November 2010
109 posts
Express stream entry rate
Straits Times Forum, Nov 30, 2010:
MR WONG TUCK YIN: ‘This year’s Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) saw 63.5 per cent of the candidates qualifying for the Express stream, 22.1 per cent for Normal (Academic), 11.7 per cent for Normal (Technical), while 2.7 per cent failed. A large proportion of the candidates would have had pre-primary education, private tuition and extensive exam preparation, not least by systematic drilling in past years’ papers. So I am surprised by the 63.5 per cent rate for Express stream entry. Should the Ministry of Education (MOE) review whether the level of difficulty of PSLE papers has been set too high? This could accentuate the unhealthy trend of more and more tuition and pressure on parents and children. A larger proportion of non-Express stream pupils may not progress beyond Secondary 4 and may well join workers in a lower-skill, lower-income bracket; a development we should minimise.’
Does not compute.
If you lower the entry bar to the Express stream, you may have a higher failure rate, so you lower the standards within the stream as well. Then you may have a lower proportion qualifying for pre-university, so you lower the standards.. in the end, you will might have many university graduates. But if degree standards are so low, how does it help them where skills and jobs are concerned?
If it’s that low you might as well start degree mills and save everyone’s time. Not a good place to end up in.
Open ID Is A Nightmare →
blog.wekeroad.com
100%! I’ve experienced exactly the same pain as a user trying to figure out which OpenID I use to login to Hacker News/Clickpass to upvote comments..
“The real reason Apple offers free engraving is to weaken the secondary market. iPds are durable goods. Apple has a monopoly on iPds, but it still has to compete with the products of its former self. If people get tired of their iPds or decide they want to upgrade to a newer model, they can sell their devices to other consumers, who in turn are not giving their money to Apple. By offering free engraving, Apple makes these used devices less valuable to other consumers. Who wants a weird engraving chosen by the previous owner on his iPd? The more iP*ds are engraved, the smaller (or at least less valuable) the secondary market is, and the more profitable it is to be the durable-goods monopolist, Apple.”
—Why Does Apple Offer Free Engraving? // Eli Dourado
the second star: the nine types of intelligence →
thesecondstar.tumblr.com
Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University proposed that there are several types of intelligence.
1. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) - Designates the human ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the natural world…
Not feeling very intelligent after reading this one.
Instapaper 2.3 for iPhone and iPad now available
Dark Mode improvementsThe iPhone’s font panel also got its most highly requested feature, a Light/Dark toggle without needing to leave the article:
But you won’t need to use it as often, because I’ve added a ridiculous little feature:
You can now have Instapaper automatically use dark mode at night and normal (light) mode during the day.
But how, exactly, do you define “night”? There’s no API access to the iPhone’s ambient light sensor, so I can’t just enable dark mode in dark rooms.
And I can’t just define hour boundaries, because 8 PM in December is much darker than 8 PM in June.
And I can’t just look at hours and the date, because 5 PM in December is much darker in Alaska than in Costa Rica.
So I used with the most reliable method I could think of: sunset times in your location. Yes, Instapaper is now location-aware, but only for this feature. (Leave it to me to come up with the least-social use of locations possible.)
Best unusual use of location awareness.
“别离总是伤感的，但却带来相聚的喜悦。”
—
When friends leave… « asdf-zxcv:
There is much truth in these words. Yet it led me to think of the beauty there is in partings too. As our friends leave, we stop for a moment in our hectic lives to look back and think of the good times we spent together, the experiences that shaped our friendship. It was as they left that I found the time to think through the odd manner in which we came together and became friends in the first place. It is for these moments that we go through the confusing process of becoming friends yet we often forget them along the way.
How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked Out →
alternet.org
Got this great story from Give Me Something To Read, Instapaper’s companion site edited by Nostrich. I wanted to quote nearly every paragraph.
What’s great about this article is that it provides an intelligent counterpoint and reality check against all of the usual “the entire U.S. food system sucks and is killing our children but first making them fat” narrative of the documentaries and investigative-entertainment shows that we all enjoy watching.
The school administrators responsible for their food programs largely aren’t being ignorant, cheap, or irresponsible: they’re usually doing the best they can in the bureaucratic, societal mess they’re stuck in.
One of the big issues is that many kids won’t eat the school lunches if they’re not appealing, and nearly every alternative they’re likely to choose is less healthy. But if you give them too many appealing choices, they’ll just eat french fries and ice cream and ignore the healthier dishes. This West Virginia policy is genius:
Goff adds there are no outside vendors and “we do not permit a la carte sales.”
Author Jan Poppendieck explains that a la carte food “undermines the nutritional integrity of school meals.” She says kids “can pick at the parts of school lunch they feel like eating and then fill up with pastries. They have on their tray a meal that has been planned to meet nutrition standards, but then they can buy candy, and research shows that they do. Children who were in school without a la carte options ate more of the official lunch.”
Removing choice is often beneficial for everyone if those making the choice are likely to choose against their best interests.
And nearly every enforced regulation, while good-natured, may cause unintended workarounds:
School meals must meet two sets of standards to be reimbursable. One, they must provide a minimum amount of proteins, minerals, vitamins and calories. Two, meals must contain a maximum of 30 percent of calories from fat and 10 percent from saturated fat. […]
If a school district finds a meal has too much fat, it can raise the calorie count to lower the proportion of fat. “The quickest, least expensive fix … is to add sugar,” writes Poppendieck. “Sweetened, flavored milks have become a staple of the cafeteria, and desserts are making a comeback. An additional serving of vegetables, the element in which American diets are most glaringly deficient, would usually fill the calorie gap, but it is beyond the financial reach of most schools.”
Like The Wire, this article helps illustrate that the causes of what we see as an isolated issue — unhealthy cafeteria food — are actually broad, systemic failures, side effects, and incentives gone wrong with no simple fixes.
Worth a read.
Seconded.
Letter: Generation Text, Living on a Screen - NYTimes.com:
To the Editor:
Having taught art history courses for more than a decade, I have witnessed firsthand the relatively rapid and somewhat disheartening transformation of attentive, questioning college students into the easily distracted, gadget-glued generation so accurately portrayed in your article.
While the lack of focus you mention is certainly a byproduct of the digital environment, more troubling is a corollary phenomenon — a tendency of the digital generation to dispense with nuance and multiple layers of meaning, much like a computer, in favor of immediate and often cursory observations.
Most academic disciplines, however, are learned and truly appreciated only through careful, nuanced and extended readings that require not only focused observation but also focused thought over time, seemingly a nuisance in the age of Twitter.
It is perhaps not a lack of focus but a lack of patience that will ultimately define us.
Brian E. Hack
Brooklyn, Nov. 21, 2010The writer is an assistant adjunct professor in the art department of Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
—
Heraclitus of Ephesus.
The SEP has a considered reading of this that differs somewhat, as an observation that change is required for constancy oftentimes – change and constancy are not mutually exclusive, as the phrase ‘change is the only constant’ sorta alludes to. A river is, by definition, a constantly changing entity.
One of the things that came up from a really long walk up the Singapore River.
Nachts
Singapore at 4am is – cabs, cabs, and more cabs. And the occasional strange person walking around town, like the old man standing at the bus stop with no bus services running.
Things look different in the middle of the night. Clarke Quay. The Bolero sculpture at UOB Plaza. The Singapore River. People. My front door.
Some goodbyes and farewells have been said, will be said this week, will be said in 6 weeks. Will we meet again? (Maybe.) Will things ever be the same again? (No.) Was this the best time of our lives? (Time will tell.) What happens next? Que sera, sera!
