Monthly Archive
Browsing entries posted on December 2007
A slight rally to finish above 4.0
GEK1542: Forensic Science
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B
Result: B+
Hey, not too bad! Not awesome like an A- would be, but I think this is an appropriate grade. Prediction-wise, within range.
PL4202: History and Systems of Psychology
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B-
Result: B
No surprises there. Also smack in the middle of my prediction.
PL4218: Psychological Assessment
Optimistic: A+
Pessimistic: B
Result: B
I have been cheated! I got full marks on the midterm and I can’t have done that badly on the final. Thus I can only conclude that something went wrong along the way, or the lecturer’s not such an open book after all. I could ask for a review, but those usually turn out to be useless. I guess I’m one of the guinea pigs for whom the experiment didn’t work, then.
GEK1046: Introduction to Cultural Studies
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B
Result: A-
Yay! And also my sole triangle for this semester, and it’s a “minus” to boot. That sucks, but it could have been worse. This upper-limit result makes up for the lower-limit one above.
PL4223: Introduction to Clinical Neuropsychology
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B-
Result: B
A solid performance in a non-examinable module! W00t (word of the year)! I pronounce myself pleased with this result.
Overall, it was rather a miserable performance with my CAP dropping even further, but still within range of my target. And with only one more semester to go, I don’t think I need to be unduly worried. Performance over the whole semester is a lot more consistent than last semester’s fiasco, since it’s mostly square letters and they’re all decent grades. No nasty round ones like last time, although the triangles are in scant supply as well.
The fact that all three of my Honours-level modules scored Bs should be reassuring, I suppose, since last sem I scored a C at the same level. I suppose I have the hang of 4th-year modules now, but there’s definitely room for improvement since I no longer have CCAs to get in the way. Sem 2 is always a killer though, because of Chinese New Year interrupting the momentum. Plus I’ll personally be busy hunting down jobs and sending out resumés. Bah! Looks like I’ll be grabbing easy Unrestricted Electives to boost up my grades, as usual.
At the beginning of 2007, the ol’ Chinese Almanac predicted a yucky year for Rat students. And yes, I know I said things would get better after the 2006/07 academic year concluded and I was no longer an ARS3. But 2008 is MY YEAR (as superstitious as that sounds), so I really don’t expect things to get worse.
Just to make sure, though, I’m rearranging my room according to Feng Shui principles.
You never leave your toys behind.
Why is it that we have “big boys toys” but not “big girls toys”?
That’s because little boys grow up and so do their toys. Look at what boys play with - trucks, planes, pretend drills and hammers, and guns. Then they become adults, and graduate to the real-world version. That’s why you have grown men in SUVs, flying their Cessnas and hunting with their rifles. And it’s all still play!
Now what do little girls play with? Baby dolls that eat, drink, and poop; pretend houses with pretend kitchens; and fashion dolls that have more extensive wardrobes than I do. When they grow into women, the babies are real, the poop is real, the house gets messy, and they dress themselves instead of plastic dolls with impossible proportions. This isn’t play. This is life.
That’s why there are big boys toys, because little boys play with mini versions of daddy’s recreational stuff. Playtime for little girls, on the other hand, is pretty much a training session in domesticity.
Perhaps instead of banning toy guns for our sons, we should ban play kitchens and masak-masak sets for our daughters. Resist overt gender-typing socialization!
On an unrelated note, when you graduate to adulthood, you still take a lot of your childhood along. It just comes in a different packaging. Case in point: comics, cartoons, video games.
The kiddie adventure comics lead to graphic novels in adulthood. Of course, I started out reading Marvel comics, so I didn’t really do the whole kid-level thing, but instead of a simple good-vs-evil storyline in the regular superhero oeuvre, you have the anti-heroism of Morpheus and the gray boundaries of hero morality in Watchmen.
The innocent anime of Doraemon and Slam Dunk yield to more thought-provoking series such as Ghost in the Shell. Now there’s one show that is geared totally towards the adult audience. Not only because of its single overarching storyline, but also because of the philosophical questions that it raises along the way, in particular those pertaining to machine AI. Those tachikomas - cute, but darn if they don’t make you question reality.
The only thing that changes in video games as you get older is that stuff like car-jacking and seeing nude women aren’t amazingly cool and deliciously forbidden. Nothing you ain’t seen, or maybe even done, before. Video games aren’t really the best medium to explore philosophical uncertainties - playing as Socrates and constructing arguments to vanquish your intellectual foes just doesn’t seem to translate well to consoles.
It’s nice to know that your childhood diversions grow up along with you.
Choice Web Hosts
*Paid Post*
When the Internet first became mainstream, the majority of domain names were taken up by corporations and other entities with a significant financial interest in maintaining a web presence. Individuals who just wanted to have a tiny slice of cyber-estate went with free hosts like Geocities and Angelfire, because web hosting fees were quite substantial then.
Now the market is much more open, and practically anyone can afford to buy a domain name and sign up with a hosting plan. Competition among host services is keen, and the proliferation of services can be mind-boggling to a newcomer.
That’s where http://www.webhostingchoice.com comes in. It’s a directory of web hosting plans, and features a search function where you can input the features you want, and your budget price range. The service will return a list of results matching your requirements.
In addition, there are ratings published for each hosting plan, so you can rely on others’ opinions and experiences with a certain web host in making your decision. Overall, it’s a good solution for inexperienced users who need a simple interface.
Does anyone remember this toy?
For some reason, an old toy of mine just popped into my head at night.
It’s a water toy, where you fill it with water and press a button to (presumably) send out jets to move the stuff in the cylinder. Mine had a monkey that would do gymnastics around the bar he was anchored to. I think my cousins had one where you tried to get the balls into the holes. Simple stuff.
Seriously, it’s water-powered and has only one button. ONE. And it was huge fun too.
Link here. If it looks familiar to you, leave a comment!
Because sometimes, old memories that resurface at night are indistinguishable from dreams.
Your Name On A Plate
*Paid Post*
If you’re the kind of person who loves to put your name on everything, Private Number Plates would be right up your alley. The Northumbria Numbers website serves this niche market with a search function on the site that allows prospective buyers to see if their desired number is available.
For those who need more information, there’s also an FAQ section to make life easier. Overall, the website is simple to navigate and clear in its presentation.
Prognostications Sem 1 07/08
GEK1542: Forensic Science
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B
The paper was 100 multiple-choice questions, and required us to recall probabilities, drug dependencies and evidence law along with other more mundane stuff like how such-and-such a case was decided. Time management was a bit tight, but I had enough time for everything. Some questions were ambiguous, however, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The forum was filled with complaints later about the fuzzy wording of the questions.
I got B+ for both the midterm test as well as my fingerprint report, so an A seems out of the question. I would be very happy with an A- in fact, as my GEMs have a tendency to score that way (with the exception of that nasty Food and Health module). But in a class of 404, competition is keen, so a B+ seems more likely. Bah. I hope it won’t get worse than that, because it IS a level-1000 GEM after all. And if all else fails, I still have the S/U option to exercise. Whee for post-hoc grade elimination!
PL4202: History and Systems of Psychology
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B-
I refer to this as my pseudo-philosophy class, since for the first half of the semester we were mired in terms such as dualism, consciousness, and other vague terms that did not hold my interest. It was mostly a talky class, with the lecturer interacting with a few outspoken students while the slower-brained ones (like myself) sat and watched the clock.
I really dislike false advertising in IVLE module outlines, and I didn’t realise it was going to degenerate into a giant discussion session. At least some history got taught, in the form of dates, notable contributions and so on, but it didn’t make up the bulk of the module. While it’s an effective module in terms of making the students think critically and deeply, it does not satisfy my criterion of “can I score”. I’m sorry, but if employers only want to see the triangular letters and have no interest in how well I can argue for a functionalist perspective on machine AI, then I shall only focus of the ability of the module to fulfill that criterion. I’d recommend this module to others only if they really love talking in class, or have a high enough CAP to make up for the shortfall this module may cause.
PL4218: Psychological Assessment
Optimistic: A+
Pessimistic: B
This is my fun Wednesday module, because there’s very little preparatory reading to be done, and most of the class is hands-on. You show up, the adjunct professor talks a bit about the topic of the week, and you split up into groups to work your psychological magic on each other.
It’s about the use of assessment skills and tools in clinical practice, and our lecturer is a practicing psychologist with an Irish accent. This is the first time she’s teaching in NUS, so her classes weren’t as bogged down with NUS-style assessments of class participation. Anyway participation wasn’t forced and we always had a lot of fun administering tests to each other, or roleplaying as therapists and patients. Continual assessment (CA) came in the form of a midterm test (for which I scored full marks, yay) and a solo or group presentation on a topic of our choice. That was great. Anything went, as long as some form of assessment was covered. Since I was presenting solo and I only had 10 minutes, I went for a narrow focus of diagnosis and assessment in autism. No one else did autism, strangely, although a couple of presentations dealt with gender identity issues, as well as malingering.
The paper had 2 questions, both compulsory, which meant that our whole class of 50 people wrote the same essays. The first question was a case study in which we were supposed to come up with a treatment plan for someone presenting with a whole litany of disorders. You couldn’t begin to disentangle his depression from his anxiety and drug abuse, and that’s probably a realistic portrayal. Nothing in psychology ever comes clear-cut.
The second question was basically a chance for us to earn points by doing a memory dump. She requested descriptions of the symptoms and possible developmental factors in the 10 personality disorder subtypes we had learnt about. Just as well I spent time mugging those 10. Beautiful, flowing prose went out the window, to be replaced with tersely worded descriptions of antisocial personality disorder, borderline PD, and the like. I didn’t even have a summary - what was I supposed to say, “In short, the above are the symptoms and possible factors” bla bla bla? I hate repeating myself, and my hand was hurting anyway. Memory dumping - I like. A throwback to my JC days where regurgitation was a prized skill, I suppose.
So yes, she did seem quite eager to give us all triangular letters. Quote from the last class: “If your spelling and punctuation are all right, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get an A+”. Or something similar. Of course the A+ is contingent on your getting the correct content onto the page first, of course. She was just warning us about her finickiness for spelling and grammar. With an enrolment of 50, I’m sure some sort of bell curve will still come into play. But so far, this is my best bet to make my quota of a triangle per semester.
GEK1046: Introduction to Cultural Studies
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B
Another level-1000 module, one more and I’ll have hit quota. Arts students are allowed a maximum of 8 level-1000 modules (presumably from our own faculty, since we should be encouraged to take modules from other facs). This one is under the aegis of the English Literature Department, so I felt at ease to spout misinformed theories of Marxism and gender identity formation. Tutorial participation isn’t graded anyway, so I decided to have fun spouting off.
Despite what many people think, it’s not all about watching TV shows and movies and analysing them. Sure some watching and analysing goes on, but before you think this is a chance to legitimise repeated viewings of ‘300′ by taking a gender issues perspective, we had to watch a David Lynch film, and it wasn’t pretty. It’s very theory-laden for an introductory course, and I’m sure more than a few freshmen got lost along the way.
The final exam was open-book, but I didn’t touch my notes. I decided to take up their offer to analyse a Nokia advertisement and a 50 Cent poster, and managed not to make any references to any cultural theories. Baudrillard, Barthes, Adorno and Horkheimer, de Certeau - nice knowing you, so long farewell. Perhaps my analysis of the 50 Cent poster was lacking in depth a bit - I didn’t talk about how he influenced gender identity formation in adolescent males by his overt display of masculinity, because I only have an hour for each question and I have to handwrite. But all in all, I think it was okay. Which, knowing my luck, means I bombed the paper.
So again, another B is the lower limit, since I really don’t expect to do very badly. But not impressively well either, despite my “interesting reading” of the Ratatouille poster that I did as a take-home assignment.
PL4223: Introduction to Clinical Neuropsychology
Optimistic: A-
Pessimistic: B-
This is a non-examinable module, so by right it should be at the top, but never mind. This course is taught by an adjunct professor who practices as a clinical neuropsychologist at SGH and various care centres.
Coursework makes up 100% of the grading, of which 30% was from our case study presentation, 30% on our topic review on any neurological disorder, and 40% divided between reading reflections and class participation. He gave us the option of doing an extra assignment and being graded on 10% participation, or the original set number of assignments and 20% participation. Since I write better than I speak up in class, I opted for the extra work.
It was primarily quite dry in the beginning, with a set topic of the week - stroke, dementia, epilepsy etc. He used videos extensively, which is great because 2 hours of him talking about a single disease can be quite boring. It’s not that he’s unable to hold our attention, but because the subject matter is quite dry to begin with.
Also, his focus is more on developing our soft skills in preparation for a life in clinical practice. So we would often watch videos with real patients documenting their life with their condition. I think many of us appreciated this human focus, plus it’s all non-examinable so we were able to just watch and learn whatever we wanted from it, rather than hurriedly copying notes. I gave up writing notes after maybe week 5, when I realised that “hey, none of this stuff is coming out anyway!”. So yeah, sometimes no-exam modules can be great.
So since I did quite enjoy this module, and put effort into my writings and topic reviews, I hope to score something decent. I’m not sure of the score for the presentation but it should be okay as well, based on the feedback he sent to us. The lecturer is very fond of class polls and feedback, which makes for a more transparent learning environment. I think that’s great.
I guess I should have written all that in the feedback exercise, huh?
Let Your Unconscious Be Your Guide
Pretty soon, it’s going to be New Year’s resolutions time. Strangely enough, though they’re called ‘resolutions’, the people making them are usually less than resolute - that’s why you’ll see most of these self-improvement goals broken by mid-year.
If their conscious selves lack the willpower to do so, maybe they should tap into the power of their unconscious to motivate them to achieve their goals. There are hypnosis downloads available that can help you to hypnotize yourself, at http://www.instant-hypnosis.com/. The site has an extensive list of downloads and is worth checking out.
From the more mainstream applications such as meditation and stopping smoking, to habits such as knuckle-cracking and nail-biting - you can find a relevant hypnosis program here. You can even use hypnosis to get yourself to love exercise, so you can finally stick to an exercise program and cross an item off your New Year’s resolutions list.
The Materia-List
Lifehacker linked to a page about beating your bad mood here. I only just wanna talk about one - counting your blessings. And because this is titled ‘The Materia-List‘, it’s going to be all objects, all the time.
- My laptop
Can you imagine in 10 years’ time, telling our kids that “when I was your age, we didn’t have wireless Internet! No, we had to stay glued to our PCs and a phone line!” It’s a pretty radical concept when you think about it. It means I can read gossip blogs in class while my classmate checks her blog advertising.
- My Nintendo DS Lite
Second only to my laptop, literally. It’s become my near-constant companion over the last 6 months. Previously it mostly sat in my drawer, coming out only when I wanted to feed my Nintendogs. Now it comes with me on the bus, to the library, and pretty much anywhere I expect a wait of more than 2 minutes. With a homebrew application, I can theoretically browse the Internet as well, but I seem to be having implementation problems on that aspect.
- My vast cosmetics collection
I was just comparing with my sister, and I counted 8 eyeliners in my possession. EIGHT. That’s 4 for each eye. That is insane (or in the words of a certain person, that’s Sparta). Why am I thankful for it? Because, ironically, I don’t use it all that much.
On a side note, I quipped to my sister that a man marries one woman, but gets the wardrobe and dressing table of 6.
- My beanbag
It’s a great backrest, is nice to cuddle, and is highly ergonomic. It’s also cheerfully red-and-white. It doesn’t do much, or indeed anything at all, but I am very proud to own it. It’s cool.
- My bitch boots
The bitch boots are a staple if you want to add some edge to your alter-ego-du-jour. Mine are black leather with a pointy toe and a pointy heel. They don’t go very high - they hit around the mid-calf - but they are like Wonderbras for my legs. I have friends who wear stiletto pumps and call them the CFM shoes. Me, I’ll swear by my boots.
Maybe an Orlando Bloom lookalike will take off my boots seductively while we romp on a beach somewhere. Yeah, and while we’re at the magical wishing tree, I’d love to have Keira Knightley’s body as well, thanks. (Pirates 3 reference, btw.)
- My t-shirt collection
I need to update my photo database of my shirts, having recently acquired some new ones since the last update in my sophomore (!) year. I love the versatility and aesthetics of the shirts, and I am greatly saddened that I shall probably not be able to wear them to work after I graduate. I let my shirts speak for me, because after all I am seen and not heard.
- My comics collection
If a fire broke out and I couldn’t save my books in time, I’d cry my eyeballs out. 11 volumes of Lucifer plus 2 volumes of The Sandman and a few copies of Fables as well as Absolute Watchmen and Bone, all turned to ashes - you’d cry too. Especially since one volume, Taller Tales, is no longer in print. I found it by sheer luck in a shop I don’t usually patronize, so it’s not even replaceable as the others are.
This alone makes a pretty strong case for my refusal to ever smoke.
The list could go on and on until I’m done cataloguing my possessions. There are still the other gadgets like my camera and phone, and the novelty items such as my nodder, my Anfield sign and my MUSE poster that are significant because of what they say about me. But let’s restrict it to functional items for the time being, yah?
Chocolate Cravings
*Paid Post*
Continuing my list of gift sites for females (who, strangely enough, have much in common with me), I present to you a site featuring chocolate gift baskets.
This site works as a directory of chocolatiers that offer their wares online, and features such famous names as Gevalia and Richart. Besides the usual gourmet chocolates, custom-assembled gift baskets are available. And if you’re the enlightened sort who believes in fair trade or eating organic, this site also provides links to purveyors of such guilt-free goods.
But you’ll still have to work off the caloric effects after the holidays!
Nut and Bee, gifts for me!
I shall now unashamedly point all my readers to an online purveyor of amazingly cute and adorable gift items. Just in time for Christmas, so consider this my shopping tip to those of you who are stumped for gift ideas for that bimbo in your life who has Cute Overload bookmarked on her browser.
Nut and Bee are based in New Zealand and they make very cute stuff. I find the magnets an interesting idea - cute yet functional. Add in the fact that they come in 96 designs, and you have a winning business model. You can’t buy just one. Some of them come in sets, so of course you gotta have the full set, right right? My favourites are anything with bunnies (obviously) and the cloud series. I like to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, so?
The rest of the site features one-of-a-kind knitted pieces, stickers, lettersets and bookplates. What are bookplates, you ask? Go and find out. Just make sure you have tissues ready for when your head asplodes from teh qte*.
*if you can understand this, you are either a fluent lolcatter or too attached to Cute Overload.
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