Snow Angel Nine Ball

Multimodality

2009-01-10T06:06:00.002+08:00

" In defining the genre of an educational CD-Rom, inclusion of both visual and verbal genres is salient because both semiotic systems are specialised to make meanings in different ways. The point is that the multimodal integration of the two produces a multiplying effect meaning that the one contexualises the other to produce an overall text meaning." (Baldry, 2000:60)

Baldry, Anthony. (ed.) 2000. Multimodality and multimediality in the distance learning age. Campobasso, Italy: Palladino Editore.

The postmodern rich poor gap divide

2008-10-01T19:52:00.002+08:00

This quote below reminds me of the Automation project I did a few months ago on critiqing the arguments made by an author summarising the benefits and demerits of Automation in American society in a paper written in 1983.

Silvio, Carl. 2007. “The Star Wars Trilogies and Global Capitalism” In Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci (Eds) Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films: Essays on the Two Trilogies. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Pg 67

I suggest that the chief contradiction of this later period lies in the dissonance that many Americans feel between the supposedly benevolent and progressive nature of our new global economy and the way that this economy does not always appear to benefit the middle or working classes of the country. Over te course of the 1980s and 1990s, wages for working Americans consistently fell in relation to the cost of living, a trend offset in most cases by employees working longer and longer hours. Between 1989 and 1997, the earnings of a median American worker fell 3.1 percent, the income of a median American family declined by 2.1 percent, while the amount of time that such a family spent at work increased by six weeks per year. This steady erosion of middle and working class wealth occurred while the general productive capacity of the economy grew by eight percent and the average salary of CEOs more than doubled (Mishel). And yet we find ourselves constantly bombarded with hype about how the new information age, systems thinking, and globalisation are revolutionising our world for the better. For instance, in spite of what these economic trends seem to indicate for the future of the working and middle classes of America, Edward Simon president of Herman Miller, can actually argue that "[b]usiness is the only institution that has a chance, as far as I can see, to fundamentally improve the injustice that exists in the world" (qtd. in Senge 5).

Ciprofloxacin

2008-02-04T16:59:00.000+08:00

Urinary Tract Infection

- severe case was discovered after being examined by the doctor at the 24 hours clinic at Bk Panjang.

- Outset was probably on Thurs night/Fri morning with pains at the upper thigh area. Foul smelling urine with cloudy sediments - symptons of bacteria infestation.

- Sunday night was feeling very cold and weak after bathing, and feeling of dying. This was the trigger to visit the doctor. Was prescribed Ciprofloxacin as antibiotics and told to revisit doctor again if fever occurs.

Review of modules taken for Academic Year 2007/08 Semester 1

2007-12-30T04:11:00.000+08:00

End of Academic Year 2007/08 Semester 1

Here’s the list of comments for the modules that I had taken for the semester:

Lexicology and Lexicography

Basically lexicology is the theory or linguistic concepts behind the art of making dictionaries whereas lexicography is the practical approach or the actual steps that go into the making of dictionaries itself that includes the types of information to be included in dictionaries, the arrangement of definitions given in the dictionaries, etc. This module is interesting because it helps undergraduates expand their understanding of how ordinary people organize the lexemes or lexical units in their mental lexicon which in a sense is not haphazardly organized but organized according to their relations to other similar lexical units such as within the same lexical semantic fields – synonyms, antonyms, etc. Thus, the mental knowledge of ordinary people’s linguistic repertoire is never independently developed in isolation to other lexical units or their contexts. Concepts or frameworks covered in this module include John Sinclair’s multi-word lexical model which involves the semantic prosodies, semantic preference, colligation and collocations of the core lexeme; the use of 3 types of evidences which are the introspective knowledge of ourselves or informants, the citational evidence gathered from various sources that include newspaper articles, google search, forum search and corpus evidence that is systematically gathered for a specific purpose in order to prove or disprove a hypothesis(corpus based), or to create a hypothesis based on the corpus evidence(corpus driven), in order to triangulate to produce for a more concrete conclusion for the hypothesis; Fillmore’s frame semantics; Ooi’s concentric circles model of Singapore English; Wierzbicka’s semantic primitives or the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach; Lexical Semantics and Mel’cuk’s theory of word relations; the WordNet database in simulating the mental lexicon for a closer representation of linguistic categorization in the brain for the linguist’s dictionary; the notion of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and the difficulties in translating cultural concepts from one language to another especially with regards to metaphorical translations; and finally the new lexicons or the new online electronic dictionaries such as Urban dictionary that favours a more democractic and descriptive approach to the given definitions to new linguistic terms in electronic dictionaries to more rapidly record the rate of linguistic change around the world as opposed to the more prescriptive approach that is favoured in our more traditional dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The group project consisted of critiquing some articles that were taken from the Journal of Lexicography. From this exercise, I learnt to critically assess what the background of the author of the article is and from that is able to more properly gauge his position or what the author values in order to understand his argument better. I also learnt that the lexicographer has to take into account the needs of the audience or the users of the dictionary that it is intended for so that the dictionary will be useful to the targeted audience and not solely based on the assumptions of the lexicographer. Not merely providing the meanings or definitions of the words but it is also important to provide pragmatic information to the users such as the discoursal features of words and the politeness that is associated with using certain words and finally the importance of including context of use for the words.

The individual project is one of the most fulfilling because it is a more hands on exercise in which I get to gather the 3 types of evidences – introspective, citational and corpus data to support my given hypothesis. The topic I chose was the Lexis of Shmups which is a type of 2D scrolling arcade game. For the website/software review, I chose to compare the OALD’s 3D search with the Visual Thesaurus. I especially like the visual component of these softwares because they can serve to simulate the visual imagination of the user and also because these 2 softwares are different in their own right and shows that we cannot only rely on 1 dictionary for our expansion of the mental lexicon but through complementing both dictionaries and others could we achieve a more comprehensive knowledge for the advancing of our pre-existing linguistic repertoire. The Visual Thesaurus is of course based on the popular WordNet database.

The final exam compulsory question includes the question asking the rationale for the structuring of the dictionary entries in the WordNet database as well as the organization of example sentences given in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary. The answer I gave was the paradigmatic or ontological organization of the entries in WordNet as opposed to the sytagmatic organization of the example sentences given in the CALD which can allow users to understand what is the typical usage of the core lexeme and thus is able to infer when the core lexeme is used untypically if it is used in other contexts through extension of the typical meaning. The other question that I chose for the paper was the question that asked me to state my position as to the question on whether I agree with the view that online electronic dictionaries such as Freesearch should not be allowed to exist. I had prepared for this question and I argued that this view is not sustainable because this is the future where dictionaries are to go in the digital age where online dictionaries would be recording everyone’s use and creation of new lexicons at a much rapid pace, i.e. the tendency towards the descriptive stance of dictionaries. From a purely prescriptive point of view, advocates of this statement are merely trying to maintain the status quo, i.e., the division between the formal and the informal; and the educated and the uneducated, but the advent of these online dictionaries would only further contribute to the blurring between these divisions due to the ease of spreading due to the technological advancement of the world wide web that basically makes everyone a lexicographer who can enter his own dictionary entries into such online dictionaries, though of course a certain amount of prescriptivism would still exist where definitions that are deemed to be nonsensical or offensive would be edited and removed by the moderators and administrators of the online dictionaries. I ended off my argument by returning to the prescriptive stance that it is nevertheless important and we should not disregard it because to adhere to rules we would allow a more wider audience to understand us instead of using idiosyncratic words that none understands and hence the usage of words should be based on the context itself.

Discourse Structure

This module deals with the linguistic structure that is above the unit of a sentence. Concepts covered include Longacre’s 4 text types: narrative, procedural, behavioural and expository; Labov’s model of narrative structure: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda; various evaluative devices that signals to the reader what the author of the texts understand it by and why he considers it significant which includes external evaluation, embedded evaluation, evaluative action, evaluative lexicon, evaluative grammar(intensifiers, comparators, correlative, explicatives); Hoey’s Problem-solution pattern(Situation, problem, response, evalution); ideational relations – Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structural Theory (condition, reason, elaboration, purpose, result, solutionhood, circumstance, evidence, motivation, concession, antithesis); action sequences(adjacency pairs, sequence expansions); discourse markers; Prince’s seven information types; Chafe’s one new idea per Intonation Unit constraint, Preferred argument structure, light starting point constraint; and cohesive ties.

The topics set for the tests and exams are predictable in the sense that test 1 consist of the topics for Labov’s narrative structure, evaluative devices, Longacre’s text types. Test 2 consists of the topic for ideational relations, action sequences and discourse markers. The final exam consists of the topic for Hoey’s Problem-solution pattern, Chafe’s one new idea per IU constraint, preferred argument structure, light starting point constraint and cohesive ties. Even though I did not do well for this module, I learnt the importance of structuring the points in support of my argument in answering the main question to give a more focused answer.

Interactional Discourse

This module emphasized on analyzing spoken discourse instead of written discourse, i.e the interactional aspects as opposed to the transactional contents of spoken discourse. The frameworks that were taught in this module include Hasan’s Generic Structure Potential(for genre of text types); Wilson’s Speaker Rights Theory(for conversation); Francis and Hunston’s Exchange Structure; Martin and Rose’s Exchange Structure(derived from Systemic Functional Grammar); Gricean pragmatics that include face and politeness. The first test consists of analyzing a given short transcript and several short questions were asked in order to test on concepts taken from Generic Structure Potential, Speaker Rights Theory, exchange structure and transcription methods. This test can be scorable in the sense that the concepts covered and the questions asked guide the students in giving the corresponding answers to the questions so it would not be rather complicated test to attempt as compared to the open type questions given in the final exams. For the presentation, my group did on the exchange structure(Francis and Hunston analysis) and politeness analysis on the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky. My essay was done on the adaptation of Francis and Hunston’s Exchange structure to the genre of interview with Noam Chomsky. I understand that I did not do well for the essay because I had not provided a focused thesis statement at the beginning of the essay and structure the rest of the essay accordingly in support of the thesis statement under a common umbrella. The final exam is basically either comparing or identifying the similarity between 2 or 3 given transcripts of conversations/interviews based on exchange structure framework and politeness strategies. I should have done well for this module, but for the deficient nature of the essay which I have learnt is important for the module on the whole.

Language, Ideology and Power

This is one of the more interesting modules that I had wanted to take all along because this module touches on issues that affect us in the real world. Concepts or issues touched on in this module include in chronological order: language and reality(man made language), ideology, political correctness, representational issues which include the sexist representation – linguistic and graphical of women; and the Benneton Culture which is a rather controversial marketing campaign because it mixes commercial interests and at the same time championing human rights by showing controversial images such as a man dying of AIDs to instill awareness of such issues on the consumers of this culture. The controversial issue and question is: “how can one reconcile the commercial interests of Benneton with its self-proclaimed slogan of championing for human rights through the showing of such controversial images through the media and without the company itself engaged more actively in eradicating stereotyped representations of people in the campaigns.” Other topics covered include institutional control(oracular reasoning; politics of ESL classroom) – the tension between the authoritative and democratic approach between the experts and the ordinary people, feminine self-identity through other-centredness and male heterosexuality, Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign, Gender, language and the politics of literacy, critical language awareness and emancipatory discourse, anti-languages and finally issues of empowerment. For the class presentation on ideology, I was in charge of providing the case study portion for the presentation and I showed the case study of the muti-racial ideology in Singapore because this issue is closer to our hearts and therefore could serve to allow the class for a better understanding of the concepts in the reading by applying Van Dijk’s reading of ideology to the multiracial ideology. The term paper was done in groups of 2 and my topic was on the linguistic analysis of the newspaper article that appeared in September 2007 on the AWOL case of CPL Dave Teo. Lessons learnt from writing the term paper is to provide at the outset a proper background behind the Straits Times (by applying the calibrated coercion that I raised in the class presentation) to better explain why the report is linguistically written in this way. Secondly, to separate the authorities and show when it is clear that the sentence is talking about the police, when the SAF and when it is not clear and finally structuring the paper thematically to provide a stronger focus for specific points raised. The final exam’s compulsory question is on a 2006 article that talks about the issue of race and politics and asked us to critically unpack the concepts of ideology, empowerment and identity as regards to the article given for analysis. The second question I chose was on this quote from the Thomas Theorem, “all people define situations as real; but when powerful people define situations as real, then they are real for everybody else in their consequences.” The question asked us to consider how institutional power can be discursively negotiated and not simply imposed top-down. The basic argument that I provided was for a more middle approach, when institutional authorities have to be aware of their limitations of their authoritative knowledge in the educational and medical contexts and hence include a mixture of social and medical model when dealing with the other people in order for a more holistic analysis or approach of the situation at hand.

FASS Awards Ceremony 2007

2007-08-20T02:09:00.000+08:00

I was part of the audience for this ceremony on 17 Aug 2007. The ceremony started punctually at 7 pm with the Dean, Prof Tan Tai Yong giving the welcome address and congratulating all the prize winners. First up was the giving away of the Long Service Awards medals - from EL department was A/P Anne Pakir. The host was A/P Paulin Straughan. what I liked about her hosting of the ceremony was that of the light-hearted way she conducted the ceremony through "comedic acts". For example, she announced her own name and went to collect her own award from the Dean in a humourous manner which made the audience laughed. There was a new category of winners this year which is the undergraduate research prize category that was different from past year's award ceremonies. This was the next category of prizes given out. Finally came the book prize winners. This was also different from previous years in that a more personalised approach where the department heads gave out the prizes to the winners instead of the dean. With that came the performance firstly by Dikir Barat, a kind of "Malaysian" style of vocal singing performance where the performers were seen to be able to interact with the audience. Some of the performers were from NTU as interviewed by the host. The second performance was by the KR Harmonica group. I feel that the performances were much shorter than last year's performance. The final prize category was the Dean's List recepients. First up was the 2006 cohort. This was the biggest group and the students had to be divided up into 2 separate groups for the photo taking. Followed by the 2005, 2004 and finally 2003 cohorts. The ceremony ended at around 8.30 pm with a reception outside the LT.

Death

2007-08-11T00:24:00.000+08:00

I have several dreams about death. It might be a side effect from the life threatening injury and operation that I had many years ago. The feeling about death is a sensation of emptiness, hollowness, voidness, and timelessness whereby I felt that a million years had passed without me noticing it.

An appropriate quote about death is from an anime character from Inuyasha. In the anime episode 115, Bankotsu, the leader of the Band of Seven stated in front of the graves of Kyokotsu and Mukotsu that "Once you are dead that's it, there's no afterlife!"

群星耀东方－王心凌、齐秦

2007-07-30T01:53:00.000+08:00

20070729 群星耀东方－王心凌、齐秦
Credits: 王心凌大陆歌迷联盟发布

那年夏天寧靜的海+迷你电影

2007-07-16T06:10:00.000+08:00

那年夏天寧靜的海
________________________________________

Most touching MTV made for this album. Cyndi also sang it in remembrance of her friend Xu Wei Lun. Quoting from the lyrics: "回憶比真实精彩" - Memories are more exciting than reality. English lyrics translated by me.

Track 2 那年夏天寧靜的海
詞曲：彭學斌＠口袋音樂
製作人：小螞蟻
編曲：涂惠源

那時我們天天在一起　太幸福到不需要距離
Those times we were together everyday. So blessed that no distance is needed

很貪心　要全世界注意
Very greedy Want the whole world to notice

只是太年輕　快樂和傷心
Only that too young happiness and sadness

都像在演戲　一碰就驚天動地
All seem to be acting. One touch and will shake the world

今天看你　昨天的你去了哪裡
Today see you where did the yesterday you went?

那年夏天我和你躲在　這一大片寧靜的海
That year summer you and I were hiding at this big and peaceful sea

直到後來我們都還在　對整個世界充滿期待
Till we were still holding full of expectation for the entire world

今年冬天你已經不在　我的心空出了一塊
This year winter you are no longer around and a piece of my heart feels empty

很高興遇見你　讓我終究明白
Very happy to have met you. Let me ultimately understand

回憶　比真实精彩
Memories are more exciting than reality

那時我們天天在一起　太幸福到不需要距離
Those times we were together everyday. So blessed that no distance is needed

很貪心　要全世界注意
Very greedy Want the whole world to notice

只是太年輕　快樂和傷心
Only that too young happiness and sadness

都像在演戲　一碰就驚天動地
All seem to be acting. One touch and will shake the world

今天看你　昨天的你去了哪裡
Today see you where did the yesterday you went?

那年夏天我和你躲在　這一大片寧靜的海
That year summer you and I were hiding at this big and peaceful sea

直到後來我們都還在　對整個世界充滿期待
Till we were still holding full of expectation for the entire world

今年冬天你已經不在　我的心空出了一塊
This year winter you are no longer around and a piece of my heart feels empty

很高興遇見你　讓我終究明白
Very happy to have met you. Let me ultimately understand

回憶　比真实精彩
Memories are more exciting than reality

還記得一起努力　還有那些　一言為定
Still remember worked hard together and those promises

現在我就當過去　是種學習　雖然好不容易
Now I treat those past as a kind of learning, although it is not easy.

那年夏天我和你躲在　這一大片寧靜的海
That year summer you and I were hiding at this big and peaceful sea

直到後來我們都還在　對整個世界充滿期待
Till we were still holding full of expectation for the entire world

今年冬天你已經不在　我的心空出了一塊
This year winter you are no longer around and a piece of my heart feels empty

很高興遇見你　讓我終究明白
Very happy to have met you. Let me ultimately understand

回憶　比真实精彩
Memories are more exciting than reality

Bye bye, never say goodbye
未來　我期待未來
Future I am expecting the future

迷你電影
__________________________________

迷你電影's MTV is a continuation of the MTV from 那年夏天寧靜的海. In this MTV, Cyndi reminisces once again about the events from MTV 那年夏天寧靜的海 symbolised by the black and white coloured shots in the video.

Track 8 迷你電影
作詞：易家揚　作曲：廖世傑　編曲：Terence Teo

白云在蓝天飞行飞到哪里
White clouds flying in the blue sky where are they flying to

把往事翻来覆去折成纸飞机
Flipping and turning around past memories folding them into paper airplanes

好多的日子像是风景
So many days seem like scenery

没抓住什么有一些失望而已
Never caught hold of anything feeing a little disappointed

想回忆想过去想自己的戲
Thinking of memories thinking of the past thinking of my show

像空气像呼吸像一场旅行
Like air like breathing like a trip

没有人代替演好
No one to replace acting well

我的迷你的电影
My mini movie

好像16厘米的回忆
Like 16 cm of memory

在我的時間裡滑過去
Slipped away during my time

酸甜苦辣的雨下在眼睛里
Tears falling within my eyes

1寸1寸心中上映
1 inch by 1 inch swelling up my heart

想回忆想过去想自己的心
Thinking of memories thinking of the past thinking of my heart

像空气像呼吸像一场旅行
Like air like breathing like a trip

没有人代替演好我的迷你的电影
No one to replace acting well my mini movie

好像16厘米的回忆
Like 16 cm of memory

在我的時間裡滑過去
Slipped away during my time

叶良俊

2007-07-08T05:02:00.000+08:00

I enjoyed listening to 叶良俊's songs. He helped Jolin composed the melody for her song track titled 什么样的爱 in her "Don't Stop" album. The song is also included in 叶良俊's album titled 《我总是听你说》released in 1996 as track 10 什么样的爱你才懂. Here's the lyrics for the song sung by Jolin as well as the MTV of the song.

什么样的爱歌词-蔡依林(Tsai, Yi Lin Jolin)
什么样的爱

歌手:蔡依林专辑:don't stop

什么样的爱

词:黄舒骏曲:叶良俊编曲:terence teo

犹豫不决
是你的脸孔
模糊不清
是我的心痛
请你别只是望著窗口
什么都不说
曾经你要我付出所有
现在你却说只要自由
所有的对为何变成错
伤心的我只想问
什么样的爱
你才懂
什么样的我
才能让你感动
我的爱难道还不够
不够让你
沉醉到永久
什么样的爱
你才懂
什么样的我
才能圆你的梦
再也不会有人像我
像我痴心爱你不回头

Stan Bush The Touch

2007-06-30T04:53:00.000+08:00

One of my favourite songs from The Transformer animation movie soundtrack - The Touch by Stan Bush:

You got the touch
You got the power

After all is said and done
You've never walked, you've never run,
You're a winner

You got the moves, you know the streets
Break the rules, take the heat
You're nobody's fool

You're at your best when when the goin' gets rough
You've been put to the test, but it's never enough

You got the touch
You got the power

When all hell's breakin' loose
You'll be riding the eye of the storm

You got the heart
You got the motion

You know that when things get too tough
You got the touch

You never bend, you never break
You seem to know just what it takes
You're a fighter

It's in the blood, it's in the will
It's in the mighty hands of steel
When you're standin' your ground

And you never get hit when your back's to the wall
Gonna fight to the end and you're takin' it all

You got the touch
You got the power

When all hell's breakin' loose
You'll be riding the eye of the storm

You got the heart
You got the motion

You know that when things get too tough
You got the touch

You're fightin' fire with fire
You know you got the touch

You're at your best when when the road gets rough
You've been put to the test, but it's never enough

You got the touch
You got the power

You got the touch
You got the power

Orson Welles and Transformers

2007-06-26T03:50:00.000+08:00

Transformer animation movie DVD cover

With the upcoming release of the live action movie in theatres, this has made me interested in finding out more information about this animation in general, especially with regards to the original classical Transformer movie way back in 1985.

Orson Welles in 1937
Picture Source: Wikipedia

Interestingly, is the fact that one of the voice actors is the famous Orson Welles that had made the movie Citizen Kane which was touched on in my EL3880B module and which I had written on about in my essay. The fact is that Orson Welles had been much limited in his ability to create films due to the curfew that had been imposed on him by the Hollywood people, and that he had to resort to other professions such as providing voice for animation, commercials, etc in order to finance his own films. Incidentally, the voice over that Orson Welles provided for the main villain Unicron in the classical Transformers movies was his very last film role in Hollywood.

Unicron in Robot mode

With regard to the live action film, it had yet to be seen. Personally, I feel that the original films would always be the most pure form and hence the best as it had not been adapted or modified in any aspects into other medium. Adaptations could signify a divergence or a creation of an entire new content separated from the original work itself.

Bit Depth and Resolution

2007-06-19T01:29:00.000+08:00

Something that I learnt from Inside your Personal Computer module is the trade off between resolution and bit depth if you have a slow computer.

Decreasing the resolution of an application or video would allow a higher bit depth to be shown, for example, 24 bit on a computer with a slower video card. However the cons is that the resolution is smaller so I can't see as much as when viewing a higher resolution video.

This can be applied to video games. Another pro factor is the drastic improvement in game performance as well as lesser lag faced when playing the game.

Here are some screenshots of Dark Crusade played inside a window at reduced resolution:

One Word Tag Line Poster

2007-06-17T15:50:00.000+08:00

Inside Your Personal Computer Final Exam

2007-06-15T16:42:00.000+08:00

Some of the exam questions that have been puzzling me:

1. What is sampling rate and sampling precision equal to in a JPEG image file?

Is it sampling rate = resolution or frames per second
sampling precision = bits per pixel or colours per pixel

2. Twisted Pair wires have 2,4,6, or 8 wires. Which is false?

Is it 2?

Some of the other questions that came out in the exam:

1. War Drivers

- What are War Drivers?
- What problems can they cause?
- How can we prevent ourselves from being made use of by War Drivers?

Kinda expected this question because it was not asked in the quiz question and it is included in the Sound Bytes.

2. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

- What are DDOS attacks?
- What else does a hacker do to conduct DDOS attack?
- Why is it difficult to recover from a DDOS attack? How can an ISP help?

Did not do well for the last part of the question cos I misinterpretated what the question was asking.

3. Analog to Digital Graph conversion

- Write the binary digits corresponding to the values in the graph
- Plot the Analog graph on the graph
- Calculate the percentage increase in the number of bits used

Did not do well for this question because I was not able to calculate the bits correctly as well as the percentage increase.

Number of values for 0-3: 4 = 2 ^2
Number of values for 0-15: 16 = 2 ^4

Percentage increase = 4/2 X 100 = 200%

4. Why can't hard drive work very well at high altitides?

I wrote that because of the lesser amounts of airflow that is at higher altititues and hard drive require air to cushion the read/write head above the platters during spinning to prevent it damaging the magnetic surface area of the platters by scratching it

5. JPEG and Bitmap: which utilise compression and which don't?

6. Why is the minimum file size on a hard drive 4096 bytes?

The minimum file size on a hard drive is 4 KB which is 4 X 1024 bytes due to Windows XP and NTFS.

7. When a computer sends data to computer Y through a wireless access point, and there are also computer X and Z in the vicinity, which computer will get the data?

Only Computer Y will receive the data.

Total of 90 questions inclusive of True/False questions, MCQs, fill in the blank answers and short answer questions.

Understanding how the internet works

2007-06-13T23:06:00.000+08:00

Today's the final test for this module that I'm doing. I liked the last 2 short answer questions that came out in the paper. Basically, the first question asked us about TCP compared with another protocol that is similar to retransmission timeout. TCP consists of Duplicated Acks and Retransmission Timeout whereas the protocol that was posted in the question consists only of RTO. I answered that the protocol is simpler and hence easier to apply in networks and hence more scalable. The cons of the protocol is that unlike TCP which has other protocols such as Duplicated Acks in order to infer traffic congestion on the internet and adjust Window Sizes accordingly to suit the traffic condition, this protocol does not have additional protocols. TCP is thus able to more efficiently utilise the available bandwidth in the network because duplicated acks allow TCP to infer that there is some traffic congestion in the network but is not as bad as that from Retransmission Timeout. Hence, it will only reduce the data transfer rate to that of the congestion avoidance phase. In contrast, upon receiving RTO, the data transfer rate would be dramatically reduced to that of slow start phase. Here's the graph that I drew for the test:

The 2nd short answer question basically asked about P2P softwares such as Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and what are the pros and cons of these softwares. The 2nd part of the question provides us with a scenario whereby an entrepreneur devises an algorithm to combine a Gnutella network with Google Page rank search engine and ask us to comment whether this would work or not and what are the barriers to this type of algorithm.

Besides these questions, the MCQs are tough because we have to choose the correct multiple choices (not only 1 correct choice but can also be more than 1 correct choice) in order to get the full marks for the question. Many things tested were not from the syllables. For example, I did not know what a Kalman Filter device is.

Computer Ports

2007-06-05T01:26:00.000+08:00

Here’s what I learnt about computer ports from the GEK1500 module. Some of the slower ports (legacy ports) are already being phased out and cannot be found in new computers due to the faster speeds of the other ports, especially the Universal Serial Bus port. Below is the list of some ports that are found in computers according to their data transfer speeds.

Serial Port 56 Kbps (legacy port) – normally used for slow speed modems (dialed-up), keyboard and mouse and PDA cradles

Bluetooth 1.2 – ~700 Kbps
Bluetooth 2.0 – ~2.1 Mbps

Used on mobile phones and other peripherals that do not have high power consumption

Pros: Conserve battery life as it uses very little power, do not require line of sight for devices to communicate with each other
Cons: Short range (depending on power can go up to only a few hundred metres), low data transfer rate (~700 Kbps), only faster than a serial port.

IrDA port – 4 Mbps – requires line of sight. Usually used in palm tops, mobile phones and some keyboards

Parallel port (legacy port)– several Mbps per sec up to 12 Mbps – Usually used to connect printers, can also used to connect zip drives and other old scanners and webcams

USB 1.1 - ~1.5 Mbps (Low Speed) ~12 Mbps (Full Speed) – can use to connect devices such as mouse, keyboards and webcams

A twisted pair CAT-3 or CAT-5 cable

Ethernet – 10-1000 Mbps – Use to connect computers to form a network to share resources, also use to connect to the internet via a router and to connect to a network printer

Firewire – 400 Mbps – Commonly use to transfer video files from digital camcorders, music from portable mp3 players, many pictures from digital camera and for other large file transfers. Also can be found on printers but rare. A faster standard called Firewire 800 with a speed of 800 Mbps also available which has twice the speed of the original Firewire 400.

A flashdrive, a typical USB mass storage device (storage capacities can range from a mere few 10s of MBs to today’s 2 GBs and above)

USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps – Commonly known as the Hi-speed USB port with data transfer rate up to 480 Mbps (60 MB/s). Used to transfer large video files and other multimedia files that require high speed transfer, from a digital camcorder or digital camera. Nowadays USB 2.0 ports are the most common and popular ports in computers and can be used to connect many devices such as keyboards, mouse, Ethernet cable, printers, external hardisk drives, and other peripheral devices.

UNSW related article

2007-05-27T02:45:00.000+08:00

This article looks interesting. It's a letter written by a reader regarding the inflexible education system of Singapore.

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com

I READ with dismay about UNSW pulling out, but I knew that this is something that could happen any time to many foreign organisations which test their toes in Singapore waters.
One of the major reasons is the unforgiving inflexibility of the system and the way we Singaporeans have been groomed to accept that trying is not good enough, a failure is a failure and that we have to take full brunt of the consequences of failure, no exceptions.

The many unknowns and possibilities these days are ironically coupled with technological achievements that can have indicated abilities to predict some certainties giving rise to set regulations, guidelines and norms, benchmarks and deliverables being foisted on every engagement and contract, particularly at governmental level.

The weakness in the system shows up most when, firstly, the predictions/calculated risks don't match up to benchmarks despite the utmost efforts of both parties, secondly when there are more variations, changes, scenarios that are covered by these initial guidelines and deliverables and, thirdly, when the party with clout - which is usually the governmental body or GLC - is in a position to flex its muscles which it inevitably does without conceding an inch.

I have encountered many instances and accepted them because deep down, I do take the view that guidelines and deliverables are what differentiate us from being a cowboy country and which are required to set minimum standards and achieve accountability.

However, the latest personal episode set me thinking about how flawed the system can be.

My son, who is seven, attended a premier kindergarten and now attends a premier primary school - none of the educationists in these institutions alerted me to his learning disabilities which could have been rectified at an earlier stage.

Being very apprehensive at their comments that he was not trying hard enough, I arranged for an assessment at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore.

They were an excellent team who carried out tests showing that while he was not dyslexic, he had visio spatial and motor issues that caused him to scrawl instead of write, and rendering him unable to cope with the galloping curriculum, including being expected to spell 'community service' and 'amenities' (among a list of 200 phonetically unrelated words).

I wrote to the Compulsory Education Unit to request an exemption as home schooling may be an option to help him catch up at this juncture in order that he could achieve mainstream acceptance at a later point.

I received an ultimatum to reply within 21 days with a long list of requirements which included full details of how I expected to find alternatives to fit within the national education curriculum and system failing which I would be exposed to the full penalties of the breach including a fine and jail term.

Currently, my family and I are in turmoil. It is obvious that the child needs help through occupational therapists, education specialists and also sports and music related activities. The reason why we wanted to take him out of the system is that after a full day of school, he is unable to fully reap the benefits of these specialists particularly as one-to-one support is recommended.

Instead of the system being supportive of what is a very challenging move, we get an implied threat.

In fact, it was the difficulties of challenging the system at the onset that may have exacerbated the current position.

Our request to delay his admission to Primary One as he was a premature child born in December had resulted in a whole array of requirements which so dumbfounded us that we decided to take the path of least resistance, that is, enrol him in Primary One within the requisite dates.

My elder son, who is now completing his Master's Degree in Canada, was luckier.

In the early primary years, he was also branded as being subnormal. We, as parents, knew that this was not the case. He was a great personality and very bright - but he did not always do what was demanded of him. Fortunately, intelligence tests proved that our instincts were correct. He was put in the gifted education system which did much for him.

In my case, as a child of a diplomat, I returned to Singapore in Secondary 3. I failed every subject including English despite being on the top honour roll in my high school.

I was also fortunate to have great friends and tuition teachers who pointed out that that the system then only required regurgitation - nothing more - and I became a top scorer and attained undergraduate and graduate degrees in NUS.

Perhaps the system has caused our educationists to be fully aware that their primary role is one of accountability - and there are set norms, rules and codes of behaviour and conduct which are cast in stone.

When there is any deviation to the set answers or mode, no matter how superior such deviations are - they have to be marked to be wrong.

Let me give you three instances.

Even when my son was in the gifted education programme, he was asked to give as many words for the letter Z as possible.

He included 'zeppelin' and 'zinnia' in his list. He was marked wrong. I questioned the teacher because a zeppelin is an airship and zinnia is a flower. She said they were proper nouns. I further challenged her for the differences between zinnia and rose - she dismissed me with a shrug and a frown - and my son tugged me and begged me to give in, in case he was reprimanded further.

Another instance was when he was asked to give an answer based on a graph - he put 75.2 per cent (trying to be as accurate as possible) but the teacher said the answer was 75 per cent - no negotiation.

The only reason why I wanted to raise these points was that I wanted my child to be able to look at situations from as many angles as possible - and when he is not supported for pushing boundaries, then there is something wrong because neither he nor I could find any real basis for such dismissal.

The third instance was composition-set words. One of my educationist friends in the international school system remarked how her student in the Singapore school system, whom she was helping, was thumbed down by his teacher for an essay which used more suitably nuanced words than the givens and was given a fail mark.

I myself looked at a 'model' composition which my young son was asked to follow and found not just grammatical errors, but also cliches that did not actually happen in real life - only standard Singapore textbooks and exam guides.

Relating all this to the UNSW scenario, I can see how all this harks to the inflexibility of our unforgiving system and our well-trained bureaucrats.

The guidelines are always clear and until the guidelines are changed top down, the bureaucrats must follow it to a T - that is the safest route and the route that ensures that benchmarks are met and the line is toed - so the bureaucrats have passed the test of accountability and there will be no possibility of any slap on the wrist or what my son calls 'chicken egg' - a big fat zero.

Jasmine Tan Chin Chwee (Ms)

Updates!! and end of semester

2007-05-05T02:46:00.000+08:00

Sorry for the lack of updates. Even though I had taken only 4 modules this semester but had been super busy leh. Shall do some recap for the modules that I had taken this semester.

The Child Language module is non-examinable which makes it super intensive but still lots of fun and manageable. Why intensive, because there were 2 presentations of two readings, 3 tests(including the prerequisite test), class and IVLE forum participation and one big project which is 40% of the entire module. The project is fun because we got to choose and “play” with the child to gather linguistic data for analysis. Our project topic was on “Investigation into tone acquisition by a non-speaker of Mandarin”. Why the project topic is interesting because we wanted to find out how the child who had some prior exposure to Mandarin would acquire the new Mandarin tones we were going to teach her. We basically teach the child two minimal sets of Mandarin tones. From this project, we learnt that the gathering of linguistic data from a child is not easy at all and we have to offer an interpretation of the data we gathered. I would also like to thank my partner for providing the child for the project, for without the child, this project would never have been able to start at all.

What other things are interesting for this module? Basically there are some theories that are behind Child Language research which is applicable to human nature itself. These include the nativist theory which states that language is innate to our brains as well as the “social” theory which postulates that our environment shapes the language that we use.

The language and internet module is basically about corpus linguistics. This module is one of the modules that I had wanted to take all along. Why is it interesting is because of the analysis of blog language as well as other languages that are used on the internet by the various virtual communities. The linguistic data I gathered and analysed show how language is creatively appropriated and used by different people or virtual communities which help to make each community distinctive. For the individual essay, I had analysed and compared Singapore Teenage blog language with British Teenage blog language. The main weakness of the essay was that I had focused too much on the Singapore side which made the analysis skewed. For the group project, we had carried out a research on the language of game forums, comparing the language used in DOTA Allstars forum with World of Warcraft forums. The results are expected because we found quite a lot of similarities between the language used as DOTA is a subset of Warcraft series of games. However, there were some distinctive language used for each forum because of the different nature for each game. The exam questions were rather difficult. The first question basically asks about ethics in corpus research – how to carry out the gathering of data naturally but not be a skilled imposter. Hmm, spent quite a long time about 15 minutes before starting on this question. The next question is about Sinclair’s semantic prosody and semantic preference which is one of the simpler questions. Finally, I also attempted the question on how not to resort to cultural stereotyping when analyzing corpus data. Basically, I quoted the examples from the Thai chat reading combined with my own arguments.

Cinematic discourse module is basically about watching films. What I like most about this module is because it’s not very technical or linguistically inclined. Therefore I also highly recommend this module to be taken by non EL majors. I like the part where we learnt about the different camera techniques used in movies to create different kinds of effects. My essay was focused on the topic of camera techniques used in the film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I had started the essay since Chinese New Year in February. Of course this sounds like kiasu but had to start the essay early so that can gather enough information to write a good essay mah. For the group project, our group did on Animatrix. Our group was deciding between doing a Muse MTV or Animatrix, and in the end the majority of votes go to Animatrix because many of our group members were anime fans. We did one of the short films inside the Animatrix: Program which was of course Japanese anime inspired and it was also entirely created by a Japanese anime creator.

Here's a link for the Animatrix short: Program:

For the exam, I did on question about characterization and difficulties involved with it, which also touched on the elusive issue of identity. However, I argued that identity even though it is elusive and complicated is nevertheless an important consideration for the analysis of characterization. For the second question we were shown a video clip for Citizen Kane and asked to answer how linguistics and discourse analysis are important in the study of cinematic narratives. I kinda expected that Citizen Kane would be used in the exam because it is such an important movie.

The last module is narrative structures. It’s not an easy module considering that the concepts taught to us were abstract and we had to do lots of self learning. Of course, for the essay I had talked about the use of camera techniques in the creation of cinematic space in Citizen Kane. This is one of the most interesting essays that I had written because I learnt a lot of new things in the process of writing. The group project that my group chose was on Shakespeare In Love. I was in charge of the cinematography portion for research and presentation. Incidentally, this movie won the best picture for the Academy Awards which is why the cinematography is important for this film. The exam for this module was the hardest as the questions were very vague and open ended. Just hope that the answers I gave were okie. Seems that the first question is similar to the question that was set for cinematic discourse about how important linguistics is in the study of narrative in general, including narratives that are not encoded linguistically. The second question I chose was on morality and whether it has structural consequence or only has occurrence in the contents of narrative. I argued that morality has structural consequence as I feel that morality can shape the plots of narrative. But I feel that my argument was not very strong on the whole.

That’s all for this semester’s work. Next, taking two more modules in the coming semester – GEK1500 and GEK1512

Recently I was trying out an email reading program called Emailcash Pro. Was wondering on the reliability of this program. But still trying it to see how it goes..

Stressful Dream

2007-02-06T23:35:00.000+08:00

Haiz, I just had a dream that my painstakingly written school notes were torn up. It must be the stress in school...

First Week of lesson

2007-01-15T02:31:00.000+08:00

The past week was my first week of the semester. The first lesson was on Language and Internet. We had a hands on interaction with a computer program called Eliza - meant to simulate a person, but its responses are actually based on rules and keywords, according to what you type, the program will respond in a definite manner. There are 2 programs we need to use in order to analyse language use in communities and chat programs - WordSmith and WMatrix. Specific patterns of language will become apparent as we analysed the language data collected from the internet. There should be similar patterns according to gender, age, occupation, and the type of forums, or country that the data is collected from.

The new module Cinematic Discourse is rather interesting. It is mainly about questioning the basic assumptions that are normally taken for granted when we watch movies, or rather, we often abide by a schema to make sense of what is happening in the movie. An example shown during the seminar is from Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). The cowboy in this movie does not know how to use a gun, nor does he know how to ride a horse. Does this mean that he is not a cowboy? No!! A cowboy does not necessarily need to use a gun and ride a horse. This is just a stereotypical assumption that we often take for granted which is the schema that we used to make sense of the world. Therefore, we have to step back, and question this assumtion. The project topics have 3 broad categories: Discourse of Home movies, Discourse of advertising and Discourse of animation.

Narrative Structures is an advanced EL module that has some relations to Cinematic Discourse and Narrative Structures. Narrative mainly involves two notions - the what and the way. The what is the content of the narrative and the way is the discourse, or how the narrative is presented. Narrative is an important concept because it is present in many other fields such as sociology, history, psychotherapy, medicine, etc. The CNM lecturer, Mr Alex Mitchell also attended this module, he seems interested to learn about the other modules in NUS. Towards the end of the seminar lesson, we were shown 2 videos. The first one has no narrative, it is just like the visualization that we see when we open an instrumental music with Windows Media Player. The second one is the Crazy Frog Video:

Why is there a narrative? Basically, there is an exposition, or opening sequence to the video where the frog just starts the music. Then the scene changes to where the evil guys are building some gigantic robot in the sea, and the frog gets dragged into the conflict with the evil guys when he went fishing in the sea. There is the climatic moment when the crazy frog confronted the gigantic robot and is able to escape from the gigantic robot, and up to the surface of the water by the end of the clip.

The last lesson of the week is on Child Language. I took this module out of curiosity, although I'm not confident about the technical aspects of the module - phonology and morphology. Was late for the class because Friday was raining heavily in the morning and there is a very big jam at Clementi area. The lecturer is very nice because she smiled at me even though I was late. Lesson started with brief introduction from the students. The assignment is to get hold of a child up to 4 years old and gather language data from the child by the next seminar lesson. The baby blues comic strip is later shown to us, although not very funny but is relevant to the contents of the module. Had the first test in the semester - the prerequsite test for this module, basically testing students knowledge in analysing morphological, phonological and syntactical data.

A lecturer in Sociology department collapsed and died on Tuesday when he was having a thesis discussion with one of the students at 2 pm. Associate Professor Ananda Rajah had collapsed in his office due to cardiac arrest. He is one of the nicest and friendliest lecturers in NUS. I had taken 1 module from him last summer term which is Singapore Society. I had enjoyed his lessons tremendously. I still remembered how he had spoken about the various food cultures in Singapore, and also how he related his experiences in the army of how the soldier says something or apologises to the tree spirit when the soldier wanted to urinate near the tree. His tutorials were also memorable, he shouted loudly when he announced that the hell gate had opened according to a diagram he drew on the board, in order to catch hold of the student's attention in class. I had communicated frequently with him by email during the term, he even asked me why I have not slept yet 2 am in the morning and still sending him emails. I want to quote some of the email exchanges I had with him in remembrance of him:

Offering to write letter of reference for me on his own initiative.

Hi Weimin

Over the years, I have had many students asking me to write letters of reference for them when they apply for foreign exchange studentships at universities which have signed memoranda of understanding with NUS, when they apply for jobs, when they apply for scholarships to pursue graduate studies at Masters and PhD levels. That kind of thing. So, if ever your are thinking along those lines, when the time comes, do let me know.

Cheers.

Ananda

Asking me why I was having late night.

Dear Weimin

My goodness! You are still checking your e-mails so late in the night?! I have, sometimes, to stay up late in the night to complete responding to student queries and other communications with people in other universities because of the time difference, but I think we all need a bit of rest at some time. Tonight, I shall have to leave rest/sleep to be little later.

Prof Ananda relating his army experience to me.

Hi Weimin

My NS experience goes a long way back. A arther long story, so I'll try and summarise. I was enlisted in 1971. At that time the SAF could not take in all the 18 year olds. I believe it was Dr Goh Keng Swee, as Minister of Defence who made the decision that 10 per cent of enlistees (who had been admited to the University of Singapore and Nanyang University - Nantah) could be balloted (a 'Toto system' which was I think in turn was based on a practice in Israel - but I could be mistaken). I was lucky or unlucky (depends on one's point of view) and actually was balloted out. So, after six months (basic training, section leaders training, school of small arms training - nowadays called BMT and SISPEC), I was allowed to go to the University of Singapore. I finished with a first class honours degree in FASS.

Went back to the SAF in Officer Cadet School (OCS), 4th Standard Military Course (SMC), SAFTI (1977). Graduated, and was posted to 6SIR, where as a 2nd Lt, I was a Platoon Commander, DyS1, and then Company 2IC. In my reserve service, after I did my PhD at the Australian National University (1986), I was posted to 1PDF. I served as Company 2IC in Delta Coy in 150SIR, and then as OC. I finished my reserve training as a CPT. That's why I had a Land Rover with driver!

I doubt if I ever met the lady you mention. She must have been in IPDF HQ. At IPDF, most of my interactions were with successive S3s.

Cheers.

Ananda Rajah

Very personal email correspondence with him, from the below exchange, this shows that he does not treat students as less equal position than him as a lecturer professor.

Yes, of course. Let's stay in touch. E-mal is great. I and many former students still keep in touch, even those who graduated. I am 52 years old right now, and I don't plan to retire so soon! But, yes, we will stay in touch. I just got a private e-mail account with gmail.com, on the recommendation fo a former student. The e-mail address is: rajah.ananda@gmail.com. Try it and see if comms can be establish through that avenue. I'm still new to the gmail account - only registered for it a few days ago.

I enjoy communicating with students. As I said, I greatly appreciate our intellectual exchanges. So, no need to be 'pai seh' or 'kek ki'. And, I'm glad to hear that there are other lecturers who are helpful. That's how it should be.

He offered me to take his module during this semester:

Want to a course with me in Semester II, next Academic Year? It is SC2206 Culture and Society. We go beyond the shores of Singpore in that one.

Cheers.

Ananda Rajah

Prof Ananda Rajah came over to my exam location personally to ask me if I have any problems - this shows that he is very dedicated.

Dear Weimin

I trust you are not too exhausted from the examination today. I have to invigilate the examination for the other students at 9am tomorrow morning. But, I'll come over to respond to any queries you might have at your location, after 9.30am. Ms Chia Hsiao Ching will be your invigilator. If you have any queries before I come over, let her know. She will know how to get in touch with me at LT11. She is a very helpful person, so do not hesitate to ask her for any assistance.

I am sure you will do well.

Regards.

PS: Did I ever mention that I enjoy our intellectual exchanges over the Forum and through e-mails? If I haven't, well here it is: I do.

The last email correspondence I had with him:

Hi Weimin

Have you followed the Mr Brown issue that has emerged in the Today newspaper, and related blogsites? The podcasts by Mr Brown and Mr Miyagi are really funny and are all about aspects of Singapore popular culture! I wish I had known about their podcasts before: could have suggested that students check out the podcasts and see how students would analyse them as aspects of popular culture. Only discovered the Mr Brown and Mr Miyagi blogsites after the Today paper issue.

Regards.

Ananda Rajah

張韶涵 - 夢里花

Angela Chang is releasing her new album in a few weeks time. Here's the video of her new MTV titles "Meng Li Hua" 張韶涵 - 夢里花 or translated directly to "flower in her dream". She mentioned that the tune for this song is from her dream and when she woke up she wrote down the tune and let the composer of the song transcribed the song into the official version in the album.

Lyrics at http://mymedia.yam.com/m/886189

I think the MTV is very surreal. The white setting of the MTV makes this song feels like it really does come out from a dream. The melody is smoothing and dreamy. Angela's vocal is still as unique and strong as ever.

10 Jan 07 Cyndi Wang Enews:

This clip is talking about Cyndi's latest enews asking people to go online auctioning for children.

RM Encoder Problem

2006-12-30T01:11:00.000+08:00

The reason why my encoder was not able to load the mpeg2 video files, but opens an activemovie window instead is because the RM encoder reads Mpeg and Mpeg2 via Directshow. The default directshow filter for Mpeg2 playback will not feed the video to the encoder software and the activemovie window will pop up.

One of the solution is to install Klite codec and set install MPEG-2 (Demuxer/Decoder) as Ligos/Ligos as shown in the diagram below.

Another solution is to install Moonlight's Elecard Mpeg player which will enable the RM encoder software to load the Mpeg2 video clip successfully.

AY 2006/2007 Special Term Modules

2006-12-29T00:15:00.000+08:00

Here is the list of tentative list of modules that will be offered in next year's special term. The list is certainly much more comprehensive and with more variety now as compared to the modules that were offered last year.

These modules look quite interesting to me and are under consideration by me:

GEK1500
GEK1501
GEK1512
GEK1511
GEK1527

NM2219
GEK1520
LSM1301

Taiwan Earthquake killed the Internet

2006-12-27T21:22:00.000+08:00

According to Yahoo News, Tuesday night's earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale that occurred off the coast of Taiwan severely damaged the vast network of underwater cables that enables modern communication. According to Hardwarezone, it would take three weeks for the underwater cables to be repaired to resume normal services.

Wednesday December 27, 7:08 PM

Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/061227/1/45o3v.html

Wednesday December 27, 8:17 PM

Internet access in Singapore severely affected by Taiwan quake
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/061227/5/singapore249388.html

Some of the effects that are experienced here for home users:

1. Unable to connect to Instant Messaging Services that includes MSN and ICQ.

2. Slow downloading of files from the internet.

3. Slow access to certain websites especially overseas based sites.

4. P2P services down including most torrent trackers.

Release of Results?

2006-12-16T02:16:00.000+08:00

There is a website that allows students to check their results before the official release date.

https://integral.nus.edu.sg/ui/exam2000a.HomePage

Some say it's the unmoderated exam results, while others say that it's the "official results" which is the same for their results when it is officially released on the actual date of release.

Personality Traits

2006-12-14T00:43:00.000+08:00

I learnt more about personality traits after I had taken the interactive storytelling and from doing the final project. Firstly, personality comes from the noun persona and persona means a mask. But personality is not necessarily to hide or disguise, but to typify a character. For interactive storytelling, the goal is to define personality - emotional, thought and character attributes - in order to drive behavior. Interesting behavior, in turn, drives dynamic, dramatic situations with a story.

Possible Spoilers ahead

I find the personality traits of evil characters or antagonists/bad guys to be particularly interesting. One personality trait often found in antagonists as portrayed in stories is of being manipulative. This manipulative personality trait I had tried to use it for one of my main characters in the final project. The iconic villain is from Star Wars’ movies who is Palpatine. In the first 3 movies, he is simply a senator who has gained more and more power throughout the trilogy to become the chancellor of the republic. In the first movie, it is he who manipulated the Trade Federation to take over the planet called Naboo which caused the former chancellor to become displaced due to his ineffectual handling of the Naboo situation. With this removal, Palpatine is able to get himself elected to the chancellor office through the great numbers of sympathy votes. By the end of the second movie, Palpatine had engineered the Separatists attack on the republic in order to gain more “emergency” power in his office. The clone armies he created are also a tool used in the third movie to destroy all of the Jedi scattered throughout the galaxy who are leading the clones in attacks on the Separatists. In the third movie, Palpatine manipulated and twisted Anakin Skywalker to become his apprentice Darth Vader, by feeding on Anakin’s desire for more power in order to save his wife’s Padme’s life from certain death which Anakin had been able to see in his dreams.

Another villain is Naraku from the Japanese manga/anime Inuyasha. In the beginning of the series, Naraku shapeshifted into Inuyasha and tricked Kikyo into believing that Inuyasha only wanted the Shikon No Tama jewel for himself to become a full Yokai and that his relationship with Kikyo is only one of the methods that he can achieve that aim. Naraku seriously injured Kikyo in the guise of Inuyasha and had wanted Kikyo to heal herself with the jewel. In doing so, Naraku would be able to corrupt the jewel for his own since healing herself by using the jewel is a selfish act. However, Kikyo sought to be burned together with the jewel in order that no other beings would be able to get the jewel for their own selfish needs again. Naraku continues with his manipulative schemes throughout the rest of the series. In a recent ended arc of the Inuyasha manga, it is Naraku who manipulated Hakudoshi and Akago to go independent from him. The purpose of this manipulation is for Hakudoshi to create Moryomaru who is initially just a puppet and his subsequent development into an independent Yokai after Akago is implanted into him contributed to him developing into a powerful Yokai, even exceeding the power of Naraku, but not that of his manipulative abilities. In the end, it is Naraku’s scheming and manipulative traits that won over Moryomaru, when Naraku let himself be absorbed by Moryomaru. But like a Trojan Horse virus, with the barrier dissolving abilities of the Yomeiju’s which he had absorbed earlier, he is able to incorporate and absorb Moryomaru into himself and gained the main powerful abilities of this Yokai which includes the Kongosoha technique.

A villain from PC Game is the final boss demon called Diablo, which is again of manipulative personality traits. It is he who engineered and let loose the demons in the town of Tristram after having possessed King’s Leoric’s son as his vassal and body in the mortal realm. But the body is too weak, and Diablo engineered the event in Tristram, in order that only the most powerful hero would be able to overcome all of his monstrosities that he created in the catacombs beneath the town. When this hero reach Diablo and defeated him, Diablo would in turn countercorrupt the hero, and hence gain a much more powerful body than he had ever before. Diablo continues with his manipulative behaviour in Diablo 2, the sequel to the original game of the same title where he freed his brothers Baal and Mephisto who are held trapped in the mortal realm. However, he had been defeated by another hero in this sequel and what future manipulative behaviour that he has will wait to be seen in Diablo 3.

I find that famous antagonists and villains are often defeated or betrayed by the ones closest to them. Emperor Palpatine during his act of killing Luke Skywalker using Force Lightning, contributed to Darth Vader turning back to the light side and gripped the Emperor and threw him down the power core shaft. Naraku would probably have met with the same fate of his destruction probably also contributed to by one of his closest minions or “detachments”. One example is seen from a recent development of the Inuyasha manga when he ordered Kanna, his most loyal detachment to destroy Inuyasha’s main weapon Tessaiga. Naraku does not view Kanna as anything else besides as merely a tool used to achieve his aims just like the Emperor just using Darth Vader as a tool but Naraku’s trait is more villainous and explicit then the Emperor’s because he would have Kanna sacrifice herself to destroy Inuyasha’s sword. In the end Kanna perished, but not before communicating the secret to destroying Naraku to Kagome through the glass shard that hit Kagome’s eye.