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[ October 2007 ] | |
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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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What's Happened: Recovered mid-term results for the Programming Languages module, which slightly to my surprise weren't too bad at all despite another bit of carelessness. About as surprising was the fact that no-one managed to get full marks for it. The lab I referred to a couple of posts down got only 70%, but the average happened only to be about 55%. Am I getting too obsessed about grades? Also helped my grandfather fill out an "Annual Survey on Infocomm Manpower and Usage by Enterprises" for his one-man repairman "business". It turns out that fixing up old refrigerators and air-conditioners partly as a pastime has little to do with the vaunted infocomm edge, and I ended up circling so many zeroes that I may be able to get some advanced credit towards becoming a Zen initiate. 
Profound (Source) "The Zen circle, a popular motif in Zen art, represents the entire universe in a single, perfect stroke. Although simple, images like this are difficult to paint successfully and thus must be done with a clear mind focused on the task." - ReligionFacts website Listened to DotA chat on a late bus home from two distinct sources - a group behind me were discussing the merits of a Skadi and two Divine Rapiers on a hero (painful build, I've got to say) while the student seated next to me held an animated handphone conversation on a 1v1 challenge for the night and debated Battlefury-to-Butterfly for Bounty Hunter. Brings back memories when I myself got Bfury on just about every melee hero when I just started :) Version 6.49 just came out btw. Management & Organization group video out, get it while it's hot (may be taken down by member request, no promises): Had to take a crash D.I.Y. course in Adobe Premiere to produce it, in the meantime learning a couple of new tricks such as video-within-video and greenkeying. Downloaded a bunch of free/shareware to integrate the many different media formats I was handed, and discovered that a decent format to export to is WMV9 NTSC 512K download (30+MB for a 8:59 video, decent quality). As for the opening 20th Century Fox spoof, no I didn't do it from scratch myself (though I briefly considered it); I rightly assumed that someone out there was probably both good enough to create an editable 3D model (it's a famous enough scene) and kind enough to share it, and after coming across a couple of US$50++ offers for the scene as part of a package, I found him. The free Blender 3D editor (7+ MB) looks interesting, maybe I'll try it after the exams. Another week of marginally positive returns ($111.20/$100) for imaginary punting, though it could have been so much more had Everton held Liverpool to a draw as I expected them to, not that they didn't deserve it. $1070.70/$1150 entering Round Eleven. This week, some risk-taking: $50 on Arsenal to beat Liverpool (at 2.40) - Pool are at the formidable Anfield, form out of the window when two big clubs meet, blah blah. Believe me, I would love it for Liverpool to take some points off Arsenal, but realistically they could be badly punished. 2.40 seems very generous $20 on Man United (-2.5) vs. Middlesbrough (2.30) - Three clear goals at home; It was just weeks ago that one would have been worshipped. How quickly things change $15 on Sunderland to draw Fulham (3.15) - Looks like one $15 on Portsmouth to beat West Ham (1.70) - Silent, strong type for the win
Just realised that the first sentence of my last three posts all contained the word, "just". I have really got to discover more variety in my openings. Taking a breather before re-learning how to edit videos for MNO1001, and after raising my first Seneschal in Dragon Court (account Edmund_Chong created on 17 July 2007 according to my Gmail archives, so it indeed takes about three months), I decided to just exploit that "just" piece of trivia and create a weakly punny themed post - and what cooler thing than to append ice to it? Pedo Justice We begin with the Canadian pedophile suspect Christopher Paul Neil, 32, who was caught in Thailand a few days back. Apparently, a big factor in his arrest was that police managed to "unswirl" a distorted image of himself that he posted online, secure in his untrackable anonymity. Apparently he regarded himself as pretty computer savvy, but unfortunately for himself the "swirl" function isn't exactly suited to obscuring data. While the German experts are yet to reveal their "latest high tech tools", I daresay they needed little more than a copy of Photoshop with its built-in Twirl filter, and a bit of guesswork: 
Photoshop for Great Justice (3D Head Image Source)The key to the failure of swirling is that it in practice approximates a one-to-one (two-way) function - that is, knowing the central point where the swirl is applied and the degree of the swirl, one can map a pixel on the original image to a pixel on the swirled image pretty well. Then, to recover the original image, it remains only to reverse the function. In contrast, functions for encryption purposes generally should be one-way. But when obscuring a photo, we don't really want to recover the data as in encryption applications anyway - in fact, we can simply discard enough data such that there is insufficient data to reconstruct the original at all, as proven by information theory. An example is the Mosaic filter, which divides the image into blocks of a given width, then averages the colour within each of those blocks and sets that as the colour of the whole block itself: 
I've used this here often enough Intuitively, this mosaic function is definitely not one-to-one. Consider a 2x2 block with just four pixels, and let their colour values be say 0 (black), 0, 255 (white) and 255. Averaged, they give about 128, which is a medium gray. Now, imagine one tries to reconstruct the original block from this data. All we know is the average value of the colours in the block, and thus 0, 0, 255, 255 is a possibility. However, 1, 1, 254, 254 is also a possibility, as are approximately 16 million other combinations of pixel data - and this is just a grayscale four-pixel block. More importantly, even if all combinations could be enumerated, there is still no indication of which of them is the correct one. Put another way, if one could produce all possible combinations, the original face would surely be reproduced - but so would countless numbers of other incorrect faces, with no way to discern among them which one is the right one. This is in fact the very logic behind the unbreakable one-time pad encryption scheme. Of course, as with the case of flawed nonrandom keys for one-time pads, an improper execution of the Mosaic filter (such as extremely small blocks) may make it remotely possible for some useful data to be recovered, but I wouldn't bet on it. Gay Justice Section 377a of the Singapore Penal Code, which prohibits male-on-male intercourse (note: hot lesbians excluded!), has drawn quite some attention recently. A website has been set up to argue for its repealment, with a parallel website aimed towards keeping it being created in response. Personally, I have precious little interest in what consenting individuals do to each other in private (www.idunreallycareabout377a.com, anyone?), but the arguments presented are rather interesting. Keep377a.com cuts straight to the bone by declaring that "almost 70% of Singaporeans expressed negative attitudes towards lesbians and gay men", implying that the majority should win out - we are a democracy after all, no? Repeal377a.com in contrast exhorts readers to "act towards change for the good of all Singaporeans regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation". Me, I just say society accepts whatever it will. Suppose now that society regards a twelve year-old as an adult. This isn't really that farfetched as the age of consent was thereabouts just a century or two ago, only rising closer to 18 relatively recently. It has often been ironically observed that in many countries, a 16 year-old is old enough to die honourably for his country as a soldier, but not old enough to drink, watch certain movies or engage in not-so-clean fun with the opposite gender. Indeed, is there any stone-clad reason that twelve year-olds should not be regarded as adults? If mental maturity is the key, hitting a certain age is no guarantee of that, and humans appear to be getting smarter; It may also be that teens behave immaturely because society deems them as unworthy of being adult yet, and not vice versa. Certainly in many cultures it would be natural for a 12 year-old to undergo initiation and be recognized as a man. California is asking itself this question, with a proposal for 16 year-olds to have half a vote, and 14 year-olds a quarter. It seems difficult to slam any society that does pass this as a law. But what is the implication of this, combined with gay rights? Suddenly, Christopher Paul Neil is not a scum-of-the-earth pedophile suspect, but a fine and upstanding citizen, assuming that he does not coerce the kids unduly but instead strikes some agreement with them. This is not a veiled attack upon gay rights, mind - taken alone, the reduction in the age of consent would lead to it being legal for grown men to "do it" with 13 year-old girls, which it has to be again stated was not all that uncommon for most of human history. Man-to-boy pederasty was an institution among the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts and Persians, and more recently among the Japanese samurai. Was Neil just born into the wrong age? The quote was originally used in reference to intellectual property, but I say it applies similarly to equality of rights too - "it is the wrong verb about the wrong noun". Take the case of freedom of religious expression. Say, if a widely followed religion commands its followers to fully hide their faces, would it be fair for service-oriented jobs to bar them if it affects their ability to relate to customers? Or are the customers at fault for being unfairly discriminative, and it is they who should "open their minds"? Another example: Let us say that an employer has experience with people from a certain region/race/religion/social group, and the facts are that out of every ten such people he has employed, nine turn out to have qualities unsuited to work despite their qualifications. If he does not discriminate, he thus calculates that it is likely his business will go bankrupt soon, but if he does discriminate then he would be unfair towards those people who are good workers. It is completely unacceptable to say so, though, as Nobel laureate James Watson found out when he claimed that "black people are generally less intelligent", and that he was "...inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". The strange thing is that if he made the statement that he had proven that "black people are generally stronger and faster" or "black people are generally better at basketball", probably few would have batted an eyelid. Even accounting for socioeconomic factors, given that sports is a respected and lucrative pursuit in the USA, the preponderance of black athletes in the top leagues would appear to strongly suggest that. Yet, for daring to suggest that "white people are generally smarter", he gets thrown out on his ass. Would he have fared better if he had dispensed with any interpretation and just said something along the lines of "research data shows that... Race XXX generally scores higher/lower on I.Q. tests"? Probably not by much, even if he added the disclaimer that I.Q. tests may at most measure one particular facet of intelligence. It's a complicated world. Exam Justice Another year, another PSLE season, and another batch of parents raving over the unfairness of it all. Unfortunately, the nature of exams and indeed any competitive measure means that not all can be satisfied, for some will be "ahead" and other "behind". Leaving aside the usual knocks that academic performance is overemphasized, is it fair to test concepts from outside the syllabus, as the Math paper was accused of? I would say, why not? - if the out-of-syllabus content is well-balanced (i.e. counts for relatively little). A little extra would go towards identifying the very best, and getting about 90% without that little extra isn't going to kill. If that's "murder", then the student's going to have a very sad life ahead. Parents have to do their part, though, and recognize that absolute scores don't mean anything. Getting 50% is wonderful if that's the top score, while getting 80% may turn out to be just average. Let us look at a 5-mark question for this year: 6/14 of the chairs in a hall are in rows of 13. Half of the chairs are in rows of 7. There are 112 more chairs in rows of 7. The rest of the chairs are stacked up. Find the total number of chairs. Throwing in the "rows of 13" and "rows of 7" designations as red herrings may have been a bit cruel, methinks. Actually, all that is required is to note that 1/14 of the total number of chairs is 112 chairs. Presto, the total number of chairs is 112*14=1568. My guess is that if the question were reworded as 6/14 of the chairs are blue, half are black, the rest are red and there are 112 more black chairs than blue, quite a few more students would be able to do it. Worth an experiment someday? Legal Fees Justice Little guy wins for once in this well-publicized case. Don't take this as the norm, however. Not Justice (Totally random stuff) The Japanese have come up with an original way to hide from crooks - transform into a vending machine! There's a crazy cute fire hydrant version for kids, which hopefully comes with the warning "Please do not use in presence of dogs". Well, the Japanese have always been kings of wacky inventions. Two-second T-shirt folding too.
Just back from the Soccer Heartbeat Carnival 2007 that lasted from 9 am to 4 pm. I don't remember ever feeling so drained since I left NS, other than the Swimfest, likely aggravated by staying up until 3am to get an Econs tutorial assignment done early. Two draws, three losses, one good shot on target, one weak header on target, one own goal... More or less expected for a team that got together for the first time, and without any subs for most of the matches. Great fun nevertheless. Also: Indoor boots are bad on rain-wettened slippery hardcourts. Buncha attractive picks in the EPL today after the international "break" that saw England crash 2-1 to Russia, I'll go even stevens on them. Currently $959.50/$1050. $20 on Arsenal (-1.5) vs. Bolton (at 1.75) $20 on Man City to beat Birmingham (1.50) $20 on Everton to draw Liverpool (3.15) $20 on Portsmouth to beat Wigan (2.23) $20 on Fulham to beat Derby (1.58)
"Suppose that today, the stock market goes down..." (Deathly silence) "Touch wood." - EC3332 professor does it again Just relieved that I managed to settle my Denotational Semantics lab exercise more or less on schedule, just an hour after I was preparing for the worst (i.e. a total writeoff and rewrite). Hoping against hope I tried fe=fe.extend(ts, ev.nextElement().eval(e2)); to append the new environment bindings to the function values once, and there was light. The more natural e2=e2.extend(ts, ev.nextElement().evalDynamicScoping(e2)); did dynamic scoping already, so I was done. Uplifting, this successfully wrestling with a programming problem. At least if the TA's don't use crazy testcases... So uplifting, in fact, that I'm going to dump all the undeveloped tidbits from my blogging file of inspiration. The Chinese High School's (now HCI's) school song is set to an 1857 American ballad, Annie Lisle. Yes, that's the tune. It's shared with Cornell and a bunch of other universities, and no I didn't know any of this until recently so shoot me. HCI has its own Integrated Virtual Learning Environment too. No need to wait till NUS. Æon Flux. Never watched the 2005 movie (what's new?), but the edgy Korean visual style caught my eye on Youtube - take a peek at War and Gravity for examples. They were on MTV in 1992, so should be ho-hum by today's standards. But entertaining. Wonder why so few of the original animations were produced, given their obvious popularity. Another case in point was the distinctive-looking wrestler with words all over his body and impressive aerial moves that I remembered glimpsing long ago on WWE. Completely randomly, I learnt his name - Hakushi, and once I got that it was a simple matter to dig out a few action clips. Not bad at all. Strangely enough he lasted only a year or so in the WWE. Wow, it's been over ten years. A little more WWE stuff - everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it is all a (well-coordinated) act, with the littler guys often selling moves to emphasize the power of the bigger ones. Shawn Michaels shows how to overdo it hilariously. When it comes to selling moves, Michaels doesn't come close to the average professional footballer, though. Check out a typical training session. Frankly, after watching a few Rugby World Cup matches, I have come to respect the average no-necked cauliflowered-ear rugger player a lot. One doesn't see them taking completely ridiculous falls or try to influence the referees. Just their luck that they won't ever replicate football's universal reach. And finally, burning water. What will people manage to do next time, walk on it (Some weak points, but as always a grain of truth. George Carlin rules)???
I just had to post this since it is the most WTFPWNAGE optical illusion I've seen in... ever. 
Source Bewildered by some peoples' opinions that the girl could actually be spinning counterclockwise (from top down) when she was so clearly going clockwise, I laboured for over half an hour before finally managing to see it that way. Now I can more or less switch between the directions at will, but clockwise still seems more natural, shadow notwithstanding. And it's not a trick GIF, I opened it in Animagic to make sure. Scout's honour. Hmm, never was a Scout, so Programmer's honour, whatever that's worth. Readers are especially encouraged to comment on their initial reactions for this one :)
- changelog - changelog v1.07c --------------- * FeedBurner FeedCount added somewhere. * RSS Feed now autodetectable by IE Toolbar. * Couple of blog links added/updated. * Minor bug with special characters in Javascript functions (partially) fixed. Taking a breather from Financial Economics, I figured that this was as good a time to unearth my planned post on game theory as any. It's not going to be anywhere near as comprehensive as I envisaged, but perhaps that's a good thing. So, what is The Game? 
Nope, it's neither wrestler nor rapper... The short answer is, it's everything. Everything is a game. How can this be so? Let us look at the mathematical definition. While the very first sentence states that there must be a goal "to win", I would suggest that it might more generally and accurately be specified that there must be just a "desired outcome", to avoid being misled by narrower concepts of "victory". An adult might deliberately throw a board game to please a child, and on some level both achieve what they desire - games are often not zero-sum. So we now have a working idea of what a game is. Economics (applied math) teaches us how to analyze stripped-down versions of real-life games, apparently under the assumption (as usual) that these approximations are close enough to reality to be useful. This field is called game theory, and it teaches us how to make decisions when the strategies and their outcomes are laid out before us. A simple example: Consider the game where you are deciding whether to do a pair assignment, and the choices are either to do it (D) or not to do it (N). Suppose you then inform your partner of your choice, and he then has the same choice whether to do it or not (your choice is fixed once you inform him, perhaps because you will be away for a trip). This game may be fully specified as follows: You: D, Partner: D - Both get credit for completing the assignment, utility is, say, 10 for both. You: D, Partner: N - Both get credit for completing the assignment, but partner happier because he managed to get the same result without expending effort, while you had to. Utility 8 for you but 12 for partner. You: N, Partner: D - Both get credit for completing the assignment, but you are happier because you managed to get the same result without expending effort, while your partner had to. Utility 12 for you but 8 for partner. You: N, Partner: N - Assignment not done, both flunk the module and thrown out of school, utility 0 for both. So, what does game theory suggest you do? You could do the assignment first, but then according to this framework your partner would just free-ride. Alternatively, you could just ignore it and throw it onto your partner's lap. Within the logic of this framework, he would rationally realise that sucking his thumb and completing it would be better than having both of you expelled, and so you would surely get to free-ride instead. You would thus choose not to do it, and expect your partner to. Problem is, it doesn't really work this way in practice. Or even close. First off, it assumes a lot about you and your partner. Do neither of you really enjoy doing assignments? Would the learning process confer some utility? How are the utility figures set anyway - out of thin air? This might be expected to be less problematic when something quantifiable is used as a measure (such as money), but even then utility is often not a linear function of cash. Outcomes are also seldom fully predictable (what if the partner falls sick or...?). Secondly, it assumes a one-time interaction, which is very rarely the case in reality. Be a cock for long enough, and soon one's reputation will precede him - he might have a few short-run "wins", but end up a big loser in the long run (not nearly long enough that everyone is dead anyway, to paraphrase Keynes, though). Thirdly, there is bona humana, the irrational and unpredictable in all of us. This might expected to be especially pronounced when one perceives that the outcome of the game doesn't really matter much - have you ever grabbed a can of mushrooms even though it was ten cents more expensive than an identical looking can next to it? I know I have. Cue today's case of a pilot getting canned for pranking his Canadian colleague with unauthorised orders for Canadian pizza. Seems slightly harsh to suspend a person for what might reasonably be laughed off, but then he's a pilot, so... Game theory does attempt to resolve multiple interactions by modelling them as repeated games, but this only comes up with the finding that for a known finite number of repeated games, the one-game outcome will hold for all of them. It may be time to introduce the classic prisoner's dilemma, which unlike the previous assignment example is simultaneous (both players decide effectively at the same time) and rewards cooperation (if both players keep mum, they would be better off than if both rat the other guy out). Of course, the thing is that neither will know if the other will betray him, so game theory expects that both ratting each other out is the expected optimal outcome (Nash equilibrium).  Again, this is often not reflected in real life. One explanation might be that the criminal underworld generally doesn't take kindly to snitches, and thus one might rationally choose to keep silent if the alternative is almost certainly to sleep with the fishes in concrete shoes. In this case, the payoff matrix would be inaccurate to begin with. Even with the absence of such guaranteed retribution, the players might still "trust" each other enough to gain the cooperative rewards. This is reflected by Hofstadter's superrationality. An example where superrationality features prominently is the Platonia dilemma, where an eccentric rich guy gathers a number of people together, then separates them and informs them that they can decide whether to try for a billion dollars; If exactly one person tries and the rest do not, that one guy gets a billion dollars. Otherwise, if none try, or more than one tries, no one gets anything. The superrational solution is supposed to be for each person to simulate the roll of a dice with number of faces equal to the number of people involved, and try only if he gets a one. Surprisingly, if everyone does subscribe to this methodology, the chance of the billion dollars being awarded to someone is respectably high - it is ((n-1)/n)^(n-1) where n is the total number of people, and appears to approach a limit of about 36%. In reality, when Scientific American tried something like that, they discovered that almost nobody adhered to it, even taking into consideration that their readers should as a whole be of a certain intellectual calibre. My current opinion on superrationality however is that it is unnecessary - one can just budget for it in the "lower" concept of classical game theory, by having it affect the utility values, and attribute all inaccuracies in classical game theory to improper formulation of a game. In the adult-child board game example, the unexpected outcome (adult losing) can be adequately modelled by incorrect utilities (adult doesn't derive pleasure from beating a kid), or insufficient game level (one might imagine the "game" of the board game itself being subsumed within a larger "game" of the adult-child relationship). Building from the ground up, we can then imagine that there is the game, a game that is the superset of all the smaller games that make up one's life. We may not know exactly what it is, or have it as immutable, but probably have some sort of idea of it at any given point. Then, that must necessarily the game that a person rationally tries to "win", and all other games must be adjusted based on their effect on that single, all-consuming game. For instance, some time ago, I attended an experimental study which was composed of a collection of bargaining games - like the prisoner's dilemma, one would get more points if one cooperated, and less if one did not. The thing is that, in such games not cooperating is, as has been demonstrated, rationally the only no-lose situation - if both don't cooperate, you would at least break even on the deal, but if the other guy is silly enough to, you get to beat him on the deal. Confident in this analysis, I played strictly according to this analysis then. Trouble was, that wasn't really the game. The game was to accumulate as many points as possible, which would be proportionally be translated into a (small) monetary reward at the end of the session. In the end, I finished with an average score only. Likely there were enough other people who hadn't studied economics, were plain nice, or who knew each other to make the non-cooperative strategy poor. Of course, this may not be the point since if everyone did behave like me, then I would still have ended up with an average score (like everyone else in this case). However, now let us say that only the highest scoring of the participants would get a big prize. Suddenly, with enough participants, and high enough points for cooperation, it may seem logical to cooperate sometimes at least since an average score would do nothing towards winning the big prize as the odds are that some participants would happen to cooperate with each other. The exact decision would depend on the specifics of the point structure, and mixed strategies probably would come into play. The same applies in lotteries, for instance - it has often been stated that they are a tax on the mathematically illiterate, but the joke may be on the mathematicians here since the expected utility may be positive despite the expected return not being so. Say, if there are a million tickets priced at two dollars each for a million dollar price, the expected return is negative one dollar per ticket, as each ticket is "worth" a dollar (a one-millionth chance to win a million) but sold for two. However, the almost certain loss of two bucks might not mean anything to a person, while getting a million dollars (admittedly very unlikely) does, without even going into the entertainment value of listening to the lottery results. Yesterday, I attended another experiment, this time on the ultimatum game (it was specified as a study on negotiation, though, which wasn't that accurate since no negotiation actually takes place). Two players take part (their identities are not known to each other), and one player is allowed to propose a division of $10. The second player can accept or reject the proposal. If the proposal is accepted, both players get what the proposal specifies. If it is rejected, both get nothing. Then, according to game theory, the first player could offer the second player one cent, and the second player would accept it because hey, one cent is better than nothing! I was the second player, and must have been up against such a rational player since he offered me fifty cents. Obviously, I rejected it - as I wrote in the survey afterwards, "the satisfaction gained from rejecting a paltry amount far outweighs the possible monetary gain." If the offer were five hundred thousand against $9.5 million, though, I would certainly think twice. The Wikipedia article does describe cases where the equivalent of two weeks' wages (say, $1000 in the local context) being rejected when the experiment was held with real money in Indonesia, just because of the split being perceived as unfair, so it does seem that the possible value of satisfaction gained can be very high indeed. So, the moral of this story? Know the Games and Play them. Don't do something just because it seems correct at a lower game level - Recognize how to "win" each subgame, where each subgame stands in relation to higher subgames, and try to recenter on The Game once in a while.
A 4-0 United win yesterday - didn't think I would get to see that. Broke even on the first thirty bucks, here's my thoughts on the remaining seventy for the week: $30 on Reading to beat Derby (at 1.60) - Reading may have lost, but they did score four. Derby have been mostly meh. $20 on Arsenal (-1.5) vs. Sunderland (1.55) - Gunners can't go on forever, but Sunderland are short on the class to stop them $20 on Liverpool to draw Tottenham (3.50) - A high price for a non unlikely draw. I'll take it. Going to scrape together a literature review, but got motivated by Seminar Bingo to create this. Get a few pals together, print some sheets out, and you'll have something to look forward to during the next lecture!
$810.90/$950 at the beginning of Round Nine after I only called the Pompey-Reading game correctly last week, but the record 7-4 thriller was almost worth it. United take on Wigan early today, and after they polished off Roma - yes, by a one-nil scoreline - in midweek, I'm tempted to throw my hat on a 1-0 exact score for a 700% return. But no... $20 on Manchester United (-1.5) vs. Wigan (at 1.53) $10 on one goal in the above match (5.80) Game on! Also, the latest video our M&O professor used to kick off a lecture. United fanboy shows commendable forward planning to procure a strikemate:
- academics - I'm going to walk out of the exam venue to do my thinking once I finish future exams next time - seriously, realizing loopholes in your solution after handing the paper in is becoming too common an occurrence for me. Hopefully it will cost only a couple of the twenty marks on offer. With all the stuff due soon, I'm feelin' like a bunny placed in a circular enclosure and told to relac one corner, lah. 
How to relac??? (Source: Guess where?) Econs has been pretty entertaining, though - my Thai TA described to the class how a bank back in his native country nearly collapsed after a dog got hit by a car. Huh? Yes, after a dog got hit by a car. You see, the dead dog happened to get flung onto the pavement just outside the bank's doorsteps. And a crowd gathered around it. Then some police arrived to check out the fuss. Then some responsible citizens began calling up their friends, relatives and countrymen about the mass of people and police outside the bank. So, when the bank got around to opening its doors for the day, it faced a mob of depositors eager to withdraw at any cost. Sucked to be them. And what's with the Specialize in Door-to-Door to Moscow tagline I saw on a presumably local moving company's vans? Didn't know SG-Russian freight could be such a prominent niche.
- academics - "If your professors knew how to make money from investments, they wouldn't be here" - EC3332 professor (paraphrased) Still behind my planned schedule despite my (mostly) best efforts, but on the bright side didn't do too badly at all on the first A.I. quiz (exam). Down to a few hours to take care of my CS3212 midterm tomorrow, so I'll make this quick. Used a couple of nights to create a research website for my EC3333 Portfolio Management project, but truth to tell the short one-month scope makes investment rather a shot in the dark. Hey, even with "expert expertise" about three-quarters of mutual funds underperform the market index (not helped by fat management fees), so what hope does the average shmuck have? Well, I do have (arbitrarily) low transaction costs on my side for the purposes of the academic project, and a bunch of probably irrelevant stats to justify my success or failure. Being able to tell just how much the STI component stocks are correlated to each other counts for something, no? For the record, I'm banking on Hyflux, OCBC and SIA to begin with, mostly since they have been set rather higher target prices (i.e. value for money) by Credit Suisse. Here's a video of a match my Footstar character was involved with. It entailed a bit of fussing over codecs and the like as I struggled to encode ten minutes of decent quality video into a file of less than 10MB, only to discover that Youtube's limit is 100MB. Duh. Good thing was I discovered the free Xvid codec, which should come in useful when I edit my MNO clip. For now, watch out for the player Lin bin Ali losing the ball below :) (No I didn't think that up, the character name was selected out of a pregenerated list)
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