-run universities are there to transcend those flavors of the month, anticipating long-term needs for the country. Singapore, for example, identified biotechnology many years ago as an opportunity for national development, and developed this field in its state universities. All that foresight is paying off now with a corps of Singaporean experts as well as expatriates they’ve been able to lure in to develop the country’s biotechnology industry.

I’m not just talking about high-tech courses. The University of the Philippines, for example, is the only university in the country that offers the full complement of social sciences: anthropology, sociology, geography, history, political science, linguistics and demography, with philosophy thrown into the deal. The social sciences and the humanities are there to excite students about new worlds, new ways of thinking, so that we produce scientists rather than just technicians.

We forget, too, that the bulk of our elementary and high school teachers come from public educational institutions, led by the Philippine Normal University. Private universities tend to concentrate on graduate education courses, for which people are willing to pay as a way toward promotion, but it’s the public normal schools that provide much of the basic training for teachers. As government cuts back on the budgets of these teacher training schools, it’s not surprising to see the entire educational system deteriorating.

Non-sectarian

One last reason we need state universities is the non-sectarian education that these institutions offer. Under the Spaniards, we only had schools operated by Catholic religious orders. The Americans came in and established the Manila Trade School, the Manila Business School and the Philippine Normal School, all essentially vocational institutions to fast-track the development of civil servants, office workers and technicians.

The American University of the Philippines offered higher education courses, such as medicine, but it was still set up around a colonial agenda, a need to produce Filipinos who, they thought, could best implement the United States’ blueprint for the Philippines. To a large extent, the Americans succeeded, yet, precisely because all these institutions were non-sectarian, they were hot houses that produced the shakers and movers who would dare to agitate for independence and, later, the activists and leaders who would challenge corruption and dictatorships.

It all boils down to issues of fairness and equity. The state schools’ subsidized tuition should allow poorer families access to quality education, but it is also the state schools’ independence from government interference that allows for a safe and nurturing environment for inquisitive and innovating minds. In the long run, the benefits aren’t just for individual households, but for the nation as a whole, as Filipinos acquire a fighting chance to chart our own development course, rather than following the whims and priorities of other nations.

Originally posted at www.inquirer.net
PINOY KASI, Inquirer
Published on Page A13 of the November 3, 2006 issue of PDI