Should we be concerned about anything at all, and other short stories

“For though he was gentle and kind, it was Quasimodo’s crime to have been born hideously deformed. But one day his heart would prove to be a thing of rare beauty. She was Esmerelda. The victim of a coward’s jealous rage, she is unjustly convicted of a crime she didn’t commit. Her sentence is death by hanging.”

Nothing quite puts it the way this extract does. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo, should have been resurrected in a few of the questions in Prelim Paper 1 this year (eg: Q8 and Q11), but that was not to be with the scripts I marked (Q8, 9, 10 & 11). You don’t really need Quasimodo, actually, and substance and style are on equal footing. What are less forgivable are some of the crimes that some candidates commit. Here I post documents (censored or otherwise, as indicated by the description) related to the scripts I’d come across.

(1) Examiners’ report for Q8 (this should be printed for all in a week’s time)

(2) Examiners’ report for Q11 (this should be printed for all in a week’s time)

(3) Statistics of scores (useless info unless you love statistics and Excel sheets)

(4) Comments & corrections on marking scheme for Q8, 9 & 11 (this may not be edited in time by our new Chief for a clean print, and in case you don’t receive the amended version, check that against this document)

(5) Comments & corrections on marking scheme for Q4 & 12 (this should have already been factored in in the version which you will receive)

(6) Real cases of funny language, use of Ex & challenging the Q (this will not be printed)

I also have quite a few essays which scored above 30m and if you are interested in taking a look, let me know.

***

It just feels good to be out of bed again. Had to spend the entire Wednesday resting due to some rust-taste cockles in the char kway teow I ate for lunch from Adam Road Food Centre on Tuesday. Maybe it’s not the see-harm. It might be the mouldy ham I ate for Tueday dinner. Or the mouldy grapes. All ready and recovered in time for the final lecture tomorrow…

The away-goal rule

In football, the away-goal is worth 1.5 times more than a goal scored on home ground. It has been so since 1970, according to Football365’s John Nicholson. It’s about reinventing the game. Such an observation holds in life sometimes:

August 25, 2010

A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS (The NY Times)

CORTES, CANADA — Imagine a country whose inhabitants eat human flesh, wear only pink hats to sleep and banish children into the forest to raise themselves until adulthood.

Now imagine that this country dominates the study of psychology worldwide. Its universities have the best facilities, which draw the best scholars, who write the best papers. Their research subjects are the flesh-eating, pink-hat-wearing, forest-reared locals.

When these psychologists write about their own country, all is well. But things deteriorate when they generalize about human nature.

They view behaviors that are globally commonplace — say, vegetarianism — as deviant. Human nature, as they define it, reflects little of the actual diversity of humankind.

This scenario may sound preposterous. But if a provocative new study is to be believed, the world already lives in such a situation — except that it is American undergraduates, not flesh-eating forest dwellers, who monopolize our knowledge of human nature.

In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.

Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.

According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.

Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence.

In itself, such extrapolation is hardly fatal. Freud built his account of human behavior from his work on patients in Vienna and generalized for the world. So many great analysts of human nature, from Aristotle to the Buddha, reached for transcendent human truths despite limited contact with the range of humanity.

The Canadian study’s claim is not to invalidate all extrapolation so much as to suggest that American undergraduates may be especially unsuitable for it.

The study’s method was to analyze a mountain of published, peer-reviewed psychology papers. It found evidence both of a narrow research base and of the eccentricity of that base. Among the many peculiarities of the usual subjects who serve as “universal man” are these, the study found:

American subjects disproportionately prize choice and individualism. In a survey of six Western societies, only Americans preferred a choice of 50 ice creams to 10. Studies have found that Americans are all but alone in giving newborns their own room.

Americans are also peculiar in the so-called Ultimatum Game, in which a subject receives money and must make an offer to share it. The second subject can accept or reject the offer, but if it is rejected, neither subject gets paid.

Americans playing the game are fair in the extreme, making higher offers than most. But they are also outliers in another way. In various places, including Russia and China, psychologists observe the rejection of excessive generosity — a demurring when offered too much. This behavior is absent from American undergraduates.

The study’s list goes on and on. Westerners tend to define themselves by psychological traits, and non-Westerners by relationships. In some languages, including English, directions are built around the self (“Take a right after the church”), while in other languages, they refer to immovable objects (“It is behind the church”).

Americans are worse than many at overcoming common optical illusions about the length of lines. But they are better than East Asians at recalling an object when the background changes, perhaps because the latter focus on context.

The data on these differences are patchy, the study’s authors acknowledge. Not enough work has been done on human variation. The Canadian attempt was simply to synthesize the existing research and to establish with their synthesis that psychological sameness is an implausible assumption.

Some critics of the study have suggested that there are universals underlying surface differences, and that the WEIRD variables may not be the right ones. But there has been little dispute about the premise that psychologists have extrapolated from an outlying few the ways of the global many.

It is an extrapolation with consequences. Democracy promoters tell us that all humans feel the same way about authority, despite evidence of diversity. Economists say that all humans are self-interested rational actors, though many succumb to selfless and irrational pursuits. Abstract rights are proclaimed for all humans, overlooking the fact that many prefer their ethics in more grounded, context-specific ways.

China, India and many other societies shy away from such universalizing. Their thinkers avoid proclaiming that all humans do this or do that simply because the Chinese or the Indians do. If they began to do so, how might things change?

For now, those outside the West continue to feel a certain pressure from beyond to think in ways not their own. The television sitcoms they watch, the books they read, the superheroes they grow up with, the PowerPoint presentations they give — these were often designed with someone else’s psychology foremost in mind, on the hope that they fit universally.

One response to the WEIRD study, by the psychologist Paul Rozin, is that extrapolating from Americans is acceptable because the world is Americanizing. “The U.S. is in the vanguard of the global world,” he said, according to Science magazine, “and may provide a glimpse into the future.”

But it is also possible that people around the world are not simply in the process of becoming like American undergraduates, and relying on WEIRD subjects can make others feel alienated, with their ways of thinking framed as deviant, not different.

Among the less-examined facets of globalization is its psychic pressure: a force that makes people feel that they are playing by others’ rules, that makes their own home turf feel like an opponent’s stadium. In this WEIRD people’s world, so many only know away games.

(From ST)

Wrong a right to right a wrong

If enough people use a wrong word frequently enough, it will soon become right. Two such words are “whereby” and “thereby”. I’m not sure why so many people find the suffix “by” sexy, but I’m glad I have it in my name.

Globalisation scares people because people do not fully comprehend what globalisation is. I’m not sure how confounding it is, but I thought it’s just a word explaining the interconnectedness of the world. I have seen “globalisation” used by students from various schools as if it were “technology”, “geography” and other discrete random variables over the years that it’s scaring me!

Another phrase which has the potential of being abused is “liberal arts”, but it’s still not peddled like cheap imitation the way “globalisation” is, because it is still pretty alien to people here. “To set the record straight: In a liberal arts programme, students are exposed to a wide range of disciplines–in the arts, natural sciences, humanities and the social sciences. The idea is to give students a grounding in various disciplines and to teach them to consider issues from different perspectives,” says Sandra Davie in ST on Apr 29, 2010. (Read the full article here and another article on the same subject here while MOE’s reply to Davie’s article is attached here; reading it makes me think of how justifiable it is to charge consultation fees of $15/student/session and marking fee of $30/script the way a local university does it!)

Newspeak is a terrible thing which everyone is capable of especially if you are in power, so congratulations, some of you may become the next Iranian President!

The violence, the hurt, the scare

I am speechless with the way that President described the weapon.

Jun 8, 2010 (ST)

Lessons from the age of the Crusades

By Ross Douthat

WATCHING the Israeli government’s botched, bloody attempt to enforce its blockade of Gaza, I kept thinking about Outremer. That’s the name – French for ‘beyond the sea’ – given to the states that the Crusaders established in the Holy Land during the High Middle Ages: the principality of Antioch, the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the kingdom of Jerusalem. Out of a mix of amnesia and self-abnegation, we tend to remember the Crusader states only as deplorable exercises in Western aggression. (Never mind that in an age defined by conquest and reconquest, they were no less legitimate than the Muslim states they warred against – which had themselves been founded atop once-Christian territories.) The analogy between Israel and Outremer is usually drawn by Israel’s enemies: ‘Jews and Crusaders’ is one of Osama bin Laden’s favourite epithets, and Palestinian radicals often pine for another Saladin to drive the Israelis into the sea. But Israel’s friends can learn something from Outremer as well. Like today’s Jewish republic, the Crusader kingdoms were small states forged by military valour, based in the Middle East but oriented westward, with distant patrons and potential foes just next door. Like Israel, they were magnets for fanatics from east and west alike. And when they eventually fell – after surviving for longer than Israel has existed – it was for reasons that are directly relevant to the challenges facing the Israeli government today. The first reason was geographic: the Holy Land is easier to conquer than defend because its topograpy and regional position leave it perpetually vulnerable to invasion. The second was diplomatic: the Crusaders were perpetually falling out with their major neighbours, from Byzantium to Egypt, and the support they enjoyed from Western Europe was too limited to save them from extinction. The third was demographic: the ruling class of Outremer, primarily Frankish knights and their retainers, was a minority in a territory whose inhabitants were largely Eastern Orthodox and Muslim, and they had difficulty achieving the kind of integration that long-term stability required. A decade ago, before the collapse of the peace process, the Israelis seemed to be faring better than Outremer on all three fronts. Their potent armed forces and nuclear deterrent more than offset the weakness of their geographic position. After decades of isolation, they had forged reasonably stable relationships with many regional powers – including Turkey, Jordan and Egypt – and an enduring bond with the world’s superpower, the United States. Their substantial Arab minority was better treated and better integrated than minority populations in almost any other Middle Eastern state. And they appeared to be disentangling themselves from the long-term occupation of a much larger Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank. Ten years later, though, only the military advantage endures. Diplomatically and demographically, Israel increasingly faces the same problems that bedevilled the 12th-century kings of Jerusalem. In the wake of the Gaza and Lebanon wars, and now the blockade-running fiasco, the Jewish state is as isolated on the world stage as it has been since the dark Zionism-is-racism years of the 1970s. Meanwhile, its relationship with its Arab citizens is increasingly strained, the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank seems destined to continue indefinitely, and both Arab populations are growing so swiftly that Jews could soon be a minority west of the Jordan River. Israel can probably live with diplomatic isolation so long as the American public remains staunchly on its side. But it will have a harder time surviving the demographic transformation of its territory. If Israel can’t extricate itself from the West Bank, it may be forced to choose between the quasi-apartheid of a permanent occupation, and the dissolution that would likely follow from giving Palestinians a significant voice in Israeli politics. Israel’s critics often make this extrication sound easy. In reality, it promises to involve enormous sacrifices, of land and everyday security alike – whether in the form of extraordinary concessions to a divided Palestinian leadership, or a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. What’s more, either approach would almost certainly invite stepped-up violence from the Palestinian factions and their Iranian and Syrian backers, who will see any retreat as a cue to escalate the struggle. As American foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead put it recently, Israel may ‘have to pay virtually the full price for peace… without getting full peace’. Nobody should blame Israelis for shying from this possibility. Yet it may be the only way to guarantee their survival as a nation. Outremer was finally overrun by Muslim armies. But if Israel is destroyed, it will be destroyed from within. NEW YORK TIMES

*

Violence is part of everyday life, taking on different forms. With Israel, the author might be suggesting  a calculated pullout. It is a well-planned article, well-thought and well-meaning.

But some tend to use bad arguments and they threaten the dignity of others:

What a headline! I hyperventilated.

Maybe that’s why companies believe that teachers are not properly trained to engage students, and they probably believe that teachers can’t spot spelling errors which will decrease their credibility:

And three days later, on Aug 23, 2010, another ST headline caused me to do a double-take: “Students who can’t afford tuition ‘won’t lose out’: Education Ministry is monitoring tuition trend, says Ng Eng Hen”

The implicit message seemed to be that tuition is certainly needed, so if you can’t afford it, the ministry is looking into it and is perhaps going to regulate the market price of tuition. Oh my.

That really saddened me, until I read on and realised that it is one of those usual cock-up by ST in their attempt at sensationalising the news (or it’s a case of not being careful with the use of words):

[Ng Eng Hen] said: “I want to assure you that over the next few years, we will continue to build an education system where it doesn’t mean you have to be rich, or that your child has to have tuition, (but where) if he works hard, he will succeed.”

The paraphrased paragraph before that in the article was also misleading, but if indeed the Minister had that intention in mind, he would probably have not said the cited statement, or he might have realised that it was a boo-boo and he was correcting himself.

There’s a need to be careful with the use of language, if you are in such an important position.

Aug 22, 2010 (ST)

The power of words to heal and hurt

‘Ground Zero Mosque’ debate illustrates how language can be used to stir up passions

By Paul Farhi

No matter where you stand on the question of building a mosque near Ground Zero, you have to hand one thing to the framers of this issue: They understood the power of words to create and perpetuate an issue.

Calling the proposed Islamic cultural centre in Lower Manhattan a ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ stirs up a far more passionate response on either side of the issue than calling it ‘an Islamic cultural centre and mosque in Lower Manhattan’.

Strictly speaking, the proposed 13-storey edifice at 51 Park Place isn’t exactly a mosque, at least not as that term is generally understood (domes, minarets, et cetera), and it certainly isn’t going to be a mosque that’s 13 storeys tall.

The proposed building would contain many things – a cooking school, basketball courts, a swimming pool, childcare facilities, a restaurant, a library, an auditorium, a Sept 11 memorial and, yes, a Muslim house of worship, or mosque.

It would be located two blocks from a corner of the Ground Zero site, in a neighbourhood already packed with places of worship, including another Muslim prayer house that predates the events of Sept 11, 2001.

Read the preceding paragraph and ask yourself: Doesn’t ‘Mosque at Ground Zero’ sound more like the sort of thing that could get opponents like Newt Gingrich to declare the project ‘a political statement of radical Islamist triumph’?

(The Associated Press and The Washington Post are advising their journalists to avoid the terms ‘Ground Zero mosque’ or ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ because they’re inaccurate.)

Politicians, revolutionaries, editors and advertisers have long understood the power of a single word to recast and reframe an issue to explosive effect.

By calling the estate tax the ‘death tax’, conservatives broadened a narrow debate over the obligations of wealthy families into a question of taxation for all. Similarly, ‘pre-owned’ vehicles sound a lot nicer than ‘used’ ones.

Journalists, at least the ones still obligated to neutrality, have tried to dance around loaded phrases for years. What to call someone who takes up arms against a government – a ‘terrorist’, an ‘insurgent’, a ‘partisan’ or a ‘militant’? Who or what are ‘freedom fighters’?

Is Israel’s barrier on the West Bank and Gaza Strip a ‘security fence’ or a ‘separation wall’? Are they ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘undocumented workers’? Is it fair to label someone who opposes abortion ‘pro-life’ when doing so suggests that an opponent is ‘anti-life’?

In Washington, naming a piece of legislation is a dark semantic art, fraught with deception and political manipulation. No matter what their flaws or merits, on name alone it’s hard to be against something called ‘the Patriot Act’ or ‘the Clean Skies Act’.

Calling anything a ‘reform’ or ‘progressive’ initiative implies that the reform is necessary or that opponents are regressive.

The general rule in navigating this minefield is clarity and accuracy, says Ms Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, an organisation dedicated to maintaining both of those things in newspapers, magazines and websites.

‘Terms that get caught up in religious or political ideology can be misleading, so we try to avoid those,’ she says. But even ‘neutral’ labels have limitations and can be misleading, she adds.

If you oppose abortion except in cases of incest and rape, are you therefore ‘quasi-pro-life’, she asks. If you oppose abortion but are in favour of the death penalty, what are you then?

Corporations try to play the opposite game. Instead of bland neutrality, they spend millions of dollars annually on names they hope will evoke a positive, emotional connection with consumers, says Mr Hayes Roth, the chief marketing officer of Landor Associates, a company that creates names for marketers and organisations. Ideally, he says, a great brand name is connected to ‘a great story’. Apple, for example, is an ingeniously simple and resonant name for a computer because it suggests simplicity, familiarity and ease of use, all attributes for a potentially intimidating device like a computer.

This is where the promoters of the downtown Islamic cultural centre/mosque may have let events slip beyond their control, he suggests: They didn’t come up with a name that would have blunted the emotional uppercut of ‘mosque near Ground Zero’.

Indeed, Mr Roth says, the entire controversy might have been averted if the organisation behind the project had selected a name that recognised the neighbourhood as the site of epic tragedy and conveyed unassailable, unarguable intentions, using words like ‘memorial’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘international’, ‘interfaith’ or ‘understanding’.

Not coincidentally, Landor recently completed work on logos and brand identifiers for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, located at Ground Zero. Landor’s shorthand ‘identity’ for the project is simple and to the point, and unlikely to raise any hackles at all: ‘9/11 Memorial.’

The Washington Post

Solving the puzzle

You participate in a quiz show in which you are shown two locked boxes, one of which contains a carrot and the other a diamond. The keys to the boxes are held by two ladies, one of whom always tells lies and the other always tells the truth. You do not know which is which. You are allowed one question to be put to one of the ladies. How can you discover which box contains the diamond?

Ah, those stones are always intriguing. And I am tempted by the sale…The price of diamond

To buy or not to buy, that is the question, and it is a question plagued by ethical discussions. I’m not sure if people would still buy the diamonds after knowing the high probability of any diamond being a blood diamond.

Aug 26, 2010

Blood clouds the diamond’s sparkle

By Andy Ho (ST)

WHAT is British supermodel Naomi Campbell doing at The Hague’s special Sierra Leone war crimes court?

A small west African republic of four million, Sierra Leone was racked by civil war between 1996 and 2002. The former president of neighbouring Liberia, Charles Taylor, is currently on trial at The Hague, accused of recruiting for the Sierra Leone insurgents and supplying them with arms.

The armed insurgents forced civilians to mine for diamonds, with which Taylor was allegedly paid. According to a 2003 United States Congressional Research Service report, the rebels terrorised the local population. Most egregiously, they amputated the limbs of men, women, children and infants. Women and children were made sex slaves, while boys were also forcibly conscripted. More than 120,000 were killed and two million displaced. Understandably, the stones mined under such circumstances have been called ‘blood diamonds’.

Ms Campbell allegedly received some of these from Taylor. Thus, she might be a key link in the chain of events that connects the former dictator to crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone.

Blood diamonds have also been mined by rebels fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Angola. The trade in blood diamonds first attracted media attention in the past decade or so, after human rights activists like Global Witness highlighted the plight of their amputee victims in Sierra Leone.

A 2006 Global Witness study estimates that 20 per cent of the diamond trade involves such illicit stones. According to a 2006 US Government Accountability Office report, this illicit trade – which has a link to Al-Qaeda that was identified in 2003 – continues to this very day despite the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.

De Beers is the firm that has dominated the world’s diamond market since it was founded 130 years ago. In May 2000, it met human rights activists and African political leaders at the diamond mining city of Kimberley in South Africa. (Many producer nations in Africa, like Botswana and Namibia, are in profit-sharing schemes with De Beers.)

The parties agreed to set up a global certification scheme to prevent the trade in blood diamonds. States began adopting the scheme from December 2002, including the US and all European Union nations, which then passed laws to enforce it.

For instance, the US passed its Clean Diamonds Trade Act in 2003. But the law left the process of certifying diamonds to industry itself. The industry, in turn, merely set up a voluntary system of proper invoicing to ensure that blood diamonds were not bought or sold.

How did human rights activists even get the traditionally opaque industry to act in concert with producer nation governments? The key was the highly oligopolistic industry’s Achilles heel: Diamonds are not only merely sparklers with little intrinsic value, but they are also not even scarce. Yet their worth to consumers depends largely on an illusion of their scarcity and mysteriousness.

To boost sales after the Depression, De Beers began advertising heavily in the 1930s. Its efforts transformed the sparkler into a rare and mysterious yet ‘traditional’ symbol of eternal love. So successful was De Beers in this regard that the diamond ring came to be regarded as a must for any man proposing to a woman.

By the same token, the industry is extremely vulnerable to public opinion. Publicity about the human rights abuse in Sierra Leone could link diamonds to amputated limbs and child rape. If this led to consumer outrage, especially in the US, which accounts for two-thirds of all consumer purchases of diamonds, the industry could be dealt a mortal blow.

In Blood Diamonds (2004), Greg Campbell notes that De Beers began speaking up against blood diamonds only after activists threatened a boycott of its products. Thus industry had to act, which was made easier by the fact that De Beers is not merely a diamond retailer but also owns 40 per cent of diamond mines worldwide. Moreover, it buys up 70 per cent of the world’s production of rough diamonds – hence its huge stockpile of diamonds, as Ingrid Tamm notes in Diamonds In Peace And War (2002).

While De Beers’ mining is large-scale and capital-intensive, that in Sierra Leone was labour-intensive and involved enslaved locals digging for the stones along alluvial streams. The rough diamonds from these operations were small and easily smuggled out of the country. They then passed through many hands before ending up in secretive diamond bourses.

These stones get ‘mixed and re-mixed, traded back and forth’ between large and small bourses, according to the 2006 General Accounting Office study mentioned above.

Since their origins cannot be determined, this means licit and illicit stones may be traded side by side. It helps that the Central Selling Organisation – also created by De Beers – controls two-thirds of the trade in these bourses the world over.

At the retail level, jewellery certification is meant to attest to their origins in rough diamonds that are not illicit. Yet a 2004 Global Witness survey of 30 leading US diamond retailers found that only five kept records of Kimberley Process invoices. A 2007 Global Witness and Amnesty International survey of 37 top retailers – half of which did not respond – found that only eight kept records.

While it may foster an impression that the business has been thereby decontaminated, the Kimberley Process has no meaningful enforcement mechanism. Hence those who do not abide by it face no sanction.

So the truth is that whatever processes now exist do not do much to stamp out blood diamonds – and these continue to sit on many a woman’s ring finger.

*

(http://www.giddykipper.biz/WordPress/?m=200908)

It’s a question of faith, what you choose, what stand you take.

Pascal’s wager: “If God exists and if I believe in Him, I will get eternal life and eternal happiness. If God does not exist and if I believe in Him, I will get nothing. If I do not believe at all, I will definitely get nothing. Therefore, if I believe, I may get an infinite reward and I have nothing to lose.”

*

This is a SICK ASS chapter, featuring “S”

The beauty of logic in stand-taking

(x.1) Negating a Universal statement: “All X have Y” becomes “not all X have Y.” (~ p is true when p is false; ~ p is false when p is true.)

I: All cows eat grass. Do you agree?

Possible S’s:

Yes, I agree that all cows eat grass.

(Negation) No, some cows eat grass (while there are mutant cows who eat humans).

(Absolute negation) No, no cow eat grass–what planet are you on?

(x.2) Negating compound statements (de Morgan’s laws): ~ (p and q) = (~ p) or (~ q) while ~ (p or q) = (~ p) and (~ q).

I: Every one should provide food aid and financial assistance to poorer nations.

S:

Not every one should provide food aid and financial assistance to poorer nations. Some one should not provide food aid to poorer nations, or some one should not provide financial assistance to poorer nations.

Then, the Issue becomes: who should…? why should they…?

*

Tower of Bramah: In the great temple at Benares rests a brass plate in which are fixed three diamond needles. On one of these needles, at the creation, God placed sixty-four discs of pure gold, the largest disc resting on the brass plate, and the other getting smaller and smaller up to the top one. Day and night unceasingly the priests transfer the discs from one diamond needle to another: he must not move more than one disc at a time and must place this disc on a needle so that there is no smaller disc below it. When the sixty-four discs shall have been thus transferred from the needle on which at the creation God placed them to one of the other needles, the world will vanish. How long will the complete transfer take?

*

If you are at a reception attended by 400 guests, you can be sure that there will be at least two persons with the same birthday.

If MCYS had imbued such lovely mathematical GPish facts and puzzles in their dating campaign, then foreign press like the AFP will stop ridiculing Singapore…

Singapore woos singles in latest dating campaign

AFP

Sunday, 15 August 2010

Singapore is launching yet another campaign to promote dating among its notoriously love-shy singles as the city-state grapples with low marriage and birth rates.

The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) issued a tender this month through the government’s official procurement website calling for proposals on how to encourage singles to date.

“This tender is called to engage a communications agency to conceptualise, plan and implement a public communications campaign to promote dating,” said a notice on the site.

No details of the tender were given in the notice but the Straits Times newspaper said the winner will produce a television commercial to promote dating and draw up a “unique dating concept” to get singles to interact.

Targeted at people aged 20 to 35 who do not date, the initiative is the latest effort by the government to act as matchmaker for its loveless singles population.

It comes amid falling marriage and fertility rates in the tiny but affluent island-state with a population of about five million, more than one million of whom are foreigners.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in February urged citizens to ignore superstitions about the Chinese zodiac and make more babies during the Year of the Tiger, which began in February.

Lee said he was particularly worried about ethnic Chinese couples who choose to hold back from having babies during Tiger years because of a superstition that children born during the period will have the animal’s fierce attributes.

Singapore’s fertility rate dipped to its lowest level ever at 1.23 babies per woman in 2009, down from 1.28 in 2008 and well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed for a stable population, he said.

The marriage rate hit 6.6 marriages per 1,000 residents in 2009, down from 7.8 in 1999, the Straits Times said, citing government statistics.

A fresh university graduate reacted coolly to the latest campaign.

“I think it’s a bit silly,” Koh Hoon Kiat, 25, told AFP.

Asked if a television commercial would prompt him to find a date, he said: “I’m not at a very desperate stage yet.”

Previous government attempts to heat up romance and encourage couples to make more babies have so far failed to reverse the falling birth rates.

A campaign dubbed “Romancing Singapore” involved month-long carnivals to celebrate love, and another initiative called “Beautifully Imperfect” carried the message of loving one’s partner despite imperfections.

Singapore, which has a reputation as a nanny state that interferes in citizens’ private lives, regularly carries out campaigns to instill discipline, promote courtesy and discourage the use of broken English.

Other initiatives included a campaign urging wedding guests to arrive on time and rating public toilets for cleanliness.

The Last T-Day

It was a nice and simple T-day, the last one I will be having, the last one that falls on a day other than Friday. But it was one that stretched from Monday to Thursday.

For the first time, I received three bottles of hair gel, or wax, or mud, or whatever the name is with “product differentiation”!

But when that’s low on supply, I use Gatsby. Moving Rubber (TM). (Oh wait, I don’t think Gatsby applied for trademark on that name, but the flap does say,”Do not eat.”) So now I have Air Rise Moving Rubber, Cool Wet Moving Rubber, and what I have been using, Spiky Edge Moving Rubber! All bottled in delicious colours, for different hair length. And they are all carrying some special endorsement from Japanese stylists, apparently: Shuichi Kakuta, Naoyasu Toba and Takako Kato. Okay, that certainly fits my hair styled by a Japanese named Hisato.

Right, that’s one whole paragraph (or two) of product endorsement. I should get a cut or something.

The Nike shoe-bag comes in handy too.

And there’s the mouse from “Micro-mouse”. Coincidentally, I was the mouse who was supposed to bell the cat that same day, and I headed straight to the lunch where some other mice gathered. Some were cautiously trying to bell the cat, but it was pretty much a customary cautious session where no one dared to go too close. I, on the other hand, gave my best shot, and I was mauled.

I don’t usually get home-baked stuff, and the bottle and packet of cookies go straight to my emergency food-aid kit at my desk. I tried them while I was clearing some WRs that caused me bouts of hunger pangs and suffocation. Very tasty. So I stopped gnawing away on those junk on A4.

The doughnuts! D’Oh! Oh my gosh…

(Aren’t they cute…)

I can’t help it but to eat the weirdest looking one first. I don’t really like seaweed, but I thought I smelled wasabi! So I went crazy and ate it. Anyway, it’s a habit to eat the sweetest–and the cutest–last. There is a story behind these doughnuts, and it was a nice story while I remembered it!

(And I hope all of you managed to decipher the Jabberwocky text on the postcards!)

When my stomach’s settled, it’s time for the notes. They are touching and they remind me of what I am, what I can do and have done. They are the balm for my eyes when I read a ‘dedication’ from an ex-student on the Alumni-blog, and though ‘important’ people would have read it and passed their judgement the way they liked, I was reminded of the happy memories captured on these notes of today and yesteryears. I was reminded of the love other institutes have placed on me: the college which picked me out of the trough at the end of last year, the premium institute which I was supposed to go to in 2007, and the institute that I will be going to in October. September will be a short month, but memories of what I have done will linger. There has been no regret being back here for three over years, doing what is true to my heart. There are the SMSes from ex-students–one was inspired to do philosophy at the university. That was unexpected! Everyone’s managing well, in green or in hippie attire in uni.

And there’s the video-montage which was flattering (mostly!) I watched it thrice. Say, I don’t think I arrived in college past 7.20am on any recent Friday…

My colleagues also gave me lots of chocolate which almost all have been eaten. Nothing beats the love of your close friends: a pencil named “George Orwell” from Jack Kie, a lift out of school for lunch in J.Leong’s Mazda, a stool (which I’d always wanted) from Marilyn and intellectual jokes from Ivan. And, the friendship which we still share with Kaifeng who’s now in HQ, whose just an SMS away.

There you are, the people young and old I will miss.

(Shot with a 2-megapixel cam-phone)

There it is, a magnificent sunset at my favourite spot. It had been elusive over the weeks but on a day full of sentiments, the scene was there at Mandai Lake. As Vanilla Twilight played on my iPod coincidentally as I was driving past, I just had to stop and marvel at the view and the sound.