Recap

I'm going to blog about last week's and this week's lectures.

For the Google Wave lecture last week, it's probably the first time I've experienced a live video conferencing lecture like this. I felt that it was quite successfully conducted. Other than the lag that was present, everything else was pretty much smooth-going (no connection breaks, interrupts, etc). I enjoyed Pamela's critique of our apps because it provided a good perspective of what she as an experienced programmer in Google saw. Her enthusiasm and sharing certainly made me re-evaluate about what I thought of Google Wave and its extensions, especially with the new robot API.

Fast forward to this week: Zit Seng's lecture was quite enjoyable. For me, most of the things shared were entirely new to me. While there were some things that I may not have caught, at least I got a good overall picture. I think he did a good job in talking about the problems that people may encounter as well as the techniques we can use to improve performance. I also liked that he provided references of which we could find out more about. It'll definitely be things I'll check out when I have the time. I do however wish that Zit Seng could have been a bit more layman friendly with technical terms such as SCSI. It would have made following a little easier.

Last but not least, there was Prof Ben's little additional lecture. I liked how meritocracy was defined as being equal access rather than equal outcome. Equal access makes more sense and is more accurate in describing the landscape in Singapore. However, I did not feel too comfortable about the pyramid that Prof drew about social mobility. Not that I disagree with the message that he was trying to convey, but I felt that the diagram was somewhat insufficient to describe what was going on; it felt a little too simplified.