Yet another example of Channel NewsAsia’s “quality” journalism “CNA…kwality journalism as always” - b_catenin Thanks to b_catenin who discovered this massive Channel NewsAsia FAIL. On the surface, this insipid article seems like nothing more than the typical bland coverage of the Olympics. However, the choice of accompanying photo makes it blindingly obvious that at least one person, probably more, is asleep at the editors’ offices. That is most certainly not an Indonesian flag on the badminton player’s shirt! If you’re wondering what country’s flag that is, it’s India. The confusion is understandable when one takes into account that in Chinese, India is 印度 while Indonesia is either 印尼 or 印度尼西亚, and that both Indonesians and Indians are relatively dark-skinned. Still, when you add this to the increasing pile of evidence that Channel NewsAsia does a really terrible job of journalistic inquiry and fact-checking, it is really not at all surprising that the Singapore media doesn’t have a particularly sterling reputation anywhere. The birthplace of ‘anteanteanteantepenultimate’ Ennui finally got the better of me and I’ve decided to coin the word ‘anteanteanteantepenultimate’, meaning “sixth from the last”. Welcome! I searched for the sequence of words ‘ultimate’, ’penultimate’, ‘antepenultimate’, … on Google and got this particular distribution of hits: Hopefully I now get to skew the tail end of this plot a little. Heh heh. Links for 2008-08-11 [del.icio.us] Dovecot secure imap server The LHC, what’s the mystery? The Large Hadron Collider has reached its operational temperature and should be ready to fire today, with injection tests scheduled over the weekend. The first actual experiments are scheduled for September, but if you’re absolutely dying to find out what’s going on right now, here’s a summary of the testing so far. Meanwhile, if you’re still unsure as to what the big deal with the LHC is all about, here’s a short summary:  The rate of the development of science The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test. - Richard P. Feynman, The meaning of it all Tomorrow’s a big day The Olympics begin at 2008-08-08, 8:08 pm (GMT+8), thus ushering in two weeks of frantic festivities and flaunting physiques. The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on, with a 10-25% probability of making Stable Black Holes That Eat Up the Earth, Destroying All Living Organisms in the Process And Singapore will gear up to celebrate yet another year of economic prosperity and racial integration. Happy birthday. Chinese rah-rah Please tell me, dear reader: how is this kind of rah-rah from China in any way different from that coming out of Singapore? Clearly they have learnt well. My, what cute girls they have! Links for 2008-08-03 [del.icio.us] TreeMaker origami on demand! The Pioneer Woman Cooks! » Blog Archive » P-P-P-Pie Crust. And It’s P-P-P-Perfect. A pie crust recipe that works! Adso Annotates chinese text with pronunciations and dictionary definitions. Perfect for brushing up on my rusty chinese nciku 在线词典 Chinese characters and pinyin dictionary New Chinese dictionary! Hand-write dem characters! Al-Jazeera in Singapore: food, inflation and the poor Thanks to The Online Citizen, I watched this amazing piece of media coverage about the poor in Singapore by Al-Jazeera. Look, it’s Chee Soon Juan and he’s not a rabid monster! And ooh, did she just utter phrases like “tightly-controlled media” and comments about “the government liking criticism even less than it does welfare”? Oh my! References Laura Kyle, Al-Jazeera, Soaring prices hit Singapore’s poor, 2008-07-27. Some good Temasek news For once, I’ve read some positive news regarding Temasek’s investment in Merrill Lynch. The Financial Times of London has just announced a new wrinkle in the Temasek-Merrill deal, one that means well for Singapore: The Singapore investor had negotiated a reset clause, which meant that if Merrill were to issue new stock at less than $48 a share within 12 months, the bank would compensate Temasek for the difference for each share held. The result was that Merrill had to hand back $2.5bn, which Temasek plans to re-invest immediately along with a fresh capital injection of $900m. [...] Temasek’s proposed $3.4bn holding in Merrill Lynch is subject to regulatory approval. Depending on the take-up of Merrill’s $8.5bn share offering, Temasek’s stake could rise from 9 per cent to closer to 15 per cent. Any holding above 10 per cent would require formal approval from US regulators. This apparently means that Merrill Lynch will effectively reimburse Temasek for its paper losses so far. Good for them! Still, it’s pretty obvious that the big Singapore-side investors have massively underestimated the magnitude of the current US slump. One can only hope that they’re really in it for the long run. References Sundeep Tucker, Financial Times (London), Temasek ploy pays off at bank’s cost, 2008-07-29. Excerpt from ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ From Steven Krantz’s Through a Glass Darkly, posted on arXiv: A mathematician typically goes through most of his early life as a flaming success at everything he does. One excels in grade school, one excels in high school, one excels in college. Even in graduate school one can do quite well if one is willing to put forth the effort. Put in slightly different terms: One can get a long way in the basic material just by being smart. Not so much effort or discipline is required. And this may explain why so many truly brilliant people get left in the dust. They reach a point where some real Sitzfleisch and true effort are required, and they are simply not up to it. They have never had to expend such disciplined study before, so why start now? While there is no question that being smart can take one a long way, there comes a point—for all of us—where it becomes clear that a capacity for hard work can really make a difference. Most professional mathematicians put in at least ten hours per day, at least six days per week. There are many who do much more. And we tend to enjoy it. The great thing about mathematics is that it does not fight you. It will not sneak behind your back and bite you. It is always satisfying and always rewarding. Doing mathematics is not like laying bricks or mowing the grass. The quantity of end product is not a linear function of the time expended. Far from it. As Charles Fefferman, Fields Medalist, once said, a good mathematician throws 90% of his work in the trash. Of course one learns from all that work, and it makes one stronger for the next sortie. But one often, at the end of six months or a year, does not have much to show. On the other hand, one can be blessed with extraordinary periods of productivity. The accumulated skills and insights of many years of study suddenly begin to pay off, and one finds that he has plenty to say. And it is quite worthwhile. Certainly worth writing up and sharing with others and publishing. This is what makes life rewarding, and this is what we live for. Krantz clearly wrote for the mathematical audience, but what he has said about graduate school and academia can apply equally well to any scientific discipline, and probably most other disciplines too. In my graduate career I have seen otherwise smart people get frustrated with nature and physical reality being too opaque for them to understand. The worst of the lot, however, neither tough it out nor exit gracefully under pressure, but rather choose to externalize their shortcomings as having come under attack by other Forces at Work that have been hampering them: the Establishment, the chauvinistic culture of academia, the hideboundness of professors, their other labmates’ conspiracies, … I have had to deal with people lashing out at me for trying to comment thoughtfully on what they were doing; they apparently took it personally, even as some form of sardonic criticism. But you know, we’re not in this for people to pet us on our heads, telling them what smart little boys and girls we are. It’s about some modicum of passion for the subjects that interest us. Some people just don’t get it. In the end, I can only look back at such people with pity. Scholarship agencies: old hat in a global labor market Again, the Singapore press trots out, from the usual sources, the hackneyed complaint that people who break their bonds are morally deficient ingrates. There is nothing new in these arguments. What’s more interesting, though, lies beneath that veneer of smear. On the same day comes more comments on complacency: ‘Our people must realise that being No.1 is very temporal.  ‘We better keep on honing that…Make sure that our young people are hungry. If our young people are not hungry enough, bring in hungrier ones from overseas. Make them feel hungry, increase the hungriness index.’ Strip away the rhetoric, and the stark truth is exposed: Singapore simply cannot continue to grow along its current trajectory. Other countries, other economies, they’ll catch up. We already know that. We already know the solution: move toward economic activities that require more brain cells that what Fox calls the Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V type job. We have moved away from physically menial jobs to mentally menial jobs, but in order to stay one step ahead, we’ve got to move yet again toward something more ‘value-added’. We need people to do creative jobs, and yet we cannot find the people to do them. Singapore simply lacks people of appropriate caliber to do them. It’s a problem not unique to Singapore either. The world lacks such people, and desperately wants them. That’s why talent in this century can serve a global pool, not merely a local or even national one. This is not news either. What perhaps is new, though, is looking at both threads together. Who are the people taking advantage of the global labor pool? There are the scholars that return and others that leave. Are those who leave deficient in moral fiber, or are they simply gravitating toward better deals spun in a free-for-all international arena? Which scholars leave? Perhaps if these scholarship agencies were to examine their personnel files more closely, they may one day realize that ironically, the people who leave are disproportionately their best and brightest. Bond-breakers aren’t leaving in a huff and then working double-shifts at an assembly line job to pay their liquidate damages; many of them end up at big-name companies like Google, Microsoft, UBS and Merrill Lynch. Why do scholars leave? If it is as simple as taking the better of two deals, why are scholarship agencies offering the worse deal, despite what they claim during their marketing sessions of taking their charges seriously and offering to nurture them properly? Are scholarship agencies offering careers commensurate with the rates on the global labor market - rates almost certainly higher than those on the regular market? And how about opportunities? perks? fringe benefits? work environment? Why would people want to get stuck with staid, stolid government careers when they think other people can offer them more challenging, more exciting, better-paid jobs? The proletariat classes have found job security to be based on nothing more than empty promises. Six years of indentured labor is not an asset, it is a fatal liability, a sign that Singapore scholarship agencies don’t trust their recipients to do the right thing. Is it any surprise, then, that the recipients chafe under this paternalistic, supercilious arrogance? The government agencies handing out scholarships have the power to tilt the balance. They set the rates, they set the agenda. They can make better deals than the ones that have served our country so well in the twentieth century. The government makes a big deal about maintaining Singapore’s competitiveness, and not being complacent. Yet it seems to turn its blind spot on its immense complacence regarding Singapore’s competitiveness in the top-echelon labor markets. Low-wage policies can only go so far in the current economic climate, as inflation eats away at real incomes and other rapidly-developing economies undercut large swathes of jobs held by Singaporeans in the late 20th century. The only way is up and forward, yet their policies are still firmly entrenched in the vision and rhetoric of our Founding Father. It is no different with the crème de la crème that is so actively sought out by so many people. Now for the last interesting twist - are the poor better scholarship holders? No doubt that it’s fantastic policy for upward social mobility, but the flip side is that they are obviously the ones that can least afford to bail themselves out. Controlling for that one factor, I cannot think of any reason why they would be less likely to break their bonds. Gratitude can very quickly give way to resentment in the realization of the vast array of opportunities that open up in the process of schooling. The missing ingredient is this: scholarships are not the only route to a college education at a good school abroad. The ever-growing list at the Incomplete Guide to Financial Aid for Singaporeans is testament to the opportunities being created by universities and private foundations to fund students falling into precisely this category: the bright but underprivileged. And in fact, the increasing number of needs-blind financial aid sponsors shows that one doesn’t even need to be poor to have a foot in the door - there is no significant reason to think that merit and poverty are in any way correlated. The Singapore scholarship agencies are already falling heads-over-heels to clarify that being poor has nothing to do with being any more or less deserving of opportunities for higher education. At the end of the day, who’s the bigger fool - the Singaporeans who are leaving, or the Singaporeans who continue to harass and mock ex-scholars ten years after the fact, and despite their grandiose schemes have little to show for their efforts? People are free to mock us who have chosen to leave, but they choose to do so at the expense of revealing their own ignorance. Thanks to Fox who told me about these articles. References Fox, Next Stop Wonderland, ST: Still adamant that scholarship holders serve their bonds, 2008-07-23.  Zakir Hussain, Straits Times, Still adamant that scholarship holders serve their bonds, 2008-07-24. Jeremy Au Yong, Straits Times, ‘Closet socialist’ Philip Yeo favours poorer students, 2008-07-24. Jeremy Au Yong, Straits Times, Key to staying No. 1 - young people who are hungry, 2008-07-24. Hoe Yeen Nie, Channel NewsAsia, PSC, A*STAR clarify scholarship policies following Philip Yeo remarks, 2008-07-26. Things that shouldn’t happen at a conference People visiting your university for a conference shouldn’t have to read a campus map and a map of the town just to figure out where things are. How much would it have cost to put up strategic signs to tell people how to walk from the hotel to the lecture hall to the poster room, instead of having streams of semi-confused attendees traipsing randomly all over campus? Half the attendees didn’t realize that there were two rooms until both poster sessions were over. People shouldn’t have to be led on a ten-minute walk away from the conference hall just for the coffee break. Especially at 9:45 on a Sunday morning, and especially when 300 people braved the rain only to discover that campus catering forgot the order. Three hundred hungry conference delegates shouldn’t have to serve themselves dorm food from just one serving line for every meal. And when most of them are graduate students, “Well, if the lines are too long, there’re plenty of restaurants downtown!” is not an acceptable alternative. The conference schedule shouldn’t have the wrong time printed on it for the conference banquet. Also, it is ridiculous to expect students to have to pay $5 for a soda and $6 for bottled water at the reception, no matter how high-class the venue is. Seriously. Conference delegates shouldn’t be expected to make their way to the banquet dinner location on their own by public transport in a city that is foreign to 85% of them. The venue really didn’t need to be an hour away, either. Attendees who drove to the conference shouldn’t have been issued the wrong kind of parking permit, causing half of them all get parking tickets and have to be all trouped down to campus police to get it all sorted out. Attendees who have vehicles shoudn’t have to discover on the last day of the conference that campus construction had cordoned off one third of the assigned parking garage for drilling, causing the hapless vehicles behind the flagged line to be towed away and forcing the other cars to drive over concrete debris and power cords. “Your hosts should have told you”, said the tow truck driver. No kidding. People presenting posters shouldn’t have been told to expect to give a poster of a specific size, only to discover that the boards actually provided were too narrow and too tall. Flimsy cardboard that was obviously requisitioned for this temporary purpose, with insufficient pins or other mounting material provided, and having to actually dismount the poster board just to tack their oversized posters on them makes for a rather class act. In this day and age, it should be reasonable to expect wireless Internet access at the conference sites. People shouldn’t have to have to walk to the nearby Burger King just to use the free wifi hotspot there. Links for 2008-07-18 [del.icio.us] density functional theory beta version My advisor told me about Kieron Burke's project to write a textbook on density functional theory. It's woefully incomplete, but very insightful. Tamsui Fisherman's Wharf 淡水漁人碼頭 [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: Once a smelly fishing port, the district of Tamshui in the north of Taipei is now one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods. This sunset panorama is taken near the train station. 當年薰味的淡水漁人碼頭，今日已變成高級主宰區，天天來欣賞夕陽的人不少。 Stitched together with hugin+autopano-sift+nona+enfuse+enblend 這帳環境攝影是用hugin軟件屏成的。 Links for 2008-07-15 [del.icio.us] 10 Minute Mail Get email addresses that expire in only ten minutes! Gr8 for sites that need some place to send you a confirmation email Links for 2008-07-13 [del.icio.us] GoThere [cond-mat/0211443v5] A bird's-eye view of density-functional theory Lucid and well-written introduction to DFT as it is practiced today A graduate student’s take on the structure of knowledge In a moment of unbridled silliness, I doodled this Venn diagram in skitch. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! Links for 2008-07-08 [del.icio.us] BYTE.com > Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash CUDA Zone—CUDA Documentation txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator Gethuman - Home Page gnuplot tips (not so Frequently Asked Questions) Matrix Reference Manual Tips and tricks for LaTeX, BibTeX and friends NULLSTONE Optimization Categories Работы призера международных конкурсов, фотографа дикой природы Tim Flach (66 фото - 7.53Mb) - 2PHOTO.ru | theFOTO.ru | thePHOTO.ru 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design | Fonts | Smashing Magazine New webzine: Glass Castle Glass Castle: Born in 1965, you in essence grew up side-by-side with the nation of Singapore. Could you talk a little about the evolving expectations for women in society over your lifetime? Sylvia Lim: I did not feel it in my family as my parents treated boys and girls similarly. But I have seen evolution outside of my family. These days, it would not be acceptable to ask a girl not to further her studies so that her brother can do so. Another phenomenon is that being a homemaker is now a luxury compared to the past, when economic pressure and the cost of living was not so severe. Jolene, a long time blog reader, informs me that one of her new projects, along with collaborators Athena and Reine, has reached fruition. In Jolene’s own words: We’re pleased to announce the launch today of a new webzine focusing on women’s welfare and gender relations in Singapore and the region. The inaugural issue includes an interview with NCMP Sylvia Lim and an explanation of the aims and aspirations for this new online community. http://www.glass-castle.org/ Updates to the main zine are every other Monday, but the blog will be updated on a more frequent basis. Please have a look, and have your browser bookmark ready if you like what you see! The quote at the beginning comes from an exclusive interview with NMP Sylvia Lim on her experiences in male-dominated sectors of Singapore society, from her early days as a police officer to her current portfolio as NMP. Feminism to some connotes bra-burning fanaticism, but in reality it’s more about gender equality from the women’s point of view. While it may seem abstract and remote, and hence a non-issue to some readers, Jolene lists some common examples of inequity in her inaugural editorial in Glass Castle: Here’s a few example of sex inequality in Singapore: poor women are purchased from neighbouring countries to be all-in-one cleaners, sex partners and wombs. When husbands force intercourse on their wives, the law does not see this as rape. Women are bombarded with advertising insisting that our bodies are problems requiring solutions. (Glass Castle’s list doesn’t include one example too painfully obvious to mention: no national service for Singapore women. It’s not just about women when it comes to gender inequality.) And yet it’s the women whom, all too often, get the short end of the stick. Glass Castle continues with this: We do not accept that inequality is part of our culture that must be preserved against Western imperialism, modernity, or anything else. Women everywhere - in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, not just in the West - are facing down inequality. For thousands of years women in most places had almost no say in what the “culture” of “their” societies involved. The “cultures” of our immigrant ancestors included crippling women in the name of beauty, and throwing living women into fires when their husbands died. Culture does and must change. If you care about changing our society for the better, do check out Glass Castle and say hi to Athene, Jolene and Reine, the team working hard to bring you news and analysis on the women’s welfare front. Fireworks Happy post-party-fireworks-photo-review day! Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Fireworks in Champaign [Flickr] Elia Diodati posted a photo: 4th of July fireworks in Dodds Park in Champaign, IL Perfect day My annoying labmate is absent, my advisor just sent out my second paper and is now reading the draft of my third manuscript, it’s sunny out - 78 F and low humidity to boot - and my parsley-cinnamon bagels actually turned out well. Ah, for more days like this.