I shall dedicate this post to my recent experiences in school. So since this is the time of the term when the results are being given back, I shall talk more about the results that I had received after having a new revision schedule planed out for my tests, specifically about the failures that I had faced in the tests.

So I had just gotten back my English paper. Although English had never been my strongest subject, I had a lot of confidence that I could get good marks for this test, and after I received back my results, I realized I only managed to scrape a B4, which was far below my expectations for myself. I experienced a sense of acrimony when I thought of how this mark badly affects my MSG for this term, making the MSG rise by about 0.4. I had been constantly languishing in the sense of dejection and thus had been moody and feeling depressed, even to the extent of playing poorly when representing my class for an inter-class badminton competition in the consortium. Despite how much my friend told me that this mark did not matter much and that I could still make a comeback in the next term and also that if my Humanities scored well, I could still have my MSG for this term saved back, I kept confining myself to the negative thoughts about how this mark could make a huge impact on my overall grades.

When I got back home, I managed to calm down and I had this thought that I never had when I was so agitated after knowing my score. I was thinking: So what if I did not score well for this term? So what if my MSG is badly affected by this grade? No matter what I do, how depressed I behave, how much I keep thinking of my grades being affected, the test is over. There is nothing else I can do about that test to change the score. The only thing that I should focus on now is how to improve the situation instead of keeping the negative thoughts in my head. Therefore, I made up my mind that this term MSG should not make me too depressed, because the most important point is not how I fell, to what extent I fell and got injured, but to think of ways to make myself stand up and brush that depressing incident aside.

Today, I am going to talk about a newspaper article from The Straits Times page 13 in section A and the title of the article is 'High-speed rail: China slams brakes further'.

Following the incident of the rail way accident in china in July 23, where one bullet train rear-ended another, killing 40 passengers and injuring 190 others. The sped of the high speed trains in china have been decreased by about 40kmh to 50kmh. New rail construction were brought to a halt after public outrage over the deadly crash.

The new lines where not required to reduce the speeds of the trains, but the number of trains had been reduced from 88 to 66 daily. By august 28, more trains would be required to reduce their speed because it would increase safety and also help officials accumulate safety management experience. The Railways Ministry acknowledged that flaws exist in the way railway projects are managed.

I feel that this incident of the railway accident should be dealt with seriously. The trains used are bullet trains and since they travel at high speeds, the collisions that may occur would be very severe and could lead to massive loss of lives, which had occurred on the 23rd of July. Many people in China choose the take the high speed trains because it is cheaper than flying and also that the time needed is not very long, thus with so many people boarding the trains, the Railways Ministry should have been more meticulous in the way they manage the railways. due to just this one failure in management, 40 people were killed and 190 were injured, which was not a small number and this would cause the relatives of the people who were affected by the accident grief and also worry, and they would have second thoughts about taking the trains in the future, and thus this failure in management also costed the business of the railways to be affected.

China is a very huge country and thus having trains that travels at high speeds would be the only choice to travel around the country that would be cheaper than to take an airplane, thus the option of having high speed trains in China should not be aborted, so the only way to improve the situation is to have constant vigilance in the maintenance of the railways and also to improve the officials expertise in this field of safety management.

Since I have recently touched on two newspaper articles for my two most recent posts, I shall be focusing about some of my current personal experiences for this post. So for today, I shall talk about how my term 3 life had been academically.

For term 1 and 2, my MSG had been higher than 3.00, and for both times it is way higher than the class average MSG. So for my term 3, I planned out a rigorous revision schedule for the whole term, because I wanted to improve my MSG by a lot so that I could save back my overall MSG for the year.

For term 3, I had decided to cut down my time on the computer to about 10 minutes unless there is a need to use the computer for academic purposes, and an example will be right now, when I am making a post, compared to in term 1 and 2, where I had been very relaxed in my revision schedules and I could spend up to 5 hours on the computer just to chat with people and also play online games, which were actually pointless and unimportant. sometimes, I could even spend up to a whole day on the computer! So this term, I had strained myself to the short amount of time I had on the computer by constantly reminding myself that I have to score very good results and that if I continue my slack attitude in academics, the only way I could go is down. this proved to be useful because in the end I could put more time on completing homework and also I could do more revision more effectively.

Also, I had managed to plan out a schedule that allows me to revise for about 1 to 2 weeks for tests, and with a long time for revision, I did not need to focus so much on last minute revision when the test is about 2 or even 1 day away. when I did last minute revision in the past, I ended up sleeping very late and thus the next day during the test I had very little energy and thus I did poorly in subjects such as math and humanities. And now, with the new schedule that places so much emphasis on early revision that is long drawn, I was able to revise a lot beforehand and when it is just one day before the test I could just do some light revision and not need to sleep very late at night like in the past.

With this new method of revision and handing with my academic life, I hope that my efforts would not go to waste and I would be able to achieve better results and not pull up the class MSG like in the previous terms. I would also continue and persevere with this new method of making schedules for my academics until Secondary 4 and try to score well from the start of the year next year, as for the past 3 years, I had a very bad start to the year all the time by scoring the highest MSG for the whole year and I only managed to scrape the bottom line marks in the end when the overall MSG is calculated at the end of the year.

Today, I would like to talk about a newspaper article on page 5 of the Home section of 'The Strait Times' yesterday. The title of the article is 'Man accused of inciting violence'

Mr Gary Yue Mun Yew, 36, had allegedly posted a video clip of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's assassination to the Facebook page of socio-political website Temasek Review, calling for such an event to be re-enacted here.

Last year, Mr Yue had also been accused of posting up a doctored picture of a Vietnamese soldier holding a gun to the head of Mr Wong Kan Seng, who was the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, whose head had been superimposed into the original image.

Under the law, anyone who is convicted to making or communicating an electronic record containing an incitement to violence shall be punished with up to five years jail of both.

After reading this newspaper article, I realized that Mr Yue is targeting on the ministers in Singapore. I feel that Singaporeans should not have an attitude like this. If we incite violence to ministers in Singapore like Mr Yue, we would not be cooperating with the government in Singapore and instead of solving the problem and ending the anger, we would be creating more troubles for ourselves and the government. We should all instead cooperate with the government so that some of the measures that they have put in would succeed. If we keep complaining and being so self-centered, policies by the government may fail and after it does not succeed due to the citizens not cooperating, the self-centered people would make continuous insults to the government which would cause even lesser cooperation and thus this would lead to a vicious cycle. If we could keep our feud against the government to ourselves and cooperate with the government, it would make it easier for the government to succeed and this end result is definitely better than us being anti-government.

I feel that this ideology also applies on many other aspects in our daily lives. If we learn to accept others, instead of being against them when there are certain conflicts which are not major, the end result would often be a win-win situation. I would like to focus on the school linkage to the school environment since I am still studying in school, thus an example is in class with the teacher. If we think that a teacher is not good and we thus do not cooperate in class, we would end up making the teaching job difficult for the teacher and at the end of the day, our results would not turn out to be good too. But if we learn to accept the teacher's teaching and we cooperate by paying attention in class and participating actively, the teacher would be able to teach and would also be able to improve his or her teaching methods with more ease and by accepting, paying attention and cooperating, we would have good grades, which is a win-win situation.

Today, I am going to talk about a newspaper article that appeared on the 'Home' section, on the front page of the Monday 'The Straits Times'. The article is titled 'S'pore-Malaysia football game's over, but... Ugly sniping goes online' (longest headline I seen).

After the Singapore's World Cup qualifying against Malaysia had ended, more issues has arised. After the battle on the field, there is a battle on the internet by fans from both sides of the team. The latest issue in this online firing was hackers from the fans in Malaysia hacking into the homepage of the Singapore Cars Online website with an image of the Malaysian striker, also leaving a message for the Singapore team insulting the Singapore team and also to the Singaporean soccer fans. Although the website had been restored, the battle is still going rampant elsewhere in the internet.

There was also a picture of a defaced Singaporean flag that has triggered angry responses from the netizens.

- the Singaporean flag being defaced by the Malaysian football supporters (photo from stomp)

I am not going to give in dept situations in the game, for I am not an avid soccer fan, but what I am going to focus on are the actions of the Malaysian football supporters. Having all these acts do not reflect well on Malaysia, and when people see these acts, they may generalize that the people in Malaysia are all people who could not contain their frustration after the loss of the Malaysian side and have to turn situations ugly. By hacking into Singapore websites and defacing the Singapore flag, it does not make them superior than Singapore, if this is what they intend to achieve by having these acts.

I would like to elaborate on the part where the Malaysian football supporters defaced the Singapore flag. We carry a large amount of pride in our country's flag. By defacing it, they destroy the whole purpose of the flag and this is a great insult to Singapore's pride. However, no matter how big these situations get, I feel that Singaporeans should try to contain their anger, unlike these extreme Malaysian football fans, because if we give them the negative attention, they would feel the joy in making us angry and thus they would come up with more and more uncivilized acts and the whole matter would blow up to a larger extent. Instead, if we choose to turn a cold shoulder to them, it will show how childish these Malaysian football fans are and when they realize that no one really bothers about their attempts to arouse resentment in the Singaporeans, they would eventually stop. So Singaporeans would have to stay strong at times like these.

Of course, I am not saying that all the Malaysian football fans are all out to insult Singapore after the game, but there are definitely Malaysian football fans out there who are all out to try to gain back pride for their home team by trying to downgrade the other teams, and the consequence would usually be they downgrading themselves.

I would like to touch on something other than recent news. I recently realize that I have been losing concentration in many things that I do, like when I am revising for tests and exams, I realize that soon after I have touched on a paragraph, I have side tracked and got distracted by other thoughts and in the end I spend a lot of time on revising which is not very effective. In my CCA trainings, when we are having a lecture, I tend to lose concentration after some time and thus would not be able to remember clearly the skills that my coach had imparted to us in theory form. When I am playing a game of softball,n I would also tend to lose focus and thus would not be able to react well when the play on the field requires my cooperation sometimes.

Thus I was interested in finding out why people often get distracted and lose concentration. I would like to touch on why kids who play sports lose their focus when performing. When we play sports, we need to achieve a zone of focus so that we could succeed easier. In this state we would most likely be able to play with confidence and also perform our best. But it is no always easy to

focus our best in sports, because we sometimes do not know what to attend to, and thus we get distracted easily. People when playing sports often stumble at a few common mental game obstacles, and fall into many common traps. Athletes often focus too much on the score and statistics, dwell on their mistakes and stay stuck in the past, lose focus at the critical moments during the game because they feel pressured, nervous or worried, pay too much attention to the reactions of people watching the game, allow distractions to run wild in their minds, and have no plan for getting back on track mentally, and could even be distracted by things such as the weather.

There is also another psychological reason why we lose concentration in the things that we do. When something occurs on a frequent basis, the brain starts to create what is called a "brain map". If we do something for many times, our brain would form a brain map and we would be accustomed to a way of dealing with stuff related to the thing that is etched into a brain map. So thus when we face difficulty in dealing with new things that we feel are not very familiar, and we rather follow the way we do which is formed onto the brain map, the brain would start to lose the previous brain map and formulate another brain map that would take its place and this would require a state of calm relaxation. And the behaviour that has been agitating you when you try to fight through using the old brain map would slow down and by getting away from the brain map, and changing a new one, it reorganizes the brain and thus we would be in a state of relaxation and thus we would lose concentration at that period of time.

Lacking of concentration could also be due to the lack of iron. Iron deficiency is the most common nutrient deficiency in the world. The symptoms are irritability, poor concentration, loss of appetite and frequent colds and flu. 50 to 80% of the children in Asia are iron deficient. Iron deficiency can cause profound effects on the behaviour and development of children. Iron deficiency in childhood could cause irritability, difficulty concentrating, lethargy and minor behavioral changes. Iron is needed for producing energy from food, which is why a lack of iron can cause tiredness and a lack of energy and also poor concentration. Studies have shown that iron deficiency between the ages of nine and 24 months of age can cause an impact on the intellectual and psycho-motor development, and that a comparison of children with normal iron status and those who are iron deficient have shown that there is a significant degree of impairment in the iron deficient group. in adolescents, difficulty in concentrating is a common symptom f iron deficiency as iron carries oxygen around the body and the brain has a big demand for oxygen. Iron is essential for brain function, especially attention and memory. One study of 213 male and female adolescents found higher academic achievement scores in those with better iron status.

However, there are ways to improve our concentration. Since concentration means that we can focus on one thing, to the expulsion of all else, we have to practice one-pointedness. to improve our concentration when we are dealing with daily stuff, we have to stop trying to do several things at once, because in that way the progress of the work would be counter-productive and if we practice one-pointedness, we would develop a tremendous intensity that enables us to achieve our tasks much quicker.

We also have to learn to control our thoughts. The obstacle to concentration would be the random uninvited thoughts that enter our mind. We have to be aware that we do have the choice to welcome or reject thoughts. We are not helpless victim of our minds. We would also have to watch our thoughts and prevent ourselves following any train of thought that distracts from our concentration. When we have determination we would be able to concentrate better and thus the progress of the work could be more successful.

Sometimes, it may be difficult to concentrate on one thing for an extended time period. Thus the best solution would be to give ourselves frequent changes. The change in activity enables us to use different qualities, therefore we can maintain our powers of concentration without becoming tired of one activity.

We would also have to put attention to our physical well-being. when we are lethargic, it would be harder to concentrate. If we give high priority to our physical health, we would be able to concentrate easier.

We can also increase the iron count in the body by making sure that our diet contains enough iron, especially haem iron food such as lean beef, lamb and organ meats such as the liver, rather than choosing food sources that have non-haem iron, which are plant food such as breads, cereals, vegetables and legumes, because haem iron is easier to be absorbed by the body than non-haem iron. There should also be intake of non-haem iron because despite the low absorption rate of the iron. We should also avoid excessive intake of substances that could block the absorption of non-haem iron such as tea, coffee and fibre.

Today, I am going to talk about a recent incident of Nightingale Nursing home mistreating the patients in the Home.

The Ministry of Health had ordered Nightingale Nursing home to stop accepting new patients after a video that had been secretly filmed was broadcast on 9/6/2011. The video was filmed by a delivery man who only wants to be known as Mr Toh, who he wanted to let his mother stay with him instead of staying at a Nursing Home.

The video shown a women who was a patient in the Home, seated unclothed on a chair, and was exposed to everyone in the room. Two female staff then flung her onto the bed and when she groaned, one of the female staff slaps her. She was said to have been seated unclothed for about 30 minutes. The video went viral on the internet and drew in many criticism, also leaving many people wondering if there are also other patients who received the same abuse from the Nursing Home.

Mr Dennis tan, CEO of Ling Kwang Home for Senior Citizens in Serangoon Garden had also said that even is the patients in the nursing home is abusive to the staff, they should never react. Mr Michael Foo had also said that there should be zero tolerance for violence and staffs who have these kinds of behaviour would be repatriated and a police report would be made if needed. He also added that some of the residents are like children and they would resist the staffs' attempts to take a bath or eat medicine, and they may even hit the staff, but on no account are the staff allowed to retaliate.

I feel that such behaviour towards the patients is unacceptable. The reason why people had to pay a monthly fee to nightingale Nursing Home is for the nursing home to take good care of the patients, not to abuse them and also harm their self-pride. Most of the patients in the nursing homes are elderlies, and they are physically weaker and they need more care and positive attention as they are unable to live independently, and instead of showing care and concern, Nightingale Nursing Home had abused the patient. The nursing home may even have had a long history of abusing the patients before this secret video is released. The patient was left unclothed under a whirling fan, and other than the loss of self-pride because she is in full view of everyone in the room, she is also physically weak and she can catch a cold by sitting under a fan without adequate clothing. By flinging the patient onto the bed, the patient may even risk having broken bones. The patient would thus become irascible due to the lack of love she receives from the nursing home and could not do anything about it because the family members does not know about this.