This week President Ma Ying-jeou announced a plan to relax terms for low interest loans for college students under financial stress. The new plan, which seems wise and fair, could go into effect as early as February.

A couple months ago (on June 20, to be exact), in a column entitled “Graduates speak of college experience highs and lows,” I promised to one day share advice that a group of soon-to-graduate seniors gave me last spring for freshmen entering Taiwan's universities in the fall of 2011.

The WikiLeaks release this week revealing President Ma Ying-jeou's personal feelings toward a pair of older political rivals in the Kuomintang (KMT) was not, of course, at all surprising. “Well, sure,” many observers must have yawned.

Habits, we can easily observe, are both blessings and curses in our lives. Some of our habits are good for us (eating wisely and brushing our teeth), and some are not so good (abuse of alcohol, laziness, and so on).

I am as human as everyone else, and so took an interest this week in the racy headlines that 30-year-old military officer Major Fan Chun-chen attracted because of photographs she first posted on her personal blog, and then removed under pressure from authorities.

Is there any connection at all between the following front page headline in The China Post this week, “Britain must reverse its 'moral collapse': Cameron” (8-16-11) and the one that appeared two days later, also in this newspaper, “Twenty place bids to have sex with child, 9” (8-13-11, p. 16).

In the midst of a talk on friendship ethics a week ago, I paused and groped for an example to illustrate a point about what some of us call “the principle of autonomy.”

I thought I was doomed to be the last one forever, but I was wrong.You see, I am 100 percent certain that I was the last one among my department colleagues to learn how to use e-mail.

I hesitate to comment on the horrific mass murder that claimed the lives of some 80 people last week in Norway because I sense that to say anything at all is to run the risk of trivializing this singularly enormous and incomprehensible tragedy.

Oh me, oh my, will these words today simply wind up as a foolhardy and faulty comparison of apples and oranges? Let's hope not.