Chart Play
By Kevin
I learnt about Google Charts API quite a while back but didn't quite found time to explore it. I had wanted to use it to create charts to showcase certain data trends on ERPZ so that I don't have to generate Microsoft Office graphics to be uploaded. For my experiment, I decided to use the same data set for the distance fares to generate a chart using the Google Charts API. I took the following that I used in the previous entry:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By MS Office)
Using the wizard provided by Google and then tweaking the codes a bit here and there, I managed to create the following:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By Google)
It actually looks great and I guess in future, when I need to present any data on ERPZ, I'll be using this API.
Learning By Examples
By Kevin
Matching Context
Materials on ERPZ are often more focused on delivery of concepts; in particular, our current set of notes in the Economics Section deals largely with the theories and concepts covered in the syllabus and not so much on how to tackle your exams. Essays requires additional skills typically not covered in your lecture notes or textbooks. You could learn them from model essays but it would be better if you build up a style for yourself.
I'll be writing quite a few entries on essay-writing for Economics, which can also be applied to other social sciences at A Levels. I'll start off with an emphasis on examples. The school usually only teach you how to do half of your essay - the conceptual part. And if you don't explain and illustrate (diagrams for) your concepts particularly well, then you can't even get a pass. The other part of your essay has to do with application, which really means explaining in context and giving examples tailored to the context.
When dealing with a question that asks about market structures in Singapore; perhaps one requiring you to cite an example of a oligopoly. You could talk about the hypermarkets or supermarkets but you have to define them carefully and describe the correct players:
Examples of Players
Hypermarts (Giant, Fairprice Extra, Carrefour)
Supermarkets (Cold Storage, Fairprice, Sheng Siong)Why Oligopoly?
Hypermarts and Supermarts compete on prices and promotions, enjoy large economies of scale from marketing (bulk purchase, advertising, transport) and are usually anchor tenants at various shopping malls. Their mutual interdependence is reflected in attempts to market their house brands during recessions and also trying to differentiate by positioning themselves slightly different. Cold Storage goes for the 'sophisticated but affordable' image while Fairprice going for the 'simple and affordable' image; of course, Sheng Siong targets majority of the households looking for cheap deals.
Within the Singapore market, there are also other shops dealing in the same sort of 'industry' as the hypermarkets and supermarkets so one needs to be careful when discussing them. It is important that you look into the scale of the market you're hoping to discuss about. If you're thinking about just a large neighbourhood or area; then players may actually be engaged in monopolistic competition rather than oligopoly.
Examples of Players
ECONS Mini-market & Neighbourhood Provision ShopsWhy Monopolistic Competition?
Compete based on niche markets, providing specialized services (eg. Home delivery by provision shops) and benefit from relatively inelastic demand for necessities.
Do not confuse the different market structure; be clear about the scale of the market you're discussing and think about the players. For localized competition, the players could be specific outlets or stores; but then for a grander scale market, the players would be the group (like with chain-stores and lots of outlets). The explanation on why each of these examples would fit into your concept or theoretical framework is extremely important. Saying stuff like 'most markets in Singapore are Oligopoly, for example the Telecommunications industry' will not be a clear demonstration of your depth of thought. To give your essay more rigour you have to describe the competitive behaviours of the firms in the industry and give examples of actual marketing campaigns or events.
University Appeals
By Kevin
A Step Away...
This piece is really a collaboration between Scherzo and me. We've got friends requesting for help to look at appeals for university places and I thought it'll be useful to provide some sort of guidelines on writing appeals for university. It'll be great if this can help some of you get your place in the course you want.
First start with words of gratitude for a chance to be reconsidered and then get on to your main point; your approach should be humble and there's no point repeating any achievements that you've already submitted before in your application. The points to include should be the following:
Which part of your application might have been weak and how you've followed up and attempted to overcome them.
Discuss what drives you to want to be in the school; the course, the activities? Suggest passion, prior experience and the motivations.
Tell them what other skills/experience will help you with university, your course.
What the university really want to know is it you know your weakness and how you would be able to overcome them. At this point they have doubts about your suitability for university education and your appeal is to show them otherwise. Therefore, a write-up that reflects and deep and sustained academic interest can be very helpful. If you're not the academic type then you need to convince the university that you can make great contributions to them without compromising your academic results. You need a strong explanation why you want to be in university in the first place.
Keep your appeal short; it has to be that anyways because of the restrictions. Nevertheless, use good English that is forceful and to the point. An active tone is important for this writing because the university wants to see that you're serious about wanting your place.
Good luck for your appeals then.
I Don’t Know
By Kevin
Sure or not?
It's been a long time since I wrote something about learning and studying. Recently it just came to my attention of the problem of the lack of active curiosity amongst students nowadays. People who are self-confident won't use the term 'I don't know' or admit they don't know something; as illustrated by the rather lame riddle, which testers claim has stumped 96% of Harvard students while majority of Kindergartners could offer an answer.
I turn polar bears white and I will make you cry.
I make guys have to pee and girls comb their hair.
I make celebrities look stupid and normal people look like celebrities.
I turn pancakes brown and make your champagne bubble.
If you squeeze me, I'll pop.
If you look at me, you'll pop.
Can you guess the riddle?
Apparently the answer is 'no' and rather than give the answer, people who don't give up would be in the 'work in progress' stage where the 'let me guess' thinking process doesn't cease. While this spirit may have failed for this riddle, it is the thing that drives the very same people to Harvard. At work, 'I don't know' is one of the most irresponsible phrase, both in terms of your duty and towards your personal development. It is okay not to know something but then just plain stating that reflects inaction, the implicit refusal to get pass the stage of ignorance. It is important not to fall into such a trap; being completely confident in yourself is not always good but then the liberal use of 'I don't know' represents another extreme.
Instead of saying 'I don't know', use 'let me check', 'I'll find out', 'I'm working on it' to remind yourself that you have the responsibility to know and should be finding out. Changing your attitude from a preference for inaction and status quo to one that involves actively overcoming one's inadequacy is an important step to achieving personal excellence.
Some Tools
By Kevin
Making them handy
I've been working a lot of research and as I was suggesting in an earlier entry, many resources are no longer free. The good thing then, is that National Library Board has a eResources site that provides free access to important journal and publications databases. You just have to register an account, which is free. And then you can use their search system that will aggregate search results from multiple databases.
Alternatively, you can use the NLB eResources site to go straight into a single journal database. My favourite is JSTOR where they hold old journal articles and research papers on a huge variety of subjects. I've successfully found famous economics papers there and looked through some of them. They are particularly useful for academic research and if you're keen to find out more about some papers Tim Harford read while writing his book, Logic of Life, you could search for them there too.
For Statistics, you would be glad to make use of Google's Public Data sets, a tool very much in its preliminary stage of development. For more sophisticated and complex data there's OECD Stats, but mainly focusing on OECD nations. There's Eurostats of course, and both World Bank and IMF provides extremely useful data to the public.
Logic of Life
By Kevin
Perfecting Rationality's Definition
I wrote a review of Tim Harford's Logic of Life a long time back. It didn't make it to the publication I intended it for and so I publishing it here:
Thanks to a huge mishmash of research done by a new breed of economists who try to take on the challenges to rational choice theory, Tim Harford the Undercover Economist is persuaded that humans are smart rational creatures working within a world of imperfect information and impossibly tough circumstances. And obviously, he has decided to write a book to convince you of that too. Harford's Logic of Life takes on the Freakonomics track - citing loads of research supporting quirky or counter-intuitive explanations for common phenomena, which is perhaps very rational given that Levitt's Freakonomics sold more than 3 million copies worldwide while The Undercover Economist have no such statistics to brag about.
Unlike Freakonomics however, Logic of Life draws upon a larger collection research and is not detailed with the description of underlying research. Harford groups the different studies with ancedotes on some of the researchers to weave incredible but true stories about how people choose their lifelong partners, why people choose to live in crowded and expensive cities when the rise in their wages doesn't justify their expense and many more. Harford sees himself as a detective, peeling away layers of complexity from issues like crime and racism and attempting to investigate the causes of the emergent patterns. This is perhaps why the chapters were further segmented with sub-headings that gives the location and date related to events or research that follows, much like the old detective movies where the establishing shot is augmented by these information.
He starts out with the most provocative topic of 'sex' and go on around what he call the 'edge of reason', actions or habits which conventional wisdom will probably declare as largely irrational behaviours. In his chapter titled 'Las Vegas', Harford connected stories of Chris Ferguson, Von Neumann and Thomas Schelling with their research on Game Theory, rationality of gamblers and other sort of addicts. He explains the birth of Game Theory and the hopes of its applications in a myriad of different fields. A similar pattern emerges in every chapter, with Harford using his journalist style of conveying economics research findings to laymen, occasionally planting his opinions and thoughts, all the while steering readers back to the main message of his book, "humans are by and large rational and takes rational actions".
Another dominant theme in his book is that irrational or extreme situations can result from purely rational behaviours on the part of individual agents involved in decision making. It is much like prisoner's dilemma being played out by an entire community of people. Prisoner's dilemma is a situation where 2 individuals rationally chooses the collectively worst outcome simply because the alternative, better collective outcome appeared impossible. Harford points out this is probably how racism is perpetuated and reinforced by rationality of both the racist and the victim race, citing an experiment at University of Virginia where 'racism' was initiated by patterns that started merely by random chances. He offers his view that the solution out of this vicious cycle would somehow involve a change in the incentives of the parties involved and would take a long time.
Having started out his book with rational decisions that affects individuals and gradually moving on to those small individual rational decisions that impact on the community or even a race, Harford paces towards the finish of his book with how countries' politics and even the history of mankind is influenced by the combination of rational decisions so far made by all the tiny little economic agents each just trying to do their own things and to get by. He ends with the wildly speculative but not wholly unsubstantiated idea that the explosion of innovation and economic growth within the last century or so is merely a result of people responding to incentives.
Logic of Life offers a huge load of interesting, nice-to-know but otherwise pretty useless (at least to you and me) facts and speculation about the world that economists have discovered or concocted; very unlike The Undercover Economist which breath life into textbook economics. And this brings us to the question of why we should even bother to read this book. Rationally speaking, Logic of Life helps us gain a deeper appreciation of the study of economics as a means of understanding the world and ourselves - it demonstrates how the subject can be used to answer questions posed by the psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist and a whole lot of specialist in other fields.
Pay Gates
By Kevin
Blocked...
I've been working on a couple of writing assignments that requires intensive research and I discovered to my horror that more journals are erecting pay gates for their articles. I subscribe to The Economist and so I don't have to worry about theirs but Wall Street Journal gives me quite some trouble.
I'm therefore actively using articles from The New York Times, Business Week and Fortune Magazine as my main sources. The Straits Times website pay gate frustrates me in particular because I want to keep myself updated on local news through their site but they're not helpful with it and worst, when I ever need an article from them, it is usually copied from New York Times or other international publications and yet they're hidden behind the pay gate.
For those working on more news research sort of stuff, note the publications without pay gates!
The Scholarship Interview
By Kevin
Ask & Be asked
I think interviews are rather artificial settings; they surround a poor candidate and then bombard him/her with questions. Yet one should remember that an interview is not interrogation and the whole point is for the entire thing to become a natural interaction rather than an artificial, forced conversation that tells no truths. This is a rather short piece on the contents of a scholarship interview, not an article that tells you what to wear, how you should shake your hand or smile at your interviewers.
Questions to Ask
Although you usually start out being asked questions, you should be preparing stuff you want to ask the interviewer beforehand so that you are not caught off guard when the interviewer asks if you have any questions for him/her. These questions should be genuine questions so don't bother to ask if you already know the answer because your face would tell that while you're listening to the reply.
There's a couple of areas you might like to ask about; in particular Scholarship selection procedures, life of a scholar, and the work of the scholar in the organization. For selection process you might like to ask "How many rounds of interviews will you be put through?" or whether there is "any other sort of assessments (like test/essay to do)?" Some organizations would have a psychometric tests, others have workshops that are sessions to assess their candidates.
On life of a scholar, ask if there's any internship or attachment for scholars? And how will they be related to the work scholars eventually do at the organization? Related to that, is the work a scholar is going to do upon graduation; ask "What sort of work do scholars do after graduation in the organization?", check if there is job rotation, and "How long is each cycle?" as well as "What functions will scholars be exposed to throughout the career/bond period?"
Depending on how you've set the tone of the interview, you should preferably be able to ask some casual stuff like how long your interviewers have been with the organization. Ask about their work if you don't know their positions yet and see how they like the organization or if they face any particular difficulty/challenge in their work in recent times. This would help make the interview a more natural conversation rather than one that is zero-ed in on 'work'.
The Grill
Questions they might ask
Now for the more important questions, the ones they will be asking you. There are very general ones like your aspirations, reasons for choice of your course, how they tie up with your interests, how you're coping in school right now (or how have you coped with school in the past).You should also be expected to share your experiences in school with leadership activities, or team activities.
Some organizations like to pose scenario questions like 'talk about a time when you had disagreements with a teammate', 'tell us a situation where you had to overcome a huge challenge', 'tell us your most difficult time in life so far'. Otherwise, the open-ended tough questions like "What have you done in life so far that tells you that you'll be suitable for our organization?", "Can you tell us why you deserve this scholarship?"
Prepare to explain your present commitments as well: "What are you doing now?", "How do you spend your vacations?", "What interest do you have besides your studies (and work)?" Knowing some current affairs would help especially when they are related to the organization that is offering the scholarship: "What do you think is a challenge facing our industry/organization?" "Do you think there's anything about our organization that we should change or need to change?", "What potential markets have we overlooked in the course of our expansion?"
Which way?
Other Tips & Advice
Try to remember your responses to their questions and also their answers to your questions because it'll serve you well to remain consistent throughout your rounds of interviews; you'll realise that some questions comes to you over and over again posed by different interviewers because they never heard your reply to these questions, so it's also important to maintain that consistency.
Remembering their responses to your questions shows that you're paying attention and not contemplating what to ask next or how to respond while they are answering your question or explaining stuff to you. If possible, jot down their responses to your question somewhere right after your interview (perhaps type a note in your handphone or something)
Remember there is no right or wrong answers in an interview so never look as if you regretted something you just mentioned (if you really do, please correct yourself immediately on the spot) and in many sense, as long as you are sure what you're saying, you're giving the right answer.
Don't appear self-important but show the interviewers what you are willing to do to serve them and what you're not willing. When you're given the tough questions, ask for time to think about it. You could say, "Wow, that's a big question, give me a moment to organize my answer" or something like that. Try to think about the tough ones beforehand so that you're more prepared to handle them. Don't bet on them not coming out.
Don't hesitate to clarify their questions; if you don't know what they're asking, ask them questions to clarify; sometimes the question they're trying to pose is more close-ended than it seems.
Ditch Digging Passion
By Scherzo
I once read a book of letters and speeches written by Richard Feynman, compiled by his daughter, Michelle Feynman. In a letter he wrote to a college freshman, he shares some invaluable advice:
"Work hard to find something that fascinates you. When you find it, you will know your lifework, A man may be digging a ditch for someone else, or because he is forced to, or is stupid - such a man is 'toolish' -while another working even harder may not be recognized by the bystanders - but he may be digging for treasure. So dig for treasure and when you find it, you will know what to do. In the meantime, you don't need to make the decision - steer your practical affairs so the alternatives remain open to you.... The man happy in his work is not the narrow specialist, nor the well-rounded man, but a man who is doing what he loves."
- Richard P. Feynman
I came across this quote in my own blog, while trying to recycle some ideas for a university program application essay. I think it is natural for people to pursue the things they are interested or passionate about. Some may be naturally good at it, while others may not be as adept as others at it in the beginning; it is inevitable that sometimes our vision gets obstructed by the smoke and haze ahead.
Let Feynman's words serve as a reminder for all of us.
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.