Redundant Redundancies of Redundant Redundance

Welcome to the Agglomeration

I wasn't going to blog about anything today because I've been feeling a bit like Harper Lee after writing 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. My last post was so ingenious and creatively enriching that I felt nothing I could possibly do could surmount that insurmountable peak of blogging nearperfection. However, recent events have cased a buildup of irritation and annoyance that my rage simply must be vented somewhere. There is no guarantee that it will result in a mildly cohesive and logical blog post, but I guess your best chance as a reader is to take a deep breath, eat some cheesecake and read onward while hoping for the best. Alternatively, if you're William, skip everything there is to come and stop reading here.

The first thing that annoyed me was surprise surprise, TOK class on Friday. We received our assessment criteria for the entire course and to my amazement and sheer disbelief, it outlined that all students had to maintain both a journal (full of reflections captured from supernatural mirrors and stored in a easy to access Word File) and a scrapbook (full of banana peels and carrion captured from the back of garbage trucks and stored in a vulture-attracting vault). My first reaction was, 'What the Redundant?' My second reaction was 'That's redundant!' Deciding to end the potentially infinitely regressable vicious cycle here, my point is that I believe these two concepts should be about as mutually exclusive as matter and antimatter.

Another thing that I find constantly annoys me is the pace of TOK. I'm probably the only person in the class who is actively trying to accelerate this metaphorical snail, but my metaphorical snail propellant is being disabled by a metaphorical metaphorical snail propellant disabling machine. I mean, another noticeable factor of TOK is how similiar to a Year 7 style of learning it is. I came into the course expecting philosophical debates, the discussion of ethical issues and a style of higher level thinking that could challenge the way I think about things. At the moment, the only thing that is being challenged is the thought why I ever thought I'd enjoy TOK. All we seem to do in classes is read handouts, because you know, reading is a very important skill quinessential to the success of the IB. And pretty much everything else I could think of that has occurred in the past 10-12 years of our lives. What's worse, every time I try to move the progress forward by saying 'We've done this last lesson. Let's do this', I am confronted with the usual reply of 'Let's read it again.' You know, because we humans tend to forget everything that hasn't happened in the last 2 hours or so. Although I wish we did, so I wouldn't have to remember the second thing that has thoroughly annoyed me today.

A good friend of mine somehow stumbled onto the issue of crushes, which is something that I find a pointless area of discussion, because if you're not sceptical enough to realise that since these things are private issues and people are capable of lying to you, then you might as well click the next pop up that tells you've won $100,000,000, give all your details to the Sicilian Mafia, and then commit suicide by eating money blended in a concoction filled with nitric acid, nuclear waste, sludge from the exhaust of a car, and cat vomit. No i'm not talking about how to make homemade lemon juice, but again, I wish I were.

But what's the point? There exist few people that can cure such irritation because when they try to comfort you by talking to you, they end up exacerbating the problem. And so by the end of this shortened rant (because you know, apparently all of you are too lazy to read long posts which I put a lot of effort into) I still feel like there's a part of me that still wants to break something. I guess if there is a cure for unhappiness, it's probably some narcotic or illicit substance that is a bit like taking the edge of the pain of your broken finger by sawing your leg in half with a hacksaw.

I like this final opportunity to ridicule a phrase used by a close friend of mine:

Happiness may be relative, but when your relatives die, they stay dead.

And on a more serious and somber note, I am saddened to hear of the death of Susan Tsvangirai, who was killed in an accident when her vehicle was sideswiped by a US contractor truck. I hope her husband pulls through and has a stronger resolve than ever to ensure that the tyranny in Zimbabwe under the iron fist of Robert Mugabe is finally ended.

And now off to I go to entertain my sorrows.

Till next time, may you agglomerate all your unpremeditated contempations.

Oblique Outcomes Of Old Orderly Operations

Welcome to the Agglomeration

The overwhelming result of my first poll was that I should blog about current events. Since I have not done so yet, I shall today.

Article 1 - http://www.danwei.org/front_page_of_the_day/98-year-old_con_suspect_on_tri.php

This story concerns a 99 year old conman who managed to trick a scholarly character into funding him and his two accomplices in their attempt to locate 'key banknotes' vital to retrieve hidden vaults of money valued at up to 130 trillion US dollars stored in the time before the Communist takeover in China in 1949 and frozen by the American government ever since. They managed to get 749,000 yuan from the clever and obviously ambitious fellow.

First thing that's interesting about this story is that although the man suspected of orchestrating the scheme is 99 years old, the link to the story on the website says 98 year old man. Must've been his birthday or something.

Secondly, it suggests that there are no limits to human stupidity and gullibility. We draw 2 conclusions from this.

f(human stupidity) approaches the vertical asymptote of infinity exponentially. Its domain and range are both all real humans and all real cyborgs. The people who even try to visualise this curve and attempt to disprove are merely the increasingly large values of human stupidity.

f(human intelligence) on the other hand is known more commonly as merely the straight line y=0 --> am I implying something? I don't know. Perhaps it's time to revert to our infallible friend deductive reasoning.

f(human intelligence) = y=0
The x axis = y=0
The x axis = f(human intelligence)

Thus, with further extrapolation, all graphs we draw in maths are mapping human intelligence against why? And with our excellent knowledge of science and dependent variables, 'Why?' depends on human intelligence. That means reasoning is different for people of different intelligence levels. Yet if that is true surely the meaning all of you readers are receiving is different to what i'm actually saying. So why bother?

'So zero bother?' I hear you say...

Third thing is the nature of the punishment this person should receive. In this case the sentence he is expected to receive - 10 years in jail - is much more severe than the usually much more strict punishment of life in jail without parole, as he's likely to die soon. I seriously hope this sets a trend, a precedent for all those rotting away in retirement homes or even on the street. Why retire, when you can commit fraud and be sent to prison? Then you're getting accomodation for free, and the government would have to look the other way because of their lack of prisons. Vive la revolution!

Article 2 - http://www.smh.com.au/national/gun-amnesty-under-way-20090301-8l9r.html

On a more serious concluding note,

Not-so-Postly Poll #3 - Do you think the gun amnesty is appropriate and in the best interests of our community?

PS - A recent Facebook quiz has determined me 50% racial stereotype and generalisation. Does that make me half Asian or half non-Asian? A modern variation to an ancient problem. How times have changed.

Till next time, may you agglomerate all your unpremediated contemplations.

Fatal Flaws of a Fault-Finding Framework

Welcome to the Agglomeration

Today I would like to blog on something that has happened in my life. A mixture of current events and my life, so I guess that makes 70% of my readers happy (this statistic correct at the time of this post with reference to the poll).

The specific topic of this post concerns an addition made by the Board of Studies in 2007 that concerns all students wanting to complete an HSC. It is a compulsory initiative called 'All My Own Work', and let me tell you now, this is perhaps the most aimless and meaningless facade that the Board of Studies could've developed to make an impression that they're actively trying to do something. Is the impression real? Yes it is. Does the initiative actually do anything? Absolutely not. Let me explain by outlining some of the fatal flaws of this newly introduced program.

1. The Nomenclature

'All My Own Work' is a completely stupid and non-applicable name for this program. Not only does it not reflect what the program is trying to teach (which is how to properly acknowledge and cite sources of research, thereby making components of your literary piece or artwork or whatever contain influences of the work of other people and making therefore my logical extension your own not exclusively your own) but judging by how the program is carried out, it might as well better be called 'All My Own Ability To Answer Extremely Obvious Questions With My Surplus Of Common Sense Repeatedly Until I Am Able To Get A Mark Of Eighty Percent Or More'. As an acronym, 'AMOATAEOQWMSOCSRUIAATGAMOEPOM' totally blows 'AMOW' out of the water.

2. The Aim

The Board of Studies introduced this program to advocate scholarly practices and advise students against malpractice, opting instead for a path of honesty and integrity lined with extremely pretty pink flower petals. However, this isn't something that needs to be 'taught'. It should've and has been incorporated into the syllabus since late primary school. The skills of citation, referencing and so on can easily be integrated into all the subjects they're actually relevant to in Years 7-10 at least. And that's all of them. So why we need a separate pointless program that acheives nothing but make the Board of Studies look like a group that either has way too much time on their hands and needs to fill it up by inventing redundant schemes or lacks the intellectual capacity to develop something that actually works or a group of fascists that simply wants to sabotage the NSW education system.

3. The Structure

What this program basically consists of is 5 modules:


1. Scholarship Principles and Practices
2. Acknowledging Sources
3. Plagiarism
4. Copyright
5. Working with others

(Taken from http://amow.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/) --> See? I'm learning...

Moving on, each module contains:

1. Information and advice on the module focus questions
2. Quiz questions
3. Summary
4. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
5. Link to a glossary
6. Links to relevant websites.

(Again taken from http://amow.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/) --> Further citation superiority from me here.

However, the only important part of any of this is the quiz. What one has to go to 'pass' the program is achieve 80% or more in each of the quizzes of the modules. So essentially that is reading comprehension, probably one of the only skills you'll get out of it. If at all. See, I attempted the quizzes without bothering to read the material at all. And I managed to get 100% in 3 of the modules, and 96% in the other 2 (getting only one question wrong in each) first try.

See, the problem with the questions is that most of them are incredibly obvious. There are 3 types of questions: True or False, Cloze Passage, and 2 Option Multi Guess.

Here's a sample question: Plagiarism is a type of cheating. True of False?

Now any person with half a red sponge for a brain and a metal rod for a finger could answer that correctly.

Furthermore, if one scores less than 80% on the first try, they can try again. Repeatedly. For an unlimited amount of times. Seriously, what is the point of this? Now the only skill that is being tested is one's memory. And guess what else was being tested while I did this test? My patience! For most good quizzes, when you answer a question correctly there is usually a statement that provides extra information to help you learn more about what you just answered correctly or incorrectly, as the case may be. Instead, the Board of Studies opts for the conventional and widely tested, 'Since they're too stupid to be right even when they're right because they must be guessing and so we have to state the obvious for those simple minded idiots' approach.

For the above sample question, when one answers 'True', the following statement pops up:

'Yes, that is correct. Plagiarism is a form of cheating'. Are you sure, Board of Studies? Don't you think there is a possibility that the answers could've changed or we might've forgotten it in the split second between we chose the answer, clicked the 'check answer' and your statement popped up? So, not only is this test a COMPULSORY waste of time, you're also in for a session to get your intelligence insulted by the very people who are going to set the tests that will likely decide your future within 2 years.

In the end you're going to have to comply with this tyrannous suppression of free will, but at least we don't have to pretend we like it. The next thing we know, the Board of Studies will be devising programs to teach us about drawing margins, document setup, acceptable computer use, examination protocol, subject selection, university courses, and how to use printers. And even if were forced to do all of these, it wouldn't be worse than the epitomy of governmental failure that is 'All their own Work'.

To conclude, a poll, which obviously won't be featured every post, as evidenced by their absence in the past two posts.

Not-so-Postly Poll #2 - Should executive salaries be capped in light of the recent events concerning 'Pacific Brands'?

Comment below.

Till next time, may you agglomerate all your unpremeditated contemplations.