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I am sec 1, but a superstar.

2007-08-23T18:55:00.000+08:00

Category: Social Issue

In the recently concluded Campus Superstar II, 13-year-old contestant, Shawn, was crowned the champion. Even though this is a singing competition, Shawn’s singing ability ironically plays a minor role in his victory. It is widely believed that he won because of his appearance and money, both of which precisely reflect the immaturity of our society.

Undeniably, being the youngest and also the cutest contestant, Shawn does have an edge over his competitors in terms of appearance. He is unique. And uniqueness is indeed one of the important traits that a superstar should have.

However, in this talent search competition, should uniqueness be the determining factor?

Looking back on the similar events in the past, I have “coincidentally” found out that the winner for 绝对Superstar is also someone pretty unique – he is blind. It immediately seems clear to me that the audiences were not voting for the idol in their hearts (as they should be doing), but were seriously fooling around. It seems that we are no longer paying respect to skilled performers but to those who arouse pity and affection. This behaviour not only makes me wonder if Singaporeans are truly ready for such competition but also makes me think twice about the definition of superstar.

A term which is once only used on actors like Brad Pitt who is an integration of both beauty and skill is now being labeled on normal individuals who just so happened to make their appearance on stage. The dilution is obvious – superstar has already lost the superiority part of its meaning. It is being exploited as a manufactured and empty idea imposed on the culture at large through a top-down process by the media. This dangerous machine precisely locates our sense of wanting-to-be-above-all-others and digs it up regardless of how deep it is buried.

All machines need money as an input, media is no exception. It is reported that Shawn’s parents have spent more than 10 000 dollars dialing the hotline. Not mentioning whether such investments are worthwhile for a diluted title that will fade with time, the idea of money leads to success itself is something that should not be encouraged. It upsets the balance between success and hard work, resulting in the younger generations no longer willing to achieve their dreams via righteous means if the unrighteous ones save them effort and time. Yet the media is happily distorting such important moral value just to thicken its annual income report. What level of maturity does this reflect?

At the end of the day, I think we should be asking ourselves what we are going to leave behind for our future generations. Shall we make a leveled world where no stars will shine? Build a skyscraper with economical foundation? Or buy a Statue of Morality? All these options are unique.

But they may not be the best.

Suicide, our last resort?

2007-08-19T20:19:00.001+08:00

Title: Chinese toymaker commits suicide after recall

Category: Social Issue

Studies have shown that the number of suicide cases is rising every year. One explanation to this worrying trend is the increasingly high level of stress the society puts on individuals.

Due to our growing population and improving education standard, people of all ages in the work force are facing stronger and tougher competitions each and every day. This, often seen by economists as an ideal way to keep up the competitiveness of a country, is also putting a tremendous amount of stress onto the citizens.

I may be rich, but I am a human too.

I believe this is a general complaint generated by the people high up on the social ladder. Indeed, all humans fear being stripped of things that we treasure. In order to preserve them, we work hard. However, there always seems to be someone who works harder. And thus, we fail.

To many of us, failure is the best stimulant because it attacks our emotion. It wakens our desire of reclaiming things we have lost. However, just like muscles, our emotion can be overworked. When failure either quantitatively or qualitatively gets out of hand, we will be left with no choice but to take a break.

Sometimes we are extremely upset about something. This signals the time for us to take a step back, relax ourselves and recall the past joyful occasions. If you really cannot think of any happy moments in life, just imagine yourself strangling the lady that issues your bills or the guy who sets all the examination papers and you will definitely feel better.

However, no solution is perfect. Once in a blue moon, that strategy may fail and we will have to turn to our last resort – friends.

Friends may not be as closely related to us as relatives, but they do understand how we feel and can in many ways give us emotional support by either comforting us or just lending us their ears. We also feel “safer” talking to them, in the same way we feel while chatting online, due to the distance that separates us.

Although it is said that no one is born alone, certain people, unfortunately, are so engaged in pursuing their own goals that they have neglected the importance of socializing. Thus, their last resort fails. And this leads them to a dead end, with one last door – parents.

It may seem surprising that parents are reserved for the very last moment, but it makes perfect sense when factors like the generation gap are taken into consideration. However, no matter how far away they may appear to be, or we may say they appear to be, family members are always closest at heart. Even if the whole world is against you, your parents will still be standing by your side. Thus, talk to them and they will definitely rekindle your spark of life.

As we can see, there are many measures we can take when stress got better of us, but suicide is never one of them. Numerous cancer patients are yearning to live just one more second. What right do we have to give it up?

What’s going on?

2007-05-20T19:34:00.001+08:00

Title: Evolution miracle fights for survival in Death Valley

Category: Environmental Issue

On average, I would expect to read at least one piece of news regarding endangered life forms per month since the day I picked up my newspaper reading habit 3 years ago. Are the animals really dying or it's just that we, the humans, are increasingly sensitive to our habitat over time? To me, it seems ridiculous that all the wildlife suddenly starts to extinct as soon as we stepped into the 21^st century.

Everybody knows about the theory of revolution. It states that all beings born into this world are put into a competition of survival – the fitter you are, the longer you will survive. All living organisms have been following this law for billions of years, why do we now worry about this natural phenomenon? Why do we now care so much about those being left out in the process of natural selection? These critical questions are preventing me from agreeing with environmentalists' concerns until I read the following line said by Barrett,

"We don't have the right to play God, it's arrogant of us to think that as humans we can come in, and take away something that's not convenient."

Indeed, we are the ones who intrude their habitats, who caused their extinction, and yet we want our hands to be clean of their blood? No! They are also made of flesh and blood. They are also entitled to live.

Another statement in the article that makes me ashamed of myself is this,

"When you see a fish, you think: 'I'm wondering how that would taste with lemon on it!'" Baldino said, saying that compared to iconic animals like polar bears, grizzly bears and bald eagles, the pupfish were "a harder sell."

I cannot agree more with this. Compared to those gigantic life forms that instantly grab our eyeballs, how much attention did we give to these small organisms? A bug is as vigorous as a monkey, yet how much we feel for them when they die?

I believe it is time for us to really reflect upon our biased conceptions and reconstruct them into something more empathetic. Only then, will we be able to preserve our lively earth and benefit our following generations.

Is Democracy the Best Way Out?

2007-05-13T21:21:00.001+08:00

Title: Philippine election candidates make last pitch for votes

Category: Political Issues

Democracy is the most adopted political ideology in the modern society. For the developed countries, this government system provides the best platform for citizens to voice out their opinions, thus allowing those at positions of power to best serve the society. However, this ideology assumes the presence of a matured and well educated public which is something majority of the developing countries lacks. Is democracy, then, the best way out for the developing countries?

In Philippines, for example, many citizens are not matured enough to carry out a proper electoral process. As reported in the article,

In the latest incident, mayoral candidate Salabat Diocolana and two companions
were ambushed in the southern town of Shariff Kabunsuan late Friday, leaving
Diocolana wounded and the other two dead, a police report said.

Instead of voting for the party of their favour, the citizens attack politicians they detest every now and then, causing not only unnecessary harm to others but also leading to an unfair election which is against the basis of democracy – fairness and justice.

The election candidates, on the other hand, are also not morally upright. As reported in the article,

Arroyo's chief aide, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita laughed off the
opposition's charges of planned cheating, saying "that is expected of them. This
is all just part of politics."

The politicians are actually convinced that cheating is a natural and acceptable technique in politics! This distortion of morality simply shows how uneducated they are.

Instead of blindly following what the developed countries do, and being “marred by cheating, vote-buying and violence, particularly on the local level”, I think the developing countries should really try to modify the current ideologies to suit their own needs. In my opinion, provided that there are capable leaders, a high degree of monarchy would definitely help in the development of a society whose citizens are largely uneducated. In this way, much time and money wasted on pleasing the citizens and holding elections can be used on economic developments. With a stronger economy, better education can then be given to the citizens to make them better prepared for democracy.

On a more personal level, I have once fallen into the trap of blindly mimicking what the “pro” does without processing it again through my less capable mind and it has proven to be lethal in terms of getting commendable grades.Some of my friends always study one day before the test and yet managed to do well. In admiration of their high efficiency, I decided to try that too. To my astonishment, instead of helping me to memorise better, the intense pressure made me more forgetful! Needless to say, I failed that test but lucky enough, I have learnt to think.

NEWS

2007-03-04T19:10:00.001+08:00

Published online: 27 February 2007; doi:10.1038/news070226-6

The more, the wikier

The secret to the quality of Wikipedia entries is lots of edits by lots of people

Philip Ball

Why is Wikipedia as good as it is? While the debate about precisely what level of goodness that entails has been heated, the free online encyclopaedia offers a better standard of information than many would have expected from a resource that absolutely anyone can write and edit.

Three groups of researchers claim to have untangled the process by which many Wikipedia entries achieve their impressive accuracy. They say that the best articles are those that are highly edited by many different contributors.

Listening to lots of voices rather than a few doesn't always guarantee the success that Wikipedia enjoys — just think of all those rotten movies written by committee. Collaborative product design in commerce and industry also often generates indifferent results. So why does Wikipedia work where others have failed?

Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman of Hewlett Packard's research laboratories in Palo Alto, California, addressed the specific question of how Wikipedia's better articles get to be that way. Specifically, do edits by a (largely) unregulated crowd really make an entry better?

Right now there are around 6.4 million articles on Wikipedia, generated by over 250 million edits from 5.8 million contributors. Wilkinson and Huberman have studied the editing statistics and found that they don't simply follow the statistical pattern expected from a random process in which each edit is made independently of the others1.

Highly edited

Instead, there is an abnormally high number of very highly edited entries. The researchers say this is just what is expected if the number of new edits to an article is proportional to the number of previous edits. In other words, edits attract more edits. The disproportionately highly edited articles, the researchers say, are those that deal with very topical issues.

And does this increased attention make them better? So it seems. Although the quality of an entry is not easy to assess automatically, Wilkinson and Huberman assume that those articles selected as the 'best' by the Wikipedia user community are indeed in some sense superior. These, they say, are more highly edited, and by a greater number of users, than the less visible entries.

Who is making these edits, though? Some have claimed that Wikipedia articles don't truly draw on the collective wisdom of its users, but are put together mostly by a small, select élite, including the system's administrators. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that he spends "a lot of time listening to four or five hundred" top users.

Aniket Kittur of the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-workers have set out to discover who really does the editing2. They have looked at 4.7 million pages from the English-language Wikipedia, subjected to a total of about 58 million revisions, to see who was making the changes, and how.

The results were striking. In effect, the Wiki community has mutated since 2001 from an oligarchy to a democracy. The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators increased steadily up to 2004, when it reached around 50%. But since then it has steadily declined, and is now just 10% (and falling).

Weight of numbers

Even though the edits made by this élite are generally more substantial than those made by the masses, their overall influence has clearly waned. Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the elite but individually less active. Kittur and colleagues compare this to the rise of a powerful bourgeoisie within an oligarchic society.

This diversification of contributors is beneficial, Ofer Arazy and colleagues at the University of Alberta in Canada have found. In 2005, when Nature's news team arranged for expert comparisons between articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica online, the experts found only a moderate excess of errors in the Wikipedia articles. (The idea that the two sources were broadly similar was vigorously challenged by the Encyclopaedia Britannica; see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html and http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060327/full/440582b.html.) Arazy's team says that of the 42 Wikipedia entries assessed in the article, the number of errors decreased as the number of different editors increased.

The main lesson for tapping effectively into the 'wisdom of crowds', then, is that the crowd should be diverse. In fact, in 2004 Lu Hong and Scott Page of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor showed that a problem-solving team selected at random from a diverse collection of individuals will usually perform better than a team made up of those who individually perform best — because the latter tend to be too similar, and so draw on too narrow a range of options. For crowds, wisdom depends on variety.

Visit our newsblog to read and post comments about this story.

EDITORIAL

2007-02-10T22:12:00.000+08:00

Nature
Published online: 7 February 2007; Corrected online: 09 February 2007 doi:10.1038/445567a

Light at the end of the tunnel

An emphatic and clear status report on global warming opens the way for action — presenting new risks.

The release of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last Friday marks an important milestone (see Special Reports: From words to action– Carbon copies and Is the global carbon market working?–Lifting the taboo on adaptation). Following the scientific consensus that has been apparent for some time, a solid political consensus that acknowledges the problem finally seems to be within reach. But achieving this outcome brings its own risks.

Until quite recently (perhaps even until last week), the general global narrative of the great climate-change debate has been deceptively straightforward. The climate-science community, together with the entire environmental movement and a broad alliance of opinion leaders ranging from Greenpeace and Ralph Nader to Senator John McCain and many US evangelical Christians, has been advocating meaningful action to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. This requirement has been disputed by a collection of money-men and some isolated scientists, in alliance with the current president of the United States and a handful of like-minded ideologues such as Australia's prime minister John Howard.

The IPCC report, released in Paris, has served a useful purpose in removing the last ground from under the climate-change sceptics' feet, leaving them looking marooned and ridiculous. However, this predicament was already clear enough. Opinion in business circles, in particular, has moved on. A report released on 19 January by Citigroup, Climatic Consequences — the sort of eloquently written, big-picture stuff that the well-informed chief executive reads on a Sunday afternoon — states even more firmly than the IPCC that anthropogenic climate change is a fact that world governments are moving to confront. It leaves no question at all that large businesses need to get to grips with this situation — something that many of them are already doing.

Tough choices

So then, the enemy is vanquished and the victors can rejoice? Hardly. In fact, the pending retreat from the stage of the president of the United States and his allies leaves those who do acknowledge the severity of the problem facing an even greater challenge than before. The world now broadly accepts that we have a problem, if not a crisis. So what is to be done?

The policy choices that lie ahead are more daunting than political leaders (or the media) have thus far been ready to acknowledge. In a sense, twenty years of frustrating trench-warfare with the sceptics has prevented a rational discussion about what needs to be done from even taking place.

At present, the political response to the situation is, in large part, incongruous. We need to restrict emissions in the developed world, and some steps are being undertaken to do just that, chiefly through the much-maligned Kyoto Protocol. We need to develop clean energy sources, and these are being pushed ahead quite rapidly, although each one — nuclear power, biofuels, wind power and hydropower, for example — creates its own environmental battlefield. Steps are also being taken to build systems for large-scale carbon capture and storage, and to improve the efficiency with which energy is used (see Super savers– Experimenting with efficiency ).

The trouble is, none of this is even close to being sufficient to meet the challenge. Hybrid cars are being purchased (and often allow their lucky drivers special access to empty highway lanes). David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, has sought planning permission to erect a wind turbine in his back garden. And Pink Floyd and Pearl Jam have declared that their most recent world tours would be 'carbon neutral'. But we are all vaguely aware that all of this is nowhere near enough.

Economic sacrifice

Even the most progressive governments continue to put the issue of climate change on the back seat behind their fundamental commitment to strong economic growth, which is needed to ensure political survival (in developed countries) and to enable human dignity (in developing countries). So in a typical European nation, for example, governments are calling for strenuous emissions cuts while also planning airport expansions that anticipate a further tripling over the next twenty years of air travel — the fastest-growing source of emissions, and one not capped by the Kyoto Protocol.

The fundamental difficulty here is that it has been politically impossible to accept that fighting global warming may involve some economic sacrifice, at least while the sceptics were in the picture. As these are vanquished, it becomes possible — and indeed necessary — to start the discussion.

Similarly, it has been hard to talk about actions that need to be taken to adaptation the damage already certain to be caused by climate change and associated rises in the sea level, as such steps were regarded as a capitulation to those who just want to keep emitting greenhouse gases. This is no longer the case (see Lifting the taboo on adaptation). Adaptation, which can take many forms ranging from the Thames Barrier in London to the introduction of drought-resistant crop strains in the Sahel and the establishment of a proposed climate-change adaptation fund, needs to be squarely on the agenda, alongside emissions cuts.

A similar relaxation arises with regard to revised negotiations for the second stage of the Kyoto Protocol. There is a case for opening the second phase beyond a simple extension of the cap-and-trade proposals that made up the core of the first. US President George W. Bush will remain a participant in such negotiations until the end of 2008. But even before then, talks should include all the options open to a planet that is now ready, at last, to acknowledge the fix it is in.

* This editorial inadvertently referred to 'mitigation' of climate change, where the authors meant to say 'adaptation'

Article brought to you by: Nature