Monday, 17 April 2023

Private Medical Insurance Proposal.

This is just a suggestion for future medical care in Malaysia.

User: Normal People who work/stay in the same region for example Klang Valley.

Insurance Companies : Local Universities with Medical Degree Program with a running hospital. (UKM, UM, UIA, UiTM etc).

Banker/regulatory body: An institution which withheld the fund paid by policy holder on behalf of the universities. This body responsibility is to slowly disburse fund to local universities as many universities are inexperience in handling fund and can easily run out of $$.

Each user upon it’s first employment he can buy a long term insurance policy from one of the local universities. This fund will be slowly disbursed to the universities as operational expenses and future development.

First before the user is admitted for a long term insurance policy, the local universities will do a health check and analysis on the user.  Base on the user lifestyle, a premium value is calculated and the users are admitted to the insurance policy. Any big health issues with the policy holders, it is the local university medical faculty responsibility. There is no hassle in checking insurance company. Just come and you ‘ll be served.

Transparency, a statistics of number of doctors, specialist for each area, medical facilities and other resources are identified, published and they are bind to the policy holder. Policy holder will be served first instead of non-policy holder.

Policy Holder trading.

Let say Mr Charlie move from KL to Kota Bharu. He can change his policy from UM to USM hospital. The will be a small handling fee and if Mr Charlie lifestyle is extremely bad, USM hold the right not to accept Mr Charlie policy.

Let say Mr Alex who currently a policy holder from UM, he is not happy with the service. He can switch to UKM.

Towards a healthier society.

The university is incentified to implement a healthy lifestyle program among its policy holders to minimize their future health expenditure and yet collect the same amount of premium. More focus will be done on prevention side. Thus, a lot of health problem will be eliminated.

There is a lot of unclear issue to address. Thus, a new company should be formed consisting of local universities medical faculty team, medical testing facilities company such as BPLab, insurance companies and banker. This will facilitate the move to a healthier society at a more affordable price. It must be regional for example Klang Valley only. It should not be nation-wide like “National Health Care System” which bound to be failure.


Direct feedback. Shorten the feedback cycle and you will see a more sensible result/action.

Example: for dental care.

The maximum age for dental patient new policy holder is 25 year old. The policy is renewable up to age 70. An annual fee of RM200-300/- is required. Inflation price will be added yearly.

Coverage: Dental filling, yearly dental check-up. For every 10 years, 1 crown, 1 root canal treatment.

Term: Good behaviour such as daily brush teeth, not eating hard food.

Non-coverage: accident, teeth implant.

If this policy is done early, many people don’t need root canal treatment.

In Summary, ”old time local dentist guarantee”, if you come here every time, I guarantee you no need root canal for the rest of your life.

 

 

Sunday, 16 April 2023

Future Local University Funding.

There are many things happen due to system design failure. The reward structure is unclear and most of the time, government policy is very forgiven for public universities. Thus, I propose the following.

1.      A fraction of the university funding will be coming from their own student future tax revenue. All student graduated with a funded degree/undergraduate program from a public university will pay taxes to their university for 10-20 years. I strongly believe Master and PHd by research program, the fee should be minimal unless a lot of research facilities are required.

2.      The annual tax return from these students will be channeled 100% to the local university.

3.      The university staff salary/pension will be paid from the fund received.

4.      University are free to set their quota system and course offering

5.      The fraction of university funding from government will be slowly reduced and the funding from student tax return will be gradually increased up to 30-50% of the university revenue.

6.      If there is insufficient fund, the university will have to reduce their staff salary and benefit.

Whatever big financial decision made by the university management must be recorded (who suggested this, who approved it). Later on, anything wrong there will be penalty/reward on the pension side. Then, the university will make a wiser economic decision rather than a political one.

Local Public Universities. Please publish your account (P&L, Balance Sheet).

There should be an allocation of up to 5% for transparency ranking for all university.  Many public universities receive a lot of grant from their government. Yet, very few of them publish their balance sheet information to the public. The general public need to know how public universities spend their money. Without this information, it may be difficult for the public to judge any action taken by the university such as raising student fees, reducing the number of student grant etc.

In Malaysia, as far as I know off, only University Malaya published their balance sheet information in their annual report.

https://www.um.edu.my/about-um/media-centre/annual-report

The rest of the public universities, these information is unknown to most people. If these information is published, the public can properly assess the ROI of government funding and any wrongdoing in each public university.  In stock market, the quarterly P&L statement and Balance Sheet information of a company provide the basis on whether one should buy or sell their stocks. These universities are given massive funding every year, why can’t we see their accounts.

All these while, what the public talks about quota system, bad facilities, mismatch education and industry need. Publish the account then we can see lot of things to improve.

Thursday, 13 April 2023

Assigning Different Assignment Question to Student Automatically.

 

Problem.

In large classes with over 100 students, assessment plagiarism is a problem. One way to resolve it is to have examination in an exam hall. Anything that is not done in an exam hall, there is a tendency for some student to copy.

The situation can be so bad that in some private universities, student will only do work during contact hours (lab, lecture and tutorial hour). The only way for them to learn more is to give after contact hour assessment such as take home test or assignment. It may not be graded but during lab hour they will be tested/quizzed on what they did for their assignment. However, this is less effective, as most student will not put in their effort in anything that is not graded and in this scenario, they may just simply do their quiz.

One effective way for student to learn is to give them an assignment where the student is forced to work out the solution for a pre-long period of time so that they can indirectly learn from it. This assignment should be zebra type assignment, where the student can self-test whether their solution is correct or wrong. For example in Computer Science,

a)      built a network using Cisco Packet Tracer with 5 routers.

b)     Build a 4 bit counter with a count sequence of 5->10->15->2 (repeat).

However, the student will copy their assignment from each other. Thus, the examiner must give a lot of different questions. If an examiner has 500 students with 100 questions, each question is done by a group of 2 students, keeping a record of which student doing which question can be tedious. There is a better solution to solve this problem.

Solutions.

Each student indirectly has some random variable such as birthday, student ID, National ID, Passport No, Gender, Race, Home State, HomeTown, Country etc. Hash function can also be used to ensure uniform distribution. If it is a single student, the question assignment can be in the following form

a)      Sha256(STudentID, Birthday) % (No of question) = Question No

b)     (studentID)%No of question =Question No. Variable on the question will depend on the student Birthday.

A complete example will be as followed.

If your student ID ends with "0", you suppose to do 5R10.pka

If your student ID ends with "1", you suppose to do 5R1.pka

If your student ID ends with "2", you suppose to do 5R2.pka

If your student ID ends with "3", you suppose to do 5R3.pka

If your student ID ends with "4", you suppose to do 5R4.pka

If your student ID ends with "5", you suppose to do 5R5.pka

If your student ID ends with "6", you suppose to do 5R6.pka

If your student ID ends with "7", you suppose to do 5R7.pka

If your student ID ends with "8", you suppose to do 5R8.pka

If your student ID ends with "9", you suppose to do 5R9.pka

 

All PCs are connected to f0/0 port. All IP addresses must start with "2"

The first 2 digits of your IP address is based on your birthday

Let said your birth day is 4th Dec 2000

Then the IP address for the whole network will be

204.12.X.X

 

Let said your birth day is 12th July 2000

Then the IP address for the whole network will be

212.7.X.X

All the last digit of the Router IP for all interfaces will follow the Router No!.

R1 f0/0 = 212.7.1.1

R2 f0/0 = 212.7.2.2

R3 f0/0 = 212.7.3.3

R4 f0/0 = 212.7.4.4

R5 f0/0 = 212.7.5.5

 

All PC IP will end with 100.

E.g. PC1 IP = 212.7.1.100

 

If R1 is Connected to R2, then the IP will be

212.7.12.1 (R1) and 212.7.12.2 (R2)

 

If R3 is Connected to R2, then the IP will be

212.7.23.1 (R1) and 212.7.23.2 (R2)

(start with the smaller digit).

The network mask is 255.255.255.0

 

Special Cases, If your birthday falls on 24 - 31st, Then you must deduct 20 days from your birthday.

For example., your birthday is 26th Feb 2000, (minus 20 days will be 6th feb 2000) then the IP address you use should be

206.2.X.X

 

 

If it is a group assignment consisting of two person, a lot of variation can be done

a)      Question No = (StudentID 1 [+,x,^] StudentID2 )%NoOfQuestion

b)     Question No = sha256(studentID1,studentID2)%NoOfQuestion

Etc.

In this way, student cannot copy directly from their friend. However, they can look at their friend’s solution and try to implement the same approach into their assignment. They are also encouraged to discuss their assignment with their friends. Given, the enormous amount of effort required to do the assignment, it is quite unlikely to have someone else to do your assignment.

However, this kind of scenario is only possible for certain subjects in Computer Science such as

Digital Logic Circuits (varies between different Boolean Function, Count Sequence, Flip-Flop Type, IC type)

 Computer Network (Varies the network topology, IP address, interface type and protocol type)

Programming Subject (Varies between different type of programming question for example in MicroP programming classes)

Q22. The 32 bits value stored in 0x2000 till 0x2000 + 36 is actually the date in BCD format. For example, MMDDYYYY,  for example 0x11221972 is represented as 22nd November 1972. If the date format is valid, store “1111” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36). Else store “2222” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36).

Q23. The 32 bits value stored in 0x2000 till 0x2000 + 36 is actually the date in BCD format. For example, YYYYMMDD,  for example 0x19230523 is represented as 23rd May 1923. If the date format is valid, store “1111” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36). Else store “2222” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36).

Q24. The 32 bits value stored in 0x2000 till 0x2000 + 36 is actually the date in BCD format. For example, YYYYDDMM,  for example 0x19231503 is represented as 15th March 1923. If the date format is valid, store “1111” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36). Else store “2222” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36).

Q25. The 32 bits value stored in 0x2000 till 0x2000 + 36 is actually the timestamp in BCD format. For example, 00:HH:MM:SEC. For example 0x00233435 is represented as 23 hour 34 min 35 second. If the time format is valid, store “1111” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36). Else store “2222” in 0x2100 till (0x2100 + 36).

 

 

For other subjects may require some form of creativity is required to varies different type of question from a similar problem.

Assessment Problem.

1.      The difficulty of each question is not uniform

2.      If the solution is correct it is easy to verify, however if the solution is incorrect then it may be very time consuming to check. Thus, it may be best to give a slightly easier problem so that it is achievable for majority of the students. For example, instead of 4 bit counter, reduced it to 3 bit counter.

3.      It may not be possible to give answer to all solutions. It is only possible after one round of teaching.

4.      The examiner does not want to do extra work or don’t have the creativity to create many questions.

 

Key summary

1.      Student are forced to do their assignment

2.      Most of the assignment cannot be copied but the approach is similar where student can learn from each other by looking at each other solutions.

3.      It also encourages discussion/self-teaching among all student.

 

Good Information Dissemination

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