Singapore!
2 examples.
Some observations from a fellow blogger when he read the local english newspaper he dubbed "Good News Times" on the topic of inflation. Actual statistics - The poor getting poorer and the rich still getting richer. Singapore styled statistics - The rate of poor getting poorer is not so much greater than the rate of the rich getting richer. Good news indeed.For the lowest quintile, the compounded price increase from Jan 2004 to June 2007 was 6.7%. On the other hand, for the highest quintile, compounded price increases amounted to 1.3% over the same period.
Readers may recall that the bottom 10% of households in the period 2000 - 2005 had virtually no income, and the next 10% saw household income fall 19.7%. See details in the article Income inequality widens markedly.
During that same 5-year period, the top decile (i.e. the top 10% block) saw their household income increase 14.8%, and the next richest decile gained 12.5%.Yet these are the ones who hardly saw inflation affect them.
You would think, wouldn't you, that a more appropriate headline and lead sentence would be something like "Bottom income groups suffer markedly more inflation than top ones"? Because really, that's what the table as a whole shows, doesn't it?
Instead the Good News Times squints into the 0.4 difference between the figures "1.1" and "0.7" on the last row of numbers in order to proclaim "Hail the benevolent king!"
Second case from our local political website
Minister: Lim Hng Kiang
Headline: GST’s up but not hawker prices
Paper: The Straits Times, Wednesday, 29 August 2007
Most hawkers have not raised their prices despite the 2% GST increased on 1 July 2007, said Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang.
The Department of Statistics surveyed 1,300 hawkers across the country and found that more than nine in 10 did not raise prices after the GST hike. Most businesses have not used the tax increase as an excuse to raise prices, said Mr Lim.
I noticed that quite a few hawkers increased their price before the GST hike while other raise prices by reducing the quality and quantity of their products, i.e. 1 less prawn for your hokkien mee etc. What about subsequent price increase in the future partly due to GST hike? And the issue of price increased by more than 2% after GST hike?
There are many ways to make use of statistics. These are just 2 simple examples.
According to this guy's theory, I jumped the gun in today's moral lesson.
Basically, when we make a decision when faced with a moral dilemma, we make one based on one of the reasoning above. Did we do the 'right' thing to avoid punishment and receive rewards? Did we do so to maintain a certain 'image' or because of rules and regulations? Did we do it to make the world a better place for everyone. Kohlberg's theory is that you can't jump ahead and attain higher levels without sorting out the lower level stuff.
- Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
- 1. Obedience and punishment orientation
- 2. Self-interest orientation
- ( What's in it for me?)
- Level 2 (Conventional)
- 3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
- ( The good boy/good girl attitude)
- 4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
- ( Law and order morality)
- Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
- 5. Social contract orientation
- 6. Universal ethical principles
But that's social science. No theory is 100% in social science and depending on the era, they tend to say very different thing. After all, the society is changing, so is the science of society. The beauty of Physics is, even if Newton was proven to be wrong in his idea of dynamics and gravity, but we still apply them in modern physics calculations because it is always a good approximation. To send a man to the moon, all we need is Newton's physics.
Enough of crap, my nose is clearing, after getting blocked for 1/2 a day due to the foul air in this 15th day of the 7th month in the lunar calendar. I shall rest...
So, Keely lost and I thought I saw some familiar faces in the audience area yesterday. Wonder what happens when that boy, Shaun?, grows up and his voice under goes some expected changes. It's the end of another season of money spinning youth attention grabbing event by mediacorp.
Anyway, here's the prep work of our own 'superstar' event. Amazingly put up in such a short notice.
Much more work needed in post processing. Guess I'm too busy lately. Maybe will do it end of the year. Maybe will work on something else then.
Physics tutorial takes 1.5hr per question... But I'm getting the sense of achievement in answering each question. Now Q1 done, Q2-5 to go... Darn.. why Masters course need to submit tutorial one.
Audience at the Getai
A very animated singer... entertaining even though I don't understand hokkien.
The 2nd singer and the host. This singer is new to getai and is not as good at entertaining the crowd compared to the other 2 singers that I saw
Regardless of race, language or religion. Our fellow Malay Singaporean doing Chinese and Hokkien songs during Getai. Amazing... but have to leave because it's getting a bit late by that time.
Looks like I can't sleep early tonight. The getai is still blasting at full volume now. Good thing is I went down to catch a few shots and am almost done processing them. Been a long time since I took photos for my own interest only. Thanks to sucre for accompanying me for the shoot and explaining the hokkien stuff to me. I'm almost a hokkien idiot cos I'm cantonese. lol... photos to come soon.
The gross matter of ear wax and trivial stuff about ear wax, age and whales in Wiki. I didn't know of the wet type ear wax till recently cos I only have experience with my dry type Asian ear wax. Yikes...
Ok... everytime there's a test going on I must 'emo' a bit, but for totally different reasons okay. I can write about totally different things on tests, but actually they are all the same too. They reflect my beliefs in education. And my beliefs are quite simple, it's to learn how to learn.
Today, I also shared with my year 4 on some of my attitudes in learning. The stuff about quality studying instead of quantity. About giving in your best rather than forcing yourself through. About learning from mistakes and always keeping a positive attitude to learn. The biggest difference in learning is your attitude. I shall repeat one of my classic example about my belief in learning here to share with anyone who pops by and read it.
When given a set of problems/questions, I like it when I find that I do not know how to do it, because this gives me a chance to think of the problem, to look for the solution and most important of all, a chance to learn. Because if I don't even know what are my problems/weakness, I can't learn at all. So I rather that I get a problem set that I do not know how to do than to get one where I already know all the solutions too. Because I know which one gives me the opportunity to learn.Of course, like Paul Erdos would have said, "this problem is too hard for one who is not ready". Looking for a good problem to learn from is an art, that maybe I could 'emo' about during the examinations.
At the end of the day, there are no boundaries in learning. Subject syllabus is just pieces of paper filled with words defined arbitrarily in a meeting of a few person. We concentrate on the content that will be examinable and conveniently forget about how to learn. After all, the test of life is not about your grades and we should learn to prepare for life too. Exams will be over in a few weeks but there are decades left in our lives.
(P.S. This post was prepared a few days back but due to lack of sleep I couldn't finish it until today.)
So... the MSP quiz ended very early all thanks to contestant of the year from 3A who managed to answer most questions before the rest have a chance to digest what is it. That leaves me with a great chance to cover the Year 4 Pre-Exams motivational concert plus paper birds and encouragement message day. I missed it last year due to not so sure what's the reason but at least I catch the final bits for this year. Get to see my 4J get some of the love motivational message and paper birds that I made during my MC period. I know it looks ugly but it comes with its fair share of bacteria love. LOL...
Singing
More Singing
Happy audience
"I love my teacher"
"I love to pose"
Good luck 4J! Work hard for your finals in 8 days time! One more hurdle and it's senior high for you. (And if you take Physics, more of me... [insert evil laughter]
Sorting out your finances for the next 6 months may not be good for your financial health particularly when you know of the coming release of 'Advanced Amatuer' Sony Alpha DSLR A300, (or A200 or A10 or whatever they are going to call it in the future)
With many rumours from not so reliable sources (hence I'm not linking them here) flying around, there are many so called 'leaks' of the specifications for these new cameras. Many are impatient with the long wait but I'm not in a hurry to know. Sony managed to bring out an innovative camera in the form of A100 by producing the 1st 10mp entry level camera that includes SSS and other features (DR optimizer, eye-start etc) to improve the photo taking experience.
The latest juice in this new body?
1.25 crop sensor instead of a 1.5 crop at about 14 mp with a 1.5 crop switch to make it backwards compatible with digital only lens. Simple implementation for a supposedly 'big' problem' with digital only lens. That should makes both sides happy. Especially for those who got the 16-80mm CZ lens. And by my calculation, going from a 1.25 crop to 1.5 crop leaves a usable 10mp area on the sensor which means the sensor could be similar in configuration to the A100 but how would the noise issue be for a 2nd generation Sony camera is an unknown.
But if it's 1.25 crop, I'm happy cos my 28-75mm fast standard zoom becomes a 35 - 93.75mm fast standard zoom. Better than the 42-112.5mm not so standard zoom that I'm using now.
Ah well... we shall see the new camera real soon. And hopefully I can wait till the next GSS before finally getting one with many Sony freebies thrown in... like buy camera give Bravia LCD TV? haha... that may be a good time for more electronics. Who knows.
Finally back to work after the long National Day break, and part of my morning routine is to have breakfast in front of the laptop reading Straits Times interactive online while listening to the campus radio for the latest and juiciest stuff about school (usually goes in the tone that students shouldn't date). Anyway, I spotted something funny while surfing ST online today.
I'm fully away of the great firewall of Singapore and many other things in our school network that protects us from 'undesirable' stuff such as mrbrown, pr0n, worms and other 'shall not be named' stuff. But today, ST online was 'censored' by the time it reached me.
Screenshot
Access to National Day 2007 contains "active content" that they removed to guard against potentially malicious content from the internet. Well Done! Happy 42nd Birthday Singapore, maybe it is time for you to be less paranoid about yourself. The forum page reads like selected text for schizophrenia recently.
That's how much I missed due to sickness when I find that I have nothing NDP related (pictures) to blog about. Tons of work to be done ranging from year end paper to year 3 test papers to year 5 lecture notes and grading of SAP practice tasks. And I will officially start my year 5 modules on Monday... 8:30 pm dinner or 5:30 pm dinner.... 5:30 pm is too early and 8:30 pm is too late... sigh...
Some physics photos. White light get splits into red and blue inside a diamond and scatter into different directions. 
Taken with H1 with M3358 close-up filter
Some time ago I have a great chance to pick up one of these for about $400 less than the local retail price. I took the chance to test out the lens but was disappointed with some unknown problems with it so I'm didn't manage to offload more than $1000 from my pockets for a piece of dream glass. (Literally dream glass as I dreamt of it the day before I went to test that lens) The Sony/Minolta mount is the only DSLR camera that have access to premium autofocus Carl Zeiss lens unless you want to go to the Leica 4/3 mount option with Olympus/Panasonic.
Maybe it would be more worthwhile to wait for price drop because I'm pretty sure it will be sold for much lesser than the amount it commands now when new Carl Zeiss lens are finally out in the near future. (And when ppl starts to sell their CZ lens for newer ones etc). After all, I'm enjoying the fact that I managed to source for great 2nd hand deals so far and managed to recoup my investments by selling some of the lenses away. Something that is not possible if I go for brand new lens.
Anyway, here's the sample photos from the CZ lens that I tested in comparison to my KM 28-75mm f2.8 lens. Which is a gem if you ask me.
And let the technical stuff begins
The original resized photos of indoor test shot. On the left - 16-80mm f3.5-4.5 CZ , on the right - KM 28-75mm f2.8. Taken at 80mm for the CZ lens and 75mm for the KM one both at f4.5 and the exposure settings (ISO etc) are kept the same. Focus by centre spot.
CZ indoor centre 100% crop
KM indoor centre 100% crop
The results are obvious, the KM shot shows better sharpness at centre frame. And judging from the crops, maybe the CZ lens did not get the focus accurately. Maybe it was slightly back focussed. I tried many shots with the CZ lens and all samples turned up like this. I was taken aback by the relatively poor performance of the CZ lens compared to the KM. I thought it would at least be comparable and given the better range, make it a better walkaround lens for me.
It was suggested that the problem could be that the CZ have problem focusing in low light situations, so I brought it to shoot some brighter outdoor scenes.
Resized shots of the 2nd test site. Again, left is CZ, right is KM. With similar settings once again and tested many shots. The ones you see here are the better shots I got from CZ. Again focus is set at centre spot.
Centre crop for the CZ lens
Centre crop for the KM lens
Let's study the road sign that is about 10 m behind instead
CZ version
KM version
The CZ version seems a tad better for the road sign behind, so could it be that the CZ lens consistently back focussed a little compared to the KM lens? After trying 2 different CZ 16-80mm lens indoors and outdoors getting the same results for both photographers. I decided that the CZ may not be for me. At least not those 2 copies that I sampled.
This is only the first stage of the testing of CZ lens and I have already rejected it. I sampled the corner sharpness and it's incredibly sharp, but unable to find the right focus plane makes it a deal breaker for me. I read somewhere that the CZ lens is a strange beast, it does not like high contrast sites for focusing and prefer low contrast details for focusing. I have yet to try it out but even if it is true, I don't believe in spending over 1K on a lens and have to deal with so many problems. Right now, I'll just stick with my el-cheapo kit lens for my wide angle needs, until I wait for the next good deal to come along.
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