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A recent article in the NYTimes is highlighting a crisis happening in Japan. According to the article, Japan is suffering a “flight from science”. It was engineering prowess that lifted the country from it’s postwar defeat but few are interested in entering such professions today.

In actual fact, this is not a problem that is unique to Japan. It is something that is happening everywhere in this world. Even here at Cambridge, a random survey of engineering graduates will find that few end up working in engineering fields while most end up in banking and consulting. Why?

The answer is a very simple one.

Engineers spend many years of our lives working hard and actually learning real skills at university, only to end up in a job that is under paid, under appreciated, working as an expendable component in an over-glorified assembly line, under a boss who knows nothing about solving problems and having them take the credit for the solutions to problems that we come up with.

Hence, such a situation should come as no surprise to anyone at all.

For example, an engineering PhD in the UK, can either get paid £25,000/year for an exciting and challenging engineering job, or get paid £45,000/year for a boring and simple programming job for a financial institution, the choice becomes very simple for most of us. Although most engineers like the challenge of solving real difficult problems, we have to think about things like marriage, kids and a family as well.

Personally, I don’t think that there is a shortage of engineers at all. Most management types think that we are all expendable cogs in the machine anyway. So, economics will dictate the fact that since we can be replaced by any pizza delivery boy with two weeks of training in pressing some buttons in order, we will not get the pay that we deserve.

I believe that there is definitely a surplus of engineers in this world today. This is partially as a result of the push by various governments. Governments recognise that they need a large number of people with engineering skills. But they may have gone overboard in encouraging and pushing people into the service. As a result, we end up with a large surplus.

So, I’ll wait till the day comes when engineers get paid more than bankers. That will actually be the day when there is a crisis of engineering. Until then, we will just have to find other ways to enjoy both the joys of solving real problems, while making enough money to have a life. The only way for engineers to do this today, is to become entrepreneurs themselves.

Annual scholarship rejection time. This is a drama that our country goes through every year and personally, I’m getting a little sick of it all. There is a problem and the problem needs fixing. Let’s put on my engineering hat and try to figure out what to do with it.

According to TheStar, the PSD DG said:

The most common misunderstanding is that academic excellence will guarantee them scholarship. However, the fact is that many excellent students have to compete for a limited number of scholarships and those awarded will be the ‘cream of the crop

Personally, I have a beef with a lot of people. So, I’m just going to lash out here. If anyone feels offended, please feel free to leave some comments.

• Cream of the Crop.
  What a load of hogwash. With so many 1As being bandied about, it merely dilutes the value of the result. So, there is no possible way of actually telling who are the smart ones and who are the dumb ones. Just because someone gets 20+ 1As does not mean that he/she is actually smarter than someone who only got 8 1As. It just means that he/she had more 1As, that’s all. As a result, scholarships sometimes end up being given in an arbitrary manner, resulting in many unhappy and dissatisfied kids.
• Sad Stories.
  I’m really fed up with the kids who whine about not getting a scholarship to study their dream course overseas. For goodness sake, it’s time to grow up. The world does not revolve around you. Grow a back bone. Yes, it’s an extra hurdle that you’ll need to cross to achieve your dreams. But overcoming it will just make you stronger. The PSD scholarship is only one of the many ways to land your dream career.
• Sad Parents.
  I place quite a bit of blame with the parents. I know that every parent thinks that his/her kid is the sharpest tool in the box and he/she wants to give the kids the best. Since they’re almost 18 anyway, it’s a good time to stop shielding them from the harshness of the world. Let them know that there are lots of other options in life and sometimes, they just need to roll a hard six.

As a possible solution, I would like to propose something to the government. This is an idea that came to me at 2.30am. So, it may need to be fleshed out a little.

Scrap the whole post-SPM scholarship awards craze. There is little value in the diluted result anyway. Instead, force every kid to go onto Matriculation, STPM, A-Levels, IB or equivalent programme, on their own. Then, let them all apply to the universities and courses of their choice. Rich kids can go to private colleges and do their A-Levels while poor kids can go to public schools to do their STPM.

The PSD must release a list of approved universities and courses, based on the country’s needs. The approved universities can just be picked off the THES Top 100 universities or some other ranking. The approved courses will be based on the country’s needs.

Once the students have secured a place with a foreign university, they can then be awarded scholarships. Scholarships can then be allocated on a needs and reward basis. On a rewards basis, anyone who secures a place in the Top 50 university, is automatically given a scholarship. On a needs basis, anyone who secures a place in the Top 100, are given a scholarship, based purely on financial need. Anyone outside the Top 100, can kiss their scholarships goodbye.

You see, in this way, it will help the PSD save a lot of time and money.

• The responsibility of vetting the students will be outsourced to foreign universities. Let the educators decide who is good enough, and not a bunch of bureaucrats. Scholarship interviews can be done away with entirely.
• The students will no longer be subjected to arbitrary criteria. If the students get rejected by the universities, it is less likely that they will whine. This outsources the liability and saves the PSD from having to make “corrections”.
• If the foreign universities decide to offer the students a scholarship or aid, this saves the PSD more time and money again. They won’t need to consider these people anymore and can divert their limited funding elsewhere.

So, what do you think?

UPDATE: Another radical 2.0 idea. Why not let the kids decide among themselves, who deserves the scholarships? Set up a website where the kids can all make their scholarship applications. Then, list out some basic features, such as their results, activities and what nots. Nothing that can be made to identify an individual directly. Then, let the kids and other Malaysians vote on whom they think deserve a scholarship. The top 1000 or something, gets offered a scholarship.

I randomly got asked by some friends if I was interested to watch a movie tonite. The title of the movie was “Made of Honour”. My friend called it a “fluffy” film. Well, with a meaningless title like that, it was obviously a brainless one. So, I looked up the film on IMDB and the checked out who was acting in it. Then, I decided that it was probably a good enough waste of time for me to go watch it as I needed something to take the edge off.

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather recently and have been suffering some problems. After more than a week of suffering, I decided to go see the doctor today. The doctor told me that my problems were most likely caused by stress. But just in case, we will be doing some other tests to see if there are any physiological problems. But the doctor was pretty confident that it’s just stress. So, I was told to “take it easy”. Well, that’s easy if my thesis deadline wasn’t next month!

Since I had already typed up quite a number of pages already. I thought that it would be okay for me to just take the night off and go do something silly. Plus, it’s the doctor’s advice. So, I went out with my friends to watch this fluffy film. The main star of the movie was “McDreamy” from Grey’s Anatomy. But I went because of the main actress, who last acted as Ethan Hunt’s wife in MI3. She’s quite pretty. Their on screen chemistry was so nice that it carried the whole film through.

The show is your typical, Hollywood love story, with a short, dramatic, and fairy-tale ending. And it was stupidly funny. So, it was a good movie to watch. I’ve decided to go watch Indy Jones with these friends too. Watching the movie, I think that I should really go up to Edinburgh for my friend’s wedding. A friend of mine is getting married next month and I have yet to give her my RSVP (bad of me!). But then, I’ve not been feeling well and so I wasn’t so sure if I should go for it.

So this weekend, I’ll make some travel arrangements for the wedding. My friend recommended that I take a train ride up to Edinburgh, but I’m not sure if I’d like to spend so many hours travelling. I’ll compare the train and plane prices and take whichever one makes more sense. My friend also recommended that I book myself into a nice B&B instead of a hostel as they’re cheap and nice. That might be a good idea too.

I’ve recently been receiving a lot of email from the department with regards to my teaching work. At this time of the year, all teaching assistants are drafted in for marking work. There are a number of other things that we have to do but the bulk of the work essentially involves checking and verifying marks after the exam scripts have been marked by the principal assessors.

One of the interesting things that they recommended was for us to work on checking the scripts at home. This is to protect the secrecy and confidentiality of the marks. The idea is that working in the department itself is not sufficiently secure as students can gain access to the papers as we are working on them. The papers also need to be kept safe for review by external examiners and record purposes.

However, in my case, it’s going to be a little bit of an issue for me. I cannot work on it in the main engineering site as I do not have a place to store the papers there. My desk at CAPE is also in an open area without any suitable storage for the papers. So, I would need to work on it at home. However, I have a couple of engineering undergraduates living in my house. So, I would need to hide the papers from them in my room.

The things that we are supposed to check for are pretty standard. I did the very same thing previously. We’re supposed to make sure that every page of the answer scripts have been looked at, that the appropriate marks have been given, and that the marks have been totalled up correctly. According to the emails, it seems that a number of errors have been detected this way in previous years. We’re supposed to raise up a red flag if we spot any problems so that it can be resolved immediately.

I’ve decided to come up with an optimised method of doing the task. Unfortunately, a computer would not help me much in this task. I will start by totalling up the numbers on the front of the answer script to ensure that it is correct. Then, I will flip through the pages to check that the marks on the front correspond to the ones in the answer scripts. Don’t ask me why, but I have a feeling that this is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

So, this means that I’ll have a stack of exam scripts sitting on my desk over the next week or so. I’ll have to go through the mundane task of flipping pages and punching numbers into my trusty scientific calculator. It’ll take me hours to go through all the scripts. I have been allocated several hundred scripts to mark. It’s mind numbing work and I think that I’ll do it between writing up.

This is a spoof AirBook ad made by the people at Lenovo. It’s so true.

The items plugged into the USB hub are stuff that the X300 comes with, which are not found in the AirBook. However, there’s still one thing that the ThinkPads lack: the sex appeal. The AirBook just looks sexy as hell, compared to the drab looking X300. On top of that, I have to really wonder about the additional stuff that the X300 has and ask if I’d really need the stuff.

The official plus points listed for the X300 are:

• Replaceable battery.
  This is certainly a plus point as laptop batteries tend to die rather a quick death, regardless of how much precaution is taken to prolong it’s life.
• 30g lighter.
  Harping on a trivial 30g eeks of desperation. I doubt that many would be able to appreciate the miniscule difference.
• 4Gb of memory
  Few people need this much memory. Vista may benefit from it, but OSX sure wouldn’t.
• Optical drive.
  I honestly cannot remember when was the last time I used the DVD drive to read/burn DVDs.
• 3 USB ports.
  This is the second real advantage, if somebody was looking for a desktop replacement, to plug a keyboard, mouse and other peripherals into. But nobody would buy either of these laptops as a desktop replacement.
• Management software.
  Would not really be required if the operating system is good enough, to not require any management anyway.
• TPM security.
  There are few applications for the TPM module and fingerprint reader.
• Ethernet port.
  Only a minor advantage as it can be easily circumvented with a £15 wireless access point and nobody buying a mobility laptop wants to be bogged down by a network cable.
• Wireless options.
  Although the X300 can handle all kinds of wireless options, from Bluetooth to Wireless WAN, most of it does not come standard anyway.
• Superior cooling.
  Unless you took the words “lap-top” literally, you aren’t going to be sticking it on your lap. If you are, you should stop frying your nuts.
• Stronger case.
  Regardless of how strong either machine is, neither one is likely to survive being run over by a car. Toughbooks they are not.

So, in the end. The X300 does not provide a significant advantage over the AirBook. I will admit that replaceable batteries are important. However, the AirBook is sexy. So, if they were comparatively priced, I’d expect the AirBook to win.

However, the cheapest AirBook retails for £1,199 while the cheapest X300 retails for £1,997. Honestly, I think that the battle for the thin-and-light laptop category has been won, hands down.

My dad has just emailed me to let me know that our home got broken into recently. The robbery occurred during a time when nobody was home, which was a good thing. One specific document was taken, in addition to some cash and jewellery. My dad has his suspicions on who was responsible as the robbery was fairly precise.

So, I’m just trying to recall if I have anything valuable kept at home. The only possible thing that I can think of is my foreign currency collection. I’ve been collecting random bits of foreign currency, in small denominations. I can’t recall if I have it kept in my room but it probably was. It’s not much anyway, maybe around RM 100 worth of various coins and notes. But my dad’s collection of old coins and notes were stolen too and that was worth significantly more than mine. My mum’s jewellery was probably worth a little bit too.

Although I have a nice collection of computers at home, none of them were carted off. That was very nice of them as I would have mourned the loss of my computers more than my cash, even though they are probably not worth very much either. According to my dad, the computers weren’t even touched, even though the various drawers in the computer room were all opened. Too bad that they’d only find nothing but electronics and computer parts in those drawers and lots and lots of cables.

For me, this experience is rather surreal to me. I have been reading about the rising crime rate in Malaysia but it has never actually touched my family until now. In fact, for as long as I can remember, my family has never had our home broken into. Not even once. My family has always lived life with a simple belief that if you don’t have anything worth stealing, nobody will bother to rob you, which has evidently served us well until now. In fact, I plan to live the very same way in the future, in a spartanly furnished home.

Too bad for the people who robbed us then. My family is not rich. They would have made a whole bundle more if they robbed any one of our neighbours. But like my dad says, money was probably not their primary motivation.

Several important things have happened back home, today. Firstly, RPK has finally gotten off his arse and decided to post bail and go home. Personally, I have been wondering what he was trying to do when he decided against posting bail. If all he wanted was to draw attention to his case, he could do a better job of it outside, lobbying support. If he wanted to be turned into a martyr, he has to die first, and personally, I’d much rather see him alive and kicking ass, than dead and forgotten. I asked myself what I’d do if I was ever in his position and I would definitely post bail. It’s better to live humbly for a cause, than to die heroically for it. At least, by staying alive and outside, he can continue to do what he does best and expose everyone’s deep dark secrets. Now that they’re trying to pin him on sedition charges, he does not need to mince his words anymore.

Okay, that’s a big development. However, there’s an even bigger development in Malaysia that has caught the headlines of various news wires. Religious freedom has just gotten a kick in the pants. As reported in TheStar, the Beebs and IHT, for the first time in recent memory, a Muslim convert is allowed to change her religion. This was a decision granted by the Syariah High Court of Penang. As noted, this does not spell a nationwide precedent as Syariah Laws that govern each state are different. In certain states, it is entirely illegal to leave Islam while in other states it’s possible to do so. In his judgement, the Syariah Court Chief Judge laid the blame squarely on the state religious department whom he sees as having failed in it’s duty to provide for sufficient care for the newly converted. So, there is no point in keeping her a Muslim if she does not believe nor practice any of it’s tenets.

Legally, I think that this is a very BAD judgement because it does not set any form of legal precedent. From the judgement, it seems that this is a case-by-case ruling. She was allowed to revert to another religion, not because it was her Constitutional right to do so, but because it was deemed that she was never a Muslim to begin with, as she never bothered to practice the faith and had always maintained her previous religious practices. In other words, her Article 11 rights had nothing to do with it, whatsoever. So, it was the wisdom of the presiding judge that prevailed, and not the law.

Politically, I see this as an exploitative experiment. If things go horribly wrong with this judgement, the federal government can lay the blame on the state government of Penang, which is presently headed by DAP. You can be sure that they will play up this card, to stoke up religious tension within the state, which has a marginal majority of non Muslim citizens. If things work out well, the federal government can call it a reform and claim credit for it. If this decision is lauded by everyone, then the government can say that they are all for protecting the rights and freedoms of religion in Malaysia, as enshrined by our Constitution, which it does NOT.

So, I can’t help but see the sheeple of Malaysia lap this bit up as a good thing. Already, everyone, from civil society organisations to politicians, are praising the judgement. It is a good thing for Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah, because she no longer has to pretend to be a Muslim but it is NOT a good thing and does nothing at all, for the state of Penang, much less the nation as a whole. Until the day that our Article 11 rights are respected in it’s entirety by the courts, we are all in danger of it being subverted.