Yes. I am back, but not for long. I am still in Singapore, not overseas, not with Mib and definitely still going to school daily. I have not been blogging lately due to the immense workload that has emerged after this rather long June Holiday. I have to announce that my blog shall cease to have new posts until further notice, though Dr Croc may still post essays or articles.
This temporary cease in operation may last for about 4 months, when I complete all my education for the year. The good news is that after that, I may be writing so much, on a daily basis that no one would have the time to finish reading the posts. Anyways, Vib will be unable to reply any request, comments, or shouts for the time being.
Yes. I know there are word limit for essays, and perhaps for certain competition entries in which you have to write a shot paragraph of crap, or even an ‘SMS’ – but for a research paper? Indeed. Students are already deprive of voicing their views loud enough and here comes someone by the surname ‘Ng’, announcing that there will be a word limit imposed on the research paper than students are doing. Failing to abide by it will result in penalty that involves the reduction of marks and this indirectly torments the student mentally for it is his intellect that dicates the amount of stuff he write and it should not be the teacher. For a research paper, one should only be limited by the existing ‘literature’ or studies on the topic, and not the amount of words.
Other limiting factors could be the time given to complete the research, the standard or expectations of the student, the broadness of the research topic chosen, but never the word limit of the paper itself. Why on earth must one attempt to cut down on what he is supposed to write in a research? When I was doing my PhD, our research should involve intensive studies of the selected topic and the more the findings, the better, though you might have to account for more deviations. Anyway, by limiting the amount of words allowed in a research paper – regardless of it being a scientific or humanities one, teacher/educators are sending out the wrong message to potential great researchers. The attitude of a good researcher should be to probe, the deeper the better, and more intensive.
Limiting the amount of words is forcing the students or should I say potential leader in the field of scientific or social science research, the mentor is actually preventing the student from going more in-depth in the study. This would inevitably result in sluggishness on the part of the student: thinking that once he reached the word limit, he has completed the study. Or worst, he may end up cutting away all the important parts, even to the extent of compromising depth just to satisfy the word limit. Whoever who imposed the limit, do you think this is worth it?
I am sure you have done your Masters and I am clear that there is no word limit imposed for that. Let me ask you, if there’s a word limit, won’t you have failed the paper, given your lousy English? Haven’t you forget that you need to write a paragraph to express the same idea as others who can do the same in a sentence. You are so lousy in your English that ‘Plus’ is ‘Prus’ to you. So who are you to dictate the number of words student write in their research? As one of the first animal who majored human psychology, I can understand the kind of mental torture that such ‘limitations’ have of the students. I am sure they are going to state in their ‘Limitations’ portion of the paper: “Due to restriction in the amount of words I can write, I am unable to present any further findings of the research in this research paper”.
Though not as plain as Mib’s blog, I always thought my blog lacked pictures. Not fanciful ones that crash the browsers loading your page or images that repeat in almost every post. And of course not a colorful background depicting a sky then having ‘Icy Wind’ as your blog title. Those are all disgusting. By the way, having no images or graphic in your blog theme actually sux too. Compounding on the fact that you draw some big, red, pixelated Chinese Seal image on so many of the posts. Yuks!
I thought I would start a ‘column’ on my blog. It is by an imaginary character named ‘Dr Croc’, and he will talk about education, or those childish stuff that I usually won’t write. When I say childish, I am referring to things related to children. I am thinking of drawing some political cartoons of ‘Dr Croc’. You will soon know what I mean exactly. A crocodile is chosen mainly because of the simplicity of it and also the multiple dimensions in which you can interpret its personality. You can say it is a slacker, but it is also an opportunist – there is almost no limits to the way you can talk about it.
Since this is the ‘exam and tests’ period, I will only return with more graphics during November. But in the meantime, you can actually see what Dr Croc have to say about stuff in Singapore. For those sensitive people, Vib is NOT Dr Croc. Whatever he says do not represent me! By the way, all the images or graphics of Dr Croc or related are my original works. Please do not steal them and put on your blog without my permission!
I only realised recently that the date and time stamp of my blog is totally messed up and I suspect it had been so since I upgraded the wordpress blog. I didn’t have the time to amend all of the post so I merely corrected the time of the posts that are on display on the first page. I don’t think it poses any problem but it does look strange that I am blogging at around 3am in retrospect.
I don’t usually talk about food on my blog but I will do that today – now that I realised that food is another profound art waiting for more youngsters to probe into. I went to the Coffeeshop No. 286 or whatever it is called for lunch this afternoon and ordered Teh-Peng as a beverage for the meal. For those non-singaporeans, Teh-Peng means Iced Tea with milk (Breakdown for dumber people: Teh – Tea with milk, Peng – Iced). I have been drinking Tea with milk since I was young and I only take it with ice when the weather is somewhat hot.
As I waited for my order to be processed by the absent-minded cashier, who asked me what I want when I approached the counter, asked again when I paid the money and one more time when the person in charge of making the drink asked her. Well, that I am quite used to. I observed the person making the tea. First, she added extremely thick tea into a cup of water, adding evapourated milk as she poured in the tea from the stocking kettle (this one you don’t know I can’t help – too local). Next, she scooped about three quarter teaspoon of condensed milk into the cup, stirred frenzily. Finally, she scooped in about half a soup-spoon of coarse sugar (not brown one) into the cup before stirring again and pouring the contents into a bag of ice for me to take it away.
Just a cup of tea, so many processes and mixture of different flavouring (though all are supposed to give a sweet taste). It is no wonder why the sweetness we taste is usually different at different coffeeshops. The key to obtaining the best tea is probably having the best permutation of the proportion of milk, tea, sugar or any other flavourings. There is still so many other kinds of tea and combination of ingredients for us to discover: Teh-Si, Teh-O and coffee too – Kopi, Kopi-Peng, Kopi-O, etc.
I rarely do propaganda for others, but I seriously think that Internet Explorer is screwed. Browser Happy is a site dedicated to educating people about the harms that Internet Explorer brings and promote alternative browser softwares. Do visit it and download the suitable browser for your browsing experience.
By the way, if you browse this site with Internet Explorer, and then compare it with the view on Mozilla Firefox, you will realise that there seems to be a difference in the way they process the colour codes of the background. I am not sure why but it doesn’t make a single sense. Basically, Internet Explorer doesn’t really deliver the content as desired by the programmer at times, in fact, most of the times.
Personally, I use Firefox as a primary browser, with Internet Explorer as the secondary. This is mainly because of the large number of Visual Basic driven site, which I have to access. Firefox don’t seem to be able to process certain of the Visual Basic coding. Too bad. Nonetheless, Internet Explorer is still giving me problems like crazy pop-ups. In school, we also see those computer-dumb (not illiterate, just dumb) teachers who have tonnes of spywares and virus on their computers, the explanation – Internet Explorer.
So the final message: Avoid the Blue ‘E’, Down with ‘IE’.
Okay. Erpz.net was down yesterday. We have been having this problem since we changed host. Well, it is not our fault but we still have to apologize to readers. This is sarcasm to the host if you haven’t noticed.
Since it is the holidays, I haven’t really been doing anything productive. I fiddled with photoshop again and got this picture as a poster for my film, that should be completed by the end of this month (but will probably not).
I used a yellowish base as background then scattered the leaves with the preset ‘leaves brush’ in Photoshop CS, followed by the ‘grass brush’ at the bottom of the poster and added another layer with a green shade, and set it to ‘color’. Add the text and poof, I got this thing. Sounds much easier than it is done. I did experiment with the colors to obtain the best combination. But guess what kind of comment I get from my sister?
Looks like a ‘World Green Day’ poster to me.
I thought the green is supposed to give the poster a natural touch because everything in the film is simply too stiff and it is also supposed to make viewers feel calm. Green is supposed to soothe. Unfortunately, being Singaporeans, they just link everything that’s green in colour to being environmentally-friendly.
If that’s so, what is the Chinese Black and White painting of bamboos all about? Frankly speaking, from a scientific perspecive, plants looks green because the leaves absorb every other colour of light except green light. Plants hates green light – it provides them with almost no energy at all. If you shine green light on a green plant and expect it to grow, I can tell you that you are definitely stupider than this dumb fat blogger who denies that his lipid content is increasing.
Gravitational pull increasing. Yeah, right. Wait till you damage the bathroom scale. They did start lying to you by showing you the same weight all the time.
Somehow, this PC Show post got posted about 7 times on my blog. I have no idea why. I probably clicked the publish button a little too many times (my sister disconnected my computer from the net at the exact moment when I clicked publish for the first time).
Mib’s life is screwed. So is US actually any better than Singapore? Probably not. But still, we are screwed by the system over here. This is a great example. As for Terry, he is so screwed by his power supply. Okay, enough of screwed stuff. For those so wants peace, with nothing exciting, please vist Newspeaker. Given the little crap there, I doubt anyone actually discovered that Newspeaker have existed for almost a month already!
