e pur si muove

The little red dot represesents Singapore. The slash across refers to the efficient censor’s signature. The streak of red on the right hand side tells us what we all know: at the back it’s all red tape. - alfian, on the meaning of sba’s logo.

life is stabilising for me pretty well right now. between ta-ing a graduate class that really isn’t much work at all, getting the old research engine crankin’ again and taking yet more über-geeky classes, i’ve been able to squeeze in a few (free) shows at the kranner center. shows watched:

1. the st. petersburg ballet theater troupe, doing an interestingly contemporary interpretation of romeo and juliet. the props were just incredibly beautiful, and really highlighted the emotional troughs and crests of the classic play. faux stained glass, the dead/sleeping juliet being lifted up on a wooden platform out of the scene, and the appearance of an ethnicized temptress/witch… it was magical to watch. which was to say that i snoozed through act i, but was pretty much transfixed on the stage after that.
2. antares, a quartet from connecticut with a very interesting repertoire. i particularly liked olivier messiaen’s quartet for the end of time, especially the juxtaposition of extremely high and extremely low notes. (the bloomingdale school of music has a pretty nice rendition available for download) slightly disconcerting, but very moving.
3. festival 2005, the annual concert put up by the department of dance. there’s just something about pretty faces and lithe, fit youths in tights that never fails to cheer. i wouldn’t put it pass the hormones to be responsible for that.
4. rosario andino, an incredibly underrated pianist whose fingers can make a grand piano laugh and cry. the cuban dances by saumell, cervantes and lecuona were just brilliant.
5. the chicago symphony orchestra, playing bartók’s two pictures (a personal favorite), and prokofiev’s symphony no. 5 in b-flat major, among other things. oestensibly to celebrate the indomitability of the human spirit, it said much about the performance that most of the ushers were glad it was finally over. i felt that each movement in itself would have made a good piece of music, but all of it together was more 48 minutes of patient waiting than the triumphant overtures that prokofiev may have intended. maazel refused to do an encore for the sold-out audience, despite receiving five curtain calls. it was a snub that some audience-goers took personally, although i later discovered that the union contract for the cso players demanded an extra thousand dollars per minute of overtime or something like that. gee, that kinds of puts everything in perspective doesn’t it?

a faint glimmer of hope at a quick buck was quashed when a wisconsin quarter that i had picked up turned out to be normal after all. no freak coins for me. and passing up the free garfield park conservatory chocolate festival in downtown chicago was really killing me. (that and time-dependent incoherent perturbations in quantum mechanics. **cringes**)

cny was pretty much a non-event for me, what with classes and all. todd krauss gave an excellent lecture on the big day itself on the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, which along with mildred dresselhaus’s talk last semester, was one of the very few nanotube talks that wasn’t just pure waffle over the lovely things to come from the miraculous allotrope. (atrocious talks back in singapore, and karl hess’s ece talk come to mind.)

my only real concession to the festivities was a quick call to mummy dearest, assuring her that i hadn’t forgotten; the only celebrations that i partook in was bobo china’s tuesday dinner special; the only thing about which was special was the crowd and the unusually high price of $10.87 for the buffet, usually $7.62. that and the fact that loads of singaporeans showed up. what was more interesting for me was eyeballing the hordes of sloshed undergraduates wearing bead necklaces and speedos under their jackets and trenchcoats (it was still freezing): what were the chances of mardi gras coinciding with chinese new year to begin with? the ssa had a formal celebration on saturday evening but i didn’t feel like shelling out another $12 for less-than-gourmet pseudo-singaporean food. spinglasser apparently felt that i didn’t miss much. after the near-miss from the chicago expedition, i really had my qualms about the organizational skills of the ssa committee. and it seems like the committee itself is having trouble maintaining its coherence, almost. hm.

so instead of shelling out $12, i poured $2.22 worth of bean soup¹ down the garbage disposal when adding almond milk to the mix of beans, barley, lentils and peas sold at meijer did not result in the expected lovely-smelling stew. instead, the almond quickly developed a skin over the simmering mélange and produced an inedible cloying green slime instead of a soup. note to self: add almond milk powder sparingly, if at all, next time. thankfully a wildly successful culinary experiment paid off handsomely: panfried chicken breast strips, marinated with non-fat yoghurt and then rolled in breadcrumbs. the resulting chicken had the expected delectable crisp breadcrumb exterior while maintaining a juicy interior. the juice wasn’t oil; i tested. so it seemed like frying with spiced breadcrumbs at moderately high temperature is the way to go. except that when i tried it on ground beef, the lack of internal rigidity made for an unpalatable mess in the skillet, with the yoghurt slopping off the ground beef and creating puddles of oily curdled breadcrumbs around poorly cooked meat. not at all appetizing.

my fellow first-year student is starting to get on my nerves. he seems to be pulling a lkm on me, imitating just about eveything that i do. he also pretty much told me he was envious of my superior background in theoretical chemistry, but apart from whining about it doesn’t seem to be doing much else about it. he’s also been complaining about his heavy workload, which consists of taking two classes and a senior undergraduate ta assignment, to just about anyone else who would listen to him. sorry dude, it’s not working: i simply don’t have the emotional energy to spend on feeling sorry for you, because i don’t see how you should be sorry about anything.

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1. what is it now? a lame joke!↩

old news, i know, but i think it’s sad to hear what happened to this teacher. no doubt what she did was at some level illegal, but she wouldn’t have been able to demonstrate otherwise had she gone through the normal channels.

melanie hewlitt of the singapore review puts it thusly:

Its form over substance that counts in Singapore. You come here, worked hard, did things their way, performed and delivered the goods. Even the “customers” (i.e. parents and students) were happy.

But no, that’s not enough. You are not measured on your performance here. They need a piece of paper to measure your ability. You dont have that paper and that means you have failed on this technicality.

“Only in Singapore do we have a government that is so engrossed with the accumulation of paper qualifications, that they have long since forgotten the original objective behind the education system, and have instead identified the means as an end to itself. In their blind pursuit of their version of a utopian society, educational elitetism takes center stage above all else, eclipsing the actual needs of the labour market itself.”

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sg_Review/message/1

If Ms Wen had that piece of paper, she would not have been fined or persecuted even if all her students had failed their exams. Its form over substance that counts here and a persons worth is reduced to what is printed on a piece of paper, to the exclusion of all else.

Liberal education, including all the traditional arts as well as the newer sciences, is essential for the development of top-flight scientists. Without it, we can train only technicians, who cannot understand the basic principles behind the motions they perform. We can hardly expect such skilled automatons to make new discoveries of any importance. A crash program of merely technical training would probably end in a crashup for basic science.

The connection of liberal education with scientific creativity is not mere speculation. It is a matter of historical fact that the great German scientists of the nineteenth century had a solid background in the liberal arts. They all went through, a liberal education which embraced Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, and history, in addition to mathematics, physics, and other sciences. Actually, this has been the educational preparation of European scientists down to the present time. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and other great modern scientists were developed not by technical schooling, but by liberal education…

The aim of liberal education, however, is not to produce scientists. It seeks to develop free human beings who know how to use their minds and are able to think for themselves. Its primary aim is not the development of professional competence, although a liberal education is indispensable for any intellectual profession. It produces citizens who can exercise their political liberty responsibly. It develops cultivated persons who can use their leisure fruitfully. It is an education for all free men, whether they intend to be scientists or not.

Our educational problem is how to produce free men, not hordes of uncultivated, trained technicians. Only the best liberal schooling can accomplish this. It must include all the humanities as well as mathematics and the sciences. It must exclude all merely vocational and technical training.

Mortimer Adler, What is Liberal Education?

“The problem nowadays is that the Liberal Arts education so proudly taught in many fine institutions costs a freaking bomb (hmm maybe like a mini-tomahawk?) And mostly only accessible to the well-heeled and super-eng one. The administrators of the respective unis or colleges give alot of scholarships meh?
And just look at Lisa Simpson, so many years liao and she still haben go to Harvard or her worst nightmare, Brown.

To paraphrase ROyston Tan’s 15, A Liberal Arts Education is only for the Rich lah.” - ted

“Dirac, Feynman and Schwinger were among the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century. They certainly did not undergo the traditional form of liberal arts education.” - hertzvector

“On the contrary, most top US liberal arts colleges are very, erm, liberal with their financial aid for US citizens.

I wouldn’t say you need a liberal arts education to be a talented scientist, but you need it to be a good citizen. If you believe science is subservient to the greater picture of the meaning of life etc., then you’d want your scientists to have some knowledge of the liberal arts.

I don’t think Dirac is the best example of a good citizen in that sense. He seemed somewhat immersed in his science to the exclusion of everything else.” - Wowbagger

“I have considerable doubts about needing liberal arts education to be a good citizen. It is more of a prescription than a description.

You mean to say that one cannot be a good citizen without the benefits of a liberal arts education? In other words, in countries without this particular form of education, there are no good citizens? Or that people who do not even go to college cannot be good citizens?” - hertzvector

“”Good citizen” is too vague a term perhaps.

You could be a law abiding citizen without a liberal arts education. But if you want your citizens to understand their role as a human being in society, a liberal arts education helps a great deal.

It is possible to educate yourself in the basics of the liberal arts without going to college, of course. But you still need that education. It may sound too high-minded, but I would prefer that people who aren’t informed and haven’t thought about the issues that are covered in a liberal arts education not influence national policies. And presumably in a democracy, everyone is given the power to influence national policies, so it would be better to have a population that knows what it’s doing.

If I wasn’t clear enough, I meant you don’t have to have gone through an “official” liberal arts education in college to be a good citizen. College is just one of the possible means through which you would have gained that set of knowledge/skills, which can be self-learnt.” - Wowbagger

“Yes but I still vehemently disgree with the opening statement - Liberal education, including all the traditional arts as well as the newer sciences, is essential for the development of top-flight scientists.

That’s simply not true. There are many examples of top scientists who have not gone through liberal education.” - hertzvector

Title: Experiment and Theory on the Complex Dynamics of Water
Speaker: Dr. John Asbury, Fayer Research Group, Stanford University
Venue: 112 Chem Annex
Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Hydrogen bonds between water molecules form networks that evolve in time. These networks are dynamic, with constantly changing bond lengths which determine the strength of bonding intereactions. Fluctuations in these networks (on the order of 10 fs to 1 ps) play an important role in solvation processes due to solute molecules having to fit their way into this structure in order to dissolve. Also, hydrogen bond dynamics also play an important role in protein folding.

The presence of a hydrogen bond lowers the intermolecular potential and results in redshifting of the vibrational frequencies. This can be monitored via spectral diffusion using vibrational echo experiments. The pulse sequence can be described using the runners’ analogy due to Erwin Hahn, 1952. Three pulses are employed, analogous to guns. The first shot starts the race, with runners running at their own speeds. The second shot stops the race and the third gets everyone running backward with the same average speed as they started out with. But since fast runners would also run back faster than slow runners, etc., the effect of having a large spread in the initial speeds is cancelled, leaving only differences that they had picked up along the way. Similarly for molecules in a pulse echo experiment, such a sequence rephases inhomogeneities in speed but not fluctuations in speed. This method eliminates the large linear absorptive part of the signal, resulting in increased sensitivity.

Hydrogen bond dynamics of HOD was studied in D₂O. A vibrational echo correlation spectroscopy setup with heterodyne detection was employed, with monitoring of both the ν_1->2 and ν_0->1 transition frequencies, corresponding to stimulation emission and absorption respectively. Very short pulses of 40 fs were required to illuminate the broad O-H stretching peak. The frequency autocorrelation function (FFCF) was then calculated and fit with simulations to a theoretical model using diagrammatic perturbation theory.”;s:4:”body”;s:3119:”The experimental results were compared with simulation results from Jim Skinner (UWM) using three different models of water, all of which were rigid: TIP4P (four-point transferable intermolecule potential), SPC/E (extended simple point charge) [pdf]and SPC-FQ (SPC with fluctuating charge). Comparisons of the frequency autocorrelation function from experiment and simulation initially showed an overestimate of the FFCF by all three models. However, a major experimental effect that was not accounted for in the theoretical fit was a frequency-dependent linewidth, which could not be adequately captured using a tri-exponential fit as well the Gaussian approximation employed in diagrammatic perturbation theory.

The workaround was to restrict the data analysis to the region where the signal peak was roughly symmetric. SPC-FQ was then seen to be able to reproduce the dynamical linewidth well, but still overestimating. TIP4P and SPC/E predicted autocorrelation functiona that were way too fast. This seems to indicate hydrogen bond equilibriation on the picosecond time scale as well as the importance of dynamic polarization in capturing those dynamics. However, some residual effects due to damped many-body motion were also observed experimentally that were not captured.

In order to study these many-body correlations, ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy was then performed, also with heterodyne detection. Two dimensional time-frequency spectra showed the formation of a redshifted photoproduct as the time delay between pulses was increased up to ~6 ps. Analysis of the data with singular value decomposition was necessary to resolve the spectrum into the ν_1->2, ν_0->1 and photoproduct bands respectively. A wavelength-independent vibrational relaxation time of τ = 1.42 ± 0.05 ps was obtained, in contrast with previous findings. This could be explained by previous investigators not accounting for the photoproduct absorption peak. An equilibrium temperature increase of 2°C was calculated.

The presence of an isosbestic point in the spectra indicated exchange between to populations, namely vibrational population of the OH mode vs. population of the OD mode. This in turn was a precise measure of whether or not the OD bond was particpating in hydrogen bonding. The data could not be explained with the conventional hydrogen-bond mode “bath” model, necessitating the use of a kinetic model where other intermolecular and intramolecular modes had to be accounted for explicitly.

It is interesting that the SPC-FQ model was able to account for the experimental data, given the rigidity of the model. Also interesting in the accurate reproduction of the frequency-dependent dielectric constant from 0.3 wavenumbers to 3300 wavenumbers, even though the model was not specifically optimized for that purpose.