At the very least, I have apps to install [...]]]> The Playbook just got it’s new OS, and so far it’s looking to be quite crappy. The much anticipated android app player is a disappointment(I thought I would finally be able to run android apps), a decent email client and calendar, and nothing else really exciting.

At the very least, I have apps to install on my kindle fire. There are practically none on the playbook. And geolocation doesn’t work too. For all the weakness of lousy hardware on the Kindle Fire, hey, at least I can do stuff on it(after rooting it).

If RIM wants to be taken seriously, it has to start being serious. And start living up to expectations.

So far, the only plus point for the playbook, is that I get 50GB storage on box.net with it. So much potential, so under-delivered.

Hack&Roll ’12 was decently successful. The participants who won were very happy with the prizes, and [...]]]> Today, NUSHackers very first Hack&Roll ’12 was completed. Amongst the teams that took part, 1 built a UAV that streamed video and did face recognition, another built a forum interface for IVLE’s forums that resembled Facebook’s groups.

Hack&Roll ’12 was decently successful. The participants who won were very happy with the prizes, and industry people who came down were impressed that students actually came down to build awesome apps on a Sunday. And some of the stuff that the students did were pretty high quality, especially since it was within 24 hours. Some of those that have already been deployed online includes Geek Rave.

In any case, it was pretty successful, hope it sets the right tone for bigger stuff. Photos here.

Now, the University as so far handled it very well, with an immediate clamp down, [...]]]> Now I know most of you would already have heard about the NUS Campus Crusades for Christ, and the awesome stuff they did recently, including implying that the Buddhists have no joy in their lives because they are not Christians.

Now, the University as so far handled it very well, with an immediate clamp down, and forcing the closure of the site, as well as mobilizing campus security to take down all the posters. But, 1 question remains.

Crusade: A holy war undertaken with papal sanction.

Shouldn’t the university have blocked the formation of this club on the grounds that it was instigating violence to a certain degree, and was essentially extreme right wing fundamentalism? Heck, even when LinuxNUS became NUSHackers, the school demanded quite a bit of explanation for our name change. And a group that is about launching Crusades for Christ is allowed to stay?

Double standards max?

I would be VERY interested to hear about NUS’s stance on the naming of clubs and societies.

Oh yea, and just a thought. Since they have NUS Campus Crusade for Christ, seems like a NUS Campus Jihad for Allah would be appropriate. Join the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster today!

This is just gross. Now, I’m not going to go the standard route about how they go around being elite and all that. But this, is a step too far. They crossed a line here. They deserve all the flak that they are getting.

Now, I am a free thinker. [...]]]>

This is just gross. Now, I’m not going to go the standard route about how they go around being elite and all that. But this, is a step too far. They crossed a line here. They deserve all the flak that they are getting.

Now, I am a free thinker. I respect the Christians if they have beliefs that I don’t believe in. That is their right. But, they jolly well do not step on the beliefs of others. That is crossing the line. And that, is one step too far.

Speak up
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

That is the very reason why I’m doing this. We have to stand up for what is wrong now, even if it does not affect us. We cannot simply ignore it. This, is fundamentalist religious bigotry at it’s worst. We are in the 21st century, there is NO space for such bigotry anymore.

We have to stand up for what is right. Speak out against the wrong. Use reason. Outreason them. Do not sink to their level.

Do what is right.
[Link][Link]

[footnote]
I have to say, I’m impressed by NUS’s response to this. Kudos to the Provost and the Dean of OSA, who responded to my emails almost instantaneously. They have restored my faith that the system can be saved.

This blog post is a response to a blog post by the provost of NUS, titled “The Bell Curve“. Read it first if you haven’t.

So a few weeks ago, the entire [...]]]> Finally back blogging. Had a lot of stuff to handle over the past month. Feels good to be back blogging again.

This blog post is a response to a blog post by the provost of NUS, titled “The Bell Curve“. Read it first if you haven’t.

So a few weeks ago, the entire NUS was spammed with this new post that the Provost wrote regarding the bell curve, and how NUS grades the students. Within hours of his post, Professors and ex-tutors from NUS shared the link on Facebook, congratulating NUS for being so open, being transparent, and all that bullcrap.

tldr version

The bell curve in NUS is used as a tool to ensure normal distribution of grades within a cohort. It does not signify the ability of a student, as the standards of each grade shifts from year to year, and hence, no longer shows the standard of NUS as an institution of higher learning.

Long version

From reading the blog post, it is clear to me that the provost does not fully understand the problems that has been voiced out associated with using the bell curve system to grade students. Alot has been written on this by current and ex-academics who quit after giving up on changing the system.

From “The camel has two humps”

Nowadays in the UK one has to say that they ought to fail, but because of misguided Quality Assurance procedures and the efforts of colleagues who doggedly believe in the normal curve, very many of them are mistakenly and cruelly ‘progressed’ into following courses. That process so far degrades the quality of their education and the reputation of computer science as an academic discipline as to be of burning commercial, professional and intellectual importance, but in this paper it must be by the by.

From “Why I am Not a Professor”

And the thing was that the School was not in a position to fail these students because, crudely, we needed the money and if we didn’t take it there were others who would. Hence failing students was frowned upon. By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.

However there are lots of ways round this little problem. One of them is doctoring the marks. Except its not called ‘doctoring’ its called ‘scaling’ and its done by computer. You scale the marks until you get the nice binomial distribution of fails and firsts. You can turn a fail into a II(ii) with scaling. Probably you want to be generous because otherwise students might not elect to study your course next year and then your course will be shut down and you’ll be teaching Word for Windows. Scaling was universal and nobody except the external auditors (who were lecturers who did the same thing themselves) got to see anything but the scaled marks.

While the provost claimed that NUS does not blindly follow the SOP’s in place in deciding the grades, it is clear from his blog post that these ‘flexibility’ occurs only in small or elite classes.

Let me give an example of why this bell curve regime is problematic and bad for the educational system in Singapore.

Assume there is a cohort A, and cohort B, both taking the same module in different semesters. Cohort A is made up of the best exam takers, and as a result, the bell curve tends towards the right. Cohort B, on the other hand, is made up of people who cannot do exams. Now, assuming that this module is not a ‘elite’ module, and that cohort A takes all the modules as a group, and cohort B takes all the modules as a group, such that people from both cohorts will never be in the same class. This then ensures that the criteria for moving away from the bell curve no longer exists, as since they all take modules separately, their GPA/CAP is normally distributed, and hence, normal. And as a result, the standard of A grade in cohort A is vastly superior to the standard of A grade in cohort B, and I dare say the standard of B grade in cohort A will be higher than the A grade in cohort B as well.

Now, the chances of this happening in the same batch of students is very unlikely. There is bound to be a mix of students in all modules, and students will not all go through the same timetable.

However, there’s another similar case that will very possibly happen. Students in different years are much more likely to take the same modules with the people in their year. Therein comes the problem. Because of the existence of the bell curve, the standards of A in different years are very much likely to differ. And because of the work required to explain why they deviate from the normal distribution, professors are more likely to close one eye and shut the other eye, and push the reason of different difficulties in exam papers as the reason for different marks scored in absolute terms. In addition, as mentioned in the other 2 articles, they have this quota to meet to ensure that their courses remain popular in future, and that students will remain at the university to continue funding their research which is used to meet KPI for continued employment.

Hence, despite the ‘clarification’ given by the Provost, I believe strongly that this method of moderation needs to be removed from the education system. Standards are not kept. And that is a problem. The degree is no longer a good signal for how good a person is, but rather how much better he/she performed as compared to his/her peers in the same batch.

Note: I have gamed the bell curve system many times in my undergraduate life to get by without studying, or learning anything from that module. It can be hacked.

I think this is very true. This generation and the previous generation is too damn soft, unable to fight for what they believe in, unable to stand up for what is right. If this continues, the future will be very bleak for all of us.

We need more battle hardened youths.

He is America’s last hope.

I had made that decision because of 1 very simple reason. I had given up hope of changing the system. I had voiced my displeasure at many things [...]]]> I made my decision earlier last month to retire from teaching, and after some thought (and getting back the teaching feedback), I’m seriously reconsidering that decision.

I had made that decision because of 1 very simple reason. I had given up hope of changing the system. I had voiced my displeasure at many things that the school were doing that I felt was detrimental to the students’ learning, to no avail.

I had told the profs, that I felt that their papers were badly set, that it focuses more on forcing students to learn a specific language’s rules, rather than learning how to solve problems using code, whichever language it might be, without much success. I had told the profs, that the module was called CS1010 Programming Methodology, not Programming in C, which fell on deaf ears.

I had created an intellectual culture in my class, which was completely destroyed right on the week before mid terms, because the past year papers were released, and the students (rightly so) had decided that it would be much better for their grades to game the system by mugging all the esoteric syntax in order to score higher marks in exam.

And I was given some feedback from a prof (who shall remain unnamed) that I should give my students answers to the discussion groups.

In addition to that, there has been rampant misuse of technology in order to make education ‘scalable’.

I had, for all intents and purposes, given up all hope, of fixing the system. Then came the teaching feedback.

I was pleased to see that I scored way above the department/faculty average for almost every single criteria, some as high as 0.6+ more than the department average, which is higher than the faculty average.

And that, reminded me of one quote from the movie, The Emperor’s Club.

The worth of a life is not determined by a single failure or a solitary success.

Similarly, while I could not changed the system, I am confident that me teaching, had resulted in at least some of my students having a better environment to learn, to explore, and to learn that they can learn by themselves, instead of having to take a module to learn every single thing.

As educators, we are not here to segregate the student population, to give elite education to one group, and ignore the other group. As educators, we have a moral obligation to teach everyone who comes to us, everyone who wants to learn. We have a moral obligation to help everyone who gives a damn about what we teach. We are lacking teachers who believe in that.

Nor are we here to fill the students with knowledge. We are here to ignite their passions, to make them believe, and to make them dream, so that they can one day go beyond where we have stood.

Not to force them to mug and mug and mug and get rid of whatever creativity and passion that they have in their hearts. We are now seeing education reduced to a set of KPI’s and SOP’s. Is that what education really is about?

I’ve decided to come back out of retirement and continue the fight for better education.

A movie that inspired me to teach. The Emperor’s Club. All educators should watch it.

To end off Grace Fu style

“When I made the decision to teach in 2011, pay was not a key factor. Ability to make a difference, the opportunity to change lives, and to help the supposedly weaker students were. The disruption to my (way higher) income from freelance work, or even part time work, was definitely something that I did not care about.

I had some ground to believe that I could make a change in the education system even though I earned less than peanuts. If the balance is tilted further in the future, it will make it harder for any one considering a teaching career.”

In other news, I just transferred my domain to Namecheap.com and using Cloudflare as my DNS server. You should find my websites responding alot faster now =D

What is college for? | Why I am Not a Professor

They are very lengthy, but they are really worth reading. In essence, there a problem where schools these days are dumbed down to simply graduate students through a series of processes that [...]]]> The 2 articles that inspired this blog post.

What is college for? | Why I am Not a Professor

They are very lengthy, but they are really worth reading. In essence, there a problem where schools these days are dumbed down to simply graduate students through a series of processes that will almost certainly ensure that KPI’s are achieved (through the bell-curve god) in order to fund research that are going nowhere (again, read the article “Why I am Not a Professor” to understand this, and try to think of what bleeding edge technology has NUS come out with that is widely used in the real world), and at the same time, produce graduates who cannot do anything. This is a crisis that affects not only the industry, but national security as well (the military can only hire locals, and the schools are not producing enough talents).

And yet, when students come up and voice these opinions out, the professors shoot down the students saying they are whining, they don’t know better, or that other universities are the same. Read here, an excellent rebuttal to the last argument, an argument that has been made by the elites in Singapore for a huge variety of problems, including education and transportation.

I think the time has come for change within the educational system, such that actual learning actually take place, and not just trying to meet KPI’s. And the government needs to wake up it’s idea, and realise that creating more universities is only going to cause more problems.

And the universities had better start realising using the number of papers professors write as KPI is destroying the intellectual culture, and not bringing value to anyone. A random check on 4 professors who have taught me before proved the following point.

The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author’s actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you’ll see that many of the titles bear a striking resemblance to each other. “Adaptive Mesh Analysis” reads one and “An Adaptive Algorithm for Mesh Analysis” reads another. Dividing the total remaining by the average number of repetitions halves the list again.

From “Why I am Not a Professor”

I suspect if someone actually went to do research on it, the results would more or less be the same.

So what’s my main point here? I’m really concerned about the state of the tech economy here in Singapore. A quick poll among most funded startups and MNC’s in Singapore shows most of the real work being done by foreign talents. The universities simply aren’t doing their job of fostering an intellectual culture anymore. They are no longer producing people interested to learn, but rather, robots who only know how to follow SOP and meet KPI’s. And the worst part is, the system rewards these people.

There needs to be a shift from the existing culture. And the first problem that needs to be solved is the universities.

I think this is a very good debate that shows how some people are very good at stonewalling when you try to talk sense with them.

First, in [...]]]> So you got a Kindle Fire, you looked at the other guides and they all somehow require you download an app from the Amazon App Store, which you cannot do if you are outside of the United States. So how do you actually go about installing the Android Market on your Kindle Fire?

First, in order to install anything on the Kindle Fire, you have to root it first, as always. This part has been well documented all over the internets ( Windows | Mac/Linux ) so I guess I won’t be going over it.

[UPDATE 1! Rooting process doesn't work for version 6.2.1. Still waiting for someone to find a way to root it.]

[UPDATE 2! Rooting now works on 6.2.1. Head over to RootzWiki for instructions]

Now that you have rooted your Kindle Fire, it’s time to do the actual installation of the Android Market.

1. On the browser on your kindle fire, click on the following links and download both ES File Explorer and File Expert. After the files have been downloaded, open them from the downloads page, and install the apps. Congrats, you can now view what files there are on your Kindle Fire
2. In both apps, select the menu icon, go to settings, and enable Root Explorer.
3. Download the entire suite of Google Apps on the Android platform here, and unrar it on your computer.
4. Then, load the entire folder somewhere onto your Kindle Fire. You need the USB to Micro USB cable though.
5. After you are done copying the entire folder into the Kindle Fire, use ES File Explorer and select GoogleServicesFramework.apk. A dialogue should now come up asking you for permission to install it. Just go on and install it
6. Then, still from the ES File Explorer, long press on com.amarket.apk, and move it to /system/app
7. Now, use File Expert, navigate to /system/app, and long press on com.amarket.apk, and then set the permissions to read/write for owner, and read for both group and all.
8. Then, click on com.amarket.apk to install
9. Now, go back into the folder where you put the google apps, and install com.gau.go.launcherex-1.apk
10. Congrats, you now have the Android Market on your Kindle Fire. To use it, launch the Go Launcher, and you’ll see the market icon there.

Keyword: hardware.

Pros:
The tablet is relatively responsive, almost as good as the iPad, and has a decent UI to go with it. The one that I received [...]]]> Got my hands on a Blackberry Playbook, and as each day passes, the Playbook seems more and more like an awesome piece of hardware.

Keyword: hardware.

Pros:
The tablet is relatively responsive, almost as good as the iPad, and has a decent UI to go with it. The one that I received was preloaded with the Beta 2.0 software, so there’s a bunch of bugs in there, including occasional problems with the sound.

As an entertainment device, it is quite good. Plays HD videos without lag, surfing the net is relatively comfortable too. And because it is smaller than the iPad, this is one tablet where you can actually read books on without holding the tablet with both hands.

It has 2 cores in the tablet, and has a pretty decent battery life. Being a relatively heavy user, gaming, surfing the net and watching videos on it for almost the entire day, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the battery lasted the whole day.

Cons:
There are practically no apps on the Playbook. Yet. They are working on the Android Player which will allow it to run Android Apps when 2.0 is officially out next year. And that means you get the entire ecosystem of the Android world, and the more enterprise-targeted apps on the Blackberry App World. But that’s gonna happen probably only next Feb.

Summary:
The Playbook is a decently awesome entertainment device, if all you are looking for is to watch videos and listen to music, and surf the net using an ultraportable device. If you want to play tons of games, then waiting till Feb 2012, or getting an Android tablet is probably better.

Below are a couple of screenshots from the device.

Multitasking on the Playbook

A screen shot from the game: "Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus HD"