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Sunday, Apr 10, 2016 - 21:03 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Old News New Mews


Insidious influence extended!
(Original source: facebook.com)


The School of Computing mascot has been revealed to be a cat, in keeping with the university theme, which didn't go down well with Mr. Ham. He does have a point in that penguins have an OS, foxes have a web browser, cats have a shell command, and even pigs have a Big Data platform, so rodents may be severely under-represented in the software hierarchy.


A Man A Poop 'Anama

Some John Doe leaked millions of documents involving Panamanian offshore companies over the past year, and the raw sewage has well and truly hit the helicopter blades, with the immediate family of Xi Dada, David Cameron and of course The Right Honourable Najib, getting implicated.

Living up to their lofty international reputation for scintillating investigative journalism, the local press were only too quick to proclaim that "no one from Singapore has been mentioned in the Panama papers" (original April 4 release). Of course, had our hardworking reporters bothered to, like, stay in their seats, pull up the handy online source database, and press a button, they might have discovered thousands of local individuals and institutions. As it was, it took an editor from the Irish Times to do their work for them (current copy).

Frankly, though, the news came as zero surprise (do top politicians and other ultra-rich people hide their money? Is water wet? Was Gaddafi killed for his bling rather than for "humanitarian concerns"?), and shell companies do have legitimate purposes. As Cameron may be discovering, it's not the deed, it's the cover-up that gets you. The Prime Minister of Iceland was probably the first high-profile casualty (possibly clearing the way for a takeover by pirates), but to be honest, it's par for the course for others like Putin.


That P-word

We're not done with the Fourth Estate just yet. Continuing on the by now very public tussle between Dr. Lee Wei Ling and The State's Times, the national paper dropped a bombshell yesterday: they did not gag the good doctor - instead, her latest column was not published due to plagiarism.

In particular, two paragraphs comparing the instant Cult of Mao against the rather more subdued commemorations of Churchill, were deemed to have been taken almost word-for-word from a combination of an online website, and a The Guardian feature. On the face of it, it seems strange that Dr. Lee - who is a trained and much-published neuroscientist, after all - could have failed to understand the ramifications of copying passages wholesale. [N.B. That said, I'm often tickled by the textual gymnastics that lesser academics sometimes resort to - the equivalent of calling a fish a "gill-bearing aquatic craniate animal" to clear this perceived hurdle.]

The unspoken key here, it seems, is whether Dr. Lee was informed that the rejection was due to plagiarism concerns (one suspects that if she had instead swiped a paragraph conflating her dad with George Washington, our diligent The State's Times editors would have kindly reworded it for her). Indeed, it seems not, with Dr. Lee claiming that in their emails, "never did [the editor] bring up the issue of plagiarism".

And the flames are being fanned - it appears that Dr. Lee is one of those who are (justifiably) unconvinced by de facto familial succession as a working political philosophy, going as far as to disparage the current situation as "...if the power that be wants to establish a dynasty, LKY's daughter will not allow LKY's name to be sullied by a dishonourable son [!]"

As it is, while her elder brother and sitting Prime Minister hasn't pulled out the trusty defamation suit just yet, our trusty ever-dependable Media Literacy Council member has admonished her with a reminder that "blood runs thicker than water"... which ironically was the whole point to begin with.

While this should blow over soon, it remains heartening that there are continued indications that incumbent hegemony is being called into question. In short, it is not obvious that the supposed "unity" advantages of what is effectively a one-party state, will continue to be - or has in fact even been - superior to a more open multi-party democracy. Indeed, I could appreciate the incumbents a lot more, if their representation corresponded more closely to their actual vote share.


Three Years In The Making

In the meantime, our wise incumbent MPs are describing foreign workers as "walking time bombs" while essentially pushing for apartheid, while appreciating national servicemen for their years of underpaid duty with... a S$100 voucher. Okay lah, mai hiam buey pai lah.

Anyway, policy change of the week - the PSLE scoring system will be revamped, with the T-score removed from 2021, and removed by wider grade bands.

As my clever readers might well expect, this blog has been on top of things, at least since this was floated back in 2013 (refer in particular to "The Party That Cried Change", and "Our Hamster Conversation"). In the former post, the obvious observation that banding by itself would merely introduce a random factor was explained, which to be fair has been recognized by many (see for example the recent Forum letter, "Banding doesn't resolve resource issue")

Then, in "Our Hamster Conversation", our favourite furry analysts projected the practical impact of such a move, which is reproduced here (with updated comments) for convenience:
  • Late 2013: Committee set up to study the issue

  • Mid 2014 Mid 2016: Report released. Propose to use the existing letter grade, converted to a numerical band value (i.e. A*=1, A=2, B=3 and so on), as befits our beloved conservative bureaucracy
    [N.B. It turns out that whatever committee was involved took three years longer than expected, while not even finalizing the details; anyway, chances are that they'll just adapt the existing letter grades]

  • Immediately: Hordes of anxious parents write in on how their kids' weak command of mother tongue could kill their hopes of getting into a top school
    [N.B. Parents indeed already onto it, as they realise that banding will merely advantage the more well-rounded at the expense of specialist talents (can't compensate for a 75/B in one subject with a 100/A* instead of 90/A* in another), and will probably just result in students spamming extra-curricular activities to distinguish themselves]

  • Early 2015 Early 2017: Another committee compromises by declaring that the better band of the two languages will be used, with the result for the other language used as a tie-breaker if needed. Mollified parents don't realise that this makes next to no difference in actuality
    [N.B. Expect some such minor adjustments to be made for show to demonstrate "responsiveness to parents' concerns", after the details are released]

  • Nov 2018 Nov 2021: First batch under the new banding system. 2000 of the 50000-strong cohort get the best possible score (4A*=3 points, plus tiebreaker immunity). Vast bulk put the traditional topmost tier schools (NYGH,RI,RGS,HCI) as their first choice. However, these schools have maybe 800 places between them after an expanded direct admissions programme
    [N.B. Seriously, doesn't the MOE get this, in that admission selectivity was the entire point? While grading may "no longer be based on how pupils do relative to their peers", the key realisation is that entrance to top schools remains a relative competition between students and their peers]

  • [New selection tests by popular schools etc...]

  • 2021 2016: When pointed out in The State's Times, one helpful commentator states that it is the parents' mindset that has to change, the government has done what it could, and this builds character anyway. Meanwhile, university graduate salaries stay largely stagnant. The government promises to re-review the banding criteria to reduce stress...
    [N.B. Hey, one Forum contributor has already jumped the gun here with "PSLE changes need to be coupled with mindset changes". These things have to be done in the right order! Citizens these days...]

We reserve further analysis for a later date, but all indications are that parents are gearing up to game the new rules already.


Razor-sharp Margins

Call me cheap if you must, but I don't change razor blades often (doesn't a touch of rust build character?). Having gotten to four months with the Gillette I acquired on a whim last November, I figured I should finally change it, and...

Twenty-five bucks for four cartridges.

I mean, I know that the business operates on a two-part tariff, but six dollars for a sliver of steel (note: previously solely dependant on an electric shaver)?! Okay, so they may be more complex than it seems, and a dollar a week shouldn't be too much to pay for a fuss-free trim...

Nah, eff that, ordered eight cartridges from Qoo10 for S$22. So it may be a parallel import or something, but it's not as if my hair follicles can tell between Russian and English. Makes one want to try out a straight razor in the future... or even adopt classic fashions, genetics willing.


Autocomplete, Autodelete

Everyday experience of Chrome's autofill function, has convinced me that Google is perfecting the art of mind reading.

Okay, not really, but it's come some way since "traverse a prefix tree" (a basic implementation is on my other site). In particular, these seem the major improvements:
  • Context Aware Fill: No, not the computer graphics technique, but perhaps close enough in a sense. For example, let's say you searched for "Harare", the capital of Zimbabwe. Next, you type in "Bul". Without any prior, one would then expect words beginning with "bull-", or maybe "bulb" or "bulk" to be the most likely. The search history however suggests that "Bulawayo" - another Zimbabwean city - is the desired word.

  • Phonetic Translation: Error correction not just by alphabetic distance, but by the intended sound. For example, "Oiler theorem" (one of my own early transcription errors in math lectures) gets "Euler" suggested, "illicit response" is corrected to "elicit response", etc.

  • Bidirectional Search: Predictions can now try to fill in stuff in the middle, which is helpful when one enters a phrase, before editing it.

I'm not certain exactly when these got implemented, but from what I can recall, there has been a marked - if mostly silent - improvement several years back. That said, Google Translate remains very much a work in progress...

On to online storage. As if security weren't enough of a stumbling block, there's no assurance that companies won't just dump your data, going by how Microsoft OneDrive is cutting its free storage limits from 15GB to 5GB. Well, that's why Google is stealing their lunch... did Google just discontinue a US$300 smart hub, just like that?!

Seriously, what's the point of throwing buzzwords like "distributed" and "cloud", if it just means they can trash your precious files from multiple remote servers, instead of one? Even US$10/month for one terabyte doesn't seem all that attractive, when hard drives of that capacity go for about US$50 nowadays. Waiting on writable DNA any day now...



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