Tan Kah Kee & Lee Kong Chian

要使马来西亚和中国两地的华人摆脱贫苦与无知，最关键的办法就是兴办现代教育。陈嘉庚躬行实践，不仅自己慷慨捐款，也同时致力唤起社会团体和社群领袖的办学意识。

 

陈嘉庚认为体育是教育的重要一环，因此为集美学村和厦门大学建造了运动场和游泳池。

 

中华人民共和国成立以后，许多华侨子弟归国求学。陈嘉庚协助安排他们在适当的学府就读。

   

陈嘉庚的第一届全国人民代表大会代表当选证书（1954年）

陈嘉庚的护照

 

陈嘉庚的生意失败后，他竭尽全力筹措款项，以求让学校继续运作下去。他一方面变卖自己的房产， 另一方面吁请李光前和其他朋友出手相助，创立了集友银行。

 

尽管当年经济处境艰难，陈嘉庚仍坚持要在中国创办一所大学。面对向外筹集资金不易的困境，他毅然独资办学，终于在1921年建立了厦门大学。在所后的世界经济大萧条时期，陈嘉庚即使在生意陷入困境的情况下，毅然坚持为厦门大学和集美大学村提供经济资助。

 

莱佛士书院的创立。陈嘉庚为莱佛士学院筹建基金捐资1万元（1941年）。

 

李光前出身寒微，这更使他对“教育能改善人生”这个道理有着更深的感受。曾立志成为工程师的李光前，非常清楚科学对现代经济发展所起的重要作用。此外，李光前对具备双语能力所带来的优势也有深切的体会，因此他在战后大力提倡新加坡推行双语教育。

 

李光前出殡时，数以千计的新加坡人为他送行，送殡队伍之长，为史上少见，场面感人。

   

宽柔中学的账簿，记载着南益树胶公司（Lee Rubbers）每月捐出的款项。

 

柔佛新山宽柔中学“光前堂”（1964年）

 

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Identity theft

Do you know that it is not a advisable to leave your mail in your mailbox overnight or on weekends? Do you know that you need to tear up unwanted documents that contain personal information, e.g. credit card statements, bank statements, etc.

Identity theft is a kind of crime without a scene.

First, we would discuss on bank identity theft. There are 1.4 million fraudulent cheques written every day in the United States. Cheque books are stolen and used by thieves. Cheques can also be altered by washing away names of payee and amount and rewrite them. It is easy to steal cheques. Lots of people pay their utility and credit card bills using cheques. ID thieves just have to steal those mails and take away the cheques.

Alternatively, criminals could also print their own checks as this poses fewer risks. In order to print cheques, first they need real account numbers. They could get it by stolen mails or by a tactic called ‘shoulder-surfing’. Shoulder-surfing means standing casually behind an ATM machine customer, close enough to read an account number or a deposit number. Another method is simply retrieving a discarded receipt from the bank after a deposit or withdrawal is made.

In several important ways, identity thieves depend on the mail as a means of acquiring new victims. Many crooks steal other people’s outgoing mail, targeting mail that appears to be a bill payment containing a cheque. Mail theft is a dangerous problem, and is considered the single most common method of stealing another person’s identity.

Source: Stewart, Gail B. 2007. Identity theft. Thomson Gale, MI, USA.

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Horizontal Hypermobility

The most notable feature of the new labour market, as just about everyone agrees, is that people don’t stay tied to companies anymore. Instead of moving up through the ranks of one organization, they move laterally from company to company in search of what they want.

The playing field is horizontal and people are always on the roll. This kind of mobility is commonly seen in Silicon Valley. Since then, such hypermobility has become the norm across the entire economy.

Americans now change jobs on average every 3.5 years; and workers in their twenties switch jobs on average every 1.1 years, according to 2001 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More than half of IT workers in the Information Week Salary Survey say they have been with their present employer for less than four years and expect to change jobs in less than three years. A quarter of these workers have been in their current job for two years or less and expect to change jobs in a year. More than 40 percent considered themselves “on the market” in 2001. And more than 60 percent say recruiters had contacted them in the past six months – on average, six times.

Fully 60 percent of respondents to a 2001 Towers Perrin survey said there is no longer any appropriate time an employee should stay with a company, and just 10 cited three to five years as appropriate. More than half were actively in the job market at the time of the survey, and more than two-thirds said they thought it would be easy to et another job, even in late 2001, when layoffs hit a ten-year high.

Source: Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, New York.

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National debt

Please visit http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html to see the real US debt clock shown above.

I agree with Jeff Ooi that how about we come out with a National Debt Clock? How much debt is our country currently bearing? How much is the national debt per citizen? How much is the credit card debt per citizen?

That would be an interesting statistics.

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Rubik’s Cube

I solved the Rubik’s cube for the 1st time in my life! Yahoooooo!!!!

But I was merely following step-by-step instructions on internet, I haven’t memorize the steps yet, so I can’t solve it without looking at instructions on internet.

Now I must practice more and memorize the steps…

hehe!!!! Happy!!!

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Fuel saving tip

Did you know?

Avoid wasting fuel by leaving the car idle to warm up. Most cars don’t require it anyway.

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Biggest source of food contamination

Most of you will think that major contamination of our food are additives and/or pesticides. I am going to tell you that it is wrong, by far, the most significant source of contamination comes from food contact materials! It’s the chemicals from packaging that migrates in huge quantity into food.

Issues such as epoxidized soybean oil (ESBO) from gaskets of lids of glass jars, primary aromatic amines (PAAs) from nylon kitchen wares and plasticizers from PVC wrapping films and containers are abundant.

Yet, people choose to ignore those chemicals that leach from food packaging.

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