TR EMERITUS

Dear readers, We have set up a Chinese section to house translation of selected articles by our writers. We will be translating more articles in time to come. Please publicize our blog to your Chinese-educated relatives and friends. We appeal to students from NTU, NUS, SMU and all polytechnics and JCs to join us as student journalists. Your time is precious and we will pay you a honorarium for your efforts. Please do not provide cheap and free labor to help PAP rejects and political wannabes advance their careers. Our site was suspended frequently during the last few days due to heavy traffic. The problem lies with our scripts written in php which use up more CPU memory and space than normal html files.  One solution is to switch to a virtual private server will cost us $70 more a month. We will try our best to resolve the problem by removing the featured content gallery, youtube clips and poll during periods of heavy traffic. Some readers have expressed concerns that our site will be overwhelmed again during the elections. Rest assured that there will be mirror sites set up in three different servers to share the load when the time comes. Wayangparty.com has seen a rapid increase in readership in the last few weeks. We thank you for your support and we hope you can help us invite more people to our site so that we can help them reverse their years of "national education".   THE EDITORIAL TEAM  Read More →

Reproduced from Terry's blog with kind permision I remembered that our supposedly two-hour-long lecture ended early today - shortly an hour after it started. Mingyun, Marianne, Cho Yee and I had McDonalds and Subway for breakfast at around 9.45am. We chatted a little and headed for the library at around 10.30am, the time the incident occured. A couple of minutes into our studying schedule, Cho Yee informed us that there was a fatal stabbing incident on campus that just happened. The police and paramedics were there too, as another friend sent a mass SMS around. The first thing that flashed across my mind was a knife-yielding student went berserk on campus, slashing everyone in his sight and one of his victim was so seriously injured that he/she died of inflicted wounds or blood loss. When I was informed that there was only one victim and it was a professor, the hairs on my back stood - the professor died of the stabbing? It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that the local online community was boiling over with posts about the incident - David Hartanto Widjaja, a final-year undergraduate of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, seriously wounded an information engineering professor, Prof Chan Kap Luk, by stabbing him in the back. Professor Chan defended himself with his hands (thus explaning the lacerations on his hand when he was checked by paramedics), David then fled to the sixth story (Level B1) of the S1 wing at South Spine, slit his wrist and leaped to his death. The marker on the map below shows the approximate locaiton of the scene: Upon further investigation, I realised that Prof Chan is the supervisor of David’s final year project, titled “Multiview acquisition from Multi-camera configuration for person adaptive 3D Display“. Given that the final year projects for the final-year undergradutes are due in a week’s time or so, it’s not surprising that tension and pressure are mounting on the senior students - but what exactly triggered the Kamikaze-like attack was still largely unknown. A big question mark still hovers above the confusion and fear among the campus population. Leaving library at 7pm, had dinner with Chong in Canteen A. As I waited for Chong to arrive, almost every single conversation around me revolved around the stabbing - what exaclty happened, what people think might have triggered the berserky behavior and etc. I headed over to the newstand - the local evening paper has red, bolded headlines screaming for attention - Fatal Stabbing Incident in NTU leaves one dead (translated from Chinese). I was immediately reminded how efficient the propagation of information had become nowadays - Chong told me over our dinner that his dad called him at around 12pm - that’s less than two hours after the incident, and his dad is not in Singapore but in Malaysia. He advised his son to be careful and not to get involved in the incident whatsoever - I can imagine the confusion and fear a parent will have. I expect tomorrow’s newspaper headlines will be all about this stabbing incident. I wonder what the reporters will write about it. As I took the shuttle bus back to my dorm in the evening, the bus was again filled with news, speculations and probably untrue accounts of the stabbing incident. As I walked back to my room, I still can’t come to terms with the fact that someone actually died in my university, from a suicide, after nearly fatally stabbing a professor. Bregitt’s mom even called her that she shouldn’t visit the accident site because David’s ghost will linger around the area until he gets seven people to replace him, as according to Chinese beliefs. I’m not sure how true is this, but well, it’s logical to avoid the place. I don’t want to be reminded that the spot is where David, an Indonesian Chinese, decided that his life is worthless. Perhaps he was haunted by the fact that he will be prosecuted, or is it a planned act executed the way he wanted? Nobody knows for sure. Later in the night I rang home, and to my surprise (and relief) that my parents have not heard of the incident. Had my mom knew about it, she would have freaked out and start spam-calling my phone. She asked what I think about the incident and I told her that I wasn’t very much bothered by it, but it’s a shame that one squandered his life over a possible disagreement or row with his supervisor. Or did he succumd to stress? I’m not making any conclusions here, until the whole situation gets clearer. Although not as serious as the mass killing of innocent students on university campus, such as the Virginia Tech massacre, the incident still send chills down my spine. It’s an isolated incident, I hope that I can get over it as soon as possible. Just like how Eli puts it, suicide is “nothing more than the most selfish form of complaining ever invented by the juvenile mind.” Some people blamed on the high level of stress an undergraduate student experiences - I have to agree with that. University isn’t as dreamy as I heard from anecdotal accounts and expected. It’s still a busy life - you’ve got loads of tutorials to do, projects to rush, lectures to catch up and if you’re intending to live on campus, get enough points to stay in the hall of residence. I do feel very stressed out certain times but never did I think of stabbing a professor in the back and then leaping to my own death. I’m speaking from the perspective of a first-year undergraduate though - I’ve heard that the commitments, responsibilites and requirements get exponentially greater and harder to deal with as we move on to the next academic year. Source: http://www.teddy-o-ted.com/food-for-thought/aftermath-stabbing-incident-ntu/  Read More →

Translated by Jane Tang (Read original article in English by Fang Zhi Yuan here) 当新闻爆出新加坡的主权财富基金，新加坡淡马锡控股在去年的证券投资中亏损了五百八十亿新币后，大家期待很多严肃的质疑在新闻报刊中被提出来,但是却什么都没有. 更令人失望的是，当这件事情被美国Dow Jones新闻社透露说GIC可能已经损失了大约500亿新币的时候,GIC的损失的程度却并没有公布在英文报纸上. 在20年前,少数新加坡人能分辨出主流媒体和当今外国媒体所报道的在内容上的差异,现在读者有很多选择,他们在当地的博客中可以非常容易地搜索到任何在新闻报刊中没有被报导的内容. 如果我们的主流媒体继续对那些民族重要的事件就像这次悲惨的经济损失仍然奉行自我审查的,不合时宜的政策，那么主流媒体将面临在民众的眼中失去信誉的风险. 最近有两份报告强调了新的媒体对还没有赶上时代的传统媒体所造成的威胁正在不断壮大：海峡时报的一篇报告说新加坡是世界上网络普及率最广的国家,同时,在最近的一份由亚太区OgilvyOne营销机构进行的调查研究中指出，有超过一半的新加坡人表示，他们相信博客超过了报纸或电视新闻公告。 尽管国家媒体经常告诫民众要有保留地去看待博客里所写的一些报道,但是越来越多的新加坡人却发现反面是真实的,这就很自然地填补了官方的谎言,半真半假的新闻以及一些谣言当中存在的的真空地带,从而变成了新的(被歪曲的)事实. 对于主流媒体和政府来讲,要抑制那些永无止境的猜测的最好的方式是把真相公布给民众，越是保持沉默，越是让人察觉到好像有一些事情要被故意隐瞒起来. 主流媒体拒绝说出国家重要事件的严重问题,所以它的报道在新加坡民众中将不可避免的引起大家的冷嘲热讽,怨恨和蔑视,从而提升了具有对抗性的而且在最近的时间内已经成为对付官方媒体的反对正流派的博客的发展.如果主流媒体敢于留有更多的空间和灵活性在公众领域发表一些和当局政府不同的意见，那么新旧媒体在政治上的分歧会越来越小而不是像现在这样分歧越来越大. 在当今的这个只要人们简单地点击一下鼠标就能在任何别的地方获得信息的时代,如果还想要在公众领域隐瞒什么信息已经没有任何意义了. 在一个没有任何边界的无线世界，新媒体的影响力通过口耳相传，小册子和光碟甚至可以延伸到那些不上网的人群。所以国家媒体如果选择无视利益受到损害的人民的呼声,那他们只会让自己看起来很愚蠢.  Read More →