laremy.sg

So! I was quoted in an article in today’s Straits Times.

This is a snippet from the article, including my quote:

Education Minister Heng Swee Keat was a guest at the Pre-University Seminar last June but chose to sit unnoticed at the back of a hall for more than an hour, to listen to students’ presentations.

He said he prefers not to disrupt proceedings or affect the candour of discussions.

He also stressed that it is his belief in working together with educators at the front line and with the community that “shapes my interaction, rather than a reaction after the [General Election]“.

Mr Heng also does not believe in making unannounced visits to schools to try and catch educators out.

That is not helpful in generating trust between educators and those at the ministry’s headquarters, and trust is what matters in the long run, he said.

Project manager and parent of two, Mr Tan Gin Tat, 40, gave a thumbs up to Mr Heng’s school visits.

However, he added: “If Mr Heng is walking down the school corridors, I hope he doesn’t just talk to the top people but chats with teachers on the problems they are facing on imparting knowledge to kids.”

Teacher Laremy Lee, 28, however, wants more unannounced visits to be made. Schools and teachers sometimes “stage a show” for office-holders on planned visits, he said.

– Andrea Ong and Cai Haoxiang, Do-it-yourself ministers gaining notice, The Straits Times, 3 Jan 2012, p. A8 (my emphasis).

I realise that I may sound as though I want Heng Swee Keat to catch educators out, so I thought I’d share the actual quote I gave in its entirety:

Question: Heng Swee Keat has been making it a point to visit schools of all levels and strengths to find out more about what’s going on the ground and to gauge the prevalence of parents’ feedback. A few of these visits were unannounced. How do you feel about this move by Mr Heng? Are you in favour of it or do you feel it’s just “wayang”?

Answer: Unfortunately, I don’t have a bird’s eye view of things, so it’d be difficult for me to correlate the visits with efforts such as the recent Character and Citizenship Education initiative. If the visits have led to the understanding that parents are as responsible as teachers for instilling values in the youth of today, for example, then yes, I am in favour of more visits like these.

With specific regard to unannounced visits, I think it’s great. When announced visits are made, what happens is that schools and teachers will stage a show for the visiting office-holders. So office-holders end up going off with the impression that everything is fine and dandy, when in actual fact, there are many problems that have been swept under the carpet, only to resurface after the visiting office-holders leave. So there should be more unannounced visits.

The point I was trying to make was that there should be more unannounced visits so that office-holders get a good sense of the realities of the situation as opposed to an artificial view of what is going on.

I can’t sleep so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by dashing off a quick post.

I’m hoping the writing will tire me out enough for me to sleep, and also because I thought I’d share what’s on my mind – which is, coincidentally, the same thing that’s preventing me from sleeping.

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Since my last prophetic success (LOL), I’d like to make a few more social media predictions (which aren’t so far removed from my own technological wish-list, actually):

1. Tit for Tat:
   A Facebook app that goes through your friend list, discovers what privacy settings people use on you and apply those same settings back on them.

   Sounds like childish pettiness, I know, but look at it his way: we’ve reached an age in which information can be valued – or priced.

   Hence, if Entity A has more information about Entity B than the converse, Entity A has greater leverage and Entity B stands to lose out.

   Now, answer me truthfully: would you rather be Entity A or Entity B?

   Precisely.

   And knowing how some of our information on Facebook has the potential to make or break us, it’s only fair for information to be shared in as fair a manner as possible.

   I’m as sure as hell not going to trawl through my Friend list to figure out privacy settings for each individual ‘Friend’, so an automated process to do this would be nice.

2. Mute function and Timeline for Twitter web client:
   These are actually quite low-level ideas, but I think they’d really make Twitter better to use in the long run.
   • When I’m using my Mac at home, I have Tweetdeck which works great in terms of muting stupid people who tweet about inane things.

     However, I don’t always use a Twitter app that has this function which means there’s a lot of noise I have no way of filtering out.

     I’d unfollow these people, but I think it’s rude, so I’d rather just mute them – similar principle to that of Tit-for-Tat, I guess.

   • Twitter needs a timeline in the same way Facebook has one, just so we can re-discover all our ‘old-but-gold’ posts and marvel at how intelligent (or alternatively, how juvenile) we used to be.

     Until we started working and turned into our parents.

3. Google Tunes:
   This is different from Google Music in that it works like a normal Google search.

   Instead of a textual input, however, you SING or hum a tune to your computer or Siri or what have you.

   The Google Tune search then scours its ginormous database to find the name of the song you’ve just hummed, thereby saving you many sleepless nights of having an earworm run through your head endlessly.

   This is especially helpful when you can’t Google the lyrics because you don’t, for the life of you, know what the lyrics are – but you know the tune to the chorus very, very, very well.

   Tragicomedy aside, it’s possibly the highest-level idea of the lot, because it’s very close to the concept of what Web 3.0 is envisioned to be like.

Let me know when these things come about, or better yet – if similar products already exist.

• Owner surprised to find cat regularly catches bus | The Telegraph
  While it’s quite a cute story, I thought I’d share this more to point out how well the spokesperson for the bus company conveyed the company’s stand:

  A spokesman for bus firm First said they didn’t mind Dodger on their buses but didn’t actively encourage him.

  He said: “The drivers have been asked not to feed it because we recognise that cat has an owner and we do not want to discourage it from returning home for food and shelter, but in principle we do not have a problem with it being around the bus station.

  “Given this cat is elderly we suspect it would be eligible for free travel, perhaps a bus puss, if such a thing existed.”

  Makes the bus company sound witty and gives it a human face right? That’s why all Singaporean organisations need to work their PR like that. 

• How to ‘Age’ Your Wine 5 Years in 20 Seconds: Hyperdecanting | The Blog of Tim Ferriss
  Yet another reason to get a hand blender.
   
• 5 People To Meet When Vetting Potential Significant Others | Thought Catalog
  I want to highlight the converse as well i.e. bringing your potential significant other to meet these five people before deciding whether or not you should get together with him or her. Assuming the normality of these people, these people will help you suss out whether or not said significant other is good for you.
   
• The loneliness of the long-distance panda | Nature
  Short story about mechanical panda love. Sounds weird, but it ain’t too different from human love.
   
• How taxis are turning us into zombies after midnight | S M Ong
  “They just zoomed past us and after a while, I realised that the taxis were just going round and round, not picking up passengers. I could recognise some of the taxis… . The streets were really deserted save for us, the walkers. It was like a scene from the TV show The Walking Dead. The taxis were the humans running away from us.”

  A humorous piece, but on a serious note, that’s why we need another taxi-fare model in Singapore; the current one, with its call-booking surcharges and the like, leave passengers at the mercy of taxi drivers all too often.

Still somewhat upset at the irregular regularity at which items in my own apartment go missing…

Nevertheless, I’m not going to let that spoil my day. Because today, I am bond free!

Technically, though, but still – it’s good to be free! *makes whale sounds*