Travel Experiences 2 Singapore

Singapore is a fine country- you are fined for littering, and many other indiscretions. There is a strong Indian community, and idlis and dosas are everywhere in Little India- biryani too. I went there a  few times in the last few years, and mostly enjoyed it. Some pics of well-known places and people. Made a few friends at the NUS programs I attended (as a student), and caught up with some old ones.

 Above and below-Chinese Garden, with free entry - a rarity in Singapore.

 My favourite people- above and below.

Summer School

There is a set of week-long (or two) courses at National Univ. of Singapore each summer (also called the IPSA-NUS Methods School). I have now attended two, in successive years, and recommend them to students of any age. Particularly good are the qualitative ones, though you have to pick one that's suitable for you. Happened to meet an old colleague, Senthil, from IMT Nagpur there too.

Here are some pics from the experience.

1. Fitting right in with the global crowd. Kent Ridge Metro station serves the university.

 There are also outings for socialising. Dinner at Kowloon Express, Clementi. That's Bruce Lee behind us! South Korea, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Turkey, China and Vietnam at the table. Jai ho!

Class in progress. Prof. Max Bergman of Univ of Basel is the Boss.

The NUS campus is a delight.

The food variety at their campus food court is amazing. Koffee C is our style of coffee.

Singapore, Architecture and More

 Waiting for a university shuttle.

 Metro station

 University Food court- Steven Riady Centre

 Ventilation at the food court. Notice the angled glass windows.

Two above 1. Another view of the University..Nice, modern architecture. 2. Marina Bay Hotel, with the boat-shaped top.

Below, a hotel frontage in Little India and large classroom with video-conferencing.

Learning in Singapore

Just a short reminder to myself that it's nice to be on the other side of a class. It builds empathy for poor students that we subject to so much in a day..in a Quantitative Text Analysis course in the National University of Singapore, or NUS..the prof. (Inaki) is from Texas Tech, Lubbock..I also got reminded of how much I hate programming and love packages of software. We are using R, a programmable software out here. I am with a group of students from the US, Germany, and Singapore, and they are mostly half my age..the class itself has more from other nationalities/places and speakers of languages from there. Many are doing a doctorate in political science, economics, etc.

Large masses of text can be analysed using the methods we are learning. Political speeches, press releases, tweets, Facebook posts/comments, and what not, can be analysed in different ways, for word frequencies, co-occurrence of words, and even sentiment behind the words in some ways.

Amazing what a dumb computer is capable of, if intelligent humans can get it to work..now, if I can just get that program going..