When I was driving home today, I listened to the phone-in radio program.  It was talking about the provincial government is planning to introduce standardized test to grade 4 and grade 7 school children.  The teacher union oppose this idea, saying that will increase their work load and more test will give pressure to the children which is not good for their development.  They worry that in order to get good grades, the children have to work on drills for the test instead of learning real stuff.  Some audience phoned in supporting the teachers and say practicing for exam is a waste of time.  I think that audience is either out of school for too long or he is fairly uneducated, otherwise whom would believe the BS of the teacher.  I understand the teachers may be overworked by the new tests, which it is fair to request more resource to cope with the extra teaching requirements.  However, please don’t trash talk the new tests system just because you want to have less work.  Exam techniques is one of the most valuable skill I have learned in school.  You may have studied very hard and learned all the stuff in the textbooks, but you don’t do well in the exam, who knows you knows the syllabus well?  Exam techniques helps you to boost your grade and make yourself more representable.  In fact, you are tested not only when you  apply for university, you will be tested if you want to enter grad school, become a professional, or get any kind of license or certificate.  Therefore, learning exam technique in early age is a good investment that will pay back handsomely in one’s lifetime.

I just renew my pledge of monthly donation to Project Advance of the Archdiocese of Vancouver. I rarely give money to church or religious institutes.  Project Advance is an exemption, which I keep donating money every year.

I refuse to pay for the Sunday donation that usually go to the operating cost of the church. One would say it is fair to donate since you use the church and you should share the cost of running the church. However, I don’t go church out of my free will. Going to church every week just a sentence prescribe to all Christians in the Bible. I would prefer not going to church and help cut down the cost. It is unfair to ask a prisoner pay for his expenses in the prison, so it is unfair ask me to donate to the church’s expense. I will let those who enjoy going to church pay for the bills in exchange for the happiness they get from the church. In fact if happiness and donation is proportional, I think the church should reimburse me.

On the other hand, money goes to the Project Advance is used meaningfully. It helps finance the youth program, catechism class for special need people, running various Catholic charity, schools and building new churches. In short, Project Advance is a brand building project for the Catholic Church. I belongs to the Catholic Church and I choose to be a Catholic, or least I choose to still being one. The image of the Church is directly related to the satisfaction I gain from my Catholic identity. Therefore, I feel obligated to share my duty in growing the Church.

I have many friends have joined the children sponsorship program of the World Vision to help poor children in third world countries. You just have to donate $35 a month, World Vision will pool together donation from many donors to provide food, shelter and education to the poor children. In return, you will get a photo of the child you are sponsoring and once a while the child will write thank you letters to you. Indisputably, donation to World Vision is charitable act that will gives you a good feeling and makes you think that you are a good person. World Vision’s intention is good, it make difference to the life of those children they help, but I always question is it the best way to solve the world’s poverty problem. The poor children grow up, give birth to more children that they can support, leave them in the hand of World Vision, and turn into a vicious circle.

The poor children the World Vision helping are extra population in the earth that we don’t want and we don’t need. They should not be born in the first place. If the parents cannot raise the children, then they have no right to bring them to this world. We already have too many people in the third world countries and the number is raising. If we want to fix the problem, we have to fix the root cause, not just treating the symptoms. Instead of running World Vision like charity, we should support charity that carry out birth control in third world countries. The goal is to minimize the number of children suffering in poor countries. It would be much more cost effective to prevent those suffering children come to this world in the first place.

Just imagine if we spend that $35 on birth control up front, we can prevent how many potential suffering children draining World Vision’s resources. If World Vision can spend the same amount of donation on a smaller number of poor children, each of them can get better education and service. They can learn skills to earn a proper living to support their next generation and left the vicious circle. Just like treating diseases, finding the prevention is always better than finding the cure, stop the poor children coming is better than raising poor children. The only problem is that I haven’t come across a charity origination focus on birth control in third world countries yet.

Tonight I went to the semi-annual dinner of APEGBC Vancouver branch to receive the framed certification for my Professional Engineer designation.  All new certified professional engineers from different fields show up in the meeting.  Actually there were over 50 people receiving their P.Eng title in Vancouver in the past 6 months.  The event started off with a standard cocktail session, the so called networking opportunities.  I talked to quite a few engineers from other fields, learned something interesting such as forensic engineering and environmental regulations, but didn’t really make any useful connection.  There was a presentation from the APEGBC chairman following the dinner.   The chairman belongs to the Al Gore’s climate change work force.  He is one of the selected thousand individuals who received training in presenting Al Gore’s slides.  Yeap, you name it, the presentation tonight is a live version of “The Inconvenient Truth”.  I have already watched the movie, so I have seen all those slides.  I must admit Al Gore has done a much better job in giving that presentation.  As a result I dozed off almost half of the presentation.  After the boring talk, at last all the new P.Eng are lined up to receive their certificate.  Just like your university convocation, you get about 5 seconds of stage time, just enough to shake hands with the chairman and take a picture.  And that concludes tonight’s event.  What a waste of time.  To make me feel like even more stupid, I actually got the certificate in mail.  I have to bring the certificate to the dinner, have the chairman present it to me and then bring it home.  I could have save all those trouble by forgoing that stupid picture.

Friendster is out, facebook is in. In the past few weeks, facebook seems to grow exponentially around my circle of friends. Everyone is ditching friendster and signing up with facebook. I registered my facebook account two weeks ago and now I already have over 30 contacts. People even send messages in friendster to tell people they are switching to facebook. It is fair to say friendster is showing its age. The site is always slow and it lacks of features. Facebook is much more user friendly and the interface is quite intuitive. How the photo album supports tagging people’s name is really genius, highly recommended. It is only the matter of time before facebook overtake friendster, repeating how MSN overtake ICQ. I am pretty sure a few years, some better social networking site will comes in and out shine facebook. Then there will be another round of mass exoduses, everyone migrate their contacts from one site to another.

There is one thing about this kind of social network I love to hate or hate to love. Before everyone you ever known is connected by social network, whatever passed is passed. If you want to forget someone after you two’s circle of life drifted apart, normally you won’t hear any news from each other.  Eventually the memory will be preserved under a dusty corner somewhere inside your brain. Now with these kind of massive social networks, that someone is just always a few click away. You may tell yourself you don’t want to and you don’t need to know anything about that person. But curiosity makes people click in and take a look how that person is doing these days. Is she happy? Has she find someone to take care of her yet?