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A public service announcement from Xianjie for all from the RI GEP Class of 1999:
Lunch with Mr Chan [Ying Ying] on friday..
Hi everyone,
we'll be meeting on 7 Jan 2005 (Fri) at 12pm at Northpoint's Crystal Jade La Mian Xiao Long Bao?
Its on the 2nd level of the annexe to the main building i think...
Transport: MRT to Yishun or Bus to Yishun Interchange
Please spread the word for me also.. thanks guys..
See you all there!
Xianjie
97507135
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Course pack has a few scribblings (hey, you get what you pay for), and should be the same as this semester's. Course pack contains: Plato's Euthyphro, Plato's Meno, Plato's Republic (Book I), Descartes' First and Second Meditations, Extracts from JS Mill's On Liberty - also makes for light bathroom/bedtime reading.
Free delivery to anywhere in NUS at my discretion is included.
Look upon it as a fringe benefit for visiting this blog :) Do spread the word if you know someone taking this module.
Offer has been taken up even before the publishing of this blog post, but I was too lazy to delete it, so.
The bidding statistics for Round 2A are interesting. I went 2/3 of the way down the list, and the modules where the lowest successful bid was 2000 or more were as follows:
BSP1004: 2600
CE5603: 2000
CS2103: 2022
DSC3212: 2023
EC1301: 3073
EE2009: 2000
EE3501: 3096
EE4306: 2800
EL3201: 2015
FNA1002E: 2360
HR2002: 3094
ME3262: 2000
Where do these people get all their points from?!
Oh, and GEK1533 (Woman's health and changes in her lifetime), offered by the Medicine Faculty went for 700 points. Probably all girls who think it'll be very easy for them.
But most modules went either for 1 point or none (ie no one wanted to take them). Aww.
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I don't get it. If you walk around with the "just out of bed" look, people frown. But if you use gel to get the "just out of bed look", people are fine.
Similarly, they cut holes and make tears in their clothes and jeans, and get them to look faded, but if any of this was unintentionable, it'd be socially unacceptable.
Humans are weird.
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Someone: "do you even find time to study? lol
you leave your footprint on so many blogs
you're almost prolific like Glenn Reynolds"
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On NUS:
"Being a student myself in NUS, what i gathered from most tutorials are, prob 90% of the students are just silently waiting for the answers and 99% of their focus/ attention throughout the class is on avoiding (hokkien:siaming)eye contact with the teacher(lowers the chances of being called up to answer). A typical Singaporean student's response would be silence (act blur, take cover, never be a volunteer!)...
Personally, i don't get the astonishment over "smart" "university" students don't thinking critically. Typical PAP talk. It is only understandable and predictable. Nothing about the way of teaching has changed, from primary to university, only perhaps there are now fewer students in a class, but it still ain't inversely proportionate to class participation.
Also, I have taken a couple of Soci modules myself, and critical thinking appears to be something one can do without when it comes to examinations. Soci modules, very often, have titles that promises interesting facts/analysis about the workings of the human society, facts that are gonna make u go WOooo~so desu ne!. But instead, the syllabus often focuses on who said what; theories theories and more theories. For example, i have taken this module "sociology of deviance" before, and had expected to learn more about the "evils" of society, instead what i learnt(and forget) are THEORIES, the only real life example that the lecturer actually "informed" us was that druggies hung out in the east of Singapore. Thanks alot, for nothing! The average middle class university kid, sheltered Singaporean-style, wouldnt even know that druggies actually exists in Singapore. YEs we are that naive, thanks to crime watch. So how do we get the bloody theories & concepts apply? sometimes, even if one might claim to think more than memorize, the singaporean environment limits one's thinking as well. There's something really screwed about the NUS system (or the education system in general here)? It's not even about laziness, just take a look at how the libraries in school are packed each day will tell ya how "lazy" we are. If people can sit in the same spot the whole bloody day, with just one 1.25litres of Ice mountain, memorizing theories, formulas, and concepts, surely we are capable of being hardworking at da BIG word called "THINKING" right? The system doesnt allow it, and neither does our environment. We are a very sheltered and pampered bunch, and the school loves theories, so there's nothing CRITICAL to think about in the first place. Even the tsunami incident doesnt strike close to our hearts enough to make it to even tea time chat. Probably just donate to ease our minds which is jampacked with all the graphics from news, and then forget about it later. that's how sheltered we are. it's sad i know. i'm sorry for myself too, at times.
I also wanna point out that NUS DOESN'T return exam papers after the exams, for whatever reason, i don't know. i have never studied overseas, so i don't know what is it like for them. But i think such a policy is really a mind f**Cker. i believe it's the primary reason to student waiting for the "model answer", and not wanting to think. If the papers never get returned, it means that the power of correcting the papers lies entirely on the marker, and who's the marker? Ze LECTURER of course! and how do we get him to get us an A, by answering using his OWN answer of courSE! he can't possibly mark his own answer wrong, can he? or maybe he can, only god's gonna know right? so, here i'm, a typical student, a typical singaporean, blaming the system, too bad, it's an easy target. Laziness might not be the main reason that we do not think critically. even if there is, laziness sprouts from inactivity, so think deeper yo."
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The lord's profits - "The music is catchy, the mood euphoric and the message perfect for a material age: believe in God and you'll be rewarded in this life as well as the next... Brian Houston's open, good-guy demeanour disappears. No, he will not tell me what he or Bobbie earns. "All you guys [the media] want to know about is the money," he says. "You don't want to know about the church." Well, it's a bit like walking into Rose Hancock's house and not noticing the chandeliers - the money at Hillsong just leaps out at you."
A whole thread of people pissed off by fundies:
"The only thing I worship is the God of Song (aka Jacky Cheung)... proud to say that at least I dun try to force people to buy Jacky Cheung's album coz at least I know it sucks nowadays." (Heh)
"If they remain trapped in any belief, they cannot accept the possibility of anything outside of that belief. Anything contrary to the held belief is incorrect, and therefore precludes them from investigating further. Therefore the belief becomes a reality they have adopted, which is based on delusion." (Explains all the crazy logic they try to use)
It seems the fundies have pissed of a helluva lotta people :)
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Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land
"A 22-year-old gamer has spent $26,500 (£13,700) on an island that exists only in a computer role-playing game (RPG).
The Australian gamer, known only by his gaming moniker Deathifier, bought the island in an online auction.
The land exists within the game Project Entropia, an RPG which allows thousands of players to interact with each other.
Entropia allows gamers to buy and sell virtual items using real cash, while fans of other titles often use auction site eBay to sell their virtual wares.
Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia."