Blog traffic quadrupled thanks to TOC; more on liberal education in NUS later

What a sudden jump for this lowly blog

Yeah I don’t know what happened or who picked up NUS administration’s “censorship” on the Online Citizen, but suddenly traffic shot up by a whole lot. Nothing to shout about, but it puts a small smile on my face.

What’s not mentioned in the censorship post was that I original wrote it for The Ridge Online, but the editors never picked it up after a few weeks, so I decided to publish it on my own blog.

Currently finishing up an essay on Thai politics, will have something to say about that in a while. I have also been getting some feedback from people on Facebook about the post on my impending unemployment. Some very useful conceptual pointers, but I would like to develop it further.

However, it’s the essay and the political science honours dinner tomorrow, so it will have to wait to Saturday.

Btw, do big words make the post easier to read?

Will NUS censor student journalism?

After the mid-sem break, The Ridge was in a meeting with the NUS Dean of Students, Associate Professor Tan Teck Koon today, along with several student groups: Campus Observer, NUSSU Hooked, Political Science Society (PSSOC), NUS Political Association (NUSPA), and the revived Democratic Socialist Club (DSC). The agenda: Publications.

Obviously, the issue of censorship of student journalism at NTU was pretty much a good motivation. If you were the school administration, you would want to do something to prevent student demonstrations because it’s not good for university image.

So which side did A/P Tan pick, freedom or repression? Here’s how A/P Tan ran it down to us. There are certain things that students can’t publish, which are religion, race and politics. That’s right, politics. However, he also stressed that the university’s priority is intellectual discussion and debate. So if it’s a considerate, balanced, and intellectual rigorous article on politics, it really is fine. It just can’t be partisan.

Technically, the university shouldn’t be partisan. The only place where that is allowed is NUS Political Association – but by this standard, I think that they’re pretty underdeveloped.

In addition to those rules, writers must take full responsibility with their articles. No hiding behind pseudonyms. Put some facts behind the argument. All in all, articles must be defensible. A little bit of controversy to generate awareness is okay, but be reasonable.

The Campus Observer noticeably brought up Dr. Chee Soon Juan’s visit to NUS. A/P Tan said that the only concern was the distribution of leaflets, which were regulated even for commercial interests. However, since it is an open campus, there wasn’t anything wrong with Dr. Chee coming to talk to students. As long as he doesn’t bring supporters to hold a political rally, it’s fine.

There was the issue of campus security just shadowing Dr. Chee while he was here. A/P Tan said that some people were more sensitive to these kinds of thing. Probably the guard thought that he’d better take care of his job by erring on the side of caution. So far, it’s unchartered territory, and the university will see how it goes.

Politicians, government or opposition, could be invited to speak as long as it was on an intellectual basis. He really liked the pre-elections forum the PS department held during the last elections, which notably had representation from various political parties. However, he said that “whatever our students hold, should be for our students”, and we would have to filter outsiders at the door.

Nevertheless, will there be student censorship? He didn’t seem to keen about it, but it’s not something that he could just let be. “We’ll try to talk to the writer and ask him/her to be more considerate in the article.”

I have no real-life skills in Political Science

The following are chat excerpts with a friend who’s in computing. She’s been doing really awesome stuff, really:

I just love seeing my design work out there and watching how people react to it
I did a few UI designs before but they were not for online stuff
2 years ago LG released a black chocolate handphone
I designed the interface for the screen which people could interact with during the launch
where the floor was all black, when a person got near it the black chocolate phone arrows will show up
and the screen right in front would show the phone order screen hahaha
that was really really fun stuff

then there was the Listerine new Orange flavour campaign. Or was it lemon? bleah can’t remember the flavour.
but for that, we took a truck and redesigned it to look like a lemonade / juice drink stall.
but instead, people would approach it and get to try their new mouthwash equipped with basin too!
interaction design is really fun, you always have to think of what to do to get the users to react in a certain way

Political Science students have no skills at all. Literally. What can we do besides academia and journalism? What have we been doing for 3-4 years? Reading and writing. Research. If we don’t make it into a job or career where there is some hint of national or international politics involved, then that three to four years we spent in university is basically report-writing practice at some bloody office building.

Totally skip out on student organizations? Then you’ve got no organizational or teamwork skills. Never worked with anyone, never led anyone, never done anything besides write essays. Student organizations in NUS suck anyway, they’ve never institutionalised training of technical skills anyway.

NUS people hate team presentations. single-person presentations too. I have seen countless presentations in which the powerpoints totally suck, there are in excess of 150 words on that slide. And there are ten slides, for a totally of a short essay.

Is PS a waste of time? Maybe. We learn a whole bunch of stuff about democracy, other countries, international movements, ethnicity, rhetoric, public administration, etc. It is totally interesting, and a will never come into use in real life unless you REALLY REALLY make it useful (like go into politics, journalism or academia) or the job scope demands part of it (think tank researcher, some large companies have government affairs department). We get to meet people (a certain kind of people), but you can do that in other courses of study anyway. We might have “critical thinking skills” but I’m sure Eng Lit students have them too.

I’m not sure if PS gives me an edge at nearly anything. What do you think?

The random tech post: Quick safely remove hardware trick

Okay, this is a damn Windows tech post. Okay, I really hate that I have to go into a dialogue box to “safely remove hardware” whenever I want to pull out a USB drive or whatever. I found a quicker way.
Instead of double-clicking, or right-clicking, do a quick left-click, right-click, and left-click and the following pop-up menu will appear.

This pop-up is much better than the damn dialogue menu

Somtimes simply left-clicking doesn’t make this menu appear. After some experimentation with both my laptops running Win XP, I found that the three-click method is more reliable.

Yeah, this post is just to remind myself I can do this.

SPOILER ALERT: You need to prepare to watch “Blindness”

Even though “Blindness” was panned by critics at Cannes and Toronto, I actually enjoyed the film.I’ve got a reason for it, and that’s because I read the book it is based on. The book itself is one everyone should read, and for the same reasons, the movie is one you should watch. Here’s a way to pierce through the fog.

A major reason I thnk why people don’t like this film because it’s too successful at making you feel blind, unsure of what’s going on, lost. Look at Roger Ebert’s review:

“Blindness” is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I’ve ever seen. It is an allegory about a group of people who survive under great stress, but frankly I would rather have seen them perish than sit through the final three-quarters of the film. Not only is it despairing and sickening, it’s ugly. Denatured, sometimes overexposed, sometimes too shadowy to see, it is an experiment to determine how much you can fool with a print before ending up with mud, intercut with brightly lit milk.

I admit this is true. The film has its cinematographic moments. however, Ebert can’t piece the film together because the director pulls out every trick in the bag to disorient you for a good reason.

So here are the necessary spoilers and caveats when watching Blindness. (Well, it’s no longer apt to call it a ’spoiler’ since I can only make it better by telling you this.)

• The book makes you feel blind. In that spirit, the movie tries to make you feel blind too by using a whole bunch of camera tricks that are outside the norm of regular cinematography. Just bear with it and take it in.
• A quick summary of “Blindness”. It’s about a woman who doesn’t lose her sight in a blindness epidemic. The initial cases are quarantined in an asylum, with ironically no help from the outside. More people come in everyday. It’s a kingdom of the blind, with people pissing and shitting and stumbling around. It quickly descends into mobster rule. There’s something to be said about the human condition, politics and ethics, but you decide that on your own.
• Nobody in the movie is named. We’re used to having the names of pivotal characters given to us, because this signifies ‘this is a character you need to pay attention to’. The movie does away with that because it doesn’t need to. Arguably, when you’re blind and you’re reduced to such a state, it doesn’t really matter anyway.
• Why doesn’t the lady go blind? Where did he find a gun? Where is the city location? . Plot device, or it doesn’t really matter.

Further spoilers ahead.

There’s a certain irony about using a visual medium to depict blindness, but in a certain way it works too. Imagine being confused throughout the whole film. Then as a character regains his sight, the movie regains normal cinematographic ‘language’ to parallel plot development. I’m not sure whether this works or not because I know exactly what’s going to happen as the movie doesnbn’t deviate from the book. But through the optic of the book, it’s easy to see the film for what it tries to do.

One paragraph review: Watch it with a friend who read the book. I like Ruffalo and Moore.