Looking for origami pieces I can do for the kids, I found this:
CRAZY! This man is Kamiya Satoshi and the video shows him folding a phoenix. He made a dragon using 2m x 2m paper: (NOTE: All the links are in Japanese!)
I am obviously 'working'. Watching lectures from my intermediate statistics class. I've done all of this before in applied econometrics at LSE, but this professor takes a much more intuitive (and slower) approach, so I've been trying to match her intuitive explanations to the theoretical concepts I learnt before. I find the LSE professor's approach so much more accessible - it feels like the more I hear, the more confused I get!
Interesting, if not very PC, article about beauty, mainly focused on Dove's latest campaigns:
Another Dove ad, focusing on girls’ insecurities about their looks, concludes, “Every girl deserves to feel good about herself and see how beautiful she really is.” Here, Dove is encouraging the myth that physical beauty is a false concept, and, at the same time, falsely equating beauty with goodness and self-worth. If you don’t see perfection in the mirror, it suggests, you’ve been duped by the media and suffer from low self-esteem.
And an article about the sexism embodied in the ideal of a flight stewardess, that mentions our own SIA:
I personally don't mind, but the world's 13th largest carrier still proudly refers to its female cabin crew as the "Singapore Girls." Boasts the airline's Web site: "We have one of the world's youngest fleet in the air, a network spanning five continents, and the Singapore Girl as our symbol of quality customer care and service." It's a branding that dates to 1972 and is the brainchild of Ian Batey, founder of the Singapore advertising giant Batey Ads, with whom the hometown airline has shared a decades-long relationship.
In many countries, the requirements to become a Singapore Girl are the stuff of discrimination lawsuits or are banned outright: Candidates can be no older than 25, and are forced to "retire" by 35. They must be of Asian extraction (most are Singaporean or Malay, but many are Chinese, Indian, Korean, Indonesian or Japanese) and must be "slim and attractive, with a good complexion and warm personality."
"The Singapore Girl strategy turned out to be a very powerful idea," writes Venture Republic magazine. "A successful brand icon with an almost mythical status and aura around her." Madame Tussauds wax museum in London installed a Singapore Girl in 1994. It was the museum's first commercial figure. In 1992, the Mattel toy company released a Singapore Girl edition of its famous Barbie doll.
"The Singapore Girl encapsulates Asian values and hospitality," adds Venture Republic, "and could be described as caring, warm, gentle, elegant and serene."
Or, put another way in a story from Reuters, "Despite her success, critics complain the Singapore Girl concept is sexist, outmoded and largely intended to serve male passengers' fantasies of desirable, subservient Oriental women."
I don't know how many male passengers truly fantasize about subservient Oriental women, but plenty of fliers, male and female alike, fantasize about good on-board service. Obviously the Girls excel in that regard, helping Singapore Airlines rack up more customer service awards and accolades than virtually all other carriers combined.
Justin Timberlake's new MTV starring Scarlett Johansson. As hot as he is, even he can't pull this off. The 'acting' bits are PAINFUL. And when he says 'you get what you deserve', Scarlett Johansson gets into a horrible car crush?! WTF serious. The whole MTV seems like an excuse to make out with Johansson - no wonder Cameron Diaz broke up with him! Plus the song is allegedly about Britney. So lots of gossip and hot footage of people making out. Plus the song's actually pretty decent.
Senior citizens have a moral and social obligation to take care of themselves
THE report ‘Ministerial panel to tackle concerns of the elderly’ (The Sunday Times, Feb 4) clearly shows that ministries are trying to pre-empt the impending problem of our greying population. The Government is trying to defuse this ticking time-bomb but the senior citizens themselves have a part to play in taking proper measures so that they do not bring harm upon themselves.
Take my former colleague, who is now 66 years old. One day, he found that the light bulb in his hall was defective. So he got hold of a ladder and positioned it below the light.
He climbed the steps but when he reached the top, he felt giddy. He fell with a thud and broke his arm.
He was hospitalised for a week and the hospital bill was more than if he had employed an electrician to do the job.
An elderly neighbour, 65, has the job of looking after two young grand-daughters thrust upon her by her professional son and daughter-in-law.
Her son told her that he could not trust a maid to look after her precious grand-daughters and it would be better for her to keep an eye on them while he was at work.
He felt that as a grandmother, she would not ask for a salary and blood is always thicker than water.
One day, she brought the kids to the playground to play on the swing. Suddenly, the younger grand-daughter ran towards the busy main road.
In her haste to stop her, the elderly woman tripped over the kerb and broke two front teeth.
Her dental bill came to a substantial amount and it was cold comfort to her when her son told her to be more careful in the future.
Our senior citizens have sometimes laboured under the impression that they are only 35 and they could still perform tasks which they could do years ago.
But they have the moral and social obligation to ensure that they take care so as not to bring pain and suffering upon themselves. The Government has the duty of looking after them, but unless senior citizens take upon themselves to be sensitive and realistic about their own physical robustness, they have only themselves to blame if they incur pain through their own foolishness.
Feb 8th 2007 | BANGKOK From The Economist print edition
The rich little place that the others love to hate
SINGAPORE won South-East Asia's football championship on February 4th in a final against Thailand that was mostly peaceful, despite a bad-tempered first leg in which the Thais stomped off the pitch and sulked for 15 minutes. The players were doing no more than imitate their military-run government, which has been in a strop with Singapore since Singapore's deputy prime minister met Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed Thai leader, last month. In protest, top-level meetings with Singaporean officials were cancelled. General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the Thai junta's leader, accused Singapore of spying on Thailand, using the telecoms business it bought last year from Mr Thaksin's family. He told his soldiers to stop using their mobiles and go back to walkie-talkies.
Despite 40 years of expressing fraternal warmth at meetings of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the region's leaders never miss an opportunity to pick a fight with Singapore. In recent years, Singaporean firms, many of them state-backed, have bought businesses across the region, providing cause for paranoia. Indonesian parliamentarians claimed this month that their military secrets were also at risk because the Singaporeans had bought into a local satellite firm.
Even sand is a matter of national security. On February 6th, an Indonesian ban on sand exports came into force, following a similar move by Malaysia some years ago. Singapore buys the sand to reclaim land from the sea and increase its puny terrain. Indonesia's official reason for the ban was to stop the environmental damage caused by sand mining. But a senior navy man let slip that it was motivated by various diplomatic spats with Singapore. The Indonesian navy has now sent no fewer than eight warships to its maritime border with Singapore to intercept suspected sand-smugglers. At the same time, the Indonesian sand-shovellers' association, facing unemployment, is threatening to sue the government over the ban.
The Malaysians, always up for a row with their estranged ex-spouse (Singapore and Malaysia were in a brief, unhappy union in the 1960s), are blaming their recent floods on Singapore's land reclamation. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's disgruntled former prime minister, has sought to undermine his successor, Abdullah Badawi, by accusing him of secretly negotiating with the Singaporeans to lift the sand ban. Mr Mahathir also added his voice to the Thai junta's attacks on the Singaporeans: “You'll get nowhere with them either being nice or being tough, they only think of themselves,” he said on Thai television.
There is always a plausible-sounding reason for the fights that Singapore's neighbours pick with it. The Singaporeans' kiasu (win at all costs) negotiating style does them few favours in a region where saving face is important. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the little country's unforgivable offence is being richer and more successful than its neighbours, and not particularly apologetic about it.
Becoming famous is relatively easy: Anna Nicole Smith was born with a beautiful face, a big smile and a voluptuous body she was happy to bare for Playboy. Staying famous for nothing much is hard work, and that is the real story of Ms. Smith’s life and death. Her desperation for fame was so raw that she didn’t mind being the butt of the joke if it helped maintain her place in the spotlight. Her career started out tacky, went downhill from there and ultimately says more about the culture’s fascination with celebrity than it does about Anna Nicole Smith.
While most stars play a clever cat-and-mouse game with the media, Ms. Smith’s sport was Extreme Fame. Her sense of how to court attention was simply to show up, pose and practically say, “Come get me, use me.” In that blatant desire for publicity she embodied the ultimate symbiosis of celebrity: between an individual who acted as if life out of the spotlight were worthless, and a press and public eager to indulge her craving for attention.
But without any actual career to back up her claim on the public, the question becomes: why did we watch? The unsettlingly vapid reason: because we could. She was a glittery spectacle who offered guilt-free voyeurism, as we watched her dramas with drugs and weight and inheritance laws. And the lesson of her fame is that there is no lesson.
All the attempts to justify her fame that have flowed in since her death on Thursday are hollow. She was not Marilyn Monroe; the closest Ms. Smith came to a real movie career was a small role in the spoof “Naked Gun 331/3 : The Final Insult.” She was not a rags-to-riches inspiration; most little girls don’t dream of growing up to be Playmate of the Year, marrying an 89-year-old billionaire and fighting for his money all the way to the Supreme Court. And she was not a cautionary tale; she courted attention too relentlessly to seem innocent or deluded.
Not everyone's a genius, but don't say so in front of the children
BY the time Laszlo Polgar's first baby was born in 1969 he already had firm views on child-rearing. An eccentric citizen of communist Hungary, he had written a book called "Bring up Genius!" and one of his favourite sayings was "Geniuses are made, not born".
An expert on the theory of chess, he proceeded to teach little Zsuzsa at home, spending up to ten hours a day on the game. Two more daughters were similarly hot-housed. All three obliged their father by becoming world-class players. The youngest, Judit, is currently ranked 13th in the world, and is by far the best female chess player of all time.
Would the experiment have succeeded with a different trio of children? If any child can be turned into a star, then a lot of time and money are being wasted worldwide on trying to pick winners.
Really interesting article! My next paper requires me to design a school system - in 10-12 pages! (That's about 2500-3600 words, depending on how much I mess with margins and line spacing.) Fascinating stuff, but I find my school system looking remarkably like Singapore's. The more I interact with people brought up in different systems, the more I like ours, and the more inclined I am to believe that while Singapore's education system is far from perfect, it's close to being one of the best out there. My biggest grouse with it is teaching to the test.
Does anyone have suggestions for easy, cheap arts and crafts projects?
I'm babysitting 18-month-old and 5-year-old boys, as well as a 6-year-old girl, and I'm trying to think of easy things we can do that won't require me buying new material! So far, we've done the crayon thing (where you color the entire piece of paper with lots of colors, then color over with black crayon so all the colors can't be seen, and then draw by scratching away with black crayon). I've promised eggshell puppets next week (though we might just do gloves because that's more convenient). We're also thinking of making necklaces out of pasta. But without arts supplies (acrylic paint, ice cream sticks, little 'eyes', wool...), it's hard to think of things to do! So any suggestions would be great.
The babysitting has been going well. I love kids. Right now, up on the wall in front of my table is a little letter from my reading buddy, complete with a picture of the two of us. She's adorable.
Recently, Senator Joseph Biden described Senator Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. Lovely huh? The NYTimes has a great article on it.
This site, allegedly made by a white couple to show how much black people love them, is hilarious. But what's most hilarious is the responses. Irony and satire appears to be beyond certain people.
Q1. 3 people are in a prison together. All wear either a red or a blue hat, but they do not know the color of their hat (in fact all wear red hats). No communication allowed.
The guard tells them that he will ring a bell every hour and if somebody knows that he is wearing a red hat, he or she can leave. (ETA: the guard also tells them that anyone wearing a blue hat who attempts to leave will be executed on the spot.) Nobody leaves!
Does it change the outcome if he announces to all: “There is at least one person with a red hat”? Who will leave and when (i.e. after how many hours)?
SINGAPORE, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Members of Singapore's long-ruling People's Action Party (PAP) are posting anonymous messages in Internet forums and blogs to rebut online criticism of the party, a leading daily reported on Saturday.
The postings were an initiative driven by two sub-committees under the PAP's "new media" committee chaired by Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen, the pro-government Straits Times said, citing unnamed sources.
A government spokeswoman contacted on Saturday declined to comment.
The two sub-committees, made up of politicians and some technology-savvy party activists, were formed after the May 2006 general election, the Straits Times said. The PAP's share of the vote slid to 66.6 percent last year, from 75.3 percent at the previous election in 2001.
The panels had been set up to express the PAP's views online where there were few pro-establishment voices, the newspaper said, quoting a member of parliament who heads one sub-committee.
"The identity is not important. It is the message that is important," Baey Yam Keng was quoted as saying.
The Straits Times quoted Baey as saying that the messages were only effective if they were not "too obvious" lest they resemble "propaganda".
A PAP activist involved in posting the anonymous messages was quoted as saying that he tracked popular blogs and forums to "see if there is anything we can clarify" on controversial issues such as the impending hike in the goods and services tax.
The PAP, which has ruled Singapore since independence in 1965, has been criticised by human rights groups such as Amnesty International in the past for its curbs on freedom of expression.
Party leaders say tight regulation of public debate and the media in the city-state is necessary to maintain law and order.
If it's showing at a theater near you, you have to watch God Grew Tired of Us.
It documents the lives of three Sudanese teenagers who are relocated to America after spending a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya. The documentary is painful to watch. First, it sets the scene, describing the journey of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who are driven by war (genocide in my opinion) to march from southern Sudan to Ethiopia and then from Ethiopia to Kenya, after the regime change in Ethiopia. A lot of these boys are roughly my age and it is heartbreaking to compare our childhoods. A young boy at thirteen was made to be the leader of a group of boys, simply because he was the tallest. Just because of his height, he was put in charge of over 1200 other boys, responsible for things like burying the dead along the way. I can't even begin to imagine how I would cope if put in his shoes. The compassion of these boys is amazing. I look at how selfish and bratty kids around me are (especially in Singapore), and marvel at how young boys at little as seven could take on the responsibility of caring for other children, who were often strangers.
Watching them adapt to life in America made us realize how lucky we are and how much we take for granted. Some boys were working up to three jobs simultaneously to send money home to the other boys back in the camp and their family. All this while struggling to cope with a completely different lifestyle and culture. And here we are complaining about how tough our lives are.
What amazes me most is how little attention the world has paid to these children. This war has been raging for decades, but how many Singaporeans even know about it? The parochialism of Singaporeans is the issues I believe urgently needs to be addressed by our education system. Singaporeans need to be raised to have a greater awareness of the events going on outside our country.
The world is so incredibly fucked up. As we walked out of the cinema, I asked Kristin why people can't just be nice to one another and she was like, 'How old are you?!' I just hope what we're studying now will eventually enable us to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate people around us.
Off to watch The Last King of Scotland. This is my week of depressing movies about Africa. I'm taking a course on the politics of development policy and another one on achieving universal access to education, so there'll be a lot more depressing news. Even though SIngapore is a developed country, I'm more interested in developing countries because children in those countries need our help a lot more urgently. While writing my final paper about poor rural children in India, I had a little breakdown thinking about how tough their lives are and how little we can do about it. It didn't help that I'd been pulling all-nighters for a week.
I desperately need a pair of sensible warm flat winter boots. The big question: is this (UGG Dunwich boots) worth $225 USD?
(OK la, I know the answer should be no la, especially since I'm so motherbroke. But DAMN TEMPTING! And running out of my size! And this is exactly what I want! How like that?! Wei, you going to Sweden or not? Would you wear this?! Please say yes!)
ETA: Now it's OSS and I either have to wait FORTYFOUR DAYS or pay over $250. :(
Just got home from watching Pan's Labyrinth - what a beautiful, surreal movie. The CGI was just brilliant. Everything looked incredibly lifelike, almost real. The scenes in the magical underworld were captivating - even I, the avowed nature-hater, wanted to explore it. There was a lot of violence - an excessive amount some say - but I thought it served as an antithesis to the fantasy, bringing us back to reality, reminding us of what's really going out outside the girl's imagination (or is everything really happening?). That's what was amazing about the film: how pure fantasy and brutal reality co-existed seemingly seamlessly.
Of course, there were the usual themes about fascism and obedience (sometimes disobeying has good consequences, sometimes it has bad). It's a movie just dying to be subjected to Prac Crit. It would be so much fun showing this for an S Lit class!
Also, I watched a preview of The Namesake and I really want to watch it too! Next week, I've also made plans to watch God Grew Tired Of Us and The Last King of Scotland. Hoping to squeeze in Children of Men too - it's shopping week! My last week of freedom! Might as well sneak in all the hedonistic time-wasting pleasures I enjoy.
The testing class really got me thinking. Test preparation is so commonplace in Singapore (spotting questions, TYS) that we don't even think twice about it. But is such test preparation 'productive'? Does such test preparation do anything beside raise scores on this one test? Are the gains in scores generalizable to different contexts? Are we really teaching students when we drill them like that?
When does test preparation become cheating? How fair is it when some teachers are brilliant at 'spotting' questions and others are not, such that their students' performance is heavily influenced by how well the teachers can game the system?
Youthink will resume print on Feb 05. For the first opinion call of 2007, we are seeking pieces that explore the theme of "disassociation" Singaporeans feel when they are away from home. In particular, this should apply to Singaporeans who are currently overseas studying and working, including those who have studied/worked overseas, and are now back in Singapore.
Your pieces can discuss what you understand by the term "disassociation", in relation to your situation. Is that the most accurate way to describe your relationship with Singapore? Why?
Alternatively, if you don't feel "disassociated", talk about your own positive experience and how despite being overseas, you still feel a strong connection to Singapore, and why that is so.
Your articles should refer to some personal examples that highlight how long you have lived in which country, and what you are/were doing there, for color.
It should also discuss some area of national policy, existing or lack thereof, that is pertinent to this topic. For example, the recently established Overseas Singaporeans Network by the government - will it work to foster more loyalty to the country? Why and why not? Have you heard of it, are you a member of it? How can national policy work better to include and round up Singaporeans who are overseas?
We will be selected five articles for print on Feb 05. The writers whose articles are chosen will be paid per Youthink regular rates. Please include at the bottom of your article your full name, age, affliation (school, company), and contact information.
Readers like to read articles that offer a fresh perspective on tried-and-true discussion topics. So we will select for variety as well as excellence in writing. If you think you have a unique and thoughtful take on this subject, please write to me at yen.feng@gmail.com with a short summary on what your article will include, and I will contact you individually for follow up.
We are trying to work a week in advance, so the deadline for your articles is this Friday, Jan 26. As such, your summaries should reach me no later than this Wed, Jan 24.
Thank you!
Yen Feng "
You would think a journalist would take care not to make mistakes when writing.
This is an interesting article about cosmopolitanism and parochialism in film. We just watched Letters from Iwo Jima, and while I enjoyed it tremendously, it was ultimately an American film, with American sensibilities, starring Japanese people speaking in Japanese (though what can you expect from Clint Eastwood right?).
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
flyingfaeries's journal
(NOTE: All the links are in Japanese!)
