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Cross-posted from my Facebook, where it lives as a friends-only note. Preface for non-Singapore readers: This piece assumes a mild level of familiarity with the Singapore education system. The Gifted Education Programme, introduced in Singapore in 1984, is a selective scheme for high-IQ children that over its history has taken in 0.5 to 1 per cent…

Be the leopard pacing its cage. Be wood, driftglass, tossed smooth by the sea. Be doomed fire casting small transparent shadows. Speak little. Write less. Bed down for the winter beneath the world’s skin. Such clever children. Such shine. You should know better.

so I’m desperately trying to teach myself Python, as well as Ruby on Rails. anyone have any really, really good resources for COMPLETE beginners? as I said to the husband, “What I need at this point is not so much Python as garter snake.”

On ‘real Singapore’ People don’t like the use of the phrase ‘real’ Singapore, ‘real America’ etc because it implies that there is a particular mode that is more authentic than others. And yes, this goes for ad campaigns that attempt to celebrate ‘real women’ too. I’m thoroughly ticked off by the latter sort of ad…

This week I’m on the Metcalf Institute’s annual workshop for journalists; it’s based at the University of Rhode Island’s graduate school of oceanography, and it gets journalists out into the field to better understand how science and scientists work. Today (Monday) is the second day and the first full day; we started off with a dinner…

From Peter Kageyama’s For The Love of Cities: “We tend to think of “the city” or “the community” as an entity, a single identifiable construct to which we assign attributes and characteristics much like we would a corporation or an individual… …In asking ourselves how to change a community, we need to remember that any community…

Why hello there… it’s been a while. Things have been wacky at work. And only partly in a good way. More on that later. A couple of weeks ago I ran part of the Rail Corridor trail with some friends, just for fun. It’s been some time since the tracks were removed at the end of last…

The Straits Times, Saturday 1 October 2011 UNTOUCHED primary forests are ‘irreplaceable’ when it comes to saving tropical biodiversity, say researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Their work with scientists from Australia, Europe and the US analysed studies from around the world, comparing undisturbed forests with those that had been affected by farming,…

I took a trip recently to Chengdu and northern Sichuan (more on that some other time), but one highlight was, of course, the pandas. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, China, is a pretty odd place: part research centre, yes, but also in part a farm. Its panda-husbandry and artificial-insemination techniques are finely…