Per Ardua Ad Astra

It’s been an eventful day and tiring one too. Relatively speaking, that’s good enough since there’s minimal stress and some extra time to do some personal exploration. I’m slightly more upbeat about NUS now after going through today. Oh, on a personal note I think I found a new use for this blog. I think I’ll start putting down all my personal observations here for future reference (the junk gotta go somewhere) and perhaps somebody out there could either make use of it or help enlighten me. Either way, good luck in making heads or tails of whatever I wrote people.

The day started off with a University Scholars Programme talk. I skipped the first one last Fri so this was my first talk. There’s nothing much to recall or remember, since most of the information was already available on the Internet. However, one thing that struck me was the notable lack of enthusiasm and/or passion. S’pore ‘veterans’, I’m sure you’ll get what I mean (almost monotonous talking, nonchalant attitude). To be honest, I’m hoping it’s a symptom of perpetual tiredness. The thought of being surrounded by biological robots is far more terrifying! The highlights of the talk? You’re given licence to talk in USP modules and only give the lecturer minimal talking time, and freebies! Oh well, that’s one thing about being in S’pore. You do need to worry about not having enough shirts to wear. The number will increase over time anyway. As for the lapel pin, I’ll keep it as a memento or sell it.

Then I had to leave before the scheduled end of 1330 at 1155 to Fratello’s at the NUS Staff Club for our Engineering Science Programme (ESP) ‘Matriculation’. The lunch was great! I can only hope that we’ll get much much more functions like this. So, it’s only 47 of us in total pioneering the programme (surprisingly, the gender ratio is apparently at odds with the official target), with 8 of us under USP too. If I’m not mistaken, I’m the only Malaysian ASEAN Scholar doing ESP-USP. Finally, bragging rights! Hey, if you’re taken aback at this shameless display of vanity, let me enjoy my 30 seconds of fame will you? I’m trying to create an illusion of great personal achievement here! One reassuring thing is to listen to the Deputy Director and being pleased to know that my current level of knowledge on the developments in the scientific community is just marginally incomplete. On the other hand, I have serious doubts about my basics and so that’s where I’ll need to put my efforts into. There was a tour of the facility we’ll be using, and I wasn’t disappointed at all. In short, I want the table and chair in my room! Next up, I’ll just have to wait until the ESP building comes up in 2008, and see if they can set up a SEP to Oxford and UC Berkeley (they’re planning to set us up till PhD too!). Then I’ll have to get the grades come hell or high water (there’s so few of us that they’ll probably be breathing down our necks very often).

Then next up is the Freshman Inauguration Ceremony. Not something that you’ll talk about for the coming days on end, but I managed to keep my eyes open till the end (I had to get extra coffee at the end though). It’s titled Ascension, which reminded me of ascended Ancients (you won’t get the connection unless you watch Stargate series). Here, the speeches seemed rehearsed to me. NUS President Prof Shih’s speech was good (it’s also a not-so-subtle attempt at advertising tactic IMO). His background was both inspiring and impressive too. I wouldn’t dare spoil the fun of reading his history by summarising it. If I read it before going to the FIC today, I wouldn’t have passed the chance to talk to him after the event. Go here and read an interview of him under the heading ‘From a "mediocre" student to a Harvard doctorate — Interview with NUS President Shih Choon Fong’ or ‘Translation of the above article in English’ if you’re a banana. Since NUS is currently under his leadership, it would undoubtedly be guided by his experience in his formative years, there is hope for us average students.

Prof. Shih observed that education has a social aspect that is essential in obtaining a holistic education. Understandably, that is one obvious reason why most lecturers have academic qualifications from abroad. At the luncheon, one thing the lecturer touched on was on the types and examples of innovation (you’ll find out much more by Wiking Innovation). IMHO, the importance of the social aspect should not be underestimated. That and the spirit of innovation (dare to try, fail and to succeed) also are some of the most important ingredients of the US’s economic success. NUS’s motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ also reflects the importance of the benefits of cultural and talent diversity. In fact, even Starbucks company philosophy subscribes to it. No. 2 of the six Mission Statements of Starbucks is ‘Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.’

You guys can criticise America as a country going to pieces, but it has consistently been able to adapt to various challenges to its superpower status and still remain ahead. As long as the US remains open to all to take their shot at achieving the American dream, it will be able to remain at the forefront. Get them paranoid enough and they might just do the right thing again. You won’t see it on the surface, but the academic-corporate investments play a huge role in powering Uncle Sam’s technological innovation. Prof. Shih gave a glimpse of how ideas are formed there. It won’t be immediately apparent to you in his speech. But you’ll have to listen carefully. Good thing MSL reminded all of us that. It’s the part when Prof. Shih was out of ideas; his supervising professor suggested ‘Let’s go for a beer.’

As strange as it seemed, you have no idea how much ideas were born on a napkin over a beer or two. Dyson, Fermi and Feynmann are just a few examples of how much they achieved just by picking a random topic and running off with it while scribbling on paper napkins. It’s not just restricted to scientists too. Taking examples from my pet interest, by sketching on paper napkins over lunch, engineers managed to pull off the Apollo project, and reduce the price tag of $500 billion of getting to Mars down to just a few billion. We Asians still have the stupid notion that ideas are carefully cultivated like a bonsai plant and must be correct and practical the moment we conceive of it. When you don’t need the information to pass, you don’t need to know it. What matters more is whether you’re right or wrong.

As for you guys who think you’re the only one complaining about the state of living in PGPR, it’s not a phenomenon reserved to Malaysians and Singaporeans. While returning to our ‘home sweet home’ by shuttle bus, I had an opportunity to overhear the conversation of a group of Americans (I am making this assumption because one of them lost her wallet and she had to call California to make cancellations). I know, it’s rude to listen in but they aren’t very discreet in their criticism (how outspoken they are) and a Mentat will consider any and all sources of information, so on with the ‘eavesdropping’. BTW, I have another personal observation. Why is it that the ladies so prone to losing their wallet? Ceeesh. If you need to carry a handbag for fashion, then get your most important cards compiled together and kept in a waterproof plastic cover and keep it in your pocket! Then at least you only lose things like money if you lose your fashion icon!

Ok, I think this is really too much. Time to call it a day.

P.S. It finally rained! Finally! But is it just me or does it have a smoky smell?

It has been relatively calm for the past few weeks (thanks in part to plenty of truancy played). However, now there are the distant sounds of thunder and the still air is now replaced with the occasional gusts of wind. A storm is coming. It’s still on the periphery and we do not know when and how hard it will hit us when it arrives. For now, it is coming and that knowledge is sufficient for now. All we can do now is to prepare for it as best as we could possibly manage.

Today is D-Day and like Operation Overlord it began with a quiet theater of operations. Of course, this is no military operation of the type and scale mounted by the United Nations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces. We are not about to embark upon the Great Crusade, we’re just going to try and survive whatever that is about to be thrown at us. No sweat? Let’s hope so.

It’s the second round of bidding already, and yet I still haven’t decided on what USP module to bid for yet. Yes, I have my first choice but unfortunately it clashed with my core modules. I’m going to sleep on it, and I hope I’ll have something in mind when the next bidding session opens in less than 7 hrs time. Then it’ll be time to meet my coursemates, most or all 50 of them. Being part of a pioneer batch is scary since there’s practically no way of knowing what lies ahead of you, and you have to forge your own path. Oh well, I suppose that’s where my experience in going down the road not taken all by myself comes in handy. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of company around. At least we’ll all face the storm together, at least till the melee starts.

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

Now one small step at a time, we shall start by going through the Chemistry workbin, again.

While deciding what to bid for in studying under USP, I came across this spoof of the US Homeland Security Advisory System under the Writing & Thinking: Danger and National Security module.

Image taken from NUS USP website

And so, seems like they know how to make things lively after all. Something to look forward to at long last? I hope so.

Now what? You guessed it.

I’m going to bid for the module.

Many of you would not know what the hell is Stardust@Home. Well, to put it simply, it is an Internet project put there for the public to help researchers do their work for free (about the only thing you get is a digital certificate and intellectual satisfaction). In a way, it’s similar to Seti@Home and Protein Fold@Home (they are all Internet based projects). However, the two projects are distributed computing projects which mean that participants contribute computing power and pretty much nothing else. Stardust@Home is slightly different.

To elucidate in some detail, Stardust@Home evolved from NASA’s Stardust mission to collect particles from a comet and interstellar dust and return it to Earth thereafter. By means of a collector array made of aerogel blocks (an extremely lightweight substance consisting of 90% air), Stardust will fly to comet Wild 2-pronounced "Vilt 2" after the name of its Swiss discoverer-to accomplish its mission objectives. In January 2006, the Stardust spacecraft successfully returned the tennis racket contraption which is the Aerogel Collector Grid back to Earth.

Perforce, so that they could check all the aerogel blocks within a relatively short period of time, the researchers came up with Stardust@Home. What they do is automate the microscope scanning process and then upload the data to a ‘virtual microscope’ for the Stardust@Home participants to use. And what do the participants do? By manipulating the focus of the virtual microscope, they search for impact trails left by particles impacting the aerogel blocks. I think they can come up with an algorithm to automate the process, but I think this is a cheaper and more reliable option (to illustrate, Wikipedia is now a very accurate yet extensive collection of articles that was created solely by the public). The user that finds the particles shall be given the honor to name the particles they find, and be cited as a co-author of any research papers published in the future. However, the chance of getting cited is extremely small. Out of my first 80++ ‘slides’ analysed, about 20 are calibration videos containing obvious impact trails and the rest are pretty much empty. That’s about it.

If you want to join the 115,000 people who pre-registered and participate in the search, go here and do the test before registering. Don’t worry about the test too much. If a fool like me can get 100% accuracy, a lot of people should be able to get the same score too. Besides, the accuracy level is 80%, and you can always redo the test. Have fun!

Images courtesy of Stardust@Home and NASA’s Stardust mission website

How nice for me to write my 100th blog post from foreign soil. Hehehe, now I’m completely immune to prosecution for critising our country. No offence Pak Lah but like Wikipedia, although individual blogs may be ‘inaccurate’ or ‘slanderous’, but on the whole the blogsphere is definitely a better source of information than government censored mainstream media. This shows that our government doesn’t really practice the principles of the First Amendment after all.

Finally, I’m in my room with all my important possessions (save for the empty larder that I must stock up ASAP). Yep, I’m back in my ‘prison cell’ now and have fully established myself here. Although I’ll look forward to it if it actually happens, I’ll dread moving out in 2 months time with all the things that I just moved here. Most of the stuff has been unpacked, and I should be finished by the weekend. Now I’ll just need to find a day where I can just stay in my room undisturbed for at least 6 hrs other than for sleeping purposes so I can get things in order.

Ironically, after snickering at other people’s moving snafus, I just have to make a mistake of my own. Good thing is, I made it to the hostel from Woodlands at night without making more than half a dozen mistakes (five to be exact) and managed to remember the exact location of my own room. However, the most dim-witted thing this dolt has committed was to bring an entire PC down without one very important thing, the power cable. So much for being a tech-whiz. At the least, the mistake was quite cheap. All I need to do was to spend $8 to get one power cable. Now I need to figure out what to do with 2 extra power cables at home.

Fast forward to Matriculation today, which nearly qualifies as a long winded commercial. There are practically two very important things to do there. One was to get your Student Card with the bill and login passwords. The other was to sign up for a student package line with SingTel. In between these two things was a long series of booths for the various University programmes, University clubs and companies selling laptops at student prices there. How typical of them to try and stamp all NUS related brands on you. That is how all of us ended up with at least one bag of freebies. Thank goodness for PROSE to give away free sling bags close to the start! Plus, thanks in part to Tan Jo, we managed to zip past them in about 10 minutes without having to listen to a lot of bla bla bla stuff.

Then it’s time to go to the UHWC to be poked at and prodded by their medical staff in the name of medical checkups. The best part is I got through the entire thing in about 45 minutes. No queuing involved but I have to wait another 1 week just to be able to make my Student Pass at ICA. I pity Tan Jo. First, he didn’t get his room ready in time so he’s still living with an uncle off campus, and then he has to go and make his Student Card because it’s not prepared beforehand, and then UHWC can’t find his medical report! To rub it in, he can’t bid for his course until tomorrow. Somebody up there must have blacklisted his name by mistake.

After that it’s time to join the queue and get a SingTel number. After 3 hours of waiting, I finally got my third phone line and second phone. Within 8 months, I got a Maxis Hotlink, O2 and SingTel line for my O2 xda Exec and Sony Ericsson K608i. I think I’ll give my mom one of the phones and line too since I don’t need so many of these stuff. In the meantime, I should be reachable on my Malaysian and Singaporean numbers.

For now, this is what I got after going through the application process:

1)      ASEAN Undergraduate Scholarship (must maintain good grades for annual renewal)

2)      ESP course (studying science, mathematics, computing  and engineering)

3)      SEP to Europe (rejected, but there’s still SEP to the US & UK)

4)      QET Band 5 out of 6 (Hooray, I don’t have to take English modules! Going through IPCC reports for the Global Warming presentation in LAN paid off for something at last!)

5)      University Scholars Programme (accepted)

You can only come to one obvious conclusion from the above info.

I’m dead meat.

Now I’ll just have to figure what modules I’m supposed to bid for and what is allocated to me.

This is the second post of the day, inspired by those in ‘Hell’. Best to blog now before Orientation and Matriculation overwhelms me.

While I’ve been back here being in tranquil solitude for the most of my time here, it looks like you guys are making yourselves busy there racking up frequent traveler miles and DotAing. Plus the usual assortment of laments too (not meant to condescend, but it’s becoming tragically routine guys).

To all those who think NUS is ‘oh so wonderful’ and all that, let me temper the optimism slightly (or further darken already darkened brows). Sure, NUS is ranked 22^nd by THES (for scorekeeping sakes) but let’s hear the criticisms given in Wikipedia.

·         In 2004, NUS was ranked 18th in The Times Higher Education Supplement’s inaugural global ranking of universities, one of only 3 Asian universities (the other two being the University of Tokyo and Peking University) to be ranked among the top 20 [2]. At the 18th position, NUS was ranked higher than Ivy League universities like Penn and Cornell. The findings of the Times supplement has however been widely disputed and criticized for inaccuracy with subsequent revisions to the ranking criteria in 2005. The disproportionate ranking received by NUS is occasionally attributed to its scholarships to international students, largely from developing countries, and the peer review criteria which appear to select opinions from peers in the same region.

·         In 2005, NUS was ranked 22nd by the Times. It slipped 4 places compared to its ranking in 2004, although still retained its position as the third highest ranked Asian university, when the ranking criteria was amended to include employers’ review (which NUS did not do well in), and reduce the weightage for peer review.

I don’t have any axe to grind against NUS, but I have a gut feeling that NUS may dip further in future rankings. It’s useless to be too concerned about these anyway, so I’ll leave it be.

However, I do have legitimate concerns about NUS in general. You see, compared to our ‘tanah tumpah darahku’, everything about NUS is so much nicer. In fact, that is the main reason why the Bangladeshis and Vietnamese I’ve met are in NUS. It’s better than what their home countries offer. They also mentioned anecdotal evidence from their seniors of the difficulty of studying here. I haven’t met people of other nationalities, so I cannot accurately say that this is a general sentiment and how difficult it could be, relatively speaking. Oh hell, undergraduate life isn’t exactly a bed of roses right? More likely it will be a bed of THORNY roses in my reckoning. Question is, how many of those pointy ended razor sharp protrusions are we going to get?

PGPR is one nice eggshell, nice on the outside and not so nice on the inside. Please don’t let it be that way for NUS in general too?

One funny thing in life is this: You hear and believe in something that people around you think is true. Then, occasionally someone comes along and claims otherwise. Sometimes, I automatically reject the claim (if it’s absurd enough) or pause to reconsider. In one instance, Owie came up with a rather startling claim that getting educated abroad is a waste of $$$. No offence buddy, but I nearly labelled that claim as absurd straightaway and threw it out of my head.

However, just to be sure I paused to make sure that I’m really making an impartial judgement since I do have vested interests in moving out of here. The brain is a fickle thing. Once you embrace a line of thought, you could be blinded to all evidence to the contrary. It is this fear of getting it wrong that I have to try and keep an open mind and guzzle information to a point where information overload becomes a real possibility for my limited brain (after all, I lack the impressive capabilities of Frank Herbert’s Mentats). To be certain, there is a fine line to thread between having to decide spontaneously and deciding to hedge for more time. To be rash is one thing, and to let fear paralyse you into indecisiveness or retreat is another. Unfortunately, balancing those two factors nicely is an art which I have yet to master. For now, I think the price to pay for being rash is dearer than being fearful, which explains much of my decisions. I’ll just have to keep paying the price of missed opportunities in the meantime.

Back to Owie’s point of contention, I’m lazy to nitpick and lay down the points in painstaking detail, so I’ll be short. Before I start, I must admit that I’m particularly struck by the irony that the issue was raised by a NUS Medicine course freshman. If you want to save money Owie, you would have gone to IMU and studied medicine there. Since he didn’t do so, the claim was made redundant by the claimant himself.

In case you want something more concrete than that, here’s food for thought: Tell me, is the price of knowledge in a book only worth the price tag on it? Similarly, is the knowledge you learn in an undergraduate course is the same as the tuition fee imposed on it? I am but a fool who places disproportionate value on ideas and information, so I answer in the affirmative. Furthermore, wherever you get your degree from you might get an opportunity to earn foreign currency. You spend RM to earn AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD or USD. Engineers in M’sia, S’pore and UK all earn roughly 3,000 a month in their own countries, but in their own denominations. In a sense, you spend more to earn more.