33. My Hobbies KPI for parents, Kids, close relative and Friends

 18th June 2024.

In one of the gathering with friends. The parent (of our ages+10 years) spoke about how she managed to get her kids to grow up in sports (swimming). She said it was tiring to fetch them here and there for training, paid for coaches (small sum back then) in the end they represented the country at junior level for swimming events. They also did well in studies. Now, as they have grown up, they start earning part time by teaching swimming. A sign of contentment. Then the complaint begin "well i dun dare to involve them in my activities". I asked do u know how to swim? Aiyah! Useless lah, my son never teaches me.! dunno how to teach me etc etc....

Well, at this point in time, I felt there is a great disservices from her child. Well, it is their family business. However, after reflecting for 1 - 2 years, as I recalled b4 writing this. I have a new KPI.

"Whatever hobbies I do, my parents + kid + close relatives + friend (in descending priorities) , should have a taste of it. If I've climb mt tahan, they should at least climb Sg Long etc etc. " Unless they are not interested. Something 4 U to think about!

32. 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.

 

 

31. 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 forgiving 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 students 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.

30. 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.

29. 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.

 

28. Stages in Trail Clearance

Negative Stage: Totally unknown or forgotten. Nobody know about it, example secret tree, waterfall, caves, plane crash site, forgotten historical land mark (KKB train to Bukit Kutu) yet to be discovered. (for mount peak:- It can be easily detected and seen from below). In this case, the target is unknown.

Stage 0: Target GPS location is known but then no known trail to reach the destination. There are plenty of them. Just use google map terrain, find an un-named peak you want to go and start exploring. For waterfall, it is much harder, you need to go to a slightly bigger forest with at least 500m peaks. Then, you have to look for valley in the terrain and just hike there hopefully you hit a jackpot.

Stage 1: Someone has reached the peak/destination. But the trail is still not properly marked and not clear properly. Remain a trade-secret for those who “cari makan”. E.g Trans Batu!

Stage 2: GPX is recorded and distributed. Experience hiker can reach the destination following the GPX. However if there is a landslides along the GPX then big detour, If massive tree fall then a slight detour. If there are massive brushes overgrown such as paku-pakis and bamboo tree. Then, extensively cutting is required. Hikers seldom goes to these mountain as there are generally not so popular. (E.g Trans Meranti, Bah Gading)

Stage 3: Trail is properly marked with ribbon cable and 90-95% of the trail is clear, almost no cutting is required.  Most popular mountain are like that. E.g Trans Naning

Stage 4: Super highway (Nuang, Gunung Hitam, ANSI, Datuk, Bukit kutu Etc)

Stage 5: Community hill. (SACF, APEX Hill, Wawasan, Sg Long.) 

The problem in Stage 4-5 are

a)      Most hikers would like to create short cuts + connecting route here and there.  It may be confusing for hikers who are new to the hill.

b)     Soil erosion on the trail due to excessive number of hikers. The trail should not be created on the steepest one (water tends to flow here) but it should be created on the 2^nd steepest one.

c) Cannot throw paper marker or kena curse, if U 1 2 contribute, make some sign board at each junction to remove hiker confusion.

For most mountain, it will go back and forth between Stage 2 and 3, during monsoon session or puasa month, some mountains are deserted. Thus, some part of the trails will be overgrown with bushes. There is a need to bring hikers to hike in periodically. During hiking paper marking may be needed so that hiker won’t get lost. The trail can be done on the steepest terrain as the water flow maybe helpful in preserving the trail. The trail should be made on shaded route as bushes tend not to grow on shaded route. On an unshaded route, be prepared to cut again every month if there is less hiker.

For Serdang Hill (beside MEX highway), Putrajaya, Bukit 527, the trail look like Stage 2.

27. What I put in my car for hiking?

1)     Spare clothing

2)    Slippers 

3)     Big size cotton clothing (old t-shirt) covering the front seat (driver + side passenger). Use to absorb those hiking dirt and sweat and collect dust. Once reach home just take out the T-shirt from the car seat and throw inside washing machine.

4)     4x 1.5 liter fresh water stored in 100+ bottle. For washing and bathing after hiking!

5)     Changing Tent! I use the changing tent for bathing as well! Just flush away all the body sweat and odour with fresh water. I have an almost-cleaned and dry body after hike. I seldom see hiker use a changing tent. They just have a wet underwear all the way home.

https://shopee.com.my/Camping-Changing-Tent-XL-Auto-Pop-Up-Outdoor-Waterproof-Privacy-Toilet-Shower-Bath-Fitting-Barang-Tandas-Khemah-Solat-i.868272385.18949694491?sp_atk=c84d8055-fb7b-442b-ba15-b53ce6c96e3a&xptdk=c84d8055-fb7b-442b-ba15-b53ce6c96e3a

6)     Big Plastic nylon bag to put all the wet clothing and dirty shoes.