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TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
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- academics - gaming - To honour csq & tpk emerging once more from the river/lake to blog again, I'm throwing together this brief update. On School Dodged the grad school orientation ("highly recommended" only, lah) day as I wasn't feeling too fine, not to mention that it didn't seem quite that important. Good news is that I'll know at least one guy, another TCHS alumni, who is embellishing his CMU bachelor's with an NUS master's. Nice. Forced myself to wake early for lunch at NUS with csq, Canada-bound psw and roastbird. csq spoke of some Japanese ramen-cooking robot he saw on TV (a video of an example, probably not the one seen). Just after I thought a general-purpose cooking bot (add packaged ingredients into correct compartments, or even try to automatically detect them?) might be a good innovation... The next step up from the rice cooker, and the decline of household culinary skills? Mindful of the terms of the NUS Research Scholarship, in particular item five, "...undertakes to devote his/her full time and energy to his/her studies and to the best of his/her ability, apply himself/herself to his/her programme of study, to the satisfaction of the University.", I figured I had best get a leg up, and printed the past year exam papers for the Qualifying Exams, to be taken in about nine months. Come to think of it, the "full time and energy" and "best of ability" clauses are, strictly speaking, humanly impossible to fulfil to the letter. It is sometimes heard that a person or group has given "100%", "101%" or even "200%", but that is pure hyperbole - blindly maximizing effort doesn't maximize performance, while maximized performance is unverifiable. Of course, the key thing here is to satisfy my alma mater/paymaster, and thus far they've been quite reasonable; thus, by the frequentist interpretation, I should be okay. Now, the Qualifying Exams consist of two papers, CS5201 - Foundation of Theoretical Computer Science and CS5202 - Foundations in Computer Systems, which roughly comprise theoretical CS and applied CS respectively. For CS5201, the paper has always been three hours long and open-book (I knew I kept those notes and textbooks for a reason), with a choice of three out of four questions, so there's about an hour to solve each question. There is one question from each sub-area, namely algorithms [corresponds to CS3230, taken], theory of computation [CS3231, taken], programming languages [CS3212, taken] and logic & AI [CS1231,CS3243,CS5340? taken]. Browsing through the papers, I was a relief to have a vague recognition of most of the questions, i.e. they were of the sort to have appeared in the final examinations of the relevant modules (in this respect, it is a slight advantage to attend grad school at one's undergraduate institution?). Some algorithm/theory of computation questions looked, dare I say, fun, with logic & AI ranging from (deceptively?) simple to rather more tedious. I confess I've never particularly like (and probably therefore not scored particularly well in) principles of programming languages, so I can't quite evaluate the difficulty of those questions. Will brush up on the basics, but I see myself dropping the programming language question when the time comes (unless it's really superbly simple). The format of CS5202 is identical to CS5201, with the four sub-areas being operating systems [CS2106, taken], computer networks [CS2105, taken], database systems [CS2102S, taken] and computer organization/architecture [CS1104 (now CS2100), taken]. A quick observation is that these modules are all at a lower level, and though I did fine on all of them, I have also forgotten relatively more, likely since I took the four modules in my first four semesters, thus it's been an average of three years since I covered the material. The grades lend faith that the content is muggable, just that it might be hard to confirm if one's answers are acceptable - perhaps sneak onto the modules' forums if desperate. From the looks of it, databases should be an almost certain pick, with no particular preference between the three remaining sub-areas. While advanced (higher-level) modules in some of the areas (e.g. databases, networks) exist, a cursory glance indicates that such knowledge is probably not required. On Games and (maybe) Funny Stuff Whiled away some hours on Hardwarezone forums' Shocking n Funny Gifs thread. Guy using a marker to draw on his jeans, then setting the line on fire before being stomped on to put it out? A cat that would make a decent baseball outfielder? Panda rolling down a slope? There's all that and much, much more. One of the standouts was probably the breakdancer vs. baby incident above. No worries, the kid was just winded, but if you have edchong's parenting instincts you might want to skip the video. DotA-ed with a full 4O team for the first time in eons, as colin reappeared out of nowhere on leave from his accountancy gig. Managed three games, and slightly more notably actually won all of them for once. Here are the reports: Game One vs. Skeleton King, Dragon Knight / Enchantress / Phantom Assassin, Stone Giant Game Two vs. Doom Bringer, Sand King / Troll Warlord / Drow Ranger, Nerubian Weaver Game Three vs. Shadow Shaman, Stone Giant / Troll Warlord / Demon Witch, Spiritbreaker On Local News, Again Local news update: SM Goh "sees a potential danger arising from Singaporeans becoming more religious", by which I infer is the "my God is the only true God and nobody should hold any before Him (all glory be to Him), burn/kill/convert infidels/heretics/pagans, sniff sniff" type of religious, instead of the "well I may think so but that's not very important, what's more important is to do right by your fellow man" kind. More interestingly, I wonder what has led SM Goh to see "rising religiosity" here. The intensity of belief (and more importantly, concrete actions taken as a result) is one possibility, but hard to quantify. The proportion of professed believers is a more tangible measure, and a check with SingStat says that "...there was no significant change in the population shares of the major religious groups", over the past few decades:
Amusingly, I would have been counted as a Buddhist in the statistics for year 2000 (being sixteen then), although the sum total of my devotions then was being very occasionally dragged to temples, where the pigeons were a far bigger draw to me than the smoky altars. In fact, I'm not even sure if I have officially changed my religious affiliation in the eyes of the government, and actually even if I haven't, I'm in no particular hurry to update their records. Keeping that in mind, other than the major trend being the decline of Taoism and rise of Buddhism (what was the driving force, I wonder), another striking trend is the disproportionate percentage of young people professing "no religion" (see Table 4 of the above paper for detailed figures). Some 17 to 18% of those aged from 15 to 34 identified as such in the year 2000, compared to just 13.7% of those aged 45 to 54, and 9.8% of those 55 and over. Then what about globally? Authoritative data is hard to come by, but there are some more-or-less accepted figures. Christianity, including Catholics (which make up over a billion), is the largest religion, with a total of just over two billion believers. However, over the past century, its share of the world's population (about 32%) has actually declined slightly. There has been a great explosion in Africa (from 8 million in 1900 to nearly 400 million in 2000), but this has been offset by a decline in the First World democracies of Europe and *gasp* even America. In these cases, the move is largely towards non-religious beliefs. Islam is definitely growing faster than Christianity, largely through higher birth rates, although the difficulty (or impossibility) of converting out may have contributed. Its current share of the world population is about 19%, but there are wildly different projections of future growth. At one extreme, the World Christian Encyclopedia predicts nearly no growth for Islam from now till 2200 (with a growth in Christianity to about 37% in the same period), while at the other end, assuming current growth rates as determined by the U.S. Center for World Mission hold up, Islam would overtake Christianity in a couple of decades. Have a care for argumentum ad populum, then. What about the non-religious? Lumping atheists and agnostics together, they make up about 14% of the world population, and as a percentage they have declined in the last few decades. Yes, those bemoaning rising irreligiosity in America and Europe may be surprised at this statistic, but the explanation is simple: The significant masses in China and the former U.S.S.R were under (actually, are still under, in the case of China) Communist regimes that enforced bans on religion. With the U.S.S.R no more, and China slowly loosening up, those forced to abandon religion in these places began practising once more. Forced atheism is no better than forced theism, and neither is the commie bastard-godless atheist linkage, so it's all for the best. Religious workers are actually one of the most trusted groups of people in China according to a poll of over 3000 Chinese by Insight China magazine - though, for what it's worth, prostitutes came in right behind them in third place. Students came in fifth, until such time that they become teachers, and slide further down the list. Latching on to the "growth by birth" theme, PM Lee felt it important enough to emphasize falling birth rates as a worry ("Well done gals, but where are the babes? Don't worry, there aren't many breakdancers to kick them here"), even after SM Goh aired the issue just a few days ago. No change from last year then. PM Lee has a First in Math from Cambridge (and a diploma in CS!), but I fear that "no solution" stares at him here - maybe set up a cosmetic hub? Nine more years to go for my prediction... Finally, Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard, former chief economist of the IMF, is of the opinion that "Within a few years, Western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate (itself a sort of soft default?), partially default - or some combination of all three.", as published in the Straits Times. Guess what, The Onion was there first yet again. Next: Grad Week One
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