blogspot kinda failed on me, so i'm using scribefire

Garg. I realise that if I don't write regularly the old-school way, the hand will feel funny when taking up the pen.

ok. so i've blogged a bit here:

http://eddiechoo.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/gargh-google-blogspot-has-failed-me/

but I wanted to write a bit more. I need to find back that link to information and society. See how bah.

Had many, many enlightening conversations. The next sem will be quite tough, I think. Oh well.

the interconnectedness of health and poverty

With this post, I think I have amassed a whole backlog of issues worth further analysis in my wordpress blog. And to add to that...

I'm now helping out with a community project, which is about evaluating whether people require funds from a welfare organisation. Part of that involves a home visit, and this post was about the home visit... tangentially.

A near-retired man has heart disease, and that is preventing him from taking job. And he requires financial assistance. I wonder if being poor and having such chronic health problems is correlated. I wonder about the access to health education and good food, and think about whether the poor have access to cheaper but poor-quality food, rich in fats and carbohydrates, which ends up causing health problems, financial problems in the longer run.

So the thought is: is education also correlated with health problems correlated with economic problems? I don't know. But observing the family, health problems have been more obvious, and I hope that the cycle does not get perpetuated.

Add to that, is the thought about the elderly. Govt is probably now in mitigation mode, which means that they want to lessen the social, economic costs of being old. Won't work. Because the perspective is entirely wrong. Being old isn't all bad, but instead, needs to be re-looked at. The framing of the old s crucial, because its prob also one of the missing components that make SG a place really worth living. Can I grow old here? - that question will come into full force many years later...

In other words, old has to be reframed as gold.

lessons learnt from a short gathering

Had a short gathering with some sec sch friends.

And perhaps today I finally laid things to rest and understood better what friendship is: that despite all the divergence, friendship - the legacy links are what remain.

I thought about the agency-structure thing a bit, and I thought about the scholars bound for the various agencies. I guess they would be the ones who would understand the agency-structure thing most. For me, I guess the complicated thing is that structures are also composed of agents, and its a conflict between those who wanna maintain the structure, and those who wanna change the structure. Even the real anarchists, would define a social order, one that is based between the arrangements of people, using a shared framework - and that would include an order within.

The next thing I thought about was context. I thought about the overseas scholars again, and how they would be from scholars who studied in SG. Overseas dudes bring a different experience, but it is the SG scholars who are immersed in the local environment, whom I hope would know and understand the situation here. The challenge for all of us is how to remain critical thinkers, in the midst of a deeply entrenched system that does not always tolerate divergent opinions....

Which brings me to another point, that understand is not empathy, and I think, for policy to be truly effective, it has to be empathetic, not just effective. I know that govt tries to do that, and sharing by people who are there leads me to believe that policymakers don't live in ivory towers...But in SG's current path in development, policies could perhaps move not just from effectiveness, but have components of empathy...- a lot of fluff, and perhaps I'll get to there someday in fully fleshing out the idea...

And so... understanding is not empathy. Empathy is understanding, with the added emotional, experiential context. And that perhaps, is the end for all information systems, with technology being the means in bringing about the end of emapthy. Maybe infocomm is misleading, maybe empathetic tech might be better, though the juxtaposition is surely jarring...

Is that all?

-All these from a run. bleargh.

saturday already!

I'm not going to say 'time passes so fast' becomes its so cliche.

But I'm a bit tired from having been left hanging by people. Especially when they don't SMS, email, or reply on IM.

On a brighter side, I've been running a lot.

A lot of other exciting things, but for now, all I feel is fatigue and being emotionally drained, more so than the physical. Need to talk.

design failures in SG

I would want to write about the various design failures in SG and how they impede social interactions.

For example, there's a Senior Citizen Active Corner that has exercise devices more suited for people wanting to do serious workouts. The purposes of the exercise devices are also unclear...

One could always think about the bus stops, and how despite their pleasing aesthetic, sucks at providing comfort to the people waiting for bus stops. And then extending on... the lack of amenities that serve a social function... all of these are design failures in themselves...

And then going on, the extrapolation that SG as a country and the flaws in its policy design...

Hmmm....