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Following the incident in which a student posted an ‘academic blacklist’ of international students, The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sent out an email warning to its students about the school’s regulatory guidelines on internet postings.

The email, titled “Message on Exercising Freedom of Expression Responsibility“, warned students in particular not to ‘make comments that cause hatred or dissatisfaction with the Singapore justice system’ and not to create ‘web pages/blogs containing information on religion or politics’ unless the student has ‘acquired proper licences from the Media Development Authority AND the written approval of the University.’

While the list of regulations has a few sound guidelines on exercising exercising free speech on the internet, it makes no case to explain why dissatisfaction with the Singapore Justice system, if there was ever one, could not be freely expressed by its students. At the same time, the insistence on a complete blanket ban on blogs that discuss politics or religion without acquiring ‘proper licenses’ from MDA and the school contravenes the very tenets of freedom of speech.

I've interacted with more people who think a single counter-example is enough to prove a generalisation or stereotype wrong (in other words, those who confuse the concepts of range and mean [or, perhaps, confidence intervals]) than people who think that stereotypes always hold.

perhaps this reveals that the oft-mentioned person who cannot think beyond stereotypes is a classic bogeyman

the people I interact with on such issues are those who have a higher level of education, but then this would be proof that "education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices".

I am used to SMA's weak stance against alternative medicine, but this letter in the ST Forum today is a new low for the "professional" association.Unwise to criticise alternative medicine, says SMA

Notice how Dr Razak had not addressed Dr Ho's main focus, which were on the lack of evidence behind alternative medicine.

Instead of accusing Dr Ho of failing to "take SMA's proposal to amend the SMC ethical code in context", Dr Razak should perhaps ask himself why SMC's ethical code specifically makes that distinction between medicine and "complementary medicine" - as I have argued in my previous posts, just because practitioners of a certain mode of alternative medicine are registered does not mean that there is any evidence backing their claims; reality does not alter itself because of cultural beliefs, political decrees, economic conveniences, or public opinion.

While Western-trained doctors do warn their patients about the risk and safety profile of what they prescribe and voice their opinions on various kinds of alternative medicine to their patients, it is another thing to advocate that the local medical profession collectively criticise alternative medicine groups.

This is especially so when doctors and alternative medicine practitioners are seen to be competitors and criticising alternative medicine can be construed as self-serving.

Dr Ho's column on Saturday failed to take SMA's proposal to amend the SMC ethical code in context. When the current code was introduced, TCM practitioners and acupuncturists were not state-registered. They are now. We do not think doctors will refer widely to TCM practitioners even if the code is amended. However, patients do request from their doctors medical reports and summaries when they seek care from TCM practitioners. The present code disallows such formal communication. Amending the code will facilitate better communication between a patient's various caregivers so that the patient's interest is best served.

from the earliest years, education should be based primarily on exploration, understanding in depth, and the development of logical, critical thinking. Such an emphasis, she says, not only produces a citizenry capable of recognizing and rooting out political jingoism and intolerance. It also produces people capable of questioning authority and perceived wisdom in ways that enhance innovation and economic competitiveness. Nussbaum warns against a narrow educational focus on technical competence.

a successful, long-term democracy depends on a citizenry with certain qualities that can be fostered by education.

The first is the capacity we associate in the Western tradition with Socrates, but it certainly appears in all traditions -- that is, the ability to think critically about proposals that are brought your way, to analyze an argument, to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. And just in general, to lead what Socrates called “the examined life.” Now that’s, of course, important because we know that people are very prone to go along with authority, with fashion, with peer pressure. And this kind of critical enlivened citizenry is the only thing that can keep democracy vital.

The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability". Worldwide, Gini coefficients for income range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.

No matter how the Department of Statistics jiggle the numbers, Singapore's Gini coefficient (ranked second highest in 2009) is an ugly reminder of the widening income disparity. The orange line is based on lower numbers adjusted for "Government benefits and taxes" to pretty up a gruesome picture. If they are referring to housing grants or GST relief payouts credited to the CPF account, we know neither provides the hard cash to put food on the table. Or pocket money for the school kid to stave off hunger pangs during recess time. NTUC's welcome largess of a 5 percent discount on 500 essential items like rice, cooking oil and detergent confirms the pitiful plight of the poor is very real. Never mind if the temporal relief is only good for 3 months, after which the general election should be over, and a new round of price hikes will be slammed in.

Meanwhile the holdouts against a minimum wage salvation are still preaching the skill upgrade gospel. MP Liang Eng Hwa repeats the official mantra, "Rather than cash handouts, training and increasing their productivity may help them break out of the low wage cycle."

Statistics that are quoted, by themselves, may be quite meaningless, unless they are on a comparative basis. To illustrate this, if we want to say that Group A (poorer kids) is not significantly worse off than Group B (richer kids), then it may be pointless to just cite the statistics for Group A, without Group B’s.

“How children from the bottom one-third by socio-economic background fare: One in two scores in the top two-thirds at PSLE” “One in six scores in the top one-third at PSLE” What we need to know for comparative purposes, is the percentage of richer kids who scores in the top two-thirds too.

“… one in five scores in the top 30% at O and A levels… One in five goes to university and polys” What’s the data for richer kids? Since the proportion of the entire population going to university and polys has increased substantially, this clearly shows that poorer kids are worse off!

In your article, you make the argument that “Straits Times Forum Editor, was merely amending his (my) letter to cite the correct statistics. “For example, the Education Minister said “How children from the bottom one-third by socio-economic background fare: One in two scores in the top two-thirds at PSLE” - But, Mr Samuel Wee wrote “His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination”.” Kind sir, the statistics state that 1 in 2 are in the top 66.6% (Which, incidentally, includes the top fifth of the bottom 50%!) Does it not stand to reason, then, that if 50% are in the top 66.6%, the remaining 50% are in the bottom 33.3%, as I stated in my letter?

Also, perhaps you were not aware of the existence of this resource, but here is a graph from the Straits Times illustrating the fact that only 10% of children from one-to-three room flats make it to university–which is to say, 90% of them don’t. http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf I look forward to your reply, Mr Leong. Thank you for taking the time to read this message.

we should, wherever possible, try to agree to disagree, as it is healthy to have and to encourage different viewpoints.

The Straits Times Forum editor Yap Koon Hong has told opposition politician Chee Soon Juan that he would be denied space in the Forum pages until he withdrew his “serious and unfounded aspersions” on the integrity of the newspaper. He was responding to previous reports on the SDP website which implied that The Straits Times had unfairly edited certain portions of Chee’s letters before publishing them.

Chee took issue with the fact that the title of his second letter had been changed to "PAP just as confrontational, replies Chee", which implied that he was indeed confrontational. In fact, newspapers rarely use the headlines suggested by writers and most readers know that headlines, together with picture selection and captions, are the work of sub-editors and not writers.

The SDP website shows that almost half of Chee's letter was deleted before publication. The original text was 635 words long. Forum page letters are generally less than 400 words long. The published version of Chee's letter was 348 words long.

icking from one channel to another, I often had to go past Channel NewsAsia (CNA). On two occasions, I stopped for a while to see for myself how they were reporting the Egyptian uprising compared to the others. It was pathetic.  Their reports were not timely, nor had they depth. Where Al Jazeera and the BBC had leading figures like Mohamed El Baradei and Amr Moussa on camera, together with regular on-scene interviews or phone interviews with the protestors themselves, and even CNN had the Facebook organiser Wael Ghonim, all CNA had was an unknown lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies from some institute or other in Singapore giving a thoroughly theoretical take, not on unfolding events, but on the background. And in a stiff studio setting.

This weekend, the bad news is the Richter 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Miyagi prefecture of Japan that produced a tsunami that was 10 metres high in places.

when I was at my father’s place, I wanted an update. All we had was CNA an so I turned to it for the eleven o’clock news. They had a reporter reporting from Tokyo about how transport systems in the capital city was paralysed last night and people walked for hours to get home. This topic was already covered on last night’s news; it is being covered again tonight. No other news agency with any self-respect is making “walking home” such a big news story (or any news story at all) when people are dying. CNA then followed that up with reports from Changi airport about flights cancelled and how passengers were inconvenienced. Thirdly, they had an earth scientist on air to explain what causes tsunamis. To soak up the time, he then had to field about four questions from the host repeatedly asking him whether tsunamis could be predicted — as if this was the burning issue at the moment.

Privately, several independent bloggers have voiced unease at the ugly mob behaviour that swamped cyberspace during the general election. The experience has sparked internal discussions about how best to manage readers’ comments, in particular, since that’s where irrationality has run riot.

There are also established bloggers who are no longer content to speak among the converted. They want to widen the online debate so that it does not attract only anti-government voices. (I've made a similar point in an earlier piece.) Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you see some of Singapore’s influential independent bloggers creating new platforms for national debate in the coming months, either by developing new websites or by reorienting their existing ones.

But even if they build them, will government sympathisers and spokesmen come? One thing that will have to change is the PAP’s politics of intolerance, which has contributed to the polarisation of debate in Singapore. Its “with-us-or-against-us” philosophy has compelled establishment types to stay clear of plural spaces. (The classic illustration was the PAP’s refusal to take part in The Online Citizen’s multi-party forum before the general election.)

1. You stated we wrongly replaced the statistic you cited with another from Ms Rachel Chang’s article on March 8 (“School system still the ‘best way to move up’). Your original letter “It is indeed heartwarming to learn that 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university.” Reasons we edited it: Factual error, sense. There were two problems with your sentence. First, it was contradictory and didn’t make sense.Your original sentence cannot mean what it says unless you were elated over the fact that nine in 10 children from less well-off homes failed to qualify for university. So we edited it for sense, i.e., underscoring a positive feeling (heartwarming) with a positive fact; rather than the self-penned irony of a positive feeling (heartwarming) backed by a negative fact (90% failure rate to university admission by less well off children). That was why we replaced the original statistic with the only one in Ms Chang’s March 8 report that matched your elation, that is, that 50 percent of less well off children found tertiary success.

(Visa: Firstly, I find it hard to believe that nobody in the Straits Times office understands the meaning of sarcasm. Secondly, there was NO FACTUAL ERROR. Allow me to present to you the statistics, direct from The Straits Times themselves: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf )

Second, we replaced your original statistic because it did not exist in Ms Chang’s March 8 front-page report. Ms Chang quoted that statistic in a later article (“Poor kids need aspiration: March 18; paragraph 5), which appeared after your letter was published. (Visa: It did not exist? Pay careful attention to the URL: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf . Look at the number. 20110308. 2011 03 08. 8th March 2011.)

Did any of you notice, by the way, how the ‘world’ was defined in this UBS study? Did anybody notice any Central Asian city in the statistics? We had three token “Middle Eastern” cities from the Islamic world – Dubai, Doha and Istanbul. The former two are Gulf cities, and we all know how representative the Gulf cities are of the entire Middle East. The latter is one foot in Europe. Also, how many African cities were featured in this study? What? Only Johannesburg, Cairo and Nairobi? Africa accounts for 15% of world population, and Europe accounts for 11%. I am sure you can do the math on proportionality of representation in this UBS study.

Were we expecting that there would not be such behaviour – at this first truly Internet election? Are we who are in Singapore so deep within our own well that we are surprised by this sort of behaviour? In the words of one old man, grow up.

If you teach a people how to behave, and coerce them, frighten them and show them examples of what would happen if they do not behave as told, then you must accept that this people would learn your ways.

And this is what is happening with Tin Pei Ling – the people have learned from the PAP. And yes, it is distasteful. It is unwarranted. But to lay the blame on the people alone is just plain missing the point, isn’t it?

1. One cannot criticise if one has not read the articleMr Singh said that between the reporter (Ms Sim) and himself, they had received 7 email complaints, with many more criticisms online. However, he said that most of these complaints had come from people who were reacting solely to the front page without reading the article. Mr Singh said that he had expected most intelligent and educated Singaporeans to have read the article before jumping the gun to judge TNP for their article.

2. "Are Singaporeans ready for a gay MP?" was the angle TNP chose to take because they thought it was an important issue concerning votersEven though the PAP said that Dr Wijeysingha's sexual orientation was not an issue for them, TNP felt that it was an issue for Singaporean voters. They therefore went out to poll Singaporeans about whether they were ready for a gay MP. 76% of the Singaporeans polled said that they would be fine with a gay MP. This, Mr Singh said, actually helps SDP more than the PAP, and therefore he felt that it was quite "ballsy" of TNP to have taken this angle. However, TNP only polled approx. 130 (I forget the real number) people and so it would not have been statistically correct for the headline to say "Singaporeans are ready for a gay MP". (This was in response to my question about why the headline could not have reflected the poll.) He also said that TNP decided to do a poll about lowering the age of consent in Singapore because it was an issue raised in the video (albeit not by Dr Wijeysingha) and they felt that it was relevant to Singaporeans. 

3. It is only a smear campaign if what the PAP say about Vincent Wijeysingha is untrue Mr Singh said that it would only be accurate to say that the PAP has launched a "smear campaign" against Dr Wijeysingha if what they are saying is untrue. However, what the PAP has said is true, and so it cannot be labelled a "smear campaign".He said that he had asked the SDP if they had attempted to suppress the video in question, and that the SDP said yes. So the PAP hadn't been "smearing" the SDP by implying they were trying to suppress the video, because they were

n the present era with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, such as twittering and Facebook, the old editorial policy is no longer viable. Even Straits Times’ journalists have said as much. If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.

Here is the front page for Friday 29 April 2011:

Yes, you will notice that there is a wide-angle photo of the crowd at the Workers’ Party rally the previous night that was held at exactly the same location as the iconic rally in 2006.