Sunday, December 25, 2005

Red, Amber, Green

So now you know how it is possible for some scholars to

1) receive a congratulatory letter from the university/department for getting into the Dean's List (or something similar)

and at the same time

2) a warning from their sponsor for poor academic performance.

Red Amber Green
Source

If you are not yet sick of blog entries dissecting the scholarship issue, I further recommend these to read:

a. The Kway Teow Man (I, II)

b. Kevin

Yeah, I realise this time of the year is also the start of the scholarship applications season in Singapore. So erm, good luck to those of you applying? Ho, ho, ho...

Related: Scholar cannot fail

Edit (1 Jan 2006): A reader to this blog tipped me off about a case of a PRC ex-scholar in NUS being sent to jail under two counts of the Computer Misuse Act. Many of the relevant issues (I think) were already discussed in earlier entries. Although as a Singaporean, I share with many others on this: Why is the MOE giving out so many scholarships to the PRCs to study in the local universities when locals have to take out loans to finance their tertiary education?

2 comments:

L'oiseau rebelle said...

In the past, that bureaucracy in question displayed more data about their scholars (I can't totally remember now), and you can actually see discrepancies in the number of scholars whose grades are reported and the total number of scholars for some universities. Alas, this information doesn't seem to be evident in their latest batch of statistics.

Anonymous said...

In the middle of Aug 2005, A*STAR announced the invention of the a urine-powered battery by Dr. Ki Bang Lee, a principal investigator in the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN). There was quite a media fanfare which gave A*STAR quite a bit of publicity since it was a world first.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:KETTimZYZ6YJ:www.a-star.edu.sg/astar/biomed/action/biomed_pressrelease_details.do%3Fid%3D0e6c4f7c8cOZ+%22urine-powered%22+site:a-star.edu.sg&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

It turned out that the device was invented by Dr. Ki Bang Lee in South Korea before he joined A*STAR and he became extremely unhappy about the way A*STAR was claiming it as a local invention. As a result, the word has it that he left IBN after a few months after joining.

If you check out
http://www.a-star.edu.sg/astar/biomed/action/biomed_pressreleases.do?year=2005
you'll realize that they have withdrawn the Aug 16 2005 press release about the urine-powered device. Fortunately, the press release was cached by Google.

Interesting...