I saw people playing frisbee in the quad at 12+. Weren't they afraid of heatstroke. Maybe next week I can sit in the quad and think: 'Oh my god, I am totally gonna die'.
The Bukit Timah campus has a lot of CCTVs and emergency call points. Maybe the people working at the Botanic Gardens are very dangerous.
The BTC shuttle bus drivers have this pole which they use to flip the sign on the side of their buses showing the direction they're going. Hurr hurr.
I was trying to use an auto-feeder attached to a Xerox in the library, but it was spoilt - it sucked in new pieces of paper without shooting others out. As such my zapping was screwed. I called the servicing staff, and one of them came down and gave a lame excuse about copyright. Wth (there's nothing in the library that can be easily copied, if copied at all, using an auto-feeder, since only crisp sheets of paper work well with it). I then suggested they remove the feeder, or at least put a sign there saying it was spoilt.
I saw an advertisement for University-level tuition for the first time - $70/hr of programming training. That's cheaper than some secondary-level tuition.
Someone said the USP Year 1s are less cheena than the Year 2s. She also claimed that talent skips generations - the Year 4s CMI, the Year 3s are not bad, the Year 2s CMI also and the Year 1s are promising.
NUS library external members don't get eJournals access. Damn. They also have an access-only membership. But who would want it? You can just walk in anyday and no one will stop you. Unless you want to use special libraries like Law.
My library card got checked on Sunday. I think the staff member was too free, since the people who joined me later weren't checked.
Chris Lingle's "Singapore's authoritarian capitalism : Asian values, free market illusions and political dependency" is in the library, in RBR (time-limited borrowing by students only) and the Singapore-Malaysia Collection. No wonder you can't borrow SMC books, or bring them out of the room. I swear, that place is like a Secret Police library.
The most subversive books date from 1995 and before. I suggested to someone that this meant things had gotten better, but he responded that maybe nothing had changed.
There's a book of "Singapore Erotica" in the SMC. I suspect some of the stories supposedly written by girls were written by guys.
There is little point in giving participation marks in Applied Maths, or any other disciplines where there is a fixed answer. The raison d'etre for giving participation marks is to encourage participation, in the form of students thinking up and sharing their own ideas or perspectives. This is good for the genuine Arts and Social Sciences. In Applied Maths though, there is no sharing of answers. You just write your solutions on the board, solutions which everyone has (or should have, at least) already.
This is especially so when participation is recorded mechanistically and very visibly each tutorial, and constitutes an unprecedented portion of the course grade. What happens is a race to the bottom as the same people scramble to 'present' each week, spoiling the market by crowding out other people. Then again, whoever said education didn't teach you about the real world?
If you're good at Maths you do Maths, (real) Applied Maths or Engineering.
If you're not so good at Maths you do Applied Maths (ie Economics)
If you're very bad at Maths you do Literature. Or Law.
If you want something else to do your Maths for you you do Computing.
Someone who's graduated: my maths deteriorated a great deal since i started doing economics
