Category: Uncategorized

After watching the semi-finals of “The Apprentice”, I was left wondering about one issue. In certain characteristics, I do identify myself with Lucinda, the person who got fired tonight. The reason that she got fired was because Sir Alan felt that she was not suitable for his organisation.

One of her interview questions struck a chord with me. She was asked if she was motivated by money and she said ‘No’. I have been asked this question before and I have also answered ‘No’. I know that it is not the right answer to give, especially if you’re dealing with a profit driven corporate environment, but that’s the truth. To me, money is not an end in itself, but only a means to achieve an end. Even then, it is not the only means to achieve any end. So, money does not have much motivational affect on me. Money is merely one measure of success and certainly not the most important one.

Another issue that the interviewers had with her, was that they didn’t think that she was a team player. She has spent her time as an external contractor, working independently. When she was put in charge of the teams, twice, she performed well and was liked by the rest of her team. But there were problems when she had to work under someone else and she had problems adjusting and there were complaints that she undermined the leadership of others. She was also considered an odd-ball, consistently side-lined by the others. This made her a little too zany for Sir Alan’s organisation and she was ultimately fired.

I have a similar problem myself. I have spent most of my life self employed, either working independently, or leading a small team. When I do work under someone else, I will have problems, if the leader is incompetent. I do not suffer fools gladly, regardless of whether they are above or under me. And what’s worst, I will make it clearly known that I feel this way. This is possibly the biggest problem, that makes me unemployable.

In my case, I’m very certain that I’d be able to positively contribute to any organisation, as long as I’m working under a boss who takes criticism well, even when it comes from under him, and with a team that’s open minded enough to accept odd-ballness. I have had my fair share of working under incompetent leaders, but it’s only the bodoh sombong ones who have a problem with me. When I attack a policy decision, I’m not attacking the person who made it. I think the trouble is that some people take things too personally. My straightforwardness doesn’t help matter either.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this. It just means that I am fated to try to find my own way in this world. Not everyone is born to be a team player. You have got to have some team leaders as well as independents. In fact, I’d argue that all kinds of people are needed in an organisation. However, it’s the practice of most organisations to hire like minded individuals to reduce the amount of internal discord and dissent, which is detrimental.

As a result, an inanimate object like a corporation, ends up acquiring a character. That’s how you can have things like a Chinaman Company, which is generally characterised by it’s extreme shrewdness. Thankfully, there are also other kinds of organisations, the kind that are not entirely driven by profit. However, whether or not these organisations are sustainable in the long term, is yet to be seen.

PS: Time to think of how to set up a Social-Technoprise.

We had a prolonged TehTarik session last night that lasted till 4.30am. During that time, lots of things were discussed and one of the things that came up was game theory. As the rest of us were not very familiar with it, we asked the economists to explain a typical game to us, the prisoner’s dilemma.

You can read the details of the game on wikipedia. The gist of the problem is this:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies (“defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Each prisoner can either choose to defect (D) or collaborate (C) with each other without knowing what the other chooses and make their decisions independently. But that is a rather false assumption because the decisions will never be independent.

For this game, the typical argument is that if we assume that the other prisoner chooses D, then we have to choose D too, in order to ensure a 5 year sentence for us. If we assume that the other prisoner chooses C, then we have to choose D in order to ensure that we go free. But if we assume that both prisoners are rational, the outcome would be DD, which indicates that CD is a transitionary state and the problem will not converge on that state.

Therefore, the only two possible points of convergence are CC and DD. CC happens by direct choice of both prisoners, and is a potential irrational point of convergence. DD is a potential rational convergence by being forced into it due to the situation. CD is rather impossible unless one of the two prisoners is an idiot. And of these two steady states, CC ensures the minimal punishment between the two. Therefore, if both prisoners are smart, they will both choose CC.

I don’t know why, but this is the way that my head works. That’s probably why I usually give odd-ball answers when asked questions like this during interviews. This is also why I have always struggled with probability in school because I can never quite see the same outcomes as the mathematicians. Maybe I’m just an irrational person or the irrational idiot who chooses C.

PS: Obviously, I’m not an economist nor a mathematician. I’m just an engineer who likes steady states and hates non-steady states.

Oh, after reading the wiki article further, I do think that I’m not weird anymore. I can understand why I strongly support Open Source as much as I do. A similar dilemma is present in the Open Source model of development. Being the irrational idiot that I am, I choose to support the Open Source model. I’m just happy to know that I’m not alone and there are many engineers who think the same way that I do. Also, the Open Source movement is on a slow but steady way to world domination.

I’m rather curious with the recent decisions made by our government. As a result of the rising fuel prices, I had predicted that the government would raise the pay of the civil service, which would then force the private sector to follow suit, leading to a pay inflation in Malaysia. However, the government seems to have decided not to do that.

Instead, the government is now encouraging civil servants to seek employment outside the civil service to supplement their income. This is contrary to the General Orders of the civil service. All this time, it is general knowledge that although the GO exists, the government wouldn’t take any action against it’s employees. However, this time around, things are slightly different as the government is openly encouraging it’s employees to contravene the GO.

The idea of encouraging civil servants to get second jobs or start small businesses is only a very short term stop-gap measure. Assuming that the economy gets worse, then what? The civil servants are not immune from the effects of an ailing economy. With a limited economy, there are only so many things that you can sell, and so many part time jobs available. Assuming that the economy gets better, then what? Force all the civil servants to abandon their successful sources of secondary income in order to adhere to the GO? That would just be unfair to the civil servants who have put in an effort to make their little businesses work.

Then, there has also been recent suggestions by the government to pay it’s employees twice a month, instead of monthly. The excuse is that this will help the civil servants manage their expenses better by only releasing their pay packets, half a month at a time. This doesn’t make any sense to me as everything else is synchronised to a monthly pay cycle. So, bills will still need to be paid at the end of the month, with only half the pay packet in the bank.

What this silly idea suggests to me is that the government may be having some cash flow problems, which worries me. As usual, I think that our present government has gone bonkers. They are not thinking things through and only taking the short view. Maybe they don’t feel that they will be in power very much longer, and will leave the cleaning up to whomever takes over after. If that is true, it’s a rather sad situation for the rest of us to be in.

PS: I am not an economist nor a politician.

Of course, marks auditing isn’t all about the problems. There were also many funny parts of the process. Some of these students obviously have too much time on their hands during the exam.

There was a paper which I checked, where the student drew a small little cute cartoon at the end of each part of a question. So, there were a dozen or so little cartoons in the answer script. And the cartoons aren’t random cartoons either. They were all relevant to the question although none of them got any marks, which was a shame. The cartoons were actually quite good.

Then, there was another paper, where the student handed in an extra sheet of paper, which did not have anything on it except for a big cartoon, and an explanation of the cartoon. In it, the student explained that there were thirteen sheets of the answer script, and since thirteen is an unlucky number, the student decided to add an extra sheet with a cartoon in it, just to avoid being unlucky. Well, this student is obviously not Chinese, cause fourteen is probably just as bad, if not worse.

There are also some papers where our jobs as auditors were made very simple, by the fact that they got zero marks for the whole paper. Often, I will also find papers where the student had given about a dozen pages of answers, only to be awarded one mark, probably for the effort. It’s actually kind of sad when I see this and when another person can get full marks for the same question, by only answering everything on a single page.

There was even an instance, where the student had the paper upside down. So, the student flipped the page upright and left a short note on the top of the page, stating that the diagram was upside down. There isn’t any problem with this. But then, the problem is with the mark auditing. Not really sure if it was a 6 or a 9 seeing that the page is upside down. Of course, we ultimately work it out in the end.

And although we aren’t supposed to identify any individuals, we cannot help but be curious about any interesting papers that we come across. When we come across someone who scored more than 95% on a paper, we check to see how well that student did in other papers. We cannot really help being a bit nosy. We do the same when someone does very terribly in a paper too.

And finally, there are some students whose scripts are coded to indicate some special status. Most of these are fairly mundane, like being allowed to take their exams in college due to medical reasons or what nots. But there was this special category that made us all curious as to what it means. It was a code for Jewish students. Presumably, these students may not be allowed to take exams on certain dates. So, they may need to take their papers in quarantine.

I’ve been rather busy auditing the marks for several papers. Of all the modules that I checked, less than half of them were without error. There was only one engineering module that had some minor problem and was promptly fixed. However, for some reason, every management module that I audited had problems in them, with some very major problems, beyond my pay grade to solve.

For this particular module, there were no marks written on the answer scripts. In fact, there were numerous sheets with not even a scratch on them. This means that there is no indication that the sheets have even been read. Then, there were not marks written on the sheets themselves. So, I could not check if the totals in the mark book were actually correct. Even the final totals on the mark book are incorrectly entered. And finally, the distribution of marks were skewed.

I then emailed the examiner with a list of the problems and asked to meet up to rectify them. I was then asked by the examiner to fix some of them myself, and ignore some of the other problems. Obviously, I bumped this up and was told that I could not do it myself, for very obvious reasons that it’s just beyond my pay grade. Since I was lucky enough to have been assigned that module, I was the one who had to settle it.

I was told by the department that the examiner is from the business school next door. So, I called them up to contact the examiner. I was then told that there was no such person. Then, I asked if there might be an external lecturer with that name and was told that there was no such person. Panic!

Then, I dug up the earlier email from the examiner, which listed a mobile number as a contact number. I called up the mobile and got the examiner on the line. I then found out that the examiner lives in a second city and teaches at a third university but is also attached to an institute within the university. So, I guess that the examiner is some sort of adjunct lecturer. However, the examiner is currently overseas and will not be back until next week.

So, I set up a meeting with the examiner. However, I’ve just been told that I might not need to meet up with the examiner as the matter might be taken out of my hands. This is a problematic issue as the marks are needed by last week. We have bumped the issue up and are waiting for more direction. I’m hoping that they will take the thing out of my hands as there is little that I can do about it anyway, except act as an errand boy.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swfMy friend’s wedding was an interesting affair for me. It’s only the second church wedding that I’ve been to in my life, and it’s the very first Chinese church wedding that I’ve been to. So, there were many interesting bits of it.

The day started with Ray picking me up from my hostel and driving over to church. When we arrived, he went on to set up the video camera as he was the designated video man for the day. I was being a busy body and helping him a bit. Then, a guy came over to ask Ray a few questions. After that the guy looked at me, and the conversation went something like this:

Random guy: (staring oddly at me) Who are you?
Me: Hi, I’m Shawn, a friend of the bride’s.
Random guy: (looking surprised) Oh, I’ve never met you before.
Me: Yea, I’m a friend from College.
Random guy: Hi, I’m the groom.
Me: (looking exceedingly embarrassed) Oh! Congratulations!

Pretty silly right? And throughout this time, Ray was standing right next to us and not saying anything! I have never met the groom before and I don’t know how he looks like. When I asked Ray earlier, which was the groom, Ray told me that he was the best dressed guy. Incidentally, the groom is Ray’s cousin. Well, that’s just so Ray.

Soon after that, the bride arrived and the ceremony started. The ceremony itself was pretty interesting. The groom was from Edinburgh, and spoke Cantonese. The bride was from China, and spoke Mandarin. When they took their vows, they both did it in their own language, Cantonese and Mandarin. I found that rather curious especially since they struggled a bit with the extremely formal form of the language. It is your typical “till death to us part” kind of vow. And a comical bit happened when the groom forgot to remove the veil, which he promptly fixed when reminded.

Another interesting bit was the hymn singing during the ceremony. As I do not know any of the hymns, I usually try to just follow along. The music is usually quite simple to follow. So, I just wanted to make sure that I was singing the right parts. But when I tried to listen to the singing, I couldn’t catch which parts everyone else was singing. After a while, I realised why. Most of the congregation was singing in Chinese, while I was trying to discern the English lyrics!

I believe that the thing that sets this ceremony apart from regular church weddings is the bowing. After they were declared man and wife, they took three bows. One to the family of the groom, one to the family of the bride, and the last to everyone present. In return everyone bowed back. So, there was a lot of bowing involved, which makes it a very East Asian kind of ceremony.

Although Ray and I had agreed to get them a gift together, he went on and got them something on his own. So, I was left stranded and had to do the traditional thing of just giving them a red-packet. Thing was, Ray forgot to bring me a red-packet either. So, I had to scrounge around my bags for an old decrepit piece of angpow. Well, as long as it’s red and it contained money, I guess. And I gave it to the bride when I spoke to her after the ceremony.

After the ceremony, there was some lunch, prepared by the members of the church. Damn, it was good authentic Chinese food. I’ve not had such nice stuff in ages. So, I made sure that I had a good helping of everything: dimsum, pau, zhang, ribs, rice, noodles. Everything. Then, there was a photo session outside, with the wedding couple. This took a long time as people had to queue up to get their photos taken. After that, people made their way off.

Some people then went off to the wedding banquet for dinner. I went off to town, to visit the National Portrait Gallery. I never thought that a gallery of peoples’ faces could be so interesting. Then, I caught the bus to the airport and flew back to Cambridge.

PS: The bride’s gown is very elegant. She makes a very beautiful bride.

I spent last weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland. For some reason, it reminds me a lot of Ipoh. Both cities are surrounded by hills, are about the same size, and the way that the main city centre is laid out between two parallel straight roads, just seems so quaint. The main difference, is obviously the overbearing presence of the castle.

I took a noon flight on Saturday. Ray picked me up at the airport and acted as my chauffeur and tour guide for much of the weekend. He took me on one of his standard whirlwind tours on the first day. Mainly, we visited the castle complex, which was interesting. Then, we went to an OZ pub where I had some roo meat. I actually think that it tastes quite good. It’s a little tougher than chicken and much juicier than beef.

However, by the end of the day, I was knackered. So, I went back to my hostel to sleep. I checked into a mixed dorm and got put into a room with four other girls. After getting a shower, I quickly fell asleep but was disturbed many times by people chatting. Two girls in my room came back late and kept whispering away for an awful long time. But there were noisier kids in other rooms. At one point, somebody lost their cool and shouted at the people making the noise, and it worked.

The next day, was my own free day as Ray had to go help prepare and set up things for a wedding. And seeing that the weather forecast said rain, I decided to go visit some museums. The National Museum is really quite good. It provided the history of Scotland, from the time they were a bunch of mixed tribes all over, came together as Scots and got unified with England. Now, I can understand why there is so much talk of devolution. The Scots were never conquered and so, still retain all their pride as an independent nation.

Then, I met up with Ray and some of his friends from church. After dinner, we went off Musselburgh, which is outside Edinburgh, for some really good ice cream. The name of the place is S. Luca and it has been selling fresh ice cream for more than a century. There was a long queue outside when we arrived but service was quick. Then, we went to various beaches at Portobello till it was quite late.

After sending his friends back, we went off for some fish and chips where Ray introduced me to the Edinburgh sauce, which had an interesting taste. We then had some drinks at the pub and chatted for a bit about the frustrations of writing up a thesis. As we had a wedding to attend the next day, I went back to my room, and slept. It was a quiet night and I slept nicely till morning.

I’ll talk about the wedding in another entry, after I have post-processed the photographs. I got some really good ones and I might make a photo book out of it, for the bride. Post processing may take a while though, as I have to work on my thesis. And post-processing wedding photos can be quite a chore, as I need to make the photos exude love and happiness. Hopefully, it’ll be easy in this case.

If you look at the small gallery of photos I have on Edinburgh, you will see three that look a bit odd. These are more experiments with HDR photography. I really need to figure out a way to get rid of the noise in the sky. I particularly like the one of St Mary’s Cathedral and the Castle.