MM Brain Dance

How facts backfire

2010-07-27T04:01:00.001+08:00

Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

China breaks into Supercomputing league

2010-06-02T01:52:00.002+08:00

BEIJING — A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked the world's second-fastest machine in a list issued by U.S. and European researchers, highlighting China's ambitions to become a global technology center.

The Nebulae system at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen in southern China came in behind the U.S. Department of Energy's Jaguar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to the list released Monday.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners.

The semiannual TOP500 list highlighted Beijing's efforts to join the United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite and its sharp increases in research spending, driven by booming economic growth.

It also reflected China's continued reliance on Western know-how: Nebulae was built by China's Dawning Information Industry Ltd. but uses processors from Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., both American companies.

The Nebulae is capable of sustained computing of 1.271 petaflops - or 1,271 trillion calculations - per second, according to TOP500. It said the Jaguar was capable of sustained computing of 1.75 petaflops.

The Chinese computer ranked first in theoretical computing speed at 2.98 petaflops, the group said. The list was compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The communist Beijing government wants China to evolve from a low-cost factory into an prosperous "innovation society." A 15-year government plan issued in 2006 promises support for areas ranging from computers to lasers to genetics.

Boosted by Nebulae's performance, China rose to No. 2 overall on the TOP500 list with 24 of the 500 systems on the list and 9.2 percent of global supercomputing capacity, up from 21 systems six months ago.

The United States held onto its overall lead with 282 of the 500 systems and 55.4 percent of installed performance.

Europe had 144 systems on the list, including 38 in Britain, 29 in France and 24 in Germany.

Elsewhere in Asia , Japan had 18 supercomputers on the list, up from 16 six months ago, and India had five.

A second Chinese computer also made the Top 10. The Tianhe-1 at the National Super Computer Center in the eastern city of Tianjin, at No. 7, uses processors made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., another American company.

The list also reflected breakneck advances in supercomputing speeds.

No. 1 on the June 2008 list was the Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, capable of 1.04 petaflops, or about two-thirds of Jaguar's level. In the latest list, Roadrunner dropped to No. 3.

Which Is Worse for Your Brain: Texting or Pot? (Hint: Pass the Pipe)

2010-01-15T06:01:00.002+08:00

It’s a challenge of modern life: email, Twitter feeds, instant messaging, text messages, and other snippets of information are coming at us so fast that it’s hard not to feel under digital attack. Sure, some of it’s important — and that’s precisely the problem. Turn it all off and you might as well quit the workforce. But read it all and your mind becomes so drained that it’s a challenge to get anything else done.

In some ways, technology has evolved in a way that puts mere humans in a bind. Consider the email conundrum. From the moment you wake up, it seems the inbox is calling your name. And if you’re like most of us, you answer its call pretty quickly.

“The brain hates uncertainty,” says David Rock, the CEO of Results Coaching Systems and author of “Your Brain at Work.” “It’s literally painful to not download your email the moment you arrive at your desk in the morning. But once you’ve processed 30 or 40 emails, you’ve ruined your brain chemistry for higher level tasks that are going to create value.”

In fact, a University of London study done for Hewlett-Packard found that “infomania” — a term connected with addiction to email and texting — can lower your IQ by twice as much as smoking marijuana. Moreover, email can raise the levels of noradrenaline and dopamine in your brain by constantly introducing new stimuli into your day. When those levels get too high, complex thinking becomes more difficult, making it harder to make decisions and solve problems — key roles for all managers.

In short, the brain’s capacity for decision-making evolved at a time when people had less to think about. Great, so now you have an excuse for not keeping up. But you still need a game plan.

1. Take control of email.

Don’t start your day with email. Set your email so it doesn’t download new mail automatically or, at the very least, turn off any alert system. Instead, set a time to check for messages manually — preferably later in the day, after you’ve used your brainpower for more important things.

Equally important is that others at your business know how you want email used. “Emails should be short, concise, and used only when a conversation is not an option,” says Adrian Moorhouse, managing director of executive coaching firm Lane4. “The easier communication is to digest, the more likely it is that the messages will be delivered effectively.”

Some colleagues seem unable to help themselves. We all know the type. They send too many emails; they gossip or forward jokes. Get them to divert their personal chatter online by allowing them to use social media at work (even if it’s just at set times of the day). Or talk to the worst offenders one-on-one. Peter Taylor, the director of the project management office for Siemens and author of “The Lazy Project Manager,” says when he’s cc’d on emails, he tells the senders to cut it out. “If people had to produce single sheets of paper and hand them out every time they wanted to communicate, they’d be a lot more conscientious. I educate everyone who I communicate with and as a result, the emails I do receive are pertinent to me. I restructure those emails, copy them into ongoing documents, and keep my inbox very small.”

If you’re reaching a breaking point, do the email equivalent of filing for bankruptcy. Simply wipe your inbox to start afresh. It seems drastic, but it can work. Send a message to all contacts letting them know what you’re planning, select all emails, and delete or archive them. If you’re planning a new regime of folders, rules, filters, and information-sharing disciplines, starting from scratch isn’t so crazy.

2. Prioritize your prioritizing.

To help you prioritize, start by setting clear goals. We all tend to do this subconsciously, according to Lane4’s Moorhouse, but writing them down helps you actually achieve them. Here, too, time of day really matters. Prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes,” writes Rock in his book. That means it’s best done when your mind is fresh and well rested. Allocate time to order your thoughts — dashing off a to-do list of tasks that are “front of mind” is easy, but it won’t break the back of the work you need to cover.

Try organizing your thinking visually. One great way is with Mind Maps, diagrams of ideas linked together in a tree system that help you visualise all of them in context to each other. That way you won’t forget any of your ideas when you have to decide which ones are the most important.

3. Blindside the data (approach it from an unexpected direction).

Break down complex information into sub-groups. Once you’ve determined a goal, you can “chunk” your work into groups to achieve it. You can also do this with your to-do lists.

According to an experiment at Wilfred Laurier University, (It’s About Time: Optimistic Predictions in Work and Love, European Review of Social Psychology) people are generally very bad at estimating when they’ll finish their own work, but good at guessing for others. So gauge your timing by using someone else’s experience. You’ll be less stressed if you’re realistic about your workload.

4. Do less.

To do less, you should delegate more. Too many managers can’t resist the temptation personally to get involved in everything that’s happening. But effective delegation means limiting the amount of information you have to process, as well as empowering those around you. Then, ask for regular briefings.

5. Unplug.

Many managers feel they can’t shut off the fire hydrant of information. But they can take a break from it. “It’s tempting to think that more information makes for better decisions,” says Penny de Valk, CEO of the UK-based Institute of Leadership and Management. “But in most cases, it just erodes your focus. You need time to synthesize information and generate real intelligence.”

That takes discipline, of course, but it’s useful to stop thinking when you are stuck on a project so your brain can recover. “You do need to switch off and rebalance your brain chemistry if you’re going to come up with new ideas,” says Rock. Stefan Sagmeister of New York-based design firm Sagmeister says he so much believes in the power of time off that he closes up shop for 12 months every seven years to pursue “little experiments” that he doesn’t have time for in his daily life.

Wireless Elecricity

2009-09-09T02:42:00.006+08:00

Witricity might be coming closer to commercial usage as envisaged in this 10 min video clip, courtesy of TED.com.

Wireless Eletricty

Imagine no wires with your PC or phone charger.

In the Internet age, could there be another MJ?

2009-07-09T02:04:00.002+08:00

The extravagant mourning for Michael Jackson has some critics wondering whether the pop singer’s global superstardom could ever be duplicated in an Internet era offering endless entertainment choices.

Jackson’s sudden June 25 death caused an outpouring of praise for the singer, whose 1982 “Thriller” album is the best-selling of all time with estimated sales of 50 million copies. In death, Jackson’s personal scandals no longer seemed so important to his fans and those caught up in the moment.

“In the world of YouTube, no one could occupy the worldwide effect of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’” said Jonathan Taplin, a University of Southern California professor.

“I was scouting a movie for Walt Disney in 1983 in Congo, Gabon and Ivory Coast. All you heard on the radio was Michael Jackson,” said Taplin, a former television and film producer.

The Internet has joined the world together in new ways and can elevate unknowns to stardom in an instant, as illustrated by Susan Boyle, the dowdy British singer who shot from obscurity to international fame when her performance on a British talent show was posted on YouTube.

But such fame is fleeting and one Internet sensation is quickly replaced by another. “There will be thousands of Susan Boyles, but no Michael Jacksons or The Beatles,” Taplin said.

Before the emergence of cable TV and then the Internet, tens of millions of people regularly tuned into the same hit shows at the same time. Now, the Internet has flooded the world with choice and diluted audiences.

Dubbed the “King of Pop,” Jackson, 50, sang with his brothers in the “Jackson 5” before achieving solo stardom with hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” which he promoted with boundary breaking videos on cable music video network MTV.

JACKSON WOULD FIND IT HARDER

But MTV no longer plays hours of prime time music videos and the Internet allows anyone to post songs and videos online. The New York Times’s David Segal wrote that this probably spelled the end of fame on the level achieved by Jackson.

“That’s why even Michael Jackson would have a hard time becoming Michael Jackson these days,” he wrote. “There is something sad about our infinite menu of options. It could very well mean the end of true superstardom.”

Jackson won 13 Grammy Awards and during his lifetime sold an estimated 750 million albums.

Susan Ohmer, who teaches modern communication at the University of Notre Dame, likened Jackson’s fame to that of Britain’s Princess Diana, saying that while people may not have known the real Jackson or Diana, the personas they portrayed on camera captured the world’s attention.

“Michael Jackson came of age when music was becoming more international,” Ohmer said “Like Princess Diana, his style and movements seemed to come alive on camera.”

Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said it would be more difficult for another global icon to be created in a “fragmented era of modern technology,” — but still possible.

“The Internet has allowed a new route to fame,” Thompson said. “But becoming truly famous is still something that happens very rarely.”

Thompson and Ohmer both pointed to US President Barack Obama as one of the world’s new icons, but based on a record of political achievement and real intellectual power rather than songs and dance moves.

“In any new medium, stars emerge,” Ohmer said. “Celebrities become global icons because they interact with media in ways that fascinate the public and because they speak to us in some way about our lives and times.” — Reuters

The Future Source of Energy ?

2009-03-16T21:58:00.008+08:00

LIFE, an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, is an advanced energy concept under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Based on physics and technology developed for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), LIFE has the potential to meet future worldwide energy needs in a safe, sustainable manner without carbon dioxide emissions.

By burning nuclear waste for its fuel, LIFE has the added benefit of dramatically shrinking the planet's stockpile of spent nuclear fuel and other materials that lend themselves to nuclear proliferation.

NIF, a project of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, is the world's largest and highest-energy laser. On track for completion by March 2009, NIF is designed to achieve thermonuclear fusion ignition and burn in the laboratory using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) (see How to Make a Star). As such, NIF is the culmination of nearly 60 years of research into controlled fusion – capturing the energy of the sun and stars to provide clean, limitless energy on Earth.

Ignition experiments designed to accomplish NIF's goal will begin in 2010, and successful demonstration of ignition and net energy gain on NIF will be a transforming event that is likely to focus the world's attention on the possibility of ICF as a potential long-term energy option.

The Promise of Hybrid Nuclear Power

Success on NIF will serve as a springboard for LIFE, a hybrid technology that combines the best aspects of nuclear fusion, a clean, inherently safe and virtually unlimited energy source (see Inertial Fusion Energy), with fission, a carbon-free, reliable energy technology that currently provides about 16 percent of the world's electricity. Through the combination of fusion and fission, LIFE power plants could generate gigawatts of power 24 hours a day for as long as 50 years without refueling while avoiding carbon dioxide emissions, easing nuclear proliferation concerns and minimizing the concerns associated with nuclear safety and long-term nuclear waste disposal.

Existing and future inventories of spent nuclear fuel, natural and depleted uranium and weapons-grade plutonium could produce enough energy to meet the world's energy needs for hundreds to thousands of years. Besides offering energy independence and security, LIFE power plants could provide the United States with an enormous economic competitiveness edge in the energy sector in the coming decade.

The LIFE engine would use an ICF laser system similar to the one now under development at NIF to ignite fusion targets surrounded by a spherical blanket of subcritical fission fuel. The fuel could be one of many fertile or fissile materials, including thorium, light-water reactor spent nuclear fuel, weapons-grade plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and natural and depleted uranium. (Fertile material is nuclear material that can be converted to fissile material through the capture of a neutron, such as uranium-238.)

LIFE provides a point source of ICF-generated neutrons to extract virtually all of the energy content of its fuel. LIFE would close the nuclear fuel cycle without the need for chemical separation and reprocessing. The system would require about half as much laser energy input as a pure fusion plant, and thanks to the extra gain from the fission blanket, produce 100 to 300 times more energy than the input energy. LIFE would be proliferation-resistant and passively safe, require no uranium isotope enrichment and minimize the need for long-term geologic storage of nuclear waste.

LIFE would enable the worldwide expansion of nuclear power in a safe, secure and sustainable manner. A number of reviews and discussions of the proposal with energy experts over the last year have been positive and supportive of the concept. A LIFE development team of about 40 physicists, materials scientists, engineers and energy and national security experts from LLNL, the University of California at Berkeley and other institutions is on track to complete and review a "point design" – the target and laser features for specific experiments – and propose a path forward for LIFE in Fiscal Year 2009.

Here are links to more information on the LIFE project:
• Why Do We Need LIFE?
• Benefits & Challenges
• How LIFE Works
• Project Plan

Dinner with Nick Miller

2008-10-20T23:28:00.002+08:00

Crammed TV screens a strain on the brain?

2008-09-06T02:31:00.003+08:00

Ever since television executives decided viewers wanted screens crammed with banner headlines across the top, crawls along the bottom, talking heads in tiny boxes, moving graphics and unmoving logos, all of it pasted over a background of shape-shifting patterns, scientists and others have tried to figure out how well our brains are handling the information overload.

They're still trying to figure it out.

“The concept of utility, or how much information is getting processed, depends on how a person derives satisfaction,” said David Kirsh, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego.

“Some people like deep processing – examining a football game, for example, in a detailed way: Who's playing well? What are the weaknesses on each side? What are the coaching strategies? If they're experts, these viewers might not need more than a glance to know what's going on, like a chessmaster who can play multiple games blindfolded. That kind of deep understanding doesn't need much working memory.”

Most people, however, are more the checkers sort, one game at a time.

In case you've forgotten, working memory is short-term memory, somewhere between sensory memory and long-term memory. Sensory memories are brief, unprocessed signals that last only a fraction of a second. Think about those times when you scan a parking lot searching for your car. You see many other cars, but they flit through your head, quickly forgotten. They're sensory memories.

Long-term memories, like your mother's face or the name of your best friend in sixth grade, are more enduring.

Working memory is the selected information we consciously juggle in our heads at any particular moment. It persists as long as we're actively using it, but it is also limited. Studies indicate that working memory for most people consists of no more than three, maybe four, items retained at a time – a name and phone number, for example, or as many words as you can speak in two seconds.

Or maybe the last three plays of your favourite team’s scoring drive.

Given these limits and what is known about human brain function, some researchers wonder whether phenomena such as cluttered cable news screens are examples of cognitive overload.

A 2005 experiment at Kansas State University found that viewers who watched TV broadcasts with a news crawl remembered 10 percent fewer facts than those who watched the same broadcast without the stream of headlines, sports scores and weather updates.

The fact is, many researchers say, our brains aren't as good at multitasking as we think. Kirsh notes, for example, that it is impossible to read and really pay attention to someone speaking at the same time.

“The brain has to rapidly toggle back and forth, sampling each stimuli,” Kirsh said. “If what's being said isn't very informative, that quick sampling may be good enough to get the information. But if the message is more difficult or complicated, then one of the activities will require more thinking and focus.”

In a 2001 study at Carnegie Mellon University, study participants were asked to perform two mental tasks, sequentially and then simultaneously, while undergoing an MRI. Researchers reported that when participants multitasked, brain activity was just 56 percent of what it was when they focused on each problem separately.

Put another way, it may be hit-and-miss whether TV viewers can seriously evaluate how the Team A are positioning themselves in the field and simultaneously scrutinize camera angles of Team B’s positioning.

Still, our cerebral capacity is pretty remarkable, the product of more than 100 billion intricately connected neurons. Sheree Josephson, a professor of communication at Weber State University, said her students during lectures appear capable of writing, talking, eating, texting and surfing the Internet all at once.

Whether they are also learning is less certain.

Joseph Allen Schroeder, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Connecticut College, said human brains are good at filtering and focusing, but he wonders about the depth of knowledge acquired this way.

People have grown accustomed to instant information and lots of it, he said. But hardly anyone seems to linger, thinking.

It remains to be seen what viewers think about multiscreen Chelsea games or eight EPL contests at a time. Steve Mosier, Cox Digital's senior product marketing manager, said testing indicated that viewers enjoyed seeing six camera angles simultaneously.

Or at least they did “once they learned how to watch a game that way,” Mosier said.

Robert Mercer, director of media relations at El Segundo-based DirecTV, said the “Game Mix” package involved “no neuroscience.”

“Eight cells on one screen was the maximum that didn't look overwhelming, with each large enough so the individual images were easily viewable,” Mercer said. “Based on the feedback we've received, our NFL superfans and their neurons love this feature.”

Just don't ask them who won.

The Future of Education

2008-08-15T07:32:00.002+08:00

This is an excellent talk by Ken Robinson expounding on the role of creativity in the future of education of our children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga2CYYCrtNE

What the Internet is doing to our brains

2008-06-24T17:30:00.005+08:00

BY NICHOLAS CARR
Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

[Makan R&R] Lotus meet‏

2008-05-14T01:16:00.000+08:00

We had light banana leaf dinner. I thought they wanted to slaughter us by giving huge helping of crabs, but being smart Mensans we told them we wanted only 1 crab cut into 4 pieces with lots of gravy. Same goes for the kambing with more portions of rice and more papadam. :)

There was me and Ai Siew, Paul and his wife, our friends Ken and Susan from Canada and Khoo Chin Leng. Gerald came later.

Talks centered on the variety of food in Malaysia and how those who migrated eventually found their way back home because they miss the food. Then the conversation turn more sombre to the security or insecurity of our neighbourhood caused by alarming crime rates. Who here doesn't know someone who's not been mugged or had her handbag snatched?

Not to scare our foreign friends, we turn the conversation to Paul's inventions - yeah, he has some. And he's looking for venture capitalists. Anybody out there interested? I could invest but I only have my two cents worth. I can't divulge what his invention is but I can only say that it doesn't run on electricity. The rest, you'll have to find out from him.

We're looking forward to the next outing - maybe a trip to the durian orchard? There I hope to pick Paul's brain again.

CT Yong

World's Youngest Professor

2008-05-02T07:52:00.004+08:00

By David McNeill in Tokyo
Thursday, 1 May 2008

Youthful prodigy, clarinet maestro, black-belt martial artist and budding scientist, Alia Sabur has astonished her parents and teachers for years with her exploits inside and outside the classroom.

Now, still almost two years shy of being able to buy her first legal drink in her home state in the United States, the New Yorker has been named the world's youngest college professor ever, breaking a record set three centuries ago by a Scottish mathematician.

Korea's Konkuk University has announced that Ms Sabur, 19, will begin teaching physics next month at the Department of Advanced Technology Fusion. The appointment, which was made a few days short of her 19th birthday on 22 February, earns the doctoral student a place in the Guinness Book of World Records ahead of Colin Maclaurin, a physicist who became professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen in 1717.

Few who know her were surprised at the announcement. University graduate at 10, bachelor's degree at 14, masters at 17; Ms Sabur has been "setting records and making history, starting with reading at eight months old", says her website (aliasabur.com). Along the way, she found time to become a concert clarinettist with the Rockland Symphony Orchestra when she was 11. She plays Mozart, but loves U2. "I went to their Vertigo concert," she says on the phone from New York. "It was awesome."

Ms Sabur, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering, is developing spectroscopy techniques "including nano-tube-based cellular probes" that could be used to zap tumours – a cure for cancer, in other words. At university in the US, she worked with her professor on a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

Last year, while waiting to decide her future, she took a temporary position at Southern University in New Orleans, a black institution that she felt had been neglected by the authorities after Hurricane Katrina. "It is the only university that is still operating out of trailers... the only black public college in New Orleans. I do think that is why it is not as far along as other colleges."

What's her secret? Childlike curiosity, she says. "I just wanted to know how things worked. What is science really? It's how stuff works." She thanks God, and her mum and dad – a retired engineer and a cable television reporter – for her genius. "My parents encouraged me in anything I wanted to do. We believe it is a gift from God... a combination of gift and environment."

The gift has sometimes been a burden. By five, Ms Sabur had outgrown her primary school friends and had to bounce ahead into secondary, where she became, in effect, a misfit, too far ahead of everyone else for scheduled lessons. Colleges refused to consider her so she read in class by herself, and studied Tae-Kwon-Do, becoming a black belt at 9. At 10, she was accepted by Stony Brook University in New York, where she took her stuffed toys along to physics classes.

The Guinness announcement has sparked a deluge of e-mails from curious parents. "They want advice for their kids. I say encourage them at what they're good at."

source: The Independent

Brain energy consumption

2008-05-01T23:32:00.000+08:00

The neurons of the brain require a lot of energy. Although the brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization. The energy consumption for the brain to simply survive is 0.1 calories per minute, while this value can be as high as 1.5 calories per minute during crossword puzzle-solving.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V3.1

2008-04-15T18:46:00.002+08:00

A friend of mine in Singapore (Mr BT) wrote the following based on a reported news article in the Singapore Straits Times. For those not familiar, he was making a comment on stupidity following a recent incident where a terrorist suspect name Mas Salamat made an escape whilst in the custody of the Singapore authorities in the island republic.

Read 10 Apr 2008 Straits Times in Singapore, Home Section Page H1.

Two men hijacked a car. The car’s occupants were a 60+ woman, a 3-year old girl and a Filipino maid.

They went to a town centre where one of the men forced the 60+ woman to go with him to a bank to withdraw money.

The other man drove the car to a multi-storey car park, locked the car doors with the childproof locks on and went off. But the “smart” fellow left the window open 8cm for air.

“Trapped” in the car, the Filipino maid and the little girl shouted to passer-bys for help.

The first person who came, and who could understand English, was a Singaporean lady.

This is where the litany of stupidity starts.

Stupidity #1 : In many cars, the child locks are only in the rear doors. There should be nothing to stop the maid and girl from climbing into the front seat and letting themselves out. You would not expect the maid or the girl to know that but surely the Singaporean lady, herself a driver, should have attempted this simple manoeuvre.

But she did not. Instead she called her neighbour, a Singaporean man, who had just driven into the car park. And then, she left to pick up her son from school. (Duh??? A possibly life threatening emergency right in front of you and it is more important that you fetch your son from school???)

Stupidity#2: Even if you can’t unlock the car because the child locks are on all the doors, you can get something heavy and break the windows. Car windows are made of safety glass and the shards from shattering are not normally dangerous. Just ask the occupants to close their eyes and turn away!

But she did not. OK, she is a lady, not given to sudden acts of violence.

Stupidity#3 : But neither did the man! (oh, he did not try the “climb into front seat and open door” method either!) The man called the police (yup, right thing to do). And then just twiddled his thumbs waiting for the police to arrive! (aaargghh!)

Stupidity#4: 20 minutes later, the lady came back. (ah, she has a kind soul after all). And slipped packets of milk, bread and biscuits through the car window to the maid and little girl! Duh???? Is this an earthquake, landslide or building collapse? They’re not in some natural disaster where it would take days to dig them out. They don’t need nourishment!!! They just need you to open the door!!!!!!!

And of course, everyone stood around waiting for the police to arrive and get things sorted out. (does anyone remember the old joke about two men trapped on a deserted island with a beauty queen?) Which they did. Eventually. Hurray for the Singapore Police Force.

If these people are indicative of the average Singaporean’s level of common sense and initiative, I am not surprised that Mas Salamat got away…….

A 50 year old symbol

2008-03-21T03:23:00.002+08:00

It started life as the emblem of the British anti-nuclear movement but it has become an international sign for peace, and arguably the most widely used protest symbol in the world. It has also been adapted, attacked and commercialised.

It had its first public outing 50 years ago on a chilly Good Friday as thousands of British anti-nuclear campaigners set off from London's Trafalgar Square on a 50-mile march to the weapons factory at Aldermaston.

The demonstration had been organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) joined in.

Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious objector from West London, persuaded DAC that their aims would have greater impact if they were conveyed in a visual image.

He considered using a Christian cross motif but, instead, settled on using letters from the semaphore - or flag-signalling - alphabet, super-imposing N (uclear) on D (isarmament) and placing them within a circle symbolising Earth.

Holtom later explained that the design was "to mean a human being in despair" with arms outstretched downwards.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v3.0

2008-03-10T18:57:00.002+08:00

Well, how did it happen that history was created on 08.03.08 in Malaysia?

Those of you who knows "cause and effect" understands the difficulties of pin-pointing the "actual cause" but I care to speculate some of the contributory causes in my humble opinion (based on various sources on the Net):

a) It started around 10 years ago with the removal and subsequent conviction of the former deputy prime minister in Malaysia;
b) coupled with the appointment of a new prime minister about 5 years ago;
c) with a family member having very political ambition; and
d) together with a forward looking former prime minister who guaranteed the freedom of the Net.

The above concoction mixed with the following:

i) A "leaked" video depicting an "Indian lawyer" pretending to be on the phone;
ii) followed by a peaceful march by the lawyers demanding fair and equitable judiciary;
iii) replicated by a demonstration by the public demanding free and fair elections;
iv) replicated again by a demonstration by a group of ethic Indians demanding fair and equal treatment;
v) followed by the arrest of some key-leaders under the ISA; and
vi) the boycott of a religious gathering at the caves

is just a part of the recipe that probably led to the recent historical weekend.

If I'm a historian, I'd probably summarise the above in a one paragraph, but one can just imagine other contributory factors apart from the above summary; may have contributed to this recent event as well.

Other factors such as global inflation, oil prices, drought in Australia, commodities shortage etc. may be added on.

Any other ideas to add on?

History is being written as we speak today...

PS: I'm merely compiling "facts" from various sources on the net.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.9

2008-03-10T18:30:00.002+08:00

What a weekend for all of us in Malaysia, being part of history and we all live to tell it today!

History was created in this Nation of ours with several firsts. They include:

a) A Federal Parliament ruled by a simple majority
b) Voting across racial lines
c) The ruling coalition conceded "defeat" by any measure seen to-date
d) The ghost of 1969 has been well buried and the bogey-man since has finally RIP
e) 4 States on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia won by "opposition" forming a contiguous strip of land with rice fields in the north and industries in the south
and, most important
f) The people are now firmly in control with ability to change any government

We the People will now await for the deliverables to be put on the Peoples' table and to me they include:

i) Local Government elections
ii) Transparent and open governance; minimal secrecy surrounding public funds and accountability across all sectors
iii) Racial and religion "Divide & Rule policies" to be buried with the ghost of 1969
iv) More places of worship for all faiths
v) Improve religious understanding amongst various faiths; no religion to be subservient to any other religion
vi) Assisting the poor regardless of religion, faiths, race and political background

I know we don't live in a Utopian state but what I'm looking for is neither Utopian by any measure.

LONG LIVE MALAYSIA.

We finally show them that we have Grown after 50 years of independence!

Malaysia 1 - UMNO 0

2008-03-09T15:19:00.000+08:00

cossie's PersonalDNA

2008-02-14T21:14:00.000+08:00

My personalDNA Report

JLS

2008-01-03T21:58:00.000+08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2007-12-25T02:04:00.000+08:00

The End is Near

2007-12-21T04:30:00.000+08:00

There will be no new sporting world records after 2060 as humans will have reached their physiological limits, French scientists have said.

The conclusion by experts at the biomedical and epidemiological institute of sport, Irmes, followed analysis of 3,260 world records set since 1896 — the year of the first modern Olympics.

Then, athletes used 75 per cent of their physical capacity, while today, according to the study, they use about 99 per cent.

After looking at five disciplines — athletics, cycling, weightlifting, swimming and speed skating — the researchers are convinced that the human race will soon hit a wall.

“It’s the beginning of the end,” said Jean-François Toussaint, the head of Irmes.

Some current records are likely never to be broken, such as 10.49 seconds for the women’s 100 metres set by Florence Griffith-Joyner, in 1988. Toussaint suggested that in the future records should be less important than the way a race is run and the quality of the sporting contest.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.8

2007-12-20T18:30:00.000+08:00

It's coming to the end of another calendar year and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

Traditionally its also a time of the year when many choose to recount their achievements or misses for the year and resolve to do better next year via a new year resolution.

My wish list (not necessarily my personal resolution) may look something like this going forward:

1) To see/hear less lies in the press, magazines, TV, internet and other media
2) To see more people use their brains to think for themselves and act for themselves intelligently
3) To see less people act as blind followers
4) To see more people talk and act rationally and, think more and speak less if possible
5) To see more people use their brains to help others and to act for the betterment of mankind rather than to use to it for their own selfish means
6) To see more people respect others for whoever they are regardless of colour, creed, religion, political affiliation etc. and treat each other a fellow humankind
7) To see politicians speak less

The above may sound very "utopian" like or a wish list for a Miss Universe pageant but its my sincere hope to see it happen in how ever small increment they may occur.

Merry X'mas and Happy New Year everyone.

Time to go and dig out "James Stewart in 'It's a Wonderful Life'"

christmas decorations 2007 (i)

2007-12-09T22:57:00.001+08:00

christmas decorations at the curve, mutiara damansara, petaling jaya. 8th december 2007.

2007-11-28T01:03:00.000+08:00

Which Disney Hero Are You?
	You are Simba. You're young, naive, and misguided. However, don't fear, because your growth comes exponentially with hard times ahead. Only then will you reach the goals you've set out to accomplish.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Which Disney Hero are You

2007-11-26T09:07:00.000+08:00

Which Disney Hero Are You?
	You are Beast. You are ugly on the outside but those who know you well have learned that underneath your exterior is a marvelous prince. Your warmth and patience are your greatest qualities and they have helped you make loyal friends. Protect your friends well because they will soon repay you in full.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Why Should We Go Home On Time?

2007-11-11T01:23:00.001+08:00

Mr. Narayana Murthy is undoubtedly one of the most famous persons from Karnataka. He is known not just for building the biggest IT Empire in India but also for his simplicity. Almost every important dignitary visits InfoSys campus. He delivered an interesting speech during an employee session with another IT company in India. He is incidentally, one of the top 50 influential people of Asia according to an Asiaweek publication and also the new IT Advisor to the Thailand Prime Minister.

Extract of Mr. Narayana Murthy's Speech during Mentor Session:

I know people who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, or more. Some people do so because of a work emergency where the long hours are only temporary. Other people I know have put in these hours for years. I do not know if they are working all these hours, but I do know they are in the office this long. Others put in long office hours because they are addicted to the workplace.

Whatever the reason for putting in overtime, working long hours over the long term is harmful to the person and to the organization. There are things managers can do to change this for everyone's benefit. Being in the office long hours, over long periods of time, makes way for potential errors.

My colleagues who are in the office long hours frequently make mistakes caused by fatigue. Correcting these mistakes requires their time as well as the time and energy of others. I have seen people work Tuesday through Friday to correct mistakes made after 5 PM on Monday.

Another problem is that people who are in the office long hours are not pleasant company. They often complain about other people (who are not working as hard); they are irritable, or cranky, or even angry. Other people avoid them. Such behaviour poses problems, where work goes much better when people work together instead of avoiding one another.

As Managers, there are things we can do to help people leave the office. First and foremost is to set the example and go home ourselves. I work with a manager who chides people for working long hours. His words quickly lose their meaning when he sends these chiding group e-mails with a time-stamp of 2 AM, Sunday.

Second is to encourage people to put some balance in their lives. For instance, here is a guideline I find helpful:

1. Wake up, eat a good breakfast, and go to work.
2. Work hard and smart for eight or nine hours.
3. Go home.
4. Read the books/comics, watch a funny movie, dig in the dirt, play with your kids, etc.
5. Eat well and sleep well.

This is called recreating. Doing steps 1, 3, 4, and 5 enable step 2. Working regular hours and recreating daily are simple concepts. They are hard for some of us because that requires 'personal change'. They are possible since we all have the power to choose to do them.

In considering the issue of overtime, I am reminded of my oldest son. When he was a toddler, if people were visiting the apartment, he would not fall asleep no matter how long the visit was, and no matter what time of day it was. He would fight off sleep until the visitors left. It was as if he was afraid that he would miss some thing. Once our visitors' left, he would go to sleep. By this time, however, he was over tired and would scream through half the night with nightmares. He, my wife, and I, all paid the price for his fear of missing out.

Perhaps some people put in such long hours because they do not want to miss anything when they leave the office. The trouble with this is that events will never stop happening. That is life! Things happen 24 hours a day. Allowing for little rest is not ultimately practical. So, take a nap. Things will happen while you are asleep, but you will have the energy to catch up when you wake.

Hence, "LOVE YOUR JOB, BUT NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR COMPANY BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE COMPANY STOPS LOVING YOU” - Narayana Murthy

BERSIH memo 10th Nov 2007

2007-11-11T00:00:00.000+08:00

The BERSIH memo was successfully submitted to the Istana.

Fish Really May Be Brain Food

2007-11-09T17:32:00.000+08:00

There may be truth to the old adage that eating fish can make you smarter, according to three new studies. Each suggests that fish intake, particularly the consumption of omega-3 fatty acids in fish, may improve cognitive performance.

A Norwegian study of more than 2,000 elderly people found that those who ate more than 10 grams per day of fish had markedly better test scores and a lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who ate less than 10 grams of fish a day.

The more fish a person ate, the greater the effect. People who ate about 75 grams a day of fish had the best test scores.

A Dutch study of 404 people, ages 50 to 70, found that higher plasma concentrations of omega-3 fatty acid at baseline were associated with a lower decline in several cognitive measures over three years.

Finally a New Zealand study of more than 2,400 people found a strong and consistent association between circulating concentrations of the omega-3 fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid and physical health and a less compelling link between omega-3 fatty acids and mental health.

The studies were published in the November issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

While these are interesting observational studies, they don't establish a direct link between consumption of fish/omega-3 fatty acids and cognitive function, Dr. Irwin Rosenberg, of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, wrote in an accompanying editorial. There is growing evidence of such an association, but randomized clinical trails are needed to confirm the link, he noted. (Source - Health Central.com)

Density of a City

2007-10-29T17:17:00.000+08:00

The only measure of density of a city is the quality of life. If you find yourself unable to be polite and civil, then it's dense.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.7

2007-10-25T18:25:00.000+08:00

It is not uncommon that when a Government or Local Authority passes some legislation or law, exemptions are either stated explicitly in that piece of legislation or where it is explicitly silent, it merely means that the law will not apply in that particular case.

For example, we may have a law stating that a licence is required to rear the following animals dogs, cats, tigers, lions and snakes. What it means here is if I keep a rabbit, no licence is required.

Recently I personally encounter a requirement which states getting of an exemption certificate. What it means here in the example above is that I now require to get a licence/letter to state that my rabbit is exempted from this law! Bureaucracy now requires us to get a licence to state that we are exempted from licencing........

On the subject of bureaucracy, I also realise the importance of "rubber stamp" when dealing with the less developed nations (inc. my home state). When my company recently applied for some approval from another country, we require our passports (as directors) to be certified by no less than 3 different parties including a translation into the local language of that country. I also noted the importance place of making sure we get no less than 5 rubber stamps and signatures from various parties to substantiate the authenticity of our documents.

RUBBER STAMP appears to be like a SEAL of authority despite its availability in abundance everywhere! I for one until no, cannot understand the importance place on this "rubber stamp" which can be fabricated at a low cost at your neighbourhood shop.....

Please someone enlighthen me on the process of bureaucracy which is beyond my comprehension!

07.07.07

2007-10-16T13:30:00.000+08:00

Ok .. this post should have been done on 7 July 2007 but I guess better late than never.

The supposedly wondrous day caused wedding registries to overflow. Even the Registry of Companies got into the act and opened office on a Saturday(!) so that people who so choose may submit incorporation documents for their company on that day and have a date of incorporation as 07.07.07. The most ridiculous act thus far are those idiotic parents who choose to have their child delivered by caesarian section on that day. I think the gynaes who agreed to that are most irresponsible. I learnt that a woman whose baby was actually due on 27 July had her child by c-section on 7 July. That is like taking away 20 days of development that is so very vital for a baby. I wonder if these parents will be able to live with themselves if (touch wood) the babies who were 'forced' to be born on 07.07.07 suffer health problems as a result. Stupidity knows no limit!

saturdays in malacca

2007-09-17T19:17:00.001+08:00

i spent the last two saturdays in malacca.

the week before last, was used to explore all those old places which i last visited last year. some things have changed a lot in one year.

tried foot reflexology; some parts hurt like crazy.

also went to the wrong satay celup shop; didn't like the taste at all.

left my friends’ phone numbers in my old phone, so couldn't call any local kakis to locate that superb bkt shop.

tried to walk all around bukit cina but ended up just doing one side cause it's huge!

last week we stayed overnight at trend hotel in melaka raya. quite a good place.

went for two types of massage; traditional which hurt and subsequently the next day for a chinese massage which soothed my aches.

still hadn't tried all the food yet even though i've been in and out of malacca for years.

most improved food establishment is the jonker street laksa. the taste is all unique.

had tea at the 13 states coffee shop. i thought of something ironic of that place. it claims that visiting jonker street means seeing the whole of malaysia. really? so where were the indians, malays and orang asli? rubbish...

Wisdom: Men & Women

2007-08-29T19:18:00.000+08:00

Men :

1. All men are extremely busy.
2. Although they are so busy, they still have time for women.
3. Although they have time for women, they don't really care for them.
4. Although they don't really care for them, they always have one around.
5. Although they always have one around them, they always try their luck with others.

Women :

1. The most important thing for a woman is financial security.
2. Although this is so important, they still go out and buy expensive clothes and stuff.
3. Although they always buy expensive clothes, they never have something to wear.
4. Although they never have something to wear, they always dress beautifully.
5. Although they always dress beautifully, their clothes are always just "an old rag".
6. Although their clothes are always "just an old rag", they still expect you to compliment them.
7. Although they expect you to compliment them, when you do, they don't believe you.

What Kind of Pet Would You Be?

2007-08-29T13:53:00.000+08:00

You Would Be a Pet Bird

You're intelligent and witty, yet surprisingly low maintenance. You charm people easily, and they usually love you a lot more than you love them. You resent anyone who tries to own or control you. You refuse to be fenced in.

Why you would make a great pet: You're very smart and entertaining
Why you would make a bad pet: You're not interested in being anyone's pet!
What you would love about being a bird: Flying, obviously
What you would hate about being a bird: Being caged

What Kind of Pet Would You Be?

ACFK-j Annual Trip, 2007

2007-08-15T16:52:00.000+08:00

kelab pemilik kenderaan perodua: its melaka and johor chapter had their annual trip on 11th - 12th august, 2007.

we had a barbeque and an overnight stay at the d'sisik resort at the estuary of sungai sisik, tanjung resang, mersing, johor.

this image was taken during a stop at kota tinggi for breakfast. in all, 26 members went in 12 vehicles.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.6

2007-08-12T18:20:00.000+08:00

This blog is as good as dead in the water but I'll post anyway.

Well in Malaysia, many things are geared towards the coming general election which many see as the true test to the current elected Government. It is currently facing many threats at its forefront with those usual challenges such as economy, corruption, constitutional crisis, judiciary etc.

I for one am still struggling with my own lessons in philosophy and I thought it be interesting to post some snippets on Logic due to the coming election. We'll probably see lots of illogical arguments being floated around and false promises in due time.

Time permitting, will try to post new blog as frequent as possible before the coming election. Some of the posts here are from two interesting books, Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte and a classic text book on logic, Copi & Cohen's Intro to Logic.

Today I shall talk about "Argument Ad Hominem" which loosely translates as "against the person". This is sometimes also called character assasination, which is very commonly used during election.

It is a fallacious attack in which the thrust is directed, not at a conclusion but at the person who asserts or defends it (Copi & Cohen).

In Malaysia, we see many such fallacy judging from past election process. It ranges from whether that person is a divorcee (or living in a polygamous marriage), suspected of some past misdeeds or lives in a large mansion. Efforts and character assassination are all directed at these. Seldom does the press or public concentrate on the issues at hand or argue about the conclusion or premises.

Well I guess we live in a society where many are simply more interested on trivial and irrelevant issues; and hence can only comprehend on whether that person is living a "moral" life or otherwise and, choose to ignore issues..or maybe because its just to complex to discuss and debate?

Life appears more colourful and interesting than to debate on matters too complex for the common people......

The Pain Of Being Human

2007-08-01T15:20:00.000+08:00

FAMILIES' ELDEST BOYS DO BEST ON IQ TESTS

2007-06-23T01:11:00.000+08:00

Boys at the top of the pecking order — either by birth or because their older siblings died — score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers. The question of whether firstborn and only children are really smarter than those who come along later has been hotly debated for more than a century.

Norwegian researchers now report that it isn't a matter of being born first, but growing up the senior child, that seems to result in the higher IQ scores.

Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal report their findings in the 22 June issue of the journal Science.

It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family — the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy — the first born or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.

Kristensen, of Norway's National Institute of Occupational Health, and Bjerkedal, of the Norwegian Armed Forces Medical Services, studied the IQ test results of 241,310 Norwegian men drafted into the armed forces between 1967 and 1976. All were aged 18 or 19 at the time.

The average IQ of first-born men was 103.2, they found.

Second-born men averaged 101.2, but second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9.

And for third-borns, the average was 100.0. But if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.

The findings provide "evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," they concluded.

It's an issue that has perplexed people since at least 1874, when Sir Francis Galton reported that men in prominent positions tend to be firstborns more often than would have been statistically expected.

Since then, several studies have reported higher intelligence scores for firstborns, while other analyses have questioned those findings and the methodology of the reports.

While the Norwegian analysis focused on men, other studies have included women, some indicating a birth-order effect and some not.

Frank J. Sulloway of the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, welcomed what he called the Norwegians' "elegantly designed" analysis.

"These two researchers demonstrate that how study participants were raised, not how they were born, is what actually influences their IQs," said Sulloway, who was not part of the research team.

The elder child pulls ahead, he said, perhaps as a result of learning gained through the process of tutoring younger brothers and sisters.

The older child benefits by having to organize and express its thoughts to tutor youngsters, he said, while the later children may have no one to tutor.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.5

2007-06-17T21:57:00.000+08:00

Looks like this blog is dead but what the heck. Been very busy at work due to a corporate exercise till now. Its close to 2 mths since last post.

Karen Armstrong a historian/author on religion was in Kuala Lumpur speaking to a large public audience this weekend on Islam and the Western World. We probably need a dose from someone respectable to tell us what is also happening home but then our country has always been "foreigner" comment about others not about us. I'll leave it for another day.

Today was at a large mall and my wife remarked about a man she saw starting at a lady with a somewhat low cut dress.....it then came into my mine the following questions/ thoughts:

i) Does one dress to please one self or others? If it's to please one self, then possibly one should just wear what he/she likes and can be happy while at home.
ii) What if everyone else in this world was blind except that person, would she be wearing something revealing as well or just walk around in the nude?
iii) If its not for "show" who is it for? Surely it is with intention to attract attention both from men and women...?

Please don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that women are at fault if they attract the wrong kind of attention e.g. like some "religious" leaders who claim that rape cases are due to woman "wrongly" dress. I'm here merely soliciting some view points on what is the purpose of one's dressing (other than to keep oneself from cold).

Its also quite similar when I speak of people who worship designer labels. Are they to garner envious looks from other members of the public or merely to satisfy oneself? Who do you know who pays for designer label but merely keeps it in a drawer at home?

The BIG big picture

2007-05-05T01:53:00.000+08:00

A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOS
HERBERT MEYER

Herb Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for the President and his national security advisers. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. Government official to forecast the collapse Soviet Union for which he later was awarded the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest honor. Formerly an associate editor of FORTUNE, he is also the author of several books.

WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON?
FOUR MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS

Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world events. These transformations have profound implications for American business owners, our culture and our way of life.

1. The War in Iraq

There are three major monotheistic religions in the world: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the 16th century, Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward. Religion remained at the center of life, church and state became separate. Rule of law, idea of economic liberty, individual rights, human rights - all these are defining points of modern Western civilization. These concepts started with the Greeks but didn't take off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened, it unleashed the scientific revolution and the greatest outpouring of art, literature and music the world has ever known.

Islam, which developed in the 7th century, counts millions of Moslems around the world who are normal people. However, there is a radical streak within Islam. When the radicals are in charge, Islam attacks Western civilization. Islam first attacked Western civilization in the 7th century, and later in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, the Moslems (Turks from the Ottoman Empire) were literally at the gates of Vienna . It was in Vienna that the climatic battle between Islam and Western civilization took place. The West won and went forward. Islam lost and went backward. Interestingly, the date of that battle was September 11. Since then, Islam has not found a way to reconcile with the modern world.

Today, terrorism is the third attack on Western civilization by radical Islam. To deal with terrorism, the U.S. is doing two things. First, units of our armed forces are in 30 countries around the world hunting down terrorist groups and dealing with them. This gets very little publicity. Second we are taking military action in Afghanistan and Iraq . These are covered relentlessly by the media. People can argue about whether the war in Iraq is right or wrong. However, the underlying strategy behind the war is to use our military to remove the radicals from power and give the moderates a chance. Our hope is that, over time, the moderates will find a way to bring Islam forward into the 21st century. That's what our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is all about.

The lesson of 9/11 is that we live in a world where a small number of people can kill a large number of people very quickly. They can use airplanes, bombs, anthrax, chemical weapons or dirty bombs. Even with a first-rate intelligence service (which the U.S. does not have), you can't stop every attack. That means our tolerance for political horseplay has dropped to zero. No longer will we play games with terrorists or weapons of mass destructions.

Most of the instability and horseplay is coming from the Middle East . That's why we have thought that if we could knock out the radicals and give the moderates a chance to hold power, they might find a way to reconcile Islam with the modern world. So when looking at Afghanistan or Iraq , it's important to look for any signs that they are modernizing. For example, women being brought into the workforce and colleges in Afghanistan are good. The Iraqis stumbling toward a constitution is good. People can argue about what the U.S. is doing and how we're doing it, but anything that suggests Islam is finding its way forward is good.

2. The Emergence of China

In the last 20 years, China has moved 250 million people from the farms and villages into the cities. Their plan is to move another 300 million in the next 20 years. When you put that many people into the cities, you have to find work for them. That's why China is addicted to manufacturing; they have to put all the relocated people to work. When we decide to manufacture something in the U.S. , it's based on market needs and the opportunity to make a profit. In China , they make the decision because they want the jobs, which is a very different calculation.

While China is addicted to manufacturing, Americans are addicted to low prices. As a result, a unique kind of economic codependency has developed between the two countries. If we ever stop buying from China , they will explode politically. If China stops selling to us, our economy will take a huge hit because prices will jump. We are subsidizing their economic development; they are subsidizing our economic growth.

Because of their huge growth in manufacturing, China is hungry for raw materials which drives prices up worldwide. China is also thirsty for oil, which is one reason oil is now at $60 a barrel. By 2020, China will produce more cars than the U.S. China is also buying its way into the oil infrastructure around the world. They are doing it in the open market and paying fair market prices, but millions of barrels of oil that would have gone to the U.S. are now going to China . China 's quest to assure it has the oil it needs to fuel its economy is a major factor in world politics and economics. We have our Navy fleets protecting the sea lines, specifically the ability to get the tankers through. It won't be long before the Chinese have an aircraft carrier sitting in the Persian Gulf as well. The question is, will their aircraft carrier be pointing in the same direction as ours or against us?

3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization

Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable. Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1. In Western Europe , the birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there will be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy and Spain are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population declines by 30 percent in 20 years, which has a huge impact on the economy.

When you don't have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany , and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don't support the Iraq war is they fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020 , more than half of all births in the Netherlands will be non-European.

The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. The Europeans simply don't wish to have children, so they are dying.

In Japan , the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30 years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe , they refuse to import workers. Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2000 schools, and is closing them down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics.

Europe and Japan , which comprise two of the world's major economic engines, aren't merely in recession, they're shutting down. This will have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is already beginning to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct correlation between abandonment of traditional religious society and a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is becoming irrelevant. The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below replacement, the population ages. With fewer working people to support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay marriage and having a family. Once this trend starts, the downward spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the traditions they formerly held in regards to having families and raising children.

The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an increase in population because of immigration. When broken down by ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 (same as France ) while the Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S. , the baby boomers are starting to retire in massive numbers. This will push the elder dependency ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is not as bad as Europe , but still represents the same kind of trend.

Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive society understands-you need kids to have a healthy society. Children are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become taxpayers. That's how a society works, but the post-modern secular state seems to have forgotten that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had been the same as post-World War II, there would be no Social Security or Medicare problems.

The world's most effective birth control device is money. As society creates a middle class and women move into the workforce, birth rates drop. Having large families is incompatible with middle class living. The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic development. After World War II, the U.S. instituted a $600 tax credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of 22 million kids, which was a huge consumer market that turned into a huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in today's dollars would cost $12,000 per child.

China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both countries, there is a preference for boys over girls, and we now have the technology to know which is which before they are born. In China and India , many families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of these countries there are 70 million boys growing up who will never find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for every 100 girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100 girls.

The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen . Russia has one-sixth of the earth's land surface and much of its oil. You can't control that much area with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have China with 70 million unmarried men - a real potential nightmare scenario for Russia .

4. Restructuring of American Business

The fourth major transformation involves a fundamental restructuring of American business. Today's business environment is very complex and competitive. To succeed, you have to be the best, which means having the highest quality and lowest cost. Whatever your price point, you must have the best quality and lowest price. To be the best, you have to concentrate on one thing. You can't be all things to all people and be the best.

A generation ago, IBM used to make every part of their computer. Now Intel makes the chips, Microsoft makes the software, and someone else makes the modems, hard drives, monitors, etc. IBM even outsources their call center. Because IBM has all these companies supplying goods and services cheaper and better than they could do it themselves, they can make a better computer at a lower cost. This is called a fracturing of business. When one company can make a better product by relying on others to perform functions the business used to do itself, it creates a complex pyramid of companies that serve and support each other.

This fracturing of American business is now in its second generation. The companies who supply IBM are now doing the same thing-outsourcing many of their core services and production process. As a result, they can make cheaper, better products. Over time, this pyramid continues to get bigger and bigger. Just when you think it can't fracture again, it does. Even very small businesses can have a large pyramid of corporate entities that perform many of its important functions. One aspect of this trend is that companies end up with fewer employees and more independent contractors.

This trend has also created two new words in business: integrator and complementor. At the top of the pyramid, IBM is the integrator. As you go down the pyramid, Microsoft, Intel and the other companies that support IBM are the complementors. However, each of the complementors is itself an integrator for the complementors underneath it. This has several implications, the first of which is that we are now getting false readings on the economy. People who used to be employees are now independent contractors launching their own businesses. There are many people working whose work is not listed as a job. As a result, the economy is perking along better than the numbers are telling us.

Outsourcing also confused the numbers. Suppose a company like General Motors decides to outsource all its employee cafeteria functions to Marriott (which it did). It lays off hundreds of cafeteria workers, who then get hired right back by Marriott. The only thing that has changed is that these people work for Marriott rather than GM. Yet, the headlines will scream that America has lost more manufacturing jobs. All that really happened is that these workers are now reclassified as service workers. So the old way of counting jobs contributes to false economic readings. As yet, we haven't figured out how to make the numbers catch up with the changing realities of the business world.

Another implication of this massive restructuring is that because companies are getting rid of units and people that used to work for them, the entity is smaller. As the companies get smaller and more efficient, revenues are going down but profits are going up. As a result, the old notion that revenues are up and we're doing great isn't always the case anymore. Companies are getting smaller but are becoming more efficient and profitable in the process.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOUR TRANSFORMATIONS

1. The War in Iraq

In some ways, the war is going very well. Afghanistan and Iraq have the beginnings of a modern government, which is a huge step forward. The Saudis are starting to talk about some good things, while Egypt and Lebanon are beginning to move in a good direction.

A series of revolutions have taken place in countries like Ukraine and Georgia . There will be more of these revolutions for an interesting reason. In every revolution, there comes a point where the dictator turns to the general and says, Fire into the crowd. If the general fires into the crowd, it stops the revolution. If the general says No, the revolution continues. Increasingly, the generals are saying No because their kids are in the crowd.

Thanks to TV and the Internet, the average 18-year old outside the U.S. is very savvy about what is going on in the world, especially in terms of popular culture. There is a huge global consciousness, and young people around the world want to be a part of it. It is increasingly apparent to them that the miserable government where they live is the only thing standing in their way. More and more, it is the well-educated kids, the children of the generals and the elite, who are leading the revolutions.

At the same time, not all is well with the war. The level of violence in Iraq is much worse and doesn't appear to be improving. It's possible that we're asking too much of Islam all at one time. We're trying to jolt them from the 7th century to the 21st century all at once, which may be further than they can go. They might make it and they might not. Nobody knows for sure. The point is, we don't know how the war will turn out. Anyone who says they know is just guessing.

The real place to watch is Iran . If they actually obtain nuclear weapons it will be a terrible situation. There are two ways to deal with it. The first is a military strike, which will be very difficult. The Iranians have dispersed their nuclear development facilities and put them underground. The U.S. has nuclear weapons that can go under the earth and take out those facilities, but we don't want to do that. The other way is to separate the radical mullahs from the government, which is the most likely course of action.

Seventy percent of the Iranian population is under 30. They are Moslem but not Arab. They are mostly pro-Western. Many experts think the U.S. should have dealt with Iran before going to war with Iraq . The problem isn't so much the weapons, it's the people who control them. If Iran has a moderate government, the weapons become less of a concern.

We don't know if we will win the war in Iraq . We could lose or win. What we're looking for is any indicator that Islam is moving into the 21st century and stabilizing.

2. China

It may be that pushing 500 million people from farms and villages into cities is too much too soon. Although it gets almost no publicity, China is experiencing hundreds of demonstrations around the country, which is unprecedented. These are not students in Tiananmen Square . These are average citizens who are angry with the government for building chemical plants and polluting the water they drink and the air they breathe.

The Chinese are a smart and industrious people. They may be able to pull it off and become a very successful economic and military superpower. If so, we will have to learn to live with it. If they want to share the responsibility of keeping the world's oil lanes open, that's a good thing. They currently have eight new nuclear electric power generators under way and 45 on the books to build. Soon, they will leave the U.S. way behind in their ability to generate nuclear power.

What can go wrong with China ? For one, you can't move 550 million people into the cities without major problems. Two , China really wants Taiwan , not so much for economic reasons, they just want it. The Chinese know that their system of communism can't survive much longer in the 21st century. The last thing they want to do before they morph into some sort of more capitalistic government is to take over Taiwan.

We may wake up one morning and find they have launched an attack on Taiwan . If so, it will be a mess, both economically and militarily. The U.S. has committed to the military defense of Taiwan . If China attacks Taiwan , will we really go to war against them? If the Chinese generals believe the answer is no, they may attack. If we don't defend Taiwan , every treaty the U.S. has will be worthless. Hopefully, China won't do anything stupid.

3. Demographics

Europe and Japan are dying because their populations are aging and shrinking. These trends can be reversed if the young people start breeding. However, the birth rates in these areas are so low it will take two generations to turn things around. No economic model exists that permits 50 years to turn things around. Some countries are beginning to offer incentives for people to have bigger families. For example, Italy is offering tax breaks for having children. However, it's a lifestyle issue versus a tiny amount of money. Europeans aren't willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to have more children.

In general, everyone in Europe just wants it to last a while longer. Europeans have a real talent for living. They don't want to work very hard. The average European worker gets 400 more hours of vacation time per year than Americans. They don't want to work and they don't want to make any of the changes needed to revive their economies.

The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In August, the country basically shuts down when everyone goes on vacation. That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living in nursing homes and hospitals died. Their children didn't even leave the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies. Institutions had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies until people came to claim them.

This loss of life was five times bigger than 9/11 in America , yet it didn't trigger any change in French society. When birth rates are so low, it creates a tremendous tax burden on the young. Under those circumstances, keeping mom and dad alive is not an attractive option. That's why euthanasia is becoming so popular in most European countries. The only country that doesn't permit (and even encourage) euthanasia is Germany , because of all the baggage from World War II.

The European economy is beginning to fracture. The Euro is down. Countries like Italy are starting to talk about pulling out of the European Union because it is killing them. When things get bad economically in Europe , they tend to get very nasty politically. The canary in the mine is anti- Semitism. When it goes up, it means trouble is coming. Current levels of anti-Semitism are higher than ever. Germany won't launch another war, but Europe will likely get shabbier, more dangerous and less pleasant to live in.

Japan has a birth rate of 1.3 and has no intention of bringing in immigrants. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be 70 years old. Property values in Japan have dropped every year for the past 14 years. The country is simply shutting down.

In the U.S. we also have an aging population. Boomers are starting to retire at a massive rate. These retirements will have several major impacts: Possible massive sell-off of large four-bedroom houses and a movement to condos. An enormous drain on the treasury. Boomers vote, and they want their benefits, even if it means putting a crushing tax burden on their kids to get them. Social Security will be a huge problem. As this generation ages, it will start to drain the system. We are the only country in the world where there are no age limits on medical procedures. An enormous drain on the health care system. This will also increase the tax burden on the young, which will cause them to delay marriage and having families, which will drive down the birth rate even further.

Although scary, these demographics also present enormous opportunities for products and services tailored to aging populations. There will be tremendous demand for caring for older people, especially those who don't need nursing homes but need some level of care. Some people will have a business where they take care of three or four people in their homes. The demand for that type of service and for products to physically care for aging people will be huge.

Make sure the demographics of your business are attuned to where the action is. For example, you don't want to be a baby food company in Europe or Japan . Demographics are much underrated as an indicator of where the opportunities are. Businesses need customers. Go where the customers are.

4. Restructuring of American Business

The restructuring of American business means we are coming to the end of the age of the employer and employee. With all this fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. The new workforce contract will be, a Show up at the my office five days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else.

Husbands and wives are becoming economic units. They take different jobs and work different shifts depending on where they are in their careers and families. They make tradeoffs to put together a compensation package to take care of the family. This used to happen only with highly educated professionals with high incomes. Now it is happening at the level of the factory floor worker. Couples at all levels are designing their compensation packages based on their individual needs. The only way this can work is if everything is portable and flexible, which requires a huge shift in the American economy.

The U.S. is in the process of building the world's first 21st century model economy. The only other countries doing this are U.K. and Australia . The model is fast, flexible, highly productive and unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. This will increase the economic gap between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.

At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China , we are the only country that is continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground military experience through our war in Iraq . We know which high-tech weapons are working and which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily. There has never been a superpower in this position before.

On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children. The U.S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the marketplace. We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world.

Ultimately, it's an issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V 2.4

2007-04-21T20:35:00.000+08:00

Looks like 0ur blog has lost its appeal but anyway, will just post whatever on my mind to see what happens.

Been close to 3 mths since the last post and what has happened since? Many things have happened both within and without Malaysia.

As for me still very busy at work with very little time for blogging or philosophy (in the formal manner I mean). We can't really stop thinking or using philosophy can we? We use it in our daily activities from thinking rationally and logically, to questioning our politicians, asking about what we read in the press or hear in news etc.

Recently, in Malaysia we hear lots of news about by-election due to the demise of two elected representatives. There is this question about whether promising to deliver some goodies to the voters constitute bribery or not. Morally it appears to be so, but legally it appears to be OK.

Then there is a lot of talk about character assasination during election campaigns. Campaigns here are about personalities right and wrongs rather than about whether the public benefits from the elected representatives work and effort. We have become so shallow as to allow character assasination take the forefront of our electoral process. Don't get me wrong, the elected representatives' moral,character and integrity are important but this is not Malaysian Idol. Yes elections are usually perceived as popularity contest in this part of the world but should it have been brought to such levels?

Other than that we also have a mini Constitutional Crisis in our Nation. Some courts have been elevated to a different status due to the decision of the Court of Appeal recently. Certain courts by a judicial decision has had its boundaries expanded beyond the ambit of the Constitution.....

Whatever happen to basic common sense? Is our education system that bad?

Also why do South Koreans have to apologise to the US for the wrongdoing of a fellow countrymen? Do you see any other Nation's citizens doing so? Did the Koreans' do anything wrong?

Today I was at my car workshop and I overheard the mechanic telling a customer of his, that certain parts of the car sent for repair cannot be repaired here and need to go back to the authorised centre do to some proprietary issues.

I remember when I studied for my MBA a few years back, intellectual property patents cannot be extended to parts of a product in the UK. I believe the intention then was noble, i.e. to prevent a "monopolistic" hold on parts needed for replacement. But thanks to softwares and computers, we now have cars that are basically functioning like computers and require software to manage and run it. Parts although can be bought and fixed elsewhere cannot be fitted in without updating the software.

Soon cars will have "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" buttons on it!

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.3

2007-01-30T19:27:00.000+08:00

Its 1 month into 2007 and our blog site is still deep in the still water, untouched since and yours truly here has now taken the liberty to post the first blog for 2007.

How has 2007 been for us here in Malaysia? Well it's a rather sad turn for us here with 2 prominent bloggers being hauled up in a Civil Suit by a leading newspaper. The Press now resorts to the court to go after minnows. With all their $ and exposure, they choose to go after fellow bloggers in the name of freedom and justice.

A philosophical question here is, can there be real justice if one party is a huge giant with all the funds and lawyers $ can buy and the other party is a mere mortal man on the street with a pen/ keyboard on his fingertips. Is the pen mightier than the sword? Will David be able to withstand Goliath? Anyway, will there ever be any real justice anywhere in this world we live in? Some say justice can only be sought in the after-world (if there is such a place).

On my personal front, how has my journey into philosophy been so far? Well it started before 2007, with a fellow blogger here IO who suggested reviving or starting a Philosophy Special Interest Group with a retired politician speaking at a talk to kick start this group. That idea is probably going ahead although when, I'm unsure. I also met up with another fellow philosophy blogger YJ who told me our "Matrix Trilogy" movie-thon cum discussion may proceed this year.

Another friend of mine at a Think-Tank has got me interested in Islamic Philosophy/Religion which we debated/ argued for 2 hrs around midnight recently. Last weekend at a kiddos birthday party of a friend of mine whose kid turned 3 yrs old, I met the grandfather of this kid who is a well known artist in Malaysia and we started to talk about life, philosophy and consumerism. That got me interesting in talking/ writing about consumerism and how many become slaves to brand, fashion, shopping malls, credit cards and spending.

Which brings us to the question, how much do we need to live a reasonable good life? What are "needs" and what are "wants"? Do you need to change cars every 5 years? Why are "durable" products no longer durable today, i.e. they fail 1-2 years after your warranty expires? Is technology so advance that producers can build in a failing device to fail a product after in use for a short while? Why must we upgrade software which we really don't need? How much of a software upgrade for mobile phones or other digital equipment like digital camera do we really need? Should we go for faster, better, quicker, efficient etc.?

With all the above, has our quality of life really improved or worse still, deteriorated?

I've decided not to participate in the race and made this decision many moons ago and where possible, resist change.

So I now own a 4 year old mobile phone (without camera and colour screen), drive a 23 year old car, shop at factory outlets, pay a bit more for really "durable" goods possibly minus the "gadgetery bells & whistles", avoid goods that we don't really need e.g. toys for man etc., carry a real notebook made of paper and scribble with a pen, keep addresses in a book that will never crash or get virus infected and avoid reading magazines with glossy covers that has no substance (ever notice that we pay $ to buy/ read magazine advertisements since advertisement forms the bulk of most magazines nowadays). Most of my non-essential money is now expended on books, my only sinful past time!

New Species in 2006

2006-12-29T08:05:00.000+08:00

It appears that 2006 was a bountiful year in the discovery of new species on this planet. Read about it here.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.2

2006-12-25T10:21:00.000+08:00

Well its the end of 2006 and coming to a new 2007. Malaysian Mensa had its small year-end bash last weekend and I attended my only function for the year. Mr Ismail Omar suggested the revival of a Philosophy SIG over here. I'm quite sure they are many similar SIGs in other Mensa chapters all over the world though I'm not certain as yet. I'm all for the revival of this SIG but unsure how many participants we could get. The mere mention of Philosophy frightens most people.

Many however do not realise that the practice of Philosophy is a daily endeavour for humankind. Nearly everyone if not everyone with their thinking faculty still intact practices some form of Philosophy everyday; from decision making to making logical choices, arguments, admiration of beauty in whatever art form etc.

Making a new year resolution has never been my annual practice but here are my wish list for the future for everyone out there:

i) People should use their grey cells deeper and more often; think more rather than talk
ii) Always question; never believe whatever is reported or published without going back to (i)
iii) Politicians, people in authority, religious officials, public personality should be subjected to the highest level of scrutiny by the public; remember this, they are there because of us. They owe their existence to us.
iv) Always read the fine print first before anything else
v) Spend less of material items, our needs are very basic and we'll be much happier with less
vi) Never compare, we are all individuals in our own right and each of us have our own distinctive purpose/role
vii) Everyone can make a difference (I don't watch much TV, but I caught James Stewart's "It's a Wonderful Life" again last week)

I'm sorry if I sound like some "self-help" guru out there but these are unlike your "positive thought" crap dished out by these gurus as I do not have any interest in selling videos, books, tapes or seminars!

Have a good 2007 to everyone here!

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.1

2006-12-11T12:35:00.000+08:00

I'm merely 1/4 into J Saul's 600 pp Voltaire's Bastard over the weekend. Heavy and slow reading I must say.

This weekend I encountered something on education which I've encountered twice so far in my self learning journey into Philosophy.

On pp 147 of this book (Penguin Canada, 1993), "Jefferson, founder and patron of University of Virginia, never allowed his university to give degrees. He considered them pretentious, irrelevant to learning and unconnected to the preparation for responsibility....."

My earlier encounter about non-degree awarding universities was in chapter 16 of Pirsig's Zen & AMM:

"..... Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education.""

BTW, I believe Uni of Virginia today awards degree like any other degree awarding institution of higher learning.

The concept of a non-degree awarding university whose primary goal is to educate and allow people to learn as much as they can I believe is something beyond the average persons grasp.

Why attend uni/school then? Isn't the goal to get a degree?

I always thought so, but now I believe the real goal is educate oneself, learning is its primary objective; not to get a degree, a job etc.

Also, do note that the word carefully "institution of higher LEARNING" not "institution of higher teaching"...think about the system in our part of the world.

Memories define us

2006-12-01T11:59:00.000+08:00

An interesting piece on short and long term memories and how they define us. See this.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.0

2006-11-30T19:42:00.000+08:00

It's a quite stressful week for me so I thought I just post what's on my mind about our real world out there and see what our other readers outside Malaysia think about us.

I'm presently reading "Voltaire's Bastard" by John Saul a book written more than 10 years ago but remains as relevant then as today. Will post some quotes/comments from there in due time.

And now back to what's happening here in Malaysia over the past few weeks:

i) A murder involving a Mongolian citizen involving some individual in high places
ii) Government spending more money probably as a way to enrich many other selected people
iii) Local government officers who are above the law despite being responsible for upholding the law
iv) Higher highway toll rates to comply with the concession agreement
v) Higher cost of living due to spillover effect from oil prices

Looks like only bad news makes it to the Press, oh I forgot, our fellow country woman, was crown world squash champion last weekend..there's some good news!

Back to point on higher toll rates, it always defies me why the Government cannot renegotiate the terms of the contract to save the general public money since these are hard times. In Malaysia as most people know, everything is negotiable particularly if you are the Government!

Maybe someone out there benefits from it....? Makes "uncommon sense"?

Also talking about newspapers and watching TV, does anyone there share my view that TV and newspaper in general today are not worth even 5 minutes of your time?

Rulers Conference

2006-11-24T13:44:00.000+08:00

Three Rajah Brooke's Birdwing seen having a conference.
Wonder what they would be discussing.

Weather Pattern

2006-11-24T13:38:00.000+08:00

It has been consistently like this in Kuala Lumpur for the past 3-4 weeks; Burning hot in the morning and thunderstorm in the afternoon. The weather changes rapidly and from a good vantage point, it looks like an invading army sweeping across the landscape.

Here's one taken just 2 days back... and another one is brewing right now.

2006-11-14T11:58:00.000+08:00

The road we travel

2006-11-06T22:58:00.000+08:00

All of us have our own roads to travel.
Sometimes, the path is lonely and we have to amuse ourselves and encourage ourselves.
Sometimes, our path takes us to bustling busy places and we have company for a while.
Sometimes, our path takes us to dangerous places and we have to tread carefully lest we stumble and fall.
Sometimes, our path is shrouded in mist and we can't see the way ahead and wonder if we are still on the right path.
Sometimes, when we are undecided which fork in the road to take, we find a secret garden between the forks where we may tarry awhile.
Sometimes, along the way, we find our path merging with another's and we have a travel companion for a while.
Sooner or later, the paths will diverge again and we part ways.
Wish each other well and a safe journey.
Do not throw stones onto another's path ... making another's journey difficult will not make our own easier.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.9

2006-10-15T11:53:00.000+08:00

Those of us in Malaysia will be aware that during the past 1-2 weeks, a very sad thing happened where uncommon sense prevailed over academic research. Some background info for those in the dark:

i) A local think-tank organisation published some research with regards to possible equity holding by a certain segment of our society to highlight some discrepancies between official statistics and they own findings

ii) A senior politician in the ruling party described the findings by the organisation as "rubbish" with the help of the mainstream media with no logical explanation nor counter-arguments

iii) The head of the think-tank organisation backdown on its findings and admitted to flaws in its research and results

iv) A senior member of the team from the think-tank organisation defended his findings but resigned immediately as possibly a show of protest

So, we have here in our society:

a) Dissent is unacceptable
b) Logic and reason shall not prevail over rhetorical ideas
c) Official voice is the only "correct" voice
d) Counter-arguments are not required if you speak from an official standpoint

A very sad week indeed for rational and logical thoughts/ ideas ;-(

Food for thought

2006-10-12T07:48:00.000+08:00

What we are never changes ... who we are never stops changing.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.8

2006-10-08T12:30:00.001+08:00

"At Mensa's 50th Anniversary, Dr. Ware, one of the founders, accosted Mensans by stating that he hoped "Mensa will have a role in society when it gets through the ages of infancy and adolescence." He also said, "I do get disappointed that so many members spend so much time solving puzzles," expressing his desire for Mensans instead to be solving some of the world's problems. "

A quote I received from someone posted on a recent e-mail.

So where does that leave us? Well we can start by using our brains more often. Question our politicians more often. Don't let the general public be misled most of the time by incorrect news reporting, news blog, facts and figures, statistics, false news etc. This I believe can be contributed by many fellow mensans here. We don't have to save the world by becoming a Superman. The root cause for many of the world's problem is that we leave thinking to the media, politicians, think-tank organisations, universities and forget that we are part of the problem and solution as well. I know its not so simple, but we have to start somewhere and where else but to highlight where and how our society is managed.

Last week, I encountered two very contrasting business news reporting between MAS (the Malaysian National Airline) and SIA (the Singapore National airline). The MAS one read something like this "We will not be affected by the delay in the delivery of the Airbus A380 aircraft" whilst the one from SIA read "We will be seeking compensation for late delivery of the aircraft". Many here would have probably heard about the A380 aircraft from Airbus which is a 500 seater jet which is due for delivery in this next 1 year or so being the largest commercial passenger carrier to fly the skies in near future.

My question to MAS is very simple, if the new planes were not bringing in new business (i.e. not affected response) why buy it in the first place? Not being affected by late delivery would merely imply that the new businesses from this plane are not factored into the existing business model of MAS. Whereas SIA on the other hand, is going after the manufacturers for late delivery.

Our world would certainly be a better place if our money is held accountable by those holding it in trust. My 2 cents for this weekend!

For those interested in basic book about how not be to misled, read the following:

i) Crime Against Logic-Jamie Whyte
ii) Nonsense-Robert J Gula

Gaia Theory, the Noosphere and GaiaMind

2006-10-06T08:27:00.000+08:00

Gaia Theory, the Noosphere and GaiaMind

Gaia Theory was originally proposed as The Gaia Hypothesis by James Lovelock in 1972 in a paper titled, Gaia as seen through the atmosphere, and popularized in the 1979 book, Gaia: a new look at life on earth. The scientific hypothesis proposes that the whole Earth behaves like one self-regulating organism wherein all of the geologic, hydrologic, and biologic cycles of the planet mutually self-regulate the conditions on the surface of the Earth so as to perpetuate life.

I coined the term GaiaMind in 1996 to describe a variation on an idea first suggested by Teilhard de Chardin in 1955 in "Le Phenomene Humain", namely that the whole of the Earth is conscious, or more accurately, is in the process of becoming self-conscious, and that collectively we and our technology essentially are that process. Teilhard called this phenomenon the noosphere - derived from the same root as the words biosphere, lithosphere etc. However, that version of the idea, as first put forward by Teilhard, often tended to emphasize our separation and departure from nature, as if each stage transcends and supersedes the previous one. This version of the idea of emergent global consciousness has become widespread with the advent of computers and the Internet, but has also often been criticized as focusing on technology at the expense of nature, as if the two are inherently antagonistic. By contrast, the term GaiaMind is intended to emphasize our continuing connection to nature and that the whole process is fundamentally an expression of the living Earth, as a totality, becoming self-aware and self-conscious rather of man, or humanity alone, doing so through technology.

Jim Fournier

The Return

2006-10-04T13:21:00.000+08:00

An email came into my mailbox from IO. It's true, the blog has long been forgotten, so forgotten that I couldnt even recall my password. The novelty just wore off after a while. Seems to be current contributions, but they look more like articles than blogs. Lunch break is over, back to the grindstone...

Are You Left Brained or Right Brained?

2006-10-02T00:51:00.000+08:00

You Are 50% Left Brained, 50% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning.
Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others.
If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic.
Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.

The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility.
Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way.
If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art.
Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

are you a paranoid schizophrenic?

2006-10-02T00:36:00.000+08:00

You Are 20% Paranoid Schizophrenic

You're so far from paranoid schizophrenic...
you probably found this quiz to be quite amusing.

Are You A Paranoid Schizophrenic?

what's your power color

2006-09-29T22:52:00.000+08:00

Your Power Color Is Red-Orange

At Your Highest:

You are warm, sensitive, and focused on your personal growth.

At Your Lowest:

You become defensive and critical if you feel attacked.

In Love:

You are loyal - but you demand the respect you deserve.

How You're Attractive:

You are very affectionate and inspire trust.

Your Eternal Question:

"Am I Respected?"

What's Your Power Color?

George Carlin's View on Aging

2006-06-12T15:11:00.000+08:00

Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we're kids? If you're less than 10 years old, you're so excited about aging that you think in fractions.

"How old are you?" "I'm four and a half!" You're never thirty-six and a half. You're four and a half, going on five! That's the key.

You get into your teens, now they can't hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.

"How old are you?" "I'm gonna be 16!" You could be 13, but hey, you're gonna be 16! And then the greatest day of your life . . . You become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony . . YOU BECOME 21. YESSSS!!!

But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk! He TURNED; we had to throw him out. There's no fun now, you're Just a sour-dumpling. What's wrong? What's changed?

You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you're PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it's all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH 50.

And your dreams are gone.

But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn't think you would!

So you BECOME 21, TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE it to 60.

You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it's a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday!

You get into your 80's and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30 ; you REACH bedtime. And it doesn't end there. Into the 90's, you start going backwards; "I Was JUST 92.

"Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. "I'm 100 and a half!

"May you all make it to a healthy 100 and a half!!

HOW TO STAY YOUNG

Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height. Let the doctors worry about them. That is why you pay "them!"
Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.
Keep learning. Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever. Never let the brain idle. "An idle mind is the devil's workshop." And the devil's name is Alzheimer's
Enjoy the simple things.
Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person, who is with us our entire life, is ourselves. Be ALIVE while you are alive.
Surround yourself with what you love, whether it's family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever. Your home is your refuge.
Cherish your health: If it is good, preserve it. If it is unstable, improve it. If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.
Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, even to the next county; to a foreign country but NOT to where the guilt is.
Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

And if you don't send this to at least 8 people - who cares?

But do share this with someone.

We all need to live life to its fullest each day!!

Have a wonderful day!!!!!!!

Tattooed Americans

2006-06-12T08:12:00.000+08:00

36% of Americans 18 to 29 are tattooed by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- 36% of Americans age 18 to 29 with at least one tattoo, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. The results suggest that 24% of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed.

Tous Les Visages de l'Amour

2006-05-02T00:54:00.000+08:00

Tous Les Visages de l'Amour

Paroles et Musique: Charles Aznavour 1975

Toi, par tes mille et un attraits

Je ne sais jamais qui tu es

Tu changes si souvent de visage et d'aspect

Toi quelque soit ton âge et ton nom

Tu es un ange ou le démon

Quand pour moi tu prends tour à tour

Tous les visages de l'amour

Toi, si Dieu ne t'avait modelé

Il m'aurait fallu te créer

Pour donner à ma vie sa raison d'exister

Toi qui est ma joie et mon tourment

Tantôt femme et tantôt enfant

Tu offres à mon cour chaque jour

Tous les visages de l'amour

Moi, je suis le feu qui grandit ou qui meure

Je suis le vent qui rugit ou qui pleure

Je suis la force ou la faiblesse

Moi, je pourrais défier le ciel et l'enfer

Je pourrais dompter la terre et la mer

Et réinventer la jeunesse

Toi, viens fais moi ce que tu veux

Un homme heureux ou malheureux

Un mot de toi je suis poussière ou je suis Dieu

Toi, sois mon espoir, sois mon destin

J'ai si peur de mes lendemains

Montre à mon âme sans secours

Tous les visages de l'amour

Obsolescence to hit the noble Light Bulb ?

2006-04-14T08:37:00.000+08:00

After 130 years, is the noble light bulb going the way of the tape recorder ?

Emails hurt IQ more than pot ?

2006-03-14T18:32:00.000+08:00

Came across this article some time back which accounts for my slow but sure decline !

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.7

2006-03-13T13:37:00.000+08:00

Err. phoenix asleep over the weekend ah?

Over the weekend I happen to be in a mall and after parking my car and as I was leaving it, I saw a car with a copy of Architectural Digest on the passenger seat in a car next to mine. Straight in my mind, was an assumption that the car belonged to an architect or an interior designer and since the mall had an IKEA outlet, it must be so. It suddenly also dawned on to me that my assumption may be incorrect as well.

We all live with many assumptions in our minds and probably trained to do so in school, work and at our leisure time. In my younger days, I used to be a fan of mystery novels and Agatha Christie, Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes were some my favourites. To those of you who are familiar with Sherlock Holmes, we would always encounter a situation where basic assumptions were frequently proven true. Holmes would frequently tell Dr Watson that it's all "elementary". By mere observation, we can deduce many aspect and to a certain extend a character of a person be it from his horse carriage, his home or even the way he/she dresses. In many instances, the fiction proves the case to be true.

Reality however is not so simple. A mere observation of a copy of magazine in someone car can mean many things. The magazine could belong to any member of the car owner's family. It could also belong to a friend etc. The car may be rented. The magazine could just be some coffee-table copy for any passenger. The list goes on. As humans, many of us have a tendency to deduce a conclusion based on the most straight forward plain vanilla premise. That's what many do. Why think further? My conclusion based on this premise is likely to be true. Period!

Then I was wondering to myself, what if someone peers into my car on that day itself? I'm one who always try to bring a book or magazine wherever I go particularly when I have to meet someone or wait at a bank or Govt department. It's needed to keep my mind occupied and to prevent my grey cells from dying. In my car that day was a book that I'm currently reading entitled "The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity" by Matthijs V Boxsel.

Who buys and reads this type of book anyway except a moron like myself.

Malaysia's record-breaking obsession

2006-03-11T01:27:00.000+08:00

The BBC's Jonathan Kent explains why the small country of Malaysia is so keen on beating world records, even those involving the world's longest buffet.

At Rawang, a little way outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, 300 people light little fires under clay pots.

They were attempting to set a new record for the largest ponggol cooking event in the world.

There was so much smoke from the little fires that my eyes started streaming.

One of the participants, Mrs Dasaratharaman, told me that Ponggol was a festival celebrated by Hindus.

"After harvesting, they have a festival to celebrate it. This pot is meant for cooking sweet rice with cow's milk," she said.

But what I really wanted to know was the answer to a much broader question - where does this Malaysian obsession with breaking records come from?

Sujartha Nair, who works for the Malaysian Book of Records, said Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad encouraged many of the country's record-breaking events.

He even turns up to some of the attempts himself, Sujartha Nair said.

And it is not just ponggol cooking contests. Malaysians seem driven to make one bigger, better or tastier than everyone else.

So much so that the unofficial national motto - Malaysia Boleh, or Malaysia can - has become something of a joke, satirised in a spoof "Bolehwood" award ceremony.

"The tallest flag poles, the tallest buildings, longest bridge," she said.

"Then of course we go from the sublime to the ridiculous. We have the world's largest park... the longest buffet line on the beach... the world's biggest lemang," she said.

A lemang, she explained, is a kind of rice cooked in bamboo.

"We had the biggest lemang in the world, but also the only lemang!" Jo Kukathas said.

The Bolehwood awards don't just send up Malaysia, they also poke fun at foreigners' perceptions of the country.

Malaysia has not been well served by Hollywood. The comedy Zoolander was banned here, not least for suggesting that Malaysia was a sweatshop economy.

The movie Entrapment angered Malaysians for showing the world's tallest buildings, the Petronas Twin Towers, next to imaginary slums.

"Did you see the background?" advertising company boss, Austen Zecha, asked me.

"He's in a boat, he's in a canal, and yet the twin towers in the background... there is no such scene in Malaysia. That's superimposed."

Mr Zecha's firm has been given the difficult task of branding the small multiracial, multicultural country for the tourist industry.

"We hit on the idea that the thematic tack line could not be anything else but to say that Malaysia is truly Asia," he said.

"You don't have to go to China to experience great, superb Chinese food. You don't have to go to India to experience great, superb Indian food. Or you don't have to go to Indonesia for great Indonesian food. It's all here."

But most of the foreign tourists I spoke to on the streets of Kuala Lumpur had a very different mental picture of Malaysia before they arrived.

"I didn't think it was such a developed country," said one person I met.

"All the women wear head dresses - that's the first thing I think of when I think of Malaysia," said another.

Noah Morowitz, a television producer making a programme about Malaysia for an American channel, said his audience was barely aware of the country at all.

"Most Americans know next to nothing about Malaysia," he said. "They would probably know that it's somewhere in the Pacific, but besides that, they would have trouble finding it on a map."

If Malaysia was just a small country with a big ego, its attempts to be noticed would simply seem funny.

But since 11 September and the Bali attacks, it has become deadly serious.

Bali may be 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from Kuala Lumpur, but in the minds of much of the world it is right next door.

It has suddenly become vital that predominantly Muslim Malaysia gets out its message - that it is friendly, safe and open for business.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.6

2006-03-10T19:25:00.000+08:00

Wow, the phoenix attempts to rise..uh is it?

Again I'm writing because I'm fed up one liner cliches that "attempts" to solve our world's problem that you see in our press headlines day in day out. In the last 2 weeks over in Malaysia, our fuel subsidy was slashed and hence fuel prices increased by quite a substantial percentage. Next day we get politicians coming out to defend the move. That's what politicians are good at, talk and talk. No one attempts to act to defend the move. This talk is no different from the Miss World/ Universe type of question in their quest to reduce hunger, poverty, make the world a better place..bah!

Everytime I read some one liner answer, I get extremely upset because it does not solve anything but people keep using it or writing it. Doesn't everyone know that there is no such thing, a cure all in one liner or answer? Answers to many of our problems and challenges lies in the many details that keep things going. Let me put it in another way, to get an automobile moving, all its parts, components and everything else must work 100%. If you have just any single part or component fails no matter how small it is, the entire car just refuses to move or move temporarily before it fails. In other words, any answer to our challenges, problems etc. lies with every component, context, people, Govt etc. all working 100%. If any one part fails, nothing works.

People out there want you to believe there is a simple one cure cause it makes money. You can hire a consultant to solve your company's problems after they issue a report. You can consult a self-help guru who asks you to think positive daily and presto, your life will turn around. You can buy a book or tape and listen and hey, your problems solve. The world unfortunately is not so easy. You can be positive day in day out but can your positiveness rub onto everyone so that your problems can be solved? The environment is something very critical in our daily lives and something are just beyond us. It may work sometimes but not everytime.

So folks out there, stop looking for simple answers because there just isn't any. All answers to our problems and challenges must be looked at both micro and macro level. You cannot assume that this or that will work if we tweak this. Our world is not just black and white. It is all grey between the extreme black and white and the answer lies in this grey area. This grey area however is wide, all encompassing and highly fluid and unpredictable. Why is this so? Because every second, the world changes. The weather is different, the wind changes, the sun has moved, the tide has changed and so has everything else.

And like the grey areas, doom, gloom and happiness are just phases in our daily lives. Have a great weekend everyone!

Malaysian Book of Records

2006-03-09T01:58:00.000+08:00

UMS (Universiti Malaysia in Sabah) in collaboration with Malaysian Mensa Society will be going for an entry in the Malaysian Book of Records. The feat attempted would be the most number of people sitting for the Mensa IQ test. This will take place Sunday 12th March in Kota Kinabalu.

THE TANGLED WEB THEY WOVE

2006-03-09T00:18:00.000+08:00

Until 1998, the Internet was overseen almost exclusively by one man: Jon Postel, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. As a graduate student in the 1960s, he was among the handful of engineers who built the Internet. For the next 30 years, he managed it on behalf of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the Internet's initial development.

Postel made seemingly technical decisions such as who should get to operate a country-code domain. Although it may seem odd that national address suffixes (such as ".uk," for the United Kingdom) were allocated to private individuals rather than government bodies, such was the case. In its early days, the Internet was so new and strange that there was usually no appropriate national organization to hand a suffix to. Besides, governments, and particularly their monopoly telecom carriers, more often hindered communications development than helped it. By the mid-1990s, however, it became clear to the small coterie of officials in the United States and elsewhere who were aware of the matter that the Internet could no longer be administered by a single individual. But who or what would replace him?

After a bitter series of negotiations among the business community, governments, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide, the Clinton administration helped broker a compromise and established ICANN in 1998. Because the United States' hands-off approach had allowed the Internet to flourish, it seemed appropriate that the new organization be based in the private sector. This would make it more responsive, more flexible, and less prone to bureaucratic and political squabbling. The negotiations were so tense that Postel suffered a heart attack as they were ending and never lived to see the birth of the successor organization he was instrumental in creating.

A song by Charles Aznavour

2006-03-08T23:59:00.000+08:00

Written by Charles Aznavour and
Herbert Kretzmer

She may be the face I can't forget
A trace of pleasure or regret
May be my treasure or the price I have to pay
She may be the song that summer sings
May be the chill that autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
within the measure of a day

She may be the beauty or the beast
May be the famine or the feast
May turn each day into a Heaven or a hell
She may be the mirror of my dream
A smile reflected in a stream
She may not be what she may seem
inside her shell...

She who always seems so happy in a crowd
Whose eyes can be so private and so proud
No one's allowed to see them when they cry
She may be the love that cannot hope to last
May come to me from shadows of the past
that I remember till the day I die

She may be the reason I survive
The why and wherefore I'm alive
The one I'll care for through the rough and rainy years

Me, I'll take her laughter and her tears
And make them all my souvenirs
For where she goes I've got to be
The meaning of my life is She... She... She......

------------------------

Now here is the original version:

Tous Les Visages de l'Amour

Paroles et Musique: Charles Aznavour 1975
© 1975 Editions Chappell

Toi, par tes mille et un attraits
Je ne sais jamais qui tu es
Tu changes si souvent de visage et d'aspect
Toi quelque soit ton âge et ton nom
Tu es un ange ou le démon
Quand pour moi tu prends tour à tour
Tous les visages de l'amour

Toi, si Dieu ne t'avait modelé
Il m'aurait fallu te créer
Pour donner à ma vie sa raison d'exister
Toi qui est ma joie et mon tourment
Tantôt femme et tantôt enfant
Tu offres à mon cour chaque jour
Tous les visages de l'amour

Moi, je suis le feu qui grandit ou qui meure
Je suis le vent qui rugit ou qui pleure
Je suis la force ou la faiblesse
Moi, je pourrais défier le ciel et l'enfer
Je pourrais dompter la terre et la mer
Et réinventer la jeunesse

Toi, viens fais moi ce que tu veux
Un homme heureux ou malheureux
Un mot de toi je suis poussière ou je suis Dieu
Toi, sois mon espoir, sois mon destin
J'ai si peur de mes lendemains
Montre à mon âme sans secours
Tous les visages de l'amour

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v1.5

2005-12-16T16:35:00.000+08:00

It's coming to the end of 2006. Christmas, holidays and the year-end spending spree is at its peak this coming weekend.

Was only quite sometime since I last read Stephen Law's "The Xmas Files: The Philosophy Of Christmas". I don't want to be a spoil sport and hence would not go on to explain what you can find in this book but to those who are interested, you can find this book in very large bookstores in Malaysia.

One point I want to blog about is the practice of giving gifts for X'mas. Gift giving is a tradition most prominent during X'mas as compared to other cultures or festivities in the East. In Chinese culture, the giving of cash is considered more common although this practice is slowly changing due to Western and media influence.

In economic sense, giving gifts is much more beneficial to giving cash. If one gives gift (probably purchased rather than home-made), one generates economic activity that transcends borders in the open economy with various spin-offs and spillovers. A simple T-Shirt for example enables various group to benefit from its sale from the cotton farmer, to the textile factory to the garment factory, ad agency, designer, shopping mall, media, packaging company, gift wrapper etc. Many parties take a cut from this humble T-Shirt, some more, some less depending on your value-add. The last minute X'mas spending provide companies a final boost to its year-end financial reporting coffers is probably another reason as well.

Giving of cash though gives you a less spin-off effect particularly if the cash is saved for a rainy day. However if its spent, it gives a similar impact although not every cent given/ received is spent. Economically speaking, the spin-off from giving cash is less the giving gifts.

However, what is good for the economy may be bad for the environment in the long term. Many of the gifts given are sheer waste of money and resources. Just look at the toys or decorative items given as gifts nowadays. They are of no use, impractical, prone to spoilage/breakage etc. They only serve one purpose though, to generate more income for the rich. These days, even as environmental awareness increases, the practice of buying, spending on frivolous items continue due to impact and brainwashing by the media. The proliferation of a buy-and-throw culture due to "advances" in technology (just look at an average age or lifespan of handphones by a typical user) and shortening of the lifespan of "durable" goods (e.g. computers and automobiles) will give you an idea of what our future garbage heap/dump will soon look like.

That is how materialism has changed the world and why we continue to be part of it is another argument in another day. The practice of giving cash in the Chinese culture for events such as weddings, new year, birth of a child etc. to a certain extend does not have such a large economic spin-off but neither does it create such a wasteful nor environmentally damaged world.

We are however free to make you own choices and decisions but ultimately we reap what we sow.

Merry X'mas and a Happy New Year 2006.

PS: It's the Thought that counts. I'm leaving you all with more Thoughts and hopefully beneficial knowledge for the new year.

maturity

2005-12-07T15:46:00.000+08:00

i think people under 40 are very childish, people over 40 are worriers, people over 60 are lost and people over 80 are frightened.

hmm... looks like no matter what our ages are, we will alwas contribute to some problem and are problems unto ourselves. man... i guess there is no such thing as to be fully matured or completely matured as this is the ultimate goodness. hopefully to be sufficiently matured at our respective responsibilites will suffice.

if you think about it carefully, maturity = level of goodness. so to be matured in certain ways, a person must be good in those certain ways. since no one is completely good, then in those areas we find people to be immatured.

so maturity and age is not related by any means.

one thus measures a person's goodness by their maturity.

what constitutes as maturity among different people? for me it is simply their goodness. an 80 year old grandma playing with her barbie dolls is not immatured to me; it's just a form of entertainment. for all purposes, if she is a decent human being, she is matured.

we settle down with others whom we find matured 'enough'. the rest are the external stuff like money looks, social standing, behaviour... basically it has more to do with the stuff that is not crucial to our spirit.

life shouldn't be so serious; it is only a temporary situation. our spirit lives forever and we need to develop that area while we are physically alive.

it is easy to be matured (according to my terms); it is only a question of wanting to.

As the Day that cleanses and gives Life, your Dragon color is... WHITE

2005-11-12T22:52:00.000+08:00

old man: If there ever was an apparition of balance, power and reclusive intelligence, your Inner Dragon is it. Whites are a fairly common dragon and are considered one of two harmonious dragons. Your antithesis is the evil Black Dragon. Together, you two embody the Yin and Yang concept of eastern religions (especially Taoism).

Though you might find that neat in passing, it's not really what a White is all about. You like to think things out, plot against enemies, and look down upon the world from the highest mountain peaks. Your favorable attributes are the Day, the Sun, reaching for spirituality, truth, a positive attitude, and helpful magic. Humans only need fear you when they stray into your domain without proper payment for passage. Of course, that payment would probably be a cake the size of a Volkswagen, but hey, if they wanted to move through your turf they should have brought it, right? If someone ever threatens you, your Inner Dragon would likely tell you to hit and run, or just plain run. If they really wanted a fight you'd be an impressive opponent, considering you pack a breath weapon combination of Fire and Lightning. Even the nicest dragons can do some serious damage.

12 November, 2005 17:28

As the Hearts of the Pure, your Dragon color is...

2005-11-12T02:36:00.000+08:00

Your Inner Dragon is the most honorable of all. Golds are the third rarest of all the dragons (after Platinum and Chromatic dragons) and have a station in society that reflects their rarity. You are what one might call a Draconic Knight. Golds live by a strict code of chivalry and commitment. Remember Draco? Yep, Gold Dragon. Your appearance is fearsome and all-mighty but you'd never stoop so low as to bring any harm to a human. As a matter of fact, that's strictly contrary to your code of conduct. You're one of only two dragon types that is aligned "Lawful Good" and is proficient in the use of magic and spells. If you're curious, the other is Platinum, the King of the Dragons. Your piety, beauty, wisdom, and inner strength are absolutely without parallel.

But of course, being a Gold Dragon isn't all high ethics and codes. You like to fly around scaring things, advise humans in their affairs, and shapeshift. Strike that, you LOVE to shapeshift. And you're great at it. In fact, if you're a Gold on the inside, you might be a Gold on the outside, too - just in human form. Your favorable attributes are honor, chivalry, truth, kindness, gold, mining, protection, wisdom, bravery, and trustworthiness. You might be a bit too trusting of humans at times, but they're just kids compared to you. If anyone threatens your humans or tries to kill you, you could strike back with your breath weapon - Fire. But then, no one's tried anything that stupid in the last couple thousand years. After all, you're about 54 feet long.

Here be Dragons

2005-11-08T00:17:00.000+08:00

A GOLD Dragon Lies Beneath!

My inner dragon is the most honorable of all. I enjoy shape-shifting, humans, and the occasional crusade to save the world. I'm what you might call a Draconic Knight. Click the image to try the Inner Dragon Online Quiz for yourself.

Can you give some advise on "office politics?"

2005-11-01T00:37:00.000+08:00

1. What kind of organization (by design & management) breed the most "office politics?" and/or rather what kind of organization (by design & management) minimize "office politics?"

2. How or should a member of an organization reveal to the boss the slandering/scheming of others against himself or herself?

flash flood

2005-10-26T21:27:00.000+08:00

today was extremely eventful!

while i was driving, a flash flood swept my car and a few others off course. then all the cars got stranded. water started filling the interior of the car. i suppose it was the same for the others. i was right next to the drain and i realized i had to get out of the car pronto. so i killed the engine, took off my seatbealt and pushed the door open with all my might. as i stepped out, i was waist deep in water and the current carried me towards the culvert. there was a chain link fence above the drain and i clung onto that. i slowly pulled myself up the slope along the fencing. then the rest of the people that got stranded huddled together and some went to warn other motorist. after an hour, the water subsided and some construction crew nearby helped to push the cars out of the way. i called kurnia assist to tow my car after the bulldozer had cleared the road of mud and rocks. this happened at the tunnel heading towards tropicana golf and country club. the tow truck operator then took me home.

the best part is, i'm alive!

Finally! Your feedback is most welcome.

2005-10-25T20:49:00.000+08:00

OCT 25th 2005 The Star:

Jaring broadband goes nationwide

KUALA LUMPUR: Jaring has announced that it is now providing nationwide broadband Internet service.

Jaring said its dial-up subscribers can now switch over to a high-speed Internet broadband service and its MY015 Internet telephony system.

The broadband service gives consumers 1Mbps of speed (versus 56Kbps via dial-up), as well as cheaper voice calls via an Internet-based phone using the 015 prefix assigned to Jaring.

Jaring chief executive officer Dr Mohamed Awang Lah said that with the blanket nationwide broadband coverage, Jaring is able to upgrade its current dial-up subscribers who have been waiting to convert to high-speed broadband and start using MY015 voice access.

“With the nationwide coverage, Jaring is fulfilling its role to provide broadband service to all Malaysians and increasing the rate of broadband penetration throughout Malaysia,” he said.

The monthly subscription fee for bundled broadband together with MY015 phone package starts from RM79 for home users. The public can purchase the package from all Jaring re-sellers or Anjung Jaring outlets, or online through www.jaring.my.

Subscribers can also choose from several MY015 call plans which suit them best, such as the Nationwide Call Plan priced at RM50 per month that allows unlimited, anytime calls to any fixed-line phone in the country.

Another, the Jaring Community Call Plan, allows unlimited calls among MY015 subscribers worldwide. It is provided free for every MY015 line.

For subscribers who need to make regular international calls, the International Call Plan is just RM150 per month, Subscribers will enjoy unlimited, anytime calls to any fixed-line phone in five countries (Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong and the United States).

For other off-net calls the rate is as low as 10 sen per minute, according to Jaring.

During the promotional period, which ends on Dec 31, every subscriber will be provided with a free modem and a free subscription of up to five MY015 lines.

At the same time, Jaring is offering a special package for wireless broadband services at RM99 per month. A wireless broadband modem is offered at RM499 (a one-time payment) or a RM25-per-month instalment over 24 months.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can enjoy wired or wireless broadband at RM139 per month, with a free subscription of up to five MY015 lines.

Jaring launched its wireless broadband service with MY015 voice communications capability in December 2004.

...friend, friend, sent this into my mail box, is there any truth to this?

2005-10-22T23:26:00.000+08:00

"An argument about the high cost of living in Malaysia, which I have
found to be quite true.

The argument in this thread from day one is the cost of living in
each country (especially UK and Europe) based on what you earn in
the respective country and whether the standards are higher than in
Malaysia.

I tried to point out that many Malaysians always convert and that
is why they say the UK is expensive. In fact, the cost of living is
much cheaper than in Malaysia.

In actual fact, Malaysians are being conned because for such a
rich and resource rich country, the pay in Malaysia is way too low
compared to the cost of living and inflation.
One good example is Singapore.

Singaporeans (average) earns around S$3000 to S$4000 and nearly
everything is half the price of Malaysia. Eg clothes, computer parts,
electronics etc. But the average Malaysian still earns M$2000
plus and goods are double the price of Singapore.

This is the same as the UK. If you earn around 2000 pounds, you
can liken this to the person earning RM$2000 in Malaysia. I give you
some examples below. Maybe you can understand.

1) Good terrace house
It is more or less the same. If you want a house in KL, it would
most probably be in Puchong and not Damansara Heights. So your house
would be RM$200,000. In UK, you can get a decent new house in Zone 6
(still within the tube) for 200,000 pounds.
If non London, you can get a nice house also for less than 200,000
pounds outside London. The same also applies to buying a house in
Seremban, Kajang etc. You can buy a nice house for RM200,000 below.
So buying a house is the same for the local and the Malaysian.

Renting a place is the same too or maybe cheaper than in Malaysia
(I am not sure of this).

A 2-bedroom flat in London is about 750 pounds (Zone 2).

500 pounds outside Zone 6 but still able to commute to London. A
2-bedroom house in Nottingham is 450 to 500 pounds. A 3-bedroom
house in

Belfast is about 300 pounds.

2) A car
A good Wira is RM$55,000. Most Malaysians have to take 7-year
loans and be in debt all the time. If you are earning RM$2000 a month,
you take nearly 3 years saving the RM$2000 with not eating at all just
to buy a Wira.

In UK, the average local earns about 2000 pounds. He saves 3
months, he can buy outright a good Ford Fiesta or a Vauxhall Corsa
without
being in debt.

If buying a second hand car, even better. A 1990 Mercedes 190E
cost 500 pounds. My 1996 Mercedes E220 cost 2000 pounds. My friend just
gave me his 1989 Honda Accord (Auto) for free because he said he could
only get 30 pounds for it. I used it for a few months and decided to
give it of for free too.

That alone speaks for itself.

Even if you are kuli or an office boy, you still can drive a
Mercedes or a BM. Yes, kuli's and office boy's get paid quite well.
Average temp/office boy in London can earn about 7 to 10 pounds
and hour.

Overtime is 1.5 times or double. A brick-layer can earn 20 pounds an
hour.

The same Indon who lays bricks in Malaysia earns RM$50 for the whole day.

Before I became a doctor, I used to be an office boy and I earned
near 300 pounds a week working about 70 hours a week.

My makan was 30 pounds a week. My rent was 70 pounds a week for a room but I still drove a BMW back then. I bought the 10-year old BMW 3 Series car for 200 pounds.
Amazing how an office boy can drive a safe and luxurious car.

3) Petrol.
For a UK person earning 2000 pounds, 80 pence a litre/gallon is
cheaper than RM$1.52 paid in Malaysia. If you don't convert, it is
like paying 80 sen a litre in Malaysia

4) Shopping
20 pounds (which is 1% of 2000 pounds) can buy you 1 week's worth
of groceries in Tesco.

RM$ 2 00 (which is 10% of RM$2000) can also buy you 1 week's worth
of groceries in Giant or Carrefour.

5) Utility Bills (This is what I pay in UK)
1. Virtually non-stop heating the whole day only 20 pounds a
month. (Only 1% of the 2000 pounds earned)

2. Electricity, I use my electricity maximum only 20 pounds a month.
(Only 1% of the 2000 pounds earned)

3. My water bill also comes to about 20 pounds a month (Only 1% of
the 2000 pounds earned)

4. My internet - I get 2Mbps for about 25 pounds (Bulldog DSL)
(Also slightly above 1% of the 2000 pounds earned)

5. Astro Equivalent (NTL cable or Sky) - 30 pounds per month (Also
slightly above 1% of the 2000 pounds earned)

In Malaysia, this is what I used to pay
1. Tenaga Bill comes to RM$200 to RM300 a month with 3 air-cons.
This is more than 10 0 % of the RM$2000 earned)

2. Water (Puas) comes to RM$40 (This is about 2% of the RM$2000 earned)

3. Astro RM$100 (if you take Chinese package) (This is about 5% of the
RM$2000 you earn)

4. Internet Streamyx 512K RM 88 per month (This is about 5% of RM2000 you earn)

6) Books
A good book is about 10 to 15 pounds in the UK. This is less than
1% of the 2000 pounds you earn. In Malaysia, you have to spend RM$75 to RM$100 for a decent book in MPH or Kinokuniya in KLCC. This is about 5% of the RM$2000 ringgit you earn.

7) Education
I think it is about RM$20,000 per year to do a degree in Sunway
Monash and about RM$12,000 per year to send your kid to UM, UKM, USM etc.
I am not sure about this.But in UK, it is only 3000 pounds a year to send your kid to a great university. That also, the white man still makes a lot of noise because the grants were taken away. Previously, it was virtually free for the English man to send his kid to university but now, since the grant was taken away, he has to spend 3000 pounds per year to send his kid to university and less money to get drunk in the pub.

Well, if you are earning RM$2000 ringgit, sending your kid to UM
to study is quite difficult. If you are earning 2000 pounds per
month, you can easily send you kid to university in the UK.

8) Luxuries
Panasonic Plasma TV in Malaysia about RM20,000. If you are earning
RM$2000 a month, memang mahal! You have to save 2 years your monthly salary to buy it. In UK, the same Panasonic ironically, Panasonic plasma is made in Japan and Japan is close to Malaysia, so the plasma should be cheaper in Malaysia) is only 2000 pounds. And this is only 10% of the 2000pounds earned.

9) Health
NHS is free. Though the service is slow, quality is still there.
You still can get a top quality by-pass for free although you may have
to wait many months.

In Malaysia, IJN charges RM$30,000. SJMC charges RM$50,000. GH is
free but as many people know, GH and UH have clown doctors. For example doctors who wear tudung and use a pen to touch the patient because scared dosa).

10) Assessments to local councils I may pay high council tax but at least my council assures my streets are clean and safe, got no holes (pot holes) on my roads, and they jump and attend to me whenever I call them. When I stayed in Malaysia, I paid my assessment and quite rent but MPSJ I lived in Subang) told me to "podah" whenever I asked them to come and fill up the pot holes, cut the long lalang, put street
lighting etc. The councils, especially MPPJ and MPSJ, were more interested in eating nasi lemak and going for 10 teh tariks in a day during office hours and hardly did anything for their residents.

11) Income Tax
My national insurance and income tax also is not wasted. When I
was unemployed in 1997, the government via social security paid for my 2-bedroom flat for one whole year and I was given about 100 pounds per week for me and my wife to live on. I am happy to know that one day if I lose my job, I can still claim social security and get my apartment paid and food to eat again for free. It is a good security to know.

The list goes on. Here alone you can see, the sterling you earn
goes a long way in the UK. So your quality of life is far better in the
UK than a Malaysian in Malaysia. It is just that Malaysians are just
too content with what they have. But you compare apple for apple.
The British just love to complain. They have it made but still
they love to complain. Nothing is good enough for the British. The
government gives the citizens so much but they still seem to want more and more."

--- Malaysian Living in the UK

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v1.4

2005-09-15T13:30:00.000+08:00

IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN THE WORLD DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF PETROL FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OILCOMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES. AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSSOVER 4 .6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES. THEREFORE THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 22nd HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED"STICK IT UP THEIR BEHIND" DAY AND THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF PETROL THAT DAY.

I rec'd the above by e-mail and was wondering whether the above would work. Logically, I do not see how this would work unless the entire transport, manufacturing, shipping,military, power (i.e. the developed world infrastructure as we know it today) comes to a halt (stop buying for a day would not work as it would mean you have stockpiled you own consumption prior to this date). The cost to the entire world is just enormous if by a miracle this can be pull off. I for one cannot see it happening at all as the world has become overly dependant on fossil fuel.

I for one would just like to see it happening on a smaller scale, for e.g. stop using/ buying microsoft products. We have become overly dependant on certain things in our pursuit of the "modern lifestyle" and hence a slave to a certain extent.

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v1.3

2005-09-14T19:00:00.000+08:00

EBay to buy Skype in $2.6bn deal, read the headlines in the business section yesterday.

Been quite sometime since my last blog due to work commitment but I gather a news like this is worth some comments.

For those uninitiated, Skype is arguably the best thing since the e-mail as it allows one to speak to another (via the PC) without paying any additional phone charges with a free-downloaded software.

Those in the finance or IT industry would know that this sum of consideration is sinful by any standards so far and reminds us of the "dot-com" era not too long ago. A quote from news article reads "The company generated $7m of revenues last year, with $60m expected this year and more than $200m in 2006, eBay said." to give readers an idea the enormous sum paid.

Obviously when someone like eBay pays for this kind of money, the newly acquired company would need to generate some kind of income/ return to its new owner to compensate them for this sort of investment. God only knows how skype can generate that kind of income based on their current business model or even any conceivable or logical business model.

The point that I wish to raise here is, investment of this kind is in a way a "zero-sum game". Someone pays and someone receives; net-net a zero-sum. Over a long term though, it may add value but what kind of value are we talking here,in order to be substantial enough to "value-add"?

To me it just defies logic by any measure use. In the IT world today, 5 years is too long by any measure; 10 yrs is probably 2 or 3 generations by human standard.

I'll wait for the time when I shall be proven wrong.

PS: I am also a user of skype and waiting for an invoice soon!

What an eye-full!

2005-09-12T21:24:00.000+08:00

A human eye has one lens; a dragonfly's eye has up to 30,000 facets, or surfaces. The facets wrap around its head so the speedy insect can see where it has been as well as where it's going. I wonder which is more amazing; That the dragonfly has 30,000 facets/surfaces or that someone had so much time and resource to count them!

Surreal

2005-09-01T13:08:00.000+08:00

Planet Up For Sale?!

2005-08-29T09:55:00.000+08:00

Advertisement spotted at Kelana Jaya.

What if you had a chance to own the planet? What would you do with it?

Be careful of using Control-C while surfing

2005-08-26T11:09:00.000+08:00

We do copy various data by Control-C for copy/cut & paste function. The copied data is stored in your PC's clipboard can be retrieved from the internet with a combination of Javascripts and ASP.

Just try this:

Copy any text by Control-C
Click the Link: http://www.friendlycanadian.com/applications/clipboard.htm
You will see the text you copied on the Screen which was accessed by this web page.

Do not store sensitive data (like passwords, creditcard numbers, PIN etc.) in the clipboard while surfing the web. It is extremely easy to extract the text stored in the clipboard to steal sensitive information. If you have copied some info that you would not want disclosed, overwrite the clipboard by copying another piece of non-sensitive text once you have finished pasting.

Development or Destruction?

2005-08-19T08:35:00.000+08:00

This is not a picture of nice corals nor that of beautiful scenery. It is a sad sight to behold to see that once again, the rich and powerful use the name of development to further fill their coffers while God's creation suffers the slow, suffocating death.

As though a strategy, the barges and machinery appeared overnight after the hue & cry from the public has died doen to commence with the Marina construction at Tioman. Can you believe they are doing piling in the sea at a "designated marine park"? Politicians must have written their own dictionary and twisted the definition to something else. One would think that the noise on land from the piling is bad enough but can you imagine the sound being carried underwater? Sound waves would be shock waves from that thing hammering down. Seems like putting "nails into the coffin" for the surrounding marine life.

The scientist Steven Hawking had stated that a computer virus is a lifeform. It adapts and propogates like that of lifeforms. However, if that lifeform takes on its image from its creator, then it doesn't say much good about humankind. Are we doomed to self-destruction?

Worm strikes down Windows 2000 systems

2005-08-17T14:25:00.000+08:00

Microsoft in 'emergency response' as worm reported on three continents

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday attackedcomputer systems using Microsoft operating systems, shutting down computers in the United States, Germany and Asia.

Among those hit were offices on Capitol Hill, which is in the midst of August recess, and media organizations, including CNN, ABC and The New York Times. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois, reportedly also had problems.

A small number of computers in an administrative office at San Francisco International Airport also crashed, but they were not essential to the airport's operation, spokesman Mike McCarron said.

The FBI said the computer problems did not appear to be part of any widespread attack.
While the worm affects primarily Windows 2000, it also can affect some early versions of Microsoft XP, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer of the Sans Institute, a network security firm based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Symptoms include the repeated shutdown and rebooting of a computer.

Microsoft has a downloadable patch on its security homepage, Microsoft.com/security.

The director of Microsoft's security response center, Debbie Fry Wilson, said the computer giant was in an "emergency response" mode. "Right now, we're mobilizing our two war rooms," she told CNN.

"The key thing I want to stress for customers is making sure that they install security updates as quickly as possible," Wilson said.

Although she said that the number of affected computers is unclear, most Windows 2000 customers are business users. And automatic security updates would have protected most home users, she said. Wilson added that "at least 200 million computer users worldwide" have downloaded the patch.

Business software provider AssetMetrix reported in June that Computers running Windows 2000 were on about half of all corporate desks.

Microsoft is working with law enforcement to track down those who unleashed the worm, Wilson said.

Lysa Myers, a virus researcher for the computer security firm McAfee, Inc., said the worm exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft's plug-and-play service. "How it's spreading is it's looking for machines that are unpatched and running itself," she said.

What was causing the damage was unclear, although experts pointed to a new worm called worm-rbot.cbq.

David Perry of Trend Micro, an Internet monitoring firm, said the latest worm may have been derived from the Zotob worm, which was first reported over the weekend.

Ullrich, of the Sans Institute, said Zotob "will connect to a control server to ask for instructions. It scans network neighborhoods and tries to infect them, as well."

Typically, the worm enters a system via a laptop connected to unsecured networks, Ullrich said. "This laptop will infect your systems from the inside."

Several versions of the worm have been released, some as late as Tuesday, he said.
Around 5 p.m. problems began at CNN facilities in New York and Atlanta before being cleared up about 90 minutes later.

The New York Times also was able to bring its systems back up, and "newspaper production will not be affected," spokeswoman Kathy Park said.

The White House said it did not have reports of computer problems.

Improved firewalls and faster patches may have limited the worm's spread, said Jeff Havrila, a technical analyst with the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a coalition of public and private groups that combats computer attacks.

He also said it is unclear how long the worm may take to run its course, noting that many people are away on summer vacation and may be affected only when they return.

At any given time there are thousands of computer worms and viruses in existence. Last year, the Sasser worm shut down millions of computers worldwide. A German teenager has been sentenced to 21 months' probation.

What dew you see?

2005-08-15T15:54:00.000+08:00

Spiderweb? Chandelier?

Perhaps something more beautiful than a pearl necklace?

Wet flower? Perhaps water marbles?

I love storms

2005-08-13T23:12:00.000+08:00

I have this thing for storms that I cannot explain ... it always leaves me in awe. I feel its power and feel one with it. I revel in its energy .. in its restless lashings and rumblings. I love storms. Of course it helps if I am cosily tucked up safe at home.

Night Visitor

2005-08-13T22:23:00.000+08:00

The Atlas Moth is considered the world largest moth with a wingspan that can attain a length of up to 12 inches. This one had a span of approximately 8-9 inches. Notice the wing tips resemble the head of a snake.

A close-up of its 'handsome' features. Wonder if its antennae could pick up TV channels?

Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

2005-08-10T07:24:00.000+08:00

This is a fascinating site on Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena by Michael Bach

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

Keroncong

2005-08-10T06:30:00.000+08:00

Krontjong (keroncong),

originally Portuguese folk music which travelled the world with Portuguese seafarers, is one of the earliest forms of world music. En route to the East the music became blended with local music. On Java (Indonesia) the music developed into the present krontjong. The genre is called the soundtrack of the Eurasian identity and the Pasar Malam Besar is the best place in the world to experience it. This year there will be performances from Rayuan Samud’ra and the krontjong orchestra Putra Malaysia will be flying in from Malaysia. A krontjong dance will be demonstrated too: a rare event!
From Pasar Malam Besar

Blogs Provide Free Speech Outlet for Iranians

2005-08-07T23:47:00.000+08:00

In a country where speaking one's mind can have dangerous consequences, many Iranians are showing remarkable bravery through a medium that is proving immensely popular, reports the Online Journalism Review. It's called blogging and thousands are doing it.

An online journal where one can write anything from personal thoughts to political commentary and link news sources from around the world, a web log, or blog, represents a "cyber-sanctuary" for many Iranians. Users can hide their identities by employing anonymous e-mail addresses and pseudonyms. Many use their blogs to criticise Iran's ruling clerics through satire or humorous cartoons.

While Iran's rulers have clamped down on the country's independent press, the Internet has so far eluded its authority, largely because the government still allows privately owned servers to operate. Even so, bloggers in Iran could use foreign-based servers to host their sites if the government tried to shut them down.

Blogging has proved effective in mobilising political action. In 2003, journalist Sina Motallebi was arrested and interrogated about his blog (http://www.rooznegar.com/). He was jailed for 23 days and later released. Motallebi says he believes the community of bloggers in Iran and the United States helped him gain his early release by publicising his case in the foreign media and coordinating a petition to free him from jail. One blog had collected 4,000 signatures on a petition.

Read more at IFEX page

Transcending to a Higher Realm

2005-08-06T08:59:00.000+08:00

CAPE CANAVERAL, 3 Aug. - Islamic devationist leader from the eastern state of Malaysia, Ariffin Mohamad, a.k.a. Ayah Pin escaped the Malaysian police with the blast of the US space shuttle Discovery here today.

The shuttle, carrying the most sought after deviationist with seven other crew members, soared into slightly hazy skies, the roar of its solid booster rockets rattling windows and shaking the ground across the Cape.

Nasa lauch director, Mike Leinbach told the newsmen that the decision to include 65-year-old Ayah Pin was made very recently as to ensure the success of the mission.

Yesterday's mission was the Nasa's first since the Columbia disaster in 2003, and the man from sleepy hollow town called Besut in Terengganu is said to be a critical factor for success.

"Ayah Pin is so special to us that he knows everything out there in the space, like everything is at the back of his hand. Even Nasa's most sophisticated technology cannot come anywhere near to his knowlegde on the sky kingdom," Leinbach explained.

With Ayah Pin on board, the astronouts are expected to find the US$1 billion mission easy as the Malaysian would be able to tell them what to do once the shuttle reaches beyond the final frontier.

"Ayah Pin will do all the communications out there with his contacts all over the sky kingdom," he said, adding that this mission will be a breakthrough where communication with space creatures is concerned.

"He told us that he is very much familiar with the outerspace, which is his second home," said Leinbach.

It is very unfortunate that Ayah Pin's four wives could not board the shuttle due to space constraints. The four, however, were seen doing some shopping at the Walmart supermarket in the Cape hours before their husband departure.

With the Nasa's announcement, the mystery of Ayah Pin's whereabout came to an end. The Malaysian police is expected to give up their hunt for Ayah Pin, as Malaysia has yet to own a similar space shuttle to chase the Discovery.

Nevertheless, Ayah Pin's departure to the space via Discovery once again prove the spirit of Malaysia Boleh! (Malaysia Can Do It).

P.S. If you wish to contact Ayah Pin via the NASA ground control you can e-mail to AP_Free@Last.skyking.dom

Moon Up Close & Personal

2005-08-05T15:32:00.000+08:00

There was a time when it was thought that the moon was made of green cheese. The astronauts went there and found only rocks & dust. That's what happens to green cheese when it is left out there for a long time ;-)

The 2005 Perseid Meteor Shower

2005-08-05T12:08:00.000+08:00

Got a calendar? Circle this date: Friday, August 12. Next to the circle write "before sunrise" and "Meteors!" Attach all of the above to your refrigerator in plain view so you won't miss the 2005 Perseid meteor shower.

The Perseids come every year, beginning in late July and stretching into August. Sky watchers outdoors at the right time can see colorful fireballs, occasional outbursts and, almost always, long hours of gracefully streaking meteors. Among the many nights of the shower, there is always one night that is best. This year: August 12.

The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is nowhere near Earth, the comet's wide tail does intersect Earth's orbit. We glide through it every year in July and August. Tiny bits of comet dust hit Earth's atmosphere traveling 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a tiny smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light--a meteor--when it disintegrates. The shower is most intense when Earth is in the dustiest part of the tail.

Perseid meteors fly out of the constellation Perseus, hence their name. The best time to watch is during the hours before sunrise when Perseus is high in the sky: sky map. Between 2 a.m. and dawn on August 12, if you get away from city lights, you could see hundreds of meteors. Scouts, this is a good time to go camping!

Really, it could hardly be better. The Perseids come on a warm summer night. (Note: This is a northern hemisphere shower.) Other familiar meteor showers like the Leonids of November require a parka to enjoy. All you need for Perseids are light pajamas.

And there's a bonus: Mars.
In the constellation Aries, right beside Perseus, Mars is shining like a bright red star. Step outside before sunrise, look east, and you'll find you have a hard time taking your eyes off Mars. There's something bewitching about it, maybe the red color or perhaps the fact that it doesn't twinkle like a true star. It's steady. You stare at Mars and it stares right back.

Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter on October 30. Consider August 12 a preview. Mars already outshines every star in the night sky, and it's getting brighter every night. If you like August, you'll love October.

And you will like August. Picture this: It's four in the morning. The sky is dark. The breeze is pleasant. Mars is beaming down from the east while meteors flit across the sky.

Maybe you should go circle the calendar again.

PDA shipments up

2005-08-03T08:19:00.000+08:00

PDA shipments up 31.5% in Q2 2005 by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- Gartner said worldwide shipments of PDAs rose 31.5%, with Research in Motion Blackberry leading the pack. 3.6 mln PDAs were shipped in the Q2 2005, up from 2.7 mln in Q2 2004. Research in Motion claimed 23.2% of the market with a shipment of 840K units, up 65% from a year ago, when it shipped [...]

Mas Plane incident in Australia

2005-08-02T20:29:00.000+08:00

I don't know if this news made in to the local newspapers, but it was on all Australia's breaking news last night.

According to the news, about 200 passengers were on board the Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur and was forced to return to Perth International Airport after the plane experienced instrument problems about 40 minutes into the journey... the plane began shuddering violently and dropping more than a hundred metres at a time over a period of about 90 seconds. Here's the best part... passengers begin to panic after one flight attendant dropped a tray of drinks and another began praying.

That was a close one for MAS. The fact that the flight attendant started praying tickled me a bit. I am not saying that it's worng but I guess flight attendants should be calm and composed when faced with such situation. Anyways, the plane landed safely and the passengers all cheered when the plane touched down without further incident.
------------------------------------
Above was from a blog by Ivan (apparently a Malaysian) in Australia

the reason why i wanna be the pm for one year only

2005-08-02T16:13:00.000+08:00

oh ya... the reason it's for only a year is because i can't imagine going to work in such an official manner for any longer than that. i don't want to wake up so early in the morning, go through all that grooming, take photos all the time, answer questions from journalist, blah-blah... which does not an ounce of good for the country. i also don't think it would take me more than a year to make such changes. it is either it can be done in that period of time or it can't be. if it can't be, then i don't want to be hanging around when i can do something elsewhere. that's the other reason why i don't want to deal with foreign relations because those take a long time and i don't want to waste even a day overseas. after my one year term, i can holiday as long as i like. :)

oh ya... i will also need a lot of help since i will be in office for such a short time; so you people better make yourself free to help ar. especially need those fellars that can write in english and not manglish like me. speaking no problem lar because people are used to samy vellu edi. only one day rest a week too; friday if you're muslim and sunday if you're christian and whatever else that is proper. any other holidays also must work.

malaysians boleh, malaysia also mesti boleh!

MM Brain Dance

How facts backfire

China breaks into Supercomputing league

Which Is Worse for Your Brain: Texting or Pot? (Hint: Pass the Pipe)

Wireless Elecricity

In the Internet age, could there be another MJ?

The Future Source of Energy ?

Dinner with Nick Miller

Crammed TV screens a strain on the brain?

The Future of Education

What the Internet is doing to our brains

[Makan R&R] Lotus meet‏

World's Youngest Professor

Brain energy consumption

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V3.1

A 50 year old symbol

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v3.0

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.9

Malaysia 1 - UMNO 0

cossie's PersonalDNA

JLS

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The End is Near

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.8

christmas decorations 2007 (i)

Which Disney Hero Are You?

Which Disney Hero are You

Which Disney Hero Are You?

Why Should We Go Home On Time?

BERSIH memo 10th Nov 2007

Fish Really May Be Brain Food

Density of a City

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v2.7

07.07.07

saturdays in malacca

Wisdom: Men & Women

What Kind of Pet Would You Be?

ACFK-j Annual Trip, 2007

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.6

The Pain Of Being Human

FAMILIES' ELDEST BOYS DO BEST ON IQ TESTS

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.5

The BIG big picture

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V 2.4

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.3

New Species in 2006

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.2

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.1

Memories define us

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V2.0

Rulers Conference

Weather Pattern

The road we travel

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.9

Food for thought

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.8

Gaia Theory, the Noosphere and GaiaMind

The Return

Are You Left Brained or Right Brained?

are you a paranoid schizophrenic?

what's your power color

George Carlin's View on Aging

Tattooed Americans

Tous Les Visages de l'Amour

Obsolescence to hit the noble Light Bulb ?

Emails hurt IQ more than pot ?

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.7

Malaysia's record-breaking obsession

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense V1.6

Malaysian Book of Records

THE TANGLED WEB THEY WOVE

A song by Charles Aznavour

Philosophy and Uncommon Sense v1.5

maturity

As the Day that cleanses and gives Life, your Dragon color is... WHITE

As the Hearts of the Pure, your Dragon color is...

Here be Dragons

A GOLD Dragon Lies Beneath!

Can you give some advise on "office politics?"

flash flood