Screenshots

Australia has a prime minister who speaks fluent mandarin. His children too. Malaysia has ministers who wants to have crosses in schools brought down, demolishing hindhu and chinese temples. Where we heading?

Rudd was a First Class Honours Asian Studies major in college.

Rudd studied at the Australian National University in Canberra, residing at Burgmann College, and graduated with First Class Honours in Arts (Asian Studies). He majored in Chinese language and Chinese history, became proficient in Mandarin, and chose a Chinese alias, Lu Kewen. ~wikipedia

He was also posted in the Aussie embassy in Beijing. So his Chinese education goes a long way.

Easy. We're moving towards a majority BN govt again.

I just read Raja Petra's article: http://www.malaysia-today.net/nuc2006/index.php?itemid=833

And it does make sense ...

The government is trying to raise the anger of other communities. The minority. Force them to do something stupid which would in turn make the majority Malays worried. And after, they be united strongly and the other communities are bogeyman.

And bravo. End of day, BN wins hands down again. And we fail to have enough check and balance in the govt, yet again.

Jeff, this is just "Ketuanan Australia" at its best....hahaha..
Previously a lot of Asian leaders like to accuse Australia of being more Western than Asian..now these people will have to eat their words.

And another thing, do not talk about glocal when they still need clutches to stand in "their own land"

"By population, Australia has 7 million people compared to Malaysia"

you mean 7 million people LESS copared to Malaysia?

Here, we have great mandarin education and not much support is given.

A few days ago, someone approached me to help a school in Tanjong Kling, Melaka buy furniture for a primary school.

They had sent letters so long ago to the relevant authorities and till this day, kids are still not getting the proper facilities needed for a better learning environment. I was told that the school was "lucky" when a kind headmaster of a kebangsaan school offer their "written off" school desk and chairs sometime ago after new provisions were given to the particular school. Children's parents and teachers helped repair the funiture.

I could sense dissapointment in the face of this individual trying to sell me fund raising concert tickets. If not for the support of the chinese community, mandarin medium schools would have died long ago.

It is sad when we hear of the english language now being given a harse treatment when the purpose of introducing it for science and math is for the competitive advantage of all Malaysians, alike.

The chinese or anyone for that matter, in this country too are also not having an easy time mustering the English language, but try we all sure must.

The Chinese were once unable to even converse in BM but look at the situation today. Chinese students are scoring "A"s in the subject and listen to the way some speak or sing their way into a Malaysia idol.

It is a waste that in the mist of mandarin speaking brothers/sisters of the same nation, many do not take the opportunity to excell. We must put away all uneccessary pride and start reconizing the strength we have in each other, build upon that and ensure the co-existance of a better people in a better nation.

At some point, competition loses its usefulness. Competition becomes obsolute and only Cooperation can help take everyone to a new level.

So long as small mindedness prevail, "Glocal" will merely remain a word devoid of spirit here. We must grow.

Kevin Rudd, speaks very well - not just his fluency in Mandarin but also he is very amiable and has charisma. I like him. I also wish him all the best as the new PM of Australia. Australia should be heading in the right direction.

Oh yes, I am a Malaysian staying in Australia, I am so happy when "Lu Kewen" won, i am so impress with his Mandarin proficiency, so much so made me feel ashamed of myself. I understand what he was saying in that interview, but don't think I as fluent as him.

He brought in some relieves and a breath of fresh air to the country, everyone esp those in the urban areas are sick and tired of his predecessor whose political party was practically "dismantled" - all the senior ex cabinet members quit frontbench.

I guess politics here is different if compare to malaysia - here it's not based not races - although opposition has taken control - but nobody is worried whether they will be discriminated, sidelined etc. Some may say its left wing and right wing - to me its all the same, just their ability to convince the people whether they are able to do a god job for the benefits of Australians - citizens and residents (like myself). Residents dont made to feel that they are 2nd class citizen - they get to share the benefits like australian citizens the only difference is not able to vote - thats all!

I've always wondered why the govt hasn't yet invested in teaching the malays how the others have been able to succeed, and make that teaching program central to everything related to changing mindsets and attitudes to life and personal development.

If it's knowledge, then it must be have something to do with language. And if the malay language hasn't been able to keep up with the vast amount of knowledge needed to compete on the global front, then one must promote the use of those languages which have succeeded in doing so.

There are three ways to compete on the global front.

One, you buy the knowhow and use it outwards; this knowhow is either knowledge or people who know. Singapore is doing both through its brain concentration program; applied to us, that's called brain drain, and applied to Umno, that's called zero-sum game between malays and chinese, indians etc.

Two, you learn the knowhow the hard way by learning the media in which it is carried - the language, study skills, networking factors, benchmarks - and then apply it first inwards, then outwards.

Three, you try to develop your own indigenous knowhow and then first try to apply it inwards to build the domestic market and then later apply it outwards for export market share.

Because of the blinkered flipflop policies of Umno, we are too late to take the third path. Our human capital supply chain is a complete mess. At the school level, the govt is de-emphasising knowledge and just hoping that students learning how to march will become good managers, technologists and researchers in the future, and where knowledge is concerned, they'd rather these students rote lessons from moral-101 while MPs continue to make degrading remarks, or learn the greatness of islamic civilisation to the exclusion of more interesting tidbits like how the spartans had used the phalanx formation to devastating effect. Or even the way of the Mean. Meanwhile, at the university level, the professors are coming out to excuse their lamentably low and shameful thes/jiaotong rankings because they say there isn't much funding. From what they write in the press to try and whitewash their rankings, you know they're waffling. From what they publish of what they research, you know even a postgraduate thesis from australia or finland, china or singapore, will put theirs to shame.

Then that lets you to thinking why the MCA man in the MOE says there's meritocracy in the public university admissions. You conclude yes there is PROVIDED before the selection they already set how many percent by race is to be offered. So for the malays it's say 65 percent; then within that sixty five percent they rank the malay students meritocratically. All along we have been thinking meritocracy was based on a complete pool of candidates regardless of race who are ranked based on a standard and uniform point system applied to relevant subject scores. We were so wrong.

And while we ponder on this, we suddenly become aware that most of the lecturers in these universities are from one race. We wonder what has happened so quietly in the past twenty years. We have no answers. In fact the day we think it's useless to wonder these things is the day we already die.

And then we read how education in the other mother tongues has not been neglected and so-and-so many schools have been built. We have been through on this before. We know the fact - if this govt really has been supportive of education using the mother tongues, those vernacular schools wouldn't be falling apart now or be in such sorry state or their teachers and wellwishers wouldn't be having to go around begging for money to keep them going. We would have seen the govt build more smart schools for them, or offer them appropriate land so that parents and van drivers don't have to ferry the schoolchildren afar just to find a chinese or tamil school, while govt smart schools are half-unused in strategic locations. We also won't have to read how the next DPM-in-waiting can deny audience of the chinese education body unless they meet the national education policy first.

But what is 'national' when in the same breath they say 'glocal'? And what is 'glocal' when everyone else is already 'global'? Can you answer me?

So i am saying if the beginning to the end of the human capital development chain of this nation is so weak, how can the future of this nation be strong from having a better foundation of more learned and motivated people who can add value to all our enterprises in order to earn more income, attract more investors and play more leadership roles on the world stage?

That's just education. In everything else, you also don't see the pursuit of excellence as the key imperative to becoming 'glocal'.

Excellence is also about public service. You don't just arbitrarily slide in big increases in business license fees without prior justification and notice to businesses. This has just happened, wasting time of the business owners to raise hell and forcing city halls to beat a retreat and say it's implementation problems and people want cheap yet more facilities. In the first place, excellence starts with being transparent first. If you're going to spend a lot on things of no value but spend nothing well on things of value to your customer the rakyat, then don't blame them for being suspicious of everything you do. Without forethought, one adds.

Likewise with the space thing. Ok, you need to lift the spirits of the malays. A hundred million. Then you read the crystals experiment is finito because they didn't take into account that when a soyuz lands after a fiery entry, it is not going to land like a feather so that you don't have to send what's left of your experiment to tokyo to see if anything can be salvaged. What happened to the brain of the experimenter? And now there is some looming talk about an indigenous space program. It's not about hardware and hype. It's about soft skills and soft wares. You need things like bang-bang theory, calculus of variation, unconstrained optimization etc to just sniff the fundamentals of kinetic trajectories. Are we anywhere near those or will the billions to be spent chasing wild dreams end up disappearing again?

Excellence is also about common sense equals to think through thoroughly.

Like trees along roads. A simple thing for this resource-rich luxuriantly endowed country. The heat from the road tarmacs in our weather instil nothing but road rage in our motorists. Come January when they raise the tolls without telling you how those toll agreements have been so cleverly crafted to bleed every motorist dry, the temperature will crotchily rise a notch more. And will the JKR please explain why the city roads of Malaysia are in such shitty conditions when IRB has been collecting so much money from everyone? One is federal, the other is state is NOT a good excuse. People just see both as GOVERNMENT.

Let me sum up clearly for everyone. The most important mindset and attitude change this country must have is for the malays to circumscise themselves from the belief that progress comes from taking shortcuts.

Just buying the hardware with money that should be saved for future generations is not progress. Just promoting hype to enthuse the young ones without teaching them the key success factors of life that calls for hard and fast work is not progress. Just talking with a view to nods of approval from equally-blinkered grassroot supporters is not progress. Just ignoring the basics and fundamentals that must be mastered is not progress.

The longer we ignore the imperative of time, the more we try to cheat ourselves with regards how far behind we have let ourselves down compared to others who have raced ahead from behind, the harder it will be for the future generations to catch up.

Now looking at just the vietnamese kids, i think we should start getting alarmed.

Look what's happening the private sector. Anything smart come out of it lately that says beyond buying and selling and building things based on standard plans, we are actually doing great stuff to take us global? Look at the public sector, any smart vision and acute calculation of where we must be strategically placed in the 21st century, and how to get there by a clearer understanding what those corridor fdi's are really composed of? Look around the society we are in today, with all its ills and ilks; the millions burnt in so many useless hype-crowed projects that deliver nothing could have been better used to champion and support really useful nation-building resource-creating enterprises - vernacular education so that the future generations of all races can interact better with the giants of Asia, aid for the marginalized poor so that they can escape the vice-like grips of inflationary cycles, productivity tools and training so that our manpower become really global in ability and capacity.

You have nothing but a building here, a lipservice speech there, and policies that continue to drain brains from this country while supporting the very sycophants who will only take you back to parochialism, and you want to talk about glocal?

Get real for once.

And lastly we come to this cabinet and the future of Malaysia's governance. At best they can only assay a few words of trying to calm down the irate rakyat after the whiplash they get from stupid and stunted policies and moves made by the very same govt machinery from which their spokespeople came. After fifty years, they're still way over their head, surviving on spin, now reinforced by anti-global laws designed by them. The efficiency and effectiveness of a government is indirectly proportional to the amount of spin that needs to be generated after an event to explain why there has been no forethought or proactivity before it. Think about that. The only reason why all of them will not get an F for their performance in Asean is because there is at least two or three countries in Asean which are still trying to catch up with us; the other self-reason of comparing us with Ghana has already been consigned to history by the rakyat as an insult to the Ghanaians. Give them a few more months; they will get their F's and that's because the rakyat will already by then be completely f'cked up by them.

Yesterday there was a Star article reporting on a World Bank study on Malaysia's higher education; basically it says we are losing competitiveness in this area compared to even our neighbours.

Here's the link to that article:

http://tinyurl.com/269oby

excerpts:

Malaysia's higher education at critical stage, says World Bank

MALAYSIA’S higher education system is at a critical state and lagging behind that of neighbouring countries, according to a World Bank report carried by Utusan Malaysia.

The front-page report, entitled “Malaysia and the Knowledge Economy: Building a World-Class Higher Education System,” said the country would need to focus and build clear strategies if it wants to compete on an international platform.

As such, the World Bank urged Malaysia to concentrate on choosing a more effective administration and financial model, improving overall quality of the universities, equipping graduates to function in a knowledge-based economy and creating a solid network between the private sector and universities.

The 258-page report was distributed at the Regional Higher Education Conference held at the KL Convention Centre on Monday.

AND here's the link to that report (1MB):

http://tinyurl.com/2acmlz

it's raining again and so the links may open slow but open they will.

my eyesight's not good anymore so can anyone help to tell where's Malaysia in the following as i faintly remember that we were once the toast of the commonwealth for the prowess of our academic achievements?

keep this link handy:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=507465

The Singapore ZaoBao Reported more than what STAR had reported.

http://tinyurl.com/23shnc
http://www.zaobao.com/yx/yx071204_502.html

确保只录取学业优异学生　消除“种族议程”争议
世行建议马国采用统一大学入学考试标准

　（吉隆坡讯）世界银行建议马来西亚政府采用统一的大学入学考试标准，确保只录取学业表现优异的学生，同时也能消除人民对大学“种族议程”的争议。
　　它指出，马国高等学府通过不同管道，包括大学预科班、高级学校文凭（STPM）、大学基础课程、‘A’水平考试和高级宗教证书来录取学生，造成人民质疑政府是否落实“绩效制”（meritocracy）。

　　《星洲日报》报道，世界银行在新推出的《马来西亚和知识经济：建立世界级高等教育系统》报告书中，提出上述建议。

　　这本由世界银行、高等教育部与首相署经济策划组联合推出的报告书，昨日由高教部长慕斯达法与世界银行马来西亚区代表伊恩波特在吉隆坡会展中心举行的区域高教论坛会上，首次向媒体推介。

不同入学考试

却有不同积分标准

　　报告书说，虽然各大专都以学生的累计平均积分（CGPA）为录取标准，但不同的入学考试却有不同积分标准，因此只有统一的入学考试才是最公平的标准。

　　它认为，马国大专院校要跻入世界最佳排名，必须先克服高等教育策略上的一些弱点。

　　它指出，不断上升的大学生失业率、滑落的大学世界排名及企业界对大学生素质的不满，都显示出马国高等教育策略的不足。

　　除了必须加强管理与财务自主权，马国高等学府面对的其他问题，包括欠缺统一的高教策略、素质管理系统、大学与企业联络网、专业教职员人才及国立与私立标准各异。

　它指出，亚细安国家包括马国的高等教育在2005年取得惊人的入学率，但素质却成为令人担忧的课题。从世界最佳大学排名来看，所有名列前茅的大学皆在知识及研究上拥有显著贡献，并十分注重研究与创意。
　　慕斯达法说，以数量而言，马国高等学府逐年增加，但如何营造优良的高教环境、提升教育素质却是很大的挑战。他说，高教部已将部分建议纳入较早前推介的《高教大蓝图》，并已落实一些建议。