Oddity Central

Oddity Central

Bizarre Anti-Cheating Paper Hats Spark Controversy in Thailand

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 04:51 AM PDT

A photo showing students of a renowned Bangkok university wearing strange headgear complete with side flaps to thwart cheating during a midterm exam caused quite a stir after it was uploaded to Facebook as a joke.

Teachers at Kasetsart University in Thailand have recently come under fire for making their students wear horse blinder-like devices made of paper to prevent them from cheating on their exams. A photo showing around 100 students wearing the rudimentary anti-cheating hats was recently posted on Facebook by the KU student board, where it got so many negative reactions that it was eventually removed. Unfortunately for the Thai learning institution the photo had already been picked up by the media and the negative responses just kept on coming. However, it appears the students were not pressured into wearing the paper blinders, in fact they were the one who suggested it. ''It was an agreement between us. No student was forced to wear a hat. Instead, all were happy to do so and thought it was fun. They felt more relaxed during the test,'' Nattadon Rungruangkitkrai, a lecturer at Kasetsart University, said during in a press conference.

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Talented Young Artist Paints with Used Coffee Grounds

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 03:09 AM PDT

21-year-old Vincent Francisco Navarro, from Baguio City, Philippines, is an emerging visual artist who uses ground coffee as the main medium of his art. He collects used coffee grounds and recycles them as paint, thus giving the waste product new value and purpose through aesthetics.

The city of Baguio produces around 300 tons of garbage every day, and authorities are still looking for environment-friendly ways of storing and disposing of the waste. Local artist and environmentalist Vincent Navarro decided to do his part by proving recycling can be of great help against the build-up of garbage in an ingenious way. After doing extensive research he started exploring the possibility of creating beautiful works of art with coffee grounds collected from a large gourmet coffee chain. He spent ten months creating portraits of coffee farmers from the Benguet region of the Philippines, using nothing but coffee and used grounds. Inspired by the months his spent as a volunteer aiding coffee farmers in Benguet and Cordillera, Navarro created his works as tributes to the “toil and sweat” these hard-working people put into growing “the best-tasting and rich coffee beans”.

Coffee Farmer 10

The Tapeworm Diet – Ingesting Dangerous Parasites to Lose Weight

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 01:38 AM PDT

The things people will do to shed a few unwanted pounds. A woman from Iowa has reportedly swallowed a tapeworm she bought from the internet in order to drop a few pounds, thus proving the tapeworm diet is more than a myth.

You can buy a lot of crazy things online these days, and apparently the tapeworm is one of them. Back in 2009, reports surfaced that dieters in Hong Kong were ingesting giant intestinal roundworm eggs in a desperate attempt to lose weight, and according to a number of sources, tapeworm pills are legally available at a number of clinics in mexico. The tapeworm diet is officially banned in countries like the U.S. and Britain, but as a recent case revealed by Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, the medical director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, proves, that doesn’t mean it’s not still practiced by extreme dieters. According to Today.com, a woman from Iowa went to her doctor and told him she had bought a tapeworm pill from the internet and swallowed it to lose weight. Unsure of what to do in such a situation, the physician contacted the state's public health department for advice. In her weekly email to state public health workers, Dr. Quinlisk provided a treatment option and talked about the dangers of this bizarre practice.

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