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11/25/2015

Enemy within

Today paper on 24 Nov published an article from Financial Times titled, ‘Enemy within is the biggest threat in cases of cybercrime’. It does not need a super talent not to see the truism in the title of the article. The article went on to say that most cyber attacks, more than 80%, was inside job, committed by people within an organization. However, many of the cases were simply deflected intentionally or otherwise to outside sources. Notably the massive attacks on US govt and commercial organizations were claimed to come from North Korea or China. What is the truth? The 81% statistics that such attacks were from within needs no further explanation.

How is this serious threat relevant to Singapore? Obvious isn’t it? With the IT industries dominated or even overtaken by foreigners, with many foreigners taking over important and financially or strategically sensitive institutions and corporations, would these people within be a threat to the interest of Singapore as a country?

The answer is a BIG NO. Singapore is very comfortable with foreigners, and foreign talents to take over our institutions and maybe even our countries. Just issue them a pink IC and they will not be foreigners anymore but Singaporeans. So simple. Did anyone say so silly? We have complete faith and confidence that the foreigners coming here, given important appointments and CEOs, even sitting in Parliament, are all for Singapore and will not betray the trust the ever trusting Singaporeans took them in, hired them, to run our show. It is all about faith. We trust them and they would reciprocate our trust. Nothing to worry about. Do not be hysterical over such things. All is well.

Have no fear of foreigners doing inside jobs to compromise our security and interests. Singapore is an exceptional country in that every foreigner coming here will be good, like angels.

In the Today article, Tommy Helsby, the Chairman of business investigation firm Kroll said this, ‘Cybercrime is one of those things where the insider is the dominant threat…You have all these clever defences against people on the outside, but people on the inside are already on the inside.’

What nonsense, this kind of things would never be a problem in Singapore or in Singapore’s institutions. We are absolutely safe from inside attacks. We have many experts and security organizations overseeing our security from such attacks. If there is a risk, they would have opened their mouths. So far they are very comfortable with the situation.

And we have the strongest armed forces to guard against external attacks. We got Total Defense also. Where got problem? Insiders, 2 million foreigners here? So what? We need growth and they are here to help us grow our economy and provide jobs for our people, plus the talents that we are sorely in need of.

We have all the holes covered. Fear Not. Just build a strong defence force against enemies coming from outside. Buy more F35s to frighten them away.

PS. The enemy within did not wear a tag saying he is the enemy. He probably wears a smiling face full of innocence and a tag saying ‘I love you, trust me’.

11/24/2015

Time for lighter moments

I quote some comments from a new citizen posted in the TRE trying very hard to be like a Singaporean. Here you are from a guy called Rayban.

‘I volunteer help PAP and got one yr I donate $250 only. I get invite go up stage hand shaking by MP Foo Mee Har. Below stage, people clap me so loud. I feel so hapy…I receive pretty MP hand shake me. Which better? You go answer.’

I must say he wasn’t trying to be funny. That is how he speaks or posted in TRE. A new citizen, a foreign talent. Please excuse him as English is not his first language, probably learn it from our integration programme. Looks like he needs more integration than hand shaking.

The contrasting style of Modi and Deng Xiaoping

Narendra Modi is in Singapore on a 2 day official visit starting on 23 Nov. Globe trotting Modi has been awarded the Asian of the Year by the ST for having met the most leaders in his first year in office, his greatest achievement as a PM. By now he probably has met all the leaders of the world several times over and probably a Guinness Record is in order for this great feat. Modi’s visits anywhere is always met by large crowds of the India diaspora and an air of great expectations with his eloquent speeches of great promises of India become the next superpower and an economic powerhouse.

Modi’s visit to Singapore is no different and a 100,000 diaspora is awaiting him at Chennai Business Park, oops, I mean Changi Business Park. He is like a rock star and will be received with all the pomp and pageantry of a rock star.

In contrast, Deng Xiaoping was like a hermit, a leader that hardly made any trip overseas. Deng also did not make spectacular speeches and though his visit to Singapore did not end up speaking to 100,000 Chinese diaspora, the media did give him a good coverage, but not in the scale of Modi. It was strictly business, he came, he saw and he noted.

In that strategic trip to Singapore, great ideas were formed in the minds of Deng. If Singapore could do it, China could do better. And in Singapore he saw a working model that could kick start a new China that he was opening up to the world. After his return from this rare trip out of China, he sent delegations after delegations of Chinese officials to study what Singapore did and took the blueprints home for more analyses. The rest is history.

From what he saw in Singapore, it gave him enough ideas and motivation on what he wanted to turn China into. The rest was true grit and execution. Not many people would want to acknowledge it, that a single trip out of China could have such a great impact on the redevelopment of China. To a good mind, it only takes a spark, to ignite a dream and turn it into a reality. That is the difference. Deng launched a powerful wave of reforms never seen in anywhere else for centuries.

Modi would still be travelling around the world to make eloquent speeches of great promises. Would this trip to Singapore ignite in him a spark to transform India into a modern nation like what China is today? Maybe Modi could do more, with many more ideas he collected from all this overseas trips and the inspirations from many more countries.

Apologies for those who think Singapore should take full credit for the modernization of China. No, Singapore was just a catalyst to spark a dream. The rest are hard work and due diligence to turn a dream into a reality, to motivate a nation of 1.3b people to work for the China Dream. Only the Chinese could do this to rebuild their country to what it is today. If it is so easy, all the countries that wanted to emulate Singapore would also be great successful stories. Other than China, no one could do it the way China did, and in a scale unmatched over a mere 3 decades..

Turning a country into an economic powerhouse of modernity is not about eloquent speeches and copying a model. It is not so simple as that. When would Modi stop travelling, return to India and start working, to rebuild India into another economic powerhouse? Perhaps Singapore will be his last stop to build up all the ideas he needed to create another mammoth Asian economic giant.

Prejudice and bias in our education system

An interesting article titled ‘ Time to look beyond the Western view of the Middle East’ by an educator, Koh Choon Hwee, appeared in the Today paper on 23 Nov. such articles are rare in a system where everyone blindly get along with western views as the official and right views of events around the world, including domestic issues.

Koh Choon Hwee discovered through her teachings in the schools that our young have been set up with very simplistic views of the Middle East as a region of deserts, camels and veiled women. How so, and she explained everything in these few words:

‘After passing through an education system in which we are more likely to study Shakespeare rather than the Persian poet Hafez, we have inadvertently been imparted with an understanding of the world as viewed from the British Isles and an ideology of the current world order that is viewed from North America, with is associated prejudices and blind spots.’

Having such a viewpoint is not so innocent as it seems. It has far reaching consequences in the psychic and mentality of the people. What is good to the west, favourable to the west but bad or unfavourable to us, would get pass as acceptable if one does not take time to consider what it should be. If the Westerners said your father is bad, your gene is inferior, the unthinking will go on parroting the same silly stuff without knowing that they have been made victims and happily going along with it.

The fault does not lie just with the education system. It is the whole system that make the people think like they are westerners, transforming ourselves ‘into an Anglophone society, and there are logical consequences of these policy decisions.’ The main media(print and screen) is the biggest culprit if you look at the amount of silly articles copied from western media and passed off as the truth, the right things to read, the right way to think.

As a result, our people do not see the world in a balanced perspective and least of all in our very own perspective. We don’t have our own perspectives. Many open and close their mouths thinking and parroting views of westerners unconsciously and making a fool of themselves unknowingly. The schools and the media have a heavy responsibility to educate our people to think for ourselves, to be discriminating, and to start thinking that what is good for the West is not necessarily good for us.

They even published stupid stuff and comments by foreign con men and women and fakes rubbishing our own people as stupid and no talents without questioning. In the same breath they are also rubbishing our institutions of higher learnings, the faculties, for wasting public money to produce waste. And none even notice this and simply agreed that our institutions are dysfunctional, only good for beauty contest. As a result we have turned our people into unthinking daft and accepting that we are daft submissively and apologetically. So everyone could only think about more training and attending more courses to be better. They forgot to structure a course to teach them how to think and how not to be stupid.

PS. This sickness, to see the world from the western perspective and to think and behave like Westerners pervade the whole society right from the top. Even academics, supposedly intelligent and critically thinking people, also act the same way and write their rubbish using western world views to look at things and events instead of from out own perspective and interests.

11/23/2015

Singapore Fooled AGAIN by Bogus University Rankings

Singapore Top Universities Embrace “Beauty Contest” Criteria for Academic Excellence

By MIKOspace

The most remarkable outcome in the latest Times Higher Education (THE) 2015 World University Rankings announced last month was the phenomenal rise of two (of the three) Singapore universities, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), to 12th and 13th place respectively. Both Singapore Universities are now ranked above Yale, Columbia, EPF Lausanne and King’s College London.

This remarkable achievement was attributed mostly to high scores for the reputation surveys, the number of international students and faculty, none of which of course have any validity or reliability as indicators or measures of excellence in learning and/or teaching.

Together with significant changes in the research citations component, the other another important factors for the rise of NTU and NUS were their continuing remarkable performance in the academic and employer surveys. NUS is at the top ten in the world for academic reputation and employer reputation with a perfect score of 100 respectively. NTU is 52nd for the academic survey and 39th for employer with scores in the nineties for both. This should not be surprising since NUS and NTU provide nearly 95% of Singapore’s fresh university graduates.

This time, the skeptics of Universities Rankings are further proven right. The 2015 World Universities Rankings had made so many strange and implausible ranking shifts resulting in many universities rising or falling by dozens and hundreds from their previous rank. Truth is, THE had tweaked their “methodology”, as with the other major ranker Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, when it broke away with their data suppliers Thomson Reuters at the end of 2014 and announced the dawn of a new era of transparency and accountability.

Readers should note that neither THE or QS have ever published the scientific basis of their “methodology”; especially the criterion factors selected as measures of “best” Universities, nor the population and samples of the respondents who participated in surveys purportedly conducted and whose “data” were used to compile the final annual rankings.

The announcements of the 2015 World Universities Rankings therefore came like the results of a beauty contest with winners (those whose rankings have risen) congratulating themselves with much self-flattery, while the losers (those whose rankings have sank) are embarrassed into protesting only silently and wondering where indeed they have gone so wrong in the past 12 months.

For example, Cambridge and Oxford overtook and pushed Harvard into 6^th place. If THE were to be believed, it was all Harvard’s fault as she suffered a huge decline from 92.9 to 83.6 in THE’s composite teaching indicator (whatever this presumes to measure). Whatever indeed happened in Harvard in 2014-2015 to “reduce” its teaching effectiveness and impact, according to THE indicators, by 10%? Should Harvard students therefore demand such fee payback based on this information?

Overnight, or precisely in over just one year from 2014-2015, Asian universities suddenly became worse off, except the Chinese Universities. The University of Tokyo dropped from 23rd to 43rd place in 2015, as she saw her research citations indicator fell from 74.7 points to 60.9, together with her sister University of Kyoto who plunged from 59th to 88^th in 2015 for similar reductions in the score for research citations. For some strange unexplained reasons, the Professors of previous years in both top Japanese Universities could no longer produce the same sterling quality of well-cited research papers.

If THE Universities evaluation were continued to be believed, the top Korean Universities had also suddenly gone silly and stupid. From the top, Seoul National University dropped 35 ranked positions and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) 66 positions, due mostly to their significantly reduced scores for teaching and research. Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) also fell 50 places, losing points in all THE criteria, despite earning good income from industry which she served but this was deemed irrelevant for THE Rankings.

Can the same Methodology which had improved both NTU and NUS rankings so significantly be trusted to be robust, vigorous and sophisticated?

It should be increasingly obvious to any intelligent researcher that the 2015 World University Rankings have created its own rankings based on new, revised criteria such as to render it incomparable with all their previous 2009-2014 rankings.

Specifically, if the Dutch University of Twente (ranked 149th by THE) deserved to be in the top 150 this year, then its 2014 ranking which placed Twente outside the top 200-225 could not possibly be valid. And if KAIST should indeed fall 66 places from 2014, then either its 2015 rankings (148th) or its 2014’s (52th) were inaccurate, or they both were. This conclusion applies equally to all the universities whose rankings may have ”improved”.

Singapore Universities have devoted much time and resources since 2007 to satisfy the dubious criteria of bogus university excellence, including getting rid of distinguished and eminent local Professors to meet the World University Rankings preferential criteria for foreign faculty, as well as its preference for more foreign students which NTU and NUS attracted with hundreds of free scholarships (since the Criteria did not specify only paid students were counted).

NTU and NUS managers and administrators, and their experts, should now carefully study the 2015 World University Rankings to discover what their critics and skeptics, many of whom included eminent University Professors, educators and the United Nations UNESCO, have been warning over the past years the Rankings were published – that the World University Rankings are bogus and misleading, since their indicators lack academic validity and have no scientifically-established construct and they utilize a highly questionable survey and data collection methodology to create information for dubious ranking results which could not survive due diligence or methodological and reliability scrutiny.

Singapore universities should maintain our Integrity and be honestly professional, and reject using the spurious World University Rankings to position our great Institutions of Higher Learning because of their lack of validity and reliability in Methodology and questionable measures of learning and research excellence.

The 2015 World University Rankings is final and conclusive proof that claims by the rankers over the past 10 years that they have carefully calibrated indicators and a uniquely trusted and vigorous methodology are untrue and bogus at best. There is no reason why the Singapore government and Singapore university administrators and academic experts should continue to be fooled repeatedly by such scams and dubious products.

Singapore universities should no longer participate in any “World University Rankings” Fraud. Singapore’s presence in the World University Rankings invariably lends our hard-earned Reputation for Authenticity and Honesty to mask their lack of credibility, validity and reliability. Our Universities must have the same high standards of integrity and authenticity as the rest of the Nation.