Think of Terengganu, you think of beaches and turtles. When I think of beaches, I think of all things associated with it - sunshine, sea, sand and bikini-clad unidentified female objects. And really, that's what I came to Terengganu for - hot, sexy bikini-clads.
So far, I've never found any. But here's the closest I could get to my fantasy - girls trying to fly kites on the beach. I learnt that if you do not know how to fly kites, try wearing the kites instead. You could make the kites look good.
Another lesson - forget the bikini-clads. Instead, hang around the hotel's jacuzzi coz' you could get lucky shots for your blog.
As for the turtles, they're nowhere to be found, perhaps because they too don't see any bikini-clads on the beaches. Don't you see why the SUKOM 2008 mascot, Si Diman, is a fish? No matter how educated or how religious we are, we continue our despicable inhumane acts of destroying our environment and cause the extinction of God's wonderful creations like the leatherback turtles. Some redemption can be here and you'll find more serious fun, bare naked with nature here.
These are my angels. One of them is a Japanese. He's the only one who loves durian and I thought that's amazing. Even more amazing - as warriors, they're not wearing their keris.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) mission is: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. The target group: The nearly two–billion children in the developing world who are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. The means to the end: A project to build and distribute a small, simple, robust and sub USD100 laptop that would revolutionise life for the poor by educating their children - or, in the most idealistic version, allowing them to educate themselves by playing with the software.
I'm reminded of OLPC upon visiting the Intel booth and surprised that it is apparently still alive. Even more surprised that our Ministry of Education is running the pilot in 10 schools. We had the Smart Schools MSC Flagship Application that drained hundreds of millions of taxpayers money without any results to show. Then came the Education Blueprint. Now this.
OLPC was launched in Jan-2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland by founder, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab. It was endorsed by Kofi Annan, Rupert Murdoch, Presidents of Brazil, Nigeria and 20 or more countries that announced their intention to buy. Several hundred thousand of the laptops have actually been delivered, mostly in Peru. Reportedly, no one knows exactly where.
Critics say it was an expensive gimmick. In places like my kampong that can hardly afford pens and pencils for their schools, it is not obvious that a USD100 laptop for every child is the answer to mass illiteracy. Read the blog of a OLPC senior executive who quit this year, Ivan Krsti, after he was sent out to Peru to oversee the distribution of the some 40,000 laptops in about 570 schools there. He describes "across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they're not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom."
Even if the laptops reach the schools they are supposed to reach, there is no evidence at all that they will actually help children to learn. Lets learn to learn. Lets learn lessons from our not-so-successful Smart Schools project that emphasized computers. It takes a leap of faith to believe that children learn better through computers than books.
The last I report I read the OLPC is going down. The collapse of the scheme higlights the falsity of the believe that IT alone can lift people out of poverty. Knowledge may, but the technology that spreads knowledge best is literacy, not laptops. Supporters say that the laptop enables people to have access to more information via the Internet allowing them to tap into a vast reserve of knowledge - e.g. Wikipedia. But how much information does a person need to consume to have sustainable livelihood? Though the Internet gives you access to information, but so does a good textbook.
How is a laptop more efficent than a book? Textbooks require no power, don't need winding up or solar cells, they can be passed to the next kid when it is finished with. They only use sustainable trees in their construction, and are cheap.
And what can a unsustainable laptop teach that a book cannot? Only IT skills, and I'd imagine that an agriculture community like my kampong, Singai, in Sarawak, does not have IT top of the survival skillset.
I'm 40 something and the Internet wasn't there to impact on my secondary education. I'm sure none of my forty something colleagues would regard our education as woefully deficient.
Not that I want to generalise, but back in my kampong school in remote Sarawak, we studied English lit with 10 copies of the novel to be split between about 60 kids. In that situation, at least, a laptop for every child would have been laughably irrelevant.
In the age of the Internet today, how is that a McKinsey study finds that only 11% of our graduates are employable by multinational companies?
An even deeper lesson: Just watch our own children - without adult support and encouragement, children will use all technology to play with. If you give them paper, they will make paper aeroplanes; if you give them laptops, they will play solitaire. So really what our beloved Malaysia needs is better educated teachers.
MOE, please learn one more lesson: In the Smart Schools project, the people in charge don't bother to find out what the end-user really needs and can cope with. The project ends up enriching some private companies, wasting lots of taxpayer money, and doing no good, and no-one takes the blame. In the end the verdict is that "lessons will be learnt" but in fact they never are because the same mistakes are repeated over and over.
At the Intel booth it was revealed that its soon to be released new generation of the OLPC, the NetBook, will be powered by the new generation Intel Atom processor.
Intel joined OLPC in July last year and introduced its version of the laptop.
Watch a video of Intel's Classmate PCs in Dr Craig Barrett's Keynote Address at WCIT 2008. His presentation defines what is a world-class presentation.
At expos, I observe that booths of exhibitors from foreign countries are usually less patronized. Be it IT expo, halal showcase, MAHA or any other exhibition, the response is the same, no matter how well-designed the booths are.
I can offer free professional advice to these exhibitors, but my advice is nothing new and in fact successful exhibitors use this tactic all the time to attract - attractive young girls in skimpy, sexy or skin-tight clothing.
Instead of giving hand outs, goodie bags or cheap gifts (some offer sweets and candies), nothing beats offering sexual favours. Imagine the kind of response a booth offering 40,000 sexual favours would get.
Hey, even Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad (MDV) exploit those sweet young girls to entertain people at MDV booth, asking for business cards and ofering gifts in return. MDV's CEO sat behind watching over the girls. If he was wearing other than a black suit, he would almost look like a pimp watching over the brood. In the scheme of things, how about repaying our loans with sexual favours? If you check out the blog of MDV's CEO at http://www.debtventures.com/cms/index.jsp, the possibilty is there.
I'm yet to imagine the number of visitors to my blog if I offer 40,000 sexual favours on this blog.
I'm not sure. Are you? The incredible ease at which I submitted by income tax returns last month left me feeling truly empowered. Like having sex, the feeling subsided after logging out off the e-Filing website. Reality struck back - the BN gov't will continue to ensure that our tax money is not well-spent and will enrich the few. The soaring cost of food and fuel, the many tolled roads, the increase in crimes, the unstoppable waste of taxpayers money, the ever churning datukship industry - I'll never feel empowered. Perhaps that's how it feels to be impotent, too.
Who will ever be held accountable and prosecuted for the over RM50 mil waste of public money on the failed e-Village project in Dengkil? Will taxpayers be able to get back the RM500 mil burnt in InventQjaya in Cyberjaya? Can MDeC answer what happened to taxpayers money in its investment arm, Meitech Development Sdn Bhd and the investments and subsidiaries such as Optica Fiber Technologies MSC Sdn Bhd, Knowledge Worker Exchange Sdn Bhd, e-commerce application service provider (ASP) GO2020.com MSC Sdn Bhd? Perhaps Datuk Arif Nun and Dr Muhammad Ghazie Ismail can explain.
Don't be mistaken when MDEC proudly proclaims that it is the pinnacle partner of WCIT. MDEC equals Taxpayers. And MDEC management must always remind themselves this when they treat themselves lavishly.
This article in The Star today caught me like the momentarily-blinding sunlight. I'm reminded that Sweden has minimal wife-beating incidences. Really, because there is almost no wife to beat. We know that Swedish people are often referred to as the freest society (unburdened of morals, also in terms of Index of Economic Freedom) and most advanced (refer to human development index, also the 2nd most ICT connected society).
More than half of Swedish men and women live without marriage, any Swede with any other for any length of time (this is the part I like). The people have coined a name for this arrangement: sambo (sam means together; bo means live). The family is no more legitimate. In fact, the family is looked down as un-modern, antiquated. Sweden is often cited by liberals as an example for freedom, gender rights, and human rights. However, Sweden has high incidences of women-beating, i.e men, whom are not husbands, beat women, whom are not wives. How free is free?
In Sweden, as an institution, the family is dead. The gov't has to step in to fill the gap - care for the infirm, the aged, and the unemployed. In substance, the Swedish are consequently, the least free - they are most state-dependent, in fact. Result, the Government bears the costs of helpers to look after the uncared for aged Swedish. Even medical care brought to them if they are unable to get around easily.
A nation like ours, need moral police such as Munirah Bahari, vice-president of National Islamic Students Association of Malaysia. Never mind Munirah's concern that “The white blouse is too transparent for girls and it becomes a source of attraction. ... This is the source of the problem, where we can see that schoolgirls themselves are capable of using this to attract men to them. ... This could see them getting molested, having premarital sex and all sorts of things . . .” (as quoted from the article). (by the way, I grew up in a community where women go about topless. Yet, till today, the community has zero molest, rape or incest case. In fact, respect & protection of women is a community norm. It came as a surprise to me that the east coast states of Peninsular M'sia has high rates of these 'silent' crimes compared to other states). It is the broader longer term effect of unpoliced moral in our Malaysian society that should be of more serious concern to us.
If not for saviours who are holier than us, like Munirah, the final phase of modernity is already on us - the non-procreative man-women union. If you are a regular at Fitness First gym, you'll also think that the continuing phase of modernity is the non-procreative man-man union. Consequently, population regresses threatening the existence of our nation, our cultures, and economic prospects.
Societies and families unshielded by the normative moral standards respected by our society, and not policed by the moral police such as the likes of Munirah, cannot survive. The society and family that function on normative moral standards, unburdens the gov't, releases people from the master-client relationship of Barisan Nasional and voters, and frees the citizens from state dominance. That is why we have a family provided social security and Western countries have a gov't-dependent social security.
We can now count on Munirah to set up a moral police department in the PM's Office. It is strategic for the enduring prosperity of our nation.
Is the momentarily-blinding sunlight coming through open windows better than the claustrophobic blackness of a secure and perpetually closed room?
I loved this booth. It's like they brought Mount Kinabalu to KLCC. Or was WCIT 2008 held on top of Mount Kinabalu? The setting of discussion tables with the backdrop of Mount Kinabalu provided that pleasant & therapeutic effect after fighting thru the KL traffic to get to WCIT 2008.
Here's my 3rd and final two cents worth in conjunction with WCIT 2008.
We’re already witnessing a few smart companies using the Internet and related technologies in radical ways to harvest talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Some of these companies routinely involve customers, independent contractors in the creation of new products. Loncin, a motorcycle manufacturer in China lets its suppliers work with one another to design components, making sure everything fits together, and reduce costs. The Linux operating system was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. When this approach to innovation becomes widely practiced, the impact on labour activity and skills of our workforce could be significant.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is a product or service created by its distributed customers. OhmyNews, a popular South Korean online newspaper is written by over 6,000 citizen reporters. Threadless, an online clothing store engages hundreds of customers each week by getting them to submit new designs for T-shirts. The community at large votes for its favorites.
As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work.
Top talent for a range of activities—from finance to marketing and IT to operations—can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business services provider.
The implications of shifting more work to freelancers are interesting. For one thing, new talent-deployment models could emerge. TopCoder, a company that has created a network of software developers, may represent one such model. TopCoder gives organizations that want to have software developed for them access to its talent pool. Customers explain the kind of software they want and offer prizes to the developers who do the best job creating it—an approach that costs less than employing experienced engineers. Changes in the nature of labor relationships could shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results. The other interesting thing, in conjunction with this new model, our workforce must have the required skills to be able to engage in this new model. Talents entering this workforce will require even stronger skills in team collaboration, information processing and problem solving.
I would not be wrong to say that this trend would gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it. As companies move in this direction, they will need to understand the value of their human capital more fully, seek new skills in the talents they need and manage different classes of contributors accordingly.
Again, all these trends in the way companies harvest talent and manage human capital will have a significant impact on future workforce. Are we preparing them for this new trend? Will our education system evolve fast enough to meet the future workforce? Are we doing anything as individuals, as parents and as responsible citizens to prepare our children who will enter the workforce?
Further reading: Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live, New York: Warner Books, 2001.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2006.
C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
Here's my second two-cents worth in conjunction with the World Congress on IT 2008 (WCIT 2008)in KL, May 19 - 21. Sellaband.com is revolutionizing the way artistes or music and singing talents become popular stars. Sellaband.com provides a platform to match aspiring singers with fans who are willing to bet on potential.
An aspiring artist puts his demo songs on the sellaband.com website and offer 5,000 "parts" for sale. Fans and artist and repertoire (A & R) wannabes shop on the site for songs they like. When they find something worthy, they invest in the artist by purchasing one or more parts, at USD10 each. Upon raising USD50,000, the artist is assigned an experienced A & R person and producer, and goes to the studio to record an album. Believers (the investors) get a limited edition of the CD.
Three songs are given FOC on sellaband.com website. The rest are downloadable at USD0.50. Believers, sellaband.com and the artist get portions of net profits from the downloads and from the advertising revenue.
The artist can also order his own CD at cost and sell it - Believers share USD2 per CD. Believers can also set up shop on sellaband.com, selling related products from their artistes. So, MCMC, who needs all those dumb copycat reality shows on local TV? Wake up, MCMC, the revolution has left you far behind.
MCMC, your website, www.skmm.gov.my, has not changed a bit after 10 years. That means you're 100 years behind the revolution. Your MyICMS 886 strategy, in its 14MB 2nd edition, clogs our creative networks. Your Networked Content Development Grant can be better used to open up our education system that continues to suppress creative innovation. Look, even RTM uses YouTube when it should be at the forefront of innovation in both delivery and content after being in existence for many decades. The minds in RTM are as old as those in MCMC, backward, stale, non-progressive.
Finally, the gov't delivers on it's promise. Now we're hearing the cheers from the farmers.
It would be interesting to see if the incentives really get to the real farmers in need. This is fertile ground for BN politicians to enrich themselves while influencing who gets the benefits. These incentives will go a long way in alleviating the food crisis and in helping farmers sustain their business in the wake of soaring production costs. So, politicians, think of what hungry people are capable of doing.
Kadar Insentif Tanaman Sayur-sayuran - RM81/mt Buah-buahan - RM78/mt
As the World Congress on IT 2008 in KL is only a few days away, here's a glimpse of how we fare among countries in the the world in terms of ICT.
Connectivity has been recognized as having a positive impact on transparency, good governance,and democracy. There are also implications of increased connectivity that are currently in the process of being defined, particularly in areas such as urban systems, lifestyles, and quality of life. For example, according to a 2006 technology needs assessment and economic development impact study, high bandwidth connectivity has the ability to enhance a city’s appeal to the “creative class” of knowledge workers. Across the world, increased connectivity has also become a prominent factor in the discourse on strengthening and maintaining social cohesion. Narrowing the digital gap between urban and rural areas has been a priority for our public sector, at least that's what our BN politicians say. The ranking benchmarks how far our gov't has gone to do so. This agenda has also served to placate fears that the rapid advances in technology would benefit urban areas at the expense of those geographic segments that are already struggling with their distance from markets.
Now, take a moment to reflect on the implications of the benchmark on our country's future competitiveness against our nearest neighbours. Then, lets think further about how we, as responsible individual, NGO and corporate citizen can respond.
Innovators: Sanjit Biwas (r.) and John Bicket have created inexpensive wireless technology that allows Internet signals to carry into remote areas.
Over the past two years Meraki has powered several thousand wireless networks across 70 countries and opened up the Internet to people who otherwise could never afford it.
The mission of the company is to bring affordable Internet access to the next billion people. Read more about how these two 25-year old PhD students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founders of Meraki, a Silicon Valley start-up that has powered thousands of simple, inexpensive wireless networks around the world, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1212/p13s01-stct.html?page=1
Now we can tell Telekom Malaysia to close down its miserable service and mediocre effort to try to connect the rural areas.
