Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
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Those readers who pay attention to stuff that appears on our navigation bar when they move their mouse on it would realise there is now a ‘Books To Read‘ page under Resources. ERPZ have accumulated quite a fair bit of entries that are basically book reviews and it’ll be good to catalogue them on a single page help readers access them quickly although you could always use the tags.
There might soon be a page indexing the articles on studying and motivation as well, so stay-tuned.
ERPZ emerged as an educational initiative about a year ago, originally focusing on delivery of study tips and exam-smart techniques; our first article, ‘Slack Later‘ introduces a means of disciplining your mind by ‘procrastinating procrastination’. Within a month the author (basically just Kevin) lost steam and articles stop flowing on the site, stunting further developments. An initiative to start a community around studying through a forum failed because of lack of forum-management expertise.
Roughly 6 months after ERPZ founding, the site underwent a transformation, moving beyond just tips and mind tricks, to discussion on worldly affairs (news in other words), tracking world developments in different fields (mainly areas of Economics, Technologies, sometimes on Climate issues) as well as making reads recommendation. This model is basically learnt from The General Paper, an initiative by a JC GP Tutor to help aggregate resources from the web for students of GP.
Today, after hundreds over entries, ERPZ is updated almost everyday; features writings of a few authors, a collection of notes from students of Top Junior Colleges of Singapore, weekly packs of video & readings links and more. In 2010, ERPZ will continue to deliver aggregation of content for the different social sciences and possibly the sciences as well, make reading recommendations and reviews of different academic resources for students at Junior Colege Level. Once again, any interested contributors might want to contact us through the comments system here and help ERPZ do more for students.
Christmas is just a couple of minutes away and I’m here wishing all readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year on behalf of all of ERPZ. Give yourself a good treat and take a break by hunting for a good book to read. Borders is going to hold a great sale this weekend after Christmas – so head down there after partying to hunt for a gift for yourself.
It’s been a while since ERPZ featured any Lifehack Tools and lately, I’ve found quite a lot of useful stuff so it would be great to share with readers and GTD enthusiasts.
Dropbox – File sharing/synchronization, online storage tool. Extremely useful for people with multiple computers and files to be shared between them.
Macheist – Mac Community that raise funds for charity and give you lots of great Mac Ware at amazing prices (sometimes free too).
Ninite.com – Multi-Apps installer; allows you to choose from a list of important “must-install” applications to be installed all at once on your computer. Especially useful when you just get a new computer or formatted your PC and want to have your favourite softwares installed fast.
Growl – Mac Notification tool, it’s basically an alert programme that seamlessly integrate with your mac and several other popular programmes.
Picnik – In case you haven’t realised, there’s are web-based image-editing tools and Picnik just happens to stand out particularly because it is speedy and extremely user friendly.
Quicksilver – It’s not easy to describe what Quicksilver does exactly but it’s basically a graphical shell that allows you to perform stuff on your Mac more quickly.
I’ve got loads of friends looking for tuition jobs and I thought I might as well advertise for them here. I’ve included their contacts and subjects to be taught under our services page (in case you didn’t know we have one). But here’s a reproduction for readers:
Other Tutor’s Services (former students of top JCs)
Wei Si is interested to give tuition for Economics, Chemistry and General Paper at JC Level. English, Chinese and Chemistry available for Secondary School student too! Interested students, please contact her via email: stardustt.14 [at] gmail [dot] com
Ruiyuan is hoping to give tuition for Economics and Geography at JC Level. Geography and Chemistry available for Secondary School student too! Interested students, please contact him via email: stainless.rui [at] gmail [dot] com
Jia Hao hopes to give tuition for Chemistry at JC Level. Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry available for Secondary School student too! Interested students, please contact him via email kel_ojh [at] hotmail [dot] com
Yan Min is providing tuition services for Chemistry at Secondary School level. Chinese (and Higher Chinese) and Mathematics for Primary school student too! Interested students, please contact him via email: dwellerz [at] hotmail [dot] com or call him at 97293953.
I’m not sure if this is long awaited, but ERPZ finally started a Chemistry Notes Section! I guess everyone would be more grateful if this was up a couple of months back when people are preparing for A Levels. Well, I haven’t found Zhuoyi’s website then and I was unsure about my handwritten notes then. So now, there’s only 2 sets of notes available, one kindly shared by Zhuoyi, which I’ve consolidated and reformatted into a single document. I might soon put up individual links to each set of Zhuoyi’s notes if readers are interested.
The other set is by me; it’s mostly handwritten with typed pages here and there. For those who might be interested, I’ve added a set of handwritten instructions on how you can make use of your Graphic Calculator’s statistics functions to perform calculations for reaction kinetics at the last few page of the document.
Enjoy Learning!
Just a couple of days back, I was searching for Economics essay questions just for fun and I stumbled upon Fiveless, an initiative by Zhuoyi from RJC 2 years ago when he was doing A Levels. It was a site with a wonderful array of materials for various subjects. Since Zhuoyi actually took A Levels the same time as me, I was kind of disturbed by the fact that I hadn’t stumble upon this site earlier when I was preparing for my exams. But there’s a chance that if that had happened, I wouldn’t have started ERPZ, thinking that someone else has already took up the job.
In any case, I wrote to Zhuoyi to inform him that I would like to consolidate the materials he has so nicely done up and make them available on ERPZ; he kindly agreed and I’m glad to push out the first set of materials that resulted from this ‘collaboration’. It’s a set of 40-page economics notes, summaries and cheat sheets. I’ve updated some of the statistics Zhuoyi has compiled in the notes, altered the formatting slightly to give a more consistent look, added content pages (that are frankly pretty much for the sake of cosmetics) and added very minimal of economics content. I hope I can find time to fill in the gaps because I’m aware that the notes lack content on some topics required in A Levels, but for now, it’s already pretty impressive. The link is also available under Economics Section.
All credit goes to Zhuoyi who’ve made such a great set of notes and generously shared them online under the Creative Commons Remix License. Anyone interested in building upon the work I’ve continued can leave a comment to request for a editable document version of the file from me.
I had a friend who once told me, why waste time reading something when you can’t gain anything from it? His idea is that if you ever read anything, you should try to maximize your benefits from it and for him, he does so by taking notes on paper while reading and staying very focused when he’s reading anything (admittedly, he rarely reads for entertainment).
I’m less extreme but I must agree with his general idea of seeking to benefit from the stuff we read since we’re exhausting our attention on them anyways. It is corollary to the idea of doing the best and achieving the best if you’re to bother to do anything at all. I’ve therefore, come up with an example of how we can best make use of what we read through asking ourselves questions that would help relate our readings to the things we learn in school. The idea is to constantly focus on looking out for examples where ideas we read about are being applied and fill our minds with a thorough understanding of how the real world has shaped the ideas that we hold about it.
I hope I can do more of such for other publications and meanwhile, you’ll always be able to access this page through a link under Economics Notes.
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.
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.