Category Archives: Personal Life

When I was a child, there were a couple of stuff I held in firm belief, which in retrospect, would send me giggles.

The Salvation Army exist to salvage unwanted toys

Albert Einstein’s hairstylist is named Robert J. Van de Graaff

Adolf Hitler & Charlie Chaplin were brothers

English dragons were predecessors of dinosaurs; Chinese dragons are predecessors of Man

Arabs invented Algebra, so Chinese invented Calculus

PAP is a giant chain kindergarten operating business that provided pre-school education to masses

Windows is to Microsoft like Apple is to Macrohard (I was waiting for this name to appear on the papers)

If you had landed properly on your feet, committing suicide by jumping off high buildings would be quite a feat

If you put enough ice into a cup of water to make it cold enough, you can get a huge lump of ice the size of the cup

Rocks are harder than stones

If you flap your hands really fast, you can fly

I seriously think I was once an idiot.

I don’t have a knack for criticizing things I have learnt. Most of the criticisms are learnt from other books or articles and then reproduced in my own words when they are deemed consistent with my logic. The same is very true for economics – sometimes I discover an enlightening piece of critique, which I go on to extend its analogies, examples and finding more evidence to substantiate its claims. Other times I reject it with a joke about its relevance and decide that there are lunatics around the world anyway. That being said, I seem to form a double standard when I meet with something prescribed in the holy document known as the ‘syllabus’. Just as the responsible, unquestioning syllabus-following teacher, I suppress any doubts I have about the knowledge to be passed on to the next generation and blindly follow the examiner remarks made by UCLES.

Lately, I have begun to wonder if I have been doing the right thing. No doubt my abilities in Sciences and limited scope of exploration in the field has empowered me insufficiently for the duty of pointing out the mistakes of our mentors. I did, however, point out problems with the knowledge we were taught when I was doing Primary School sciences because I was really interested in them in the past. The discouragement I got later (teachers told me to ignore my outside readings) played a rather critical role in limiting my personal exploration. Yet in the field of Geography, and perhaps also Literature, I have been constantly encouraged to explore and challenge the limits of analysis of the ‘experts’. Teachers welcomed fresh perspectives on old issues, exploration of new interpretations on old poems no matter how well-studied they have been. In retrospect, these great teachers I got were more of exceptions than rule. But I guess I have been lucky.

More than 20 months ago, the subject of Economics trotted along into my life. It is a wonderful subject that intersects several disciplines that I have always been interested in – Moral Philosophy, Social Issues, Multiple Agent Interactions (or Social Networks as I used to know it as), Anthropology and perhaps even Logic. Some say it’s ‘common sense made difficult’ but the dynamic nature of what truly constitutes common sense in today’s world makes theorizations of this social construct rather vital in our study of many other things. The tools of Economics, ‘Marginal Analysis’, ‘Demand & Supply Curves’, and convenient assumptions of ‘perfect rationality’ & ‘ceteris paribus‘ came to me easily because I knew what the subject seek to study and thus the things it needs to get models working. As a social science, I expected a degree of self-exploration bestow upon me by teachers that would be similar to that of Geography. I expect fresh analysis in the subject, previously unexplored to be welcomed and heralded as an indication of precocious abilities. Yet truth have been otherwise since I was connected into the Economics circuit in the Academia. I am not sure whether this is restricted to the rather closed education system, merely my College, or that it applies to the whole of Singapore (though I am very confident it doesn’t apply throughout the entire field itself globally – or it should surely have crumbled quite thoroughly).

When asked to cite factors of a particular phenomenon, or concept (such as demand), an answer that is not previously laid down would quickly be dismissed as implausible, irrelevant or at best, insignificant – true common sense was never evoked in the process. Just take for example the concept of demand. All factors of demand (as well as its elasticity) have to be non-price. I have, however, decided to evoke common sense and realized from this small-scale activity that the concept has to be much more complex than it is currently practiced. Say the demand of a good starts rising and rising because of a non-price factor initially. We have learnt that this will merely caused translation of the demand function. But thinking about it: Won’t the changes in units of the y-axis have any effect on the elasticity? In other words, if demand for something rises (say because of fashion), the elasticity will also change once the price starts climbing. In actuality, changes to demand is not so simple and changes between elasticity and the function itself cannot possibly be isolated concepts. If such fundamental common sense is not even expected of us, how can students, or even teachers be trusted to analyze concepts that involves even more variables. Ceteris Paribus must be challenged sufficiently and not ignored. I have seen economics teachers highlighting that Ceteris Paribus is not a significant thing to question because it is hard to quantify changes in the real world.

Yet these discussions I attempted above would be easily considered heresy in my classroom or lecture theater. At best, they are thought to be ‘divergent’ thinking that should be left to the break-time discussion and limited just to that time. When examinations come, be prepared to fail if you attempt to explore these territories charted during coffee breaks. I have come to realized, that our education promotes nothing close to the pursuit of knowledge. It merely tries to ‘train’, ‘instill’, ‘inculcate’ (do note that other synonyms includes ‘brainwash’, ‘persuade’, ‘coerce’) people into model agents that would promote growth in the economy and possibly stability in the society. Thinkers can just suffer similar fate as Socrates or Galileo Galilei. Education systems did not progress beyond the ancient times of Church’s reign although social cultures did. I therefore, disagree with the idea of having an education system that teaches beyond the 3 ‘R’s (wRiting, Reading and aRithmetic). Schooling and the pursuit of knowledge should have little to do with each other besides the fact that the former leads to (or at least allows for) the latter.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. – Mark Twain

I didn’t have the intention of using the quote but it just seem to fit into today’s entry so nicely. But there’s one thing I cannot agree with Mark Twain in the quote. It would be too kind to simply tolerate the nonsense that our schooling is doing to us.

I love Economics but I can take on almost any job related to the subject, except teaching the subject itself. The thing about teaching Economics is that it bears a very high risk of misleading students and possibly even scaring them away from the subject. For me, as most of the knowledge on Economics is self-taught and I realised from this process that the inconsistency evident in the subject with a mixed of both quantitative & qualitative explanations that are incoherent makes it hard for a teacher to present the subject or to ‘teach’ it in the traditional sense. One must first appreciate the inherent flaws in the study of the subject, understand how the assumptions affect the fragile equilibria that textbooks claim to exist before working on the inner substance that would involve a lot of critical analysis. I therefore, refer to this whole body of theoretical knowledge as ‘Textbook Economics’.

One who qualifies as the messenger of ‘Textbook Economics’ (ie. an economics teacher) usually satisfy a few characteristic that prevents them from becoming true economist. Of course, I am making the assumption that economics teacher are working on the same things as economist (though often they are not). Teachers, as we have come to realised, is focused on maximizing the results of students and thus work based on the assessment. The bias-ness towards ‘Textbook Economics’ of our syllabus inevitably force teachers to mislead students on the subject more easily. Students would see the subject in a perspective that render the subject rather unreasonable and in some sense, overly elitist about the mathematical abilities of economic agents. At the back of their minds, they have a whole set of notions that drives them to believe that assumptions always saves the day – if the theory doesn’t work, it is because the assumptions have collapsed. The joke is that in our essay answers, this happens most of the time and eventually, what you get is a subject that generates useless models that makes wrong predictions and then get students to tell people how wrong the concepts are.

That is all about ‘Textbook Economics’. What our teachers have not revealed to us, is the beauty of the dream of an economist, the construction of models that enables us to study a gigantic network of interactions that has been with mankind since societies were formed. We are not told how to make use of the conceptual foundations to create tools for our analysis. Instead, we are forced fed pure opinions, much like the way science force-feeds conceptual truths that have no bearings on the physical world itself. But unlike science, Economics’ search for truth has not been a smooth one and revolutions in the subject has reduced it to a state of confusion. Still, it’s a good time to be in the subject of Economics because we now have sufficient computing power to model many realities that we have not been able to study in the past. These realities are scenarios that can potentially refute fundamental theories and allow us to eliminate a couple of axioms of the subject.

‘Textbook Economics’ pushes the responsibility of tearing down the nonsense presented by traditional theories of Economics to the students who find it hard to criticize the subject both due to their own immaturity when first exposed to the subject and also because of the cultural taboo of questioning authority (especially academic authority in the education system). In Singapore, it takes a curious mind and stubborn character to push for truths in academia. For Economics, being a subject that’s inherently unstable to begin with, the problem is harder to solve. Products of ‘Textbook Economics’ who have excelled in traditional assessments would thus have the characteristic of being detached from the knowledge, presenting a double standard with regards to the knowledge he presents and the truth he believes in. At the same time, they may delve into deeper nonsense if they make no attempt to question what they are learning.

‘Textbook Economics’ erects a high barrier to the real world. It is hard to get out of the comfortable position of mathematical precision coupled with a strong set of ‘morally sound’ arguments about free market (all the stuff about Parento Optimality – which is in fact never obtained although the averages comes close); and combined with a set of assumptions that can be easily pushed out as the scapegoat for any failure in predictions, ‘Textbook Economics’ is not vulnerable to assaults from newcomers into the subject. The ivory tower that houses it stays firm but is situated far from reality – though the practical useless-ness of ‘Textbook Economics’ is not fully understood and appreciated. Problems with ‘Textbook Economics’ operate at levels of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomically, transport costs and irrationality or non-mathematical rationality of agents hinder the operation of the market. Ignorance of temporal dimension is another major blow to economic analysis that even Human Geographers have long realised (and thus decide to make use of their own social analysis tools and indicators instead) Macroeconomically, once the stupidity of agents get out of hand (too many people are irrational), the equilibrium system collapse because people over-react or under-react to changing conditions, producing thermostat-like oscillations in the system that never comes to rest.

I have essentially explained the implications of ‘Textbook Economics’ in our education of the subject and perhaps also why many students simply hate Economics. To pen down something about the world that you do not believe in is really hard – worse still for a person like me, who even knows that what I am to pen down during my Economics paper, is simply to satisfy the whims and fancies of examiners, assessors and my teachers, rather than for an inquiry into the subject in concern.

The following is an economic analysis of the experience at National Library presented in Lee Kong Chian’s Shelves.

The use for price mechanism as a means of resource allocation have been well understood by economists and commoners (at least in the intuitive sense) and the old library reference section system, whereby people with the money would willingly bring more stuff to the library, deposit them into the lockers that came in 20-cents or 50-cents variations and then enter the sections they desire with only the authorized materials. Those who are not willing to spend the money would not bring unauthorized materials and stick to just few pieces of plain paper when they need to go into the reference sections. There’s a couple of advantage to this system – it places a little barrier (the cost of the locker) between using the locker and not using it, thus allowing for excess capacity most of the time unless there is high demand for the lockers. We can also argue that the capacity of the reference section is reached when all the lockers are used because the barrier means that only those willing and able to use the lockers and yet with unauthorized items are admitted into the section. Those who don’t want to pay are kept out while those who didn’t bring unauthorized materials are welcomed since they pose no trouble to the library and the fact that they are compromising with the rules shows that they genuinely wants to make proper use of the library.

Removing the paid locker system is a major blow to this properly laid down resource allocation mechanism. People who are going to central lending but don’t want to carry their bags around can utilize excess capacity when demand has not peaked, without incurring any cost. Others who don’t want to pay and willing to leave their stuff at home now have the incentive to bring their stuff and use the lockers since they are free, unleashing excess demand that would otherwise not have existed. In both cases, there is free-ridership because of the cost-free lockers. Increasingly often, people who are willing and able to pay and thus urgently need to use the reference library is now unable to do it because they are carrying unauthorized materials. In the past, such case would be much rarer because the barrier strips the system of excess demand and allocates resources properly, allowing the full capacity to be utilized only under very high demand conditions. The removal of the price mechanism from the picture creates great inconvenience and the cost we save from the lockers now translate to additional trips made to the lockers after discovering more and more items are actually unauthorized – in the past, the security guards understand that there’s a cost incurred for the lockers and thus would be helpful in picking out unauthorized stuff from you before you use the lockers (now they only do that after you locked up everything and go to the checkpoint).

The result of the policy? A over-utilization of the lockers and under-utilization of the reference library. Lockers are over utilized by free-riders who are not genuinely using the reference library or would otherwise have not need to use the lockers and the reference library is under-utilized because most locker users are not sincere about using the reference library and some don’t use it at all. Those who truly want to use it but arrived late (peak capacity of lockers utilized) are barred from using the reference library. Removing the price mechanism has removed an assessment of how much individuals need to use the reference library and made lives much more difficult for security guards who have to argue with library-goers who are unable to find available lockers. The strict rules governing the items authorized in the reference library is actually not the issue, although it is fully responsible for the need to ration locker spaces using the price mechanism. However, once the market is created, resource allocation have to be optimal and given the existing system, it is not.

The greatest joke about this issue is that there’s no market failure. We are able to extort a fee from people using the lockers and thus it need not be provided as a public good. Since when the price mechanism is utilized, there’s no [obvious] external cost & benefits, there’s no externalities to speak of. In other words, the inefficient resource allocation is purely a result of stubborn, uneconomic people implementing rather brainless policies. A thing to note is that the cost of the lockers is not dynamic but fixed and thus there’s no supply=demand kind of graph to sketch. People can always argue that 20-cents and 50-cents are too low for anyone to respond drastically and that we should be glad we are not charged the money because even with the fee, the scenario would still be the same and we are back to square one. That’s not true. Even if the eventual situation one is faced with, one can be sure that a lot of the locker users are much more genuine users (assuming there’s a continuum of false researcher to genuine ones) than for the case without the price mechanism in place.

I am no neoclassical economist. While I advocate the use of the market-style resource allocation method, I don’t think that the result of the system would be close to Parento Optimal equilibrium because of limitations such as unwilling people who doesn’t know they need to pay for the lockers before they had gone to the library. Imperfections exist but still, it beats the senseless, information-less system that is created when the price mechanism is removed.

I know it’s rare, but a narrative that will probably find its way into a page in my memoir in future…

It used to be simpler, you have a friendly face telling you what you are not allowed to bring in, picking out stuff from your bags and informing you what you should deposit into the lockers. No, it wasn’t an intrusion of privacy or anything – it was to prevent evil deeds of vandalism on the sacred scrolls on the shelves of Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, it was to prevent abuse of the library facilities. Laws were laws and a 20 cents saves you of leaving your stuff insecurely at the security check counter (pretty ironic huh?).

Today, you have to obtain clearance after you deposit your stuff into the lockers (which are now free, and this also means that they are rarely available). The experience was daunting. I wanted to access the Business section of the majestic reference library, which is located on the 8th floor of the grand building; unfortunately, the lockers on that floor, and both those above and below it directly were taken. I had to climb right up to the 10th floor to find an empty locker. I found a couple of them, which was rapidly snapped up by those locker-hungry looking intellectuals standing behind me. Armed with ONLY my box file which contain almost nothing besides a couple of Irvin’s notes and foolscap paper and my pencil case, I tried going to the section I wanted to.

I can only blame myself for not reading instructions on the notice in front of the security counter carefully – the lady security guard told me in the most polite tone you can possibly use to a person whom you think have committed some heinous crime that only blank pieces of paper were allowed and I only manage to get permission for a little slip of paper containing call numbers of the books I was looking for. I climbed back to my locker, stuff everything into it except my slip of paper, and my pencil case. ‘Finally’, I exclaimed to myself, marched down 2 flights of escalators, determined to access the section I need to.

“Highlighters are not allowed” the same kind lady spoke in a tone now much more benign though with no sympathy for the young academic apparently shocked by the rules, after giving my unzipped pencil case a glance. She then pointed to and gave me the little pamphlet sits on the desk of the security check-point. I had no choice but to go back 2 storeys, deposit my highlighters (3 of them fortunately, to make things more worth the effort) and back to the lady now in front of a couple of angry looking teens carrying their bags and without lockers to deposit them into. I waited patiently for the little quarrel to end (the teens lost to the petite lady) and then showed the same few stuff to the lady for the 3rd time in 10 minutes.

‘Markers are not allowed’ she pointed at the fat, tube-like construction in my pencil case that had a button on one end. Yes, it was a marker but no way I am going back to place it in my locker; I have wasted almost 15 minutes by now and I decided to leave them at the counter. The kind lady granted my wish but emphasized that she is not going to take responsibility for its loss and shall pay no special attention to them.

I finally entered the library section and cherished my short 30 minutes between the shelves containing the sacred scrolls that have to be protected from highlighters, pen knifes, markers, and the great tomes, whose splendor is so great we are asked not to bring any books into the section for fear our shabby ones self-destruct in shame.

A technical economic analysis of the experience is covered in Restricted Tomes & Scrolls.

Reading Eric D Beinhocker introduced me to the concept of Evolutionary Systems, which I hope to talk about. I’ll be reviewing Origin of Wealth when I am done with it. It’s definitely a great book and I am so glad I bought it (despite the price – my price elasticity of demand for books is very very low). The reason I have decided to pen this short piece on Evolutionary Systems is that I see its application in a wide spectrum of reality and I would like to demonstrate how this idea can help weave ‘Man & Nature’ with ‘Science & Technology’, domains that our General Paper is currently delving into.

Evolutionary systems obeys certain characteristics of evolution – a process that can proceed infinitely without an equilibrium (in the traditional sense though you have no problem isolating periods of time and define them as a moment of equilibrium, albeit one that vanishes rather quickly). In Beinhocker’s words, the system is governed by the ‘evolution algorithm‘ that searches for the fit ‘interactors’ in the ‘fitness landscape’. I hope this is not too overwhelming for general interest readers. I’ll deviate briefly from my main focus on ‘Man-Nature & Science-Technology’ Argument (MNST) to explain the terms I have just introduced. ‘Interactors’ are basically agents within the system, like man within nature, technology within society and so on. ‘Evolution Algorithm’ refers to the seemingly systematic formula in which interactors constantly evolve to adapt to changing conditions within the system (whether the changes are results of endogenous or exogenous factors). Finally, the ‘fitness landscape’ refers to how fit the different characteristics the interactors can possibly assume would be given that they really manifest in the system. This is a little complex but just take it that the ‘landscape’ refers to a library of collection of strategies for interactors to survive within the system. How good the strategies are is constantly changing and what evolution does is to pick out the best of all these strategy constantly, occasionally eliminating some lousy ones and so on. This process is essentially what quantifies evolution.

Having established this, I must propose that it is nature that has created this process of evolution, and this mindless but innovating process – it is no different from the laws of physics laid down by the very same nature, as well as the interactors of systems, and even systems itself. I shall not engaged in any quarrels on intelligent design right here and mindlessly assume all my readers to be intelligent followers of the idea of ‘design without designers’. In my MNST argument, I believe that nature lays down the ground rules for things to happen and whatever happens is part of nature, and the natural order. Therefore, Science & Technology is not only part of nature but relies on the laws and forces that nature has laid down in order to work. Man, has essentially leveraged on the evolution algorithm to construct ever increasingly sophisticated stuff.

Okay, now you are saying Man is emulating nature, so isn’t he trying to play God or something? Well, yes and no. Evolution, all these while, have only searched through all the possible lifeforms, object shapes, idealized forms, whatever you can conceive, using a very crude method of trial and error that closely resembles the perturbation that cutting edge physics theorist use to approximate Unified theories. Whatever characteristics that the agents may have that can help him given the existing conditions would be played out and then depending on what characteristics survive the conditions, the evolution process duplicates or eliminates the characteristics according to the fitness assessed. As such, evolution have so far been a slow and extremely painful process of extinction, disasters. The intensification of the use of deduction by man has allowed the evolution to speed up. Logical deduction has allowed quicker elimination of flawed characteristics or strategies for interactors and so they are not even played out in reality. Technologies are products of elimination both by deduction and by the market. The residual stuff that remains are basically what’s left after evolution has stripped it of its unfit cousins. Nature has essentially created man, who in turned, emulated the same innovation (ie. evolution process) that spawned the specie of homo sapiens itself in an attempt to ground its kind in the entire of a new reality – a science-tech reality.

The problem (a sort of disequilibrium occurs) when the changes in fitness landscape triggered by endogenous factors (in this case the emergence and proliferation of products of deductive evolution) has arisen a little too fast for the evolution algorithm of nature itself to catch up. Evolution is on going because the emergence of a new strategy or at least the manifestation of it can easily alter the fitness landscape and changes the fitness of existing strategies that may have worked well for a long time (and thus harder to fade away). The appearance of technology – a product of deductive evolution sent out ripples across the fitness landscape that radically altered the fitness of individual characteristics because products of deductive evolution are often able to extract itself from existing manifestations (all the intermediate evolving stages were transversed in the minds of the innovator). This made it hard for the other interactors, with strategies that are rendered useless, to be able to adapt quick enough. Because of that, man has taken a big bold step to dictate the paths of evolution, to alter genes, to tailor species to the new fitness landscape after the rise of technologies that caused the original patterns of existence to undergo an overhaul. I must say, this may have been one of the natural pathways evolution has decided to assume. Mankind have been selected through this mindless innovating algorithm to further its function. Nature overseen the process and will continue to oversee it. Nature cannot cease to be.

Nature, is essentially just a set of laws, forces governing everything. That carbon was chosen to be the main elemental building block of life is perhaps a result of evolutionary process itself. The rest that we classify as nature are mere manifestations of these laws. Man’s being is part of this algorithm, and so is Science & Technology, a subset of man, and thus Nature itself.

Given all the hoohah about gambling, casinos and counseling on compulsive gambling – I believe nothing beats the power of pure demonstration of payoffs from the games using Mathematics. I hate gambling, not only because it is a vice but also how it epitomizes people’s ignorance of the workings of probability and chance. Perhaps I should have a little lesson teaching people how to calculate their payoffs from their bets. I’ll just use 4-D as an example. Betting on ‘Big’ will yield the possible prizes: 1st – 2000, 2nd – 1000, 3rd – 490, Starter – 250 & Consolation – 60. Betting on ‘Small’ yields 1st – 3000, 2nd – 2000 & 3rd – 800. Note that the numbers are the rewards on a dollar stake, which means winning consolation would yield 60 times your capital (stake), when betting ‘Big’.

So in effect, betting ‘Big’ on a single number would yield payoffs calculated as follows:
Payoff: Reward – Cost (stake)

Payoff from 1 dollar bet on ‘Big’: 0.0001 X (2000 + 1000 + 490) + 0.001 X (250 + 60) – 1 = -0.341

Note that the net payoffs of lottery is almost always negative (unless the lottery organization is a sucker) and for a dollar bet, the net loss in this case is about 34 cents. This means long term betting of $10 on the same number for ‘Big’ would produce expected loss of $3.41 and so on.

How about betting ‘Small’? The payoffs are worse (a greater loss):

Payoff from 1 dollar bet on ‘Small’: 0.0001 X (3000 + 2000 + 800) – 1 = -0.42

Needless to say, this mathematics should be simple enough for grown-up gamblers to understand. They are basically feeding the lottery staff with their compulsion and I guess this doesn’t really differ much from contributing to corrupted charity organizations. So what sets [lottery] gamblers apart from fools? I guess nothing much.

Penning an assault on the manifestation of religion in the world today in 1.5 hours wasn’t an easy task, for I had too much points, and too much to cover. Sam Harris helped a little, but I drew my examples from readings that I cannot really recall. My attack was more the political side and blaming on how faith itself should be an artifact that should no longer be in use rather than faith itself. I described it as a natural reaction to our curiosity but it’s time mankind grew out of it. Yea, that’s the crux.

I thought it’s pretty late to be saying this but it would be nice to share some sites that would very much help with your mugging, whether it’s for Blocks (if you are seriously desperate) or for your A Levels (final dash).

Tutor2u Economics Site: A collection of notes and presentations that features qualitative economic concepts and suitable for those who don’t really give a damn about Mathematics in the study of Economics. The topics adheres to the A Levels Economics for UK Cambridge so Singaporean students should find them handy as well. Eurocentric examples are used but if you really need more Singapore-slant examples, I would very much recommend you to read Henri Ghesquiere’s Singapore’s Success: Engineering Economic Growth – it has a whole lot of things about policies, which would extremely relevant to students desperate for Singapore-based examples.

The Integrator: Who says brute force computing doesn’t work for High School and College Mathematics? It’s only when you are armed with the machines from Texas Instruments. ‘The Integrator’ by Wolfram Research is an amazing brute calculator that does the Integration operator particularly well (not that it can do anything else). Using crudely worked out algorithms that have been done tediously by hand, the calculator compiles wholesome general formulas that uses no short cuts in working out your sums. Best of all, they help you generate general formulas, which means you can happy key in some unknowns and they would generate the answer with the unknowns factored in. Of course, learn how the inputs works first.

SEAB Syllabus Site (for 2007 A Levels): Confused with what is tested or at least what you need to know? Go download the relevant syllabuses and check them out. It’s hard to interpret some parts though, so try to study everything if you can. It’s good to know more anyway. Best perk about the site is that it provides you with a handy copy of Formula List MF15. So in case you can’t find your Ten-Year Series, you can see the .pdf beside your World of Warcraft icon on your desktop. In addition, the entire Data Booklet for Chemistry H2 is also at the kind of the syllabus document for it. No sweat if you misplace your Data Booklet! Same applies for the Physics Students’ list of constants.

Chemguide Site: Chemguide should be known by lots of students; a helpful Chemistry resource site that provides clear explanation of reactions and almost everything that we need to know in our syllabus. Since it’s for the UK A Levels, they have some reactions that we may not need to know so you can refer to the syllabus document to clarify any doubts you have about Chemguide. It covers all the 3 main themes of Chemistry at A Levels, ‘Inorganic Chemistry’, ‘Physical Chemistry’ and ‘Organic Chemistry’, and the topics and separated distinctly so you shouldn’t have any problems finding the information you need.

Physical Geography Fundamentals: Great site for students of Geography, though most stuff there are out of syllabus and may not be useful for Singapore A Levels Geography students. Nonetheless, the fundamentals are concise unlike the paper textbooks and there are relevant diagrams that we are required to know. The language used are highly accessible in contrast with some difficult research papers we may receive as readings. Useful for brief revisions.

That’s all the featured ones, in addition to the common sites people visit but often overlook their academic value, such as Wikipedia, The Economist and Miniclip.com. Oh, the last site is for relieving academic stress after your mugging.

I have spent the recent 2 to 4 years studying with the top talents in the nation, and in the experience, I have interacted (and is constantly interacting) with the polarized crowd of what the public would term elites. This would probably be a short commentary on those right at the top, but not conspicuous. I guess this is the group of people, silently slogging, and accomplishing who deserves our attention, since those ‘rah-rah’ councilors of different institutions would have easily caught it. Before the social commentary on this group of people, I guess there’s a need to first delve into how the system has created different kinds of people.

The education in our nation has created extremely distinct, polarized groups of students; but that’s not to discredit the role of the environment, family, and culture played in molding these students. I am, in essence, saying that there’s distinctly different approach or perceptions towards the same system that I speak of here. Sparing the lower extremes, the hierarchy starts from those between going out of school and in school; those in school but failing tests and willing to continue with failing; those failing, or just passing but working hard to move on; those who are average but hoping to get out of the system fast; those who are doing well but want to be at the top; those who are doing great, and have exceptional portfolio; and finally, those who are simply out of the world in intelligence, would hope to remain so, but also to remain excluded from the rest. Well, I can insert some more groups in between, or expand the list, and go on rambling but I’ll just stop here. I am saying that the attitudes instilled and held by the students belong to such vast categories that I really have to doubt they are really thinking about the same thing. In any case, I guess it’s because of the different position they are in the hierarchy that affects their attitudes and perhaps their subsequent actions and that would mean that the information flow within the system, between different hierarchy is not consistent and there’s informational asymmetry that would potentially further escalate the differences between each of these ‘classes’.

I am starting to sound like I am criticizing a social system, a society but I guess we can’t escape from the fact that the education system is essentially a society manipulated partially by the authorities and subjected to differing artificial conditions that have intended and unintended consequences on these players involved. There’s a greater need for communication between the hierarchy, to let everyone see for themselves what everyone else’s lives are about. Information flow is the prime factor that determines the incentives for individuals to work hard, that reveals the prospects of any individual and spur them on, that democratizes opportunities, that enhances the true competition and eliminates the ‘crony’ tinge in our systems. And perhaps, in writing this tract, I am essentially contributing to this body of information that may spur some on and encourage others while placing some others in less complacent positions and thus would continue to work really hard for what they truly want. It is the different barriers in information, the uneven distribution of information that stifles and block opportunities from some who really want them and further polarize the attitudes that students have.

Going back to the key topic, I have discovered that out of the people whom we normally identify as the top, there are those who are really noisy and ill-disciplined although they can study hard and produce results. On the other extreme, there are really studious people who studies really hard and get really good grades but they are extremely quiet, conservative and they believe fun lies in reading books and surfing really educational websites (they probably also think MSN is evil). Finally, there are those who balances things really well (plus a glib tongue that is tinted with truth and sincerity, compounding on their strong capabilities and sometimes the lack of need to sleep) and are easily considered the best of all students and indisputably the Crème de la crème. I guess those who grabs our attention enough are good enough with that and so I’ll turn my attention to really quiet people.

The system has emphasized on grades and results so there the quiet hardworking group of people who pushed on, even after the system emphasized on speaking up. Many people actually talks often but there’s a difference between those who daren’t talk and those who have nothing better to say. I have met people who are simply average who can speak a great deal about movies, fashion and chic fic but when it comes to academic stuff, they simply have nothing to say. To them, the body of knowledge they draw from is both academic and social but that which they contribute to is essentially that of social. In this sense, these people don’t interact and involve themselves in the things they learn in school and simply take them at face value and apply them wherever deemed fit on conditioned so. The quiet workers, on the other hand, is highly involved in what they are learning and are constantly thinking if not interacting with this intellectual body of knowledge. They engaged themselves if not the others in the learning process and have their own ideas, which perhaps, more often than not, they daren’t express for fear of rejection and criticisms. The system has created a culture of fear of criticism that has impeded some students from reaching the top notch where scholastic potential is concerned. Those perfectly and conspicuously on the top has gone pass that barrier but these quiet workers have failed there despite their innate abilities. Of course, the noisy but hardworking bunch are simply unable to hit the top because of their natural abilities or simply because their skills are not demanded if not for the fact that their noise may have been too much to bear.

Singapore has ample talents, it is just that they don’t show themselves. There are simply some exceptional people who believes that overt demonstration of talent is wrong. The system, instead of over-focusing on molding people into the way they want them to be, they should be actually eliciting more information from the crowd, fostering a culture of self-promotion and finding out how to channel the different talents into the jobs they need to fill. People can be perfectly suited for a job, specially trained [sometimes against their wishes] for the job, or [something which is so often overlooked] grow to meet certain of the job’s requirement and then redefine the job scope such that the job also evolves to accommodate them. This unexplored means of work distribution and defining or grooming talent may prove to work exceptionally well for our current nation of shy people, since the culture has not been altered. The local talents should have their brand and style of being talented while conforming to global standards of what constitutes a talent and not allow our system’s definition of talents to be the only one in the market.