Launch day

So much has gone on that it's difficult to catch my breath. Anyway, PPP has launched as an e-book on Amazon worldwide. Thanks to my marketing campaign and lots of love and trust from friends and family, it broke #1 Best Seller in several social policy and sociology categories.

For the record, I note my official response to that achievement as follows:

"It's not a harvest. It signifies a successful seeding of the field. It means that my book is in the hands of people who know, love and trust me and they get to read what I have written. The real test is whether the seeds will grow. It depends a lot on how my readers like what they read and if they would recommend it to others... and so on. Even if the seeds don't take root, they are still people I can ask for honest feedback about what they didn't like, and what I could have done better. And that will put me in a stronger position to write another book -- which I'm already starting to think about."

In the meantime, based on the fact that I have actually got some people to pay for something of mine, I've taken my first baby steps as an entrepreneur. Most importantly, I have a product I believe in that I'm proud to sell, and maybe that makes all the difference.

And now I'm working on my print book launch with a lot of help from the fam. Have to brace myself 'cos while I asked for it, I'm also scared of being the centre of attention, a position I've been avoiding for decades. Childhood trauma of constantly going 'look at me!!!', then realising there was nothing worth looking at after all.

Well, I really hope PPP is something to look at. If not, I'll have to learn and write something better next time.

The Merch has arrived!

We are looking at my very first consignment of books. Not just any book, but my book, People, Peace and Power ups: A Singaporean Retrospective. 200 copies to put on direct sales and give away at my discretion. It's a milestone also for me being an entrepreneur instead of just a paid employee. Of course I'm not giving up my day job yet, but being realistic, I know it's not a job that will last forever. So here's to new directions, and new adventures!

Final proof

A milestone day. My book finally arrived in solid form for a final proofing. I've been through the first third of the content and so far so good. If all goes well, I should be releasing it for purchase on Amazon in a week's time.

So, why do I have two copies when I only should have one? Because one is the reprint to make up for the mistake made in the first delivery. The other is the one my publisher ordered on their expense, to expedite rectifying the printer's error. So happened both arrived on the same day with the same delivery.

I am a published author now. This book is my calling card.

It's here... not

Been waiting a little over two weeks for the first physical print copy of my book, People, Peace and Power-ups, to arrive. Once I've done my proof-read and certified it free of printing errors, I will allow my publisher to finally push it out to the world.

This is the package that arrived on my doorstep that I'm eagerly unboxing...

And it's not my book. Someone on the shipping end must have mislabeled my package with this one, so that's going to be yet another delay of maybe another month or so. Something is telling me I'm keeping my day job for a little while longer.

It is what it is.

New job title

In the swirl of events of yesterday, I did not recognise the significance of the above email. I thought there were still one or two more steps to go, but technically I can now claim the job title of Published Author! 

Yes, my book is no longer merely conceptual -- it actually exists in the real world! It'll be a few more days before I can hold it in my hands via snail mail but it is done! The culmination of fragments of work spread over the last 5 or so years is a destination I did not anticipate when I started this personal project, yet here we are.

I still need to proof the first printed copy to ensure there are no mistakes in the printing process, and then I'll release it into the market when I'm satisfied it's all good. Hopefully, a few weeks from now. In the meantime, preview People, Peace and Power-ups on thegprebel.sg, where this whole idea started as just a thing to do on the side.

Going to sit down and take a breath now...

Things that came in the mail

Not the snarky watch, but the replacement watch strap in black and Bugatti red from Clockwork Synergy. My original watch strap snapped for no apparent reason, so my wrist has been bare of a watch for a couple of weeks now. Also, an anthology of short stories by S'porean writers -- my reward for donating some cash to the "Singapore Literature Festival in NYC" via Kickstarter pledge. The other part of the reward was to have my name mentioned as a donor in the programme booklet (left). I'm just glad to have helped.

Creating intelligence

I've been reading Visions by Michio Kaku. Published in 1997, it envisions the future century based on the work and research that was taking place at that time. About 15 years later, today, already some predictions have come to pass surprisingly quickly, others still need a slightly longer time-frame.

But what I want to share is three paragraphs from Dr Kaku's chapter on Artificial Intelligence. What I see in them is a parallel between the approach one AI branch is taking to create smart machines and the approach we in education default to in trying to create smart kids.

"Although researchers of the two schools of artificial intelligence sit side by side in the same building, the lines between them are clearly drawn. On one side of the debate are the distinguished founders of artificial intelligence who have spent a lifetime programming mammoth computers to model human intelligence. Their inspiration for a thinking machine was a powerful digital computer -- the bigger, the better. Their strategy was dubbed the top-down approach; they believed they could program in the logic and reasoning ability necessary for a machine to think. They assumed that thinking machines -- like Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from Jupiter's forehead fully grown -- would emerge fully developed from a computer.

Their recipe for building a thinking machine was simple: First pour the complex rules and programming into a digital computer in order to reproduce logic and intelligence, then sprinkle on a few subroutines for speech and vision, attach mechanical hands, legs and eyes... Voila! You would have an intelligent robot. Inside that robot's brain would be a complete representation of the outside world, a detailed manual that described the rules for living in the real world.

Their philosophy was based on the idea that intelligence can be simulated by a "Turing machine," which forms the basis of all digital computers. But the traditionalists soon slipped into a quagmire; they profoundly underestimated the enormity of writing down the complete road map of human intelligence. Their computer-based machines turned out to be pathetic, feeble creatures. The mobile robots built on their approach consumed vast amounts of computer power, yet they were surprisingly inept: agonizingly slow and timid, they frequently got lost. They were useless in the real world." (Kaku, 1997).

The other approach is, obviously, the bottom-up approach. This approach is the learn-by-doing, trial-and-error, develop-environmental-awareness-from-your-own-immediate-surroundings method. Dr Kaku is clear that neither is the "superior" approach and that for AI to be truly successful, top and bottom must meet somewhere in the middle.

Likewise for our kids. Based on their somewhat disappointing mid-year performance, they clearly demonstrate how their top-down learning method with heavy reliance on rote gives them a lot of information to reproduce in their essays, but very little ability to string a reasoned argument together that makes much sense. The kids may have a lot memorized, but ultimately it means nothing to them. They act like conduits, passing along information but none of it is real to them. Because they have no personal stake in the info, there is also neither structure nor framework in which they can manipulate the info to any purposeful use.

Below, I'm sharing a video clip that demonstrates how a bottom-up approach does seem to boost development in the kind of discourse required of the kids for GP:

Assuming the subtitles are legit (I'm a bit dubious of the jump-cuts), this 12-year old would ace GP already. At his fingertips are issues relating to politics, religion, socio-economic inequality, law and order, and human rights which he most eloquently discusses as he explains his purpose for not being in school today.

His intelligence stems from simply being aware of his immediate environment, exercising good sense and good judgement based on a value system that respects equality, freedom and eschews exploitation and the abuse of power. He reads the newspaper, listens to people, watches TV, reads from the Internet, and most importantly, uses his own brain. He lives GP, breathes GP, thinks GP.

A kid like this is likely to view with contempt any attempt by his teacher to give him a pre-digested 'reading package'. He might even burn it for being establishment propaganda. Our kids treat reading packages like the Gospel. 'nuff said.

Blessings from an old friend

Here's a name I haven't heard from in a long time. Our last contact was way back in '92. Through the miracle of social networking, -- she found a nearly defunct email addy of mine -- Chik and I have touched base once again.

In the span of years between us, I have been piddling around with electronic self-publication while she has gone commercial. See? An autographed copy of her first paperback anthology of Christmas themed stories (available from Amazon.com) which she mailed over as a season's greeting.

Her stories are totally family-friendly, each presenting a strong moral point focusing on the Christian perspective of the purpose and meaning of Christmas.

A few are contemporary adaptations of biblical tales and other familiar narratives. Because they have realistic settings, easily identifiable characters, and very down-to-earth plotlines, they all have the potential to be re-adapted as short before-sermon dramas.

Anyway, it's a very novel greeting card from a very novel person. Thanks, Chik! Congratulations on being a published auteur, and all the best to you and yours this Christmas season!

'This R2 unit has a bad motivator'

We're all familiar with the carrot-and-stick approach as our primary motivation tool. We reward someone for doing good work and punish them for delivering something that isn't up to standard or not doing what we wanted of them.

In school, our rewards tend to be good grades, a glowing testimonial and maybe the occasional citation or cash incentive for exceptional performance. Undesirable behaviour, on the other hand, is punished with personal audiences with increasing levels of the campus heierarchy, discussions with parents, Corrective Work Orders, threats of repeating a year or a 'recommendation to seek educational instruction at an alternative institution'.

Daniel Pink, in Drive, calls this practice Motivation 2.0. Much of our workflow systems and even our economy itself is largely based on this model, and it's been very successful so far in moving us along. Motivation 2.0 is an excellent tool for mechanical, routine tasks. Nobody wants to do them, so offering people a decent exchange for their time and effort is the only way we can shoehorn human resources into our assembly-line industries.

Problem is that our economy no longer relies on routine mass-order jobs. Our employment opportunities are now shifting towards knowledge, service and creative 'products' where we have an edge over our more labour-intensive neighbouring economies. Good as 2.0 is in replicating a compliant, narrow-skilled workforce for the industrial economy, for tasks involving thinking and complex problem-solving, 2.0 doesn't work. Throwing in more money isn't going to make solving problems easier or faster. Pink even suggests that these material rewards might even be a de-motivational factor because it raises the pressure to get the task done (reward conditional to successful delivery) and it makes people work towards what the money's worth and no further. If this sounds like what schools are like today, that's because we are still following the 2.0 model, and yet are supposed to be grooming capable workers for the new economy.

Drive advocates an upgrade to Motivation 3.0, detailing scientific and behavioral studies; and case studies of successful corporations that have adopted this new approach. One of Pink's best examples is that Microsoft Encarta (an attempt at creating and maintaining a pay-to-use online encyclopaedia) which had a huge financial backing and lots of talented employees closed down after a few years of operation, whereas a loose organization with the same goals but having no paid management, no paid employees and no for-profit motive has become Wikipedia, one of the most-referred to and relied upon websites today.

The 3.0 model emphasizes autonomy, mastery and purpose as the prime movers of human achievement. Autonomy being the divestment of superfluous supervision over the worker and the work; mastery as in putting in time and effort to get good at a skill or skill-set; and purpose as in having a sustainable, believable and realistic rationale for doing the work in the first place.

I'm looking at my students past and future. Most of them came from 2.0 schools, and even when they arrive at our doorstep we still keep them suppressed under 2.0 principles. We complain about how unmotivated they are, how slow they are to absorb new ideas and concepts, how frustrated we are that they keep making the same mistakes even though we've corrected them time and time again. We run our education like a factory churning out neatly packaged mass products but we also realize that each student is an individual with individual learning needs and hence requires a personally customized instructional programme in order to develop each potential, like we promise to. That's quite the dilemma, isn't it, trying to meet 3.0 demands with 2.0 structures?

Our biggest problem with 3.0 is in the first pillar: autonomy. I'm not talking about staff autonomy because one of the reasons why I enjoy my work on campus is that I have loads of autonomy to run my classes and other programmes the way I want. I'm talking about the kids and how we have to monitor them, guide them, discipline them, safeguard them, and sic their parents on them (if necessary) their whole two years with us. I'm talking about not trusting them to do the right thing, and likewise them not trusting themselves, coming from environments that didn't trust them either. It's going to be difficult if I apply 3.0 while the rest of their subject tutors still manage them with 2.0, the way they're used to. The kids are so conditioned under survival 2.0 they don't see the higher purpose of 3.0 as a necessary or even a worthwhile aim. Avoiding a shelling will always win out over reaching for higher goals.

I'm absolutely sure 3.0 works. The kids in Drama Club grow and develop so many skills so quickly because they have the autonomy to do what they need to do to get their show on the road. They dedicate themselves to mastering stagecraft, turning in long rehearsals above and beyond their regular scheduled schoolwork and working with a true master of the craft like Tina or Rods. And they have a purpose to turn in a performance they can be proud of for our annual Drama Night or national competition. But these same kids are often in trouble in class because 2.0 just isn't adequate to motivate them to do as well in their academic obligations.

Working in an organization so firmly entrenched in 2.0, can there be a transitional step, a 2.5 that I can at least start on? Or have I been stuck on 2.5 all along? Whatever it is, it's time to throw a bigger rock into the pond. Our collective futures could well depend on it.

More to life than just Sims

A mental checklist of all the media that have passed through my perusal this past week, just so that I can assure myself that I haven't Simmed myself to death and have actually done other things as well.

Let's see... while waiting in line for two hours on "Let there be Sims" Day, I finished Pratchett's "Nation" which I have been slowly digesting for the longest time. "Nation" isn't a difficult book to read, but trying to find time to read whole tomes has actually been a problem this year.

On the same day commuting home on public transport I also finished Gaiman's "Coraline" in graphic novel format. Had to get that read before the movie opens in the next few weeks. And I began "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" allegedly written by Austen and Grahame-Smith. It's a fanfic mashup of the classic Victorian tale set in an alternate universe in which the Bennett girls have been trained in the Shaolin arts in order to combat the plague of the undead ravaging the English countryside; but in the meantime they also have to get married to eligible bachelors as Victorian society demands. The amiable Bingley and the insufferably haughty Darcy come to mind, if only those damned zombies wouldn't keep distracting the girls from their domestic destinies. It's a fanfic all right, though I'm not sure if it's been written by a fan of Austen or a fan of zombies. But it's hilarious, nonetheless.

Got my movie fix yesterday from "Blood: the Last Vampire". Woohoo! Non-stop fighting at a breakneck pace filmed manga-style for maximum excitement. Wouldn't you know it, but the story is viewed from the perspective of a character called Alice who in keeping with the Traditions of Alice gets her world compeletly turned around and no one can say for sure what's real and what's fantasy any longer.

And today it was "Angels and Demons": a scavenger hunt through the Vatican to prevent the seat of Catholicism from being vaporized by an anti-matter detonation. The conflict between science and religion feature strongly in this movie, though the premise isn't as controversial as it was in "The DaVinci Code".

It's almost enough for me to confess, "forgive me Father, for I have Simmed". But looking at this list, I have to say that's not all I've been doing.