KUALA LUMPUR: Forget about reading tea leaves or peering into crystal balls. Feng shui master Prof David Koh predicts that the general election will take place before May.
The principal consultant at the Malaysian Institute of Geomancy Sciences said the economic forecast next year indicated that the general election was around the corner.
Future outlook: Koh showing the 2011 Year of the Rabbit Malaysian Institute of Geomancy Sciences Outlook book and the Kansai Environology (Feng Shui) colour book guide at the talk in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
“We forecast that there will be a spike in the country’s economic performance between March and April.
“And this will usually take place before an election,” he told reporters at the 2011 Outlook Talk – Year Of The Rabbit at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre yesterday.
He has a message for the men, too.
“Strong, young women will come to the fore in politics, finance or economy, in the February to March period,” he said.
“Scholars will also gain prominence between April and May. They will either bring fame to Malaysia or contribute to its development,” said Koh.
Asked for their identity, he jokingly said: “I did not ask for their names.”
He also said according to the I-Ching calculations, it was predicted that political leaders were likely to encounter internal problems in their parties.
“Some (problems) are not noticeable now but they are boiling over.
“There will be a lot of pretentious members who will trick their leaders into believing they are good but have their own private agenda,” he said, adding that the internal problems could reach a critical point in August and September.
Contrary to public belief, he said Malaysia would not experience a collapse in the property market next year.
Koh took centrestage when he presented the country’s outlook including the possibility of Doomsday 2012.
Such a doomsday, he said, would not happen.
On natural disasters, he said heavy rains in the period of February to March might lead to floods in the northern region.
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I often take a long pause when I am asked about what I do in Beijing, especially if the person is from Malaysia.
For the last two decades, more than 90% of Chinese Malaysian families send their children to vernacular primary schools. Those who do not read and write some basic Chinese are clearly the minority these days.
So when I say I am learning Hanyu (the Chinese language) here in the Chinese capital, I see baffled expressions. To them, it seems as ridiculous as an Anglo-Australian learning English in England.
I grew up in an era where my parents definitely did not believe that the vernacular system had any future. It seemed to them that China was going to fail after the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square student uprising.
What’s more, with English being the lingua franca, those who had placed their bets on Chinese education seemed to be on the same slippery slope back to the Chin (Qiang) Dynasty!
However history played out differently and China is an emerging super power and has indeed become a desirable laguage to learn. Even pre-schoolers and elementary schoolchildren in different parts of the world are beginning to see the need to learn Chinese.
Vernacular education is still a thorny subject in Malaysia.
Some live and die by it like Mao’s little red book, while others see it as an obstacle to national unity. But at whichever side of the fence you sit on, it is an undeniable fact that Hanyu, Putonghua, Zhongwen, Guoyu or whatever they call it in China, has become an important global language.
And with China embracing globalisation like a born-again capitalist, the demand for Hanyu classes is skyrocketing faster than the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
The Office of Chinese Language Council International or better known as Hanban is in charge of spreading Chinese language and culture all over the world. Under Hanban is the Confucius Institute (Kongzi Xueyuan) that is responsible of the real action.
The Confucius Institute is the Chinese equivalent to the British Council or Alliance Francaise although it runs the institution differently from the others.
The Institute often works as a conduit for a partner Chinese university and a local institute of higher learning. To date, there are more than 300 Confucius Institutes and an almost equal number of Confucius Classrooms worldwide.
For the many Malaysians who, for whatever reasons, have missed out on an early education in Chinese, learning Hanyu need not entail the arduous task of relocating to China.
The Confucius Institute for Malaysia has just started its maiden part-time Hanyu program at the Universiti Malaya city campus this year. And unlike other programmes, all teachers at the Institute are from the mainland. This helps reduce many of the Hokkien and Cantonese related anomalies in pronunciation that many Malaysians have accepted as the norm.
Its partner is the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) and it aims to be the premier Mandarin language centre by 2012. BFSU is of course no stranger to Malaysia as it is the only university in China that has a Malay department.
Currently there are more than 100 students pursuing a Chinese course at the BFSU in Beijing under a government scholarship program. Upon graduation they are expected to serve as Chinese teachers with the Education Ministry. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak’s son Norashman Razak Najib is an alumnus of BFSU after a three-week stint as a language student earlier this year.
Another part-time option is at the Hanban-sanctioned Shanghai Jiaotong University - Global Hanyu and Culture Centre (SJTU-GHCC) in Three Two Square, Petaling Jaya. They have the Baby Panda classes to cater for pre-primary school kids all the way to the completion of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK).
The HSK examination is for Chinese what TOEFL and IELTS are for English and comes under the purview of Hanban. It is the only Mandarin Chinese proficiency test for foreign students in China. The HSK was recently revised and now consists of only six levels — with Level One being elementary and Level Six being advanced. Most Chinese universities would require at least a Level Four for science subjects and Level Six for other language intensive degrees.
The HSK exams are held almost every other month in China to cater for the ever growing number of foreign students learning Hanyu. In Malaysia the HSK exams are held twice a year but this would largely depend on the school and the enrolment number.
Mandarin is one of the most difficult languages to learn as an adult. My former Russian classmate once said that learning Hanyu was harder than building the Great Wall.
And this is coming from someone who writes Cyrillic for a living. I often thought that being Malaysian gives me an advantage over the other laowai (foreigners). But after two months in Beijing, I changed my mind.
> For more information on dates and prices for the Confucius Institute – University Malaya Mandarin lessons please visit their website at www.umcced.edu.my/kzium/index.htm or www.globalhanyu.com for the same at Shanghai Jiaotong University – Global Hanyu and Culture Centre).
Tim Berners Lee has dubbed Facebook a threat to the universality of the world wide web.
Next month marks the twentieth anniversary of the first webpage – severed up by Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva – and in the December issue of Science American, he celebrates the uniquely democratic nature of his creation, before warning against the forces that could eventually bring it down. "Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently," he says.
He briefly warns of cable giants who may prevent the free flow of content across the net. "Cable television companies that sell internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment," he says. And then he sticks the boot into social networking sites, including Mark Zuckerberg's net behemoth. "Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph," Berners-Lee writes.
"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."
This is just the complaint Google made earlier this month as it banned Facebook from tapping Gmail's Contacts API. Mountain Views won't allow netizens to export email addresses to Facebook unless it reciprocates.
"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI," Berner-Lee continues, referring to his original name for the url. "Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform — a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.
"A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation." The threat here is not Friendster. It's Facebook, which now boasts over 500 million users worldwide.
Berners-Lee urges the adoption of more democratic services, including Facebook alternatives GnuSocial and Diaspora as well as the Status.net project, which gave rise to a decentralized incarnation of Twitter. "As has been the case since the Web began," he says, "continued grassroots innovation may be the best check and balance against any one company or government that tries to undermine universality."</p.
Entitled "Love Live the Web," the Scientific American piece goes to promote the use of, yes, open standards. If you don't use open standards, Berners-Lee says, you create "closed worlds." Like Apple's iTunes. "Apple’s iTunes system," he says, "identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of 'http:' the addresses begin with 'itunes:,' which is proprietary. You can access an 'itunes:' link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program.
"You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up."
He also bemoans the proliferation of net-connected apps on the Apple iPhone and other smartphones. "The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone 'apps' rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time."
Dredging up Comcast's BitTorrent busting, he then warns against threats to so-called net neutrality. This includes Google for the FCC filing it laid down this summer in tandem with US telco giant Verizon. "Unfortunately, in August, Google and Verizon for some reason suggested that net neutrality should not apply to mobile phone–based connections," he says.
"Many people in rural areas from Utah to Uganda have access to the Internet only via mobile phones; exempting wireless from net neutrality would leave these users open to discrimination of service. It is also bizarre to imagine that my fundamental right to access the information source of my choice should apply when I am on my WiFi-connected computer at home but not when I use my cell phone."</p.
Eric Schmidt now says that Google's proposal omitted wireless simply because this makes it easier to reach a compromise with the likes of Verizon on wireless lines. Wireless net neutrality, he indicates, will come later. But Berners-Lee is right to be, shall we say, skeptical.
He also warns against Phorm-style snooping and governments that restrict free speech on the web. But ultimately, he's optimistic. "Now is an exciting time," he says. "Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine." ®
Future outlook: Koh showing the 2011 Year of the Rabbit Malaysian Institute of Geomancy Sciences Outlook book and the Kansai Environology (Feng Shui) colour book guide at the talk in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
