January 16, 2010
National Addictions Management Service in Singapore
The National Addictions Management Service (NAMS) was inaugurated in August 2008, supported by the Ministry of Health, to provide residential detoxification and rehabilitation at the Institute of Mental Health in Singapore.
Services They Provide
NAMS provides services that treat problem gambling and behavioral problems, such as internet and gaming addiction. They also treat substance addiction, like drugs and alcohol. The services they provide are:
- Assessment and treatment of addictive disorders by a multi-disciplinary team of psychiatrists, counsellors, psychologists, and social workers
- Individual, group and family therapy
- Public education talks
- Training for health care and service staff
- Development of community services and programmes
- Addiction research
January 4, 2010
Ripplewerkz
Ripplewerkz is an all-in-one company which provides development for:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Print media
- Corporate ID
One of the co-founders of Ripplewerkz is Lionel Chin, and he came to Temasek Polytechnic recently to share his expertise and experiences of using New Media in the development industry.
Lionel Chin’s key points
- Website trends always change, therefore it is important to keep up with the times.
- Website design is very important, because the ease of use of the website is of vital importance for most users.
- Although website design is important in retaining viewers, in order to bring in viewers in the first place, one has to spend time and money advertising the site, to gain popularity.
- By integrating social media into the website, more viewers will come in, because of the popularity and wide-spread use of these social media, like Facebook or Twitter.
- When one decides to become a web-designer, it is important that one is patient, creative and responsible. This is because clients will constantly want to change the design, or make some changes to the content of the website. It is important to carry out these changes not only on time, but with quality.
Things that inspire me
In this lecture, there are basically three things that inspire me:
- The creativity of the web designers, to always come up with a solution no matter what.
- I also realise it is very interesting that although larger companies make a lot of money, they rely on web-designers to advertise their goods, this makes it seem like web-design is a very powerful tool.
- I am also inspired to become a web-designer because there is always room for improvement, and there are an unlimited number of solutions to every problem. This makes it very interesting, as everyone’s solution will be different, and we can learn from each other.
Conclusion
All in all, I feel that it is a good thing that guest speakers come to share their expertise, because we can learn the “Tips and Tricks” of the trade. It might give us an insight on how life in the industry is like, helping us make a more informed choice. However, I feel that if this is done again next year, this talk could be given in the first semester, where we have to take Web Design? I think this would be a more effective approach.
National Archives of Singapore
I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) recently. I must say, it was an interesting experience. There is an odd kind of joy in seeing old documents get worked upon and finally, after all the hard, tedious work put in by the staff at the NAS, it emerges as a nice, readable document. It’s also a good place to keep track of Singapore’s heritage and history. Things like blueprints of the city, old Mediacorp shows, or journal entries by people living during the war.
Who are they, and what do they do?
The National Archives of Singapore was established in 1968, by an act of Parliament. Basically, the NAS is an archiving company (duh!), that archives anything that they find important to Singapore’s history or heritage, in their words, “the collective memory of our nation”. This helps us learn about our past, and thus sympathise with past events.
The NAS also is the “custodian of the corporate memory of the government”. This means they are the ones who manage public records and provides advice to government agencies for records management. I guess this isn’t surprising, given that they were established by the National Heritage Board.
What services do they provide?
The NAS provides services such as:
- Record management and preservation
- Providing access to the public
- Sharing knowledge with the public
- Archives conservation services
October 28, 2009
Submission
I originally intended to submit my second post, but since I cannot find the article anymore, I have decided to write a new one. From reading the article “Facebook Password Reset Confirmation Email Contains Virus [ALERT]” by Adam Ostrow at Mashable.com, I have come to the sudden realisation that New Media, although useful and very, VERY convenient, causes us to become extremely reliant on technology. It also makes me think about how gullible people have become.
The gist of this article is that Facebook supposedly sends an email to a user, requesting that the said user change his or her password, and sends an attachment with the new temporary password. The user is supposed to open the attachment to change his or her password, thus releasing a torrent of trojans and nasty viruses into the hapless victim’s computer. This, obviously causes a lot of distress to the user, and this is probably what the hacker intends.
In the past, viruses, although annoying, would not cause much inconvenience. This was because most people did not keep their important files in their computers. They didn’t store passwords in the cache, nor did they store their credit card numbers in a file in their My Documents folder called, ingeniously, “Passwords”. Basically, they had nothing to lose, really. This brings me to my main point, which is that people have become to reliant on technology, and New Media. If they had written down their passwords in a good old fashioned notebook, not the digital kind, the real “Book & Binder” type, it would have been impossible to receive a trojan. New Media has made it that much easier for someone to steal your information, quite literally, from under your nose.
In my opinion, humanity has become much more gullible. From what I see in my family and friends, people are more likely to click and open something they have never seen before, even if it looks suspicious. Obviously, they have not heard of the phrase, “Curiosity kills the cat”. Either that, or they do not understand the meaning of a metaphor and assume that because they are not cats, the phrase does not apply to them. They seem to believe that whatever it is, it will not hurt them, or cause them any sort of inconvenience, because they “have AVG”.
Like many things, however, the internet is not to be blamed. The internet is neither good nor bad. It is just a medium with which we work. We can do good things or bad things, and the internet will not care. Thus, my above argument is not really against New Media. Basically, I’m trying to say that humanity is not mature enough to use New Media responsibly. People HAVE done good things with New Media, that is a fact. However, the fact that there are still viruses and trojans around undermines their efforts. The recent jump in sales of anti-viruses are enough to prove that fact. Viruses, like the internet, are man made. We wouldn’t need anti-viruses if there weren’t any people irresponsibly using their skills to create these things just for the sake of annoying others, or stealing information. I have heard that the amount of New Media will increase exponentially within the next ten years. As interesting as this may sound, I feel the pace of New Media far outstrips the pace of man’s ability to use these technologies responsibly and carefully.
October 26, 2009
My New Media Terms
I was asked to create a tag-cloud to express my knowledge of some New Media terms I have learned today. I have completed it, and will thus post it here.
October 20, 2009
Interesting Things
From what I understand, the term “New Media” is often of the digital variety. This, basically, means that it is networkable and compressible, which in turn means that it is more easily shared, and more information can be stored in the same physical medium than what I have dubbed as “Old Media”. Examples of New Media are things like Facebook, blogging, internet messaging, and stuff like that, as opposed to Old Media, things like hand-written letters, posters, be they printed or drawn, or anything else not related to the internet.
From what I see, New Media has greatly blurred the line between interpersonal communication and mass-communication. What is meant for someone else to read is probably readable by the entire world, if they knew where to look. This blog, for example, is not searchable on Google. However, if someone who knew the blog link decided to go in, whatever I say here will become available for him/her to read. On the internet, nothing is really private anymore. If you wanted to find something, you can, provided you have the equipment and, of course, the know-how.
Reading some of the articles from the website Ms Josephine has given the class, I have come to the conclusion that most people are unhappy with mobile websites. Mobile websites, I assume, are websites you access when using your mobile devices, like a PSP, or a phone. The iPhone, of course, is able to view full websites. I’m sure there are other phones out there capable of doing that, but I’m only sure of the iPhone. Anyway, there are a multitude of people complaining that waiting for a website to load on their mobile devices is driving them insane.
I feel that this is a bit too much to ask. A website’s load time is based on the speed of one’s mobile device. Currently, the technology is such that a phone has roughly 1/10th of a PC. The users cannot expect PC-like performance from a mobile device any more than they can expect a rat to lift up a cathedral, one-handed, while doing a handstand on a skateboard. It’s just impossible. Some websites, which have no pictures, videos, or anything other than text, could, theoretically, load faster. In practice, this is quite difficult. There are many things that could go wrong. The latency between the web-server and the phone, the amount of people connecting to the site at the time, or an earthquake severing the internet lines, any number of things could go wrong. Comparing phones to PCs will not be fair. Not at this day and age, nor anytime in the future. This won’t happen in future because when the technology in phones improves, so will the technology in PCs. No matter how far phones go, PCs will always be better.
Even armed with that knowledge, phone companies won’t stop trying though. I applaud their perseverance and optimism.
October 19, 2009
First Post
My name is Mark Christian Klass, and I’m a student of Temasek Polytechnic. I was made to create this blog, by my CP and New Media Technology lecturer, Ms Josephine Tan. Apparently, we need to create a blog to express our views on New Media Technology.
As of now, I don’t really have any idea what New Media Technology is, so I can’t really say much. Hopefully, that knowledge will increase in the coming weeks.
