What a motley crew of topics to write about today, the shortest of all days. (A mere 9h 18min of sunlight! Oh, the ignomy!) After this contribution to hegemonic westernization, I get to see a doctor about my potential sinusitis at the campus health center (affectionately referred to as McKillMe), plan my trip to Tampa Bay, and arrange transport for my visiting JC classmate to the local reindeer ranch. How busy the holidays are!

I learnt from Ottoman that one of my favorite cartoonists, Larry Gonick, has now released The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry earlier this year, having previously written The Cartoon Guide to Physics, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, and The Cartoon Guide to Sex, among others. Yay chemistry! Yay graduate school!

Speaking of which, it’s the season for university applications. For those of you putting the finishing touches on your graduate school applications, perhaps the unsolicited musings of academics may be of some value [1] [2]. The window is tight if you’re aiming for the Jan 1 postmark deadline but who knows, there might still be time to sharpen that personal statement of yours. (Or not, depending in your take on the advice given. My take is simple: if you’re really serious about what you want to do, shortlist faculty you want to work for and make it clear on your personal statement. Solicit them by email, even. Usually the list of reputable researchers in a given field will define your choice of schools pretty well to begin with. Worried that your school isn’t ranked top-notch by US News, Times Higher Education Supplement, or any other organization that thinks that they grok college life? Look at the criteria used in the ranking; how is (say) percentage of foreign faculty going to affect your decision at all? Get real. Got no money? Not too much to worry about if you want to do a Ph. D., as just about everyone and her cat wants to do nowadays. Kevin has some Singapore-specific advice for Singaporeans willing to risk going to the United States as free agents not bound to any scholarship. Get paid to study!

Speaking of home, the revelations from the NKF1 report appear to be hot kangtang all over the Singapore blogosphere. Mr Miyagi points to an article on Today outlining what people are saying. The main bones of contention, understandably, are that

  • Only 10% of donations raised by NKF are spent on patients.
  • A constant theme of the lack of meaningful governance (p. 3, ¶1.2.1) and confessions of practically abdication of duty from the Board of Directors, despite their portrayal of the organization as a successful corporate-like environment (p. 4-5, ¶ 1.2.4; p. 11, ¶ 1.5.5). This quote is particularly instructive:

    The common refrain we heard in the course of our interviews with those members of the former Board whom we met was that: (a) they were all volunteers; (b) and as such they operated under the belief that they were all working towards the good of the NKF; and (c) they trusted those who were being paid a salary, especially the chief executive, to have acted, at all times, wisely and in the best interests of the NKF.
    -KPMG report, p. 7, ¶ 1.4.5

  • The aggressive fund-raising tactics of the NKF, tapping “a deep wellspring of goodwill in large parts of the general population and the business community” (p. 1, ¶ 1.1.3) that went to fund, among other things, a CEO’s salary of S$600,000.

Juicy as the NKF report is, my hemisphere of the world is still buzzing over the historic ruling of Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which Judge Jones made a landmark legal decision which defined what was science, and what was not. Science by fiat! The scientific sphere is, of course, jubilant, but others are not so pleased. The Discovery Institute, a pro-intelligent design organization, has blasted the ruling as being censorship by an activist judge, an accusation the judge had already pre-empted and wrote specifically against in his ruling. Well, at least he’s not a judge accused of watching porn on his work computer.

PZ Myers (Pharyngula) has written an opinion piece this morning in which he admits that scientists are simply not at all competent in giving lectures that are informative to anyone other than small communities of other scientists. How then are scientists speaking with the authority of centuries of empirical evidence against slick snake-oil salesmen? Is this, together with the South Korean stem cell debacle, going to be a watershed in the practice of science? Will scientists, previously content to meddle in their ivory towers, now find themselves having to bring themselves down to the level of salesmen and compete for the public’s attention with glow-in-the-dark, faith-based trinkets?

This afternoon’s bulletin was brought to you by your 96.02% squeaky clean blogger on his 17.71% slutty blog, hosted on an even sluttier (54.02%) website.

Footnote
1. The NKF (National Kidney Foundation, Singapore) is a highly successful charity in Singapore. In July 2005, NKF sued SPF (Singapore Press Holdings) for alleged defamation in an unflattering article published in the Straits Times. An independent auditor’s report was recently released to the public.