caustic.soda

caustic.soda is moving!

2004-12-18T02:00:00.000-06:00

yes, it has finally happened. i have become sick and tired of blogger's limitations and am graduating to my own customized blog!

new address: http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~chen6/blog/

check out the new site and update your links. once the data migration is complete and the dust has settled, new content will be unlikely to appear on this site in the near future.

feedback appreciated, as always. registration much appreciated for leaving comments. you have my word as the sole administrator that you will not be signed up for junk beyond your wildest dreams. (as if reading my site doesn't do enough to satisfy your appetite for garbage in the first place.)

another quote: why do science?

2004-12-17T13:50:00.000-06:00

'But why are such terrific efforts made just to find new particles?' asked Mr Tompkins.

'Well, this is science,' replied the professor, 'the attempt of the human mind to understand everything around us, be it giant stellar galaxies, microscopic bacteria, or these elementary particles. It is interesting and exciting and that is why we are doing it.'

'But doesn't the development of science serve practical purposes by improving the comfort and well being of poeple?'

'Of course it does, but this is only a secondary purpose. Do you think that the main purpose of music is to teach buglers to waken soldiers in the morning, to call them for meals, or to order them to go into battle? They say "curiosity kills the cat"; I say "Curiosity makes a scientist".'

And with these words the professor wished Mr Tompkins a good night.

- George Gamow, Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom, closing words.

google grows

2004-12-14T20:51:00.000-06:00

a break from the grind of finals (the first two didn't go too well... *sigh*) to bring you a piece of breaking news, from our favorite search engine:

link: Google/U-M project opens the way to universal access to information

blurb:

"ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Google and the University of Michigan today (Tuesday) announced a joint agreement that will add the 7 million volumes in the U-M library to the Google search engine and open the way to universal access to information."

other participants: harvard, new york public library, oxford, stanford.

link: googleblog

the mind boggles at the possibilities.

people i want to rot in hell

2004-12-06T10:12:00.000-06:00

i was going to sign off and head to class, but then another sti article made my blood boil:

link: 3 wooden tables, a deck of cards and a wake: That's all it takes for operators to organise an illegal gambling session - Tanya Fong

how dare these gamblers take advantage of a grieving family! it's tough enough to lose a family member, but to be taken advantage of during their time of grief and made accessory to a crime?! i hope the police round up all these wanton animal bastards. and this is one thing that neighbours most certainly should not remain silent about, either! whatever happened to good old civil action?

call me old-fashioned, but imho, the most sacrosant rites of any society are weddings and funerals, for they are literally matters of life and death. prostituting a wake for a gambling site is as immoral as to spit on headstones or kicking the ashes of offerings. and offering cash to the bereaved is just offensive: how dare gambling operatives capitalize on emotional distress and a time of irrational decision-making,? tempting a person when s/he is down is rubbing salt into a festering wound. can a measly $300 a night make up for the loss of a loved one, really? what kind of complications does that throw into the recovery process of the grieving?

and what next, mahjong-for-profit in the reception lounge outside a wedding dinner? why not just let people play texas poker in church as the bride walks down the aisle? is that any less unforgiveable?

wtf is st thinking?

2004-12-06T08:32:00.000-06:00

woke up really early this morning (7) so here's a short grumble on something i read on st (yes i still read the party rag, if not for anything but comic relief and to rag it). a good laugh in the morning goes well with a belgian hazelnut latte and homemade stirfried chow mein (not the abhorrent bastardized american/north chinese version) in the morning. (oh, for tze char and nasi lemak at dawn again!)

i just love how every time i log in, i manage to see an advertisement for green card lottery programs. isn't it just hilarious to see nation-building articles side by side with ads like this one?

anyway, onward to the two articles that caught my eye this morning, one trivial, one depressing:

link: Many ditching cabs and buses for trains - Christopher Tan

Many Singaporeans are abandoning cabs and buses in favour of trains, statistics from the Land Transport Authority (LTA) reveal... Associate Professor K. Raguraman of the Centre for Transportation Research, a think-tank at the National University of Singapore, was not entirely surprised at the figures.

'As Singapore expands its rail network, train ridership will rise,' he said. 'And it has been government policy that wherever a rail service is built, there should not be any duplication from buses.'

duh, since sbs practically ripped out all the long-haul routes in the northeast, who'd be surprised? and just what are the figures for the nel anyway? last i heard, it was making staggering losses. a classic example of keynesian policy gone wrong: government intervention without even letting the market decide which (buses v. trains) is the more economically viable solution. of course, given the massive investment needed to realize the nel, advocates of big government can well align themselves with sbs' point of view.

link: Make small S'pore 'a great nation' - Laurel Teo

In this the party was doing well, said Mr Lee, though he squashed election rumours by stressing he would not be calling for one soon.

this sentence is a classic example of ho-hum english borne out of computerized spelling checks without the good-ol' eyeball scan. correct me if i'm wrong, but the phrased usually employed is to "quash... rumours", not to squash them. it's ok english, but just because it passes the computer doesn't mean it's bene. what on earth are the editors paid for? if st wants to be the the times of the country, it should jolly well set the standard for good english!

and more than one primary schoolkid can point out the grammatical mistake here. sigh, how can one be the leader of a country and not speak its language perfectly? i was thinking of queen elizabeth ii and the queen's english, but then just as i finished the sentence, george w. came to mind. bushisms can be just as endearing, in their quaint way.

'I can tell you we have invited a lot people to tea, we've drunk a lot of tea, and we've got some promising names, and I think when we call the election - not soon - but when we call the election, you can be sure we're going to field a strong team.'
-- MR LEE

then there's the perennial complaint about the not-here-not-there faux anglais rojak of singlish, brit and american pronunciation that newcasters in general tend to exhibit. (cunning linguists call it acrolectal singlish.) watch the channel i video to get hear i mean. (note the missing article in the caption.) watch out for poik-nent coverage of the rally. also look out for the incredulous "POTONG PASIR WANTS PAP" banner - wtf? are they sick of being passed over for upgrading time and time again? they don't want to pay less than $2.50 for their old-fashioned good and cheap tze char?

'I invite you to contribute your ideas, put up alternatives, debate national issues, take part. But don't just talk. Don't be a Nato - No Action Talk Only. Do something, participate in building our nation, strive for what you believe in.'
-- MR LEE, drawing laughter with his reference to the oft-heard pun on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

and then there's the belaboring tendency of singaporean writers to spell out acronyms in painfully correct detail. it's one thing if the acronym is rare, but seriously, who doesn't know the nato nato? it's another thing to be talking about the national association of theater owners, or the nastily abhorrent tendency to obfuscate.

In his speech, Mr Lee outlined a vision of a PAP-led Singapore as a land of opportunity, with each person treated fairly, rewarded according to his effort and ability, and allowed to realise his full potential... And even as the party must evolve with the times, he made clear that there were fundamentals that 'are absolutely permanent for us': multiracialism, meritocracy and absolute integrity.

ok, now for more substantial musings, rather than just holier-than-thou my-english-more-powderfuller-than-yours bitching. lhl has thrown down the gauntlet and i will make my statement. will you consider the words of an ex-scholar, one who used to be one of you, and now has chosen not to be? or will you dismiss yet another dissenting opinion as more angst-ridden claptrap of the demographic of the discontented young?

for singaporeans considering politics, consider: can we make small singapore a great nation without the pap? the pap has reaffirmed its acclamation to outmoded ideals. since these no longer seem feasible in 21^st century singapore, we are hence forced to consider the alternative future without our current ruling party.

why i think the pap is bad for the country: the pap may be forever staffed with meritocrats, but meritocracy with state-mandated opportunities (let's face it, even the private sector is heavily regulated) degenerates into a travesty of the ideal and more the youngian dystopia of 1958. without opportunity, there can be no hero generation. how many singapore idols can a nation generate without singapore idol? won't they just rot in karaoke lounges for life, thinking that they are no good lazy bums because singing is what they enjoy and not some wholesome career like law, medicine, engineering or (shock) 'life sciences'? and with this glaring counterexample aside, how many other truly independent avenues of opportunity exist in singapore?

meritocracy is not the only flawed ideal: absolute integrity is also a whole crapload of nonsense. ns-goers know jolly well the rampant pseudo-corruption that goes on in the saf. how can we be convinced that the same is not occurring all over the civil service? the pap's solution to this has been simple, if machiavellian: close one eye and pretend that singapore is corruption-free, then act all shocked to discover someone foolish enough to be caught in the act and make an example out of the perpetrator to stem the inevitable outrage of the brainwashed; then to breathe a sigh of relief that their tenacious illusion didn't collapse all over singapore.

and while multiracialism is one of the few things that singapore seems to be doing right, it isn't going far enough. how much indian culture do we the chinese majority know, for example? not much, going by how so many people lump all the dark-skinned people into the mental category 'indian', without nary a thought as to linguistic subdivisions (punjabi, tamil, native hindi, urdu, malayalam, etc.) and such, except the much-teased babu sengs. and who among us knows at least one difference between bahasa indonesia and bahasa melayu? for shame, we claim to be a multiracial nation, but the specter of raffles's divide-and-conquer administration still permeates our social fabric. multiculturalism must be the next step up, and if there's one thing singapore is getting the right idea about, it's to promote intercultural awareness and participation.

on the other hand, all the common hari raya celebrations won't make much of an impact without airing the uncomfortable prejudices ingrained from the past. how many of us have heard our old-fashioned mothers or grandmothers chastise us not to mix with 'those dirty indians', or to be good 'or else the babu seng will catch you to sell later?' no doubt many of us dismiss such old notions as quaint at best, but many darker undercurrents still lie beneath the superficial chitchat. how else can we explain the subtle yet stubborn mental barrier that few of us traverse, to have true friends from other races, rather than just social pals or transient army buddies?

the problem with singapore is that she is in too many ways a young and brash nation, wanting to be everything, but largely unaware of her own shortcomings. turning a blind eye to her faults has been her trademark, from everything to social inequity to censorship to depoliticization (is that a word, even?) à la lky. she runs her own mini-experiments, giving them barely enough leeway to run, see them struggle to semi-fruition, then boasts to the world that she is a genius for having made it, despite having just one successful trial run. but to progress from where she is now, she has to come to terms with her darker side, the face that lies beneath the pasty-white saccharine-sweet façade that few thinking citizens buy, if any. and for crying out loud, she must wake up to the harsh reality of the world, and not remain cocooned in her newly pre-independent birth.

and most importantly, singapore has to be willing to take criticism - even just plain old dissenting views - and take it constructively. singapore sure as hell isn't prepared for that anytime in the foreseeable future - just look at the knee-jerk not-my-fault how-can-you-possibly-blame-me mentality of our top civil serpents. self-criticism, the bitterest medicine for one in denial, is also desperately in need. she must be her own toughest critic, which means not just more rhetoric and claptrap over sacred cows, but actually exhuming skeletons in closets, subjecting them to the scrutiny that befits archaeologists and analytical scientists, not bo-chup-as-long-as-it-works engineers. she must admit to the world that yes she are flawed, but she is really trying to improve. and why don't the rest of the world try to chip in and help out by the way, she will promise not to condescend anymore.

in short, we as a country must grow up. only then can we rightly claim to be a developed country. only in redressing our limitations can we aspire to have a future at all.

i'm alive (barely)

2004-12-05T23:07:00.000-06:00

just a note to say hi, and that no, i'm not dead (yet), and that it's really hard to pick up momentum for schoolwork right after thanksgiving break, and that some teachers are just so anal about doing work during the holidays, it's not funny, and that finals are next week so i probably won't be updating until mid-month. but yeah there are some really important things that happened this week:

i caved in to popular pressure and got a facebook account. i discovered that i have more friends in other us universities than in my alma mater. i just hopeit's because the local chapter was a recent addition.
i discovered that limes left in a fridge that was turned off for over a week grow mouldy quickly and emanate a sickly caustic smell that takes about 12 hours to cycle out of the compartment when the fridge is on.
i joined a research group. some people would go, "huh? what's up with that?" but fellow science readers may be able to appreciate the significance of this act. joining a good research group is quite literally the most important event of graduate life. it was incredibly painful, having to choose between several excellent choices, but talking to various faculty back and forth led me to converge slowly toward my final answer.

got a whole bunch of links to blog but don't feel like it now. (gee, i'm procrastinating on my rec time?!)

eBay item 5541269507

2004-12-04T23:42:00.000-06:00

A woman grieving over her father's death creatively assuages her son's fears over grandfather's ghost haunting him by selling the ghost off on eBay:

eBay item 5541269507 (Ends Dec-11-04 20:28:30 PST) - GRANDFATHER'S GHOST - PLEASE HELP !!

meritocracy : mer-egalitarianism

2004-11-27T17:43:00.000-06:00

"Merlimau is a species of tree, Gelonium spp, also known as the false lime. ‘Limau’ itself means ‘lime’ in Malay and the the prefix ‘mer’ suggests that its fruits are similar, but not identical to lime. In other words, an impostor tree, a pretender." - Alfian bin S.

'When I read of another premier junior college moving into their new "sprawling 8.6ha campus in Bishan" with a new "buffet-style A-level curriculum" being offered to their top-scoring O-level students, I cannot help but think of my daughter's school, whose new premises has been delayed indefinitely because their contractor went bust, and her small pool of special teachers who are stretched, like butter over too much bread, trying to cater to as many special kids as they can.' - mr.brown

'Not so long ago, an important member of India's federal cabinet took me aside and asked why was it that Singaporeans were racist. I was floored by the question, which the official asked in all earnestness. In his long career dealing with ethnicities and communities all over the world, he said, he had never quite encountered the sheer arrogance and hubris demonstrated by Singaporeans.

"They think that they know it all," he said, noting the absurdity of a nation of four million people taking on a country of 1.2 billion people. "Even a minor Singaporean official will talk down to someone as senior as me."' - Pranay Gupte

"Singapore will get all the white trash it wants. Yes, it will get all the brown trash it wants. Anything's better than living in villages without electricity. But it's going to have problems getting the brown sahibs it needs." - quoted by Pranay Gupte.

“so it IS a case of racism, in a way -- the common singaporean assumption that the west is the final word on quality.”

post coming soon. i promise.

anus constriction meme-to-be?

2004-11-27T17:34:00.000-06:00

the reviews on amazon.com are pretty damn funny.

(click on the book)

t2l: black friday's backward phase

2004-11-27T02:11:00.000-06:00

no pictures for today, sorry. retroblogged posts to appear soon, i promise.

woke up this morning at five to walk to downtown crossing. sneaked out while the others were sleeping again; i felt that sleep had to take second stage to snooping around more of greater boston. i discussed the idea with a few people yesterday and i thought that it would be immensely impractical for me to lug my baggage around downtown while jostling with fellow shoppers. (not to mention that the suitcase was also pretty darn full already!) however, i did miss filene’s basement on wednesday; everyone told me it was a legend not to be missed. after all, it was black friday, and who could resist the post-festive rush of consumerism that running around the shopping districts could provide?

the initial euphoria of exploratory zeal gave way to trepidation at the effectively subzero weather. it was all i could manage to walk across the charles, accompanied by the frosty morning chills in the early morning. i felt like an idiot, really, dodging patches of frost and the morning retinue of traffic to cross decades-old traffic junctions, trying to read a half-assed tourist map of boston from the concierge by the intermittent and surpringsly sparse street lighting of boston and cambridge. no, i couldn’t see by the dawn’s early light. (narrowly dodges pun-busting proton gun.)

i fumbled my way to the boston commons only by the sheer force of unreason: since i was idiotic enough to wake up so freaking early, i might as well make use of it. the less-than-spectacular black friday sales downtown were also rather put-offing. what was exciting to see, though, was the small but hyperenthusiatic band of elderly old women whom stoically stood (or sat on wheelchairs, as it were) at the storefront, chattering away excitedly amongst themselves. it seems like they belonged to some kind of a shopping club who prided themselves for getting the best bargains everywhere they went. ah, the pleasures of retirement. unsurprisingly, there wasn’t the hello-kitty-esque mad dash for the doors when the slightly chafed security guard finally opened the floodgates at 0602. instead, almost everyone else waited politely while the geriatric shoppers hobbled their way past the store gates before walking quickly but respectfully around them.

apart from the gentrified guests, there wasn’t much else that was really worth seeing. filene’s (not the basement) was offering a variable discount card to the early bird shopper who walked in before noon. i was idly curious so i scratched off the seal, knowing that i wasn’t going to buy anything anyway (the card said not to scratch it off until at the cashier); it was for 10%. i looked around the famed filene’s basement but didn’t see anything really interesting. disposable underwear at something like 6 cents a piece were mildly interesting, but not very practical, as far as i was concerned. no new umbrella from the cradle of america for me either.

made a quick trip to macy’s next door when their gates opened at 0655, along with a small band of similar-minded shoppers. (i suppose having their competitor across the street open an hour later was too much for them to consider waiting until the stipulated time.) i discovered to my amusement that the absurd seven-in-one multifunction lamp-compass-thermometer-alarm-siren-light-television frankenstein was on sale at 50% off! (did they honestly think that some camper lost in the woods just had to catch the last episode of the apprentice?) but having slaked my desire for macy’s goods on wednesday, i wasn’t too keen on spending too much time in the store. i did spot one or two items that were similar to what i had bought, but were a few dollars cheaper. (they upped the clearance rate from 65% off to 50% off, but it was 30% off storewide.) however i wasn’t that much of a shopper to have kept my receipts handy to be able to buy the discounted items and return the very same item using the older receipts to the store. (that was a useful-sounding tactic that i later learnt from her majesty the queen of shopping, while asking if she did do the rounds after all.)

by the time i took the t back to b u west at 0744, the ground floor of filene’s was swarming with shoppers. the stereotypical scenes of shoppers fighting over bric-a-bracs were beginning to manifest themselves. filene’s basement itself was also swarming with shoppers, particular over one particular women’s garment. ever seen a little old lady and a plump pompous woman fight over the last $3 large-cupped bra? each held one end of the elastic strap, steadfastly refusing to give way. epithets demanding respect for the elderly and virulent defenses for machiavellian kiasuism were hurled while other shoppers gamely thrust their arms behind the dueling duo to grab more brassieres. finally the corpulent one gave up, but only because the grand dame rapped her knuckles with her walking stick! oh, the melodrama of everyday life. this is what reality tv should be hankering after; women fighting over cheap bras! (i wonder if dirac could have made money selling them kets in bulk. ok, bad joke.)

i got back to the hotel via the shuttle just in time for me to shower, pack, and half-embarrassedly wake es to send me off to logan. but first i dropped by jl’s room in ashdown to pick up my luggage (finally!) and canter downstairs. es wanted me to pay the return toll but i had no cash, so i wrote him a cheque for three bucks. he was rather bemused but typically unabashed over the matter. had a chicken tarragon ficelle (a tiny baguette) with iced peach tea for breakfast at the au bon pain located inside the terminal. the chicken was very tasty, although more was more salty than fragrant; it was a flagrant insult to the aromatic powers of tarragon. boarded the plane and tried to write up the past days’ events but ended up sleeping instead. it's quite tempting when the rest of the plane seems similarly zonked out from the turkey-eating television marathons.

deplaned at midway earlier than expected at 1255 cst; took the l to quincy to get to the union station. met a fellow graduate student in biochemistry on the train and we had lunch together at union station before boarding the 391 illini at 1340. the rail staff were offensively jocular about the boarding: "move along now, you all didn't eat that much turkey yesterday." "walk off that turkey!" thankfully the fowl language died off as the two of us walked briskly to the champaign car. shared white rabbit sweets and some homemade arizonian chocolate fudge with pecans (yummy!). i was pretty surprised to see how she polished the fudge off by breaking off a piece and swallowing it whole. we discussed taiwanese culture on the way back and also took the green bus back afterward (she was taking the green west though). so much for working on the return trip!

met up with SpinGlass, sw and the usual mandarin wokkers for dinner. celebrated post-thanksgiving euphoria by watching fear factor (saw the all time grossest foods: horse rectum and pizza made with bovine bile, coagulated blood, mouldy cheese and topped with worms and fish eyes. not the best post-prandial show, imho.) and the rebel billionaire at his room. finally staggered home with all my paraphernalia at midnight to realize that the limes in my refrigerator had begun to mold, filling it with a fetid smell, and that my oldest (dessicated) apple had mysteriously disgested itself into a pulpy reddish-brown sphere. yech.

finished off today's post, finally. yay! sleep! ~zonks

thanksgiving 2004

2004-11-25T23:38:00.000-06:00

cs came on the early morning flight to logan, thus completing our roster of jc classmates. upon returning from the airport, he, together with jt and es, promptly fell asleep. (turned out that jl forgot my suitcase. argh!) i slept in since it wasn’t possible for all of us to fit in the car on the return journey. instead, i dropped by tl’s place near the hines convention center. the others were sound asleep; they had set the alarm for eleven. (they later admitted to leaving the room only at half-past one!) funnily enough, the hotel shuttle zoomed past ys, ww and pa on the way to the b u west t stop. (later, i discovered that they all stayed at tang hall, just next door to the hotel!) i later called them to advise them of my presence at the green line stop. it took them fifteen minutes (and me missing one train) to all meet up at the station. amazingly enough, the green line runs parallel to the road, with nothing but a shelter and a low concrete kerb separating the trains from the automotive traffic, and nothing but forty centimeters of tar and asphalt separating the shelter from the train tracks themselves.

the green line train that we boarded was a cute put-puttering thing with only three small cars that brought us to hines in less than ten minutes. after that, ww led the way to tl’s place, where tl, pl and roommate were all staying, but not before stopping by store 24 to pick up more drinks and snacks. i picked up mixed vegetable chips by snyder’s (of hanover), a pita bread snack, and a bag of new england dark russell chips, all of which turned out to be pretty nice. tl’s place was small but cozy, with the delicious smells of good food greeting the wet turkeys (us) that found the place in the midst of an incredibly sudden downpour. the brunch spread was pretty good, with chicken curry, lamb curry, and braised chicken, topped off with espresso chip ice cream. it was great fun talking to
everyone again, especially since i hadn’t seen tl since almost three years ago (discounting the coincidental meeting at kendall square two days before).

after 2.5 hours of riotous fun, i tagged along with ys as pa wanted to show us around harvard square. we walked past this ridiculously named restaurant called pu pu hot pot express, at which pa expressed his distaste for its products, the consumption of which being forced onto him by ww who would go nowhere else for lunch besides mcdonald’s.

along the way, though, pa was recalled for emergency work in the kitchen. (he was preparing a stuffed sixteen-pounder for the evening.) so i got an impromptu tour of the sidney-pacific dormitories that i was supposed to have lived in two years ago from pa’s friend, who also turned out to be an a*star bond-breaker. how small the world of young singaporean expatriates is! i was tempted to ask at the reception desk if the packages that i had mailed to myself two years ago were still around, but i strongly doubted it. instead, i helped myself to the free food lying in the lobby, apparently being leftovers from a thanksgiving lunch at s-p. stewed corn always appeals to me. ys and i also took some slices of pecan pie and pumpkin pie for later. (they later congealed into a fudgelike glob in pa’s bag.) i must admit, s-p is incredibly impressive and hip, although, again, the whole mit thing was a rather painful thing for me to think about.

we later tried to resume our aborted walking tour of cambridge at four, where we promptly discovered that toscanini’s, the celebrated ice cream shop, was open! we shared a boysenberry sorbet and chocolate something that were both incredibly yummy. the boysenberry was more tart than i had expected, but it made a fantastic counterpoint to the rich and flavorful four-chocolate combination of light chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate fudge and chocolate chip. played a few silly games (i like peanut butter but not jam, bang bang who’s dead, etc.) which for some reason triggered a laughing switch in ys; she couldn’t stop laughing for almost an hour. it was pretty hilarious, although i bet the proprietor must have thought we were crazy when the to of us joined in as well.

made our way back to s-p in a light drizzle that all too soon developed into a full-blown downpour. the umbrella that i had brought along with me decided to break at that point, with phalange broken and another joint poking its way through the tip, so we ended up using it like a big sheet of newspaper to run all the way back (past pu pu hot pot, no less) to s-p. once inside i was offered the use of lc’s hair dryer to dry off my clothes but to my horror the coil died after just one minute of blow-drying. ugh. not only did i spoil something that belonged to someone i hardly knew, i had to wear that cloying shirt for the rest of the evening. not a very hot way to spend the thanksgiving evening. spoke to yl, a fellow ioi-ian whom i hadn’t seen since jc, for a few minutes as he was busy stewing something. ys and i then spent an hour or so watching ‘friends’ and ‘everyone loves raymond’ in the common lounge before dinner started; pa remained in lc’s kitchen, presumably to cut the turkey down to size.

thankfully enough, the dinner itself was enough to recompense for the wet weather. i had a short chat with sg, the freshman who consulted me about bond-breaking. half an hour later, jl and the rest of the jc class people decided to show up for the s-p event after watching their rented dvds, much to the initial chagrin of lc who had not budgeted food for so many people. but by the time the rest of them came, there were already far too many leftovers to finish, including a magnificent chocolate cake from finale that was incredibly rich.

jl introduced me to ql, apparently an enthusiastic reader and fellow theoretical chemist. we talked about nonadiabatic schemes, which resulted from jl prompting us to discuss chemistry, but toward the end, it seemed that jl’s puzzled expression just got more and more strained. sg, and the rest of the class decided to join in, so we had a long discussion about the pessimistic outlook for science in singapore, and how the bigwigs can’t (or won’t) see the imminent doom looming over the near- to mid-term future.

there was another interesting lapse into science, where sg asked me about entropy and gibbs free energy, whereby three other people immediately pounced on the problem started to answer. following which, ql posited an interesting question, apparently from zh in berkeley: the atmosphere is usually assumed to be isothermal, at hydrostatic equilibrium, is of finite mass, and spherically symmetric. which assumption is mutually inconsistent with the rest? ql claimed to have solved it by showing that the integral of the radial distribution function diverges but i haven’t sat down to think about it yet.

anyway it was getting late so we all left. the rain had stopped but a howling, biting wind had taken its place so it was a rather miserable walk back. stopped by pa and ww’s dorm rooms in tang hall before walking across a grass patch back to the hyatt.

i’m beginning to think that mit is more a fantastic marketer of high technology than a true maker. there are plenty of universities that are great inventors of technology, but mit makes it hip and trendy to be a gadget geek, especially by cultivating a slightly eccentric image and plenty of technical toys around. the buildings certainly reflect that: uniform 70s-ish industrial grime interspersed with the occasional ultramodern glass and grey, garishly making themselves heard amidst the hubbub.

a foodie tour of cambridge, ma

2004-11-24T23:57:00.000-06:00

had a gluttonous tour of boston today amidst an all-day downpour. woke up early in the morning to the red glow of dawn and dw apparently babbling snippets of french poetry in his sleep. it took a little bit longer for him to awaken so i amused myself by reading a gothic novel that he had in his room. we later had breakfast at high-rise bakery, where i had the most excellent chili (made with browned ground beef, i think that made the difference) and a wonderful selection of toast for breakfast (it was really good but too pricey to be worth it). curiously enough dw confessed to never having tried the bread in the bakery, but only the coffee, which he claimed as excellent.

we then walked toward beacon street in somerville, where dw pointed out an infamous korean restaurant known for its rude service. dw professed an intense curiousity to try the food but i wasn’t in the mood for korean. instead, we had lunch at zoe’s, which dw regarded to be the best chinese restaurant in cambridge. the $4.95 set meal came with a fried appetizer, soup, and an entrée with rice, and so was very good value for money (which kind of made up for the expensive breakfast). picked up a $2 dessert from the bakery next door; its signature dish was a chocolate muffin with a molten chocolate interior, much like a miniature valhonas cake. it smelled incredibly good but i simply couldn’t eat any more so i just brought it around with me for later.

bid farewell to dw to go meet up with jl again, but this time to meet jt and es who had driven down from ithaca. we made our way to chinatown for an early dinner (jt and es hadn’t had lunch yet) so we cantered down to a cantonese restaurant. am met us at the restaurant; she had been busy shopping. the rest of them had dinner while i ate my mini-valhonas muffin; it was incredibly rich and moist inside. it made a huge mess of chocolate but was immensely enjoyable, much in the way a one-year old finds joy in discovering the pleasures of eating baby formula with food over his face.

most of them decided to catch a showing of the lion king downtown but i had already made plans to meet up with kl and hm for dinner. we decided on japanese and kl had a boston globe discount card at a restaurant called gyuhana, opposite the north face of the prudential center shopping mall. dw’s friend had proclaimed to serve the best japanese food in boston, although by dw’s reckoning, that wasn’t saying much at all. we decided to have sashimi in the end and we were treated to an incredibly fresh platter of raw seafood: scallops, yellowtail, tuna, white tuna, salmon, and sea urchin, all of which were extremely soft and melt-in-the-mouth good. even hm, whose tastes in raw japanese food did not usually stray beyond salmon, seemed to enjoy herself very much with everything except the uni and the white tuna.

at hm’s suggestion, we worked off the dinner calories by hitting the stores. hm desperately wanted to bring me to filene’s basement, a famous discounted clothing store, but we were just in time to see them roll down the shutters. darn. instead, we contented ourselves by shopping at filene’s proper as well as macy’s. at the latter, i was horrified to discover that someone had managed to manufacture a multifunction lamp/compass/thermometer with a built-in 5” television screen! it was by far the most frankenstein-esque thing i had ever seen. gee, what were they thinking? but something about that monster must have triggered a nerve somewhere, because i starting seeing really nice-looking clothes on the clearance racks of the men’s clothing section. i expected to be somewhat bored, with hm doing her shopping, but ended up browsing longer than her. ended up buying quite a few long-sleeved shirts, including a dkny shirt (msrp $85) that ended up being sold for just $9! of course, hm’s 20% off coupon only served to sweeten the deal.

i was all hyped up after shopping so i was pretty keyed up to wake up especially early on friday for the famous post-holiday sales! but as explained later i ended buying almost nothing on friday. oh well. it’s just not the same without friends around.

regards, from greater boston

2004-11-23T22:15:00.000-06:00

greetings from cambridge, massachusetts, home of a dozen educational institutions; and part of greater boston, the world's most overgrown college town. arrived from chicago midway at 10:30 est and was met by two s01c classmates, am and jl. we took the t down to kendall square, trundled our luggage bags past mit's new stata center on the way to a food truck that was parked outside one of the spanking new biotech corporate headquarters (was it novartis?). spent $4 on a combo lunchbox with black pepper beef and honey bbq spicy chicken, which were both excellent (if not quite what i had in mind when i had it), plus 85 cents on two pints of unsweetened soy milk, which was also not bad. the three of us sat down in the sunlit, grassy square facing the foodtruck and ate our lunches, which were rapidly cooling off in the 5-degree breeze. a simple experience, yet immeasurably pleasurable: sitting down with friends that i've not seen in almost half a year, in the midst of a green lung of a technology mecca, sunshine warming us from the cold breeze; around us, the last stubborn vestiges of withered leaves gently fluttering from parent branches, still reluctant to let go.

made my way down to harvard square to meet dw and started on this post from his powerbook g4 on the 4th floor of currier house. dw brought me on a walking tour of the area near his dorm (close to the porter t stop) and later toward kendall square. we had a cheap japanese oyako don for lunch at this mini-japanese mall (which was pretty bad, actually), followed by a much more satisfying aloo naan with mango lassi at a cheap indian place nearby. dw also insisted on my trying ice cream from christina’s, where i tried a peach sorbet that had a most indifferent taste with a slight tanginess reminiscent of some unidentifiable fruit. we came to the conclusion that christina’s was only good for real full-fat ice cream.

after the food extravaganza, dw brought me to garment district, a huge second-hand clothing store where i found a really nice london fog raincoat for just $20 and dw found a nice navy blue pullover for $8. it was above another amazing shop called dollar-a-pound, where the used clothes were all dumped on the floor for treasure hunters to sift through and were priced by weight. i considered hunting through the heaps but was rather put off by the presence of used underwear amongst the piles of second-hand sweaters and cutesy t-shirts.

after which, dw brought me to the stata center for a personal tour by a mutual acquaintance, al, who was working there. the inside looked as much a seismic disaster as the exterior; with slanted walls everywhere, it wasn’t really possible to put anything practical along the hallways apart from pretentious wallpaper and huge leaning chalkboards (devoid of chalk, unsurprisingly enough. trust computer scientists to be imaginative but impractical). jl mentioned earlier that the construction of the stata center went several times over the budget and almost bankrupted the university. given the immense cost of the building, i was in general unimpressed at the facilities (although the glass walls delimiting the staff-only areas were pretty cool). i visited a lecture hall that had huge walls sloping inward, giving rise to an intense claustrophobic feeling of the room caving in on the audience buttressed by the high ceiling with a star-shaped skylight. al also mentioned that the entire building was furnished with movable furniture, but that turned out to be a bit too inconvenient since no one could afford to put their legs on the table without risking it coming apart component by component.

following the insightful tour, i met up with jl and am for a thanksgiving dinner at ashdown house. jl was raving about the menu beforehand but i thought the food was pretty standard fare – salad, cornbread, sweetcorn, and carved turkey with bread stuffing and cranberries – certainly nothing to write home about (how ironic that i make my loyal readers suffer the ennui!). but the tasty apple cider and a brilliant 2002 californian cabaret sauvignon blanc saved the dinner from being a humdrum affair.

after dinner i made my way back with dw back to his dorm to spend the night. dw showed me the travel guidebook for which he was sponsored for an expensed tour of china to write it. (the perks of being a harvard undergraduate! sigh…) i was pretty impressed until i read it and found a whole bunch of mistakes in the common tourists’ phrases section of the guide. dw’s roommate was back and we watched a bit of ‘spirited away’ with another girl before deciding to call it a day.

from the university of chicago

2004-11-21T23:47:00.000-06:00

here is a special post from the basement of the regenstein library at the university of chicago. it says a lot about education at uc that my friend whom i was visited happily trotted me down to the library where he is doing work now as i bum around, surf the net and basically wait for him to bring me home again for a nap. :-)

my mother came by to visit me earlier this weekend and i was busy bringing her around ulu chambana. jarling's custard cup just closed for the season and we managed to squeeze in a trip there for the most incredibly smooth, creamy, melt-in-your-mouth homemade custard. on top of that, we went to the best restaurants that c-u could offer: kamakura (which really bombed ; how could anyone even pretend that it as good! at least the yakisoba was so-so and fantastically overpriced), biaggi's (we waited a whole hour to get in, by which time we ate so many complimentary mints that neither of us finished our main courses. dumb right?), and mandarin wok (when the newly-retired boss lady found out that my mother was taiwanese too, she immediately went into the kitchen to cook the food herself - with the result that we had far too much to eat. i guess 自己人 hospitality can go a bit too far). i think she had a good time. hope she makes it back to canada safely.

as i was updating myself from the internet withdrawal of the past two days, i got a referral from this thread on icered which made me think that icered is populated by far too many myopic idiots. the sound and fury level is far too high to make it any source of quality reading. but for a light moment of hilarity, it certainly made me laugh for about 5 minutes.

tootpit made a comment on my previous post that i could not bear to leave unrebutted. so here is my point-by-point response to tootpit's post:

point #1: my experience is limited to us universities. however, tootpit's input only substantiates my point, not invalidating it.
point #2: please read the actual ranking criterion. tootpit makes absolutely no sense.
point #3: tootpit has absolutely no clue how academia works. bean counters measure academic success by things like citations. academics know that a whole host of hard-to-quantify things, such as the ability to ask penetrating questions, characterise the truly great academic. number of citations per faculty is a metric that only fools believe correlates strongly with academic greatness.
point #4: i already explained that there exist no unique criteria for ranking universities; rather, weighing universities against each other makes sense only in some context, be it a student looking for a good education or an academic starting his career, for example.
point #5. yes i was.

but at least tootpit was semi-coherent. wishful dreams was the other person who commented on my post who has proven himself /herself several times over to be a first-class moron. the mistakes that i spotted:

s/he misidentified me. as if s/he didn't have the wits to read my profile, the prize idiot. "nah i know the blogger. He's a local student in NUS. No scholar by any stretch hahaha. But he does devote a sizeable chunk of his blog ranting about scholars. LOL You'll find that the most vocal and vehement people who often speak about and against the education system most fervently are those, who failed to get a scholarship. If you knew any scholar in person, which i doubt you do, you'll find most of them very relaxed and non aggressive in terms of their view on the system, and most if not all, have a laissez-faire attitude about these ponderous and heavy topics. They'd much rather play sports, drink wine, travel, go skiing, play computer games and of cos, study. =)

Believe me. =)"
thinking that cal tech is a public school. "In fact in terms of FAME and PROFILE, both Berkely and Caltech score SIGNIFICANTLY less than Oxford, Penn, Cornell, Cambridge. You can argue till the cows come home that academically and faculty-wise, they're up there but like it or not, public unis will never command the same cachet as Ivy League and private unis." only in your myopic little dreamworld, butterfly.
the best one of all: "PRINCETON does not have a graduate school you moron!!! Please stop crapping here when you don't know anything about the Ivy League!" i'm not wasting any bandwidth on this one.

it's incredibly sad, reading the thread and looking at how singaporeans have the same, tired, bigoted views of american universities. but a useful thing i did glean from that thread was this article: Who Needs Harvard?

some chinese idiom half-drifts to awareness.

the influence of blogs

2004-11-18T15:42:00.000-06:00

randolph kluver, eat your heart out.

"Blogs are already influencing U.S. politics. The top five political blogs together attract over half a million visitors per day. Jimmy Orr, the White House Internet director, recently characterized the “blogosphere” (the all-encompassing term to describe the universe of weblogs) as instrumental, important, and underestimated in its influence. Nobody knows that better than Trent Lott, who in December 2002 resigned as U.S. Senate majority leader in the wake of inflammatory comments he made at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Initially, Lott’s remarks received little attention in the mainstream media. But the incident was the subject of intense online commentary, prodding renewed media attention that converted Lott’s gaffe into a full-blown scandal." - Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell. Web of Influence, on ForeignPolicy.com.

more news as it happened (a while back, even)

2004-11-18T15:23:00.000-06:00

done for the week. thanksgiving break, here i come!

google scholar unofficially debuts. [iht article] tried a few test runs today they seem to want to give isi web of knowledge and scifinder a run for their money. very impressive, considering that they've had at most a few months or so of testing, i would imagine.
electronic arts mistreats employees. maxis used to be my favorite game company, but since the acquisition, i've been feeling nonplussed about it. this exploitation story just killed what little enthusiam i have for it anymore. "you can't spell exploitation without ea". i pity his wife for having to put up with the mismanagement. i hope he and the others win the lawsuit. show those overpaid monkeys where they'd be without the technical staff!
singaporean blogger writes novella on blogspot set in future singapore. hmm.
world's strongest acid invented. ever heard the ditty on how to store an acid so strong that would dissolve anything? looks like these uc riverside scientists are one-up on the mensans.
scientists discover how paper falls. it's nice to know that at least some tax dollars go to answering practical questions.
world's largest poutine served. for those of you who have never had poutine, go visit canada and try it! it's amazing, really.

rankling rankings

2004-11-18T14:35:00.000-06:00

"They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity" - Mr. Incredible, The Incredibles

two weeks or so ago, the times higher educational supplement published what they purported to be a list of the 200 best universities in the world [pdf]. the singapore media, once again, pounced on the international media attention to crow over how nus beat other 'top' universities on the rankings.

*sigh* some people just never get over the "how many marks did you get? haha i got more than you!" syndrome. it's the whole metrics issue all over again.

here's my take-home message: a metric means nothing more than what it was meant to measure. which means that saying something is the 'best' means nothing until you define what 'best' means. obvious as hell isn't it. but apparently it isn't at all clear to the 144^th most liberal battalion of journalists. it's also the center of my view that meritocracy as a system is inherently flawed. (i shall not flog the dead horse too hard today.)

let's scrutinize the methodology here and break down the rankings by the scores.

peer review score. what the hell is this? what does it mean? considering that it forms the bulk of the final score, leaving this unexplained is tantamount to work dishonestly. i certainly hope that paying subscribers actually get an explanation of precisely what this means.

i can only assume that some kind of survey was taken, from which a whole slew of methodology questions such as statistical distribution, the exact questions asked and the way the questions were phrased are all just waiting to be asked.

and do you really trust all the faculty surveyed to rank their rivals in an objective fashion, and over 200 institutions?

for a different perspective, read an academic's comments on the rankings, and the comment left there in particular with regard to lack of differentiation by field (such as the popular us news rankings - i have my own qualms about us news but here is not the venue for them). my school sucks in the humanities, ought it rank higher than a good liberal arts college then?

int'l faculty score. not only is the percentage of international faculty metric meaningless, it is openly discriminatory. why should schools that pick non-citizen faculty be a prori superior to ones who don't? this really favors schools that happen to pick faculty that look like they are practicing affirmative action at the staff level.

besides, if a school's ranking is bolstered by having lots of foreign faculty, how good is the quality of education really if students have trouble communicating with them, and vice versa? i don't mean to deride international faculty and students but having teachers with incomprehensible accents and/or a serious language barrier in the classroom is a significant problem in many schools.

international student score going by the few schools that i know on the list, this looks suspiciously like purely the percentage of foreign students attending that school. while international students/faculty indeed add diversity to a school, many good schools are geared to specific interests which run counter to taking in international students and hence this feel-good melting-potness that the times obviously has a preference to.

public schools, once again, fare much more poorly on this metric, simply because their first responsibility is to in-state students. out-of-state students (american or otherwise) have a much harder time in applying for spots at public universities. that's why it's hard as hell to get into uiuc's engineering college if you're not from illinois. contrast this with private schools, where (to make a huge overgeneralization) anyone with a decent sat score and enough money can stand a pretty good chance. is it fair to rank such a school over a public school, ceteris paribus?

selection pressure on out-of-state students at illinois also means that the out-of-state students that do make it usually, but not always, stand near the top of their classes. and i'm not just saying that to make me feel good, but because it is a fact. bloody hell, we competed with the rest of the world to get in here!

faculty/student score. as argued many times elsewhere, this is a strong measure for how rich a school is, not how 'good' it is. a school may have many, many faculty, but how many of them actually interacts with students (graduate students in their research groups aside)? cal tech is a good counter-example that comes to mind.

to me, this is just a bad proxy for the average class size, which is itself misleading because a large class filling lecture hall may be just the right size for a first-year general education course, while a ten-person graduate-level class may be too large to handle effectively.

citations/faculty score. again, something field-specific that thes blithely assumes to be consistent across disciplines. nothing could be further from the truth. the culture of collaboration varies greatly from field to field, and a quick look at a database such as isi citations database would provide convincing evidence easily enough. it would be rare for a mathematics paper to be cited many times; however, an intensely growing field such as biomedical engineering may have a strong penchant for many, many citations, with each researcher in the field competing with a few other peers in a race to be the first to discover or invent.

the questionableness of this metric also goes back to whether a long publication record is a good yardstick for productivity of a scientist. maxwell published less than ten papers in his life, yet every physical scientist and engineer knows his equations.

even if you believe than unproductive faculty publish less than productive faculty (a statement that is gaining validity in recent years, unfortunately), is a scientist who published 501 papers really better than a scientist that only published 499 papers?

citations form an easily abused metric, and canny faculty sometimes do exploit it to toe the line with their respective bean counters. rehashed papers on the same topic can be found on the publications lists of many scientists. how much original though there is in a paper is simply hard to quantify (jokes about publons aside).

and if that weren't enough complexity for you to handle, let's take one step backward and look at the big picture. who are you? are you the prospective student, looking for a good education? the beginning academician, looking for a good place to start your career? or someone just elected to the board of governers of a collegiate system? what is the correlation between a number of faculty member's citations on his/her papers and his/her teaching effectiveness in the classroom?

(by the way, if you are a student in the sciences, phds.org is a good reference. go make your own rankings from their databases and judge schools by your criteria, not the administrators'.)

after looking at the thes rankings, i can never trust these self-styled experts on higher education on anything ever again. for crying out loud, they can't even get the names of the universities right! i go to the university of illinois, not illinois university! (there is no such university, although ironically enough niu, siu, eiu and wiu all exist) and specifically the one at urbana-champaign. and why are you ignoring the fact that the university of illinois has three campuses? are they equally good in your eyes, thes? dammit, these dumb brits get the university of california system and nomenclature right, but they can't get it right for any other american state school?

it also makes you wonder, if nus is really so damn good, why do singaporean government agencies waste tens of millions of taxpayer's dollars to send scholars to 'worse' universities? does any of this make sense? (aside: a livejournal thread that may be relevant. and another.)

weekend update

2004-11-16T14:03:00.000-06:00

as long-time readers may have realized, it has become impossible for me to log assidiously the goings-on of every week. in fact, it's been tough to find even a single hour to sit down and space out these past month or so. it's the surging tide before the anticlimax of thanksgiving.

[warning: geek humor paragraph] not only is work quantized (at the finest level, a single homework problem), i am pretty darn sure it is bosonic. which is of course something to be expected, considering that work is the consumption of energy, which is quantized in many systems. why is work bosonic then? because (a) energy usually comes in spinless quanta (excitons, photons, phonons... take your pick) and (b) there are clear peaks and troughs in the levels of work experienced throughout the semester. it's as if there is a massive conspiracylike convergence of faculty scheduling to decide to have all the midterms in the same week, all the term papers due before thanksgiving, and all the homework due the same day of the week.

but seriously though, i was seriously suffering from burnout, so i took the entire weekend off, not doing anything. friday evening was spent at miko's with a fellow first-year p. chem. student and a bunch of other fellow first-years, to celebrate a birthday. had two-thirds of a bottle of dreamy cloud (li bai) sake. if you've never tried unfiltered sake, i recommend it. the taste is pretty awesome. also had incredibly fresh sashimi (the fact that it cost $1.75 a piece didn't hit me until after i was sated. oh well, it's not every day that i celebrate a friend's birthday), an edamame salad (which turned out to be salted, roasted edamame, tastefully heaped onto a plate), and the most awful bowl of miso soup ever. you know how things that are too dilute can taste really bad? (1:50 orange juice: water comes to mind) i discovered that miso has the same properties as well. ugh.

later we adjourned to boltini's but it was too crowded (plus the others found it nauseating that the average age that night was like 55) so we went to jupiter's and bought shots for the birthday boy until he almost puked. [graphic description warning] we gouged him until he looked really sick. i half-jokingly put an empty beer mug for him to puke in when he suddenly lurch forward and made an incredibly loud expectorating sound that one normally associates with a person busily being sick. amazingly enough, the only things that came out of his mouth were a few flecks of saliva. he looked much better afterward but quickly excused himself to the bathroom anyway; we weren't sure if he really was sick in the end but the rest of us unanimously agreed that it was the most disgusting belch that any of us had ever heard.

saturday morning was spent mostly unconscious (a good stiff round of drinks before bedtime usually does that to me); i tried to so some work but failed miserably, ending up doodling on my notebook instead and disinterestedly flipping through garrett and grisham. (yes, another biochemistry exam coming up). the afternoon was spent in discussion with prof. s about ergodicity. (yep, that's me, the ergodic student. one moment on the ball, and completely slacking the next. is there any state left unsampled?) saturday evening was spent with ww, who came all the way back from mit to visit us on a whim (and a cheap flight ticket). he didn't treat us, which kinda sucked, but he did exhibit his usual waffling. ah, that does bring back memories! then we went to jarling's custard cup for another round of homemade custard before they close for the year. (november 21, guys!)

sunday morning was spent in the laundry room. stupid gas dryer sputtered throughout the entire operation and my clothes were still pretty soaked. i had to iron each item twice before it lost that cloying texture of damp cloth. grr. went to return some items to wal-mart in the afternoon but degenerated into a bout of semi-useless grocery shopping. why stock up the week before thanksgiving when i won't be around most of the time? dumbass. the usual dinner at mandarin wok with SpinGlass and tl, but also with jf, a newcomer to our dinner circle.

went for just one class on monday morning. prof. s was much more tired than usual (his eyebags unusually prominent this morning and he made a whole slew of mistakes in his blackboard algebra. in the middle of a panel he stopped and shouted really loudly "why doesn't this cancel, dammit? it's supposed to cancel!" gee, when have i not heard that before? and he kept going "ooh! ooh! ooh! sorry, i made a mistake here. but i know where it is, you know where it is, so it doesn't matter." (think gorilla-style ooh-ing, not silky lingerie ooh-ing) the eminence of seniority, indeed.

skipped all my classes today because i felt like it. yeah baby!

ok, done. onward to my biochemistry hour exam on thursday. time to figure out where all the fats go after i eat them. beta-oxidative lipolysis, here i come! (or was that beta-oxidative liposuction?)

Taking S'pore into next phase of R&D: DPM Tony Tan draws lessons from Swiss experience

2004-11-15T10:27:00.000-06:00

Nov 12, 2004
Taking S'pore into next phase of R&D
DPM Tony Tan draws lessons from Swiss experience

By Natalie Soh
In Zurich (Switzerland)

Singapore will see how it can better encourage basic research, and get private companies to spend more on it.

It will also see how it can attract foreign talent in the same way that Switzerland has, said Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan after a study tour to the small European nation.

Switzerland is known for its scientific excellence despite having only 7.3 million people, and thus hold lessons for Singapore's pursuit of success in research and development, he said.

Dr Tan, who heads a ministerial panel looking at the next phase of Singapore's own R&D direction, was speaking on Wednesday to reporters at the end of his three-day trip to study the Swiss science and technology system in Zurich.

He said he was very impressed with what he saw, adding: 'There are many good lessons for us.'

One is its emphasis on basic science, he said. For example, 80 per cent of the funding given out by the Swiss National Science Foundation - 328 million Swiss francs (S$461 million) last year - is for basic research.

Basic research not only produces new knowledge but also attracts people to train manpower that the country needs, he said.

This is one reason it has most publications per capita among the 30 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and its scientists are the most highly cited as authorities in their fields by their peers.

Another reason is that 'they have an open society, they welcome talent', said Dr Tan. This is evident in how almost half the researchers getting federal funding are not Swiss.

For example, in the country's top university - the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich - half of the faculty comes from foreign countries.

Basic research and funding help draw in foreign talent, which is key to both Swiss and Singapore's success, Dr Tan said.

'We should see how Singapore can also support that calibre of people.

'These talents can be a catalyst to attract an entire group of good scientists. We have to see how it can be translated into reality.'

With the right talent pool, Singapore could be a base for research for companies who want a foot in Asia.

This will help get private sector spending on R&D up.

In Switzerland, almost three-quarters of all the money made available for research comes from private companies.

Getting companies to do more R&D is something Singapore also hopes to do, he said.

This is because the private sector is better at identifying promising technologies that are more likely to succeed in the market.

Meanwhile, Singapore's institutions could do well to establish links with their Swiss counterparts, noted Dr Tan.

Presidents of both the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), who were in the delegation, said they were already pursuing more R&D opportunities with Swiss Universities.

Both added they already had follow-up trips planned.

Dr Tan also said that Swiss officials told him that they saw Singapore as a gateway to Asia for their companies.

'Singapore institutions should take advantage of this and build up links with the Swiss.

'Singapore can use Switzerland as a gateway to Europe,' he said.

The Straits Times understands that both NUS and NTU will be sending delegations within the next few months to Swiss universities to firm up more joint research projects and programmes.

The delegation left for Singapore on Wednesday.

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this is so singaporean. when a local blabs about it, he's told to shut up. when the ang moh opens his mouth, the gospel truth emerges.

in other news, beavers make a dam out of stolen money.

red in tooth and claw

2004-11-10T15:22:00.000-06:00

i just witnessed a hawk eating a grey-feathered bird on top of a tree just outside (where else) the school of life sciences. i expected more gore, honestly. it was pretty clean about the whole thing: rip the middle out, and keep picking with its curved beak. surgical, almost, in its precision. (that it was eating in front of a gaggle of bemused pre-med students and medical scholars certainly added to the mood clinical detachment. look, class, here's a gut, and there's a squishy red thing, and ooh, look, viscera!)

there was this clerk who was on smoke break who tried to keep a running commentary on what was going on, pretty much dulling the mood with her annoying broken-tape-recorder-esque one-line hits of "ooh!", "please tell me it's not a squirrel [it's eating]!", "wow!", "you don't see that every day around here.", "uh-uh!", "is that a bird?", "eww!", "ooh-wow", and "jim does that look like a hawk to you?". you know how it's like when you hear the same album on an mp3 player without turning the shuffle feature on? that's what it felt like after 100 s.

ah, nature.

blogged. next!

2004-11-09T21:15:00.000-06:00

to celebrate the advent of my 6,000^th visitor, here are some morsels for your edification, while i slave away the next 70 hours or so swotting for my next test.

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i've heard of meal replacement powders, but this is ridiculous!

A Liquid Thanksgiving: Turkey in the Straw

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ever wondered what newborn babies eat? new research has the answer: themselves. if i recally correctly from biochemistry, the process is called gluconeogenesis, where the body digests tissues that it can afford to lose and converts them to glucose to fuel the essential organs (heart, liver, kidneys, brain, etc.).

Newborn babies feed on themselves

it just brings to mind an incredibly gross range of baby jokes that i heard way back in sec. 2.

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how bad can loans be? just don't end up like these folks...

Court frees Merseyside couple from loan debt that soared from £5,750 to £384,000

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the 144^th most free army of journalists prove their worth once again. i lost the link to the original article (curse the dastardly three-day window!) but those who have the paper version can look up the faux pas made by a straits times reporter:

an analyst in washington dc angrily wrote to the forum on nov 4, 2004, complaining that she was misquoted, and that even the misquote was not obtained first-hand but was lifted off a mainland china newspaper. she even complained that it wasn't even the first time that the guilty reporter did something so unethical! said reporter gave an unconvincing kow-tow -kow-tow -please-don't-slap-me -beg-and-grovel of an apology. i don't know how close his head was to rolling on the floor but he ought to have been fired straightaway. don't let the straits times preach to you on the basis on morality ever again. the self-righteous mouthpiece of virtue is guilty as charged! hasn't the man any idea of 'journalistic integrity'?

what's even more pathetic that miraculously escaped comment: the article in the referenced china newspaper used the word jing-ya, which was translated as that 'native' speaker of the chinese language as 'shocked'. send the moron back to primary school! even the ang moh knows that jing-ya means 'astonished', not 'shocked'!

on a side note, i remember hearing last year that a chinese journalist was fired for stealing articles off another publication. the victim? theonion.com!

-

finally, two articles on topics close to my heart:

"Get it right! Jamie Whyte describes himself as 'Outraged of Highbury' - someone who endlessly sends furious letters to newspapers complaining about sloppy thinking, logical errors, fallacies and muddles. He does the same at parties - and even on trains. Fortunately he's a professional philosopher or he might have attracted the attention of the authorities long ago. Liz Else and Alun Anderson asked what gets him steamed up and what errors they could commit that would make him explode." - Else, L.; Anderson, A. New Scientist, 40 (183), 2004.

-

"Are standardized tests really so bad?" - MotheringDotCommune forums, thread 126397.

-

computer science exam on thursday. see you guys later.

the world's best pick-up line

2004-11-08T16:40:00.000-06:00

the experts agree, this is the best pick-up line ever invented!

tell me your results if you ever try this one.

Oppression

2004-11-04T22:04:00.000-06:00

found off a google ad. may all singaporeans read it and reflect upon it.

Of the major oppressions—political, spiritual, and social—humanity need fear most the latter. In history, neither tyranny nor suppression of the soul have long endured. But coercion of the mind and emotions by social norms is both cunning and effective. Undetected, a society’s dogma represses its perpetrators, while they imprison its victims.

Social captivity is covert and clever. It gags its inmates by not responding; by shrewdly evading challenges; by psychoanalyzing opponents. It punishes with the silent treatment. Its solitary confinement is exclusion; its death penalty, rejection. Its unknowing wardens are among the culture-shapers—the leaders in politics, communications, education, and social science. Its jailers are among the social elite; its trustees, the blind followers of popular opinion and special interest causes; its potential prisoners, the nation’s silenced majority.

Social oppression hides in people’s fears; in their failure to speak up, question, and disagree. Unrecognized, it is manifest in peer enforced conformity; in denial of opposing views; in intolerance of the “politically incorrect.” It is most apparent in its perpetrator’s one-sided biases ruling the media, classrooms, and common discourse.

- Notable Notions, Uncommon Ideas To Ponder

lesser known-blog

2004-11-03T21:42:00.000-06:00

gee, what a species i am. (ok, so the existential particle is ambiguous. shoot me.) it makes me sound like some rara avis: "here we have the great spotted owl and the mugger toad, and look! here's a lesser-known blog over there in the marsh, preening its feathers!"

such a delicious tone to it, characterizing yet another angst-ridden website a "lesser-known blog". Mr. McDermott has kindly put the offending straits times article up on his blog, replete with hotlinks! wow! so those of you, like me, who have chosen to effectively boycott the straits times since it enforced mandatory registration (with no incremental benefits, it seems!) are no longer forced to resort to the primary source. so that explains why the last n or so visitors looked up acidflask on google. notice how sue-ann inelegantly and incompletely (but politically correctly! remember, she is a proud member of the 144^th most free cadre of journalists in the world!) summarizes my blog as discussing "science and the fallacy of meritocracy".

a paragraph of that article is particularly worth mulling on, by the way:

...Nanyang Technological University communication and information lecturer Randolph Kluver disagreed that more blogs will flourish.

'I just don't see much of a future for them until regulatory policies are relaxed somewhat, or until some sort of event occurs in which a blog can provide information the media cannot,' he said.

and some comments left by friscodude suggest that people can't get enough political commentary (although he goes a bit overboard, expecting everything to be served to him on a silver platter, replete with annotations and look here! here's sarcasm! and over here! irony! woo...!):

Too bad most of the links mentioned in the ST article are just about completely worthless, aside from your blog, Myrick, James Gomez (is that a blog?), and Singapore Window (definately [sic] not a blog, but worth checking). - on singabloodypore

And I'm not really interested in some Singaporean now living in the States studying chemistry and blogging about his miserable life. - on myrick

to that, i only have one response. this is my lesser-known blog. this is my little deserted island on the sea of knowledge where i can vent my frustrations, sing my praises, and laugh incredulously at what life has dealt me. so be it. if you don't like what i write, fine. i never intended it to be good, or to mean anything. if it occasionally serves as my soapbox, so be it. you don't have to come here. you don't have to read it. but i assume that you read this either because you know me personally and are somewhat curious to how i have been, or that i've vented a little steam that resonates with some other souls out there. who hasn't had their share of events of all sorts, feelings of kinds, memorabilia of all shapes and sizes?

i shan't sink to your level, carl, but you can travel all you want and still not get a feel for what a culture is really like. if you knew a whit of what singapore is like, you would appreciate the niche that we the expatriate singapore intelligentsia, either studying or working (or even just plain bumming around) overseas, fulfil in giving the hoi polloi (or even just the pretentious upper-class) a voice that is different, a thought that is unique, a style that is special. you probably write the way you work, missing the trees for the forest, trampling over undiscovered, potentially profound wildlife in order to reach the well-documented, tired old tourist attraction. i confess to not having read any of your travelogues and/or guidebooks, but if you want to act like the rambunctious holier-than-thou american, fine. i don't care for readers like you either. i never meant for my blog to be political, but i never met a travel guide i thought ever lived up to its name. you pride yourself for picking up things just off the beaten path, but did you ever honestly reflect on how myopic an individual's worldview can be? on how you go out to the wild unexplored world and somehow shoehorn everything you see into familiar labels, perhaps making only a cursory glance at things that are slightly different?

featuring me for my political incorrectness and deviance is not characterizing me fully, even. we really all are political creatures, even those poor few of us stuck on that lonely desert island at 1.2^oN, 103.5^oE. there is that little part of us that yearns for expression in between bouts of life, that creeps in during periods of ennui and is on the verge of sparking into an existence separate and beyond the consciousness that gave it form. but to the extent my sense of impeding götterdämmerung is a take-home message for my loyal readers, it says something about what other people feel about these issues as well.

for about fifteen minutes, i was actually worried about being put under the magnifying glass of the ida. but heck, independent thought isn't illegal in singapore, and it certainly isn't here in america (although what the american electorate was thinking in electing bush, i can't imagine!), where the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness are supposedly the driving forces of the american citizenry. besides, i doubt that they can extradite me for my free speech. so they'll have to wait until the next time i visit there.

then i found out about ellen simonetti - fired for posting pictures of herself in uniform on her blog! and they weren't even indecent! the queen of sky plans to file "a BIG lawsuit". i may have to follow the results of this one carefully. i may end up in the same shithole.

but what is life without struggle, really? even if the soul didn't bother to give it meaning, life is still a constant uphill battle against entropy, until the one day we lie down on the cool ground and return our organized collection of dust back to the cool earth. why not celebrate our gift of consciousness by trying to make a difference? a quintessentially existentialist kierkegaard quote captures it much more elegantly:

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair, or not. - Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

i just listened to vienna teng perform, as a showcased new asian-american artist. her mp3s really don't do her justice, in my opinion. her real voice is so much richer and emotionally lathered in real life! she was saying that she recently did something egotistical and searched for her name on google, and how by the time she got to the 9th or 10th hit she was getting all the weird stuff, people's blogs mentioning her in passing. maybe i'll be one of them eventually. but anyway the other thing that was cool about her was how she did her degree in computer science from stanford, worked for cisco, and one day resigned to do music full-time. and she did it all to pursue her passions.

here's a toast to vienna, carl and acidflask, for pursuing their passions. for i am sure even a frisco travel writer must have been bitten sorely by the travel bug to explore the world, trudging through frame by frame, word by word, pixel by pixel, in that half-bumbling, half-ingenious way that all of us mere mortals will forever display.

here's a toast to passions.

collected advice for beginning scientists:

2004-11-01T13:27:00.000-06:00

the following was gleaned from an inspired moment upon reading an article on michael nielsen's blog entitled Principles of Effective Research. very suitable for me to chew on these few days. i've been adding people to my live bookmark list. yet another cool reason to get firefox! let the browser search for updates to blogs/news/other rss feeds/!

"[N]o one knows everything, and you don't have to." Steven Weinberg, Nature, 206, 2002, 389.
"Go for the messes - that's where the action is." Steven Weinberg, ibid.
"Forgive yourself for wasting time... in the real world, it's very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable..." Steven Weinberg, ibid.
"[L]earn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science... The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science." Steven Weinberg, ibid.
"[T]he career structure in scientific research... is virtually non-existent. Research careers are usually tied to teaching, so if you want to forge a future in research then you will need to secure academic tenure. If you are still dependent for your salary on 'soft' money — research grants — by the age of 35, you will then be told by (much older) tenured colleagues that you are 'too old' for research and that you should look for another career. So see your early steps into the research world as leading towards a completely different career. Banking, finance or teaching are common end-points. Academic administration may provide a means for revenge against those professors who misled you about your future." - John A. Duley, Nature, 206, 2002, 389.
"[T]ake note of which areas of research in your chosen discipline have the oldest entrenched academics, and head for those. Many were filled in the 1970s by baby-boomers who are now approaching retirement, so you may be well-positioned for one of their jobs." John A. Duley, ibid.
"[L]ook at the best jobs outside academia... there are good career opportunities for postgrads. They just don't happen to be in academia." John A. Duley, ibid.
"[L]ook at the new fields emerging for employment in big, profitable industries... Annual reports will reveal what fields companies are moving into, and what they are dropping."
"[L]ow pay for research scientists has been a feature of the profession since its earliest days... Clearly if any of these [the crew of the Challenger, Einstein, Gertrude Elion] and many other individuals had chosen their research paths 'according to hard-headed economics', as Duley advises, we would all be the poorer." - Mike Fainzilber, Nature, 427, 2004, 485.
"A good problem for a graduate student must [be o]pen[, d]oable[, and i]nteresting. Finding problems that fit any two of these three is not hard, but if a problem is doable and interesting, someone likely would have solved it by now. Too often interesting is the property that is given the least emphasis." - Lance Fortnow
"Pick up a proceedings of a recent conference in your area and read through the abstracts of papers until you find one that interests you. The 'interests you' part is important, for without it you won't have the motivation to study further.[/] Read the paper thoroughly. Read related papers. If you lose interest, start the process all over again. Once you've read several papers in an area that interests you talk about it with your advisor and your fellow graduate students.[/] Some of these papers might list open questions and you could work on those. You might say, 'Karp listed this as an open question, and if Karp can't solve it why should I be able to?' Karp is a very smart but also very busy person. It is unlikely he spent more than an hour thinking hard about these questions. As a graduate student you can spend much more time focusing on these problems and could easily make more progress than someone like Karp could." - Lance Fortnow
"Even better is to formulate your own problems... As you are breaking new ground, theorems can start flowing like water. Just remember not to have too much weirdness in your questions; keep the research interesting." - Lance Fortnow
"[T]he key is to start doing creative original research right away. My first year at Berkeley, I took three courses a semester, hoping to prepare by stuffing my brain with knowledge. This was a mistake. Take as few courses as you can get away with, besides directly relevant ones... Learn what you need to know while doing research, not beforehand.[/]This approach has two advantages. First, you never know what you need to know until you need to know it... second, you don't really understand anything unless you have a personal stake in it -- meaning that you discovered it, rediscovered it, extended it, applied it, tested it, implemented it, reinterpreted it, explained it to others, etc. This the reason most students forget everything in a course right after the exam. (As Feynman said, "what I cannot create, I do not understand.")" - Scott Aaronson
"So then, how do you do original research? By throwing your entire life into it. Many researchers play piano, go to clubs, sail, etc., but if they're any good they probably think about research while they're doing these things." - Scott Aaronson
"I like to start with physical or philosophical questions... and then look for related questions that can be addressed using [existing] theory." - Scott Aaronson

the latter day saints

2004-10-30T22:51:00.000-05:00

list of costumes that i've remembered seeing yesterday and today:

a feminine dragon
guy with flaming red hair. i thought he was the at&t guy but he turned out to be a red bull.
spiderman
mary poppins
a guy in black, with a bit of white under his collar and a small boy safety-pinned to his crotch, yelling, 'yeah! catholic priest!'
donatello, raphael, michelangelo and leonardo
jason, zack, billy, trini, and kimberly
batman and robin
transvestite marilyn monroe
condom
santa claus
the cat in the hat
christmas tree
one-star general in khaki uniform and hot pants
girl with batty hat
angel
dracula
gothic girl (the jingubashi ones were so much better. at least they weren't bulging out of their mesh corsets)
gothic girl wearing only mesh clothing (no bra, no undies)
nun
banana
student dressed up in lab coat and goggles (mad scientist)
thor
squirrel
chef (from south park)
phantom of the opera
tigger

too bad i left my costume at home.

Breaking news in anthropology

2004-10-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Hobbit' joins human family tree

blurb: "Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world."

'Flores' inhabitants have incredibly detailed legends about the existence of little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo.

'The islanders describe Ebu Gogo as being about one metre tall, hairy and prone to "murmuring" to each other in some form of language. They were also able to repeat what islanders said to them in a parrot-like fashion.

'There have always been myths about small people - Ireland has its Leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there's some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times," said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England.'

wow.

nature hasn't been idling about this either. the business-savvy editors have already put together a special website focusing on the flores discovery.

trial audioblogger post

2004-10-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

i've always wondered how i sound over the telephone. i guess i know now! audioblogger is amazing...

here's a little sound clip of me saying 'hmm, let's see if this works.'

and i finally got the haloscan comment script to behave well together with the blogger commenting system. so you finally get to choose which you prefer!

Wired News: On The Trail of the Analemma

2004-10-24T21:43:00.000-05:00

from Wired.com:

caption: "The figure-eight pattern of the analemma appears in a different position in the sky depending on what time of day it is photographed. Here, Anthony Ayiomamitis has captured the analemma in a completely vertical position by photographing it in Athens at 12:28:16 p.m. every several days over the course of a year. It is the first known image of its kind."

if you have no idea what the hell an analemma is, do read the original article.

votergasm in champaign

2004-10-24T19:52:00.000-05:00

i am so amused... they wanted a nationwide orgy on nov 2, but someone decided that barcrawling would be more fun! disclaimer: this is not my post.

"

Title:	ELECTION '04 BARCRAWL
Description	I'm trying to plan a barcrawl on campus at the University of Illinois in Champaign. All U of I, EIU, ISU students are invited, its only 19 to get into bars here, so it should be a lot of fun. However, I'm trying to figure out where we hold a party after the barcrawl. If you're interested or if you know of a place we can chill after the barcrawl, e-mail me at warningpunk@yahoo.com.
Directions
Email Address:	warningpunk@yahoo.com
Zip Code:	61820

"

anyone in singapore up for organizing post-election orgies too?

my dbs story

2004-10-24T19:10:00.000-05:00

from idlebastard:

my horrigible singapore bank story (true!):

a couple once walked into the takashimaya posb branch, smelling of joss sticks and incense dust drifting off them as they stood quietly in the queue. they were wearing patches on their sleeves. anyone should have been able to figure out that they just came from a funeral of a family member and was going to deposit 白金. anyone but the bank teller, apparently, who immediately started promoting some investment product to them!

if you were in their shoes then, how would you feel?

singapore may have world-class banks in terms of market capitalization, but without first-class human resources it simply isn't going anywhere. looks like two years didn't change a shit in that worthless bank.

fuck you, dbs.

morgan spurlock lecture - oct 7, 2004

2004-10-22T23:57:00.000-05:00

morgan spurlock came to chambana two weeks ago. yeah i know. late right. i toyed with the idea of putting this on my seminar page, but oh well, it will probably find wider circulation here. if the name doesn't ring a bell, check his movie out.

i was too late at the box office to pick up a ticket too late but a kind soul decided to donate one to me while i was lining up outside foellinger for the no-show standby wanna-goers.

morgan tried to do his social do-gooder lecture...

...but it ended up more like stand-up comedy, which was not particularly congenial to taking him more seriously.

quotes from morgan spurlock:

"For thirty days, I lived the Great American Dream of overeating and underexercising"
"I spent $788 over those 30 days on food." man, he must go to really expensive mcdonald's. how else can he spend an average of $8.75 per meal? who eats s$15 worth of fast food per sitting??
"Every time you eat, you vote with your fork."
"At least I didn't try to take on Whitecastle. Shit, I might be dead if I took on Whitecastle!"
"Why McDonalds? Because McDonald's is the industry leader."
"The time we used to site around the dinner table eating home-cooked meals, we now spend sitting in front of the TV eating out of bags and boxes."
"Heavy Users! Users! Like you're drug addicts... If that doesn't give you a clue that the McCrackShack is open for business... I don't know what will."
"McDonald's is now advertising health by association... Next to the five golden (sic) rings [of the Olympics] there are golden arches. 'Cos when you think athletes, you think McDonald's. Think little Carly Patterson is gonna be sucking down a Big Mac before getting on the mat?"
"Watch the commercials. Ronald never eats the food!"
"Now they have Ronald Mcdonald exercise videos for kids!"
"The old McDonald's CEO dies of a heart attack three weeks before the movie opens. The new CEO, when asked if it might have been due to his food, said, 'Bah, phooey. These are acts of God'. Crikey, sounds like God doesn't like McDonald's! God is dead; Long Live Ronald McDonald!"
"McDonald's is popular with families because they all have those playgrounds... look, it's a ball pit, filled with disease and kids."

newsflash: acetone mooncakes

2004-10-22T22:16:00.000-05:00

stuff sure happens while you're busy. my thermo and stat mech midterm was too easy! this is bad because it's gonna be harder to whack out an a for that class. anyway i don't have time to mull over that. now for the x-globins, enzymes and saccharides! fructose, glucose, pentose, hexose, ketose, aldose... yay... fun... urk *sugar overdose*

but you don't really want to hear me whine about my exams, right? what you really want are these news tidbits about me:

i am the top google hit for 'acetone mooncakes'. i hope the psychiatrists are looking out for this bugger.
some people don't know that google only takes up to ten search terms. one of my google referrals was a rod half of which is made of metal and the other half wood is balanced in the middle. when heated does the iron part go up or down. google's complaint is somewhat amusing.
some people found nemo...

... to be pretty darn tasty! ネモは美味しいですね...おお... 寿司... *rumble*
i am not really good at discriminating between chinese, japanese and korean faces. (and before any political correct people make noise, i am discriminating faces, not people, dammit!) i guess i don't have the moral upper ground then when i get sick of ang mohs saying "all asians look the same, lah!"
i am the first featured blog on the void deck, for purely lexicographic reasons. gee, acetone mooncakes sounds like a great blog title! ;-)
brain ooi from the university of chicago has linked half of my meritocracy rant.
singapore is no longer the world's most under-sexed country. 日本を祝します！
someone paid s$11,100 to have dinner with eileen wee. note at the end: "Seller will contact the winning buyer regarding postage, packaging, and payment details." uh-huh, mail order celebs? i sure hope eileen doesn't make a cameo appearance vide warren buffet.

more lame fortunes (i haven't been eating out recently. mostly bake and eat stuff at home.)

"There is romance and mystery in your future." klee-shay!
"From listening comes wisdom and from spitting repentance." this fella must have worked for lky at some point in time. *hurk*
"You will be happy and productive." interpretation 1: brainwash me again! interpretation 2: i will become an oversexed bastard.
"To be a man means constant revision like correcting a writing." try correcting the fortune.

more professorial quotes from prof. s:

"Now we forbid what we see in Florida." in the context of the class, prof. s was wanting to admit only irrotational force fields that would not give rise to vortices, such as tornadoes, such as those that have been ravaging florida in recent months. ah, the political ramifications! so that's why fark.com has a section just on .fl!
"I just do this Mickey Mouse calculation, it is so important."
on lars onsager: "His lectures were compared to Feynman['s]: all over your head. One thing about Nobel Prizes, they don't understand a peep about the work! Once he was told that a Nobel laureate was giving a lecture at Yale [where Onsager was] but that the lecture [had] already started. He said, 'Well! Just in time for lunch!'" i presume he was talking about free food.
"This result is so famous and simple, even I remember it, even if I am off by a factor of 2π." (on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem)
"As a theoretical physicist or theoretical anything, you should do all your work in two rooms. In the first room, you do all the science and in the second room, you do pure mathematics. That means you should throw away all your units [in your calculations]. If you have a large number in physics, it is meaningless. For example, if I express my weight in terms of the mass of an electron, I would be [even] more embarased about my weight than I am now. But if I express my weight in terms of say, the mass of the earth, I would be [a] pretty slim guy. But if you have a large number in mathematics, it is very meaningful and is usually related to some separation of time or length scales." pedantic pedagogical note: this quote is not physically correct until you substitute "weight" for "mass".
in the middle of a long and messy derivation where one equation takes up half a chalkboard length, i.e. about 6 m in small, spidery handwriting:"This looks like all hell is breaking loose, but never mind, the solution is actually not all that bad." this is before he takes up the chalk and cancels away like almost all the terms.
"If your Mathematica license expired yesterday and you need random numbers [today], how would you do it?"
"And now I will do something funny and write this as a Feynman path integral for the physicists in the audience. But for the rest of us who want to do real work, I will turn this into [a] numerical algorithm." note: the class has 8 people.
"If you just read the notes, you will find it boring. I will (sic) find it boring too."
in response to a student's incoherent question: "What is you thinking, really? I think you are still all fuzzy about this concept. I don't want to answer while you are still in the fuzzy mode."
"The brain is a very versatile computer: if I ask you what is 1 + 1 and you are not drunk, then you will be able to say 2."
on how stochastic resonance improves the sensitivity of neurons: "Think about it in anthropomorphic terms. If the neuron is directly pre-agitated, it is very finicky and fidgety, and anytime you poke it it will go aargh! and fire. Much better than a letharffic person, where you have to push for a very long time before he falls off the cliff." in singlish: neuron eh si kan cheong spider.
"Maybe if you are Einstein or Newton then maybe you can look at the equation and see what is going to happen, but if you are [Prof. S] then you will run numerical simulations and get data, then write [an] elegant paper showing all the beautiful mathematics but showing not the numerical data,"
"This equation is a very famous equations, it is called... uh... ah, I can't remember what it is called! Argh, I was born with Alzheimer's... Don't ever tell anyone that your professor forgot what this equation was called!"
"Now take the adjoint operator and you will expect the same behaviour. But if it is not true, thank God for it!"
"Why do we want the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions? Because this gives us an opportunity to tortune students in their homework!"

and a cameo quote from prof. f.

"I remember that I know the answer, but I just can't remember it right now. Please excuse me, I must be having a senior moment right now."

news of the weird:

Women Seeks Husband on a Billboard. 'Zhou spent A$5,000 (US$3,700) on the billboard which has a large headline "HUSBAND WANTED" and a lists of requirements, such as age up to 45, good health, non-smoker and drinker, Caucasian, solid financial background and a good sense of humor.' spgs, you girls are nothing compared to this lady!

'Two girls at Greenfield Junior High School in Gilbert, Ariz., were setting up the decorations for a school dance and got the idea of inhaling the helium they were using to fill balloons to hear themselves "talk funny." Principal Jill Bowers noted the school district's policy that prohibits the "non-medical use of drugs" also includes inhaled drugs, and suspended the girls for five days. "If it's such a dangerous substance," complained one of the girls' fathers, "why weren't they supervised? I think they went a little bit overboard and took the zero-tolerance policy to the extreme." Bowers relented, reducing the suspensions to one day. (Arizona Republic) ...Whew! Now they'll be able to squeak by the seventh grade.' - THIS is TRUE for 17 October 2004.

just came back from ushering the virsky ukranian national dance company. they are really energetic and lively, so it was great fun all round. i particularly enjoyed Vyshyvalnytsi (Embroideresses) which had an ingenious dance with women behaving like spires on a loom. sorry i can't be more specific than that but it was an amazing spectacle, pairs of dancing women holding long threadlike cloths, spinning them into tangles and out. another fairy tale dance, Oi, Pid Vishneiu (Oh, Under a Cherry Tree). abstract: "The humorous Ukrainian song, 'Oh, Under a Cherry Tree' derides the advances of an old man to a yound beauty. The girl, capricious and diffident, rejects the old man's gifts. Yet, he will not give her a moment's peace until a young man, also helplessly infatuated with the beautiful lady, enters the scene. The entire story is narrated through a very short, characteristically Russian dance. Throughout the performance, the audience will see an ancient Ukrainian puppet show which captures the essence of this particular dance." no puppet show, but the dancers were unusually jerky, reminiscent of puppets. that was pretty cool.

an ugly singaporean story

2004-10-21T16:30:00.000-05:00

i saw this article entitled Prain Engrish Campain off mrbrown.com today. ugh. i can't decide whether i'm more put off by the apparently atrocious singlish (melbem? come on!) or the rudeness. remember lkm?

hotel deco for sale?

2004-10-18T11:24:00.000-05:00

i'm taking a precious half-hour or so of my time out of revising for my midterms (statistical mechanics on thursday, biochemistry next tuesday... *sob*) to bring you news of the very weird:

Must-have decor: Entire hotel suites for sale - hotel markets its furniture for taking home after a comfortable night's stay. reminds me of the time beAr was desperately looking for that perfect trash can that he saw in some hotel in shanghai.

choice quote:

“Buying hotel furniture for a home is a logical extension of walking away with the toiletries,” says Kathryn H. Anthony, an author and architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who specializes in environment and behavior.

Are You A Food Court Druid? Or A Unitard? - "According to self-proclaimed "idiosynchrologist" Robert Lanham, a Food Court Druid is a Goth teenager who often plays "Magic The Gathering" while sitting in the food court of the mall." does this sound like anyone you know?

Which File Extension Am I?

Which Nigerian Spammer Am I?

random trivia

2004-10-17T18:35:00.000-05:00

to celebrate the crossing of the 4,000^th visitor mark, here are some trivia on my website. vive discours libre!

the most common hours for visitors to visit my site are 2 pm and 1 am singapore time.

interesting web search referrals:

density of caustic soda - very. if i remember correctly, around 1.15.

moliere vilceus - i bought a used book with his name on it. interestingly enough, he is practically invisible on the web. as of right now there are only two other webpages with those two words on the same page.

singapore break bond scholarshop (sic) - a delicious oxymoron to treasure. 'applications now open for the prestigious break bond scholarship!'
kathi kebab manhattan - yeah, tell me where the good food is if you find it.
he ruimin - his fame just keeps growing... interestingly enough, a google search on my name turns up an interesting singapore democrat's page.
psle science exam discussion forum - i don't know whether to be delighted or frightened, that people are discussing psle science exams. are 12-year-olds savvy enough to be discussing science, or are parents still mulling over the recent 'impossible question?
canned pumpkin from NTUC fairprice - huh?
he told her rudimentary phallus - i am the top hit on google for this quotation from the da vinci code, albeit stripped of search-engine-irrelevant particles.
saag ghost advantage - over chicken tikka, mayhap?
giving toddlers soda - supersize me for tots?

the psle physics problem - my us$0.02 worth

2004-10-15T15:26:00.000-05:00

i'm amazed that this problem has been the focus of debate in the latest outrage du jour sweeping sunny singapore. (for some reason i am feeling whimsical with language today, do bear with me. it think it must have been the crème brulée de vanille avec fraises. did i hear someone say 'sugar high?')

first, i have to point out that the question as circulated is posed ambiguously. the problem states that the rod is half iron and half wood but does not state whether it is 50% by mass or by length! fortunately, it seems to me that this wrinkle does not affect the final result. 50% by length is the most straightforward to calculate; 50% by mass is more involved algebraically (involving coefficients of expansion and all that fun mechanical engineering stuff) but yields the same answer.

so what is the answer? depending on your assumptions, it could stay put or swing down! the point of balance is the pivotal issue here (ok, ok, enough puns!). if the pivot is assumed to be perfectly frictionless, it will stay put forever because any infinitesimal expansion due to heat must be isotropic about the point of heating. therefore the rod will lengthen at both ends to the same extent! now if the pivot is frictionless, a slight change in the moments about it will cause the rod to shift about the pivot and re-equilibriate. therefore, you can keeping heat the poor rod and observe no movement in the vertical plane until the iron melts and the wood smells like charred incense.

on the other hand if the pivot is in anyway realistic, there will be static friction keeping the pivot at the same position relative to the local surface of the rod. therefore it can be treated as a fixed point with the same change in length at both ends of the iron segments. the centres of mass of both the iron and wood pieces then move the same distance away from the pivot. if the rod is 50% iron by length, the iron part is heavier than the wood part and hence the weight of the iron part has a greater moment about the pivot and hence the rod would swing down on the iron part. now if rod were 50% iron by mass, then the pivot would lie squarely at the interface between iron and wood. here the frictional considerations are iffy, but it is possible that in this case the pivot would remain at the interface as the iron expands. in this case the rod would still swing down on the iron side because of the greater moment of the iron half.

my favorite part now. it is a common saying in science that in theory, there is no practical difference between theory and experiment; in practice, there is. there is no reason at all why all three possibilities (swing down, swing up, stay put) should not occur at all, depending on the experimental conditions.

first the theoretical cases, from an experimentalist's point of view. note that if i oiled the fulcrum well enough the point of contact should be pretty darn close to frictionless and i would expect perhaps some slight oscillations as the rod re-equilibriates as it expands. of course the phase space of this outcome is pretty much a set of measure zero (i.e. when singapore bigwigs admit that they've been screwing up the country, i.e. theoretically possible but practically never) so the swinging down result is far more likely to be observed experimentally. (a mental picture comes to mind of thirty dandruffy, jaded men and women in a dim laboratory, clustered around a strange half-light, half-dark rod being dangled from the ceiling precariously from a thread of steel wool and being furiously attacked by a crackling blue bunsen flame. it moved! it moved! ouija really does work!)

so how about swing up? easy! if you use a strong bunsen flame, it is being fed by a stream of natural gas right? do you think the gas loses all its momentum when ignited? imagine blowing at the rod through a straw. implementation screws up the experiment. qed.

and you thought singapore was bad. 日本のメリットクラシーがより悪い!

2004-10-13T20:34:00.000-05:00

this article does a real nice job of introducing the problem. i've annotated it here and there with updates.

March 1, 1997
In Japan, Even Tots Must Make the Grade
By Keiko Katsumata, Mother Wired Tokyo Reporter
TOKYO BUREAU - Here in Tokyo, twice a week, Ko goes to cram school to prepare for the crucial entrance exam he will have to take next year. He arrives for class with a tiny knapsack packed with his crayons, lunch box and a diaper. He is, after all, only 2 years old.

Japan's super-competitive system of 'examination hell' is engulfing ever-younger children, spawning a new industry of cram schools to help the baby boomers' babies pass entrance exams for elite private kindergartens and elementary schools.

About 150 cram schools in Tokyo now cater to preschoolers, who are drilled in the test-taking strategies they need to beat the 10-to-1 odds for a slot on the kiddie fast track.

Among the lessons: Know your colors, shapes and nursery rhymes. Don't cry or whine. Sit with your hands politely resting on your thighs. And never take more than one cookie when offered the cookie jar.

Meanwhile, the cram schools also coach the babies' mothers on how to ace the equally vital parental interview.

Among the tips: Wear a conservative, navy blue suit, a white blouse, low heels and no flashy jewelry. A Chanel handbag is OK at 'liberal' kindergartens such as the famous Aoyama Gakuin, but a quiet, non-designer black bag is de rigueur at venerable institutions such as Denenchofu Futaba, whose alumni include Crown Princess Masako, wife of the future Japanese emperor.

Working mothers are frowned upon [rtf], and their children are less likely to be accepted by elite schools. Even stay-at-home moms are told to come across as homey during the interview by mentioning how much they enjoy baking special treats for their children.

'It's very difficult, but because of the way Japan is now, it cannot be helped,' said Toshiko Hayashi, whose daughter Risa, 3, was rejected by the kindergarten of her choice and will have to try again next fall.

Risa has been attending one of Tokyo's better cram schools since she was 18 months old. Tuition is $730 a month for two mornings a week.

How long will she keep attending?

'Until she passes,' her mother said firmly.

Like most Japanese trends, the baby cram schools originated in Tokyo but have spread to Osaka and smaller cities. A Tokai Bank survey conducted last year in Tokyo and Nagoya found that 26% of preschoolers were either attending cram schools or following correspondence courses at home. Their families paid an average of $124 per month.

Parents who once attended cram schools to help get into good high schools or colleges are enrolling their toddlers despite warnings from educators that intensive tutoring is unnecessary and possibly harmful for them. Some of the elite kindergartens and elementary schools also protest the advent of baby cram schools even while admitting their young alumni.

Parents call the cram schools a 'necessary evil' in Japan's 'education society,' where graduates of a handful of elite universities have for decades been seen as monopolizing the nation's best jobs, highest salaries and deepest respect.

The rigid system has loosened, with prominent educators arguing that a degree from Tokyo University, known as 'Todai,' will no longer guarantee success in the 21st century. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto has targeted education as one of six areas urgently in need of structural reform. But even Education Ministry officials think change will be slow in coming, and millions of anxious parents remain convinced that a degree from Todai is the best possible ticket to a bright future for their children.

Although dreadfully Darwinian, Japan's educational system has long been praised as a true meritocracy. Poor boys from the provinces could rise above the sons of tycoons if only they could pass the Todai entrance exam.

But now critics say the proliferation of cram schools is making it much more difficult for the children of lower-income families to break into the educational elite.

'Japan appears to be one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, but it is not,' said Todai education professor Toshiyuki Shiomi.

According to a study by Keio University professor Yoshio Higuchi, only 26% of students entering Todai in 1975 were graduates of private high schools. But by 1992, 52% came from private schools.

The wealthier the parents, the more likely they are to invest in cram schools that help their children win admission to these pricey private schools that in turn make it easier to get into the best universities.

'Parental income has a huge effect on a child's education, and through the employment system, it has a huge effect on the child's lifelong income,' Higuchi said.

Mothers of the cram-school kids said they are eager to get their kids into private schools not least because they believe those schools put a quick stop to children's bullying, the bane of the Japanese public school system.

Moreover, by getting their children into the elite private kindergartens and elementary schools that are linked to prestigious universities, the mothers hope to spare their offspring the worst of examination hell.

For example, Miki Shimamura attended the Keio schools, whose university is the Japanese equivalent of Yale. Once admitted to the Keio Yochisa elementary school, Shimamura zipped through the Keio high school and was accepted at Keio University without having to take the notoriously tough entrance exam. All that was required of him was to keep up his grades; 90% of his elementary school classmates also made it.

Now Shimamura has taken over his father's business, heading Keishinkai, an exclusive prep school for the 2- to 6-year-old set. Many of the Keishinkai parents have their hearts set on Keio.

Competition for the best kindergartens is so fierce that some parents are asked not only about their own backgrounds but about the educational and professional achievements of their parents, Shimamura said.

To pass the status sniff test, both parents must be college graduates; the father must be an executive at a large company, run his own company or be a medical doctor; and the mother must stay home to devote herself to educating her children. Although the parents must be able to pay the tuition--more than $11,000 a year for some kindergartens--nouveaux riches' kids are not welcome. 'It's a re-creation of the elite in this country,' Shimamura said.

Keishinkai offered ordinary preschool education from its founding in 1964 until about 10 years ago, when the first kindergartens began holding entrance exams. Now it specializes in helping children pass the tests, though Shimamura says that more than half his job is teaching parents to do a better job of child rearing.

Some of Shimamura's little wards are children who have been so smothered by their parents that the school's first task is to teach them how to get along with other children and how to have fun.

"Half of what the kindergarten testers look at is whether the kid can play," he said.

Reading and writing are not part of the kindergarten tests, but cognitive skills and good manners matter. Shimamura's children are taught to say "good morning" brightly and bow to their teacher, to carry tissues in their pockets and cover their noses when they sneeze.

Most of the kindergarten and elementary school testers offer the children juice and a snack and scrutinize their table manners. So Shimamura too has a bear-shaped jar of snacks. At first, the toddlers tend to stick their fists in and grab a handful, but the well-bred Japanese child is expected to take one or two and place them on a plate before eating them.

Coordination also counts in Japanese society, where clumsiness is equated with stupidity. One elementary school test required the applicant to move a pile of beans from one plate to another with chopsticks. At Shimamura's school, even the 2-year-olds are taught to use scissors (under one-to-one adult supervision), and older children are taught to fold their clothing and tie their shoelaces.

'Lately, if we leave it up to the parents, some of the kids never learn,' he said.

At Ko's cram school in a posh Tokyo suburb, one little girl spends her first day howling inconsolably over the departure of her mother. After a period of free play, the other children sit behind a tiny desk while the teacher teaches them to sing songs, draw and identify pictures of a snowman, blocks, cake, a banana and rice balls.

Ko, the son of a department store magnate, is hard at work trying to move peanuts from one bowl to another with a spoon. "No, no, no!" says the teacher as he tries to shove one intractable nut onto his spoon using his free hand.

It doesn't look like cram school, except that the teacher is grading each child on how smoothly he or she performs the peanut trick.

'The 2-year-olds don't understand they are being graded. It's the parents who feel the pressure, and so they start drilling their kids at home,' said Chizuko Nihira, a Kyoto mother of two. 'And when the kids can't do it, they [the parents] become scared at the thought of not sending their kids to cram school--even though it was the cram school that made them scared! It's a vicious cycle.'

Nihira decided against sending her son Hiroshi to one of three neighborhood cram schools, and he got into a good private school anyway. But she soon discovered that Hiroshi was the only first-grader who had not been to cram school. While he could write his name, his classmates could all write sentences. Nevertheless, he caught up within one term.

'There are some parents who send their kids to cram school because their friends all go, and there's nobody around for them to play with if they don't go,' she said.'It's sad.'

the scary part is how this is catching on in singapore. think of pap kindergartens with their homework for pre-primary children, toddlers being dragged to enrichment classes, and babies who can hardly walk being marked on how well they can count. *shudder* and think about the rich kids who each have their cadres of tuition teachers.

looks like korea is hardly immune either [pdf]. and the parellels with singapore are just as revealing:

Originally, private tuition is (sic) supposed to help students in keeping up with the school curriculum. In this respect, private tutoring is auxiliary to the learning in schools. However, things have been reversed in Korea. There is a tendency to rely more on private tutors than teachers at school, particularly in order to prepare for the entrance exams. It is presumed wither because the level of learning for the tests is too much (sic) high or the level of teaching is mediocre, of both. Consequently, schools are losing the trust of parents and students who find the alternative in private tutoring.

what's sad that even in singapore's so-called good schools, teachers expect their students to have tuition teachers, and more scarily, have started to shift their responsibilities to their tuition teachers! my brother went to acs(i), and the most common thing my mother and i heard about his teachers were: "go ask your tuition teacher, i don't have time to teach all this." it's just shocking. and his teachers were equally shocked to discover that he did not have any tuition teachers. remember what i said about meritocracy giving rise to social pressure? guess what my mother did? yeah. he didn't last too long though; it was obvious even to my brother that he was just bs-ing his way through.

and get this: if this doesn't convince you that meritocracy-linked education systems are bad, nothing will:

Sociologists point out the status attainment competition as the prime reason of (sic) private tutoring. Education is almost identified with social upward mobility in Korea. Therefore, the competition to get an opportunity for better and higher schoolingbecomes intense.

it's telling, though, that the korean ministry of finance is not afraid of telling off the korean ministry of education for turning a blind eye to the increasingly widespread trend of private tuition and its increasing burden on household budgets. it's just something that will never ever catch on in the white-dominated singapore government.

at least the japanese seem to have a serious intent to reform their system [pdf]. it took the japanese until the cram schools started ranking universities (a complete reversal of power here: the private dictating the public!) before they started to figure out something is seriously wrong with their system. (this is implied in page 7 of this paper [pdf]) how much worse must our education system get before we admit that it needs an overhaul?

two views on local schooling

2004-10-13T13:51:00.000-05:00

a straits times article, archived for your future convenience:

A testing experience for pupils
Straits Times, October 13, 2004

TEACH less, so that students can learn more, so the Prime Minister urges us. I believe that the objective of doing so is to give students more time to synthesise information, think creatively and hone processes in problem solving. It augers well for us that our leaders see the need for a broad-based education for our young.

However, I think this will not happen if we do not re-think the testing system. After preparing my eldest son for the recent Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), I am even more convinced of this.

Firstly, little creativity and real learning take place in the preparation process. The past year was spent drilling him in skills related to tackling test papers and handling exam conditions. We did a lot of work but he did not do much learning outside the test papers and made little progress in honing lateral-thinking abilities, much less develop creativity.

Secondly, the exam is not age appropriate - making 12-year-olds concentrate for more than two hours is not an age-appropriate expectation. Learning experts the world over concur that even for adults, our concentration and ability to learn or focus drops after the first hour. When a task is not age appropriate, children will not be in 'Flow' (which is when they learn best).

Anyone who has prepared children for the Maths paper knows that the first step to success involves practising to concentrate for 2hrs 15mins, during which they do 50 sums (15 problem sums) under exam conditions.

Thirdly, it has become an increasingly unfair test in recent years. The Maths and Science papers have more and more questions that are out of syllabus. The Maths paper has an increasing portion of non-routine questions that require skills not taught in the textbook. For weaker students just trying to get by, these questions terrify them.

While preparing for the PSLE, my son's teachers made him buy and do the PSLE Examination Questions 1999-2003 (sample questions reproduced with the permis-sion of the Education Ministry) for all subjects and used them to test the pupils.

We got hold of the top schools' past prelim papers which were a lot more difficult than the sample PSLE questions and he practised until he could consistently score in the mid-80s for English, Maths and Science.

I wanted him to be well prepared for the PSLE. We had heard many a horror story. Four years ago, pupils came out of the Maths exam crying, floored by a non-routine question. In the last few years, Science papers have been getting ridiculously difficult. Last year many children cried after the Chinese paper.

Unfortunately, our worst nightmares came true. The Maths paper (Section C) was rated by even the A* students as being difficult and the Science paper (Section B), absolutely impossible.

My son came out crying after the Science paper (Science is his favourite subject and he has been a consistent A student). Most children said the Maths paper was two or three times more difficult than the PSLE sample questions and the Science paper, three to four times more difficult.

By doing this, the ministry is making the exam very unfair to both the teachers and the students, especially when it had published sample questions from past years which students and teachers would take as the standard.

The children said that a lot of the questions in the Science paper consisted of experi-ments and equipment they had never seen before. Parts of it were also out of syllabus. For example, there was a question in which a rod - half of which is made of iron and the other half, of wood - is balanced in the middle. Pupils were asked if the iron part would go up or down when heated. The pupils learnt that matter expands when heated and contracts when cooled but there was nothing in the syllabus about the effect of heat on the weight of materials.

Putting children through this kind of testing experience demoralises them. If the content to be tested becomes a moving target, then preparing for the test is like catching the wind. My son said that if he does well for Science, it would be by fluke. I wonder if this is the type of message we want our children to grow up with.

While I am willing to live with the fact that we had to put creativity on the back burner for the past year and drill him for the PSLE, I had hoped that by putting in the hard and incredibly boring work to prepare for the exams, my son would be encouraged to see that hard work does pay off in the form of reasonably good results and a positive major-exam experience.

After what he has gone through, even if he gets A grades for Maths and Science, they have become meaning-less. The bad experience will shape his views towards work, the system and learning, more than the grades can make up for. The damage is done.

GRACE YONGFUI HAN (MS)

this is just screaming for attention, isn't it.

and here's a forum thread started by an expatriate about to come to singapore, on whether a local school would be suitable to send their child to.

what is meritocracy?

2004-10-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

i am glad that my posts are having the desired effect, of stirring people to sit up and think about these issues, or at least provoke some kind of response. but of the discussions that i have stumbled upon (through referral data, icq comments, and email) i have noticed a discrepancy between my concept of meritocracy and the concept that other people seem to be using, which probably accounts for large gobs of misunderstanding. to quote darius from the spug discussion:

I may be missing something here, but I feel the ranter is talking more about the education system and the examination culture rather than meritocracy.

The author seems to think that rising in the ranks in private and public sector jobs seems solely reliant on what grades they got in school. Good academic grades may get you into middle management in private sectors, or a higher scale in the civil service, but promotion after that is no longer looking at your exam results.

The only sacred cow which has yet to be slaughtered is the ceiling of promotion for none grads in the civil service. If you are a dip holder or lower, you need to work twice as hard and long to keep up with a grad.

in retrospect, i should have discussed this right at the beginning. oh well. let's see if i can redress this here.

so when in doubt, let's look up an encyclopedia. Wikipedia states: "Meritocracy is a system of government based on rule by ability rather than by wealth or social position." a trite definition accepted by most people as the 'correct' definition. however i believe this statement is so vague as to be useless. here's my logic: meritocracy says that the able should rule. that's all well and good, and painfully tautological, really. so let's go implement this. immediate we run into a snafu: how does one measure ability? therein lies the rub.

all forms of government face the same challenge: who would make the most able ruler? if one takes the broadest possible definition of meritocracy, as rule of the best, then all forms of government (excepting anarchy, possibly) practice meritocracy. the only differences are then in their operational definitions of what constitutes merit: noble birth, in an aristocracy; representativeness, in a democracy; royal birthright, in a monarchy; force of personality, in a dictatorship; or even some 'mandate of heaven', in a theocracy. ludicrous as it may seem at first blush, it's not too difficult to convince yourself that all these, in their respective contexts, do indeed form some measure of 'merit'. whether these are the 'correct' ones then boils down to a matter of taste, and more specifically the tastes of those in power. therefore, we should discard this definition as being too broad and return to the original youngian definition of meritocracy, with ability defined by some academic metric.

oh and before i get dragged into the same quagmire with metric, i shall state my operational definition here: a metric is a quantity measured with the intent of predicting ability. ability here is a generic filler to be specialized later: e.g. academic metrics predict academic ability, etc. it is critical to note that a metric is not a quantity that directly measures ability, it is a predictor of ability. mind you! this distinction is important! ability as it stands is this vague woolly thing that we all agree is something a 'good' person has, in the sense of saying "this guy is really good at juggling!", for example.

well now that i've brought up juggling as a test case, let's consider how one predicts 'ability to juggle'. not knowing much about the subject, i can only hypothesize that the best 'metric' is to see how many objects a person can sustainably juggle simultaneously. the obvious hole in the definition of this metric is what constitutes 'jugglable objects', which then spews forth real, measurable metrics, such as the abilities to sustainably juggle N cue balls, N balloons, N flaming batons, N satay sticks, N alligators, etc. now what? do we take some kind of average over all such objects to arrive at a definitive metric? should we bias it more strongly toward cue balls or flaming batons? or alligators? is this metric even useful? i hope it's obvious that it's so impractical! not to mention that most people won't even get past N = 1, or even N = 0.)

the situation then gets worse if one wants to measure something more abstract like 'musical ability'. which characteristics should go into the metric? singing ability? pitch discrimination? ability to play an instrument? ability to play many instruments? quality of? and how should these even be quantified in the first place?

jack up the abstraction level even higher, and i hope this gives everyone an inkling of how incredibly difficult it is to even conceive of a metric of just plain 'ability'. and how the rafflesian ideal of all-roundedness - an athlete, scholar and leader - is woefully inadequate and ill-defined. ('all-roundedness' is yet another loathsome meaningless Singlish buzzword - all-roundedness should mean rotundness and corpulence!)

that has not stopped people for trying to develop metrics for ability. in fact, one of the most controversial psychometric tests ever developed was designed with intention of measuring ability, by definining it as intelligence. this test is none other than the stanford-binet iq test, and has spawned huge misgiving in the united states over its supposed utility, or even predictive ability of (correlation with) the woolly notion of 'intelligence'. today we have competing theories, such as that of multiple intelligences by howard gardner, and that elusive psychometric g factor that no psychologist has yet to nail a good definition for.

that's why i say, meritocracy is meaningful only when defined as rule of the most academically inclined. to generalize any further is to be too broad. look at how merit is implied to be academic merit in this sociological study, for example. that's why it's premise is flawed, because psychometric studies have shown that academic metrics are useless for predicting real-world success. that's why many commenters have missed the point entirely - those who have left comments somewhere out there agree that academic metrics such as exams and gpas are poor indicators of 'ability' at best, but instead of drawing the logical conclusion, they attack my premise as mixing up meritocracy and metrics, that these two issues should be discussed separately. nay, gentle readers. while metrics can exist without meritocracy, meritocracy cannot exist without metrics. that's where the connection between meritocracy and the education system lies, because meritocracy is defined in terms of academic metrics.

the challenge to define ability is the same logical challenge that recruitment staffers face: how do you pick the most able people for the job short of trying out every single candidate in that job? (assume for the moment that they are all fresh graduates and have no work experience, i.e. track records, to go by.) since the latter is blatantly impractical at best, one therefore have to resort to metrics to predict, based on available information, who is most suited for the job. the public sector has already chosen a meritocratic definition, predicting ability based on academic achievement. that's the entire rationale underpinning the three different tracks for civil servants: the graduates, the non-graduates, and the scholars. the civil service's faith in meritocracy is so unshakeable that a hypothetical 4.0 scholar who screws up again and again can nonetheless be promoted on schedule because he is destined to, by design. many times this breeds resentment because such behavior is interpreted as high-handedness and/or favoritism by those in the non-scholar tracks who get passed over for promotion time and time again.

happily, those in the private sector say that grades open the door for employment, but it is current performance in the job that dictates future career prospects. it is arguable from this point of view that it is the private sector, not the public sector, that is practicing the 'idealized' meritocracy, of truly giving the most important posts to the most able, who have proven their abilities by their track records. i stand corrected on that one front. but the private sector cannot avoid interaction with the monolithic government that permeates every aspect of life in singapore. therefore, it too is not immune from the ravages of meritocracy. and check out this bbc transcript exerpt:

Andrew Marr: Moving on from the education side when people arrive in the world of business, is it again the sort of perfectly graded rat race with every kind of rat of different sizes and abilities coming in and every little rat expected to have, you know, their degree their awards etc., is that how it seems to you?

Richard Scase: Indeed, large corporations are organised very much on that basis they recruit people on the basis of their academic qualifications and, often, this leads to a disappointing performance. Recruitment selection, intelligence tests, measurements, appraisals, assessments, organisations pride themselves on being very meritocratic but of course the reality is that they're not. And the dream of becoming the meritocratic society hasn't been fulfilled. A recent survey just published, for example, looks at Chief Executive Officers of the fifty largest companies in the UK and more the fifty per cent come from Public Schools, private schools, which educates something like, seven per cent of all pupils and, of course, entrepreneurs demonstrate how really large organisations in trying to be meritocratic, really do miss lots and lots of talent because what happens is that people who don't fit in, the Richard Bransons of this world, the people who don't have the qualifications, who are not seen to be attracted by large corporations they go off and set up their own very successful businesses.

a singaporean must have contributed to that Wikipedia article, by the way. note how it goes on and on about how singapore is the world's closest thing to a meritocracy. i completely agree with that premise, because it shows up unintentionally in many aspects of singaporean culture.

a social dimension of meritocracy which i have omitted from my previous rant entirely (due to lack of data) is the agony felt by new parents, when deciding to subject their precious children to the pressure-cooker education system. witness the dilemma of this poor soul who tried valiantly to resist the social pressure to pack in 'enrichment' classes and homework for her then kindergarten-attending daughter. from kelvintan73, who archived this letter to the ST Forum:

Don't kill love for learning

I REFER to the article, 'Through-train option may pile on the pressure' (ST, Jan 30), concerning the growing amount of stress that children face in Singapore's education system.

I am particularly saddened by the case of the mentally fatigued Primary 3 boy from a top school who attends nine enrichment classes.

I have a daughter in Primary 3 this year. From the outset, I was determined that she should be allowed to develop at her own pace and have fun learning through daily experiences and play.

Friends were surprised that she was not even attending a single enrichment class in her preschool days. I had a hard time explaining to them why I would not be thrilled to have her read at two and count to a thousand by three. Of what use is the mastery of these skills at such tender ages except to inflate our egos when we compare our children's achievements, as parents are wont to do? We should examine our motives before sending our kids to yet another enrichment class. Are we doing it for their benefit or ours?

We parents are sometimes guilty of trying to live vicariously through our children, hoping to bask in the reflected glory of their achievements.

I was made to feel as if I was somewhat lacking as a parent for not preparing my child for academic life. Sometimes, the pressure to conform is so great that it takes superhuman effort just to resist the plethora of enrichment classes on offer.

Not surprisingly, my daughter was woefully unprepared for Primary 1. She was put in the Learning Support Programme (LSP) for English. According to the Ministry of Education (MOE)website, this programme caters to 'pupils who lack the necessary language and literacy skills to cope with the English curriculum'.

My husband and I are both university graduates and ours is an English-speaking home. I am sure we are a statistical anomaly in MOE's records for having a child in the LSP.

We had wanted to spare her the drudgery of doing endless assessment papers during her kindergarten days in preparation for Primary 1. But we finally had to face reality and bought her assessment papers to practise.

In three months, she was out of the LSP programme and has been scoring mainly Band 1s in English since. I have a nagging suspicion that she got into the programme because she was unfamiliar with doing assessment papers, rather than a lack of grasp of the language.

Do I regret not having forced her to rote-learn the language earlier? Absolutely not. She had a relatively carefree childhood, free from any extraneous structured lessons. She is still nowhere near the top in class, but I would rather have a happy and well-adjusted kid than a miserable one who scores high marks only by dint of sheer hard work.

Friends who are overseas say that their children love school now. Schools in Belgium do not even have formal exams for the first two or three years of primary school. My friend's son spent one term studying and researching dinosaurs and mushrooms and he enjoyed it thoroughly. How many Singapore kids can say the same?

Children are now being taught concepts that were previously introduced only in secondary school. Is it really necessary to cram them with facts and drill them endlessly, without any regard for their natural ability and inclinations? We may be causing them irreparable harm.

We advocate a passion for lifelong learning. Our children have a whole lifetime to acquire knowledge. Please don't kill their love for learning by subjecting them to interminable rounds of mind-numbing tuition and enrichment classes.

MARIA LOH MUN FOONG (MS)

admittedly the last paragraph is ambiguous, but it is deliciously oxymoronic to think of "mind-numbing enrichment".

the other thing i must stress is that i'm targeting the system, not its products. felumpfus has said it all. please don't sink to the level of ad hominem arguments. (i have already been implicated in more than one argumentatum ad hominem tu quoque.) far too many rabid scholar-bashing singaporeans are already guilty of that; must you add your name to the ledger of the illogical?

no doubt the system exerts its pressure on indoctrinates, but it is each inductee's choice whether to yield one way or another, or resist and face the consequences. there's a wide spread in characteristics for graduates of the singapore education system. thankfully, not all our individualities got rubber-stamped out. for me, i guess i was far too stubborn to yield. it has cost me time and time again, but i don't care. i like to think that i escaped without too many brainwashed influences. if anything, i have been actively unlearning all that brainwashing (think national education, haha. no of course not, i mean temptations to chow mug and all that) since jc, possibly even since secondary school.

the illogical chinese

2004-10-10T23:53:00.000-05:00

fortune cookies give chinese a bad name. why? look at these fortunes:

You are more likely to give than to give in.

Golden investment opportunities are arising.

You will step on the soil of many countries.

Your help will be needed in an embarassing situation.

Your family is one of nature's masterpieces.

You're interested in higher education whether material or spiritual.

back to the meritocracy thing, here is a predating discussion of meritocracy:
Social ossification by siginah.

and on how meritocracy breeds elitism, check out this news article on ntu's new aerospace engineering degree. i am too tired to fisk this but note how prof. meguid makes exactly the same mistake as chairman yeo: that only perfect scores matter. and how he singles out the usual suspects from rjc, hcjc and njc as being prime sources for candidates for his program.

i saw a sign outside a church yesterday: "wanted - imperfect people to join god's family. perfect people need not apply". well, i guess ntu's aerospace program is where all the perfect people should head toward.

i'm me, man! that's why i hate this! (yet another a*star rant)

2004-10-10T18:25:00.000-05:00

i hope you're not tired of this topic yet. because i just found something on a*star's website just crying: fisk me! fisk me! (no, fisk is not a pseudo-vulgarity.) apparently, this document is an extract from an a*star yearbook. i am going to strip away the dumb cutesy look, so i may place some words out of their intended order.

the punchline: chairman yeo is showing his incompetency for his position by making a rash of logical errors that no self-respecting scientist would ever dare to utter.

QUOTES from Chairman Philip Yeo:

“I am a 50% nationalist and 50% internationalist.

logical error #1: chairman has no clue what a nationalist is. dictionary definition: devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation including promoting the interests of one country over those of others. (my italics)

logical error #2: chairman has no concept of complementarity is. dictionary definition of internationalism: A policy or practice of cooperation among nations, especially in politics and economic matters. ergo, nobody can be both nationalist and internationalist.

deduction #1: chairman is stating that he is a logical paradox, since he claims to be two mutually exclusive things. at least that statement is pretty noncontroversial. or maybe he's preparing himself to be in a Schrödinger cat state, if you keep asking him the same question ad infinitum, 50% of the time he will say that he is nationalist and 50% of the time he will say that is an internationalist. but this alternative requires that he knows what quantum mechanics is, is coherent enough to prepared in such a superposition, and can be reprepared in that state after each measurement. so i suppose that that's iffy.

Must develop and nurture our 50% of Singapore talent.”

deduction #2: chairman is implying that the degree that he develops and nurtures our local talent is quantitatively equal to how nationalistic he is. see logical error #1.

logical error #3: by deduction #2 and going by the numbers, chairman is implying that the Singapore talent pool is the same size as the internaional talent pool.

deduction #3: chairman is telling the other 50% of Singapore talent: fuck off, we don't need you.

deduction #4: by symmetry, chairman is also telling the other 50% of international talent to fuck off, which of course, they don't need to be told twice.

“We have about 2,000 scientists, most of them non-Singaporean. Barely 400 are Singaporean.

logical error #4: going by the operational definition delineated in deduction #2, chairman admits that he is actually a 20% nationalist, in contradiction with the very first quote.

Eventually we want 2,500, half Singaporean, half international, and 500 of the total being graduate students in our labs.

ambiguity #1: does chairman want 2,500 students, each of which being half Singaporean and half international? does a singaporean/vietnamese-american meet this criterion?

deduction #5: chairman admits that he aspires to be a 50% nationalist.

ambiguity #2: there is no mention of how many local graduate students and how many international students a*star wants.

The international scientists should be of all colours, from different countries.

deduction #6: chairman wants a whole palette of scientists, be them green, purple, or otherwise.

deduction #7: chairman is practicing affirmative action by selecting candidates by their color.

Only their grey matter is the same colour.

deduction #8: chairman's interviewing procedure includes hacking open candidates' skulls to check if their grey matter is "the same colour", whatever that statement is really referring to. maybe the grey matter must be color-coordinated with their skins, otherwise they aren't fashionable enough to be hired.

Right now, with NSS* and OGS* and AGS*, we have more than 480 Scholars. We’re on track towards having about 1,000 Singaporean PhDs by 2010.

deduction #9: chairman's is concerned with a*star scholars up to the point where they collect their diplomas.

In addition to our Scholars, there are many students who study on Papa and Mama
Scholarships.

logical error #5: chairman is pretending that other scholars, students on financial assistance, and students on fellowships/grants don't exist.

So there are enough Singapore kids doing Science.

logical error #6: everyone on PMS is doing Science. (with a capital S, no less!)

Those who are in NUS* and NTU* can come to us to do their PhD when they graduate.

deduction #10: for those of you who didn't study overseas for their predoctoral degrees, you weren't really good enough for us. but ok, i guess even the hopeless have some potential.

We have a large-enough talent pool. Getting 1,000 Singaporean PhDs is no problem.”

logical error #7: local graduates are not considered part of the chairman's talent pool. note that from deduction #9 and subsequent word order of the text that a*star is implying that there are enough scholars to hit his target, and that the locals are just bit players in the a*star empire.

“In the 2003 A-level batch are many kids with four As, A for General Paper and three S-papers with distinction.

deduction #11: chairman does not take his freshly recruited scholars seriously, by calling them "kids".

remark #1: contrast this with how the head of the uiuc chemistry department addressed his newest batch of graduate students:

"don't think of yourselves as students who happen to want to be scientists; think of yourselves as scientists who happen to be students." - prof. g. g. girolami

admittedly the audiences are different, but the attitudes are even more polarized in their outlooks than the difference in audience justifies.

Those who want to do the PhD wouldn’t want to go into banking or the Admin Service.

logical error #8: getting a doctoral degree does not preclude a future career in banking. american friend of mine who did his doctorate in nuclear engineering (of all things) is now a successful investment banker.

remark #2: unless you're a president's scholar, getting a doctoral degree does preclude you from joining the admin service. the narrow-minded commissioners of the public service commission think that it makes you overqualified for the position, whatever the fuck that means. unless, of course, you're he ruimin; then you could do whatever you damn well please and the higher-ups will pat you on the head anyway.

They are a different species.

logical error #9: obvious. homo sapiens sapiens academicus v. homo sapiens sapiens economicus v. homo sapiens sapiens gubernaculum? that would make them subsubspecies, at best, since all three are capable of interbreeding. the chairman of a science agency, particularly one going into biomedical sciences, should have known that. and linnaeus would have been outraged at the violation of the dichotomous nomeclature anyway.

deduction #11: chairman implies each 'species' has differing abilities. would they be mutually exclusive skill sets, do you think?

For them and their parents, our Scholarships are very prestigious, the terms very attractive. We are giving them an eight-year scholarship with a six-year bond.

deduction #12: chairman is unclear between the distinction between one and two. a*star scholars are given two scholarships, each with six-year bonds to be served concurrently. this makes a huge difference for people asking for funding only in their graduate studies.

Most of the other scholars here do three years for their Bachelor’s, some do one year more for the Master’s, and still have a six-year bond.

logical error #10: most male psc scholars serve less than six years and they certainly form a substantial fraction of singaporean scholars.

logical error #11: many scholars in the united states can, and do, take four years to do their bachelor's.

logical error #12: the terms and conditions for psc scholars studying in a non-english speaking country are significantly different. most of them are for six/seven years of study with only five years of service.

This year (2004) we have 70 kids taking up BS-PhD scholarships under NSS. Fourteen other talented young people will do the OGS and nine others the International Fellowship. In addition, 61 are taking up the AGS. That’s a total of 154 scholars!

“Our NSS are of the best quality. That’s why we highlight the Chairman’s Honours List. Those on the List have a GPA (Grade Point Average) of 4.0. They are our key Scholars. We want to focus on such people and grow the group."

logical error #13: gpa measures are inconsistent across universities. see previous rant and comments.

logical error #14: assuming the previous can be corrected by some kind of normalization procedure. then this group can never grow. the only exception would be for scholars in their first semester who get 4.0. everyone else on the list has a non-negligible chance of dropping off the list of perfection.

logical error #15: a perfect gpa is not a perfect measure for "best quality". far from it, lots of educational psychology research has shown that the correlation is pretty low, for something so important. see previous rants on meritocracy.

"A GPA of 3.8 is a very high standard. Most US graduate schools take a GPA of 3.6."

logical error #16: most us graduate schools only care for an ok gpa. 3.0 or higher is ok. what is more important are gre scores for many, and much more important are the rest of the application package.

We set a high benchmark. Don’t forget, we’re paying a stipend during their PhD years and also giving them a job afterwards. So we want to make sure our Scholars are the best. We tell Scholars who are below GPA 3.6: ‘Sorry, no PhD’.”

remark #3: here the cutesy editorial comment reads: Wah lau, don't play, play!!! the extraneous comma completely transforms the meaning of this statement from being a tribute to phua chu kang to a logically impossible statement. (admonition not to play + command to play). surplus comma aside - my sentiments exactly. see previous statements.

“We’ll publish the Chairman’s Honours List every year. It will be extended. The kids who do well should be recognised. I was told by some visiting UK Parliamentarians at our Biopolis that I was promoting elitism. My response: every society needs an elite, like every train needs a locomotive. The key is to make sure that the elite feels a sense of responsibility towards the rest. Endowed with better innate capabilities, you have a responsibility. And we’re funding you. You have a responsibility to take care of the rest of society. When the elite is selfish and self-centred, that’s the worry. So we need to ensure that our Scholars have a sense of responsibility.”

remark #4: the subrant on lord young is particular instructive here.

deduction #13: chairman is a hypocrite.

[here, some email correspondence between scholar and scholarship officer is omitted]

On Diversity of Talent: “We have to compete, so we make Singapore the Global Talent Hub in Asia that is English-speaking. Our competitors are the USA, UK, Canada, Australia/New Zealand.

logical error #17: none of the competitors listed are in asia.

deduction #14: chairman lacks basic knowledge of geography.

When we recruit foreign scientists, diversity of talent is very important. Search the whole world for English-speaking people interested in coming here. We should not care whether they are from Ukraine or Canada or Latvia. But no monolingual Mandarin, Tamil, Hindi.

logical error #18: from a purely logical point of view, the last sentence contradicts the sentiment of the first three sentences.

I visited a lab at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The Professor is Greek Cypriot. His lab has Australians, Germans, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, Czech. It’s totally international.”

logical error #19: cyprus, australia, germany, korea, japan, india, china, and the czech republic do no constitute the world, which the phrase "totally international" implies. (the "totally" is used totally wrongly.)

remark #5: should national origin have any bearing whatsoever on a researcher's professional quality?

On Assimilation of Talent: “Assimilation starts when they are young. I asked this girl who came from Swatow and joined one of our schools in Sec 3: ‘How was your first year in Singapore?’‘I had a tough time, my English was poor,’ she said. Now she has scored A for GP.

logical error #20: getting an a for gp does not nessarily mean good english. it just means you got an a for gp. see rants on meritocracy. i am sure my readers are familiar with students who mug their way through gp.

remark #6: how borgian.

There is a boy who volunteered for National Service and became an infantry officer. The key for us is to bring in assimilable people. So our labs must be diversified in their scientific talent and must also be English-speaking.”

logical error #21: total logical disconnect between second and third sentences.

A Winning Organisation!
On Winning over the Winners: “The brightest young people want
to join a winning organisation. Once you have a reputation for
being good, people will join you. It’s more than pay. It’s the fact
that you’re among the best. Why do top UK and US universities
attract excellent students? Not because those universities give
more pay or more allowances, but because the bright youngsters
know they can be among the best in their domains. The key is
talent. Plus the ability to train the talented. I tell our talent: ‘I’m
interviewing you, because I want you to be a future research
leader. I’m not giving you a scholarship so that you can be a testtube
cleaner’. I know they can’t all be leaders, but the majority
will be leaders.”

remark #7: i guess he has enough bachelors's degree-holders to wash all the test-tubes in kent ridge.

view philip's scorecard on logical reasoning. not very impressive, imnsho.

the take-home message, i suppose, is that philip yeo is the ultimate meritocrat, and understands not his perilous position.

singapore: gone to the dogs

2004-10-10T16:10:00.000-05:00

Man Sets Record for Burgers in Mouth - exerpts:

SINGAPORE - Spurred on by shouts of "shove it in, shove it in," 19-year-old Ezra Nicholas set a world record by stuffing more than three McDonald's hamburgers into his mouth — without swallowing — at the close of Singapore's contest to be the world's wackiest.

Nicholas jumped up, pumped his fists in the air and shouted, "Yes! I am the Burger King!" as he spat out the last bits of the 3 and one-fifth burgers that could put him in the Guinness Book of World Records.

[...]

Over the weekend, 20 Singaporeans attempted to smash 10 unusual records and put the tiny island nation on the map. But they only broke two.

On Saturday, 50-year-old Jeffery Koh became the world's fastest eater of dry biscuits by swallowing three cream crackers in a mere 14.45 seconds, smashing the previous mark of 49.15 seconds set by Britain's Ambrose Mendy in 2002.

But other attempts over the weekend failed, ranging from the fastest to drink a
14-ounce bottle of ketchup through a straw to the longest paper airplane flight.

how incredibly sad. singapore wants to be best in everything, even in the useless, senseless things. when some people live hand-to-mouth in grinding poverty, others gets to luxuriate in activities not even worth talking about. and just wait until ezra watches supersize me.

while surfing the straits times for their angle on the preceding event, i came across an article entitled Selected not elected, but this voices made a difference. while it's sad that nominated mps are the closest thing we have to a true democratic process, it seems that it does indeed infuse some 'wake up your ideas' sentiment into an otherwise oppresively white parliament.

now playing: all i ask of you, the king's singers, chanson d'amour.

the fallacy of meritocracy part vi - lord young's prophecy

2004-10-09T01:08:00.000-05:00

this last part of the rant goes back to the united kingdom, whose culture was imported into singapore and never quite left when the british withdrew in 1963. it speaks of michael young, the man who coined the term ‘meritocracy’, its mutation through failure to recognize satire, and its use by tony blair, soliciting a few tired words from lord young.

p.s. upon reading some comments on the first installments, i stumbled upon an article on the dysfunctional aspects of singapore by thomas freeman. all good no bad gives an outsider’s refreshing point of view and raises some interesting questions with respect to what i have to say here.

- part vi -

singapore is not entirely to blame for its screwed-up implementation of meritocracy, simply because the latter is an impossible concept, even in principle. in fact, the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined in a satirical vein, a nuance apparently not picked up on ever since the word was first published and had been bothering its inventor until his death in 2002.

i assume that most of you have yet to become familiar with the venerable lord michael young of dartington, the very man who coined the word ‘meritocracy’. for those of you loyal readers who have yet to read sir michael young’s book the rise of the meritocracy, written in 1958, i highly recommend that you do. last i checked, the national library had a single copy in reserve, which you may borrow for a mere s$0.50. oh, the irony, that a concept fundamentally enshrined in our very existence be so poorly documented!

but the dystopian picture that it paints is a society where iq tests become the sole arbiter of a person’s worth, and replace the british class structure as the new way to differentiate society. social benefits become dependent on one’s intelligence (the new social class). the elite nouveau, i.e. the meritocrats, develop a snootiness that they deserve all the trapping that society heaps upon them – the same society that they govern. simultaneously, the stupid are led to believe that they deserve to fail and deserve less than the smart. Eventually, iq testing becomes more and more refined, resulting in testing and differentiation at earlier and earlier ages until it reaches its logical extreme of pre-natal testing and labeling. in 2033, the underclasses become sufficiently pissed off to incite a massive revolt against the meritocrats and britain slips into anarchy.

the parallel with contemporary singapore is chilling, even just in its synopsis. and consider that it was written almost fifty years ago! if you found this spookily accurate, i guarantee that the full prophecy will keep you up for nights on end.

this was a big issue in the uk in 2000, with a big debate over tony blair’s use of the word ‘meritocracy’. notice the conspicuous absence of similar debate in singapore, where the concept of meritocracy as espoused by the ruling elite coincides neatly with the context of blair’s usage, and is arguably much more pervasive than in britain.

even if you do not read any other article that i reference, you absolutely must read lord young’s letter to the guardian, lamenting the misuse of his then neologism. it is so important that you hear it from the horse's mouth that i will feign ignorance of copyright laws and reproduce most of that article wholesale here:

I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation...

The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033.

Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating.

Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society [... since ...] schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.

Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people's birth, status has gradually become more achievable.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.

They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.

It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.

They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.

Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.

With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.

[...]

In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.

Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.

As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.

[...]

There was also a prediction in the book that wholesale educational selection would be reintroduced, going further even than what we have already. My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that "No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes".

At least the fullness of that can still be avoided. I hope.

and in the context of contemporary singapore, it is painfully ironic that on some english website carrying a discussion of the word meritocracy, the author states:

“the problem with it, of course, was that mr young used the wrong word as the basis of his creation. merit, as usually understood, has little to do with educational achievement as such.”

obviously the author has no inkling how false his statement is to us.

i had a thought a few years ago, when i was still in jc, about how singapore might just be passing its best and brightest over. how? because some of them are not academically inclined, but may be incredibly talented at other things, skills that are not measured by standard examinations. the one i decided to voice out turned out to be juggling, which juggleress has turned into a pretty profitable (and immensely enjoyable, i would imagine) freelance act. i asked myself (and a bunch of unsuspecting friends): how should we go about discovering such hidden talents? should we go around and test for absolutely everything? how do we quantify an ability to cook? or comfort lost souls? or juggle? (i suppose you could do this pe-style, and add more and more items to juggle until people just lost control...)

then i came across another michael young document: a transcript of a speech entitled “equality and public service” delivered to the sociology section of the british association for the advancement of science on september 11, 2000. again, i will let the horse speak for itself:

Ethics [... comes] from how people report their feelings about themselves. Ethics are about other people and how well or ill you behave towards them and they to you and to each other. Your unease can be added to if you think of other people, especially towards the bottom of the heap...

So neglect at the bottom is combined with indulgence at the top – but with the suggestion that the indulgent may also be discontented, or at best no better off in the way they feel about themselves. At a deep level, something has gone awry, no doubt for many reasons. Perhaps one is that wealthier people in wealthy countries like ours are beginning to question whether wealth has much value apart from monetary. Perhaps some satiation is setting in; perhaps enough will be enough. If it happens, there could be less resistance to higher taxes and a surplus left over for the poor at home, and even more for the poor overseas who are still in grim and absolute poverty. In the century ahead, we may get near the point where advanced society turns in a new direction. If it happened it would be the biggest watershed since the first Industrial Revolution: people would no longer be cursed by being unequal but prized for their differences from one another.

Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupations and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there would be no overall inequalities of the sort we have got used to. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant to the lorry-driver with unusual skills at growing roses? A pluralistic society would also be a tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure pervading the whole society but to develop his or her own special capacities for leading a full life which is also a noble life led for the benefit of others as well as the self.

michael young espouses an ideal that we would all do well to work toward. the only question, is how.

so now that my rant is finally done, you may ask: why pick on singapore?

because singapore has taken the principle of meritocracy to the extreme of a social more, one that is enshrined as one of the country’s core values.

because examinations have long been the means of judging one’s worth in this ex-british colony.

because the concept meritocracy is supposedly steeped in a thousand-year-old tradition supposedly carried down by the immigrant chinese majority from the imperial service examinations of mainland china.

because clinging to this false ideal explains many dysfunctional aspects of singaporean society without even trying.

because practically all of us have been burnt by the unforgiving system that is the manifestation of the horrible concept at some point in time.

because many of us then turn against our society for some superficial reason but are oblivious to the undercurrents that we are struggling so hard against.

because i care, and if you are reading this, you probably do, too.

because i don’t know what can we do about it, and it worries me greatly.

- end of part vi -

ok, that’s all i had in mind during yesterday’s biochemistry class. all 6,324 words’ worth, for your singular reading pleasure. (if you include lord young's words, 7,542 words.) and to my peers in singapore, think, and think hard, together, if she is to have any future at all worth talking about.

the fallacy of meritocracy part v - the conformity of examination standards

2004-10-09T00:52:00.000-05:00

this part talks about the relationship between a meritocratic society and metrics, and the sociopolitical inertia that eventually develops in such a society.

- part v -

the bulk of social inertia in a meritocracy is due to the critical link between meritocracy and measures of merit, which translates into a deep and fundamental connection between a meritocratic society and its education system. the latter is charged with the responsibility of molding wild, unruly children into future citizens well-adapted to their role in the former; the former dictates the social norms and requirements of its citizens. resistance to change therefore arises because measures of merit are assumed (at least in singapore) to be eternal, unchanging truths. this explains why the ministry of education is arguably the most important government body in singapore, perhaps even more so than the ministry of defence. however, the ministry of education has a massive social responsible: to separate the wheat from the chaff, to predict who will do well in an ever-changing world, and who won’t. sadly, the popular tools that are used on every student – streaming and examinations – are fast being obsolete that a world that doesn’t cares much for marks and points anymore.

this fixation on metrics in a meritocratic society illustrates a fallacy which i call the engineer’s paradox: if some property can’t be quantified, than it is irrelevant in describing a system. because the most precise description of a system is when it can reduced to numbers, and we don’t have the numbers to describe woolly things like political freedom, emotional health, familial ties, etc., so we just proceed, assuming that it doesn’t matter. the logical trap here, of course, is that that a society is simply much more complex than anything else science and engineering have tackled.

let's run some numbers (the math-averse can just skip these two paragraphs): a liter of air contains 2.6×10²² molecules. each of these molecules which can be quantified in terms of its positions and momenta in each direction in space, plus accountings of internal vibrational and rotational degrees of freedom. in short, each molecule needs nine numbers to describe what precisely it is doing (let’s pretend quantum effects don’t matter here). therefore one would need 2.3×10²³ quantities for a full and complete description of that small wisp of air. now we might despair as to how we would ever characterize it, but then comes along thermodynamics, which states that at equilibrium, that puff of life can be described completely by just three quantities: its pressure, its volume, and its temperature. a triumph of science and logic; and indeed, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics work well in their intended scopes, and have become valuable tools in many scientists’ and engineers’ arsenal.

naturally, when such a powerful tool exists, one may be tempted to use it outside its context. the notion of social engineering is a case where engineering concepts have been applied beyond its useful contexts. but let’s ask the analogous question: how many degrees of freedom does the population of singapore represent? take an average singaporean to weigh 60 kilograms and have a density of 0.95 times that of water. (let’s not make them too dense to begin with.) take for an incredibly coarse approximation that an average biomolecule (in the residue sense) has a molecular weight of 100. this means a singaporean is composed of 3.4×1028 molecules, and therefore has 3.0×10²⁹ degrees of freedom. so a population of 3.5 million can only be fully described by a staggering 1.0×10³⁶ numbers! (note that this calculation ignores land and water.)

the notion that such an incredibly complex system could ever be reduced to a few quantities of interest, such as gdp, literacy, and school rankings is just foolhardy, at best. and consider that living systems are never truly in equilibrium, since the only living systems in equilibrium with their environment are dead and fully decomposed organisms. the whole premise that any form of engineering can ever been attempted on a system that is literally ten trillion times more complicated than a liter of gas starts to look shaky based on the numbers. and besides, the more extreme results of social engineering, such as the central planned economy, have already proven themselves to be woefully inadequate institutions. resistance to change is arguable the prime reason for failure. (like duh, a planned economy shouldn’t change unexpectedly right? only if it’s an isolated system, like the soviet union before glasnost.)

the notion that all living systems are not in equlibirium is extremely important, since we know from personal experience that society and culture are constantly in flux. skills considered important for survival pass rapidly from novelty to something you can get bragging rights for to mass popularity to something the younger generation takes for granted. typing is a good example. twenty years ago, few people knew what a computer was, and had precious little reason to use a typewriter; today, ah sohs who can’t figure how to sms on their shiny nokia phones are looked down as being so out-of-sync with modern society. therefore, it is only natural to expect that the definition of ‘good’ and ‘successful’ will also be in flux, yet the measure for success in our society has remained essentially constant. Arguably, changes in syllabus do account for a few things, but many dinosaurs still lurk in our required canon for graduation. Like seriously now, how many people use french curves, flexible rulers and graph papers once they graduate? How many people, when told to plot a graph, would happily print out a perfectly drawn spreadsheet result?

the problem is that meritocracy is a system that is resistant to change. why? because it is an inherently conformist system. those who are most successful in its selection criteria tend to do the best in it and are unlikely to find anything wrong about the system. or if they do find something that jars with them, they just have to swallow it if they want to climb to the top. by the time they reach the upper echelons, the tendencies to forget their original gripes are overwhelming. some set out to change the system, in the light that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. but the system exerts its selection pressure of them, and in time they are molded to become conformists.

- end of part v -

ok, i guess this part isn’t so coherent. let me know what you think. it's hard to sustain a coherent rant over thousand-word installments. but i'm almost done.

the fallacy of meritocracy part iv - the mismatch of examinations and expectations

2004-10-09T00:23:00.000-05:00

i am pleasantly surprised that in the thirty hours or so since i posted the first three parts, news seems to have spread again, with comments hither and thither. anyway i’ve finally figured out how i want to phrase the last half of my rant, which is now rapidly losing emotional steam and degenerating into an opinion/editorial-like pseudoessay. and no, i am not still in that biochemistry class right now. so here are the next few installments. (whether or not there are any more depends on how much residual rant still lives on.)

this part expounds on the various uses (and abuses) of examinations, and what they are trying to measure.

- part iv -

organizations have long given their own examinations as a means for differentiating the large numbers of candidates for open spots, and to aid their selection of successful candidates. this began with the chinese civil service examination system way back when, and was an institution that survived the dynastic cycle intact and kicking. i remember reading in some history textbook that some historians even claim that even in times of inter-dynastic anarchy, people still faithfully registered and took the entrance examinations! astounding!

of course, our dear mm claimed that he decided that gee, since this worked so well for imperial china, it must therefore work well for singapore as well and therefore instituted mass examinations and (by induction) created the entire scholarship system as well, to have the best and brightest steer the future of the country. (on a side note, this claim is not quite complete since reliable historical evidence exists that the british colonial system also did place emphasis on examinations, and did administer examinations, such as the qualifier for the venerable rhodes scholarship. and what do you think the ‘c’ in gce ‘o’/’a’ levels means? it certainly doesn’t refer to some synonymous city in massachusetts, usa.)

it is arguable that in the years before and immediately after singapore’s independence, such a system was need for lubricating the engine of modernization that supposedly propelled singapore from its third world, ok-so-i’m-independent-now-what state to the ultra-modern economic miracle it is today. whether it has indeed attained its targets is of course an entirely different story, since quantifiable metrics, i.e. economic indicators, paint a picture that jars with the anecdotal experiences of the lay singaporean. and consider this: merely a generation ago, the concept of mass literacy of one that was just sinking in to the populace. our grandparents’ generation was one huge collection of hardworking illiterates, punctuated by the occasional person who stayed in school long enough to pick up an alphabet, a handwriting style and perhaps some knowledge of the world. i bet if you administered any gce examination to them, the vast majority of our grandparents would have ended up being labeled as blithering idiots. maybe someone should travel back in time and sell them ten-year-series first.

let’s make it painfully obvious why the preceding situation is ludicrous. any examination system, by definition, differentiates good candidates from bad candidates, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ being defined as the score obtained on some examination script taken by the candidate, as graded by some rubric. the examination therefore picks out a select group of ‘good’ students, which are a subset of the entire candidate body and are therefore a set with restricted diversity in characteristics. this discrimination is based solely on some imperfect measure of the candidates’ knowledge of some specific canon of facts and/or skills deemed to be important. that is why it makes no sense to administer a written test to illiterates. many other examples abound in the educational psychology literature, particularly with regard to cultural settings. an example in point: a tribesman from the depths of the borneo jungle would fail a popular culture test miserably, and we would fail to survive in the borneo jungle just as miserably. what is considered ‘important’ is a highly culture-specific thing.

so the chinese civil service examination made sense in its time. simply by requiring that candidates be able to read and write, a vast majority of the unwashed populate was thus excluded from a system where record-keeping is of paramount importance. academic examinations, of course, work well in their academic settings: assessments for coursework play an integral part in modern education; the french and chinese universities still give their own proprietary entrance examinations to this day to select promising undergraduates to groom. but since the advent of the industrialized age, the need for mass education to promote mass literacy had precipitated the need of standardized testing, in the form of gce/gcse certificates and sat/act/gre scores. a recent development in the field of educational testing, standardized testing is seen by relieved bureaucrats as a convenient measure for deciding who to admit to college and who to condemn to working as roadsweepers for life. (the occasional drop-out-turned-billionaire is to be forgetton as merely ‘one of those flukes’).

examining agencies, however, readily admit to the limitations of standardized examinations. the educational testing service, administrator of the infamous scholastic aptitude test (sat), used to have this disclaimer on its website that its examinations should never be used as the sole judge of a students’ worth, and stressed the importance of the considering entire application package. (i have been unable to find this disclaimer again when i checked just now, so this could be just a figment of my imagination.) independent research studies by many educational psychologists have concluded that the sat scores are a reasonably good predictor for scholastic success in college, but is useless for predicting anything else outside its intended scope, such as future salaries. a telling foreshadowing for the abuse of examinations

now turn our attention back to our little red dot (or in modern political parlace, our little piece of snot). the idea of using standardized examinations has been carried to an overly rational, and hence illogical, extreme: instead of using such examinations for what it was intended for (for which it is by no means perfect), it has become a determinant for one’s social status and hence place an explicit (albeit well camouflaged) cap on the net value of one’s worth. while maternal pride at studious progeny is undoubtedly a chinese tradition dating back to mencius (or before?), presumably a predication of future riches and/or social status and a rich source of proud maternal stories and dreams of eternally bright futures, studiousness no longer has any intrinsic meaning in determining one’s future success (or lack thereof) in society.

this misguided assumption is reflected in our education system: we have the slow ‘normal stream’ track, the intermediate ‘express stream’ track, and the various highfalutin’ ‘special’ tracks like the gifted education program (recently scrapped in favor of integration into the curricula of top schools), special assistance program schools (a relic of the bribe made to the chinese intelligentsia to shut up while lky anglicized singapore), and now the special schools. no i don’t mean special education for the mentally retarded, bless their souls. i meant the nus science school and the singapore sports school. and tellingly, few people remember the mentally slow, a significant fraction of our population rapidly being left behind by the accelerating pace of change in our modern globalized society. but back to the other special tracks, the impression that the civil service gives us is that if you’re not one of their scholars, you’ll forever be second-class to them, and forever suffer less experienced (and possibly less competent) scholars promoted over your heads while you continue to slog away toward that glass ceiling? (ok, enough scholar rants here. i suppose i’ve made my point already.)

a particularly interesting aspect of our education system pertains to scholars-to-be: the gce ‘a’ level papers 0, the so-called ‘s’ papers. presumably meaning ‘special’ papers, but more accurately termed ‘scholarship’ papers, the anecdotal history of papers 0 indicate its creation by the ucles to as to fulfill the need of a scholarship agency to refine its pick of candidates, who have been picked up more and more perfect-looking grades from institutions that used to be schools, but had degenerated at some point in its history into diploma mills. now ‘s’ papers were meant for the exceptionally bright to strut their worth by pitting their intellects against problems of higher difficulty as compared to the typical ‘a’ level question. now we have the usual trappings and paraphernalia that surround every other subject: lectures on “ ‘s’ paper topics”, ten-year-series for ‘s’ papers, and horror-of-horrors, model answers for ‘s’ paper questions!

drawing from local scholarship history, this scholarship agency must be none other than the public service commission, at one time the only such agency based in singapore, and still the issuer of the most prestigious scholarships today. but consider this, my dear civil servants: what the hell does a background in electrical engineering have to do with the civil service? if you claim that such backgrounds promote the development of skills such as critical thinking, why not just test that outright? why insist that scholars maintain their ‘standards of excellence’ by consistently scoring high grades, groom them to become useful engineers/scientists (and precious few humanists), then grab them back home and mire them in administrative trivia for the rest of their lives? is this not the clearest example yet of a complete mismatch between what academic scores say and what these people will eventually end up doing? are the best students necessarily the best leaders? and are lousy students necessarily lousy leaders?

ok, i have to stop now, or i’ll never be done picking on scholarship agencies. it is a sad reflection of the times when even the best and brightest among us have to stoop to rote memorization to keep ahead in an ever-changing rat race, and have to jump through higher and higher hoops just to succeed. and sadder still, when those in charge insist that academic merit is a critical feature of a promising leader of tomorrow’s society.

- end of part iv -

news of sg-based idiocy

2004-10-08T10:50:00.000-05:00

for those of you who are asking for the other parts, i'm sorry, two things suddenly cropped up. namely, like, sleep, you know, and homework, yah?

anyway here's a newsflash that seems to have traveled far and wide:

Bank bungle destroys heirlooms
news.com.au October 5, 2004

RED-FACED bosses at a Hong Kong bank today admitted they had accidentally destroyed 83 safety deposit boxes and their valuable contents in a renovation bungle that could cost millions of dollars.

The boxes - which the bank said likely held cash, heirlooms and jewels - were kept at a branch of DBS Bank in the southern Chinese territory and had been selected for scrapping by mistake, a spokeswoman said.

By the time the error was discovered the boxes had already been crushed by compressors.

"This was a case of human error," the spokeswoman told AFP. "We have a team of investigators down there now trying to recover what we can."

She said the costly error happened on Saturday as contractors renovating the bank in the urban Kowloon neighbourhood mixed up the shoe-carton sized boxes with about 900 empty, unused lockers earmarked for crushing.

can anyone scream with me, 'this smacks of lack of proper oversight? and what were the bosses/managers doing?'

looks like one of singapore's most valuable (costly) exports to hong kong also includes our indolent management processes. no doubt heads will roll all over downtown kowloon pretty soon.

at first i was skeptical that the singapore media would carry this story, and amazingly enough, the straits times and other singapore media did publish a whole spate of articles. maybe it's not too much to interpret this as infighting? :)

a choice quote:

DBS customers reject pay offer for crushed boxes
Straits Times, October 7, 2004

University political scientist James Sung told the South China Morning Post that he would reject the DBS offer.

'I would like to see the bank take care of our feelings first before we talk about compensation,' Mr Sung was quoted as saying. 'After all the bank owes the victims, the public and its partners in the banking and insurance sector an explanation, how this terrible mistake could have happened.'

brave, prof. sung! this is exactly what singapore excels at doing, with pragmatism steamrolling ahead of human weaknesses and irrationalities such as emotions and rational discourse.

btw, i found this satirical news video of iraq [wmv] on a blog post. must be one of those late show oddities. if you like this there is a similar video of Oussama et Harry Potter that is also pretty hilarious. anyone care to furnish a translation? i can only make out bits and pieces... here's a bit of the beginning:

Commentator: (blah blah blah), oui?
Oussama: Je suis pas comment je vie(?) faire comment sortie-t-il c'est quoi?
Harry: Bonjour! Je suis Harry Potter! (something something)
Oussama: (blah blah)
Harry: Oui, c'est un bailais magique.
Oussama: Geniale! Allez à direction l'Empire State Building! (flies off)
(sounds of gunfire)

the fallacy of meritocracy part iii - the lkm story

2004-10-07T15:29:00.000-05:00

this part is a giant parenthetical retelling of anecdotes of an ex-classmate, who neatly illustrates the asocial aspects of selection pressure due to the examination culture.

- part iii -

thoughtlessness is the primogenitor of many an accident, as one of my ex-classmates has happily demonstrated time and time again to us long-suffering classmates. this guy, a fellow chemistry major, goes into lab each time and acts as though he had absolutely no clue what he should be going, even though he has the pre-lab already done. he would do every single lab by watching what other people did, then do his monkey-see-monkey-do routine.

if he decided to monkey me for one particular lab session, he would do one thing, walk over to me, then ask, “i did this. then how ah?” then if i was in a good mood i would humor him, whence he would return to his bench space and do the next step and repeat the cycle until the end of lab. if not, he would just hang around watching me do the lab until a teaching assistant (ta) would come around and ask what he was doing, and shoo him back to his bench space.

of course, he got into all sorts of hilarious trouble. a memorable incident was when he did his whole monkeying routine on me on a titration (yes, he acts as if he has no idea how to do one!) and he copied what i was doing step by step until the part where i added phenolphthalein to the acidic aliquot to be titrated. he missed that step completely and happily started titrating, and then wondered why he could not get the endpoint despite using up all the titrant! (for those of you who are rusty in chemistry, phenolphthalein is an indicator which is colorless in acidic solutions and bright pink in basic solutions.)

my favorite episode was when he borrowed a plastic ruler (the acrylamide kind that is half transparent and half white) from a fellow singaporean in organic chemistry lab to draw some pencil lines. he later found out that the ruler was stained with some chemical and happily rinsed it with acetone to wash it off. imagine the stunned look on his face when the ruler started dissolving in his hands! panicking, he chucked the melting ruler back into the owner’s pencil box, in which a melted mess was discovered by the irate owner half an hour later.

a simpler episode but just as funny was when he inverted a separatory funnel to shake up the mixture but didn’t cap the funnel before inverting it. and all he did was to stare at the growing mess on the bench as the liquid kept flowing out of the funnel that he was still holding in one hand! a bemused teaching assistant who saw the whole thing then said wryly, “looks like i’ll need to teach you the technique of bench-top extraction”, which basically involved wiping up the entire mess with paper towels and subsequent washings with solvent of said towels.

it’s pretty clear that this guy hasn’t the faintest clue what chemistry is about. yet he manages to score pretty well on tests since he happens to be one of the most kiasu people that i have ever met. he is the kind that will call me up every single time a homework assignment or test was returned, to ask “how many marks did you get ar?” like seriously, does it matter? and “ha, ha, i got half a mark more than you” or “how come you got one mark more than me? how ar, how ar?” is simply childish. like that is going to be statistically significant at all.

km has the most annoying habit of looking over my shoulder every time i note down something in lecture, and trying to figure out what exactly i wrote down, and even bugging me in the middle of lecture as to what some of my symbols mean! of course, he wouldn’t even dream of reciprocating if i asked to borrow his notes.

but by far the most disgusting episode that involves him was this one time in organic lab when he threw away his product in the second week of our final experiment, which was a three-week-long synthesis experiment. (he was doing a solvent extraction and poured away the wrong layer, something the tas drum into us never ever to do.) the course has a policy that if you ask for more starting material, you get 25% off, so he being ultra-kiasu would do anything to avoid that penalty. so he went around begging for material from the rest of the students. most of us just ignored him, but a sympathetic classmate (call her B) donated half of her sample to him to let him continue the lab.

the next week B messed up her experiment, and wanted to get some material back from km to continue the experiment, but he refused to part with any of his precious sample because he had 'lost too many marks already' so he 'can't afford to give you back any (sic)'. so poor B had to ask for more starting material to restart, so she suffered the restart penalty. on top of that, she had to stay overtime to complete the experiment (imagine trying to cram a three-session practical into two-thirds of a session's worth of time) and hence also suffered a penalty for overstaying. (yes the teacher is anal!)

ok, so the morals and ethics of the preceding situation were ambiguous. but get this: he got all depressed over messing up the lab and fretted so much over his potentially 'ruined' grade. B, despite being the weaker student, ended up comforting him over the missed opportunity and told him that 'it's not important. grades aren't everything' and not to let it get to him too much. she also confided that she wasn't confident of doing well because she had already messed up too many other experiments. turned out that she got a 'c' for the class, which she was kinda upset about but thought it was still liveable. then she ran in to km one day and she asked him how he did overall. and the cheeky bastard just said 'oh, it's not important. grades aren't everything!' later on i wormed it out of him that he got an a. bloody hell. guess why everyone shunned him after that semester.

based on what i’ve argued above, i don’t really blame him for being socially dysfunctional. it’s more a sad reflection of what intense kiasuism can do to a person and have one's moral framework totally derailed in mindless pursuit of an optimal examination score.

- end of part iii -

the fallacy of meritocracy part ii - the examination culture

2004-10-07T15:26:00.000-05:00

this part is a subrant on the psychosocial effects of examinations and the pressure it exerts on students.

- part ii -

in singapore, where social engineering has long been an important feature of our society, the effects of engineers’ fixations on metrics, manifests itself in many social settings. let’s just focus on the effect of the paramount importance of examination scores has on students. keep in mind, again, that today’s students are tomorrow’s citizens. most visible and most obvious is the relatively high proportion of student suicides over failure to achieve desired examination scores. (japan is another country that comes to mind.) and the many documented cases of examination anxiety precipitating mental breakdowns. (not widely publicized, but ask around. some teachers in particular love to gossip about these things.) and how many untold students work themselves up into a frenzy during examination season, falling sick, experiencing weight fluctuations, snapping at their unwary family members?

there is of course, a more light-hearted side to all this. many of the fluxes that occur in social traffic can be traced back to the examination culture. attendance at golden villages drops significantly in september, and resurge in december. walking along orchard road in june is an exercise in squeezing your way through a human sea like a piece of flotsam. and you can forget about finding a seat at starbucks or mcdonald’s in may without having to fight your way through a sea of textbooks, worksheets, pencil cases and bookbag decorations, punctuated by the obligatory drink that ‘rents’ the table for the next few donkey hours and preventing paying, high-turnover yuppies from frequenting their stores. no wonder frustrated store managers downtown chase students away, like unwanted crows.

only recently has the ministry of education finally realized that academic achievement is not everything, and has set up experimental schools focusing on mathematics/science and sports, respectively. well, at least it’s a step in the right direction. however, the splicing of such ‘radical’ thought with the entire system leads to ridiculous things such as forcing the sports school students to be at least of express stream standard. on one hand, they want to cultivate sports talents, but yet they can’t quite bear to decouple sports aptitude from academic achievement, their sacred cow which they love to milk for results. *sigh* well, at least they seem to be trying.

the survival tactics of mugging and kiasuism to cope with the selection pressure of academic examinations have opened up new epochs in the annals of idiocy and rudeness. mugging for an education, or what my ex-chinese teacher fondly calls 填鸭式的教育, places paramount value on factual recall, and on precious little emphasis on conceptual understanding. this is completely against the grain of both sciences and humanities, where critical thinking is the key that unlocks the world to the mind. and although a good memory is a valuable asset, critical thinking that is the real skill that should be imparted on students, because it is one that becomes applicable to every aspect of life. of course, it could be argued (darkly) that in the current conformist climate, an unthinking populace that plays follow-the-leader 24/7 is the ideal state for a meritocracy, in which case that explains the massive hemorrhage of intelligentsia in the last two decades whom must have felt that ‘their intelligence was insulted’. (what a nice singlish-ism!)

let me discuss science in particular, and the abysmal way lab sessions are run in singapore. while both emerged from a philosophy of understanding based on factual discourse, science also defines clearly the supreme role of arbiter: to let the natural world decide which hypotheses are correct and which are wrong is the fundamental philosophy of science. that’s why laboratory sessions are an important part of a proper education in the sciences. but the way we teach labs are pitiful – they are presented as things that people have to do, fixed protocols to memorize and swallow, no need to think in lab, just do. lab time is valuable – professionals and trainees alike both suffer from not having time to think in lab. when wilheim röntgen was asked to comment on what he thought of x-rays when he discovered them, he reportedly retorted: “i didn’t think. i experimented.” while this illustrates neatly the application of empiricism, this does not mean that thought is not needed to the process of scientific discovery and criticism.

- end of part ii -

the fallacy of meritocracy part i - the failure of examinations

2004-10-07T15:19:00.000-05:00

'there are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. and i am unsure about the universe.' - albert einstein

i am writing this in my biochemistry class because i realize that i would be really bored then. turns out that i was right. so let me rant (long and hard) about meritocracy, particularly as it is practiced in singapore. ranting is addictive, especially since it’s always about something one feels particularly passionate about. so let me present to you the thesis that meritocracy, especially the way it is practiced in singapore and much of the world, is an unsustainable proposition. if this is a sacred cow to you, go away, you’ve just demonstrated one of those inconceivable infinities.

the entire rant turned out to be horrendously long, so i've broken it up into more manageable subtopical pieces. hopefully you will find time to read it all. this piece is on the relationship between exams and meritocracy.

- part i -

let’s put it this way: meritocracy is a farce, and is an impossible ideal as it stands today. why? the basic premise is sound enough: reward the most meritorious, and promote them to leadership positions in a society/organization. in principle, it certainly seems superior to other means of leadership selection; such as aristocracy, where such taboo phenomena such as nepotism may occur; or democracy, where the tyranny of the majority prevails. the unwashed masses are stupid by definition, since by definition the massive populace are below average on average, as compared to the meritocrats who are by definition above average on average. (mull over it for a while, it will make sense). heaven forbid that idiots rule the country! that’s why we need to divide and conquer, to herd in the random hordes of blithering idiots lest they trip up and vote for unworthy opposition politicians!

the delicious irony of meritocracy - its achilles’ heel, if you will - is that the definition of a meritocracy conveniently sidesteps the issue of judging precisely who is meritorious. how does one define merit? in singapore’s context, the answer is clear: scores on standardized examinations. first psle and gce ‘o’ levels, then primary 4 streaming examinations (intermittently) and gce ‘a’ levels, and then most recently some experimentation with sats. why waste time thinking about such woolly things like merit when one can have a nice quantifiable measure? such is the engineer’s worldview, and a most dangerous one too. “engineers design by the numbers, and that’s the problem.” tackle a problem by defining metrics, work out some target number, and hit that number using any means possible. who cares how it works, as long as it does. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

the examinations process in singapore is an unforgiving system, because one’s performance on specific exams at specific points in time make or break one’s future, and for life. high scores open doors; low scores slam them wide shut. a spell of sickness can impair your ability to regurgitate and therefore doom your entire future; a lack of aptitude in a compulsory subject compels one to mediocrity for life; forgetting to bring a calculator to your maths ‘d’ examination spells instant failure because everyone else does so well on it. i am sure that many more such anecdotes abound. the ‘o’ level maths ‘d’ exam is my favorite example of an exam which utterly fails to discriminate between good and bad students, because the score tells you basically how many careless mistakes you’ve made on that one exam, and not how well you ‘know’ the material. so basically the signal-to-noise on a maths ‘d’ score is so low as to be practically useless.

most importantly, examinations are doing their jobs less and less efficiently nowadays. ‘a’s on gce exams used to be prized rarities in our parents’ generation; today’s top students count the number of ‘a’s on their (near-)perfect transcripts. how much of it can be attributed to a genuine increase in scholastic ability across the board? and how much to grade inflation, the specter of increased expectations of those who fund of examination authorities? how much can be attributed to the convergence of the ‘learning the exam’ strategy? if a student is able to do all the problems in the chemistry ten year series (extra credit if s/he used a copy without detailed solutions, unlike the infamous red-spot series), does that mean that s/he understands chemistry? and how about measurement uncertainty and resolution issues? is a student with 9 ‘a’s really that much worse that a student with 10 ‘a’s? how about a 9 ‘a’ student v. a 9 ‘a’ 1 ‘b’ student? how large an exam score difference does one need to attain statistically meaningful results? there is a whole panoply of issues pertaining to measurements using examinations, all of which have yet to be addressed in the public eye.

most worryingly, the phenomenon of examination-based testing cultivates the mentality that the knowledge that a subject represents should be neatly delineated into ‘need-to-know’ and not. how many times have you as a student heard the refrain ‘this is not in your syllabus?’ course syllabi are by definition a canon of standard facts and knowledge in a specific field, i.e. things that have been researched to death, and are as dry as bitter winter snow. all the interesting stuff, the frontiers of research, theses that ignite passions, takes place outside students’ syllabi by definition. what surer way to kill interest in a subject than to sigh wearily: ‘aiyah, outside your syllabus lah, donch worry!’? why teachers do this is, of course, would make an interesting exposé into the harried lives of our educators, but at any rate outside the scope of this rant.

what does all this translate into for our current students, our citizens of tomorrow? kiasuism, general apathy for all pre-university subjects, chow mugging, regurgitation without understanding, learning the exam not the subject… do any of these sound familiar? are these really the kind of values that we want to instill in our future generations, that a gauche mix of machiavellian goal-oriented tactics and chinese water-torture-like method of storing information is the way to succeed in life? that collecting awards is more important than the process or accomplishments for which that award was given? can we really blame the twisted products of the system for what it has done to them?

the notion that a person’s merit can be boiled down to a single number, a composite score from specific tests at specific points in one’s life, that such is the only worthy measure of intelligence - as it manifests itself in academic performance - is ludicrous at best. i am not sure about universities elsewhere, but american universities have definitely long acknowledged the limitations of standardized testing. not that american universities are faultless, but it’s one thing that they are doing right. the recent brouhaha over the entire university of california deciding to drop sat scores as an admissions requirement is an illuminating point in case. that’s the reason behind the essay questions; and for graduate school, research track record, and letters of recommendations. the more diverse sources of information, the better: many sources of information reduce the dependency on any one single measure and therefore the inherent flaws of each measure give a smaller distortion to the picture of the student that it is trying to portray.

- end of part i -

another week already...

2004-10-07T01:54:00.000-05:00

...and what a week it's been.

on wednesday...

aaron ciechanover, avram hershko and irwin rose won the nobel prize in chemistry "for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation". how ubiquitous the smell of rotting flesh.

talked to a postdoc in prof. s's research group and got him all excited over my thesis work. now to start recoding the program in c++, and to get it to read pdb coordinate files and spit out vmd-friendly files. and he wants to get the calculation out in time for the cmb symposium! gosh, what is he thinking?!

i discovered an online database of alumni from the uiuc chemistry department and that to date my ex-advisor has only graduated three students in the last 102 years. and the postdoc in my research group told me that my predecessor who worked on my project is in jail for murdering her husband, and that "this group does not have a good record". you don't say.

had a vegetarian lunch of string beans, caramelized onions cooked in chicken stock, another ear of corn, and six breadcrumbed mozzarella cheesesticks. (i didn't say vegan lunch) had more nachos with avocado and reheated leftovers for dinner. oh well. blame it on the quantum mechanics homework. (damn u prof. g!)

on tuesday...

david gross, david politzer and frank wilczek won the nobel prize in physics "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". but there's nothing like true freedom.

got back my biochemistry midterm and got a 65.5/100. well at least a score of 60-68 is considered in the B band, so i didn't do too badly. but boy do i need to buck up for the rest of the semester! i really should start attending sections on thursdays.

since prof. p canceled section today, i went for prof. g's office hours instead but came away with no useful information. all these silly students are having trouble over trivia. guess i'm not missing anything at all by not going.

tl came over for dinner and i cooked stir-fried potatoes, onion and garlic with minced beef. also heated up an instant pizza for the occasion. also introduced tl to the wonderful mix of avocado and cornmeal nachos (as opposed to cornflour).

on monday...

richard axel and linda buck win the nobel prize in medicine "for the discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system". smells like a good deal.

i did some research on web of science and discovered, to my great shock, a new crystal structure for light harvesting complex ii (LHC-II) published just a few months ago. so i guess that means i'll be redoing all my calculations from my thesis. damn.

roasted some corn with melted canola butter. yummy!

on sunday...

woke up late but refreshed. it's amazing what alcohol can do to deallocate your working memory. cooked lunch and just for giggles i fried my own potato chips. the food processor is so incredibly useful for slicing! (and grating, and mincing. what a wonderful machine! and it was only $40!) brought the potato chips over to SpinGlass and tl, who both proclaimed that it was crispy but overcooked. oh well, what can i say. i like my chips overdone. went for dinner with them at the usual spot (mandarin wok) and had the usual dishes. gee. how original.

on saturday...

woke up at 0345 and really couldn't sleep anymore. so i got up and did housework, and . later i walked to lincoln square to peruse the farmer's market. took nice pictures of slightly reddened trees along the way. met prof. s at lincoln square, wearing his usual olive green business suit, army green socks and brown sandals, toting a large rattan basket large enough to carry a baby in. i will never forget that image.

attended prof. l's 'workshop', which turned out to be a morning lecture in biophysics. had a nice long chat with her after that. she's ok to talk to but probably not a top choice for research advisor. at least she's not very good at thinking on her feet. and she presented a discontinuous dihedral potential! who on earth was she trying to kid?

attended said picnic and trip to boltini lounge. in between i attended the ssa/hkfac mooncake festival celebration. mooncakes, lanterns, braised tea eggs, and freshmen's skit obligatoire aside, the cool thing was that they got an ealc professor to give a short talk on the history of the mid-autumn festival.

on friday...

i had a blood sample drawn from me for my annual medical checkup, courtesy of my health insurance. the nurse was pretty cool; she didn't mess around with the needle and the spot didn't briuse. yay!

yt drove me to meijer for my fortnightly grocery stock-up. later we had dinner at chili's where i had a fried chicken entree that ended up tasting like long john silver's and yt got the baby back ribs that was more bone than anything else. bah.

i must have zonked out from all the blood lost because i collapsed on the bed at 1945 and didn't stir until the next morning.

everything before has dissolved into a whirl of what the heck happened?-ness. except that starting last thursday, the temperatures have sunk to about 5-10°C, heralding the onset of fall, and that i first noticed the trees changing color then.

false tropism

2004-10-04T20:55:00.000-05:00

later that night, i went to boltini lounge in downtown champaign and tried out my camera's low light (iso 1600) mode. i tried it on a pair of diffident flowers, and the results turned out to be pretty impressive. it has a surreal, 3d-studio-like feel to it, which i like immensely.

dcgsac annual picnic

2004-10-02T18:51:00.000-05:00

some of you may have been wondering what this picture is all about. it's of the lake of the woods state park, as viewed from the HI-tower. a mere 12 miles from ulu chambana, it's largely primary forest along the sangamon river, unspoiled by the ravages of the settlers of yore. the pristine environment is augmented, ironically enough, by the construction of an artificial lake, presumably the fabled lake of the woods.

the department of chemistry held its annual fall picnic there to try to get everyone together. not surprisingly, they were no match for the triumvirate of homework, seasonal illness and general apathy, despite the alluring offer of free food. (which wasn't really all that great. boo!) the student committee organized games in the afternoon but playing soccer at 40°F really didn't strike me as an appealing idea. so i went on a photo-taking spree. if i'll be free i would love to come here again in two weeks' time, when everything will be turning red and gold.

Aspirations

2004-10-02T18:46:00.000-05:00

A photograph taken from a HI-Tower window.

2004-10-02T18:40:00.000-05:00

Maple leaf on lecture notes.

i want a free education, too

2004-09-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

found out through bean that my blog has been recommended on sintercom as a singapore blog to read. hm. i'm not entirely happy that it centers around my a*star gripes, although i'm impressed that my rants [1] [2] [3] have generated over a thousand visitors already. this vein seems to run deeper than i had imagined. the latest referral generator was from a forum thread on research opportunities in malaysia. i stand corrected on some things, but 'lousy support staff' was a reference to the lack of technically creditable support staff who make and service high-tech instruments and the like, not so much lousy research staff.

on mrbrown's link, i found a comment left by a certain ivan:

'[note] how he gripes that certain scholars were 'cheated' into signing up with false promises of career choices, as well as how when at 19 potential scholars are unable to discern what are sugar coated lies and what they want in life. It (sic) finally great to know that the state is funding peopple (sic) with no idea what they are getting into, except for "i want a free education regardless whether it's relevant, or if i can afford it on my own".'

to ivan, if you are reading this: i challenge you to find any 19-year-old, scholar or not, who knows what he wants in life. then i will challenge you to talk to the same 19-year-old at his/her graduation, then after his/her first year of work. i'd be shocked if you could find more than a handful of such people. if you're not yet 19, then wait until you get your tertiary certificate before judging me; if you're already past 19, then shame on you, you've forgotten what it's like to be 19, naive and cocky.

as for hypocrisy, maybe i am guilty. but someone who didn't experience a dysfunctional system would feel the need for improving it.

you may think that i'm just one of those freeloading scholars, but i'm not. i paid back every single cent i took, and more to boot. how i paid is none of your business, but suffice to say that it was a tremendously difficult decision and financially quite a pinch. but with what uiuc is paying me, i may be able to save it all back before i graduate. (uiuc, incidentally, is giving a free education now.)

i signed up with psc because i felt that i would be able to contribute to singapore, to inject some fresh ideas into the government and help update it to face the ever-new twenty-first century world. indeed, how naive i was, to think that i, a barely mature 19-year-old, could have challenged the pillars of civil service philosophy and reformed into something more open, more accomodating, more dynamic!

sheer hubris, it seems now.

even now, as an ex-scholar, it pains me to see how the paradigm of so-called meritocracy continues to warp the expectations of society to conform to the needs of the newly-independent republic, still entrenched in the 1960s while the world has hurried past, cruel and uncaring. and what is the more loyal thing to do: swallow my self-esteem and take up a career as a civil whore in singapore, eventually fading into the seamless bureaucratic miasma of cover-my-ass step-over-my-non-scholar-colleagues; or to leave regretfully, still clinging on to some shred of hope that one day someone up there will wake up their ideas and see that rome is falling?

and do you know how heartbreaking to know that science is the key to the future, yet see py clomping around the top echelons of the self-styled high priests of the key, thinking that the twenty-first century will be a piece of cake after twentieth; that he can just bulldoze opposing views like lky did way back then, and still get away with it; that ; that the people who are at the pinnacle allowed by a system have become so adept at wrangling their way to the top that they don't see see the forest for the trees, to see the box that they're are in, but to climb a ladder that eventually wraps around unto itself?

it saddens me even more, having just read an article [warning: it's a long post] on Xiaxue that resonated greatly with me, the new me that has survived the past two years of pain and sadness, wrangling with psc and suffering the humiliations of having to ding-dong between moe and psc.

one day i will write up all that i want to say about meritocracy. maybe after my computer science exam next week. *wistful sigh* and i have my suspicions that the rafflesian culture is not innocent. why rafflesians? i bet the form the bulk of government scholars. no to mention its illustrius alum, the minister mentor. more on that when i'm free.

meanwhile, i will continue to mull on yesterday's exam - my first in over two years - and how i managed to totally screw it up, how i should i have studied for it, but was arrogant enough to believe that biochemistry is just organic chemistry, but with more mugging needed for amino acids. as if i'd remember much orgo to begin with. i am pretty nervous as to how this is going to pan out: it's my litmus paper for graduate school. and will i be hypocritical enough to drop the class if i screw up this exam?

re-listened to the sound of music, and i listened to i have confidence with renewed meaning. it describes exactly my emotional undercurrents at this point in time:

i have confidence (exerpt)
- julie andrews, as maria von trapp,
starting out as a children's governess
--------------------------------------

what will this day be like? i wonder...
what will my future be? i wonder...
it could be so exciting,
to be out in the world, to be free,
my heart should be wildly rejoicing;
oh what's the matter with me?

i've always longed for adventure,
to do the things i never dared,
now i am faced with adventure,
then why am i so scared?

[captain with seven children, what's so scary about that?]

oh, i must stop all these doubts, all these worries,
if i don't, i just know i'll just turn back,
i must dream of the things i am seeking,
i am seeking the courage i lack.

the courage to seve with reliance,
face my mistakes without defiance,
show them i'm worthy, and while i show them,
i'll show me!

let this be my motto: to outdo myself, and make singapore regret that they chased me away. one day. andrews, rodgers & hammerstein: you are my heroes for this semester. and ivan, you're right: screw grades; what matters is that i learn something at the end of it all. maybe i'll aim to compress the four-year phd (courtesy of nilsinelabore), and repeat history.

uiuc publicity :)

2004-09-26T22:58:00.000-05:00

thanks to the people who left me comments on episode two of my rant. amusingly enough someone started bitching about uiuc, only to find out that i am attending uiuc. don't worry, wowbagger, i am not offended. and i agree that u of c (chicago?) strengths outside of economics are understated. but uiuc's strengths in chemical and life sciences have also been neglected, waysided by the historical focus on engineering in promoting uiuc. no doubt the engineering departments are stellar, but the chemistry department is no featherweight either!

assuming you are one of those people who go by metrics, let's 'quantify' how good the chemistry department is. "The UIUC Department of Chemistry has the highest average ranking of its analytical, organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry programs of any chemistry department in the US, with all four areas being ranked in the top 10." uiuc's chemistry department also claims affiliation to nine Nobel laureates, out of a total of 21 Nobel prizes [pdf] affiliated to the university. the electrical and computer engineering department may claim john bardeen, the two-time nobel laureate in physics, but the chemistry department wins hands down for sheer numbers.

i don't know that much about other departments, but i think all the engineering departments are ranked in the top 10, if not the top 5, by all popular rankings. not to mention that condensed matter physics is consistently rated top (bolstered this year by leggett's nobel prize), as is its accounting program and nuclear engineering department. (exact rankings fluctuate year on year, so modal rankings are quoted here). uiuc also has an extremely rich history in theoretical biophysics (with a center for computational biophysics headed by a chemistry professor, lol) and materials science (the frederick seitz materials research laboratory is also headed by a chemistry professor, one of isi's highly cited researchers to boot. see any leadership trends here? ;-)).

strangely enough, uiuc's association with philip yeo and the uiuc-nus exchange program has led to its chemical engineering (now chemical and biological engineering) department being more well known than its chemistry program, yet the latter is ranked even more highly. *ducks bombs from the ChBE students* :-)

when you also throw in how ranking criteria focus too much on spending per student, uiuc is really one heck of a school. and considers it's location in ulu chambana. and that it's the only school in the world with an acoustically perfect performance hall (so they say), which incidentally is only like a few thousand times better than the durian/flies' eyes/microphone back in sg (whose pronunciation sg'eans can't even agree on, let alone what it looks like!). don't say we don't got no culture in here cornfields, mister!

aiyah, all correspondence this is taking away time from my preparation for tuesday's test. *grumble* nonetheless, i sincerely hope that future scholars will be better informed. and please learn from my mistakes!

serious thoughts on bond-breaking (a*star rant, episode 3)

2004-09-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

i just found out about my citation on mrbrown. (and also from a self-confessed link whore, who referenced my article together with a reference to another blog, a website on beer, and some sex stuff(!)) that explains the rush of traffic to my site. to my dear fans: please support a poor graduate student. every click on the google ads on the right hand side earns me us$0.16, and just costs you a few seconds. but don't tell them i said so.

self-congratulatory remarks aside, i honest hope that scholars, and a*star scholars in particular, are reading this. if not, i fervently hope that they are at least pondering why they are doing what they are doing, not just because i think a*star is screwing everything up, but primarily for the sake of the scholars' own careers and worldviews.

an a*star freshman solicited my advice on icq a few hours ago, and the topics brought up are well worth considering by everyone in a similar situation. choice quotes (edited for spelling and punctuation):

"it's so damn true what you've written, and they keep changing their wretched policies... now i have to work for one year before phd.. not that i mind, but the fact is that they change it everytime they want to, it's not quite right." - for those of you who don't know, there's a weasel clause in the scholarship deed that allows them to alter the terms and conditions at any point in the future, and the signature on the deed also means that you consented to them doing it; you just signed over your freedom to complain about it, too.

"i'm freaking out over my 3.8 gpa requirement... i'm a freshie and i'm freaking out..." - right on the dot. a*star is scaring their scholars before even coming back to singapore! geez!

"i do know i wanna do research. and that i probably want to do it in singapore. so why not just let a*star sponsor me?" - if you don't value your future ability to choose what job you want, sure, why not. don't regret it later, then.

"astar is so restrictive." - uh-huh.

"i'm not one of those screwed up people who do biology 'cos it's the next big thing.." - bravo!

ok, now for the meat of this post. some points for freshmen (or anyone really) on scholarships thinking about life beyond a scholar:

breaking your bond gets more expensive with each semester of school. each time the scholarship agency spends money on you, the higher your bond. obvious but true. but consider all the nitty gritty itemized expenses too! like all investments, the earlier you put in money, the greater your leverage. and yes, it is an investment: an investment into your freedom.
family/spousal considerations are, and must be, your top priority if you can afford to pay. whether your family is comfortable with you working abroad is a major question to consider.
time spent in singapore is not. if time spent in singapore versus working abroad is a big issue, consider this: will you be spending 100% of your working hours in singapore, or will you be jetting off to collaborations, conferences, seminars, symposia, summer sessions, training seminars, workshops, meetings, and the like? think about it.
job security went out of fashion 10 years ago. do you honestly think that if you graduate from a brand name school (the scholarship agencies won't let you go anywhere less than famous anyway) with a halfway decent gpa you won't be able to find a job?
moral responsibility of scholars is a non-issue. let's put it this way: if you return a scholarship agency all their money, plus interest and fees and monies paid for worthless orientation packages and plane tickets and other read-and-chuck-away useless dingdongs like newsletters and the once-circulated straits times weekly (i am so not kidding about this, psc made me pay!); mind you, do you owe them anything, monetarily speaking?
it's too late to think about your depriving another person of a scholarship. i seriously doubt that scholarship agencies give out exactly the intended quota of scholarships, if they have a hard quota at all. besides, you've already signed the deed, and therefore have already deprived someone who is needy, if you want to think about it that way: it's too late to do anything about that now if you already have any inkling feeling for breaking bond.
get everything in writing. my only regret about my bond-breaking: it was over a verbal promise that got shot down.quote: 'they've been saying "we will try to place u as far as possible in accordance with ur interests"'. a vague promise is worth nothing. especially if it's not in writing. get everything in writing. if scholarship agencies can take their pound of flesh, they will. be prepared for accriminations. if you want to break bond, you must do it in writing.
if it boils down to wanting to work in singapore, going with and without a scholarship makes no real difference.
don't believe everything a fellow singaporean (or anyone else, for that matter) tells you. verify, verify, verify! quote: 'when im trying to judge whether i shld take a course, i try to seek out singaporeans 'cos of a levels'. the tendency to just believe is much stronger if the source is a singaporean. because of so-called camaraderie and all that. and singaporeans, being conformist by training, if not by nature, will make believe what is possible and box themselves in. and therefore the vast majority of singaporeans, especially scholars, miss out on a lot of things that they could do but didn't because it wasn't tried and tested by some senior. but they don't ask, who taught the senior who first did it? and how old is this information? have things changed since? this disclaimer applies to everything on this website as well. while intended to provoke thought, it is not meant to brainwash people into breaking their bonds.

points to ponder specific to people thinking of a career in research, and are tempted by a*star's offerings:

you can get paid to do a phd in the us. last i checked, an a*star graduate scholarship for study in uiuc is worth $1.1k/month allowance + s$2000/month salary. the total value is us$27,318 gross at an exchange rate of 1.70. the department is offering $23,600 gross. after estimated deductions for tax, cpf, etc., the net worths are $22,687 for a*star's deal and $21,340 for the university's. (yes assistantships are taxable income in the us! ridiculous but true.) therefore my net advantage going with a*star is us$6,735 over 5 years, so after factoring interest the estimated bond is us$228,158 for a marginal utility of $6,735. run your own numbers and see.
it's not like if you want to do research in singapore, you can't do it if you're not on an a*star scholarship. they are many many other workplaces you can choose from. on the other hand but, if you do return to work for a government body, you would be second class to the returning scholars serving out their bonds. not like research in nus/ntu/dsta/dso/a*star/temasek labs is anything stellar to begin with.
a*star does not focus on basic research. while interns may be allowed to dabble in fundamental work, a*star is not a government research laboratory. a*star is a branch of the ministry for trade and information, not the ministry of education, so it's natural that a*star is only interested in r&d for commercial applications. they want to make money. my prediction: a*star will only fund basic research to the extent that fundamental research in bio will potentially generate more commercial spinoffs. to quote: "i did [my] attachment in [some a*star research institute] and [they let me do some basic research...] but my supervisor was complaining a lot abt how [s/he] can't do a lot of research cos of patent stuff." basic research cannot be patented. draw your own conclusions.
a*star is not superior to dsta "because dsta only does applied r&d for military applications". my educated guess is that returning starry-eyed a*star scholars will be in for a rude shock when you return to astar and want to pursue studies in fundamental research. i strongly doubt that they will be given much leeway in the choice of research topics. certainly not in the sense of "do what you want". at most it will be like "you have your pick of projects A, B, and C, CHOOSE NOW".
a*star's management of scholars, from what i've heard, is absymal. quote: 'my scholarship officer doesn't read his email. i email him so many times and he doesn't respond. finally i get fed up and call him all the way from the us on my calling card to ask what happened to all my emails and he said, "oh, i never check my mailbox because it's always full!"' gee, i wonder why it's always full.
if you will listen to the words of a professionally certified scientist: always verify what you hear. this includes everything that i have written here. if you choose to act solely on this information, you are a fool and i will have nothing to do with it.

unsolicited feedback

2004-09-26T18:42:00.000-05:00

what an interesting day it has been. taking a break after mugging for biochemistry, i turned on my computer and got two icq messages. the first, from a shianux" requesting a full rss feed (i will consider). his blog turns out to contain a few gems, such as this quiz:

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Moderate
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Very High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Moderate
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Extreme
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Extreme
Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

and also something very close to my heart, the one thing that blares out to america: TO ALL THE GEOGRAPHICALLY-CHALLENGED, SINGAPORE IS NOT IN CHINA. this idiot's map of the world on zen-style is a fantastic work of art! check out the lion's head sphinx, it's absolutely smashing! :-) (click on the map for a full-sized image)

which reminded me thoroughly of this:

don't forget the other maps on zen-style, especially BushWorld, バカ超東京地図 (Tokyo) and バカ日本地図(Japan). among other things, look at what happened to 福岡 (fukuoka), 新宿 (shinjuku) and 秋葉原 (akihabara). :) (博多 (hakata) is the central and historic region of 福岡.)

the other icq message was a request from a singaporean freshman on a*star's package to discuss his/her wanting to drop to his/her scholarship. i hope s/he got something out of talking to me. excerpts of our discussion are pasted into the next post.

a funny episode in the conversation:

"if you don't mind, which jc were you from?"
"vj.. u from rj?"
"yes, is it that obvious? :)"
"haha. no one from vj gets psc."
"really now."
"honest"
"so rj was like a 50% shot in the dark?"
"dont think HC ppl wld be so antiestablishment[/]
"so with vj and hc ruled out, yeah rj. duh. d="

i must compliment this scholar for his/her astuteness.

new science

2004-09-26T03:02:00.000-05:00

Is this cool, or what? A liquid that, when heated, solidifies!

Freezing on heating of liquid solutions

M. Plazanet, C. Floare, M. R. Johnson, R. Schweins, and H. P. Trommsdorff

The Journal of Chemical Physics Vol 121(11) pp. 5031-5034. September 15, 2004

Abstract
Wereport a reversible liquid–solid transition upon heating of a simplesolution composed of a-cyclodextrine (CD), water, and 4-methylpyridine. These solutionsare homogeneous and transparent at ambient temperature and solidify whenheated to temperatures between 45° and 75°. Quasielastic and elasticneutron scattering show that molecular motions are slowed down inthe solid and that crystalline order is established. The solution"freezes on heating." This process is fully reversible, on coolingthe solid melts. A rearrangement of hydrogen bonds is postulatedto be responsible for the observed phenomenon. ©2004 American Instituteof Physics.

---

Manual of the Universe - Eminent theoretical physicist writes a product manual for everything and anything.

the school term heats up

2004-09-24T20:28:00.000-05:00

wow, i can't believe how much work the school term just became. just this week, i had to write an exam (yes, write) for my ta class, for their first hour exam next wednesday, along with grading more absymal homework sets; two machine problems (computer programming assignments) due half an hour ago; and the usual quota of two homework sets from my regular courses. and i have an exam next week. boo.

i hate the mps. one of them had evil constructs like

(*(*array).[i]).[j])->dosomething();

boo.

'I have this uneasy feeling that C++ was invented by Lucifer' - fellow sufferer, in the midst of doing our mp.

and i have a backlog of seminars to review. ah well. i shall just content myself with describing tonight's event.

went to the night market this evening: an event nominally sponsored in the hopes of appreciating multiculturalism, but basically degenerated into a free food event by many of the asian students' societies, together with ukrainians, romanian and italians. the hong kong food appreciation club had an extremely strange curried fish ball dish that tasted like japanese curry mixed with chinese herbal medicines (ugh); the romanians had potato dumplings, which went pretty well with the sour cream that they had provided; the vietnamese students' association had divine spring rolls, with extremely crispy skins and rather salty but tender pork fillings; the asian american associated provided catered teriyaki chicken (sans teriyaki sauce) and homemade honeydew and coconut jelloes, which were pretty nice; the malaysian students' association came up with mango pudding; the italians served parmesan linguine and lasagne; and the romanians dished out leaf-wrapped sausaged-shaped mincemeat with one layer of rice pressed onto the surface, which was pretty interesting and somewhat reminiscent of 巴掌. and where were the singaporeans, you may ask? no one had time to cook. just as well, or we would have had a huge amount of 星州炒米粉 to finish up.

a guy from the dominican republic performed some folksy songs on an electric guitar to open to night's event's musical section. he was actually pretty good and complemented the festive-like night market atmosphere pretty well. then came no strings attached. not only did they performed a repertoire that was entirely ripped off from the real group, they had very poor harmony; they were the musical equivalent of soggy spaghetti, the kind that you try to twirl on a fork, only to keep having the noodles fall back into the bowl. and they were the kind of group with one strong singer and the rest fading into nothingness. it's really silly to have so many people crowding around one microphone and only one singer who seemed to have some inkling of how to project her voice into an open area. i was practically forced to leave.

dancing eggs

2004-09-23T15:20:00.001-05:00

ok so i skipped class. :)

i've become addicted to the egg song [swf] from iloveegg.com. it's korea's answer to the happy hampster dance by diedre lacarte, whose original page had nothing but asinine animated gifs of hamsters, mirrored here.
nostalgic samples of dancing hamsters:

the hamster dance [Wikipedia], in turn was a craze that followed the dancing baby. what could be more natural than dancing eggs now? watch out for the modulation on 'crack! crack! crack!' i think it's musical genius :)

on a side note, the episodic cartoons on iloveegg.com are trying very hard to be the next 마시마로(mashimaro), but fail miserably.

a room with a view

2004-09-23T10:51:00.000-05:00

the view from my window. try as I might, i couldn't get my new camera to focus on the background but instead on that silly radiometer. the flash came on (it's a bright sunny day outside!) and the image came out overexposed, so i tried to do some touching up in gimp. however, i accidently hit the wrong command and did a histogram equalization instead of a contrast/brightness reduction. the resulting image, however, turned out to be rather stunning: surreal, yet picturesque too. the cross in the sky is formed from contrail marks, from some high-flying aviation student, i presume. the building outside is the krannert center for the performing arts. and the radiometer doesn't work.

radiometer views the krannert center.

colin goh is just not letting up on p. yeo. check out pratapolis: first there was paper prata, now there's toilet paper prata!

prata. *rumble*

curry in sg wasn't that cheap to begin with, but curry here is daylight robbery. imagine paying $9 for a small tin of curry, about 8" in diameter and 2" thick. that's how much bombay grill costs.

heck, for $9 i'd be overjoyed to buy my own materials and try my luck at getting something decent.

*rumble*

oh, i have to go for class now.

quotes

2004-09-22T18:10:00.000-05:00

lame fortune cookie fortunes:

"A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories." - as if not going for a new voyage won't fill my life with untold memories.

"Romance moves you in a new direction." - also conficius he say, many beans make man fart.

"Keep your plans secret for now." - what, is this some leftover saying from the three kingdoms period? how old is this fortune cookie anyway??

"When you learn to be flexible, amazing opportunities reveal themselves!" - like what, autofellatio?

fans of prof. s will be disappointed to hear that he didn't really say much this week:

"Now those of you who are afraid of mathematics, close your eyes now." - prof. s, just before launching into a long derivation.

"And now you can see that they are the same except for a trivial factor, except that it is not really trivial." - prof. s, comparing the left hand and right hand sides of an equation.

"But later, no matter what worries we have here, don't worry." - prof. s, on doing something mathematically dubious.

"If you cannot do [the derivation] so fast, do it at home. It's easy to prove and you can prove it very quickly." - prof. s, on a 'trivial' derivation. uh, so time goes faster at home?

"I am worried that I am doing this too much as an expert. My voice is falling asleep; I am falling asleep; but it's not because I am not excited but because I've done it so many times in my life I can do it in my sleep. That should tell you that it's important, if old professor can do it so often that he can do it in his sleep." - prof. s, on the method of orthogonal polynomials to solve differential equations.

"Shove x in the elephants and they may seem to blow up, but in fact there are only two survivors, the orthogonality kills all the rest!" - prof. s, on the use of orthogonal functions.

"And now for the big cashoff [sic.]" - prof. s.

from the Lighting Technology Symposium:

"There are many uses for glass microspheres. For example, they go into diet chocolate to make it seem filling. The microspheres are made small enough so that they don't hurt your teeth when you bite them." - Kyekyoon (Kevin) Kim. ouch!

"Back then, all you needed was an analytical balance and a couple of test tubes and you were all ready to become a qualified chemist." - Scott Anderson, opening address. dr. anderson founded apl engineered materials, inc. 60 years ago, quite possibly the very first spin-off company from a university.

sounds of cell phones and universes, nanotubes and rage

2004-09-19T16:14:00.000-05:00

i went for a seminar on thursday, when a cell phone rang about 40 minutes into the talk. the speaker nonchalantly remarked, 'by the way, when i last visited san francisco, i heard a symphony written for the cell phone.' that got a huge laugh from the audience, but i was piqued to find out more. google happily digs up Dialtones (A Telesymphony) - Mobile Phone Concert by Golan Levin. the website has recordings that you can listen to. and they have already cut an album!

astronomy professor mark whittle at the university of virginia has an amazing rendition of the creation of our universe. by transposing cosmic background radiation data into acoustic frequencies that we mere mortals can hear, he has created several audio clips and movies that allow us to hear the creation of the universe. contrary to 'common knowledge', "the big bang actually was silent, then things got louder and louder". i was really disappointed because they all sounds like cheap sound effects from a budget movie or computer games from the 1980's. but hey, this is as good as it gets, in terms of hearing what real raw data sounds like! i recommend movie no. 5.

in other scientific news, scientists are now able to tune nanotubes as electromechanical resonators, i. e. to vibrate like string instruments: Nanophysics: Carbon nanotubes tune up [Nature]. rediscovered a proposal to use entangled photons for sub-diffraction limit recording on cd-roms. the articles: De Broglie wavelength of a non-local four-photon state, Super-resolving phase measurements with a multiphoton entangled state, Quantum Interferometric Optical Lithography: Exploiting Entanglement to Beat the Diffraction Limit. time to rewrite the textbooks!

caveat from prof. m: "Few people remember that Nature, unlike most other research journals, is written by a commercial company. That means that it is for profit, and they tend to ask authors to hype up their results so as to be able to sell more magazines." prof. m eventually published an article in nature as a graduate student, but not without lots of wrangling over hype v. scientific integrity. it's well worth noting advice from the front line.

i have received over 130 hits since writing rage against the a*star machine. i seem to have struck chords with quite a few people. a plug on livejournal posted by avid reader nilsinelabore, where it then found its way to synapse_storage++, which is apparently written by an ntu postdoc. interestingly, it found its way to a discussion thread on hardwarezone's forum, where other cynics and scholars try to advise a poor lost soul on choosing singapore scholarships; theonion, apparently a fellow jaded cynic, put my article up as 'advice' there, then went on to cross-post on tjc's and SPUG's fora.

courtesy of theonion and yl, here's a*star's official message on the moral responsibility of a*star scholars. what utter rubbish: it's not like bond breakers go off scot-free. not only do they have to pay off the entire bond amount of monies spent, the a*star bond also includes interest at 15% per annum plus about $5k/semester of 'administrative fees'. plus according to bean, it doesn't depreciate until the third year of service. yk, the informant, who incidentally just started his own blog, is indeed an a*star bond breaker; where is his newspaper article, mr. yeo?

i wonder if i will be sucked into the inevitable disestablishmentarian cynic v. loyal scholar flame war.

MM Lee Releases Rap Album

2004-09-18T15:47:00.000-05:00

colin goh must be psychic. his latest release on TalkingCock certainly resonates with yesterday's talk with Prof. Lauterbur.

MM Lee Releases Rap Album

lame humor, shamelessly pilfered from Balderdash!:

note on pronunciation: in most of the english-speaking west, 'cation' is pronounced /:kɑˌti'ɘn:/ ('kuh-tie-on'), not /:ke'iˌon:/ ('cat-i-on') or even /:kei'ʃɤn:/ ('ca-tion' as in a truncated 'education') as singaporean teachers are wont to mangle it as.

The Lost Boys - advertisers find it hard to target the 18-34 year-old male. boo hoo.

Scamming the Scammer: He wanted powerbook we gave him p-p-p-powerbook!

also installed firefox promotional code that shows up only on internet explorer. bean, be proud. :-)

a nobel laureate speaks

2004-09-17T17:59:00.000-05:00

and so my quest for a research advisor continues with prof. lauterbur, now famous for his recent nobel prize. my department requires nine faculty signatures on a treasure-hunt-like form before allowing us to join a research group on or after the enabling date of nov 5, which means we get to scuttle around like lost rabbits in the three-dimensional maze of chemistry buildings: noyes laboratory, chemistry annex, roger adams laboratory and chemical and life sciences laboratory, to say nothing of the groups at beckman institute. incidentally, noyes laboratory recently celebrated its centennial, is a designated national historic chemical landmark, and its toilets feature prominently on toiletnet.com.

the first four buildings are all linked together by underground passageways and skybridges. the practical reason, of course, is that no one wants to cart around dimethylmercury(0) or some other ultratoxic reagent across busy mathews avenue and fight the pedestrian traffic, whence the all-too-frequent errant blind cyclist careening into a chemical cart would then trigger a massive spill, injuring scores of students waiting for the 21 quad at the noyes laboratory bus stop and disrupting the traffic flow of thousands of students to boot.

professor lauterbur has kindly agreed to let me quote him in the following:

"So you're from Singapore... I can't say that I know anyone else from there. But from what I know it certainly is an example of a most rigid environment. People that I know make fun of the fact that you can't get chewing gum there; not without a prescription, at the very least. That is perhaps an extreme example of controlling people for their own good. Not a very good place to do science, I would think.

"I've heard that the venerable Mr. Lee is finally going to retire from politics entirely and not rule through his son. But I suspect that for him, like most professors doing research, that the only retirement is in death."
- Prof. Paul C. Lauterbur, 2003 Nobel Laureate in Physiology Or Medicine. Image from the School of Chemical Sciences.

a*star, eat your heart out. tell prof. brenner that his funding has run out and see how long it takes him to run to the airport and catch a plane back to 'frisco. it shouldn't take too long; after all, singapore is a regional transportation hub, isn't it?

rage against the a*star machine

2004-09-17T14:17:00.000-05:00

the message (courtesy of yk, a fellow bond-breaker):

Scholars who have attained high academic grades of GPA 3.8 and higher, or UK First Class Honours will be awarded the National Science Scholarship (Graduate Studies) for their PhD studies in selected overseas universities. Scholars may apply for overseas graduate studies in the final year of their undergraduate studies. They then commence graduate studies after a one-year research attachment period with any BMRC/SERC laboratory as full-salaried A*STAR Research Officers. This research attachment will give scholars good research exposure and mentorship, so that they can better determine the specific areas of focus in their overseas graduate studies following the attachment period. During their deployment as A*STAR Research Officers, each will be allocated travelling funds and adequate time to visit and select overseas graduate schools to further assist them in making well-informed decisions concerning their graduate studies. The year of BMRC/SERC research attachment will be counted against their bond period and their bond reduced accordingly.

NSS scholars with a GPA of between 3.6 and 3.8, or a UK Second Class (Upper) Honours, will return home to take up employment as full-salaried A*STAR Research Officers in any of the BMRC/SERC laboratories. They may be awarded the A*STAR Graduate Scholarship (AGS) in the next academic year to pursue their PhD research at an A*STAR Research Institute, leading to a PhD from NUS or NTU, or under the A*STAR joint partnership program with the UK's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, subject to finding a suitable PhD project.

Scholars who have attained a GPA of less than 3.6 will be deployed as full-salaried A*STAR Research Officers in any of the BMRC/SERC laboratories or in corporate and administrative positions. Should they perform well during their period of service, they may be given the opportunity to undertake a PhD under the AGS.
Ms. Chng Zhenzhi, NSS scholar of the Year 2001 batch, has opted to do research attachment at IMCB before she proceeds overseas for her Phd studies under the NSS(Graduate Studies). You can learn more about her experience from the weblink: http://www.a-star.edu.sg/astar/youthsci/action/scholarship_voicesofScholars.do

Finally, I would like to convey my very best wishes as you embark on the new academic year. Focus on your studies, pursue them with passion, and enrich your lives with new knowledge and new experiences which will hold you in good steadfast in your bright future as A*STAR researchers.

[Prof. L.]

the rants:

three decimal place precision gpa. yay, zhenzhi, for being a bronze tablet recepient (typically one needs a 3.98 and above). yay, zhenzhi, for graduating summa cum laude, i.e. in the 97th percentile and above. go orange and blue! but for crying out loud, give zhenzhi a break! must you rub it in that she got like one credit hour worth of an a-?

rank(l)ing élitism. why the bloody hell is a cutoff of 3.8 or first class honours necessary to pursue research? isn't it bad enough that the entire scholarship system partitions batch after batch of graduating a-level students? and that the education system in general partitions people into a-level vs. diploma vs. ite ntc certificate holders? is a student with a 3.801 gpa that much better than someone who gets a 3.799? is three decimal point precision helpful, or even necessary?

examination meritocracy. the gpa is solely a predictor of how well a student handles academic examinations and cannot measure much more important things like a student's attitude toward research, etc. many of the top schools in chemistry, including brand name schools like harvard, mit, stanford and berkeley, all say the same thing: gpa matters only as a baseline consideration, typically around 3.0 (b average). a 3.5 is already considered really good. (this translates to an a-/b+ average) yet p. yeo et. al. continue to insist on the ridiculous criterion of gpa as the sole measure of a scholar's worth. is a 3.996-er really inferior to a truly perfect 4.000-er? and does p. yeo et. al. claim to be superior to the academics at separating cream from cream?

comparing apples and oranges. a*star excels miserably at this. why should a graduating student with a gpa of 3.8 from the university of chicago be considered equally good as a a student who graduates with 3.8 from cornell? first of all, the u of c is notorious for rough grading. secondly, cornell has an a+ = 4.33 system, meaning that it is much easier to pull up your grade at cornell than at u of c. and don't you think it matters more whether a molecular biology major fails biochemistry as opposed to failing golf? and what about people who have extenuating circumstances? what if one of their family members died halfway through his/her course of study? or got severely injured in some accident? or that so-and-so took a course under prof. x who fails 90% of his students, as opposed to prof. y who gives 90% of the class a's?

comparing football and soccer. a special case of the preceding point, and one that is of critical importance: how does one correlate us-style gpas to uk-style honors? one is a finer measure than the other, and neither is consistent across universities. horror stories of hr officers being forced to draw up huge correlation tables come to mind. my first hand experience with such a story was related to me by one of my ex-scholarship officers: "well, psc doesn't really place that much emphasis. we're not like edb or dsta, whom we've heard try to 'equalize' all the scholars' grades from across different universities and calculate gpa-equivalents for their uk scholars." wtf?

risk-aversion and convergence to metrics. the obvious trend in response, therefore, will be that scholars are be going all-out to preserve their precious 4.0s. if this means dropping a hard course that may be useful, so be it. if this means skimping on rigorous classes and taking filler classes such as geology 101, a.k.a. 'rocks for jocks', so be it. let's take two imaginary scholars with gpas of 3.8 v. 3.3 ceteris paribus. maybe the 3.8-er took a whole bunch of filler classes for easy a's, like chinese 101 or southeast asian studies and breezed through, whereas the 3.3-er took a whole bunch of extra graduate-level classes for interest's sake; who, really, is the better student then? btw, i am not kidding about taking southeast asian studies for an easy a. more than one uiuc alum is guilty of that.

sheer illiteracy. what on earth is 'good steadfast'? this trend of verbifying nouns has become ridiculous enough (such as the word 'verbify' itself). and now prof. l verbifies adjectives? it is a professional requirement for scientists to be good communicators, which necessitates a strong command of english. ergo, a poor communicator is a poor scientist. and besides, communication (besides the pedagogical) usually tries to convey new information. now, the dictionary synonym of 'steadfast' is 'loyal'. yes, yes, it's obvious that scholars have to be loyal. after all, you are keeping each one on their own million-dollar leash, dammit! *sounds of whiplashes* on, my dear doggies!

a*star, watch out: you will get what you pay for. you are curdling the attitudes of an entire generation of researchers. by putting in a huge grade penalty for straying beyond the confines of the tried-and-tested boundaries of their knowledge, you will never get the true risk-taking let's-dive-into-the-unknown people who will be true blue scientists. you will forever get scholars who are academically inclined, but never academics. don't even get me started on why science in singapore is a losing proposition as it stands today.

remember your poor ex-scholars(s) whom you have driven to madness by your asinine insistence on perfect grades. i mean it literally. people have gone mad by pushing themselves too hard. and most of the time their scholarship agencies egged them on because they fell below the holy 3.8 standard. shame on you, philip. 'focus on your studies', indeed. substitute the possessive 'my' for 'a*star' and the true mr. yeo shines forth.

in protest of these, i am skipping the rest of my classes today. gosh, i can't think straight now.

千と千尋の神隠し - いつも何度でも

2004-09-15T19:22:00.000-05:00

Theme Song From 'Spirited Away' - Itsumo Nando Demo

千と千尋の神隠し
《いつも何度でも》
作詞／覚和歌子
作曲・歌／木村　弓

呼んでいる　胸のどこか奥で
いつも心踊る　夢を見たい

悲しみは　数えきれないけれど
その向こうできっと　あなたに会える

繰り返すあやまちの　そのたびひとは
ただ青い空の　青さを知る
果てしなく　道は続いて見えるけれど
この両手は　光を抱ける

さよならのときの　静かな胸
ゼロになるからだが　耳をすませる

生きている不思議　死んでいく不思議
花も風も街も　みんなおなじ

ラ…
ホ…　ル…

呼んでいる　胸のどこか奥で
いつも何度でも　夢を描こう

悲しみの数を　言い尽くすより
同じくちびるで　そっとうたおう

閉じていく思い出の　そのなかにいつも
忘れたくない　ささやきを聞く
こなごなに砕かれた　鏡の上にも
新しい景色が　映される

はじまりの朝の　静かな窓
ゼロになるからだ　充たされてゆけ

海の彼方には　もう探さない
輝くものは　いつもここに
わたしのなかに　見つけられたから

[reload this page with 振り仮名 furigana]

faculty

2004-09-15T11:27:00.000-05:00

this morning i dreamt that an ex-classmate of mine won the nobel prize in chemistry. yes i know, it's early for the 2004 proclamations. must have been lauterbur's email about my upcoming faculty meeting with him. gee, the nominees must be sweating already.

prof. s was more subdued today, but was, as ever, full of teutonic humor:

"Let's take a vote for the answer to this question... [takes vote and finds out one student didn't vote] And how about the rest? You didn't vote, you must pick a choice! Never mind if it's wrong, this is just pedagogical so just commit yourself. Maybe you will vote wrongly and say 'Oh my God! I learnt something today!' Who known, even the people who voted for the correct answer will later realize that they voted for the wrong reason. Of course this is not what I am assuming, I am assuming that they are brilliant!" - prof. s

"Everything eventually decays! Even those particles that go away from the wall are dumb enough to go back and eventually bang their heads on the wall!" - prof. s, anthropomorphizing one-dimensional diffusing particles with a reactive boundary.

"Consider sperm cells fertilizing an egg cell... only one sperm can fertilize the egg, otherwise if many sperm can penetrate the cell wall you will have a big mixup of DNA, like having five fathers and one mother, and that is bad for drawing family trees." - prof. s

"Once I had a student who did a PhD in physics and a PhD in medicine [MD]. He did his degree in physics first, with me. Then he went to the hospital; they almost fired him out there. Why? Because when he was my student I always taught him to be careful [with his conclusions]: 'Maybe it's like this, maybe it's like that.' And when he went to the hospital he said the same thing to the doctor - 'Maybe it's like this, maybe it's like that' - and the doctor was furious! 'Why don't you just say out what it is? You can't talk to patients like that!'" - prof. s. for best results, add mental pictures of violent, yet appropriate, hand-waving. i forgot the context of this story.

"If you still don't normalize, it's [sic] not too late." - prof. s, on probability distributions. the misplaced "still" leads to a starkly different implicit meaning.

tried running several faculty names through the internet anagram server ("i, rearrangement servant"), just for laughs and giggles. my old advisor turned out to be a "mink canary" or "i, cranky man". prof. s. turns out to be "luckless haunt" and "unchaste skull". prof. f? "fern: plenty!" and if you remember prof. s', he to "sketches, unlink".

i have to teach class on friday because the mink canary is going for a conference. eeks.

random news: Smelly robot eats flies to generate its own power.
akamushi-san: you win, i've registered on lj. Now how about you signing up for a dummy blogspot acount?

prof. f

2004-09-15T01:17:00.000-05:00

"h-bar is just a cute way of writing Planck's constant divided by two-pi." - prof f.

"I just love squirrels. They look so yummy!" - yt

neat, but hardly in the same league as prof. s.

who wants to be the next president? let the electoral vote predictor tell you!

historic lincoln hotel

2004-09-14T16:33:00.004-05:00

the best hospitality of downtown urbana.

wanted: cryptozoologist and explorer

2004-09-13T13:17:00.000-05:00

i don't know what to think.

i had my first snippet of dream lucidity ever this morning. i dreamt that i became a ghost and tried to get back to the real (human) world, but had no idea how. then i met these people (all chinese) and they made a whole bunch of musical phrases sound in my head as they approached. i spoke to them, and i then i became aware that i was talking complete and absolute gibberish. yet it made sense at the time. then i suddenly had control of my dream, knowing it was a dream! i felt like a sim in some role playing game, complete with pie menu and cursor. somehow i had stumbled upon a society that identified its people with so-called "welcome melodies", rather complex 30-second long which would resonate in the minds of nearby people. and they were asking me what happened to my welcome melody, it was missing! so anyway i somehow told them (in gibberish) that i was lost and wanted to get home. they said that it was ok, and they would help me, and that i was lost there before!!

at that point the lucidity ended and a whole bunch of stuff happened. i have fleeting recollections of climbing a tall tower and playing some steel bells. and of getting lost in a dark wood, finding a clearing laid with stones around a central rock with a japanese-style paper lantern on top. and trying to light the candle inside by singing to it (don't ask). but eventually i somehow managed to solve the puzzle and complete the quest, and yes i woke up with 40 minutes to get ready for class. thanks to studio ghibli for the nice rpg; it had themes from spirited away :-) it was fantastic!

the only is, once i woke up, i wasn't sure that i wasn't still dreaming, almost like 's famous butterfly dream. because prof. s' class just gets weirder and weirder.

"And now we are in the jungle waiting to make our discoveries... and we have done the difficult part of tekking through the jungle of stochastic calculus, and now we are ready to do some physics" - prof s.

a mental picture of prof. s in jungle leotards and stereotyped explorer's hat, khakied multipocketed vest, armed with blackboard chalk and hunting down algebraic terms with a butterfly net, comes to mind. blink blink.

"Everything that we have learnt here can and will be used against you, in the form of homework... everything that I find too difficult to do on the board I will give you as homework" - prof s.

"[This is] not an equation that's [like] wool - you have to understand it intuitively" - prof s., on probability fluxes in configuration space.

"Anyone who doesn't know this already, let me know. This should not come between us... and I will lovingly explain it to you." - prof. s, on green's second theorem.

"Write this quickly on the margin - CHECK AT HOME. Like Fermat" - prof s., on some 'trivial' algebra.

"I can't do this now, I am too old. If I were younger I would do something to try to get you to remember [this], like screaming and banging my head on the table. But I am too old now so maybe I will sing instead. But since I'm a terrible singer maybe it's better for you that I don't. So scream and bang your head on the table if you want, but pay very careful attention now." - prof s.

"Initial conditions are the easy part, and you must be a bit brain-damaged if you can't do it." - prof s., on the solution of differential equations.

"You must have boundary conditions. That is where the physics comes in!... And sometimes in textbooks you will see things like 'this is a no-boundary condition' problem. That is absolute stupidity!" - prof s., on the need for boundary condition when solving differential equations.

"Omega can be a sausage, it can be a sphere, it can be two spheres, it can be a big sphere with bubbles in it. Of course it is stupid to have two spheres, because we can just consider one sphere here and one sphere here." - prof. s. Omega is a space of integration.

"And this means the following, which is not so clear" - prof. s

"And when you get into trouble, the equation will not forgive you." - prof. s

"I just wiped it out, but if you have a little memory you will remember." - prof. s, when he tried to reference something he just erased on the chalkboard. some kind of mass extinction of some species of knowledge, evidently.

"This is one of the rare cases in science when making it more complicated makes it solveable." - prof. s, on the derivation of the gaussian integral. pardon me, but i thought the mathematicians lay claim to calculus?

and today's hilarity is accompanied by a dash of total and utter bizareness, courtesy of the Daily Illini, the campus newspaper:

first, the atrocious opinions column by steve kline today wails of deteriorating journalistic standard. sure, he must have been trying to be clever, senior in las and all, but the humor falls flat in its pretentiousness. and the appalling misuse of english! lynne truss would have been apoplectic with the liberal and completely unnecessary use of the solidus '/' in kline's article. and how did the editors miss obvious spelling mistakes like "bretheren" and "accited"? note also and how the forced pentameter (not even iambic!) led to ungrammatical constructs such as "Thy vehicle exceeded speed limits" (see context). now this completely out-of-place classified! what is this university coming to?

狂気が続けます!

liberté

2004-09-12T22:22:00.000-05:00

today tl and i celebrated SpinGlass' liberation from his expensive meal plan. yay!

tonight's dinner was with italian rotini-shaped egg noodles with white wine sauce, topped with portobello mushrooms and seared chicken strips marinated with thyme and oregano. SpinGlass' declared that it tasted just like restaurant food accompanying that was boiled and salted potatoes, cut into scallops.

for dessert, i baked muffins from ghiradelli's muffin mix. a no-brainer, really. the chocolate chips just smelled so heavenly when they were ready! i slightly overcooked the muffins, resulting in muffins with crispy skins but soft interiors and melt-in-your-mouth semi-molten chocolate chips. then i tried out my food processor's ability to grind ice (not very well, but it worked) and made ice blended lime sherbet with one real lime squeezed in for good measure. not bad!

total cost: $11.47, or $3.82 per person. not bad for a first-year chemistry graduate cooking chicken and pasta for the fourth time.

horticulture for dummies

2004-09-12T14:46:00.000-05:00

I like your quotes. why not try to get 7800 like me? :) - Agagooga

went to another singaporean's housewarming on friday night. (yet another one of those singaporeans boasting of a private pilot's license...) his roommate turned out to be an american chef trainee and kept three pythons (!) in his apartment. and the landlady let them! how cool is that? at least they'll never have to worry about being robbed in their sleep. one guy made meatballs and fried rice, another guy made roast chicken . the chicken, happily, was not undercooked, which is my chief complaint when it comes to cooking chicken. i hate to eat pink chicken as it is, let along semi-raw and bleeding! it's the gooey texture and the risk of salmonella poisoning. ugh. but the chicken was seasoned pretty well. i was told that they simply sprayed pancake mix on it to season the skin, which did work pretty well, i must say!

after dinner, the american roommate made cocktails of orange juice and whisky with a dash of sugar; i thought it was pretty good but it made SpinGlass gag (too strong). i recommended that he add milk to his drink to absorb the alcohol, which he promptly did and made a cocktail latte! omg. and the funny thing was, his drink must have been really sour, because the milk eventually curdled and he happily chucked it down the sink, glad for the excuse to get rid of it. oh well.

so anyway, i also watched studio ghibli's spirited away, which i thought was pretty cute. the soundtrack is also fantastic! yumi kimura has a rough but extremely bright voice, which made up for the rough breathing that chopped up the sound. although a sour note comes from the implicit message of asian inferiority. yubaba's twin sister's criticises of yubaba's poor taste in things (she has an extremely ornate chinese-style penthouse on top of a bathhouse) while she herself brews english tea and makes scones. hmf. but the overall theme of self-discovery is pretty cool.

the next morning, i went to the landlord's office, only to discover that they weren't open on saturdays. dang. well at least i got an interesting picture of the oar fountain behind the hallene gateway.

i wonder if this was official support for the football game with ucla later, or some patriotic prank. (illinois later lost 17-35).

so i went to the next thing on my list, an excursion to the university's vineyard by invitation of the horticultural club. some professor just concluded an experiment the suitability of 26 different varieties of grapes to the illinois climate, so we were there to literally gather the fruits of his research. the three that i liked the most were marquis, bluebell and jupiter. the marquis in particular are so incredibly sweet, it was shocking! we also went to pick apples - red delicious and golden delicious. i found that the reds weren't so sweet, but were more photogenic:

me staring at a bunch of apples on the ground. too bad the photographer didn't figure out the composition should have been. hm.

me under an apple tree.

i picked 10 pounds of grapes and 8 pounds of apples to bring home. yum!

shameless self plug

2004-09-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

i've set up a blog dedicated to technical things that catch my interest. yes, it will feature proper capitalization.

some professors can't think straight, some chinese can't write sense

2004-09-09T17:29:00.000-05:00

P: As you can see, this is a straight line graph!
Q: What is the significance of the slope?
P: Well, er... the slope should be one!
Q: Yeah, in some units it will be!
- Discussions between Profs. P and Q on the superconducting Bardeen relation

Cheap things are of no value; valuable things are not cheap? - today's fortune cookie

If that fortune isn't the epitome of ungrammatical materialism, I don't know what is.

the intersession

2004-09-08T15:14:00.000-05:00

intersession: ten minutes between classes
the liminal oh-my-God-gotta-run unscheduled period
of hourly rushes,
of jaywalkers, of bikers, of pedestrians,
of cars, of buses, of wheelchairs,
of rollerblades, of skateboards, of unicycles,
of bicycles, of pogo sticks, and of course, of segways.

police cars drive by, indifferent to hordes
of book-toting students: peasants and lords
united between their rooms and classes.

tender moments:
mother hoisting wheelchair,
loading son into SUV;
empty mug, coln and forlorn,
abandoned on iron chain;
shivering girl clutching files,
arm-comforted by warm boyfriend;
sports jock picking up loose papers
pursued by bespectacled nerd;
old lady busdriver waiting,
for rushing library patron with books and bags.

the entrance is nigh

crap i forgot my homework!

alice in wonderland meets the sound of music

2004-09-08T11:32:00.000-05:00

Today's rash of memorable quotes:

"And if you give t-zero to t you get this baby here" - Prof. S, in the middle of one of those derivations. for best effect, put in the thick germanic accent.

"I will not write this here because you [will] have to wipe it out of your eyes later." - Prof. S, on the conceptual limitation of a limit for stochastic integrals.

"I highly recommend [that you derive the result yourself] if you are the type who likes to understand the basics of the field. I won't name names, but there was once this student from a department on the other side of Green Street [ed: non-engineering faculties], who once asked another graduate student, 'I want to take this physics course, what do you think?' The other student went 'Ugh! [sucking of breath and expression of horror] Don't go for it! They derive things over there!' But anyway I will not derive it here, it is all in the notes. Go read it yourself." - Prof. S, on the derivation of the Ito integral.

"I will write down the Ito rules and they will not make any sense to you! But when you will use it in five minutes' [time] you will say 'ah! ah! good rules!' ... So let me get out my fancy book and write out these nonsense rules." - Prof. S

"It's like going to a mountain top. We have to wear the right attire and climb up to the [top of the] mountain where will have beer[,] and ice-cream for the children. But you must believe in me! Because we have one more hill to climb before getting to the top of the mountain. So bear with me, as it were, as we wear our walking shoes and give one hard look at the lay of the land before you start trekking." - Prof. S

itch and burn

2004-09-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

the enthusiastic optimism of yesterday gave way to a most uncomfortable today. woke up itching all over and was most upset at discovering patches of rashes all over my body. was it the bathing salts? or the half can of cashew nuts? i don't know. i gave up and went to mckinley (in some circles, they call it McKillMe) to see a doctor. guess what, he told me i was allergic to something, but he wasn't sure what. brilliant, dr. holmes. i hope it's not the cashews, what am i going to do if i can't eat them anymore? and i am so going to rewash my bedsheets. maybe it's the washing powder. i was prescribed 50 mg doses of diphenylhydramine (generic benadryl) and my rashes started to subside immediately. yay!

unfortunately, this led to one major culinary disaster when i decided to walk home and cook myself a chicken fettucine lunch. i added too much water to make the sauce and instead of waiting for the sauce to thicken, i senselessly turned heat on the electric stove hotplate to HI. next thing i know, smoke is pouring from the saucepan and the two smoke detectors in my apartment are blasting bleeps into my eardrums. neighbors left and right came out to see what happened. how embarassing! luckily the fire department didn't show up on my doorstep. silly me, i burnt the sauce and the pasta clinging to the walls of the saucepan. and the rest of my lunch ended up with a not unpleasant smoky flavor, which did jar with the cooked italian seasoning mix (oregano and thyme). blame the benadryl for sedating me and making me feel all woozy. but it seems like i'm gonna have to take them for a while longer; the effect started to wear off around 4 hrs later. reminder to self: take medication only after cooking!

on top of that, i slept all the way through phys 427 today and forgot to submit my homework in class. had to go to the homework drop box and met the ta there just about to collect all the homework. la di da...

just concluded office hours with some students. six people showed up today, which was nice because it wasn't as drawn out as last week's hours with twelve people all in all! remember that this is a class of 31, so a turnout of 12 is pretty bad. turns out that all six people who showed up had questions on the same one problem. boo for mcquarrie, for writing that question so poorly. he and his law of corresponding states. i'm glad i managed to throw a sufficiently thick smoke bomb so that no one could figure out i was bluffing my way through.

saf and the da vinci code

2004-09-06T22:39:00.000-05:00

woke up late at 1105 and treated myself to a luxuriant bath doped with bathing salts after a thorough scrub and shower. it was rather strange pouring what looked like washing powder into a bathtub and then stepping in, but it dissolved to give a rich cyan hue, giving the water a sea-blue coloration. what the heck, the landlord is charging me $10 a month on water. how could i ever consume $10 worth of water a month?? oh, the sensuous feeling of soaking in silky water!

sat in the bathtub and read half of the da vinci code for three hours straight. strangely enough, i didn't become a raisin after all that time. it must be the bath salts! after rinsing and toweling off i continued reading it until 1500 whiled doing laundry.

came across this interesting section toward the middle of the spin-dry cycle:

^
"This symbol is the original icon for male," he told her. "A rudimentary phallus."
"Quite to the point," Sophie said.
"As it were," Teabing added.
Langdon went on. "This icon is formally known as the blade, and it represents aggression and manhood. In fact, this exact phallus symbol is still used today on modern military uniforms to denote rank."
"Indeed." Teabing grinned. "The more penises you have, the higher your rank. Boys will be boys."
- Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

gee. and i thought lan jiao peng was just one of those meaningless hokkien vulgarities. although in the saf they had it upside down, perhaps an expression of repressed sexuality. really though, are most penises really broken in the middle? granted, i haven't really asked around. maybe all europeans back then suffered from Peyronie's disease. oh dear.

or considering that v is the chalice, the symbol of feminity, it may be one of those supreme ironies that most guys in uniform hunger for female company, yet carry their symbols on their shoulders. haha. and what about the arc above the chevrons (the real name for those vs)? is there some freudian meaning to that? condoms?

while we're on the topic of armies, my friend sent me this remix of 孙燕资's 天黑黑 by a RiverDance on SPUG Forums. it's a pretty funny spoof of the actual song, with the lyrics reproduced below. warning: clicking on the link automatically loads a recording of a karaoke recording, which gets pretty atrocious from the second verse onward.

Guard Duty 时候 prowling PROWL 到我脚酸
Chaokeng 总是与我难以避免
夏天的夜晚 Army 的歌安慰
我那首歌好像这样唱的

天黑黑好可怕天黑黑黑黑
离开 Guard Room 时带着我的 SBO
拖着脚步怠慢地往前走
劳累和辛苦无法控制的时候
我躲到安全地带睡觉。
天黑黑好恐怖天黑黑有鬼

我看见一个人头在那儿飞翔着
我以为这就是我所幻想的世界
然而横冲直撞，把我给吓坏
是否兵士的世界里头充满着恐

我走在每天必须面对的分岔路
我发现人头也只不过是只鸟儿累 (sic, 类?)
总是让人哭让人进入一个幻想
那 Camp 很大却看不清楚好...可...怕...
- RiverDance, Stefanie Sun Tee Orh Orh SAF Remix

mmm... how about doing one on the ri flying foetus?

finally got round to blogging these:

So You Want To Learn Japanese. If you are contemplating studying Japanese.
References for Learning Japanese. If you really want to study Japanese.
Fun with Camels. If you ever wanted to see endless pictures of camels with witty commentary, this is the site for you.

p.s. today's dinner at isr is the worst i've ever had since returning to uiuc. boo! yellow rubber surprise, mystery lumpy meat sauce, and a huge mass of congealed beans. gimme a break!

hamilton

2004-09-06T01:37:00.000-05:00

i was revising my notes and came across these interesting quotations, snippets of scientific history, which i inexplicably left out from the most recent post:

'[sir william rowan hamilton] was once asked to compose a poem in farsi, for a visiting persian dignatory. thankfully he was rescued from this mindless pursuit and became a first-rate physicist, mathematician and astronomer' - Prof. G.

'when hamilton died the historians at trinity college sorted through his desk, on which were piled stacks and stacks of notes and papers. in between the papers they found remains of half-eaten meals which were forgotten and buried under more paperwork.' - Prof. G.

i wonder if Prof. G knew about 過労死 (karoushi).

labor eve

2004-09-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

it is one of the greatest ironies of modern civilization that we celebrate labor day with - guess what - idleness and sloth.

soundtrack: miserere mei, deus by allegri, sung by the trinity college choir, conducted by marlowe. there is a most fascinating history behind the song. but that's another story

spent the rest of friday night watching comedy central at SpinGlass' place. he and tl still couldn't get over last week's screening of south park, episode 101: cartman gets an anal probe. the talk quickly degenerated into how space shuttles are created everyday from asses, just as cartman's ass generated a 80' satellite dish. sigh... we left halfway through madtv. it was just too mad to understand.

yesterday, i met mo at noyes and we spent the next few hours poring over our respective problem sets. somehow, having someone around seems to align my neurons conducively, what seemed like mounting insolubility the day before became pretty clear today. or maybe it was that i actually sat down to work out all the notation identities first. we then went

spent the morning today cleaning. bought a drain unclogger (bleach and lye, i.e. caustic soda, being principle components) and let it soak in my bathtub. et voilà! it actually drains now! i don't have to wait for the water to evaporate off before cleaning my tub anymore! vacuumed up yet more blonde hair from the carpet (gross) and got rid of unwanted newspapers and other ephemera, including the now dead-as-a-doornail wildflowers.

in the afternoon, i went to the office and cleaned it out too. i rediscovered by southern-style garlic and herb baked rice with ground beef; it was cooked fully two days ago and now shows signs of decay: a fluffy white layer of white fungus was already growing on the rice. it's really scary that just 53 hours before, the rice was fresh off the stove and ready to eat. (SpinGlass' treats on friday and saturday, followed by the birthday party put paid to the notion of actually consuming said meal.) i threw it away with a shudder; who knows what kind of strange things that mold/fungus is capable of? after all, i do work in a chemical laboratory, and the microbiologists are just down the corridor. it's instructive to note that mold doesn't seem to like junk food at all; a bunch of onion chips left out for the same period of time were not at all affected. i chucked them all the same. *wince*

since the postdoc sharing my office quit for greener pastures (his newly-wedded wife is starting a job in san diego next week), he has left behind a ton of junk: bush humor printouts, ring files with wonky inner rings that won't close properly, bubble wrap paper, padded envelopes (useful for selling books online with), a yellowed acrylic ruler, a huge collection of slighty bent paper clips, about fifty cardboard coffee cup holders, some limp tissue paper, Computer "Experiments" on Classical Fluids. I. Thermodynamical Properties of Lennard-Jones Molecules by L. Verlet, and miscellaneous litter.

amusingly, he had also left behind two piles of papers on aquaporins and bacteriorhodopsin; presumably, these weren't his, but es's, an even more senior student who graduated in 1998. add that to her who-knows-how-old posters (it has been at least 6 years now) still hanging outside our group corridor, that really makes me think long and hard about not rejoining said group. can research move so slowly that no one feels the need to update 6+-year-old posters?

went with SpinGlass and tl to mandarin wok for dinner today, arguably the best chinese restaurant on campus; which isn't really that fantastic, by the way: it just goes to show the absymal quality of 'chinese' 'food'. we had the 三杯鸡 and 脆皮豆腐, both of which being my long-time favorites. we also had a veggie dish, but i wasn't too sure what it was. the tofu skin was as crispy as ever, giving way to soft, tender and steaming hot interiors that went will with the saltish sweet sauce. the chicken was also in good shape today, although it came as a surprise that it was no longer served in three small bowls, but now indifferently lumped into one huge pot. it was heavily braised with ginger, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and a whole host of unidentifiable greens shredded and sprinkled into the pot. SpinGlass can't seem to get enough of his weekly fix at man wok!

went back to my office to do more spring cleaning, and played two campaign scenarios of warcraft iii. i am just so behind on gaming, but heck, i'm not being paid to do it. (i wish i were, though!)

thai twisties!

2004-09-05T20:32:00.000-05:00

the flavor is hot shrimp. it's amazing what you can get in ulu chambana nowadays.

week 2: 隐逸 and quarter-life blues

2004-09-03T20:28:00.000-05:00

i find that collecting these makes it much easier to stay awake during lectures.

'this is infinitely boring. what the hell, read through all this yourself: i don't want to do any of this.'
- Prof. F, on one of his transparencies. i later learnt from a physics student that he has been teaching the same old course for almost thirty years. no kidding.

'i believe you are epsilon away from the correct answer.'
- Prof. F

'now let's put this to infinity. it's a bit painful; i'm getting a toothache. but it will go away soon.'
- Prof. S

'your audience will be able to smell bullshit and condensation [sic, condescension] from a mile away.'
- Prof. S', Seminar on Seminars.

*sigh* it's incredible that fully five days have passed since i last wrote an entry here.

monday afternoon and evening were pretty eventful. having gatecrashed the fuson lecture series post-seminar reception, i met jc who was going to wal-mart to get a floor lamp for her place. she ended up driving along bradley avenue (she didn't dare to go on the highway) so what should have been a 10 minute drive became almost 25 minutes long! and besides, she forgot to look before turning into wal-mart, and ended up almost colliding head-on with a little old granny driving at 15 mph. talk about hell-raising drivers! later, she told me that although she did drive all the way from queens, nyc, it was her father and her brother that did most of the driving. ok, so that explains the less-than-stellar skills behind the wheel. gee, sometimes i even thought that i'd be able to drive better than that! mo was glad that he didn't tag along; but she was pretty nice about the whole thing; she waited half an hour for me to return my defective fluorescent light bulbs. we ended up having dinner at perkins and had a pretty good chat.

tuesday morning, i switched from undergraduate-level quantum mechanics to graduate-level qm. although the former's instructor is said to be one of the best physics lectures on campus, i really didn't have the stomach to sit through 'failures of classical physics' in grueling detail all over again. add to that the proposition of finding my loathsome ex-roommate enrolled in that course as well, made it all the more reason to change. the latter's instructor is pretty good, actually, though he is mathematically-inclined in the great cambridge tradition of theoretical physics. and to think he intends to cover quantum information theory [ps] in an introductory graduate course! just the kind of thing for me. besides that, i've skipped my first class (mcb 450) on tuesday. go me!

my birthday was on wednesday. i spent the day grading homework sets, which were generally of absymal quality (look at my solutions on reserve to see what kind of monstrosities i had to grade). dinner was at alexander's steakhouse, an interesting cook-your-own-steak steakhouse. strangely enough, only one other person was brave enough to try his hand at cooking steak. i guess it's because if the steak tastes strange, it's only your fault. plus most people probably have too much on their mind to think about cooking their steak to perfection. although twenty minutes or so into grilling the steak it did feel rather ridiculous to have participated in an expensive indoor barbeque. it's good for me, though, that i got $15 off for it being my birthday. and my friend yt happily took up the remaining tab of $5.49. ironically, my mother called to wish me happy birthday one day late. hm.

thursday evening was another extended celebration with fellow first-years. we went for dinner at za's on green and wright (they now have three branches, wow). jc dropped by with a birthday card for me. how sweet is that? but she wrote 新年快乐 on my birthday card, which i found kinda weird. she was so embarassed when i pointed that out to her! oh dear, i hope she wasn't offended. i guess that's what comes out of spending four years in an american school in taiwan. after dinner, we went to murphy's and had a blast playing pool and downing booze. i had at least five shots which i recorded on my cell phone; i don't know whether i'd lost count after that, but i don't think so. in order of consumption, i had an irish car bomb, a royal flush, an alabama slammer, a soco, and a mai tai. the first-years bought the first four; the last was kindly provisioned by a complete stranger who happened to play pool with some of the other first-years. i ended up being more sober than the other people who stuck around; i had to hoist one guy out of the pub on the way home to stop him from going in circles.

i was a bit apprehensive about friday morning, when i returned the homework sets to the unsuspecting chemistry students. they seemed pretty cool about it though, though i noticed that most of them were reading through my comments rather than really paying attention to prof. m. but then, i really think that the comments are useful for them to learn. i hope they appreciate it. yt brought me to lunch at ihop and i had a crispy chicken salad which was excellent, with fresh olives that were really tasty and a vast improvement over the lackluster black rubber rings that passes for olives back in sg. yt had his usual colorado omelette. he then brought me to pick up my parcels at the urbana post office all the way at high cross street. i finally have my biochemistry textbook!

i met SpinGlass for dinner tonight at isr. he has been treating me to various meals at the university dining halls for this past week. he's going to cancel his horrendously expensive meal plan effective sep 12. the rates per meal run at $5.75/meal if you really eat every single meal, or $14.38 at a much more typical consumption rate of 40%. at least they now have starbucks coffee on tap: it's even easier now to break even. the signs in the dining halls have been redesigned to look like arty-classy 21st century posters with obligatory semi-related photographs-as-backgrounds and lettering in lowercase verdana or similar sans serif font. however, there's still no disguising the lack of improvement in the general blah-ness of the food served. so it's no surprise that SpinGlass is wanting out of such a raw deal. (the calamari was a nice exception!)

after dinner, we went to a friend's housewarming but it was such a typical singaporean affair: sound and fury galore. chinese hip-hop blaring from a cheap $50 stereo system; purple/uv lamps thoughfully aimed at the wall, presumably to prevent searing the skins off unknowing partygoers; a strange fruit punch : vodka mixture, tasting exceedingly strange and a pale shadow of the interesting shots i had a murphy's; guys in spiky hair hold little red cups trying to figure out who everyone else is in the dim purple lighting; gaggles of girls giggle at nothing in particular; the musky heat of too many bodies in too small a space... i left after 15 min. the intense nothingness masquerading as liveliness was too much to bear. so i ended up here in tl's room, writing up this entry on his new computer (he finally managed to get it in working condition!) , waiting for a pepperoni pizza to be microwaved before going upstairs to wo's room to watch tv.

taking a break now from struggling with homework from phys 580, and writing the solutions to p chem hw #2. i just hope the students do better this time. cs 400 still at a standstill; the ews account is still not up. what the hell is peiper up to?

update: as of midnight, the ews account is finally up. now i can go about doing my machine problem. bah. mo is still having trouble with his though.

i wonder, right now, why i chose this path; why i am here, back in the cornfields in the middle of nowhere; why mit chose to reject me this year; why i decided to do a 'sabbatical' (the chinese concept of 隐逸 is perhaps most appropriate here); why am i having the quarter-life blues; why i don't feel like going back to my old advisor; why i am eschewing the larger singaporean society here now; why they seem so empty, yet trying to act full of it; why; why; why: the incessant questions bubbling up from the stream of consciousness of just an ordinary guy trying vainly to think of himself as academic-to-be material, bubbles that pop sometimes without a satisfying resolution, a collapse of a probabilty distribution onto an eigenanswer that is neither expected nor fully welcome. will this road less taken really make all the difference?

weekend roundup

2004-08-30T00:43:00.000-05:00

so the olympics ended yesterday. yay! too bad the weekend couldn't last longer. oh well.

saturday passed by quickly in downtown urbana. dropped by lincoln square to flip through the annual book fair held in conjunction with the sweetcorn festival. there was this old fart selling what looked like spillover from his personal collection. but with hardcover books selling for just a dollar, the temptation was too great to resist. adding to the mirthful glee of the moment was eyeing textbooks in excellent condition but marked 'discarded' by the university library. the complete list of acquistions:

heat and thermodynamics by zemansky, second edition, 1943. ex libris 'l. w. savage, jr'
fluid dynamics by streeter, 1948. ex libris 'lester w. savage, jr'
physics of the atom by wehr and richards, 1960. ex libris 'herbert j. sprengel'
mathematical analysis by apostol, 1960. ex libris 'ron szoke'
applied analysis by lanczos, 1964. ex libris 'ron szoke'
turbulence by hinze, second edition, 1975, reissued 1987
boundary-layer theory by schlichting, seventh edition, 1979, reissued 1987. ex libris 'moliere vilceus jr, uiuc grad student'
out of my later years by einstein, 1956, reprinted 1996.

amazingly enough, the university of illinois library was also selling old anthropology and psychology theses! poor sods. i can't imagine how i would feel if my dissertation was being thrown out at a book sale.

i also bought a miniature jade bonsai with an old man with a fishing rod for $20. in retrospect, it might have seemed a rather steep price to pay, but it turned out to add just the right dash of character to the living room, together with the free wildlife posters from the book sale. the main selling point was the bonsai grower's enthusiatic endorsement of collegiate life, to the extent that the miniature jade was capable of storing water in its leaves and therefore resistant to neglect. anyway, let's see how the long the bonsai lasts. three of its leaves have already broken off in transit to my house. although this could be blamed entirely on the plastic bag carrier, this does not bode well for the future maintainability of said plant.

the sweetcorn festival was like any other funfair: hot and sticky, with overpriced concessions and haggard parents chasing after gleeful children. the only difference, really, was the huge corn balloon made from hundreds of smaller round balloons prominently featured at a central intersection. and i discovered that yellowjackets apparently are fond of the smell of buttered corn. more than one child was eyed throwing down his or her cob and running away screaming in panic with a yellowjacket hovering around the ear with half-hearted intentions of pursuit. freebies were again not lacking; i picked up some amazingly cute rubber buses courtesy of cumtd, which were pencil-top indiarubber erasers and as good as japanese polymer erasers.

sunday was less eventful. i visited some asian-american friends whom i knew when i was last at uiuc and are now graduate students as well. anyway as you might be able to tell i'm running out of steam and it's really late and i am afraid of missing klaus' class tomorrow. more stories next time.

the first three days

2004-08-27T21:05:00.000-05:00

today i heard a rash of memorable quotes:

'in this class, there will be many conceptions (sic) that you will need to know' - Prof. P. this was a computer science class on data structures

'monte carlo? what's that? sounds like some kind of banana. you know, like del monte...' - tl, a fellow singaporean graduate student

'nj's questions, you will break out in cold sweat. rj's questions, after a few years, they will reproduce' - wo, another singaporean student, on f maths paper ii mechanics options.

'you should get a blanket like this.'
'it's called a comforter, right?'
'yeah, you should really get one. it's really comfortable!'
- wo & tl

my first week of school is over, just like that! it's quite amazing how fast time flies when i'm enjoying myself. no more mandated times to go to the office, no more compulsory sign-ins and hopeless projects to pursue. well i suppose it helped that school only started on wednesday.

i went trolling for classes throughout this week. i sat in for an introductory biochemistry class, which was unbearably trivial. then there was the first semester quantum mechanics class for physics majors, which was just terrigible. 'let's talk about the photoelectric effect...' bah. then there was the class on multidimensional nmr of macromolecules, which sounded interesting but taught by a rather dry and irritable instructor. the chemistry version of graduate quantum mechanics turned out to be an express train run-through of classical mechanics for the first class. my fellow p chem grad student who happened to be in the class left feeling even more confused than when he began. oh well.

i realized that the instructor whose course i'm ta-ing speaks really fast at times, and that people tend to glaze over when five or six words somehow become compressed into a shotgun delivery of verbiage. and that whenever she turns off the lights to deliver the powerpoint presentation, about one-third of the students immediately slip into catatonia. it must be the morning time slot. plus the fact that the weather is steaming hot now, it's almost like singapore weather.

my schedule's packed enough as it is, but i am still asking for more. the department is already apprehensive that i'm taking three graduate level classes (that's what i told them); what are they going to say when they figure out that i'm taking more than their recommended maximum? after all, it's my last chance to take classes, and having spent the last two years or so talking to materials scientists, electrical engineers and physicists have left me very incomplete in terms of knowledge. my personal theory is that one knows everything when one gets one's bachelor's degree, and that one knows nothing when one gets one's doctoral degree. and i feel a big hole in terms of physical and mathematical knowledge. perhaps it's the long association with my fellow ns-mate, among other colleagues, that catalyzed the feeling. at any rate, it certainly motivates me to make full use of this one last opportunity to take formal coursework.

last week's international ta orientation left a greater impact on me that i thought. ever since we discusses cross-cultural issues in the classroom, i've been left with a lingering feeling in my mind everytime i talk to someone. it's an added consciousness of how i talk with singaporeans, other asians (taiwanese, koreans, japanese, indians, vietnamese, thai, etc.), and americans. a little voice that nags, 'am i speaking with a singaporean accent? am i talking in a singlish lilt?' yesterday, i took another test in spoken english as an experiment in educational psychology and testing science. i had a nice long talk with the administrator/researcher who was interested in my participation. especially, she mentioned, that i put down 'english and chinese' as my native language, which she defines as a language learnt from parents/guardians since the age of one or two. which is certainly true for me, at any rate. and surprise, i was rated 'as good as native'. well, like, duh, really.

on a more positive note, my new camera came in the mail today! yippee! and i can't believe how much i saved on it, it was only $299! i can't wait to start using it tomorrow during the sweetcorn festival. and i'm also looking forward to the afternoon of free anime screening tomorrow (held, in all places, a physics laboratory). i love the hustle and bustle of a campus with 28,591 undergraduates, 9,216 graduate students and having nothing to do on weekends (for non-chicagoans, at least. the chicagoans tend to leave in droves on the illini express back to the 'burbs).

in other news, talking dutch toilets may debut soon. or one of these twin tower terror toys may find their way into more candy bags.

professors say the darndest things

2004-08-26T12:38:00.000-05:00

"Humans are random number generators, of a sort. [That means that] I can't predict where your next step will be... [some point about how the past in some way determines the future and how statistical quantities involving the future can be accurately predicted] For example, if I commit a crime in the past, my average future location is (sic) the jail." - Prof. K.

(On why a dense book is worse than a thick textbook) "You'd have to think much more, and that's what people used to do in the old days." - Prof. M.

Ah, the first day of school.

gmail invites

2004-08-26T12:37:00.000-05:00

I have six invites up for grabs. Is anyone interested?

2004-08-23T10:54:00.000-05:00

still no sign of my digital camera. boo!

moving day

2004-08-22T13:14:00.000-05:00

my new apartment rocks!

well, ok, it has a rock garden. and it's not a personal one, it's kind of for the whole apartment. and cars drive over it all the time. who needs those silly zen rakes when you can get 1000-horsepower of rock-rearranging power. and it's fun to throw in a depression between the rock garden and the main road, so that automobiles get a free chance at scratching their fronts and winning a mandatory $500 trip to the local body shop.

too bad i don't have a car that i can abuse in such friendly fashion. my friend who is renting the parking lot from me, though, is seething about the fact that the lot is also

in the corner of the carpark,
sheltered by a short tree that could harbor aerial-bombarding avians, and
almost entire blocked off on the right side by a shrub.

not that he minds each factor separately, but the combination was enough for him to almost regret taking the lot. the saving grace, as with the apartment, is the sheer physical proximity of my apartment to my (and his) workplace.

the apartment itself isn't too bad, but some things are broken, such as a light socket, a hinge off the kitchen cabinet, a chip off the cistern, the top drawer of one of the armoires, dents in the sliding cabinet doors, loose shower head, clogged bathtub, a drain/hold lever in the bathtub that refuses to move, wonkily aligned stove heating coils that emit strange smells when heating, numerous holes and sticky stains on the walls, and a hole in the cleaning closet. apart from that it's really not too bad. moving into it wasn't a problem, except for some residual dust and stains. and that my digital camera decided to disappear. boo. oh well, it was time to upgrade anyway. two-megapixel cameras are so passe nowadays. i was going to photograph my entire place when i moved in on friday to prove the original condition, but i guess putting it in writing is good enough to satisfy most people.

thousands of american students also decided that today was THE day to move in. well, not too surprising isn't it, considering that the dorms open today. look at all the cute naive freshies struggle to move refrigerators into the residence halls! gape at the several-hundred-car-lengths traffic pileup all the way from off the lincoln avenue exit on the i-74 to far/par! it's just incredible. i bet all the local residents are freaking out right about now.

well at least the locals have the urbana sweetcorn festival to take their minds off the hordes of party-avid undergraduates swarming about campus today. it's simply amaizeing how much people can say about this native american plant. but enough homily about hominy. and enough lame puns about grains.

in other news, my friend in cornell has just sent me excellent aerial pictures of the cornell campus, taken personally. fresh pictures taken just today at 10 am EDT (9 CDT). it's nice to know what other singaporeans in america are up to, while this one was just bumming around staring at traffic.

'You are independent politically' - fortune cookie

2004-08-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

today's addition to my collection of semantically-deficient fortune coookie fortunes comes from the rice garden outlet at the basement of the illini union. the fact that such a statement could be made makes for some worrying implicaitons, particularly that i could have been some kind of political dependent (dissident?) as the counterexample to 'politically independent'. what, so i'm not someone who believes in propaganda and doesn't accept gilded handshakes. hooray for me! i'm sure at least 90% of americans fit the bill on that particular fortune. on the other hand, it may well explain all the strange goings-on in congress and the stock markets (enron & co.).

although today's fortune cookie isn't as bad as my all-time worst fortunes of all time, it comes pretty close. the first runner up must be the ultra lame-o You will receive a fortune (cookie). like, duh, dude. but it doesn't beat You must be hungry now - order Chinese takeout now!, which is not only extremely lame, but is even conceptually improbable. firstly if you have the silly thing then you must have ordered chinese takeout, and secondly if you've already opened the fortune cookie then 99% of the time you've already eaten the chinese takeout and therefore would not be hungry.

anyway today's flash of sheer bizarreness was a brief but welcome respite from my hectic ta orientation schedule in recent days. the university's international ta orientation on monday and tuesday were designed for people who speak english as a secondary language, so for the vast majority of people educated in singapore, this was basically a waste of time. however, the speakers did bring up some good points on the need for proper articulation for, teaching as a kind of public performance, and the mechanics of pronunciation, a.k.a. articulatory setting. so now we can all learn how to pronounce words crisply in the characteristic midwestern way, rather than the crips manner of many singlish speakers. and that we can practice diction by exaggerating the tip of the tongue, the roof of the mouth, the lips and the teeth, and note the positioning of our jaws, the state of tension of our neck muscles, blah blah blah. and while we're at it, why not let the international tas have five hour discussion sessions instead of the usual 50 minutes, so that they can practice their pronunciation self-consciously to their hearts' content. or maybe americans should be more boh chap, lah! our england oredi so powderful, lagi no problem!

wednesday and thursday were even more a waste of time, since the department of chemistry had their own ta orientation about how keys, email accounts, classes, etc. work. why oh why do they insist on making their own undergraduates go through this as well? it's not like we forget the instant we don the gown and mortarboard and walk out of the university with diploma in hand. bah. so i ended up going for a seminar instead, which was much more intellectually satisfying.

getting the keys to my apartment tomorrow. last night on the couch tonight!

2004-08-16T00:29:00.000-05:00

due to budget cuts, the university of illinois has to make do with manually editing old nameplates in a bid to recycle old building signposts.

thoughts on the new u of i

2004-08-13T16:51:00.001-05:00

yesterday i was woken up in the morning by a squirrel jumping around the sofa. it was bouncing around the place and its tail happened to brush against my face. when i woke up, it was trying very hard to get out of the living room but kept bashing its skull on the glass sliding door that opens out to the balcony. gee, i thought squirrels were more intelligent than that.

there were some times these few days, however, that i felt like bashing my head on something as well, particularly regarding new policies applying to me now as a ta. life is certainly different now for post-9/11 international students, particularly for the mundane stuff like applying for a social security card. it used to take just three weeks at the local social security office; now it takes a few months and is strictly by appointment through the international students' office. they also have strict new rules about international students taking up teaching assistantships: they all have to pass the test of spoken english. although that in itself is a good thing (i remember having this korean student with an incomprehensible accent and total inability to communicate orally in english), the thing is that paperwork is now so slow with regard to international students that it becomes a serious hassle for us. the department secretary even told us about these few students whose test scores came so late that they couldn't take up ta-ships after all and they ended up being safety wardens/graders. how demeaning.

in addition, uiuc now has this spanking new banner system, which is an all-in-one web-based administration system. i must admit that it looks pretty good and much more user-friendly than that old u of i direct thingy. however, the hr subsystem (nessie) is incredibly bad. the forms are designed really stupidly; the forms can be several pages long and if you wanted to change something on one of the last pages you'd have to scroll through all the first few pages to get to the end. on top of that the server seems to be responding very slowly during the day; i suppose it's because it simply can't handle the huge amount of traffic during the day. imagine if just the permanent staff members log on to do their admin stuff, that's already what, twenty thousand simultaneous accesses. now add the visits from faculty and graduate students doing their time-charging and whatnot, that probably brings traffic up to spike at around 60,000 at the end of the week when most people try to submit their timesheets and all that. and the new system is also used for academic registration, so you'd have to throw in a few thousand extra people logging in at random intervals to add or drop classes. the chemistry staff told me that the system has crashed several times already and that the cites office is denying that anything is wrong. seems like singapore isn't the only place to have a monopoly on pointy-haired bosses. on the plus side, the union computer lab is also upgraded, with brand new white imacs and black dells. strikes me as very yin-yang. however, printing has become more expensive now (it's 10 cents per page). luckily i now have an office so it becomes easier for me to do that kind of stuff now.

dropped by my old research group and discovered some disturbing things. firstly, two graduate students had already quit the group. one left with a master's degree and supposedly bumming around atlanta looking for work. the other switched research groups at the end of the third year and joined a new faculty member's research group. people usually do this at the last resort since it means literally starting from scratch, which is never fun since all those years doing research under the old advisor are essentially wasted. secondly, my old prof has become even busier than before and is never seen around the office. that, in combination with her insistence on micromanaging her students, basically means that the research keeps going around in circles, since by the time the follow-up meeting occurs, maybe as late as three weeks later, she's already forgotten the original intention of the work in the first place. it drove those two graduate students crazy, and the remaining people don't seem too happy either, since the publication of their work has been delayed quite a bit. heck, my paper isn't even out yet, and it's been over two years! and i can't write it myself because she insists that she wants to write it. but then she hardly has time, what with refereeing journals and speaking at conferences and taking care of her family. oh dear.

it really seems like i should think really, really hard about whether coming back to her group's a good thing at all. the last thing i want is to be delayed graduation because i don't have enough publications out in time. yikes! it sure left me unsettled the whole of last night, because to me the whole point of coming back was so that i could come back to her research group, but now it looks that that's not going to happen. especially when she told me that she really wasn't interested in the stuff that she had me do last time, and that she wanted to concentrate on something that i was totally disinterested in. so that means that my 'home ground' advantage in not having to start anew is gone, or at the very least seriously diminished by this. on the other hand she's still the really nice prof that i remember. she offered me office space already, although i suppose that could be interpreted as a bribe for coming back to her. she was quite insistent, though, that if i were interested in bio stuff i should go look for another group.

revisiting campus

2004-08-11T09:28:00.000-05:00

well, here i am, back in champaign-urbana. (the shampoo-banana bit's an old advertisement jingle). i'm currently bumming at my friend's place (more specifically, his sofa) and my internet access is restricted to computer lab access for the time being so i don't suppose that i'll be able to upload any photos for a bit. my roommate turns out to be a rather well-behaved parrot who was later exiled to a balcony so i had a quiet nice living room all to myself (ignoring the dozens of crates, i suppose).

campustown has changed somewhat in the last two years. they have finally finished all the construction work on green street and the whole place looks really posh for a small city. the bus routes have all been re-wired (they tell me that it's back to what it was before all the renovations) and several restaurants have changed ownership.

apart from revisiting campus and doing paperwork for settling in, nothing much else to report. except that there was this really strange girl that i saw yesterday at the bus stop who kept telling everyone that she was going to shop for pie crusts. and for some reason t-mobile charged me about $100 in termination fees and didn't tell me about it. so my credit history is now dirt until the debt collection agency processes my payment. *sigh*