Global warming

I read recently that Sentosa and the Marina Bay will submerge into water soon if the sea level rises 1m. They even suggested us to set our air-conditioner warmer, unless we wish to see beach road back on the beach again. To fight global warming, Singapore has taken up a lot of initiatives, such as educating the young on the importance to fight global warming. For example, in secondary school, we have learned how to reduce our damage to the Mother Nature, such as turning the air-conditioner to 25 degree Celsius.
As global warming is a public problem, there are some unethical groups of people who do not care about global warming. Their goal is to earn as much money as possible, and not caring for the earth at all. For example, they know that global warming is a problem in the long run situation, and as Keynes has mentioned, in the long run, we all will be dead.
Fortunately, there are a lot of not for profit organizations who are set up to fight global warming. They consisted of people from different works of life whose objective are all the same, that is to fight global warming and create a good environment for our further generations to live in. Luckily, our government is very supportive of their initiatives. One notable initiative that these groups of people came up with is the 1 hour lights-off in the central business district on March every year. Although this is good, I believe there is still room for improvement, especially if the government is willing to take the lead. For example, in Japan, the prime minister set a role model by announcing that office employees do not need to wear suit to work on Friday, hence allowing the air-conditioner on Friday to be switched off. I believe this is a good and practical initiative to save Mother Nature. Although Singapore is a small country, I believe by pro-actively pushing for more initiatives, it can inspire other bigger countries and together, we can fight global warming.

Prof Ramakrishna article (assignment 1)

Visiting the NUS engineering website, the message to us is “Scientists invent things, while Engineers create things”. In NUS, prospective engineers are trained to think systematically by letting them go through a very comprehensive and tedious course. It is hard work, and there is no short-cut to complete this course. For example, the various Mathematics modules enable prospective engineers to try to understand a problem and then solve it. Every step needs to be worked out and the person doing it must be very clear on what he is doing. It also trains prospective engineers to be patient as some of the questions cannot be solved easily.

The school also teaches the students programming languages which train the student to be systematic in their thinking. As the computer is a device that can only operate line by line instruction, the students will have no choice but to try to design solution that are systematic in nature. This is very different from some fields such as arts, where there is no right and wrong answer and creativity is highly valued.

Lastly, the school has a lot of modules that have project works which will help to improve its students. For example, by mixing students of all ability, the school hopes that the better ones be able to influence their weaker peers and help them be more systematic in their thinking. By working with their weaker peers, the better ones can sort of influence their thoughts and make them better engineers. All in all, engineers are the special batches who have unique ability to comprehend complex information and design models for these problems.