A friend was fiddling with the messaging functions on a new iPhone, sent me some text and asked me whether I received it as an SMS on my 'hp' (meaning handphone or mobile phone) or as an e-mail.

Fond of not giving simple, straightforward replies, I did not send my response as just the mere 'hp' or 'phone' or 'sms' any other similar term referring to the cellular phone. I texted back 'Hewlett-Packard', intending to use its familiar 'HP' initials. My friend thought I meant the PC, and took it that I got the message as an e-mail.

It's like, to most people, ABBA may be the musical group from Sweden that made songs such as Mama Mia popular. But, to me, ABBA is the rhyming scheme of the first eight lines (octave) of a Petrachan sonnet.

As long ago as when the ABBA movie was having its first run, some colleagues on the night shift were in the company-provided transport on the way home. Philip Coorey began a discussion on the World Cup and Surinder Singh, sitting nearest to him, seemed keen on giving his views as well.

After a while, Surinder asked Philip: 'Which World Cup are you talking about?'

'The Cricket World Cup, of course,' replied Philip (a Sri Lankan), to which Surinder said: 'I thought you were talking about the Hockey World Cup!'

Almost in unison, the rest of us responded: 'We all thought you were talking about the Football World Cup!'

It gets worse for those of us who like to use several languages in the same sentence.

My friend, Jacob Idiculas, was once doing his usual round of sending huge drawings (building plans, for instance) for photocopying at Motion Smith's, then in Battery Road. On that particular day, he just wanted one copy each of the plans and told the Caucasian lady boss there so: 'One each, please.'

A few hours later, when he went to collect the copies, he was shocked when asked to fork out double what he had expected to pay. Then he discovered that the shop had made two copies each of the huge drawings.

'Didn't I say I wanted only one each?' Jacob asked the Caucasian lady.

'Yes, you did and that was what I told him,' she replied pointing to her Singaporean colleague, a Malay man, who did the copying of the documents.

'But, ma'am, you said 'two each',' he protested.

'No, I said...' and then she paused for a while and continued, much more slowy, '.... 'satu each'!' ('satu' means one in Malay), and apologised profusely.

One confusion can, of course, lead to another.

I get worried when I see the shorthand used by the wait staff on the order chit to the kitchen. Recently, I ordered barley water in a restaurant and on the chit the waiter had written 'bali'. I know we import water from neighbouring countries but Bali? That seems a bit far-fetched.

On another occasion, in the United States, my family and I were having breakfast and my wife ordered her favourite 'two eggs, sunnyside up'. The waitress wrote '2 up' on the slip she handed to the kitchen.

That taught me a lesson. I will never ever order 7-Up (the soft drink) for breakfast.

I prefer my eggs over-easy anyway.

It was a vastly different world then; the Vietnam war had just officially ended but the Cold War was still very much on. There was no such thing as cable TV; in many countries there was no such thing as TV. It was still the era of the radio.

On Oct 6 that year, military and police units and righ- wing mobs savagely attacked several thousand left-wing students protesting the return to Thailand of Thanom Kittikachorn, the military dictator ousted in a massive uprising in 1973.

There is video footage online from that day. The official death toll remains 46. The real death toll is widely suspected to be more than double that. A general amnesty ensured that nobody was held to account.

The unquiet spirits of that gruesome day when students were shot, beaten and kicked, dragged out on to the Sanam Luang grounds and hung from trees as mobs, inflamed by right-wing hotheads convinced that the students wanted to destroy the monarchy, bayed and cheered and even little children watched, have surfaced again.

Today, Thammasat is again the centre of controversy. Seven law professors calling themselves 'Nitirat' or 'People's Law' have suggested amendments to Article 112 – Thailand's lese majeste law - and have also suggested that Thailand's monarch should swear allegiance to the constitution, thus preventing any monarch from endorsing a military coup.

A fierce war of words has erupted over the Nitirat proposal. Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, with absolute monarchy officially abolished in 1932. Yet King Bhumibol Adulyadej – now a frail 84 - is the country’s ultimate moral authority and under him the Chakri dynasty has arguably reached its zenith.

The monarchy is officially above politics. But in reality any accusation of disloyalty to the monarchy is a powerful political weapon for competing power centres, including political parties and the army whose principal allegiance is not to the civilian government but to the monarchy.

Thammasat University rector Somkit Lertpaithoon on Jan 30 banned the Nitirat group from campaigning on university premises to amend Article 112, fearing''conflict and chaos' if they continued. Thammasat has seen small demonstrations since by students, both in support of and against Nitirat. The rector days later backed down slightly and said academic discussion was allowed.

Thailand's powerful army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha has weighed in against the Nitirat group, warning them to stop their campaign. This week, it was reported that the Navy chief Admiral Surasak Roonruangwong has also joined in, saying 'I think every armed force is following this group's activities to see if it will affect national security. I agree with the majority of people that the campaign serves no purpose at all.'

It is not clear on what basis he concluded that the 'majority' of people see no purpose in the campaign. To the best of my knowledge no truly comprehensive opinion poll of referendum has been held on the matter.

General Prayuth reportedly said: 'Don't exploit Article 112 to instigate disturbances. I'd like to ask whether you could accept it if your parents are insulted.'

'Parents' is a euphemism for the King and Queen.

The government – keen to avoid any trace of a taint of being against the monarchy – has categorically said article 112 will not be amended.

Yet, the campaign is set to continue. One article in the Bangkok Post this week quotes Puangthong Rungswasdisab, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, saying that the Campaign Committee for the Amendment of Article 112 was collecting 10,000 signatures to seek an amendment. Several thousand had already signed, she said.

Ms Puangthong said the army chief may not have studied the details of the proposed amendments before criticising advocates for change.

'What we are doing is not new. Civic groups used to collect signatures to petition for legislation. This is a right guaranteed by the constitution,' she said.

'What authority will the army chief invoke to stop us? Does the army think its major duty is to stage a coup to protect the institution [of the monarchy]? The army no longer has legitimacy to stage coups.'

Several commentators have said the atmosphere is reminiscent of the buildup to that frightful October 36 years ago.

'The most salient difference between the current royalist backlash and crackdown on fair dissent and reasonable reform, and its precursors that culminated in October 1976, is the absence of the Cold War,' Chulalongkorn University professor of political science Thitinan Pongsudhirak wrote last week.

Thailand's lese majeste law is the harshest in the world. Under the law anyone defaming or insulting the king, queen, heir or regent faces up to 15 years in jail. Hundreds of lese majeste complaints – which can be lodged by anyone against anyone – have been filed since the royalist-backed coup of 2006, which removed the increasingly authoritarian but popularly elected premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

(He was later convicted for corruption and his political party disbanded and a large chunk of his wealth seized; that has not stopped his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra rising to power last year on his popularity while he himself remains in self-exile, dodging the two-year sentence handed him by the Thai courts).

Back in 1976, one of the right-wing songs widely sung to denigrate left-wing students was Nak Paendin, translated as 'Scum of the Earth.'

In 2010, I heard the song for the first time, at a small gathering of ultra royalists at Victory Monument in Bangkok. They had assembled to protest against the 'red shirt' who had massed in Bangkok to challenge the establishment.

Today, it is being sung by ultra royalists to describe anyone deemed against the monarchy. Calls for amendments to Article 112 on grounds that it violates human rights and does the credibility of the monarchy more harm than good, have been equated with an attempt to destroy the monarchy.

In 1976, there were explicit calls for violence against the students. Today, there are the same explicit calls. One caller to a radio talk show said he would like to 'cut their (Nitirat’s) heads off'. Pressed by the radio host on whether he knew the details of the group's proposal, he admitted he had no idea.

'One hopes that the caller is a rarity in today’s Thai society, but recent Thai history is not on one's side,' remarked a Thai journalist who goes by the pseudonym Kaewmala.

'The brutality... in 1976 was committed by their fellow countrymen,' Ms Kaewmala wrote in an online article last week. 'Hatred against the students was stoked by the deadly mixture of ignorance, blind faith, unfounded fear and disinformation.'

'A a generation later, a group of seven law lecturers.. are being accused of having an evil plan to topple the monarchy, being lackeys of (former prime minister) Thaksin (Shinawatra), being Red (shirts), or simply being suspected of harbouring some mysteriously ill intention.'

In an interview on the website Prachatai.com, Tyrell Haberkorn, Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change of Australia National University, said the language used against the students in the days before the 1976 massacre and that used against Nitirat were 'similar in their tone, dehumanisation, and explicit calls for violence.'

And 'When (army chief) General Prayuth Chan-ocha publicly states that the members of Nitirat should leave the country.. [it] is important to ask what kind of a signal, direct or indirect, it sends to citizens.'

Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul, now a professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, was one of the students at Thammasat on that day, which in today's Thai school textbooks is referred to as a 'riot' or 'disturbance'.

In an email he wrote: 'Thailand never learns anything from any controversial past. That's not how the country deals with the past. The past is always sanitised and didactic to reproduce only the dominant ideology. The Oct 6 massacre is probably the noisiest dissonance, a haunting voice of the past that refuses to go away, probably until justice is served.'

Sitting at Thammasat, it is difficult to imagine history repeating itself especially given the different context. Perhaps as the saying goes, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - the more it changes, the more it is the same. It is an ominous thought, yet seasoned commentators have evoked it.

Only the wind in the leaves of the Bodhi tree may know the answer.

When contacted, the Football Association of Singapore (FAS) said earlier this week that an official page was in the works and would be announced at a later date, and directed me to the official FAS website, where there are news postings on the LionsXII.

Yet, even on the official FAS site, the LionsXII do not have their own section, which may be confusing to someone searching for more information on the team.

It said in a reply to The Straits Times Online: 'We are in the midst of working on a new website for the LionsXII and an official announcement will be made when the website goes 'live'. However, we have been updating LionsXII content on the FAS website since the team was unveiled on the 5th of December 2011.'

Surely, an online presence would've been somewhere high up the list of promotional efforts right from the start? After all, the agreement for a Singapore team to re-enter the Malaysian Super League was signed on July 12, 2011. The official team name - LionsXII - was then announced on Dec 5. There was more than enough time to set up a website after July 2011, and then finetune the domain name from December.

When setting up The Straits Times Online's Big Story section on Singapore's return to Malaysian football last week, I turned to Google to gather more information. My first query was for 'LionsXII official page', and the anticipation filled me as I wondered what to expect, especially after all the hype that had been built up.

The results came in: the FAS website, Wikipedia, the official webpage of the Asean Football Federation, Hardwarezone forums...you get the idea. Thinking that the FAS website made the most logical choice to source for information, I clicked the first link and waited for the page to load. And there they were, posts on the LionsXII under the FAS headlines.

Even if the FAS website is now the temporary 'home' of the LionsXII, what stands out is that there isn't even a dedicated section named after the LionsXII. I checked the National Teams sections, thinking perhaps that they might have slotted it near the Under 23 team, but there was no sight of a LionsXII category (see the screenshot below).

Screenshot of the FAS' national teams page

Eventually, though, I found a Facebook page for the LionsXII, which as of now, has about 5,200 fans.

Not a bad start for a young team, but it didn't seem to give the LionsXII the wider online presence they deserve, given that Singapore was returning after a 17-year hiatus from this tournament.

Screenshot of the LionsXII Facebook page

Having a Facebook page is a good option, but it leaves out those who don't use the social network on a regular basis. The Facebook fan page has reach, but not like that of a website with statistics and player profiles.

I fondly remember many nights I spent as a kid, listening to live radio commentaries on the Malaysia Cup matches. It was something I picked up from my mother, who hasn't as yet been convinced that she should set up a Facebook account (indeed, convincing her to let me keep a dog in the house was much easier).

I'm sure there are 'Malaysia Cup fans' like her, who, while knowing how to use the Internet, have not taken residence in Mark Zuckerberg's land.

On Twitter, the FAS said it has been monitoring activity regarding the LionsXII, and will assess the situation before making a decision regarding an official account.

It added: 'But fans are more than encouraged to do all they can for the team on all social media platforms available as the LionsXII team is about the fans and for the fans.'

Personally, I feel that a delayed LionsXII website was a missed opportunity to attract more fans before the start of the Malaysian Super League season. This is actually a wide group - fans from a generation which has grown up without the Malaysia Cup fever, and fans from an older generation that grew up without Facebook.

Hopefully, the extra time the FAS has before launching the official LionsXII website, means that the fans will get an official site that reflects their contributions, and allows them to share in the team's campaign from across the globe.

Suggestions for a Lions XII website

Fans of the LionsXII, what features would you hope to see in a website for the LionsXII? Do you know of any fan sites for the LionsXII that you feel the official site should match up to? Share your thoughts with us at stonline@sph.com.sg under the heading 'LionsXII Website Suggestions' or at our Facebook page.

Visit the Big Story on Singapore's return to Malaysian football

On a study trip organised by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Nam Theun 2 Power Company (NTPC) last year, a group of journalists from the region including The Straits Times were given extensive access to the reservoir, the dam and power station, and relocated villagers, most of whom are 'Vietic' people; Laos is a patchwork of some 40 ethnic groups.

Money spinner - electricity from NT2 on its way to Thailand -- PHOTO: NIRMAL GHOSH

NT2 reservoir, Nakai plateau -- PHOTO: NIRMAL GHOSH

The tops of dead trees protrude from the water now, and the boatmen of the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) Power Corporation manoeuvre between them at great speed and with great skill.

The rotting debris of submerged vegetation has made it necessary to oxygenate the water that passes through the turbines of the NT2 power station and into a 27km channel that cuts through the stunning landscape of the Gnommalath plain with its jagged karst outcrops.

Oxygenating the water -- PHOTO: NIRMAL GHOSH

On the banks of the reservoir, where the high winds that funnel through what was once the valley of the Nam Theun river, a once-pristine tropical wilderness, huddle new villages housing communities displaced by the rising waters.

Once subsistence communities living off the forests and slash-and-burn agriculture, the 1,240 families from 17 to 18 settlements have been located in 16 villages, given new wooden and rattan houses with their own plots, 0.66ha of land each to farm, an electricity connection, and 650 boats with which to fish in the reservoir.

Schools and health clinics have been provided. Close monitoring shows health and school attendance, and even incomes, are up over what they were before - no real surprise given that the settlements were previously very remote, with little road connectivity.

700 school children are now enrolled who would otherwise not have been - a 90 per cent rise in primary school enrolment. Previously, there was a 70 per cent rate of parasitic infections in the communities; that is now down to seven per cent, thanks mainly to clean water extracted by hand pumps from bore wells.

Problems include the fact that the 0.66ha of land for cultivation is not very good for cultivation. Several of the villagers were unenthusiastic about the agricultural plots; some were not cultivating them at all, depending instead on fishing to earn an income.

The shift from a virtually cashless subsistence lifestyle, to one that must be linked to markets and needs cash flow to purchase daily necessities, is a tectonic one. Imagine a banker and his urban family being relocated to a jungle for the rest of their life and given some hand tools and a book on medicinal plants and told they must survive.

Among the problems identified in evaluations include indebtedness of the relocated villagers. Illegal extraction of forest produce is also a major problem.

Resettled village -- PHOTO: NIRMAL GHOSH

There is also concern that as the resettled families depend more on fishing, with links to urban markets engineered by the NTPC, there may be a risk of overfishing in the reservoir even though large sections of it are reserved only for them.

Mr Soun Nilsvang, the NTPC's deputy manager for resettlement and a trained rural agronomist, said getting them to embrace a market economy had been difficult. Many did not trust banks to keep their money. Others did not see the need to generate more income than was barely adequate for their daily needs.

All the villagers met by the journalists expressed appreciation that the new settlements were 'more convenient' with schools and clinics nearby and everyone within shouting distance. But it may take a generation for the communities to fully adapt to a cash economy, Mr Soun Nilsvang admitted.

Along with the cash economy, plastic has been introduced to their lives; now waste disposal in the villages is a challenge.

Yet NT2 has won grudging praise even from environmental activists who are against Laos' plans to construct dozens of dams across the country – including on the Mekong mainstream. The mainstream dams in particular will have transnational implications, affecting Vietnam and Cambodia and to some degree Thailand as well.

NT2 was hugely controversial to begin with. It is South-east Asia’s first trans basin hydro power project – taking water from one river, Nam Theun, damming it and diverting it to another river, the Xe Bang Fai. Both are tributaries of the Mekong.

Warning on the Xe Bang Fai-- PHOTO: NIRMAL GHOSH

I recall attending a World Bank stakeholder meeting on NT2 in Bangkok several years ago. It was clear even then that the project was going to go ahead regardless of objections. It had morphed into a poverty alleviation and development project. There is something to be said however for the pressure from environmental groups; it helped drive better project design.

'What characterises this project is that there has been a high degree of consultation with affected people,' said Ms Elizabeth Mann, a senior social safeguard specialist with the ADB's Vientiane office.

'And it was the developer's responsibility to pay for the social aspects; the government provided the legal framework.

'But (the lifestyle in the new settlements) was never going to be an exact replacement for what they lost; it's still a work in progress.

'Some have adapted very quickly, and some slowly, but in general there has been a positive impact on livelihood. We have identified about 25 families who are vulnerable and need more support.'

One powerful driver will be the TV sets that now occupy almost every house - and the schools that occupy the children by day.

In one of the villages, a middle-aged woman, Hom, is one of the few who does not have a TV. But her 13-year-old grandson, Mai, goes to a friend's house every evening to watch TV.

'Sometimes he doesn't come back, and I have to go and fetch him,' his grandmother said.

Mai gave a shy smile when asked what he watched. Thai soap operas, was his answer.

And asked what he wanted to be when he grows up, he said: 'A policeman.'

At first, the task seemed straightforward. Analyse how politicians use social media in Singapore.  Simple enough.

The team had already done "social media scanning” and “thematic analysis” on the Presidential election few months back. Why not use the frameworks and techniques which we had used for the previous project?

Not quite!

Within 20 minutes of brainstorming, we soon discovered that the research project was more complex than we thought at first, and the analysis would need to be robust.

That meant we could not simply rely on technology platforms alone, but would require an overwhelming abundance of “human analytics"; that is the ability to cluster, interpret and analyse sentiments based on social, cultural and political nuances which machines would not be capable of.

The discussion went on for two hours, during which coffee cups were emptied a couple of times. We redrew the mind maps between 15 and 20 times.

From one that looked like a fishbone skeleton, we progressed to a Ishikawa diagram that resembled Paul the Octopus of the 2010 FIFA World Cup fame.

I could see the excitement and apprehension in people’s eyes at the thought of the sheer amount of hard work needed to come up with easy-to-digest frameworks needed for interpretation. We were sure that no one had done a similar study on the scale and scope that our friends at ST had planned.

Over the course of the project, we encountered many "snowballs." Data collection, archiving and coding proved a real challenge.

The more than 5,600 posts, 43,000 comments, 1,600 tweets on the MPs’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts during the four-month study period from June to October 2011 proved to be manageable data sets.

Key Challenge

However, a key challenge arose when we had to start categorising data into clusters such as negative, positive and neutral. The trends, pattern of usage and response were all derived using programs and algorithms, but to determine the essence of the posts and the sentiments, a different kind of analysis was needed.

A machine cannot detect sarcasm, nor can it ascertain that certain negative words are in fact words of support defending a politician or his position.

The qualitative aspect soon became the challenge and at one point, turned into an organisational nightmare. Unlike typical exploratory and inferential analysis, social media and unstructured data analysis is quite different.

The first step is validating the data sources and the data itself. Secondly, you need to try to have a contextual understanding of the data set and identify all relevant variables needed for the analysis.

Building meaningful dimensions for analysis is the next step and this is the point where the subject expertise comes into play. We started with five dimensions to understand the nature of postings of the MPs initially, which expanded to nine after the preliminary analysis.

Contextual sentiment analysis is the key, but an equally difficult task is to design metrics for comparison. Metrics which are simple yet powerful. The "buzz" and comments to post ratios are all different ways to meaningfully interpret the data and impactful enough for an ordinary citizen. For medium-large scale projects of this sort, you really need a good team.

That said, our teams were up to the task and soon, an army of Bell Pottinger Digital consultants dived deep into hundreds of hours of analytics and data streams, resulting in interesting insights into politicians’ different approaches to connecting with their constituents.

They shed new light on the meaning of digital grassroots, with traditional grassroots campaigning and advocacy work getting exponential amplification through the waves of social media.

Many hours were spent identifying patterns and statistics, and even more hours decoding the trends and behaviours of our test subjects.

As a result, we have the frameworks, indices and measurability indicators to begin to tell the story of how social media is undeniably a permanent part of political life in Singapore.

Avish was the lead consultant for The Straits Times-Bell Pottinger study on MPs’ use of social media in Singapore.

Read also:
http://www.straitstimes.com/SaturdaySpecialReport/Story/STIStory_755282.html

Firstly, gaming company Razer has a bold and stunning gaming tablet concept.

Code-named Fiona, it is a tablet souped up to play PC games such as Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, and Assassin's Creed: Revelations out of the box.

Razer's gaming tablet concept Fiona -- PHOTO: GRACE CHNG

Not for the faint-hearted and definitely not for the casual gamer who wants to play Cut The Cable or Angry Birds, the specifications will set gamers’ hearts beating fast.  It is powered by Intel's Core i7 Ive Bridge processor and Microsoft's latest Windows 8 operating system. It is also a multi-touch device and is equipped with an accelerometer.

Razer's Singaporean chief executive Tan Min Liang said that tablets were not made for heavy-duty PC games. As a gamer, he wanted a device which has an intuitive control and provides a great gaming experience. Hence he built one.

Project Fiona sports a 10.1-inch tablet with high resolution of 1280 x 800 and has controls which sit on either side of it. Each control has four face buttons, a start button, and two triggers. This set-up lets a gamer hold the tablet firmly while playing the game.

Said Mr Tan: 'It will have force feedback and incredible graphics. Gamers can play games in real-time and against their friends. They can start playing on their PCs at home and when they go out, they can continue playing with Fiona.'

Mr Tan hopes to gather feedback from gamers before coming out with a commercial product at the end of 2012. But be prepared to shell out US$1,000 ($1,287) for it.

Innovative

Fiona is now a finalist in the 2012 CES list of innovative products. It comes close at the heels of Razer’s latest 17-inch gaming notebook called Blade which costs a whopping US$2,700.

According to Mr Tan, supply cannot meet demand from now till March. The first units will be delivered to customers in the next two weeks.

The other product that drew much attention was Samsung’s 55-inch OLED TV, which is breathtaking in its beauty, slenderness and brilliance. OLED (organic light-emitting diode)technology is energy saving and able to project sparkling colours.

Tim Baxter (right), president of Samsung Electronics America looks on as Joe Stinziano (left), senior vice president of Samsung Electronics America speaks at the unveiling of Samsung's 55-inch Super OLED HDTV (centre) at the annual Consumer Electronics Show on Jan 9, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. -- PHOTO: AFP

-- PHOTO: GRACE CHNG

-- PHOTO: GRACE CHNG

Samsung did not provide a lot of information for it, except that it will feature a quad-core processor and full 3D support. It is expected to hit stores sometime in 2012.

This razor-thin beautiful TV greeted visitors to the Korean company’s booth at CES and attracted huge crowds.

But this Samsung TV and the Fiona are concept products only and will hit stores later in 2012.

The idea for the project came about through our usual photographers' informal idea-storming sessions. People often ask where ideas come from. But really, it's hard to pinpoint because sometimes ideas bounce around so much we end up with a mishmash of everyone's inputs. As far as I remember for this project, it started out with my interest in doing something about young people in Singapore, particularly about the children of rich expats here. My colleague, Samuel, then suggested focusing on young Chinese in Singapore and we decided to go with that.

2) How did you go about selecting the profiles for your story?

Like many other stories, 'The Young Chinese Next Door' is challenging not because it was hard to find the profiles, but because it was hard to find the right one. I spoke to many Chinese people, cold-called, and went to places where young Chinese Singaporeans hung out. I spent my free time scouring the streets of Chinatown for Chinese people to strike up conversations with. It was pretty random but I couldn't think of a better way to do it.

I even attended an orientation party for Chinese students. I walked the length of Geylang Road four times, speaking to Chinese working in the restaurants and coffee shops there. It was tiring but fun.

Although not everyone I spoke to were featured, they led me to others who in turn led me to the eventual six profiles. It is kind of like social networking but in the physical world instead of online.

3) Did you face any difficulty? Was it difficult to get them to speak frankly about their situation?

I suppose the difficulties I faced were not unique to journalism in general. Finding the right profiles was the first step. The next, and more challenging part, was to convince them to share their stories. I had limited time to work on the project so I had to gain their trust in the shortest possible time. I dropped some profiles because I felt that they were not completely honest with me and were hiding something. I needed them to open up their lives to me so that I could observe and photograph their lives in Singapore. And when they did, I saw it as a great privilege.

I wanted to get figures of Chinese nationals in Singapore but the authorities were not willing to release them, even after much persuasion. I wish I had the figures though. It would have provided something for the stories to hang on, making it an even better project.

4) The story ran in the papers on Dec 17 and the multimedia site was launched alongside it. How has the response from the public been?

Frankly, I did not get as many e-mails as I had hoped. It's always nice to get some readers' responses, whether good or bad. I did get a few e-mails, most of which were not positive. The comments were not targeted at the stories per se but at the profiles themselves. It seems there is a lot of anti-foreigner sentiments in Singapore now.

Comments left on Facebook were also not very positive. In fact, some were so mean and derogatory, it would have made a foul-mouthed boot camp sergeant blush. Still, it's always interesting to see what people's responses are and it gave me more insight about Singaporeans' attitudes towards Chinese nationals here.

5) Let's talk about the multimedia process. How did you craft the plan for a multimedia element in your stories? Is a lot more time needed? Do you think it is a necessary investment of your time?

Yes, the multimedia element to the project is way more intensive than doing just a print story. I wanted to give up at some points, but I'm glad my colleague prodded me to do it and gave me the help needed to pull it off.

We wanted the multimedia element to be a simple narration of the profiles' views on their Singapore experience. It was challenging because we had to make sure that the content in the multimedia project did not repeat verbatim what was in print. We did not want one medium to cannibalise another. It would have been fruitless if that were the case. Our aim was to value-add to the print version through the multimedia aspect. Honestly, it was a lot of team-work. I cannot imagine doing this alone.

It was a huge investment of the team's time. We had to work late nights and juggle our daily assignments on top of this project. But yes, it's definitely worth it because the reach of the multimedia site can go further and stay longer than the print version which is largely available only in Singapore. With the site, people in China can get to view it too, which is also the reason why there's English and Chinese text for the site.

Go to http://straitstimes.com/ttl/chinese to watch the multimedia story!

That was the similar reply from two people I met on Friday afternoon, when I visited the wake of Mrs Priscilla Krempl, principal of St Andrew's Secondary from 1996 to 2001 and Bedok Town Secondary from 2002 to 2007. She died on Thursday morning at the age of 66, after she was hit by a stroke and admitted to hospital. She was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer just four weeks ago.

ST PHOTO: AZIZ HUSSIN

Mrs Krempl was perhaps best known as Singapore's first qualified female rugby referee. She also coached St Andrew's national title-winning sides in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was a quiet Friday afternoon when I arrived at St Joseph's Church, where the wake was held. Most people hadn't knocked off from work yet.

Allied educator Shamir Muhammad, 27, was one of the few people who turned up. Allied educators work with teachers to nurture and develop every child in school by raising the quality of interaction with every child. But Shamir talked about his time as a student in St Andrew's from 1997 to 2001, with a mix of sadness and fondness.

Affected by family issues in Secondary 3, he did poorly in school and got into disciplinary trouble, and was at risk of dropping out of school. Mr Shamir described that period as his "darkest days".

Mrs Krempl counselled him and tried to bring him back into the fold over the course of a year. She even involved him in hosting two exchange students from Australia, even though he was not supposed to be part of the exchange programme. For Mr Shamir, being involved in the programme reignited his desire to do well in school. He eventually completed his O-levels and moved on to a polytechnic.

ST PHOTO: ALBERT SIM

Mr Peter Ching, 32, who works in the oil industry, arrived at the wake later in the afternoon.

He told me that he had a rebellious streak in St Andrew's from 1992 to 1995, and was called into Mrs Krempl's office several times. About half a year before his O-levels, Mrs Krempl, who was then the school's acting principal, called him into her office again, and told him sternly that it was time to stop getting into trouble. The message resonated with Mr Ching, who made sure he didn't get into trouble again.

"As a student, I didn't like her. But it was later on that I realised she gave me a lot of sound advice," he said.

He added that he would always remember the image of her walking along the St Andrew's corridors poised and in perfect posture, while wearing her trademark tinted glasses.

Two former colleagues who worked with Mrs Krempl during her time at Bedok Town Secondary said she paid special attention to students from lower-income backgrounds.

Mr Bernard Low, who was a maths teacher in the school, said: "She understood where the kids were coming from. She tried to build their self-belief...she created a culture of care for students."

Mr Ong Kong Hong, former vice-principal at Bedok Green Secondary, worked with Mrs Krempl in 2007 on a cluster-level project to help Normal Technical students who were at risk of dropping out. "I was struck by how much she focused on the individual. She thought deeply about what would engage these students and how to change their lives," said Mr Ong, who is now principal of Teck Whye Secondary.

Even after she retired as principal, Mrs Krempl's interest in education did not wane. She continued teaching part-time at the National Institute of Education (NIE), training allied educators in topics such as communication and classroom management. She last taught in the July-October course.

Mr Fadzli Shah, 26, who took classes under her in the March-June course, visited the wake with five other course-mates. He described Mrs Krempl as a motherly figure who gave them a lot of encouragement. "Some people don't think too highly of allied educators, but she taught us to be confident of ourselves and our work," he said.

Mr Shamir, the former St Andrew's student, said it was a privilege to learn from Mrs Krempl again when he attended the allied educator course at NIE from July to October. He recalled that she would watch clips of the Rugby World Cup during their lesson breaks, which showed that her interest in the sport hadn't declined with age.

Teachers who had worked under her said she created a warm and caring working environment for them. Mrs Yeo See Wan, who has taught maths at St Andrew's since 1976, fondly recalled the personalised cards that Mrs Krempl would make for her staff every Teachers' Day. "It was just a small card, but we really appreciated her effort," she said.

Her kindness extended to her brother's Indonesian maid, who was well-acquainted with Mrs Krempl. She said Mrs Krempl would often talk to her like a friend, and ask her if she was having any problems back home.

ST PHOTO: ALBERT SIM

Judging from the many stories shared by people who knew her, Mrs Krempl seemed to lived by her motto of "Do the right thing, and do it excellently". It was a line she used to tell her St Andrew's students whenever she addressed them, and something she still told her students at NIE.

Mrs Krempl's funeral will be held on Sunday.

Recently, another educator who inspired many, passed on. Mr Gabriel Rao, the operations manager at Regent Secondary, collapsed and died at the age of 48.

Hundreds of students and former students attended his wake and funeral over a few days, and it was testimony to the impact he made on them. Education Minister Heng Swee Keat also posted a letter of tribute from Mr Rao's cousin-in-law on his Facebook page. (https://www.facebook.com/notes/heng-swee-keat/a-tribute-to-mr-gabriel-rao/283359898369209)

Learning about how these educators have changed many lives is truly humbling. But it would be unfortunate if their influence ends with the people they have touched directly.

As Mr Shamir wrote to his course-mates at NIE: "Let us carry on what she has done so that we too may live a good and blessed life with all due care for our fellow man and for the children, that we now have to care for."

But now, it turns out, scientists from Nanyang Technological University have found that nanoparticles of zinc oxide, a substance used in many sunscreens and cosmetics, can cause a chain-reaction cascade that leads to cancer in lab-grown cells.

Cue alarm and frantic consumers saying: But I thought it was natural!

So is zinc oxide, that innocuous-looking white smear across a sunbather's nose, really a carcinogen?

The honest answer is: It depends.

Or as doctors might say: It's all about the dose.

The links between environmental toxins and the incidence of disease in real life, rather than in the lab, are some of the toughest in the world to prove. This is just because in real life,  scientists can't track everything that people wear, eat and smear on themselves. (The exception is when there is a very strong link between, say, pregnant women consuming thalidomide and the incidence of birth defects.)

But here are some useful questions to ask about products containing zinc oxide, or any other potentially harmful substance.

How much?

Does the product contain a high concentration or low concentration of the chemical? That has an impact on the level of the chemical users are exposed to.

What size are the particles?

The potential environmental effects of nanoparticles in general are known. Scientists know that at a high enough dosage, free-floating silver nanoparticles can cause birth defects or even kill zebrafish embryos, and that they might be able to enter the human body easily because they are so small.

What's the degree of exposure and what part of your body is exposed?

Are you wearing the stuff all day, every day? Injecting it into your body? Or swallowing it?
As for degree, some nail polishes contain solvents that evaporate into nasty fumes. I like to paint my nails, but I do it in a well-ventilated room once in a blue moon. (But I would worry about the health of manicurists in a poorly ventilated salon, for example.)

Closer to home, vitamin A, that eyesight-promoting vitamin good for your skin and teeth - is poisonous in very large quantities. But you would have to consume enough carrots to turn you bright orange in order to feel the effects of vitamin A poisoning. So I will probably keep saying yes to carrots.

One more thing, about the word 'natural': Just because something is natural does not mean it is non-toxic! Arsenic, for example, is a naturally occurring element that gets into well water in Cambodia and Bangladesh. No one goes around blithely drinking arsenic-laced well water just because it is natural.

Finally, there's one more important question: Which carries the higher risk - tiny nanoparticles of zinc oxide (or anything else, really) in your sunscreen, or skin cancer from going without?

That's one statistic I would like to find out. Again, the answer is probably,  'It depends...'

Now, with the death toll at more than 25 million and counting, there are glimmers of hope that the spread of the disease could be stopped in its tracks.

Thanks to decades of tireless awareness-raising and scientific research, there is a real chance that there could be no new cases of HIV -  the virus that causes Aids - by 2020, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said at a conference this summer.

He added that if world leaders and agencies unite “as never before”, the goal of relegating Aids to the history books could be met.

But there is one major stumbling block to this vision of an Aids-free world.

That is, the deep-rooted fear which still surrounds this most misunderstood of illnesses. This fear has turned many sufferers into social pariahs and deterred others from coming forward to be treated, which further fuels the spread of the disease.

Today, on World Aids day, as we take stock of how far humanity has come in the fight against the disease, one thing seems clear: Aids is capable of bringing out the best and the worst in people.

From the playgrounds of rural Scotland to the lime-green fields of Northern Uganda, I have interviewed sufferers who say the stigma associated with being HIV-positive is one of the hardest things to bear.

Five years ago, I spoke to Sarah, a 20-year-old woman in Scotland who contracted the virus in the womb after her mother received a contaminated blood transfusion.

Born in the mid-1980s, Sarah (not her real name) was one of the first children in Scotland to be diagnosed HIV-positive and was bullied mercilessly at school.

“I've had to put up with being called 'dirty' and a 'junkie'. And most of the time my family and I were treated like lepers,” she told me.

She added that her schoolmates’ parents, presumably ignorant of the fact that HIV is transmitted via unprotected sex and direct blood contact, also told their children to avoid standing near her when she coughed or using the same toilet seat as her.

“The truth is that I was more likely to become hospitalised if one of them coughed on me,” she said, referring to the fact that HIV suffers are often left with weak immune systems.

Half a world away in war-scarred Northern Uganda, I met Florence, a 34-year-old mother of four.

Even though she was receiving anti-retroviral medication when I met her last year, Florence (not her real name) was visibly very weaker and worsening by the day.

The drugs, which have helped many sufferers add decades to their lives, were not working effectively on her, largely because she had received them too late.

The reason for the delay? Her husband, who started to fall ill repeatedly after being unfaithful to her, had refused to get an HIV test.

“Even when he was very weak and dying, he did not want to go for testing and he did not want me to go either,” she said. “He feared being told he was HIV-positive.”

In a male-dominated society, it was difficult for Florence to go against her husband’s wishes or even refuse to have unprotected sex with him.

It was only after he died that Florence was free to go for the test. Not only did she discover that she had the disease but she also was told her CD4 count, which measured the health of her body’s immune system, was very low. This meant the HIV virus was now at an advanced stage.

“Now I just worry for my children,” she said. “Who will look after them? How will they go to school? Where will they live?”

Florence’s predicament is not unique. Countless others like her have been infected because their partners refused to go for the HIV test for fear of what others would say.

Only half of those with the virus know their status. And there is still great fear attached to taking the test, The Guardian newspaper reported in May.

This conspiracy of silence fuels new cases of HIV, thwarting efforts to stop the virus’s spread.

The good news is that anti-retroviral drugs and therapy, which significantly prolong the lives of people who are HIV-positive and reduce the rate of mother-to-child transmission, are available and reaching more and more sufferers.

According to this year’s UNAIDs progress report, increased access to HIV services has resulted in a 15 per cent reduction of new infections over the past decade and a 22 per cent decline in Aids-related deaths in the last five years.

But in this tough economic climate, with international donor funding for HIV/Aids programmes dropping from US$8.7 billion (S$11.15 billion) to US$7.6 billion last year, progress on that front could be jeopardised.

It is clear that we cannot rely on scientific breakthroughs alone or take for granted the steady stream of funding which has supported it.

Instead, individuals, communities and governments need to engage in practices that help lift the cloud of ignorance and fear that still surround this preventable disease. Otherwise, too many victims will continue to suffer in silence.