Musings

Since buying my first digital camera 11 years ago and getting into digital imaging, I’ve hardly ever printed photos anymore, apart from the odd occasion when we need pictures for photo frames at home, or when parents ask for them to display at Lentor.

Which is all the more funny, because I’ve been printing a lot of photos of late – and specifically, of Hannah. In fact, I’ve taken to decorating all the sides of my cubicle’s overhead cabinets with 5R photos of Hannah, and a couple more of my favorite pictures. Part of the wall now looks like this:

It’s sort of eye-catching too, because the first thing anyone sees when walking into my cubicle too are going to be these photos.:)

Oh yeah – one update: Matt will be coming after all, though given the heavy snow fall in North-East America right now he’s now flying here by an entirely different route – southwards to Houston, then to Moscow and then to Singapore and hopefully arriving the Sunday next week. The trip had to be drastically shortened from the original 25 days to now just 9 days though, with the Penang and Bali legs removed.:(

Nearly a decade ago I marked an examination paper on a subject I was lecturing and also heading in one of my prior institutions. This was an international examination, and the numbered of candidates sitting for my paper number in the several thousands from all around Asia.

I remembered the answers in one particular script weren’t very good. In fact, the candidate probably realized that he (or she?) wasn’t going to do very well, and I think this was one of my own lecture group students. Why? Because on the very last page of his answers, he wrote the following:

“Mr. Foo, I know you’re marking this paper. Please please please pass me because this is my last semester!!”

Not that I actually knew exactly who he was, because all the candidates were identified only by their student admin number.

But that’s about the extent of strange answers I get in my 14 years being an educator. Other educators around the world though have very different experiences, and someone even did a collection of it here. Here’s a sample from that web page:

Be warned though: some of those samples are a mite vulgar, if innocently so. Also, many of those samples seem to come from mathematical assessments, which leads one to wonder maybe assessments in that subject sees the strangest answers.:)

The domain transfer is about nearly done, though there are still a couple of comments that were posted just before the transfer that didn’t correctly export itself. Oh well.

There was a news paper article this morning in The Straits Times though that pique my interest: the headline says it all; truncated and formatted to save space:

Jan 15, 2010
Teacher sues MOE after fall in school
High Court case one of more than 13,000 filed last year up to Nov
By K.C. Vijayan, Law Correspondent

A PRIMARY school teacher is taking the Ministry of Education (MOE) to court after she fractured her right ankle by jumping from a height of 3.7m to get out from her school premises.

The 38-year-old found herself locked in the school on a Saturday morning in Feb 2006, screamed for help for 30 minutes and then decided to leap to freedom. She climbed over a ventilation gap between the first and second floors and jumped out onto a grass patch, but injured herself badly enough to need 100 days of medical leave. As a result, she is suing the MOE, holding it indirectly liable for the school’s alleged negligence and lack of duty of care.

…

According to court documents, the teacher went to the school in Tiong Bahru on a Saturday morning to do some work in her classroom. She was stranded when she realised the staff room had been locked with her bag and cellphone in it, leaving her unable to call for help, and all the exits were shuttered and closed.

The mother of two needed surgery after the incident and still has difficulty climbing staircases, squatting or standing for long. She also walks with a limp. Through lawyer S. Perumal, she is seeking damages from the MOE, which oversees the school and is defended by the Attorney-General’s Chambers.

The MOE is denying the claims, and argues that it was her own choice to go to school on a non-work day. There is also a standard operating procedure for teachers to sign in, which she did not do, so no one knew she was on the premises. The MOE also argues that she could have tried other routes, or raised the fire alarm.

…

Thought provoking to say the least, since this incident gets into the terrifically fuzzy area of job hazards and what exactly is your employer liable for. Falling injuries like these really do seem the extreme, and did the lady really fully exhaust all other means of getting out before taking a jump off a height of 3.7m. And to begin with, when you’re coming to work on a weekend, you should be fully aware of the security placements on doors and gates i.e. if you’re still walking around without your staff access card or handphone, you’re asking for trouble.

Still, I can empathize with her because 7 years ago I was in the same position, though at University in Perth. On a February Sunday morning I returned back to the research office to get some work done. I was still new to the campus and was figuring out the security systems, and accidentally found myself locked along a third story elevated platform that links two buildings together. The door behind me was autolocking, and the door in front of me I couldn’t open because my security access had not been fully activated yet. The platform looked like this:

In case the picture’s unclear: this interconnecting link was on the third floor – i.e. a drop of about 10 metres down if I decided to try what this lady here did with her school yesterday.

Fortunately, I had my mobile with me (unlike this poor lady) – so I ended up calling my Ph.D supervisor, and he came from home – he was fortunately intending to come to work over the weekend anyway – to rescue me.:)

Matt and I were having an MSN chat the other day while I was still in Kumamoto, and one part of it went like this:

Matt: “It is a shame you won’t get to see Nagasaki, though.”

Me: “Yeah. But Ling is now determined to visit Hokkaido. I think she feels it’s crazily unfair I’m in Japan and she’s in Singapore.:)

Matt: “Haha, you think? Duh! : ) Frankly, I think it’s unfair you’re in Japan and I’m in the US!”

The visit and exchange program to Kumamoto has been an incredibly enriching experience. It’s not merely this whole thing about visiting another country and a culture you read about so much in media, and so pervasive among youth in Singapore even.

Rather, living and teaching in Kumamoto for an intensive winter program has let me intently interact with my Japanese counterparts and students on their own home ground.

Moreover, I’m glad that my first visit to Japan has not been to a place like Tokyo or Hokkaido. Kumamoto isn’t a tourist prefecture, with the number of tourist-y ‘sights’ amounting to less fingers than you’ve got on one hand. And throughout my 9 day stay, the number of Caucasians I saw numbered about 2 – maybe – altogether.

But what I saw and experienced I think is an accurate representation of what life in Japan is like for the average Japanese, or as much as I could experience from a 9 day stay. It’s a taste of the country: not artificial and intended only for tourist consumption, as would be inevitably the case to some degree in the tourist-y cities of Japan. One of the most telling signs was the near absence of English translations everywhere: including restaurant menus, maps and street sign posts. Kumamoto City just isn’t regarded as a city for travelers from outside Japan. Heck. Even English communication with their frontline reception staff in the hotel and embedded restaurants was crazily difficult. It just goes to show how unaccustomed was the city to non-Japanese travelers.

And aside from the amazing business-class dinners I had everyday, I walked and commuted by train to work, returned during peak hour traffic, and walked some more back home (hotel) every night like the average Japanese Joe. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was obviously under-dressed for winter with just thin long pants, a short-sleeved shirt and my Karri Valley Resort windbreaker, I would have looked almost like a local – until I was spoken to in Japanese and my pathetic response would be “I’m so sorry but I don’t understand!”

Continued in the next post!

I ‘moved’ house at work just before I vamoosed for my in-camp training, and now that I’m back in the office have finally been able to properly arrange my things at my new home.

Now, one of my big regrets over the years has been not recording and taking pictures of my work areas, especially considering how much time one spends in a day at work and the number of significant life events that occur there too. So, here’s a picture of my new ‘home’, as taken very early morning – I’m usually at work by 7:30 AM – and stitched together using Photoshop from 7 pictures.

Sweeping from left to right: there’s a three tiered book shelf (two of the Blurb photobooks there), umbrellas, my ties, books, spare copies of a game magazine I’m involved in with my students, boxes for Falcon 4.0, The Sims 2, and Warcraft III, overhead cabinets, floor cabinets, and two of my three notebooks I use at work.

When I showed Ling this photo, she grumbled:

“2 tables, 2 chairs, 2 cabinets,  2 laptops, 2 umbrellas, 2 water bottles, 2 spoons, 2 phones etc. etc…. life’s not fair. :(”

Haha.:)

There’s a couple of sites that I rely on a lot whenever I make a trip overseas: one’s Tripadvisor, and the other is Google Maps. The latter is especially handy, since for every journey I have to plan for during a trip, I like to find out first all the transportation options, timings, fares and routes to get from one point to the other.

There’s one problem with Google Maps though: it’s an exclusively online application. You need to be connected online for it to work. And while there’s a lot of handphones these days, including the iPhone, with mobile versions of Google Maps, you don’t want to be paying GPRS-rated prices in a foreign country just to navigate around. It’s bad enough if you’re walking. It’s worse when you’re traveling by vehicle since the distance covered would be far greater.

What I’ve always done so far is to do print screens of the maps, then stitch them up to an over-sized version. That’s never worked very well – since it’s a lot of work to align and stitch the images up (haven’t tried those panoramic stitching programs on maps yet but I think they should work well).

That’s what I had to do regardless for the San Francisco trip in March this year though. My notebook was packed with about 25 maps of varying sizes covering each of the trips we were making and vicinities throughout the 8 days stay.

I was dreading map production for the coming trip to Kumamoto in Kyushu as this time it’s all in Japanese LOL. Fortunately, I’ve (finally!) found a program that streamlines all that stitching into a single automated process – and it’s a Windows freeware application called Google Maps Buddy.

This is a tiny application that runs within its browser. It lets you specify which areas you’d like included in your map, and you also indicate the zoom / detail level you want. The nifty little program then automatically downloads all the small tile maps, and stitches them all up seamlessly into a gigantic map for you. I’ve been able to create a city map of Kumamoto, and also a much larger map of a good part of the prefecture – since I’ll likely be commuting daily between the college I’ll be lecturing at, and also the city where my hotel is likely going to be.

The largest map I’ve produced now is 7710×10280 pixels. If I’d manually stitched client images, it would had likely taken me maybe 3-4 hours to get them all done. Using Google Maps Buddy: it took me 10 seconds to specify the map parameters, and the program churned out the image in the background on its own. Just amazing.:)

As part of the preparation for my upcoming staff-exchange trip to Japan in December this year, I’ve been translating about 30 hours worth of lecture material into, well, Japanese. The students I’ll be lecturing do know English, but – or so I’ve been advised – not with the same level of written and reading fluency than the average Singaporean of similar age, no matter what Ms. Ris ‘Boomz’ Low’s apologists would like you to believe.

A couple of colleagues jokingly said I should find time in the next 5 weeks before the trip to learn Japanese. Yeah – if I only had the time after my normal teaching hours + two current research projects (one in progress, one in planning) I’m also lead investigator for + a bunch of other student-centric activities that span the entire year.

There’re two things that make my job easier though. One is the freely available web site-based translation tools. I remembered first using them at the early days of the web before the millennium, and they were already very useful in translating the odd foreign language word or phrase. The tools these days can translate entire paragraphs of text.

Here’s what a typical slide of mine looks like right now (the topic is on the use of software metrics):

The translation accuracy using that site for single words or very short phrases isn’t too bad, but for paragraphs it can be spotty though. I’m assuming that this is due to the additional layer of statement parsing that’s necessary at application end to decipher the structure of a statement and its meaning before getting to the translation bits, and that layer adds a degree of variability to accuracy.

That’s where the second thing has come in to help: a Japanese colleague in my faculty has helped me look through each slide of my lecture series as I finish them and done the edits to clear out all the embarrassing bits. Like the following:

“Challenges in constructing software” using the web site-based translation tells me it’s “挑戦がソフトウェアを作成する”. Unfortunately that actually means “A challenge makes software”.

After her edit, it now reads “ソフトウェア構築にあたるチャレンジ “, which means “A challenge equal to the software construction” according to reverse translation.

Definitely sounds better! More notes on the trip prep to come soon.:)

This has got to be the best chemistry lesson I’ve seen in a while!

If only Chemistry was so funny back during my time LOL. There seems to be different versions of the video floating around, with e.g. another version here with a slightly different set of elements at play.:)

Blogged during my lunch break!

Even despite that I’ve been on several days of leave on and off the last week, a lot of that free time had been spent preparing for a paper’s presentation at ISATE – International Symposium for Advances in Technology Education – 2009. The conference is in its third year, and is a nice collaborative effort between several polytechnics here and the National Colleges of Technology in Kyushu.

Singapore and Japan take turns to host it each year, and it was Singapore Polytechnic’s turn this year. My paper was a jointly authored one, and centered on the use of commercial off-the-shelf games (COTS) to supplement learning.

The paper’s genesis is a bit of an interesting story in itself. A year ago I was asked to speak during a Parents Seminar about learning opportunities in commercially available games, and this was tied in with a couple of educational game articles I’d also written. These days, interactive digital media learning is quite the rage, but a lot of effort is spent creating interactive applications and games using high-level development tools.

An alternative is to look at already commercially available games on the shelves. The challenge however is that these retail games are not typically designed with education or learning in mind, so the play experience does not consider pedagogical issues in its design of play elements. So, unlike the in-house developed games which (ideally) construct the application from desired learning outcomes and consideration of pedagogy first, in the investigation of COTS, the exploration on potential learning opportunities is necessarily retrospective.

Either way, the presentation turned out alright. I spoke well in excess of my allocated time, got and answered questions, and was approached by several members of the audience later asking asking for name cards, and remarking that my talk was informative, and to another quite enjoyable. But I was delivering in my usual spit-fire mode though, and in the words of another person during a talk I did for public school teachers, like a wild “roller-coaster ride”.

Still, I recorded the whole talk, and Ling has already messaged asking to watch the presentation when I get home. Over my dead body though – I cringe whenever I see myself on screen!

“Welcome to Japan”

Ling has had a fascination with visiting Hokkaido for ages now on account of the amazing flower blooms they’ve got each season. I’ve technically been to Japan before – but only in Transit and at Narita Airport, so it doesn’t really count.

Nicely though, if plans go ahead without a hitch, I’ll be in Japan in December this year for a couple of weeks. Not for leisure (sigh), but for work – I’ll be lecturing on Software Engineering at a college in Kyūshū.

Ling is already in both parts envy and sad – since it means she’ll be alone with Hannah at home for the couple of weeks I’m away. We’re thinking about having her stay at Lentor for a bit though, since unless Hannah can learn her first words come December, I’m not certain if Ling won’t go bonkers then with no one else to talk to at home.:)