Jφss Sticks Tuition Centre

These days, being a blog awards finalist comes with great responsibility and … umm … extra tasks.

Just when Miss Loi was coming to terms with the great timing of Omy.sg’s request for “two pictures of your hand, doing anything you think is symbolic of blogging” (which arrived right after she removed her nail art), in came another request for a short email interview:

Click to enlarge.

Even though she’s been pretty busy these couple of weeks (hence the lower frequency of blog posts – hopefully this will change soon), being the archetypical goody-two-shoe award nominee that she is, Miss Loi shall nonetheless strive to fulfill this obligation in the best manner that she can …

1. How long have you been blogging and why did you start blogging?

Looking through the archives (i.e. the Ten-Year Series portion on the bottom-left of this blog), you’ll find that the total number of posts add up to 191 (including this post).

Actually “blogging” can be further split in two x–y components i.e.

x: thinking of what to write
{x: 1 hour ≤ x ≤ 3 hours each across 3 days, x ∈ R}
y: the actual writing/copy-and-pasting/images creation process
{y: 1 hour ≤ x ≤ 5 hours, y ∈ R}

So taking the average values of x and y to be approximately 4.5 hrs and 2.5 hrs respectively, and multiplying by the number of posts, you’ll get:

∴ How long has Miss Loi been blogging
= (4.5+2.5) hrs × 191 = 1337 hrs (55.7 days)

As since this blog started 560 days ago (at the time of writing), blogging has taken up roughly 47.75/561 = 9.93% (correct to 3 significant figures) of her life (which is about right in terms of work-life balance 😉 )

As for why she started blogging, let’s just say that a Darth Vader-ish voice echoed suddenly in her head on one fateful day … 😉

Note: Blogging time excludes the time spent on replying comments.

2. How do you feel to be in the running as one of the finalists in the first Singapore Blog Awards? What do you think is your chance of winning?

Ans to Part 1:

Since being selected as a finalist, the shape of Miss Loi’s lips can be expressed by the function:

f(x) = ax², where a > 0 😀

It’s now up to voters and the judges to increase the value of that coefficient a to as high as possible, but not too high as her mouth would then start to look a bit weird.

But please, please she begs you not to let a fall to below zero!

Ans to Part 2:

According to the judging criteria, it’s 70% to the judges and 30% to the voters.

Since the judges are supposed to be impartial and not be influenced by the results of the voting, we shall assume that winning the votes (V) and being picked by the judges (J) are two mutually exclusive events.

Now to calculate the chances of Jφss Sticks winning, we need to consider all the possibilities:

Jφss Sticks wins the votes AND being picked by the judges i.e. P(V)P(J)
Jφss Sticks loses the votes but got picked by the judges with judging margin (m^j) > vote margin (m^v) i.e. [1-P(V)](P(m^j > m^v|J)
Jφss Sticks NOT picked by the judges but wins the votes with vote margin > the judging margin i.e. P(m^v > m^j|V)[1-P(J)]

So to obtain the grand probability of Jφss Sticks winning P(W), we need to add up all the possibilities above i.e.

P(W) = P(V)P(J) + [1-P(V)](P(m^j > m^v|J) + P(m^v > m^j|V)[1-P(J)]

Which is non-trivial as without mind-reading abilities to extract more data from the judges’/voters’ minds, we won’t be able to calculate P(V) and P(J), let alone the *conditional probabilities in the cases mentioned above.

ARE YOU SURE THIS QUESTION IS IN THE SYLLABUS?!

*Not in syllabus – O-Level students are advised not to be alarmed.

3. Who do you think are the strongest bloggers in the category you are nominated for and why?

Miss Loi’s Temple has been heavily bombarded by flying teapots all week! You say leh?!

But having said that, Miss Loi likes the designs in Dandy Angel‘s collection very much 🙂

4. Name some of the bloggers whom you look up to and why (need not be in the running for the Singapore Blog Awards, and can mention overseas bloggers too)?

*STERN MOOD ON*

At this point, Miss Loi would like to pay a special tribute to a teacher blogger known as Stressed Teacher, whose blog was unceremoniously taken down without warning earlier this year under mysterious circumstances.

His frank writings had provided an enlightening insight into the daily working lives of teachers in Singapore, beyond the veil of glossy brochures depicting smiling noble teachers teaching in surreal classes of well-behaved students.

In a nutshell, his blog should have been compulsory reading to all aspiring teachers and to all who wonder why Singapore is a Tuition Nation.

*STERN MOOD OFF*

 Your prediction for the winners in each of the 7 categories:
 Best Youth Blog ?
 Best Design Blog ?
 Best Blog Shop ?
 Most Entertaining Blog ?
 Most Insightful Blog ?
 Best Individual Blog ?
 Best Photo Blog ?

Oh heavens you want Miss Loi to go through all that probability calculations again?!

Here ends Miss Loi’s ‘short’ OMY email interview.

*Rushes off to save The Temple from the massive attack of flying teapots by getting as many people as possible to vote daily for Jφss Sticks*