Reaction to "Vernacular, religious schools must go"

I read a letter forwarded by a columnist from Sin Chew Daily, titled "Vernacular, religious schools must go".

The writer's argument contains a cause-effect mistake. Accusing the lack of critical thinking and quality questioning skills among Malaysian for the presence of vernacular and religious schools demonstrate the writer's lack of logical thinking. According to the theory of Multiple Intelligences proposed by Howard Gardner, linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence are developed in parallel to other forms of intelligences (see https://howardgardner.com/multiple-intelligences/). These intelligences are complementary to each other, rather than competing to each other. Instead of condemning specific school types, we should provide opportunities to Malaysian to nurture and develop logical-mathematical thinking, critical thinking and multiple linguistic skills. These skills would afford Malaysian to respond rationally to current issues and avoid making improper cause-effect mistakes.  

Algorithm Humans live by

Algorithms are step-by-step instructions that seek the best possible solution to a problem.

Inspiring concepts to me:
Problem that inspires them
Emotional motivation and informational motivation
Computational cognitive science
Where rule is relaxed.
Information imbalances
Computational kindness

What is PhD?

PhD is essentially a self-actualization journey, in which you go really deep to understand about yourself by:

- understanding your past achievements and failures, 

- understanding your current strengths and needs, and 

- predicting future trends of what you are good at now.

Philosophy = Philo- + sophy
where Philo means “love” and sophy means “wisdom”

To me, loving wisdom means loving what, when, where, why and how to use knowledge.

This is aligned to my life motto: Do the right thing at the right time and use the right method.

Get it done first, then get it right

When I was pursuing my PhD at Warwick Institute of Education, I always kept what Prof David Wray taught me: “get it written before getting it right”.

I documented my written progress, especially when I modified or change my research design, as shown in the following figure. I changed 10 times in my PhD, before finding what I actually wanted to study. However, the difference between a lot of PhD students and me is: I worked rapidly at the first 6 months of PhD. According to my supervisors and seniors, the changes I made might take 2 years of other students. My secret was: I read a lot during first 6 months, and I asked a lot of questions to myself and others. 

I found most of graduate students or potential graduate students facing writing block, in fact, that happens to me once a while. 

So, to prospective graduate students who do not have a specific topic or scope of study, I may offer a tentative topic or scope for him or her to start with. 

Now I start to see the benefits of the US PhD education system: students typically spend 2.5 years taking courses, and develop a scope and topic of interests along this period, while getting exposure to most if not all generic research methods—quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, design-based research, action research, etc. With these intensive exposure and experience, graduate students should be able to develop himself or herself and prepare a solid thesis at the end of the 5th year. 

Thesis structure

Attended academic writing sessions: 'Thesis Structure' & 'How not to write' on 11 July 2008. Herewith my notes:

Thesis Structure

Structure: the interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity; a notion / reality covering the recognition.

Categories of knowledge in thesis writing:

1. Why am I doing this? Reasons? 2. What is known and unknown? 3. What is my intention to discover / investigate? 4. What are my methods?	EXPLORATION
5. What have I found? 6. What does it mean? (to you? to everybody else?) 7. So what? Possible applications / recommendations? What contribution doest it make to knowledge? What's next?	RESULTS

 

Proportion of thesis:	Percentage	Words
Introduction (write as a whole at the end) Methods (write competantly instead of tentatively) Findings Discussion (the significant of your findings)/analysis Conclusion (second last)	10% - 20% (very conceptual subject) around 20% (has to be very detailed) 10% - 20% 30% - 40% 20%	8000 - 16000 16000 8000 - 16000 24000 - 32000 16000

The two 'pillars' of thesis structure: INTRODUCTION & CONCLUSION

How to build a theoretical model

My note in March 2008 (from my research diary)

A model is a simplified (often mathematical) description of a system etc., to assist calculations and predictions.

Steps in building a theoretical model:-

1.  The variables to be used in characterising and understanding the process must be specified.
2. The forms of the relationships connecting these variables must be specified.
3. Ignorance and the need for simplicity will ensure that all relationships other than identities are subject to error and so, for purposes of efficient statistical estimation, these error terms must be specified.
4. The parameters of the model must be estimated and the extent of its identification ascertained; if this is inadequate, the model must be reformulated.
5. Finally, the model must be kept up to date and used, so that an impression can be formed of its robustness and reliability.

Theoretical models are of many kinds: static or dynamic; partial or complete; aggregated or disaggregated; deterministic or stochastic; descriptive or optimising.