Why are trains faster in Paris, Tokyo, HK?

Nicholas Joshua Law. (2009). Why are trains faster in Paris, Tokyo, HK?, The Straits Times. Retrieved April, 23, 2009, from http://www.straitstimes.com/ST%2BForum/Story/STIStory_367278.html

I WAS fortunate enough to travel with my wife to Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong in the past three months. The public transport systems in these cities seem far more impressive than Singapore's.

Subway trains in Paris arrive at intervals of between 90 and 105 seconds. Those in Tokyo and Hong Kong arrive at two- to 21/2-minute intervals. In Singapore, the peak period train interval is four minutes. Most of the time, it is six minutes.

The Paris and Tokyo train systems are much bigger and older than Singapore's, yet they have a higher frequency of arrivals.

Our taxi price structure is confusing. I live in Potong Pasir and work in Raffles Place. I occasionally travel to work by taxi, boarding at 5.45am to 6am, either calling for one or hailing one in the street. The fare for the same 15-minute journey ranges from $8.50 to $16.50.

The list of surcharges and midnight charges is mind-boggling. I do not even bother trying to take a taxi home from my office because the fare would include Electronic Road Pricing charges and other confusing surcharges.

In Hong Kong, you can get a taxi anywhere, and the fee is based on the meter regardless of the time. If you call for a cab, you get a 20 per cent discount. So you know approximately how much it would take to travel from point A to point B at any time.

The authorities should study how our public transport system compares against those in these three cities.

Just because we have been living with our current transport system does not mean it is acceptable. If I had not travelled to these cities, I would have thought our public transport system acceptable if not good.

2E2, what is your VIEW?

One reader commented that the aim of any business is to maximise profit and minimize cost. Hence, the company packs each train to the maximum number of passengers per trip at the expense of the comfort of passengers.

Yet, another reader commented that the train service in Singapore is not too bad. He still manages to get from points A to B without any hassle and in relative comfort. Of course, he does that during off-peak periods. He went on to opine that the complaints from most commuters boil down to the frequency during peak periods. He feels that this can be remedied quite easily by increasing the frequency.

#31 Lim Hui

2009



2008

#32 Lim Jia Ying

2009



2008

#34 Firas

2009



2008

#35 Mok Shou Zuan

2009

#36 Ng Xinle

2009



2008

#38 Ryan Chan

2009

Optical illusions

Federer smashed his racquet vs Djokovic Miami

Choose a useful language

Kor, K. B. (2009). Choose a useful language, The Straits Times. Retrieved April 11, 2009, from http://www.straitstimes.com/Prime+News/Story/STIStory_362109.html?sunwMethod=GET

AT 25, after graduation, I packed my bags and headed for Thailand.

I made my way to a small town near the northern city of Chiang Mai, where I taught English to students and helped out at a varsity Christian club, as part of a church missions stint.

Few spoke English there, making it difficult for me to communicate, despite daily Thai lessons for three months.

But when I returned to Singapore after eight months, I was able to speak and read Thai fairly well - thanks to the 'full immersion' experience.

Memories of my Thai days flooded back as I listened to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew at the launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign recently.

Defending his decision to promote Mandarin over dialects when he introduced the campaign as Prime Minister in 1979, he said the value of a language lies in its usefulness, not just in Singapore, but also in the wider world.

He said: 'If you speak Hokkien or Cantonese, you reach some 60 million in Fujian and Taiwan, or about 100 million in Guangdong and Hong Kong. With Mandarin, you can speak to 1,300 million Chinese from all provinces in China.'

His comments struck a chord with me.

Languages open doors to new opportunities.

Because I speak Thai, I have been sent to Thailand on various reporting assignments. I covered the violence in southern Thailand in October 2004, the Asian tsunami in December 2004, the military coup in September 2006 and the Thai elections in December 2007.

Or take English as another example.

Born into a Chinese-speaking family, I encountered culture shock of sorts when I went to a mission school where most of my classmates spoke English.

I managed only C and D grades for English in the first two years.

An argument with some classmates in Secondary Two drove me to work hard at my English.
I was sworn at in English by one classmate, but all I could muster were some profanities in Hokkien, which elicited sniggers from him.

Shortly after the incident, I accompanied my elder sister to an English service in a church, in the hope that I would be able to pick up better English.

It wasn't easy but soon my English grades climbed - eventually to A grades at both the O and A Levels.

I went on to study journalism at Nanyang Technological University.

But there has been a cost. My proficiency in Mandarin has suffered in my push towards English.

Up to my junior college days, I was able to pen Chinese essays with ease. But now the only Chinese I can write confidently are my own name and some simple words, though I can read Chinese newspapers and conduct interviews in Mandarin.

I have also lost much of my proficiency in Hokkien. I can barely speak it now with my maternal grandparents.

This is a loss for me, as I am less able to connect with the older generation and to appreciate the culture and history relating to the dialect group.

The same can be said of my less than perfect mastery of Mandarin.
Call me overly pragmatic but I believe that one has to take a big-picture look at all things, yes, including languages.

My Mandarin and Hokkien proficiency might have suffered, but I believe I have chosen the better path in picking English, given its status as the working language in Singapore and worldwide.
My foundation in Mandarin could come in useful if I work in China some day, while the little Hokkien that I can still muster comes in handy when I have to interview Hokkien-speaking folks.

But what if Singapore had not started the Speak Mandarin Campaign, and I had continued developing my Hokkien?

I would connect better with my grandparents, watch Hokkien opera and perhaps even do business with Fujian businessmen.

But then what?

I probably wouldn't have been able to get a good job in Singapore.

So, as of now, I'm happy with the languages that I speak and the levels of proficiency that I possess.
Yes, I know there are others who place importance on other combinations of languages, but this just goes to show that the value of languages varies for different people in different circumstances.

Similarly, the value of languages was also a key consideration for many parents whom I spoke to about how they decide on the dominant language they use at home.

At the launch of this year's Speak Mandarin campaign, MM Lee had urged parents to speak more Mandarin, instead of English, with their children at home. His reasoning was that their children will have no problems picking up English given its dominance in society here.

Some parents who had found their careers hampered by their deficiency in English chose it as their home language, because they did not want their children to follow in their footsteps.
Others, casting an eye on China, picked Mandarin in the hope that their children would benefit from being able to connect with 1.3 billion Chinese.

Whichever they choose, can we blame them? I wouldn't. These parents are just doing what they think will reap the maximum yield for their children.

Some people think that a language should not be measured in terms of its economic worth. It cheapens the learning process and deprives one of the pleasure of delving deeper into the culture and history relating to each language.

My question is: Does Singapore have a choice?

Given our lack of natural resources, porous economy and fluid population flows, I feel that the Government has no choice but to focus on English and Mandarin for Chinese Singaporeans.

But while the Government decides the key languages on a national scale, it's not saying that dialects cannot be learnt. It's just being pragmatic when it says that most people cannot cope with more than two key languages. Let those who can go beyond.

My parting shot? Each one of us has to decide for himself or herself the languages that will be most useful.

#37 Ong Shiu Reon

2009

When Facebook looked a twit

Lee, J. (2009). When Facebook looked a twit, The Straits Times. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.straitstimes.com/Review/Others/STIStory_359134.html

SOMETIMES, taking on your rivals by incorporating their strategies into your business model is just asking for trouble - as Facebook has learnt the hard way.

Over the past fortnight, many of the social networking site's 175 million users have been venting their frustrations online about the 'improvements' that Facebook has put in place.

And unfortunately for the website, the very essence of what made it popular - its ability to let groups of like-minded netizens get their messages across via viral propagation - came back to bite it in the posterior.

What Facebook tried to emulate was the model made famous by its very serious competitor for Internet users' short attention spans. It tried to be Twitter.

Twitter, which the world woke up to during the Mumbai terror attacks late last year, is basically a mass-SMS-texting device. The users get to write short messages and blast them to their friends and followers.

US President Barack Obama successfully used Twitter, for example, to reach out to the younger demographic during his election campaign. These days, you can follow Twitter updates from senators who tweet from congressional sessions to Britney Spears and her manager on what she's up to in the recording studio.

Obviously, given Twitter's highly successful viral reach, Facebook must have thought to incorporate that into its own modus operandi.

What Facebook appeared not to have foreseen is that its value proposition is very different from that of Twitter. Both might have been 'killer apps' in their own ways, but while Facebook became the quintessential social networking website, Twitter is more of a blogging tool - it's the lazy man's way of blogging.

Facebook started out on the same premise as other social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster and Multiply. But because it began on a collegiate- based community, where only owners of e-mail addresses of American universities could register for use, it managed to achieve a higher level of popularity with more discerning Internet users when it eventually opened up its user-account policy to anyone with a verifiable e-mail address.

Very quickly, MySpace, Friendster and their kind quickly lost their street cred to Facebook.
On Facebook, a user can connect with friends, contact via e-mail or interact with one another through various applications or games. What was most compelling about the model was that you can visit your friend's profile page to check what he or she has been up to or take note of their status update like: 'Joanne is feeling sorry for Timothy Geithner.'

Most usefully, it had a page called a news feed where it aggregated your friends' doings.
The other fun element was the fan pages of people from Mr Obama to CNN's star anchor Anderson Cooper and companies like the American Ballet Theatre.

So what did Facebook do? In its latest design, it started pushing the updates onto the News Feed page, the way Twitter blasts users' messages out.

Suddenly, users' Facebook news feeds were inundated with the latest updates from their fan pages. And the news feeds started publishing all quiz and game results of the users' friends, which caused a furore among those who didn't want to be spammed.

In fact, that is the very point that irritates Twitter users: That the lazy man's way of blogging tends to spam their 'inboxes'.

Another sign of Facebook stealing the Twitter model was the change in its status update. Previously, this was just an empty field at the top of your profile page to fill. Like the aforementioned: 'Joanne is feeling sorry for Timothy Geithner.'

Now, the field says: 'What are you thinking?' prompting users to basically tweet longer messages like they do on Twitter.

The backlash from Facebookers was so vehement that product director Christopher Cox had to issue a statement: 'We've heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.'

There's a lesson to be learnt in this failed 'improvement' experiment. And that is that on the Internet, habits tend to stick and any change infuriates netizens. Also, because netizens are so vocal, especially with negative comments, website operators must tread carefully when incorporating newer, seemingly successful technologies into their models.

As someone who oversees a website myself, I feel so sorry for the Facebook team. Talk about giving no face. But that, unfortunately, is the Internet: It's their way, or the super highway!