Video: History of the Internet

Learn how people made it possible to do whatever you’re doing now on the Internet. The graphics and animation are amazingly neat.

“History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

npTribune Volume 40, Issue 2 out now

We’re distributing this from Monday, so catch us around school. This issue has been especially difficult, because of the long school break and multiple public holidays. Everything was delayed because of that. Oxford Graphic made a surprisingly quick turn-around this time. We sent it to press on Monday, and by Friday the paper came. Normally they would have taken one-and-a-half-weeks.

How we killed creativity

I wrote the following for npTribune’s latest issue:

Our education system strangles creativity and squanders talent. We want innovation and we want it badly. But every child here has been told at least once by a teacher or parent, ‘Don’t ask stupid questions’.

Questions, even dumb ones, are a sign of a critical mind. By labelling questions, we box up imagination. Any spark of innovation is extinguished in a vice of self-censorship.

A top engineering student has been overheard complaining how his lecturer reprimanded him in class for suggesting a different answer to a calculation. The student’s answer was correct, and he confirmed it with books from the library. He vowed never to suggest answers to that lecturer in future classes.

Creative ideas stem from the freedom to think, but our society clearly does not offer that liberty given our conformist and non-confrontational culture.

No Singaporean has won a Nobel Prize. On the other hand, Finland, with just half a million more people, has four Nobel laureates. The difference between Singapore and Finland is that Finnish children grow up in an environment where their parents and educators do not impose the right answers.

British education reformist Sir Ken Robinson said in a 2006 talk: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Best map service on the little red dot

Gothere.sg is the best. It beats all the other local map/directory websites like Street Directory, and is way better than SLA’s or Rednano’s. Try the bus/MRT/taxi options. It even allows you to estimate your taxi charges to the last cent and offers detours to avoid ERP and congested expressways.

via Techgoondu.

Demon in the Water Photo Exhibition

You’re invited! See our Facebook page.

Gifted, or hard work?

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the Guardian about pure genius versus hard work:

In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely “good”. The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time – around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount – about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

The curious thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals” – musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find “grinds”, people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn’t have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. What’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

npTribune Editorial: Bus and train concessionary fares should be relooked

Transportation is expensive, with bus and train fares climbing steadily, but polytechnic students are still paying adult prices up to 89 percent more than what their pre-university counterparts pay.

Three years ago, a Ngee Ann student created an online petition calling for a fare reduction. More than 27,500 signatures have been collected since, but nothing has changed.

In 1977, students from Singapore Polytechnic and the then Ngee Ann Technical College petitioned Singapore Bus Services (SBS) to charge pre-university and polytechnic students the same fares.

SBS answered: “If we grant the concession to Poly and Ngee Ann students, we might have to extend this to the universities. This will mean a loss of $3 million to $4 million a year. Straightaway, we would run in the red.”

Last year, SBS Transit and SMRT Corporation posted a combined profit of more than $200 million. Can they still justify the price difference?

Concessionary fares should be standardised for all pre-university and tertiary students.

Written for npTribune.

Iraq War Ends, screams “NYT” headline

New York Times spoof

The Yes Men spoofed the New York Times in an elaborate stunt today in New York City. Volunteers distributed thousands of copies of the 14-page spoof to surprised subway commuters.

Take a look for yourself with the PDFs. Also see the video report and the real Times’ reply.

Gawker tells how The Yes Men got their volunteers (via Boing-Boing).

npTribune Vol. 40 Issue 1 offstones

Finally after a month of work, chasing angles, re-writing stories and putting the 24-page news-magazine together, it’s off to the printers. Out Nov. 25.

Today Fights Back… and other news

ST put out ads showing the decline of free TV. Mediacorp hit back on 29 October with their own ads on Today.

ST put out ads a few days ago showing how its stable of newspapers were enjoying an increase in reach (which takes into account total population), and how free TV was facing a slow decline. Rival media organisation Mediacorp responded via its Today newspaper with an anti-ST ad.

Elsewhere, the Christian Science Monitor is moving to a primarily web presence, and stopping its daily presses in favour of a weekly magazine (NYT). Just like what newspaper analysts said: Newspapers are dying, but paper will survive. People want viewspapers. Any newspaper which turns itself into an Economist, TIME or Newsweek will live.

Predictions

I predict npTribune will stop printing in a few years (and so will the Nanyang Chronicle). Student newspaper editors in Singapore will slowly realise that investing in the web is more important – and more timely then whatever they can do with print.

At npTribune, we have moved to a more search-engine friendly content management system, and digitised all our archives, got syndicated by ABC News, Omy.sg and got aggregated on Google News.

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The true cost of war

Volumeone and Good Magazine discover the 10 steps to calculating the true cost of America’s wars in an animated video with excellent typography and presentation.