Kevin L, Author at Kevin Low

Search and Research

It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I’ve been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you’re looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you’ve got to work out a plan somehow.

So in this article, I’d be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It’s by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you’d like to choose. I’m writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn’t require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.

I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there’s no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you’re going to write would be groundless anyways.

After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you’re clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn’t initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.

Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you’ve read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you’ve not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you’ve found in the beginning.

Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!

Printing Stuff

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Imagine you need a square meter of light, perhaps for a single ’tile’ on the ceiling that emits lights at your building. You’d probably get contractors to make a box with circuits inside that connects to a couple of fluorescent tubes (or if you’re quite rich, a couple of LEDs) and then cover the thing with a translucent white piece of acrylic. The entire structure is bulky and probably quite energy consuming. Now, scientists have found a way to make a ‘sheet’ of LED that would allow you to make that ‘lighted tile’ much more easily and is also much more compact. Essentially, the technology allows you to print a circuit that is wired in a way that acts as a diode, and one that emits light.

And since we’re at the issue of printing stuff; we mentioned previously about industrial prototyping machines that churns out 3D structures/models. I was quite intrigued by the idea of being able to print out a peg for your clothes or even design a shoe that fits you perfectly. But perhaps even more amazing would be the ability to print out cells, tissues and even organs as reported by The Economist.

The article mentioned about growing organs from scratch and raised the example of bladders being grown from original cells of patients. Essentially the patients are donating organs to themselves; the same applies for the printing of organs. The idea is appealing because there’s nothing artificial about them beside the involvement of doctors in the process of growing the cells and putting them together – ultimately the organ is still organic and from the patients. Perhaps then, Iran’s model for kidney donation won’t be so appealing anymore.

Don’t Kill Nouns with Adjectives

The sweltering heat these days reminds me of my old, favourite introduction: “The monstrous red ball of supreme heat hung on the light-blue sky, threatening to melt all the helpless pedestrians on the busy street with its radiating warmth“. I loved this introduction so much that I would use it for almost every primary school composition assignment irregardless of the question; after some time, my teacher became so accustomed to my writing that he could identify my composition from its first sentence. Since my teacher did not complain much, I had the false belief that my descriptive introduction reflected good writing style. Eventually, the use of adjectives became a desire to show off my rich vocabulary and that resulted in an immature writing style.

I did not realise my mistake until much later, when I entered high school. My heavily adjectival prose caught my teacher’s attention and when she could not take it any longer, she summoned me to her office. That day in her office changed my writing drastically because it was there that I understood the shortcomings of my style; instead of displaying my proficiency in the English language, the constant use of adjectives only made my writing embarrassingly ornate. In addition, my writing also suggests a lack of confidence, as if I am trying to make up for my inability by overdecorating my sentences. If every crisis is a critical crisis, every emergency an urgent emergency, and every problem a grave problem, then the whole idea of a crisis, an emergency, or a problem becomes devalued. In these situations, the adjective becomes the enemy of the noun.

That does not mean that we can do away with adjectives. Adjectives have their uses when they define and refine rather than simply emphasise. In the sentence “We are in legal trouble“, the adjective, legal, has a truly informative function. For a vigorous style, you can try replacing adjectives with colourful nouns. “The penniless man that lives in a small, filthy hut” can be replaced by “the pauper that lives in a hovel.” A “large and impressive house” can be replaced by a “mansion” and so on. You get the idea. Now, before you give in to the temptation of using flamboyant language, do remember the guiding principle of using adjectives and you will surely produce a good piece of writing!

This article was written by a guest writer on ERPZ.net and not by Kevin – its presence in this blog is merely due to the archived nature of Kevin’s blog posts from the past.

Moving Fuji

A couple of weeks back I mentioned that I was reading ‘How would you move Mount Fuji‘ by William Poundstone. It’s an interesting read but no doubt pretty ‘scary’ in terms of the facts it is trying to convey. Poundstone presents not only the puzzles that are offered in interviews conducted by Human Resource departments of ‘talent-intensive’ firms but also a discussion on whether this methods work to hire people that these companies need. He highlighted that companies thinks bad hires are way too high a risk that they would rather risk losing a good hire than getting a bad one by mistake. As a result the interview processes are all skewed towards rejecting people (more or less) and identifying somewhat extraordinary people.

Poundstone identifies an important question HR people should be asking themselves when posing puzzle questions and that is whether the candidate’s response is going to make an impact on your decision to hire or not. If it doesn’t then there’s no point asking the question, like this particular interesting one. Indeed, from a HR point of view, interview time is precious and missing out on good hires is not a pleasant thing either, so structuring an interview to be efficient is very important. If a puzzle can help to bring out key information then it should be used; otherwise, it might just be an abuse of the interviewer’s position.

Well if you’re not interested in the software industry or the finance industry then the puzzles in the book would be nothing more than just a great past-time. This makes Poundstone’s book more interesting because his section of answers to the puzzles given as examples in the book launches into elaboration discussion of how one should approach the puzzles. He attempts to give us some general guidelines on solving these puzzles. He gives nine steps (mainly for interviewees though):

1) Decide what kind of answer is expected (monologue or dialogue)
2) Whatever you think of first is wrong (that’s why it’s a puzzle)
3) Forget you ever learned calculus
4) Big, complicated questions usually have simple answers
5) Simple questions often demand complicated answers
6) “Perfectly logical beings” are not like you and me
7) When you hit a brick wall, try to list the assumptions you’re making. See what happens when you reject each of these assumptions in succession
8) When crucial information is missing in a logic puzzle, lay out the possible scenarios. You’ll almost always find that you don’t need the missing information to solve the problem.
9) Where possible, give a good answer that the interviewer has never heard before

Overall, Mount Fuji is a good read, but I’m guessing most readers would want to speed past the explanations and go straight to the answers themselves. The best puzzles always have the most counter-intuitive solutions and elegant answers. For more practice, you might like to visit some of Poundstone’s reference sites: here, here and here.

Serious thinking on the Internet

The Straits Times, on 19 February this year, republished an article written by Adam Cohen of the New York Times. Cohen’s article reminded me about some of the benefits of the Internet which many often overlook in view of the tremendous upwelling of “junk” (for instance, rag and gossip made more accessible online) on the Internet.

Cohen argues that some feel the Internet may be “driving culture ever lower”, but it is also allowing “a wealth of serious thinking”. He uses the example of a BBC podcast “In Our Time” which delves deep into history to examine “arcane topics from history, literature, science and philosophy”. This certainly would be the other side of the “Internet coin”, the benefits that could be accrued to laymen and academics alike. Albeit one needs to be interested before one can actually be open and be exposed to such “high-brow” knowledge, but at least it provides avenues for those interested to be enlightened.

While I admit I am not in the least interested in the “arcane topics” listed above, I am myself a beneficiary of the Internet in terms of exposure to “serious thinking”. TED.com is a good example. Short-form for Technology, Entertainment & Design, the website devotes itself to “Ideas Worth Spreading” by broadcasting presentations relating to these spheres and more, allowing netizens access to a more interactive / interesting showcase of what might be normally deemed inaccessible and arcane, meant only for academics and to be showcased in libraries and institutions. I have watched lectures / presentations that have amazed and enthused me about issues that interest me but would not propel me to borrow books from the library about it, such as on HIV/AIDS.

So… if you are bored, dont just watch paint dry on Youtube, watch something educational on TED.com and dont let your brain rot and idle.

Taxing Criminals

The Economist ran an interesting story about “a government-issued stamp that is expected to remain unpurchased, but which users of illegal goods must, by law, affix to substances they are not allowed to possess”. Essentially, the government is creating another layer of crime above a crime. It’s as good as saying you should not be stealing people’s money, but if you do really steal, then you’ve to pay taxes on your loot. If you avoid the taxes, you’re committing tax evasion plus theft.

Authorities seem to believe that the tax helps to further punish people who are arrested for a crime (since the inability to discover the original crime would make the taxes lame anyways) and thus serve a higher level of deterrence to the crime. I wonder if criminals would bother to discover that they would be penalized twice for a single crime.

The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was cited as an early conception of taxing illegal drugs. It is interesting that old bureaucracies sometimes like to make an act inconvenient rather than ban it outright. Maybe it just happens to drugs; Singapore could actually try applying extremely steep taxes on Chewing Gums rather than ban it outright.

Maths Moment

I was desperate to check the sample correlation coefficient (r) of a list of sample that forms a scatter plot. I was aware that my graphing calculator could do that but when I finished keying in the information and then applying the LinReg (a + bx) function, I realised I could only obtain the ‘a’ and the ‘b’ constants of the regression line and not the coefficient. Thanks to my JC notes, I manage to learn how to get it to work.

So just a reminder for JC kids how to allow the LinReg function display the r and r-square figures: go to Catalog>DiagnosisOn. This is probably the only time you have to go to the Catalog menu in your entire JC H2 Mathematics life.

As for those interested to explore the capabilities of your Graphing Calculator for Chemistry, you can check out the last part of my Chemistry notes.

Planned Obsolescence

If you watched The Story of Stuff, which I introduced to this site several weeks back, it introduces several ideas that are perhaps unfamiliar to most laymen or locals for the matter. One such idea is planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence can be defined as “the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer”. In other words, when product engineers design your product, they purposely design it such that it will physically or psychologically become obsolete (i.e. useless) after a while.

This sounds like a very disturbing idea, but it makes sense to the producer of the good for the consumer to keep purchasing “updated and improved” goods from them as their old ones break down. Planned obsolescence may even be described as an art; it would take much ingenuity, in fact, to design a product such that it does not break down too obviously as a result of inferior quality but consumers still want to buy this product and its future “upgrades”.

If you wonder how planned obsolescence affects us, this article from The Daily Green is useful in highlighting some occurrences of planned obsolescence in products we use in our daily lives. So have you unintentionally succumbed to this phenomena?

A Request

Hello everyone, my name is Peng Sing and I will be writing under the screen name, Scherzo (pronounced ‘S’care-Zoh’) which stands for “Joke” in Italian. You’ll find out more about me in the times to come… if I am able to sustain my interest in contributing regularly.

This post is actually a request; something that has been bothering me lately. It is a timely request, because more and more young people are becoming interested in politics/political commentary. But too many fall prey to euphemism, dishonesty and witch-hunting (personal attacks).

I came across a speech by Loh Kah Seng, given during the launch of “Men in White” at a library, which got me thinking a bit. The main excerpt which caught my attention was how he aptly describes a social phenomenon among our youth in the recent years:

“There is a tendency for young Singaporeans to read our past for inspiration and vilification. This is not surprising and is part of the enduring appeal of history. Inspiration because the past provides positive precedents, or heroes, of an earlier generation of Singaporeans (also young and idealistic then) struggling to make Singapore a better, fairer and more open society. Vilification because history also provides what appears to be proof of what some present day young Singaporeans want to believe – that the government is repressive, manipulative and narrowly neo-liberal. In short, we read Singapore history for Lim Chin Siong and Operation Coldstore.”

There’s a whole load of anti-establishment/anti-PAP angst that show up frequently on the Temasek Review and many other Internet portals that discuss Local Affairs. It is there where you can find these Singapore’s Neo-political-liberalists. My impression of them is that they love to go about scrutinizing every single piece of pro-government literature that comes out in mainstream media with “critical thinking skills” they picked up from god-knows-where. Very often these are senseless personal attacks at various political figures, or simply emotionally charged posts that appeal to the reader. They always seem to make sense at first, but upon full of logical fallacies that are either misleading or isolated cases that are exaggerated.

Be wary of:

Appeals to popularity – just because something is popular/unpopular, does not mean it is correct. Eg. “Majority of Singaporeans are disappointed with budget 2010. Singapore is going down.” Because everyone is upset about something, does not mean that it is harmful. Note that the use of ‘Majority’ as well: Majority of Singaporeans? Anti-government activists are also Singaporeans! And where did he get his numbers from?

False-dichotomies – Something that is not good, does not mean that it is bad. Be alert for people that present you with only 2 options, do not let them fool you into thinking there is no room for alternatives or to remain neutral.

Red Herrings – Used as a distraction. Eg. The PAP is not putting enough emphasis on keeping a tighter leash on PRs, what’s worse, incentives for childbirth have been stagnant for the past few years Clearly, immigration and childbirth incentives have little in common, but is roped into the argument to make the PAP look bad when in actual fact the argument at hand is about immigration policies!

I Forgot What This Fallacy is Called – But it is still a fallacy. When considering reading peoples’ interpretations of social/political trends, always take note of how his ideas are presented. Was the trend drawn from data/reliable observations? Or was it the other way round? There is likelihood that many poor/dishonest political commentators base their conclusions from their opinions/emotions first, then find ways to support their conclusion, often leaving out on purpose vital pieces of information that actually prove them wrong.

Finally, remember to address all the other political parties that isn’t PAP as ‘non-ruling parties’ and not ‘opposition parties’. It brings about a very negative connotation and is subconsciously perpetuated to those growing up; ‘opposition’ appears to be rather disruptive as compared to non-ruling.

It is unfair, if not difficult, to instantly label various political parties that don’t begin with ‘P’ and end with ‘AP’ to harbour malicious intents. They may ‘oppose’ the PAP sometimes, but where Singaporeans are concerned, they are addressing the concerns of a group of Singapore Citizens. As much as they like to find fault in our government/PAP and have peculiar ways of doing things, we must bear in mind that most of their intentions are good.

These are habits of the mind, to be critical of others’ thoughts as well as your own.

Have fun poking fun at lousy political blogs/articles/comments on Temasek Review! 😀

Biz Connect

Just recently, The Economist was tabulating the impacts of social networks and featured significant discussion on their impact on the business. The Big Money has a list of top 50 brand names (they call them ‘companies’) that has been doing well on Facebook as a social media vehicle for their brands. It appears that Facebook have become some sort of brand management tool that is carefully balanced with fans/consumer followings and interactions. As applications proliferate on these social networking platforms, there is a risk that all these commercial stuff are crowding out the actual social messages that are being sent over it. While

Google recently produced Buzz as I’ve highlighted previously, and The Economist thinks that it’ll hardly do much to dent the influence of Facebook and Twitter.