Vibhat is reading well !

Jacob Ballas Childrens' Garden

The Jacob Ballas Childrens Garden is a nice play park for children

Newater

 

And a visit to the famed Newater visitors center which lived up to its reputation. For those who don't know, Newater is treated wastewater that is reused in industry. For a industrial luddlite like me, the sight of all that high technology is scary and awe-inspiring (couldn't get good photos of the actual plant as the glass windows distorted them). And the graph (2nd picture above) is the most impressive: between 2003 and 2012, Singapore increased the contribution of Newater to its water supply system from 2% to 30%. Now that is a major shift in a single decade. These guys here *really* have their act together.  

Jan Peter Balkenende

He was the ex-Prime Minister of Netherlands and now at Erasmus University.
To be frank, the thing that stuck most in my mind from his talk was a joke about the Singapore heat - "It is better to be a tropical fish than a tropical bird".
Profound.

Guest post - Suman Maradani

My friend Suman Maradani sent me this mail recently:

This is an idea that sprung up during the last of the load shedding hours for the day yesterday, so don't take it that seriously.  It was an interesting thought exercise I had and thought I'll share to see if there's any merit/potential.

• The core idea is to build a 'massive collaborative social game' - essentially around the power situation, especially for places like Bangalore.
• Has shades of the pitting citizens against citizens by the Joker in Dark Knight :)
• Essentially, there's an app, which uses location based info, realtime info from Bescom etc, shows locality/sector wise current usage, whether a power cut is looming, the threshold for hitting it etc - I guess you see the point
• Really pit people collectively in a sector/group against other such groups - so they can reduce their own power usage appropriately (in their own small ways, but all that adds up) and avoid the dreaded load shedding or gain enough credits etc to reduce the duration, hence the pain etc.
• There's obviously a massive social aspect/element to it - collective gains, social psychology etc
• Situation about power etc will always be under crunch even in the future (even water for that matter)
• Volumes (of users) are obviously massive
• Today, there aren't any solutions and it's pretty unidirectional - bescom decides (has no choice) and flips switches.  Maybe the collective social wisdom can evolve to solve it collectively in a fun and engaging way, which is a win-win for all involved

The Garbage Can model of organisational choice

Experimenting with posting some of my readings.

I got a lot of good-natured teasing from some of my classmates for liking this paper, which they hated.

This is one of our readings in Organisation theory. Its a somewhat extreme model of organisations which are anarchic. A good description and context for the paper can be found here:
https://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/gloss/g.html

and the paper itself here:
www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/Cohen_March_Olsen_1972.pdf 

The Haze

This last week here we've had the 'Haze'. Farmers or plantation owners burning forest to clear land for agriculture in Indonesia, cause severe pollution in Singapore and Malaysia from the smoke. It shows up as a thick haze in the air, down to ground level, that reduces visibility severely. It causes respiratory and other problems in people, especially with prolonged outdoors expsoure.  The Delhi-ites in our batch and others from similarly polluted cities were being very blase about it but as Rajesh Rangarajan (one of my classmates) was explaining  "...this is normal vehicular pollution, combined with particulate matter from the smoke, and with dioxins from the burning coating the particulates ... ". Or some such. Not Good.

Photo taken off the Straits Times website.

On China

This is a post that will hopefully keep getting updated and republished as I learn more (and correct my earlier knowledge).

One of the big new things that I've been exposed to here is all things Chinese.

One of the 'aha' moments in that matter has been, that China is a significant portion of the ethnic origin of many countries around it. Singapore of course is 75% ethnic Chinese, Malaysia has a significant minority, Thailand has a significant minority (though the Chinese component has now assimilated deeply and is not so distinct, for eg. in the names. Many Thai PMs including Thaksin Shinawatra have some Chinese in their blood).  Indonesia has a 1% which is relatively small but a decent chunk of numbers. Will update as I find info about other countries too. And looking wider there are significant Chinese pockets in many major cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco and so on. The point is that it must give a great deal of national confidence to see your spread and impact outside your borders. It must give you a different almost paternalistic perspective on the world or atleast portions of it (the mothership kind of thing).
In contrast India has precious little such populations. And interestingly, where there are such populations they are Tamil! Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia. (Though no doubt the Andhraites will soon form a significant minority in the US.)

Another fairly simple fact that I didn't know, is the way Chinese write their names, the family name or last name comes first. Lee Kuan Yew for eg. , Lee is the family name. I haven't yet found out how the other two names work, if one of them is a 'primary' first name or what. Sometimes the Chinese take on a 'Western' name , and then they write their name like so 'Rebecca Lee' .

Kishore Mahbubani's 2nd Dean's Lecture, this time together with Prof Khong Yuen Foong on "Eternal Lessons of Geopolitics".  This one left me cold. I find International Relations and geopolitics distasteful. All this discussion of great powers and national interests while there is a body count every day in different parts of the world. I'm sure we would have a different world if each class on international relations was preceded by a moment of silence for everybody who got killed or injured or displaced that day in the international conflict du jour. After the talk I made a muted attempt to communicate my position with Prof Khong. He responded very quickly on the lines : "You do social policy right, international relations people in your country keep you safe so you do do your stuff". Touche I suppose.

The photos were taken with digital zoom hence the distortion and halo effects.

This week's photos

 Sleeping Buddha

'Snow Ice' - A Chinese Dessert 

 Official photo for the LKY website etc... Looking like a bureaucrat

Talk by Prof Rohan Samarajiva on "ICT Impacts In Developing Asia: What we know and what we need to know" .

I didn't have particular strong takeaways from it, which reinforces my general bearishness on ICT for Development ..

Institute of Water Policy research seminar. "Putting Women in Charge: Examining Gender Differences in Quality of Water Services Delivery", a paper  by Namrata Chindarkar and Yvonne Jie Chen, Assistant Professors at the School. They surveyed  borewell maintenance services in villages in Gujarat and found that quality of service was better in those that were serviced by women borewell mechanics. And this had the double benefit of freeing up more time of women in these villages so that they could engage in more income generating activities.