Intro to Blogging

View more presentations from Alwyn Lau. (tags: tlc kdu)

Ooooby!

What is:

• a movement of food growers and locavores with a common goal of food independence?


• a place where you can learn from, connect and exchange with local growers and eaters?


• a social enterprise which pours all its profits back into local food projects?

Ooooby! (Recommended by Ms Loo Wee Hong)

Sugata Mitra on How Kids Teach Themselves

Bill Gates on What Makes a Great Teacher

TLC in the News

Apologies for the unreadable text. Go here for the top article and here for the second one. All credit and thanks to Jocelyn Loke for getting these out to press in December last year.

Godin's #1 Habit for Success

"The #1 habit successful people share with me is this: They read books to learn. 

They do it often and with joy. 

It's cheap (or free, at the library or online) and portable and specific."

Read more.

Eiffel Tower Most Disappointing Tourist Spot?

Natalie Paris (fittingly) reports in the UK Telegraph about the top 10 'most disappointing' tourist spots:

1) The Eiffel Tower
2) The Louvre (Mona Lisa)
3) Times Square
4) Las Ramblas, Spain
5) Statue of Liberty
6) Spanish Steps, Rome
7) The White House
8) The Pyramids, Egypt
9) The Brandenburg Gate, Germany
10) The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Eiffel Tower is "frustratingly overcrowded and overpriced" while Stonehenge is "just a load of old rocks" according to a report which has named the top ten most disappointing tourist spots.

The Louvre's Mona Lisa and New York's Times Square also have difficulty enticing tourists to rush back, the survey reveals.

Even Egypt's great pyramids, one of the seven wonders of the world, made the list of underwhelming and overrated attractions, because of the oppressive heat and the persistent hawkers.

But top of the list was Paris's famous tower, which almost a quarter of the 1,000 plus British tourists questioned dubbed a flop. (Read more)

50 Strategies to Create a Web 2.0 Product

Dion Hinchcliffe's fascinating series continues...below is 10 of 50 strategies:

1. Start with a simple problem. All of the most successful online services start with a simple premise and execute on it well with great focus. This could be Google with it's command-line search engine, Flickr with photo sharing, Digg with user generated news. State your problem simply: "I make it easier to do X". Focus on solving it elegantly and simply, only add features carefully. Over time, complexity will become the enemy of both your product design and your software architecture, so start with as much focus as you can muster.

2. Create prototypes as early as possible. Get your idea into a working piece of software as quickly as possible. The longer you take to go through one entire cycle, the more unknown work you have ahead of you. Not producing software also means that you are not getting better and better at turning the work of your team into the most important measurable output: Functioning software. Throughout the life of your product, turning your ideas into software as quickly and inexpensively as possible will be one of the most important activities to get right.

3. Get people on the network to work with the product prototype rapidly and often. The online world today is fundamentally people-centric. If your product isn't about them and how it makes their lives better, your product really doesn't matter. And if they're not using your Web application as soon as possible, you just don't know if you are building the right product. Constant, direct feedback from real people is the most important input to our product design after your idea. Don't wait months for this to happen; get a beta out to the world, achieve marketplace contact in weeks, or at most a few months, and watch carefully what happens. This approach is sometimes called Web 2.0 Development .

4. Release early and release often. Don't get caught up in the massive release cycle approach, no matter how appealing it may be. Large releases let you push off work tomorrow that should be done today. It also creates too much change at once and often has too many dependencies, further driving an increase in the size of the release. Small releases almost always work better, are easier to manage, but can require a bit more operations overhead. Done right, your online product will iterate smoothly as well as improve faster and more regularly than your competitors. Some online products, notably Flickr, have been on record as saying they make new releases to production up to several times a day. This is a development velocity that many new startups have trouble appreciating or don't know how to enable. Agile software development processes are a good model to start with and and these and even more extreme methods have worked well in the Web 2.0 community for years.

5. Manage your software development and operations to real numbers that matter. One often unappreciated issue with software is its fundamentally intangible nature. Combine that with human nature, which is to manage to what you can see, and you can have a real problem. There is a reason why software development has such a variable nature in terms of time, budget, and resources. Make sure you have as many real numbers as possible to manage to: Who is making how many commits a week to the source repository, how many registered users are there on a daily basis, what does the user analytics look like, which product features are being used most/least this month, what are the top 5 complaints of customers, and so on. All of these are important key performance indicators that far too many startups don't manage and respond to as closely as they should.

6. Gather usage data from your users and input it back into product design as often as possible. Watch what your users do live with your product, what they click on, what do they try to do with it, what they don't use, and so on. You will be surprised; they will do things you never expected, have trouble with features that seem easy to you, and not understand parts of your product that seemed obvious. Gather this data often and feed it back into your usability and information architecture processes. Some Web applications teams do this almost daily, others look at click stream analytics once a quarter, and some don't it at all. Guess who is shaping their product faster and in the right direction?

7. Put off irreversible architecture and product design decisions as long as possible. Get in the habit of asking "How difficult will it be to change our mind about this later?" Choosing a programming language, Web framework, relational database design, or a software interface tend to be one-way decisions that are hard to undo. Picking a visual design, logo, layout, or analytics tool generally is not. Consequently, while certain major decisions must be made up front, be vigilant for seemingly innocuous decisions that will be difficult to reverse. Not all of these will be a big deal, but it's all too often a surprise to many people where the architect should be malleable. Reduce unpleasant surprises by always asking this question.

8. Choose the technologies later and think carefully about what your product will do first. First, make sure your ideas will work on the Web. I've seen too many startups with ideas that will work in software but not on the Web. Second, Web technologies often have surprising limits, Ajax can't do video or audio, Flash is hard to get to work with SEO for example. Choosing a technology too early will constrain what is possible later on. That being said, you have to choose as rapidly as you can within this constraint since you need to build prototypes and the initial product as soon as you are able.

9. When you do select technologies, consider current skill sets and staff availability. New, trendy technologies can have major benefits including higher levels of productivity and compelling new capabilities, but it also means it'll be harder to find people who are competent with them. Having staff learn new technology on the job can be painful, expensive, and risky. Older technologies are in a similar boat; you can find people that know them but they'll most likely not want to work with them. This means the middle of the road is often the best place to be when it comes to selecting technology, though you all-too-often won't have a choice depending on what your staff already knows or because of the pre-requisites of specific technologies that you have to use.

10. Balance programmer productivity with operational costs. Programming time is the most expensive part of product creation up front while operations is after you launch. Productivity-oriented platforms such as Ruby on Rails are very popular in the Web community to drive down the cost of product development but can have significant run-time penalties later when you are supporting millions of users. I've previously discussed the issues and motivations around moving to newer programming languages and platforms designed for the modern Web, and I encourage you to read it. Productivity-oriented platforms tend to require more operational resources during run-time, and unlike traditional software products, the majority of the cost of operations falls upon the startup. Be aware of the cost and scale of the trade-offs since every dollar you save on the development productivity side translates into a run-time cost forever after on the operations side.

Book Review Contest: Lord of the Flies (Reviewed by Kimberley Wong)

The Lord of the Flies discusses the reality of an inborn ‘dark-side’ to human nature, which, by virtue of popular belief, is innate and part of every individual, regardless of age, gender and status. Although the main idea conveyed by the novel would generally seems as one of sheer simplicity, the issue is dealt with in a non-conventional approach, that is, through vast usage of symbolism and conflicts instead of directly as an issue on its own. With this in view, many other issues are raised regarding the sanctity of human beliefs, particularly regarding our inborn conscience which had been identified as the governing feature in the actions of so called civilized human beings. As with the main theme of a darker human nature, other issues are raised throughout the novel in a similarly implied fashion rather than being blatantly stated. The result of Golding’s powerful mixture of various elements applied in addressing such dark issues in impliedly rather than outwardly was an intriguing story about a group of English schoolchildren and their struggle to survive without parental guidance.

One of the key elements addressed in the novel would be regarding the ‘myth’ of innocence, which, as suggested by many human behavioural psychologists would work against age, in line with the belief of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis where a child is believed to be born a ‘blank-slate’ true to the theory of tabula rasa. Golding sought to challenge this view by creating a scenario in which young children of schooling age, the innocent subjects of wartime, had been left stranded on an island in which survival would become an unguided task. Although the children were used initially as a symbol of innocence and successful socialization of civilized behavior, Golding had suggested that with the passage of time spent in isolation and in sheer need, these children would inevitably revert to a stage which was thought to be unique to the evolution of the human species, effectively unlearning how to function as a civilized society and adopting a more ‘primitive’ lifestyle in its stead. This includes the boys undergoing a ‘shift’ in identities from schoolchildren to hunters and survivors. Golding goes on to illustrate certain aspects of the initial development of the human species such as the ‘discovery’ and utilization of fire and hunting tools. However, in contrast to the long adopted theory of evolution, the characters in the Lord of the Flies seemed to be regressing from a more advanced sate of socialization to a lesser state; effectively from working in cooperative groups to meet their needs of food and shelter to resorting to the barbaric actions of stealing from one another and finally resulting in the death of certain members of their group. Golding had also made a successful comparison between the war which was being waged among the children isolated on the island and that which had been occurring simultaneously in the ‘adult world’ around them in order to raise the issue as to whether the age and influence was a determining factor in violence and aggression as opposed to the idea that they remained mere inborn factors native to human existence.

The Lord of the Flies also makes a successful questioning regarding the position of religion and its significance in the human society. Golding, through the use of vivid imagery and settings, conveys the idea that fear, which has been closely tied to religion through his use of a pig’s head on a spit, his reference to the Devil. This title character, namely, the Lord of the Flies, represents a source of fear among the children which later goes on to terrorize the minds of the children and govern their actions. The Lord of the Flies is a symbolic name of the Devil, Beelzebub. Through the novel, Golding has raised the issue that perhaps the Devil which we fear is not one manifested in flesh and blood but perhaps one that exists in the shadows of their minds instead. The character Simon had been inserted into the novel as one who had the strongest faith in spirituality and who therefore did not fear the ‘Devil’ which the others had feared and had, instead, sought to reveal the truth behind the existence of that devil. Simon later served as a ‘martyr’ character as he later died in the hands of those he needed to convey his discovery to. This representation of martyrdom successfully questions and criticizes society’s understanding of religion and their reactions to matters regarding which they possess little knowledge.

The Lord of the Flies served had also served as a representation of the events encompassed surrounding the Cold War, although on a smaller scale and with less use of politics. Even so, the struggle between two forces of power, Ralph and Jack, had become evident and the others were given the opportunity to select the government which they preferred, that being either one of democracy or totalitarianism, as demonstrated by Ralph’s attempt to establish a government based on equality and free input from the people as opposed to Jack’s method of ruling with an iron fist, even to the extent of intending to kill Ralph, who remained a challenger and inhibitor to his ‘authority’ till the end.

The novel concludes interestingly with the boys being saved from the island by a man stating the war of the outside world had subsided, leading to the cessation of their own battles, but however, with the realization that they had lost their sense of who they were taught and civilized to be by society and had turned into beings little more than savages during their isolation. This reinforces the frailness of human civilization and the little power it has over inborn instincts when faced with absolute physical and mental needs.

Overall, Golding’s novel was one which challenged readers to contemplate the issues which flawed existences had been hidden and denied by the human race for generations, thus bringing about new reflections of the meaning behind being a human being.

Book Review Contest: A Thousand Splendid Suns (Reviewed by Sherene Jawing)

After his first novel, The Kite Runner, was hailed as the international number one bestseller in 2003, Khaled Hosseini released his second novel entitled A Thousand Splendid Suns on May 22 2007. The title of the book refers to a 17th century poem, Kabul, which was written by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi. It was originally a Farsi poem, but the generally accepted English translation was done by Dr. Josephine Davis.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tells a tale of two brave and remarkable women, Mariam and Laila, living through harsh times in Afghanistan. The novel is divided into four parts. The first part of the book tells the story of Mariam, who was introduced into the story at the age of 5. As the pages are turned, we learn of Mariam as a harami (illegitimate child) of a wealthy business man Jalil who practically abandoned her before she was even born. Mariam spent her bleak childhood with her pessimist mother Nana in the outskirts of Heart. At the age of fifteen, after much hurt and disappointment, Jalil betrayed her by giving her away in marriage to Rasheed, who was more than 30 years older than her, right after Nana committed suicide. Mariam moved to Kabul with her new husband. The initial stages of her marriage started off well, but things started to crumble when she had a miscarriage. That was the beginning of Rasheed’s cold behaviour and verbal and physical abuse towards her.

Laila takes centre stage in Part Two. As a young girl, she was exceptionally bright and was very close friends with Tariq, whom she eventually developed unplatonic feelings for. Laila grew up during the times of war in Afghanistan, which prohibited her from going to school with her other friends. During the war, she lost her friend who was killed by a stray rocket and her two brothers Ahmad and Noor who have become shaheed (martyrs). The lost of her brothers caused her mother to phase into a state of inconsolable mourning, and Laila felt all the more neglected by her mother who was oblivious to the fact that she still had another living child with her. Things worsened when Tariq and his family decides to leave Kabul. He tried to persuade Laila to follow them and even proposed to her, but she refused as she did not want to leave her parents. The second part of the novel ended on a sad note. As they were about to leave, a stray rocket hits her home and killed both her parents, but spared Laila from death.

Part Three sees the lives of both characters intertwine. Laila marries Rasheed after he rescued her from the rubbles and after deceiving her to believe that Tariq was dead. Discontented with her husband’s action, Mariam treated Laila full of hostility despite the girl’s efforts to befriend her. Things between the two women detoriated when Laila announced her pregnancy with Rasheed’s child, which was in fact Tariq’s child she was carrying. Rasheed treated Laila like a queen but changed his mind when she gave birth to a baby girl, Aziza. After some time, Mariam and Laila developed a friendship as both women endured the trails and turmoil of life.

I find the novel to be emotionally draining as from the very first page of the book, you begin to sympathise with the characters and start to get attached to them. As the story progresses, we can see every bit of happiness being pried away from the characters hands caused not only by the war, but mainly by the people that are closest to them. For Mariam’s case, she was plunged into a state of devastation by her own father’s betrayal and just when things started to get along fine with Rasheed, the tables were turned when she had a miscarriage. Laila’s world slowly fell apart one by one starting from the death of her friend. Although both women experienced different types of emotional pain, it was the physical pain and the comfort of their companionship that brought them closer together.

One thing about the novel is that Hosseini cleverly inserts the political calamity within the novel to enhance the intensity of the story. He tells readers about the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and even the 9/11 incident in America, by which confirms to the readers that he is using a modern time-frame for the story. Even though the political issues surfaced once in a while, it plays its part as it affects and determines the course of the characters’ lives. The major focus of the story however, would be love and self-sacrifice.

Love and self-sacrifice are two things that go hand-in-hand. Out of love towards her parents, Laila gave up the opportunity to escape Kabul with Tariq. Out of love towards Aziza, Laila was willing to get caught and beaten up by the Talibans just to see her daughter. Out of love towards his son, Rasheed took the risk of getting caught by the Talibans by buying a television set for his son, Zalmai. Out of love towards her friend and family, Mariam surrendered herself to the Talibans to be publicly executed after killing Rasheed with a shovel. Hosseini demonstrates that during hard times, people with a sincere heart and clear motives are willing to set aside everything for the ones they love, even if it means giving up every single thing that they have for the other person.

Overall, A Thousand Splendid Suns is an amazing book that dares to cross the boundaries and tells the truth regarding the lives of those living through the war in Afghanistan. This novel is also confronts readers regarding human nature and the principles that is upheld by everyone. If you are looking for a book that will challenge your soul and gratitude towards the things that you have in life, then this book will do just fine.