national day photo!

Alternate Universe

Second life is emerging as a powerful new medium for social interactions of all sorts, from romance to making money. It may be the internet next big thing. 

• Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 8,786,822 Residents from around the globe.

• The people who are coming to this online universe aren’t just socializing, however. They’re also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, or even dating.

• A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent.

• By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. (This means 1.6 billion-out of a total 2 billion Internet users- will have found new lives online.)

• “It’s basically Tom Friedman’s flat world.” (In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world)

• “It’s globalization of the virtual world.

 Advantages 

1. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tool to produce just about anything, Second life is in some way the ideal free market.

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  • Linden Lab’s “no control” policy allows for any income made inside Second Life to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars.( Linden Lab is the company that operates Second Life)
  • Linden Lab has also relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship.

1. The multinational companies are using Second Life to

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  • Hold staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, email or Skype.
  • More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing.
  • With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices- where it’s easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting-and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail.

     

1. Educational and research tool,

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  • More than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life.

1. It empowers people. (social freedom)

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  • Newcomers agree to a list of several do’s and don’ts, but within the communities they form, Residents can impose their own codes of conduct.
  • The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It’s a potent medium for socializing- it provides people with a way to express, explore, and experiment with identity, venture their frustrations, reveal alter ego.
  • “Brigadoon,” for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. In Second life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life.

 However, 

• Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing.
• Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people’s getting more and more of their social activity online because virtual worlds don’t have the nuance of face-to-face interaction.
• It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life’s taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion.

  

• All in all, whether you think it’s a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it’s captivating the globe.

 publisher: pear

ODA: official development assistanceExample to show how aid doesn’t seem to be of much help to those in need:“[A tragedy of the world’s poor has been that] the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.

… It is heart-breaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicing to dying poor children.”

—    William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden; Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and so Little Good, (Penguin Press, 2006), p. 4 

  Development assistance is often of dubious quality. In many cases,

1. Aid is primarily designed to serve the strategic and economic interests of the donor countries;

·        Many only provide aid to countries that may be of some benefit to them eg:

1.  
   1. The US has directed aid to regions where it has concerns related to its national security, e.g. Middle East, and in Cold War times in particular, Central America and the Caribbean;
   2. Sweden has targeted aid to “progressive societies”;
   3. France has sought to promote maintenance or preserve and spread of French culture, language, and influence, especially in West Africa, while disproportionately giving aid to those that have extensive commercial ties with France;
   4. Japan has also heavily skewed aid towards those in East Asia with extensive commercial ties together with conditions of Japanese purchases;

• Aid systems based on the interests of donors instead of the needs of recipients’ make development assistance inefficient;

 

1. Aid Money Often Tied to Various Restrictive Conditions: aid tied with conditions cut the value of aid to recipient countries by some 25-40 percent, because it obliges them to purchase uncompetitively priced imports from the richer nations.

 

1. Too little aid reaches countries that most desperately need it

• Poorest countries were not necessarily recipients of most aid. For example, “excluding debt relief for Nigeria, aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased by only 2%”

 

1. Or [aid is primarily designed] to benefit powerful domestic interest groups

 

1. Phantom aid:

 

·        Estimate that $37 billion—roughly half of global aid—is “phantom aid”, that is, it is not genuinely available to poor countries to fight poverty.

·        Real aid only made up 53% of the official assistance

 

1. It is undeniable that there has been poor governance, corruption and mismanagement in Africa.

 

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp

 

Example qns:

1)      “Take from the rich and give to the poor.” Is this the solution to poverty?

2)      Is food aid the best solution to hunger?

3)      “Foreign aid is the best way to solve a country’s poverty” Discuss.

class photo

cant upload ar..guess the connection too slow..will try other means thou..mayb photobucket? think we had one last year right? what’s username and password ar?

China’s Me Generation!?

original posted on Time Magazine 26th july,2007

Points in the Passage:

• There are roughly 300 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that it is becoming.
• These people “belong to a generation for whom prosperity and personal freedom haven’t required democracy“
• “the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression.” according to the author, makes this generation feel powerless in politics- “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” says Chen. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”
• It was pedicted that “that economic growth would eventually bring democracy to China”, but China’s Me generation seems to be happy in preserving the status quo-“They are proud of what China has accomplished, and very positive about the government,” says P.T. Black, who conducts extensive marketing research for a Shanghai-based company called Jigsaw International.
• Because of China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1978, this is the first generation in the world’s history in which a majority are single children, a group whose solipsistic tendencies have been further encouraged by a growing obsession with consumerism, the Internet and video games. They have known little (about the situation and politics in china before eg. the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution…) but peace and an ever increasing economic boom.

• China’s future will be defined by whether they realize that democracy can help China, too.

Thoughts:

• How true is passage in applying to modern China? Do people (or according to the author, “China’s Me generation”) really not care about the Politics in China? Do Americans care more about the Politics? How do people define politics? Is it true that Democracy can really “save” CHINA or is it what the Media (especially the western) trying to make people think so?

Evaluation:

For those who can read chinese, I would recommend you to read these following passages which are all about the “China’s Me Generation”.

One passage is the declare of one of the people who was interviwed by the journalist of the Time Magazine as she is not happy with what the journalist said in this passage and she thinks that the author, Simon Elegant, twisted her words without her permission. http://www.sohoxiaobao.com/chinese/bbs/blog_view.php?id=701593

And this passage is from one of her friends in talking about how foreign journalist usually think of when they interview people in china http://www.wangxiaofeng.net/index.php?p=1334

This passage is written by one of the linkmen in Phoenix TV, Hong Kong, as she talked to the author, Simon Elegant, about the motive and intension of writting this article “China’s Me Generation” http://blog.phoenixtv.com/html/32/674832-970716.html#xspace-itemform

Or you can view them using google translate by typing in the URL addresses above in the form.

Some relevant Questions:

1. Do people in your country (eg, Singapore) care about the Politics?
2. How far do you think young people nowadays are considering material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual value?
3. Is globalisation necessarily a bad thing?

By Fangming

“Foreign direct investment in China rises 12% in first half” (The Straits Times)

 

Facts:

-         China’s foreign direct investment is currently US$6.6 billion

-         China was the world’s 4^th largest recipient of foreign direct investment last year after US, UK and France (according to the UN)

-         Pull factors: Low manufacturing costs and a pool of 1.3 billion increasingly affluent consumers are luring foreign companies to set up factories in China.

-         Due to investment inflows, China is now the world’s biggest producer of cell phones, computers and clothes.

 

Evaluation:

-         Remember Economics? Trade surplus invites resentment from the US, causing it to slap protectionism and this has worsen their bilateral relationship (Read ConnECT issue 2007.2 for further details. haha =P)

-         1.3 billion of increasingly affluent consumers translate into more consumerism in China, which may have a dampening effect on its environment. The fact that currently China becomes the world’s most polluting country (defeating the US) is perhaps one growing concern.

-         Environmental concern may due to irresponsibility of those manufacturing factories. The environment concerns are played down by the need to develop economically and efficiently.

 

Relevant questions:

1. How far can a balance be achieved between environmental conservation and economic progress?
2. Consider the importance of speed in modern society
3. The term “superpower” is no longer relevant. How far DYA with this statement?

by Christina Amanda

“Failed PSLE on first try? NorthLight offers place” (The Straits Times)

 

NorthLight

-         vocational school

-         students learn skills like electricity, retail, cookery, mechanical, healthcare or landscape (ITE skills)

-         mathematic class à use Google Earth to find their school, then introduce concept of area and perimeter

-         economics class à given real fast food menus, decide what is the best value for their money

-         seems to successfully helped students who are uninterested in primary school classes

 

Evaluation

This is a form of alternative education available (ITE for primary school students) so that rather than spending another year in primary school (where they are likely to be interested and enthusiastic in classes), NorthLight will strengthen their skills instead.

However, we shall not forget the impact that may result from this kind of “streaming”. Isn’t such streaming too early, and shouldn’t instead these children be given extra tuition or more help in studies? Such streaming may end up in negative stereotypes. Besides, such students may not be able to compete in a highly competitive environment in Singapore, end up getting a lower-paid job and this becomes a viscous cycle.

 

Relevant questions:

1. Does the government of your country pay enough attention to the needs of the sick and disadvantaged?
2. “Education needs to reinvent itself to remain relevant.” Assess the education system in your country in the light of this statement.
3. Do schools adequately prepare students for the real world?

by Christina Amanda

Top Official calls for new food safety laws

Summary: 

• A top health official has called for more integration within China’s fragmented food regulatory system yesterday to boost its troubled safety record.
• The military warned that unsafe food could undermine its combat-readiness.
• New laws were needed to strengthen food safety supervision by coordinating the duties of competing government agencies.
• The lack of a centrally controlled regulatory system is considered a key defect underpinning China’s perennial food and drug safety woes.
• Blurred lines of authority and divided responsibilities often enable the country’s countless illegal operations to escape detection.
• A specially developed food quality control system would be employed at 39 Olympic test events starting from Aug 8.
• Foods and drugs are special products, and manufacturers and sellers cannot only go after economic gain.
• Rising pork prices have also led to some farmers force-feeding their pigs with wastewater to increase their weight before slaughtered.

Personal Comments: 

o       This article is related to questions on “Governance and Politics”. For example, “what may a county’s citizens justly demand of their government?”

o       Related to questions on “health”. For example, “how far do you agree that our health is in our own hands?”

o       Possible questions:

- Food is serious business. Comment.

- Assess how effectively your country ensures the safety of her people.

 

§         Since food is one of the essential things we need for survival, this matter should not be taken lightly. Of course, the government ruling the country should have the largest role in improving and regulating the quality of the food her country produces or imports.

§         Define the lines of authority clearly and prevent divided responsibilities to prevent illegal operations from happening.

§         Food safety problems can have serious negative impact on the country.

-The number of tourists may decrease.

-The citizens of the country may live in fear over their health and safety of the food they consume everyday.  

         *Source: The Straits Times     Saturday, July 14, 2007

By Wei Bin 

 

Bio-Fuel

• In recent years, the term “biofuel” has come to mean the last category – ethanol and diesel, made from crops including corn, sugarcane and rapeseed.
• A recent UK government publication declared that biofuels reduced emissions “by 50-60% compared to fossil fuels”.
• Ethanol for fuel is made through fermentation.
• Sixty percent of new cars can run on a fuel mix which includes 85% ethanol.

 Problems:

• Asian countries may be tempted to replace rainforest with more palm oil plantations, reduce habitat for animals and wild plants still further 
• If increased proportions of food crops such as corn or soy are used for fuel, that may push prices up, affecting food supplies for less prosperous citizens.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6294133.stm

comment:

Ethanol might be the latest renewable source of energy. In the future, this may alleviate issues on scarce and depleting resources. Advancement in technologies also has helped human to utilise this new source of energy more efficiently.

Questions:

1. “Decaying, dying, dead.” Is this a fair assessment of the environment in your part of the world?

2. Is man destroying the environment too rapidly?

by Julianti Ng

The Other Side Of India’s Tech Boom

Source: Fortune magazine, July 23, 2007

Some useful information and how they can be used in essay:

• In New Delhi alone, about 10 000 people, some young children, dismantle old computers and other equipment–know as e-waste, searching for gold, copper, paladium or anything to turn to cash. (poverty)

• Recyclers expose themselves to toxic metals but it is a main source of income for them

• E-waste recycling is a booming business in India

• A study by Toxics Link, an advocacy group in New Delhi, found that metals from 183 defunct computers could yield as much as $24 000 (environment; recycling)

• India currently produces 150 000 tons of e-waste a year and illegally imports at least that amount from the West. (impact of improving technology)

• India currently has only 22 computers for every 1000 people but that number is projected to increase to 120 in the next five years (improvement in technology in LDCs)

• European firms that have come to India with plans to start recycling canters are also put off by the lack of regulation, said Ravi Agarwal, the director of Toxics Link.

• India has only 2 government-recognised e-waste recycling facilities, in Chennai and Bangalore. Together they recycle less than 1% of India’s total e-waste. (Environment)

by huiting