e pur si muove

I have just discovered that not only are Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong on Twitter, but their Twitter exchanges are hysterical.

Thanks to Reader X, who writes in with this incredibly doublespeak-laden article, which begins thus:

The Government is looking into how it can regulate the Internet with a lighter touch, a shift from its current ‘light-touch approach’.

The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts said this in a reply to a leader of a group of 13 bloggers, from whom Mica had received 20 pages of proposals on Internet freedom.

Said Ms K. Bhavani, press secretary to Mica minister Lee Boon Yang: ‘To keep up with the fast-evolving new media landscape, we have been reviewing our light-touch approach and are considering how we could take a lighter-touch approach.’

She also set out Mica’s thinking in taking its current ‘balanced light-touch approach’.

Er, wait.

A “lighter touch” vs “Current ‘light-touch approach’”?

Huh?

That sounds like something out of the Dictionary of Newspeak. Specifically, it sounds exactly like a shining example of doubleplusduckspeak.

Think i’m being too harsh on a bellyfeeling woman clearly in the role of dealing with upsubbing? Oldthink this as the very same woman who famously wrote the following doubleplusgoodly paragraphs:

mr brown’s views on all these issues distort the truth. They are polemics dressed up as analysis, blaming the Government for all that he is unhappy with. He offers no alternatives or solutions. His piece is calculated to encourage cynicism and despondency, which can only make things worse, not better, for those he professes to sympathise with.

mr brown is entitled to his views. But opinions which are widely circulated in a regular column in a serious newspaper should meet higher standards. Instead of a diatribe mr brown should offer constructive criticism and alternatives. And he should come out from behind his pseudonym to defend his views openly.

It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the Government’s standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics.

Surely people remember the outcome of this ‘light touch’: mrbrown was summarily unpersoned from his position as columnist, rousing ire and dismay from many quarters. Mr Wang famously wrote of the existence of the Bhavani Commandments, wrought from the halcyon, stratosphere-dwelling Party members famous for their impeccable helicopter vision.

Perhaps Bhavani’s equivocation this time round should be taken as comparative reticence, and hence by some reckoning does indeed constitute a lighter touch. However, even the slightest motion of the Finger Of God can have grave effects on unbellyfeeling proletariats.

Bhavani shall not be malquoted, nor shall the populace bellyfeel anything but goodthink, lest they stray into deviance and ownlife.

References

1. Zakir Hussein, Straits Times, Govt looking at lighter touch on Net, 2008-05-07.
2. K. Bhavani, TODAY, Distorting the truth, mr brown?, 2006-07-03.

It’s spring and I don’t feel like working or blogging, but rather to run around the nonexistent hills in a surrealistic von Trapp moment du jour.

Since there ain’t no hills in this part of the world, have a naughty dandelion instead.

Many readers will be familiar with (or at least have some dim recollection of) the problem sums which prominently feature in the upper primary mathematics curriculum in Singapore. Many educators believe that concrete examples provide a foundation for the proper understanding of mathematical concepts, and that such concrete examples make the concepts easier for students to grasp. For example, the following New York Times illustration gives an example of the kind of thing math teachers try out on students to help them learn something concrete:

To test this prevailing wisdom, researchers and teachers at the Ohio State University conducted a statistically rigorous, randomized-trial study of whether or not concrete examples were better than going directly to the abstract mathematical representation of a particular mathematical concept.¹

To their surprise, they found that the group of students who learnt an abstract version of the mathematical concept strongly outperformed three separate groups who were taught off concrete examples. Even more surprisingly, students who were first taught a concrete example before asked to work on the abstract example did not perform any better than students who worked immediately on the abstractions, and in fact performed slightly worse on later testing.

The researchers concluded that the concrete details distracted students from the mathematical concepts that the lessons were designed to teach them, and speculated that some students simply don’t learn by abstracting from concrete examples.

It’s important to note that the study involved college students and not students of younger schooling ages, and that the different developmental stages in cognition would probably hamper the transferability of the results directly to younger students. However, this direct challenge to conventional wisdom suggests that even younger students may benefit from scrapping problem sums in favor for algebra.

There is at least some anecdotal evidence for a particular weakness for problem sums - students tend to either ‘get it’ and understand what’s going on in the problem, or they don’t and get stuck for a very long time. Time and time again, frustrated parents are left trying to help their children do problem sums without the aid of algebra, which students are sometimes expressively told not to use, yet ironically is the very thing that problem sums are supposed to prepare students for in secondary school and beyond.

References

1. Jennifer A. Kaminski, Vladimir M. Sloutsky, Andrew F. Heckler, Science, The advantage of abstract examples in learning math, 320 (5875) 454-455, 2008-04-25.
2. Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State University News, Concrete examples don’t help students learn math, study finds,  2008-04-25.
3. Kenneth Chang, New York Times, Study suggests math teachers scrap balls and slices, 2008-04-25.

1. In this case, the study was on getting students to understand three-membered commutative groups.↩