The Personal Statement
By Kevin
Not another essay!
Your Singapore-Cambridge A Levels Results is just released, you scored pretty decent grades, enough to get you the course you want in University, so now what? The thing that stands between you and the offer to the course you want from the University is an application form (besides the tuition fees of course). And unfortunately the application form is not just about filling up your details and your results, it requires some information of your personality, aspirations and such. And they do this through a Personal Statement (or whatever they call it).
Usually a personal statement doesn't offer any questions; at least UCAS works that way but they do give some sort of guidelines as to what to include in it. You should generally talk about your academic interest, the motivating factor behind your choice of course and some activities or achievements that is in line with that. Or if appropriate, you could talk about the kind of books you read. After which you can include some of your other interests and the reason for your choice of study setting. And depending on your preferences, you could end with an appeal for an offer.
Unfortunately, not all applications are that liberal with the stuff you can write. Some would restrict you with a question, which students might prefer at times. The most popular question that have been asked is 'What are some values or beliefs do you hold on most strongly? Give evidence of how you demonstrated them.' And to tackle this question, you basically have to choose some of these values and beliefs. They come across as pretty generic and the content would depend really on the story you have to tell about yourself. A good story is rare but would come strong; that doesn't mean that ordinary tales about your life won't stand out. You'll never know. Here are some values that you might use and also guidelines as to what life story you can pick.
Discipline - How you managed to keep yourself away from temptations/distractions and pursue your goals (in studies and other endeavors of life)
Integrity - How you have been consistent in your thought, words and deeds (Maybe during leadership stints in CCAs, or what you've promised your teachers and friends)
Teamwork - How you might have dropped your own idea in support of a team activity and gone along with everyone (maybe in Project Work)
Compassion - How you've gone all out to reduce pain and sufferings of others (perhaps community work and such)
Hard Work - How you worked hard and it paid off (very cliche and overused value so I'm suggesting you don't use it unless you've a unique experience to share)
Balance - How you've managed to juggle commitments and the lighter bits of life (once again, drawn from work and life)
Excellence - How you've insisted on the best from yourself and the people around you (probably in Project Work or your CCAs again)
There's also questions that ask for an event or a person that has influenced your life; these usually end up being very cliche sort of writings but then if you know how to package it, even cliche writings can appear impressive. It is important that the influence is positive and powerful if not significant to your current attitudes towards life. This is especially true when your content has something original to offer within the cliche framework in the first place. I've seen the essay of a successful Havard Applicant about his mother's influence in his life; he started out about how a cliche is one because it is often true and then about his mother who is a NASA engineer.
Other questions could simply ask for what you've done in your last summer vacation or what you will be doing before entering the university. These are easy for those with exciting experiences like touring around the world or working at an interesting job. For those involved in mundane jobs and boring work, try your best to extract lessons learnt from your workplaces and experience that could be applied to university life or the course of your interest. It could range from making calls and interacting with customers to researching on the Internet for some information your employer have asked you to put together.
Some other general pointers about this writing is to stay humble (humility, incidentally, could be used as one of the values) and to keep description of your experiences simple and free from unrealistic adjectives. Use plain English with more sophisticated sentence structures rather than bombastic words to impress readers. That way, you exhibit maturity of thought rather than a childish urge to flaunt your vocabulary. Finally, paragraph your writing properly and it would be best to get a tutor or teacher to go through it for you. They are experienced and have seen the statements by many other students so would be in a good position to offer advice for improvement.
Sanctioning Iran
By Wei Seng
Will I still be able to buy my tea?
The Economist on 25 February wrote with regard to Iran's development of nuclear energy / weapons and whether sanctions would be effective against the belligerent country. I ever argued that sanctions will not work against Iran, and most readers in an online debate about Iran agree. However this article at least has me thinking again about the plausibility of specific sanctions against certain perpetrators in Iran and not against the whole Iranian population in general.
What would be more able to deter Iran, as proposed in this article: a ban on weapons sales, a curtail on investments in the oil & gas industries in Iran and financial sanctions against banks that deal with suspicious Iranian firms. What might successfully deter Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapon, however, might not necessarily be able to be carried out given Russian and Chinese resistance towards tough sanctions against Iran. Vested interests evidently, but at least Russia is beginning to see the light after being rebuffed by Iran for offering alternatives to enriching uranium in Iran by offering to enrich uranium in Russia. Russia continues to sell weapons to Iran however, which would negate the effect of a weapons trading ban.
But unfortunately, the Iranian government appears as if it is immune to sanctions and international action against its actions, and continues to act as if nothing has happened. Life is made much more difficult for the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards behind the scenes, but life is also made difficult for the local Iranians. Hopefully, if China can see the light and squeeze Iran, Iran might back down considering that China is considered one of its major backers.
Don’t Kill Nouns with Adjectives
By Martin See
Enemy of the noun?
The sweltering heat these days reminds me of my old, favourite introduction: "The monstrous red ball of supreme heat hung on the light-blue sky, threatening to melt all the helpless pedestrians on the busy street with its radiating warmth". I loved this introduction so much that I would use it for almost every primary school composition assignment irregardless of the question; after some time, my teacher became so accustomed to my writing that he could identify my composition from its first sentence. Since my teacher did not complain much, I had the false belief that my descriptive introduction reflected good writing style. Eventually, the use of adjectives became a desire to show off my rich vocabulary and that resulted in an immature writing style.
I did not realise my mistake until much later, when I entered high school. My heavily adjectival prose caught my teacher's attention and when she could not take it any longer, she summoned me to her office. That day in her office changed my writing drastically because it was there that I understood the shortcomings of my style; instead of displaying my proficiency in the English language, the constant use of adjectives only made my writing embarrassingly ornate. In addition, my writing also suggests a lack of confidence, as if I am trying to make up for my inability by overdecorating my sentences. If every crisis is a critical crisis, every emergency an urgent emergency, and every problem a grave problem, then the whole idea of a crisis, an emergency, or a problem becomes devalued. In these situations, the adjective becomes the enemy of the noun.
That does not mean that we can do away with adjectives. Adjectives have their uses when they define and refine rather than simply emphasise. In the sentence "We are in legal trouble", the adjective, legal, has a truly informative function. For a vigorous style, you can try replacing adjectives with colourful nouns. "The penniless man that lives in a small, filthy hut" can be replaced by "the pauper that lives in a hovel." A "large and impressive house" can be replaced by a "mansion" and so on. You get the idea. Now, before you give in to the temptation of using flamboyant language, do remember the guiding principle of using adjectives and you will surely produce a good piece of writing!
Maths Moment
By Kevin
I was desperate to check the sample correlation coefficient (r) of a list of sample that forms a scatter plot. I was aware that my graphing calculator could do that but when I finished keying in the information and then applying the LinReg (a + bx) function, I realised I could only obtain the 'a' and the 'b' constants of the regression line and not the coefficient. Thanks to my JC notes, I manage to learn how to get it to work.
So just a reminder for JC kids how to allow the LinReg function display the r and r-square figures: go to Catalog>DiagnosisOn. This is probably the only time you have to go to the Catalog menu in your entire JC H2 Mathematics life.
As for those interested to explore the capabilities of your Graphing Calculator for Chemistry, you can check out the last part of my Chemistry notes.
Gardening in School – Education or Distraction?
By Wei Seng
Homework: Watering the plants
I chanced upon a very interesting article by Gloria Dawson on The Daily Green. This phenomenon is not so much seen in Singapore than in the United States, where gardening in schools was introduced and encouraged, in particular by US First Lady Michelle Obama, to raise students' interests in gardening, nurture green thumbs as well as environmentalism and encourage healthy eating.
I thought such initiatives were pretty self-explanatory in terms of benefits, are pretty much non-political and non-debatable. Dawson had however found an article by a Caitlin Flanagan that expressed much disdain for school gardens, with the argument that "schools are taking kids out of the classroom" when they need to spend more time in the classroom to learn and be educated on the basics, and then eventually climb the educational system. It was something I never really thought about given Singapore's higher-quality educational system, but in America where educational standards are dropping and schools struggle to keep students interested, school gardens may backfire in their intentions as well.
Statistics so far appear to indicate that school gardens have somehow helped boost grades and "understanding of lessons", probably indirect effects of being involved in a garden. It might perhaps create interest in staying in school, or create opportunities to pick up skills such as organisation, leadership and responsibility which would be useful both in lessons and outside of lessons. Unfortunately, the school gardens initiative has caught on with political posturing and people are lambasting the educational system and those who implement the initiative. At least Flanagan's arguments were not exactly without merit, but it appears that Dawson is implicitly pointing fingers at politicians who are blaming the school gardens initiative to their advantage.
There's really plenty to learn from school gardens, in terms of skills and knowledge. Where your food comes from, how to eat healthily; children need to know given that they now live in a very much urban society where food is convenient and global and they do not know where their food comes from, what they should eat, how much they should eat and so on. Again, I am reminded of the book 'The End of Food' by Paul Roberts that I am currently reading about and will review in due time. Links to other articles about the school gardens argument are in The Daily Green article.
Goodhart’s Law
By Kevin
No Space for 2 Targets
A couple of weeks back, I stumbled upon the concept of Goodhart's Law and I can't help wondering if the same is true of corporate performance indicators. Perhaps the case is weaker for corporate performance indicators but the idea may still hold some truth.
The Law based on Goodhart's formulation in 1975 is "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes"
It is initially more or less based on the conduct of monetary policy and has much to do with statistics. But in the corporate setting, tying CEO's financial rewards to share prices has somewhat the same sort of effect. Without the coupling of the 2 variables - share prices and CEO financial compensation, the share prices would ordinarily reflect the performance of the company, which is a proxy for the outcome of the management of the firm under the CEO (although people might argue that it is inaccurate, but in business, outcome is still the most important). When they are linked, CEOs might become obsessed with raising share prices of the firm and neglecting the core management of the firm.
The same applies for lower level sort of work. For example, if the waiting time at the government clinic is used as a measure for performance then doctors and nurses might quickly try to go through the patients and speed up consultation to hit their performance target rather than provide quality care and service. Likewise, if too much emphasis is on delivering good food at a local restaurant, service might be compromised, which explains why the boss of the pizzeria down the street has real bad attitude. Perhaps this is just part of human nature, the narrow focus of our minds.
Fox vs Time Warner
By Kevin
Food Fight!
Days ago I stumbled upon a recent dispute between Fox and Time Warner Cable. The basic idea of the dispute was that Fox wanted more money from Time Warner for carrying their channels and Time Warner didn't want to. The whole thing ended up with publicity campaigns on both sides (Rolloverorgettough.com for Time Warner Cable and Keepfoxon.com for Fox) to make use of TV viewers' support to raise their bargaining power. They eventually settled the dispute so viewers will continue seeing Holmer Simpsons munching on doughnuts.
It is interesting how Lauren Collins explained in The New Yorker how Time Warner Cable was basically using a forced-decision device since there's a spectrum of other options available to them. Time Warner Cable could have just absorbed the price increases and sacrifice their profits. By running the Ad campaign, they're signaling to Fox that they'll not accept any changes to the pricing of the deal - either get paid the same or no more screenings of Fox programmes; effectively introducing a Morton's fork. At the same time, like what Collins mentioned in the article, "The strategy in a nutshell: couch potatoes as human shields." The company handling Time Warner Cable's campaign, Purple Strategies is pretty amazing; they are basically specialist in positioning stand in public for organizations or political bodies in ways that allow them to maneuver themselves under different circumstances.
The incorporation of strategic movements in corporate lives is going to become increasingly common, which gives us more reason to check out Dixitt and Nalebuff's Thinking Strategically or their newer Art of Strategy.
Just Reading
By Kevin
Father of Kantian Ethics
Just last week, I was recommending that you view lectures on Academic Earth if you find TED.com not academic enough; this week we're recommending just one video for your weekend. It's going to be pretty intriguing and I'm sure you'd be glad to be an audience. Recently, Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, lectured on 'Justice' in Harvard and his lectures are available online at Youtube! Sandel begins his first lecture with the hypothetical scenario involving a moral dilemma that some of you might be familiar with and got his students thinking about moral reasoning. Sandels issued his 'warning' for students of Moral/Political Philosophy:
Philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know; there's an irony, the difficulty of this course consist the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we already know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange. [...] Once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again.
Sandel also gave a good reply to the doctrine of Skepticism, suggesting that we should not give up moral reasoning just because the ancient and modern philosophers are unable to solve them; in fact, the continual emergence of the same old problems require that we constantly revisit these questions. He cites Kant's remarks about skepticism; Kant describes skepticism as a temporary resting place for the mind from reasoning - that skepticism can never triumph the restlessness of reasoning.
The lectures gives us too much to think about so I strongly suggests that you take a step at a time and limit yourself to just an hour of the video each day.
Evolutionary Systems
By Kevin
Evolutionary Riches
I read Origins of Wealth about 2 years ago and got introduced to the idea of complexity, which was elaborated for markets (specially that of financial markets) by Benoit Mandelbrot in The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets. Below is a discussion about the wider applicability of the concept of evolution I've learnt about from the book and some insights I'd like to share with more academic audiences. These ideas relates to the stuff Kevin Kelly was talking about on TED.com I introduced in a reading package. This long piece was penned during the time I read Origins of Wealth:
Reading Eric D Beinhocker introduced me to the concept of Evolutionary Systems, which I hope to talk about. 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.
The original entry I wrote on my personal blog can be accessed here.
Programming Reality
By Kevin
Lego of Life
Saul Griffith is an inventor, not many people would have this as their main identification occupation/tag today; but when you read up his profile, he really fits the title of an inventor, basically a scientist who problem-solve through inventions. In one of his talk on TED.com, he talks about programming self-assembling systems, very much like creating life itself.
There's is already what we call biohacking taking place in homes of people, much like the geeks of the 1970s who were assembling computers in their garage. Already, The Economist points out how this parallels the beginnings of the computer age where the geeks had their kits consisting of basic chips for computers.
Going back to mechanical stuff, objects can be 'programmed' to build themselves based on sequencing their materials in a certain way like what is shown in the presentation by Saul Griffith. A 3-dimensional object, in this sense, can be defined by a sequence of bits (in a digital sense). Seeing the universe - reality - as a compiler, changes the way we think about our world; it helps us see how everything contains information and how properties of objects are able to convey additional information about things they are interacting with.
Griffith also co-writes Howtoons, cartoons that teaches people how to build/make stuff.