You thought that would be it. An appeal for support to help him get into school. Then it got exposed by the Sunday Times article yesterday that Alvin Wang, the person seeking support for his appeal to get into NUS, actually did get into NUS. In fact, he was offered a place in the School of Computing’s Information Systems course. But he did not want Information Systems, he wants Computer Science. All the theatrics about the online call for support…
This morning, you might have found yourself waking up to all the buzz about helping Alvin to get into school. School, here, being the School of Computing at NUS. Oh yes, that’s where I work, hence it caught my attention, a lot more than most other viral marketing campaigns might have. It got so much of my attention that I’m now actually writing a blog post about it. What is this buzz about? Well, Alvin launched his website www.helpalvingetintoschool.com to seek…
It was Climate Action Day at NUS yesterday. This year, it’s also more commonly known as the Day of No Rubbish Bins. That’s because the organizers, for the strangest and most inane reasons, felt that rubbish bins have something to do with climate. The action this year was to remove all (or most) rubbish bins around campus, and this is supposed to create awareness about our climate and environment. Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant…
I recently found myself leading an application system project: CodeCrunch. This is an online system for automated assessment of programming tasks. It is designed to help students learn computer programming by providing a web-based system to retrieve programming tasks, submit program solutions, perform automatic assessment, and obtain feedback of testing results. CodeCrunch originally began as a student Final Year Project, until we inherited the system in early 2010, and rolled-out to go-live in July 2010.
Sometimes I feel very worried about the computing students we’re getting in my school. Yet at the same time I’m amazed at how we could achieve the top spot in Asia and 12th position worldwide in the Computer Science and Information Systems Rankings 2011 (2011 QS World University Rankings). Some of the users, both students and even some staff, that I had the opportunity to interact with leave me in utter shock that they could belong to computer science school.
We have for some time wanted to conduct an event styled like Sun Tech Days or Microsoft Tech Days. The sort of conference or workshop that would cover a variety of techie topics. No sales, no marketing, just technology. Of course, considering our resources and our target audience, ours would be just a baby version of what the big companies are doing. It would still be interesting and unique, here in my school, because there aren’t quite other workshops like…
I’ve heard many complaints about how the internal shuttle bus service in NUS has become absolute madness since the start of the current academic year. This year saw the opening of University Town, with many classes (apparently unnecessarily) moved across to the new facilities, and transportation facilities that seem to be inadequately planned. I haven’t been to University Town, so I haven’t been personally affected.
I was recently involved in delivering a Unix workshop to the new freshmen intake of AY2011/2012. It’s something that the freshmen attend every new academic year. The idea is to expose them to Unix, particularly since many of them haven’t seen such an operating environment before, so that they would not be totally clueless, particularly when they start attending classes that requie them to use a Unix system. Nowadays, the role of Unix has changed somewhat. Many people don’t login…
I’ve long found driving in NUS to be very frustrating. There are too many reasons. One of my long-time complaints is with the internal shuttle bus services. My chief gripe with them is that they often drive in such a manner to maximize obstruction and inconvenience to other road users. For example, they will often not pull fully into a bus bay even when there is no obstruction in the bus bay, so that the tail of the bus sticks…
My one-word summary: Fail. I know, it is day one of operation. But this is Food Junction. They are not a new-comer, and should have had a wealth of experience operating their other food outlets. It is such a disappointment and anti-climax after waiting through so many months of delays. Okay, on day one, you’d expect teething problems. But I’m not complaining about teething problems. First up is about space planning. Look at the photo.
