In Brief

(I’m still here)

1. I took Tuesday and Wednesday off last week, to “celebrate” finishing marking all exam papers and submitting all the results two full days before the deadline. I took Tuesday and Wednesday off this week too to do, umm, nothing, really.
   
   
2. My sister made fun of me for watching The Lake House on Astro again. I don’t understand why, as I think that it is a decent enough movie and like it, and I watched it at the cinema with her the first time. Definitely, Maybe last night was good too. I watched it with my brother.
   
   
3. After upgrading the network with higher speed and bigger bandwidth, and finally wiring the campus for Wi-Fi, the university has now offered blog hosting for staff, powered by WordPress. Supposedly, it is to encourage academic staff to communicate and collaborate in research, but so far the more active blogs I see are by administrative staff – mainly from the IT department – doing run-of-the-mill personal blogging.
   
   
4. The overall failure rate for my Intro to Econs classes last semester was 23 percent. I thought that that would come out at the Board of Examiners (BOE) meeting, but apparently it didn’t because they weren’t our students. I wonder if it came out in the BOE meeting of the other kulliyyah.
   
   
5. Already, I know of two students who are applying to resit the paper because they cannot afford to repeat the course for another semester after expecting the last to be their, well, last. One already has a job waiting for him in his home country. Another also has a job waiting, plus he’s getting married next month. It means that I’ll have to prepare another exam paper.
   
   
6. DSA 2008 ends today. I preregistered as a visitor, as I did in the last two editions, and still in the end didn’t go. As much as I like defence tech, I enjoy reading about them more than actually seeing and holding the real things. I realized this after queuing for two hours and passing through three security checkpoints with metal detectors manned by armed Marines to board the Big John during its then supposedly final visit to Boston in 2005.
   
   
7. I’ve already bought tickets for Iron Man next Wednesday.

Soylent Green is People!

The current world food price turns out to be serious enough to warrant a statement from the IMF. Thankfully, we do not have riots on the streets of KL yet, thanks to both the government’s price controls as well as our relative prosperity. While talking with my parents over my late afternoon “breakfast”, my father joked that with more and more of the world’s food production diverted towards producing biofuel, we may soon end up having to survive on nutrient pills. That comment reminded my mother about a movie they watched years ago.

My parents have already told me about the movie so many times before that I knew what my mother was talking about even before she was halfway through her sentence. It is a 1973 movie called Soylent Green (for a moment I thought it was really cool that one of the movies my parents remember most vividly is a science fiction cult classic).

Starring the recently departed Charlton Heston, the movie is set in New York City in the year 2022, when overpopulation and pollution leads to, among other things, severe food shortage. While the rich and powerful can still afford fresh food, the rest of the population only survive on processed food rations; the most popular of which is Soylent Green, square green wafers supposedly made from plankton. Heston plays an NYPD detective, who while investigating a murder discovers that Soylent Green is in fact made from – wait for it – recycled human beings.

I’d say, now is about the perfect time they show the movie again, don’t you think?

Speak Softly

Speak Softly, Love
from The Godfather (1992)

Speak softly, love and hold me warm against your heart
I feel your words, the tender trembling moments start
We’re in a world, our very own
Sharing a love that only few have ever known

Wine-colored days warmed by the sun
Deep velvet nights when we are one

Speak softly, love so no one hears us but the sky
The vows of love we make will live until we die
My life is yours and all because
You came into my world with love so softly love

I don’t remember actually watching any of the Godfather movies, but I remember the beautiful song as I used to play it on the Electone. Written by Nino Rota, who also wrote the song A Time for Us from Romeo and Juliet (the 1968 movie, not the 1996 Baz Luhrman one with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes), the song was originally sung by Andy Williams. These were from way back when my parents made me go to music lessons.

There’s also an awesome Slash live instrumental version.

Artificial Obsolescence

In an effort to make our graduates more “marketable”, the government, as reported in the media, is pushing public universities to review “irrelevant and outdated” courses and threatens to cut subsidies for them. I find this disturbingly puzzling, if not simply wrong.

What makes our graduates “marketable” is not just a matter of taking the right courses. A few years ago at the peak of the tech boom and all the hype with the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), the “in” program was computer science (CS). So many students flock into CS programs, many without knowing what CS is, or even liking computers in general. We produced a lot of CS graduates, for sure, but many of them failed to find employment in the area. Apparently, many of our CS graduates failed to meet the standards demanded by the industry. I can relate first hand to this. During the compulsory English for Occupational Purpose (EOP) course in my senior year at IIUM, we had a series of mock interviews, when the class was split into two, and we took turn interviewing one another. There were a lot of CS students in the group. Some were what I considered “real” CS students, who took the extra effort to take MSCE courses and learn the latest programming languages on their own. Others, as we saw during the mock interview, didn’t even bother to learn anything beyond the C++ in the program curriculum or even cared much about computers. They were those who took the program simply because it was “what the market wants”. Now it’s biotechnology.

There is so much that goes into being “marketable” than the courses you take, and many of the other factors are not the kind of things you can formally teach in a course. If we simply want to cater to the needs of the industry, instead of building more public universities in every state in the federation, the government should build more technical schools, as the demand of the industry is mostly for diploma level education rather than degree level. The ever changing structure of the economy and development of new technology also means that the reactive approach of trying to cater to industry needs ultimately futile. We’ll forever be playing catch up.

What happens to the notion of learning for the sake of knowledge? I am a firm believer that the primary purpose of education is to develop critical and independent thinking; the specialized technical expertise within the respective fields secondary. A good student, a good graduate should find no major problem finding employment no matter what degree he or she did. What are these “irrelevant and outdated” courses, by the way? History? An interesting recent article in the New York Times reports a growing popularity of philosophy in top US universities. I am not aware of any of our public universities offering a philosophy program; but if there are any, chances are it qualifies as being “irrelevant and outdated”. Perhaps those top American students are not too concerned about their “marketability”.

Pwned!

Last month, I saw a RM0.28 outstanding balance on my credit card statement and forgot about it. It was just 28 sen for God’s sake, and Bank Islam charges RM0.50 for an interbank GIRO transfer! In the latest statement that arrived yesterday, however, the amount grew to RM5.28; that’s RM0.28 from last month plus a RM5 late payment charge. WTF, that’s a 1786 percent penalty! Well, that’s a bank for you.

Yup, I got pwned by the frakking bank. How stupid of me to think that the stupid bank wouldn’t mind about a stupid 28 sen.

Scratch

Man, marking is awfully boring, to say the least.

I
It annoys me to bits when students fail to follow simple instructions. It is supposed to be one of the most basic of skills – the ability to understand and follow simple instructions – one should get from schooling. I’d love to call these people stupid, or illiterate, but that is unlikely, though unfortunately not totally implausible. A more likely explanation, I think, is that they pay little attention to the instructions because they think that they can get away with it. They know that they can get away with it. Many teachers and lecturers tolerate this based on compassion, myself included sometimes, but I can’t help thinking every time that we’re just rewarding and encouraging bad behavior.

And it shows, as I keep reminding myself, every time I come upon a car in the parking lots going in the wrong direction, and the driver stares at me as if I am in the wrong blocking his way. Nobody even understands arrows anymore!

II
I had a professor once who gave us ten minutes to complete a page full of questions. “A pop quiz” he said, so everybody got busy immediately. A line at the top of the sheet reads “Quickly read through all Questions 1 through 20 before attempting”. So, I did just that, and found at the bottom of the page it says “You only need to answer Question 1”.

LOL.

Legends

I don’t want to write a movie review – it’s a bit too late for that, and I’m not very good at it – but watching The Water Horse reminded me of Juara Yang Tewas.

The Water Horse, adapted from a novel of the same title, is about a boy who raised the Loch Ness monster. Juara Yang Tewas (The Fallen Champion, if they finally get around to translating it) is a novel by Aripin Said about the mythical dragons of Lake Chini. There are many variations of the Lake Chini legend in local folklore. In Juara Yang Tewas, there were two dragons living in the lake, named Sri Gumum and Sri Pahang. Sri Gumum was the older of the dragons, with scales of gold. Sri Pahang only had scales of bronze. After fighting with an evil sea monster in the Gulf of Siam, Sri Gumum succumbed to its injuries, leaving just Sri Pahang to remain beneath Lake Chini till today.

Juara Yang Tewas remains one of my all time favorite Malay books. The copy I read years ago was borrowed from a library, but I really hope to find a copy of my own to keep. I don’t know if it’s still available, though as the last print was in 1990. Perhaps DBP should print a new edition, preferably in hardcover, I can buy.

__________
PS: During the post-race press conference of last weekend’s Bahrain GP, did you notice they displayed “Kimi Raikkonen, McLaren” on the screen when he was interviewed? What a blunder!

The Week’s Summary

Spotted by l8 at deviantART

It’s funny. All week I couldn’t wait for the weekend to come so I’d be able to go somewhere and do something, but comes the weekend all I want to do is stay at home and shut the world out for two days. Then, the bookstore called to tell that my magazine has arrived, so I guess I’ll have to get out of the house after all.

My last exam was this morning. I’ve got the scripts, all five bundles of them, on a table in the living room but I’m not going to touch them until I bring them back to the office next week. I don’t want to do work work at home, and I’m not feeling too well too, with a stiff right shoulder bugging me for almost a week.

I submitted the final results for my other course in the afternoon. Nine students failed. That’s almost twenty-one percent of the class. Ouch.