Kevin L, Author at Kevin Low

To Read, or Not

It sometimes appear to me amazing how highly people think of textbooks and course books. It makes me feel like writing one; perhaps one that teaches people when they should be using their textbooks. A textbook is basically course material that is used to teach you on a subject and when you have learnt about the stuff, there’s little need to do a wholesale revisit, unless you’re confident you’ve forgotten everything.

Why should you torture yourself by relearning everything you learnt and frustrating yourself with some minor definition deviations your memory have insisted upon and trying to ‘re-memorize’ the ‘right definition’? And more importantly, if you can learn the subject or whatever you’re trying to learn without a textbook, why bother to get one?

A textbook has a couple of main uses, some of which concerns the students and others are mainly preoccupations of teachers and textbook writers. The functions students are usually concerned about are explanation and representations while those teachers are interested is includes those, and in addition, the standardization function. It’s not difficult to see why this is so, students are hoping to learn something from the textbook; the explanations helps them understand and possibly provide them a means of explaining the concepts to themselves and others while the representation gives students a means of expressing the ideas and concept on paper (ie allowing them to take exams).

The teachers would love textbooks for those two facts since they relieve them somewhat of their teaching responsibilities but more importantly, it helps them standardize what their students learn and cope with queries that they might have. This is especially important for more contentious issues in the subject that has yet to be resolved by experts and the syllabus prescribes some default stand on the matter for time being.

As a student, one should see the textbook more as a guide than an authority and use it accordingly. Going through it once and understanding the concepts one seeks to master is basically all that the textbook should offer. A slow learner might revisit it a couple of times to grasp a concept or to master the explanations fully; and occasionally one could browse through it as a reference for the way they represent certain information (in the form of diagrams, charts and such) but it is difficult to gain anything more than that on repeated revisits to the textbook.

The ideal usage of a textbook is to synthesize the stuff from different sources together with it on your notes and chucking them aside when you’re doing your revision – rely just on your personal notes (those that aggregate information from your readings of textbooks, your prescribed readings and lecture notes). Of course, this advice is more for students who revise consistently and are wholly familiar with the content which they’re sitting an exam for.

Careful Bots

It’s a long time since I last directed readers to a lengthy prose penned at The New Yorker; while some of those long-winded stuff are reserved for pure entertainment when one is really bored in front of the computer, Jeremy Groopman wrote an interesting narrative report about robots that cares for patients. If you’ve some time to spare, it’d be good to go through some of these technology stuff that is more elaborate and human in reporting than those featured in The Economist.

The same magazine reports about another kind of careful technology. Seymour M. Hersh explores a more remote topic that less people would really bother about seriously despite its implications on many.

On Incentives & Debts

James Surowiecki fiddled about the idea that our tax breaks on debt interests are encouraging debt, the ones that eventually pulled down the system with it. He makes a lot of sense, especially when he mentioned:

Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Of course, he was speaking largely of corporate debts as well as mortgages but he did also raised the point that “In the U.S., people used to be able to write off the interest they paid on credit cards. That tax break was abolished in 1986…” Interestingly, Fortune Magazine ran a story about record debt in China. The diagnosis sounds grim but it does little to compare the context of the debts in China and US, making it difficult to assess if the ‘some economists’ quoted by them makes sense. Moreover, the statement about infrastructural investments is way too wobbly, China has much room to pull ahead when you compare them with the developed world; to be frank, the top cities in China barely compare with top cities of the world. In addition, The Economist have also tried to offer an alternative, more comprehensive explanation of China’s growth linked to productivity.

Some economists believe China’s infrastructure, already superior to that of many other developing economies, has now passed the point where more investment can contribute much to growth. China, in other words — despite the rosy, headline GDP numbers — might be stuck.

And yes, Japan is now fearful of the D-word, or rather the comeback of it; not depression, or debts. It’s kind of cool to have a central bank that combats ‘deflation’ rather than ‘inflation’ though.

Tech Bits Again

While the big stuff like satellites seem to be doing a great deal for our planning and crops, the small stuff in the field of nanotechnology is doing pretty scary stuff with carbon nanotubes again. The nanotubes actually end up being integrated into the plant cells, how disgusting can that get. Okay, I’m a little paranoid.

Practical Intelligence

I got to know about this book through a friend who was exploring topics that ranged from manipulating personality test results to acting smart in front of employers. It’s a great boon that this is not the kind of book that teaches you to act smart. Karl Albrecht writes realistically about how we can go about making ourselves more intelligent in practical situations. There are many ideas in the book I’ve thought about previously but failed to put into concrete concepts as he did. I must say Karl did a wonderful job.

Like most of the other books on thinking, Karl discusses the make-up of the brains, the way different lobes on the brain controls different stuff and how they work together in concert and then he draws some meaningful speculation on the way we think. There are many speculations which are largely unproven in neuro-sciences but are well known in the field of psychology. Never mind the actual theories, Karl shows us how they might be useful for aiding us discover our mind’s potential. He firms up the concept of ‘Affirmative Thinking’, which I think is a very important idea in our lives. We’ve cease to be gatekeepers of our mind in this media age, often pushed around, influenced by the people who are in turn controlled by others around as well as prevailing culture and fads. To accept that we are often being bombarded by thoughts and ideas of others and we often take them as if they’re our own is the first step to controlling our thinking and helping us steer ourselves towards healthy thinking and mental habits.

Karl recommends simple methods to help us regain control of our minds and direct our attention so that we can tap on our mental habits, thinking preferences and styles to aid us with daily thinking, problem-solving and just plain existing in our complex world. I’m interested in the implication of Karl’s ideas on education and learning. He has another book I’m looking forward to read, Social Intelligence, which he actually wrote before this book.

Tech Muscles

No doubt the Japanese are really good with technology and particularly great with their niche areas of precision engineering. The Economist reveals how indispensable some medium-sized corporations in Japan have come to be so (despite their somewhat unknown-ness) in our global tech economy. Their culture of monozukuri (making things) and kaizen (continuous improvement) have probably helped Japan sustained these niches but I must say that the article revealed an important aspect of business in certain industry that have too often been overlooked.

The very fact that long-term working relations helps these Japanese firms gain trust from their client for reliability and a special understanding of their client’s needs presents a difficulty for other firms to compete with them. It is something rather different from brand-loyalty that consumers might exhibit like the case of food, as a recent Schumpeter article was suggesting. This loyalty is something functional and as long as these engineering firms continue to provide excellence in the fields they engage in, they’ll continue to thrive.

Of course, The Economist sounded some warning about the secrecy these Japanese firms place on their technology and how their belief in the strength of the firm being stored in the collective mind of their employees devour them of labour flexibility that may some day come to haunt them. Japanese firms have prevailed more or less and I believe they’ll adapt their culture to the changing time, all while insisting they didn’t quite change the traditions and beliefs.

Here Again!

This week’s package is a little more on the reading side. The Economist dug up the book review of a 1980s book. And read up about how sometimes, product pricing is all about business and little about economics especially when demand function starts entangling with supply. This is the sort of thing that always happens with super high-class sort of thing – or maybe it’s just high-class because of marketing.

Perhaps people are learning more about Professor Waldfogel’s theories since more retailers are rolling out gift certificates for this festive season. How about signaling your care or love for someone through the Internet or your mobile phone instead? Stefana Broadbent, a tech anthropologist speaks on how the Internet enables intimacy.

Finally, a little read on xanthan gum from moreIntelligentLife, a stabilizer – in your food but not something particularly good for your health I heard..

Remembering Stuff

If only its that simple... — If only it's that simple...

It’s been a long time since the previous entry; ERPZ have been very active with posts in the month of November generally but kind of stalled this moment. I’ve not written about studying techniques for a while now and I’m hoping to revisit it. Today’s topic is somewhat related to memorizing stuff, something I almost never dwell on because I believe that when you understand something, you won’t have to memorize it to remember it; the associations made in your brains when things you already know would help you anchor new concepts firmly in your mind. These associations can only be made because you understand the concepts.

The reality is that there might be many things that are not about understanding but pure memory. Alternatively, understanding may only come with exposure to an unrealistic amount of facts that would have to be remembered anyways. When that happens, we have to resort to ‘memorizing’; a process we normally understand as ‘getting stuff into the brain’. The question is how things normally enter our minds. The mind is a closed system which receives information only through the neurons and these cells in turn, receive the information they’re transmitting through the sensory organs. In other words, our senses are the ultimate gateway to the mind and thus our memory.

Yet when we study, we often overtax our visual sense as we task it to commit things we read into memory. For some audio learners, reading out chunks of text may help but people rarely attempt to go beyond the visual-audio means of learning. There’s more to our senses than our eyes and ears; our skin, our muscles can all work in sync with our eyes and ears help us to remember things. There is a reason why big events tend to stick to our minds more than small events – those events are big because they arouse more of our senses, we see, smell, hear, anticipate, feel through our skin and react to them through our muscles and thoughts. That’s why it’s so hard to remember a chunk of exchanges perhaps in Macbeth if one don’t feel for the characters or comprehend the context of the story in the first place (insufficient arousal to our senses). The principle of having more information to anchor new ideas works the same – understanding the circumstances where a poem was written and the background of a poet naturally helps you remember the poem better (not to mention the rhymes and choice of words which are designed to introduce patterns that our minds can recognise more easily and thus recall).

Thus, to help yourself memorize stuff, pick up things that help arouse more of your senses: read aloud as you look through your notes, process them in your mind and write them in more concise or condensed forms on a piece of paper all at the same time. This way, you remember the words you read, the things your hear, the different reactions your mind produce to the things you read and the muscle actions involved in penning down the concise form of the things you’re trying to remember. You may not progress as fast in terms of covering content when you do this compared to just plain reading, but the effect of memory is so significant you will soon realize that multiple reading of the same material is no longer justified with such intense ‘memorizing’. In tech speak, the amount of bandwidth each senses can offer as a gateway to the mind is limited and to expand this bandwidth and thus increase retention in our mind, there’s a need to use other channels, other senses.

To reinforce the stuff ‘memorized’, one could use mindmaps to surface connections between the things read and absorb after the studying process I prescribed above. The mindmap is to help you see more clearly the big picture of the disparate information you’ve been trying to take in. It reviews things you’ve learnt and bring to your attention some stuff you might have missed out and have to relook. The mindmap can be tossed aside after use (I recommend just trashing it) since its use is limited once it’s satisfactorily formed.

This article might be a little too late considering people are almost done with O Levels and A Levels now but hopefully, students who are still studying and moving on to higher level educations would find this useful.

Food for Thought

If the recent entries suddenly appear to be skewed towards recommending readings from The Economist, I’ve to admit that this is happening because I’ve got the chance to stick around the computer as much as the previous week and have come to make more use of the stuff I read on my hardcopy of The Economist.

And strangely, the magazine is pretty obsessed with the food industry this couple of days. It could well be a result of the recession, which has made the food industry a little less boring compared to the days when finance was hot and occupying too much coverage on papers (both the times when they were bubbling and when the crisis came). Perhaps more importantly, it was the trend that the food giants were transforming. And these transformations are catching the attention of regulators. The Economist discusses how the line between food and drugs are blurring as manufacturers are slapping health and nutritional claims on what they call ‘functional foods’. A briefing on Nestlé reveals how these food giants are now operating. In many ways these industries’ methods and Research and Development expenditures are fast resembling those of Pharmaceutical industries. For some, it is probably comforting to know that our food is going to do more than keep us full and alive; for me, I think it’s pretty scary to be munching with foods that promises too much (“to improve nature”) and yet claims to contain “no weird stuff”.

Beyond the boring regulatory stuff and operations of the food giant, the big players appears to be engaging in some rather interesting competition and some potential integrations. Hostile bids are somewhat frowned upon in these times of business especially when Cadbury is growing faster than Kraft (that’s if you read the article that is linked) and I’m pretty confident that Kraft will not be able to acquire the British chocolatier without revising their bid.

Work Less, Live Healthy

When the economy gets into recession, people become anxious about their jobs, worried about not being able to get employed or having not enough money to finance their spending, so they get sick more easily. Right? Wrong! Fortune magazine ran a story that tells otherwise; in fact, it even surfaced the inverse relationship between death rates and unemployment rates!

Interestingly, people are actually working too much in most developed world today. Reducing work would make them healthier and perhaps allow them to live better lives though it might not satisfy all their wants. In any case, no amount of work would be able to satisfy all their wants in the first place. The implication of this is that there is actually an optimal income level for each person involved in a particular job. In a sense, an economy at any one time has an optimal national income so that the population is healthy (optimal health-productivity balance, long life expectancy and lower mortality).