What Does Merdeka Mean? Yishan Lam August 2019 Countries are the sum of lives lived within their shores. As just one such data point of a life, the Singapore story of independence has always resonated with me on a personal level. Growing up in the 1980s-90s, as income per capita…

“In the future there will be two distinct workforces, broadly made up of the under-fifties and the over-fifties respectively. These two workforces are likely to differ markedly in their needs and behaviour, and in the jobs they do. The younger group will need a steady income from a permanent job…

Spreading ‘one people, one nation’ across a greater distance It being our 52nd National Day today, I got up and after a bit of gratuitous phone-checking, remembered I needed to go to the storeroom, fish out the flag I saved from LKY’s final sendoff — that rainy day in March…

25 March 2017 2 weeks ago marked passing my 6 month mark at consultancy firm, where I’ve so far been on 3 studies, got involved in a few community initiatives, made a few friends, and spent most of my time in 3 rather different Asian cities (not including my own)…

Mayday meditations What does it mean to commemorate a day that acknowledges the contributions of workers at a time when the prospect of displacement of workers by technological advances grows increasingly real? In 2067, will we have a Robot Day, to acknowledge the contributions of our robotnik helpers, or will…

Supervising my own learning Will a robot take your job? The question gathers momentum of late. One key contribution to its rise in public consciousness comes from a 2013 study by Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne on the susceptibility of jobs to computerisation: their assessment that…

Numbering our days Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. “What next?” he said. “Shall we have to shit as we run?” Let us manage our time; we shall still have a lot left idle and ill-spent. — Montaigne French philosopher Montaigne’s retelling of Aesop in the story above sheds light across centuries on a question that concerns us still today: how well are we managing our time? This caricature of pooping-whilst-running throws into relief the dark side of our modern preoccupation with work: our tendency…

Tips for public officers commissioning design phases of work I n recent years, design has gained a foothold in government, with more public sector agencies employing design-based approaches in their innovation efforts from policy, to operations and service delivery, so as to serve their customers and constituents better. But buying…

A new reason for being The U Press, Jan 2016 What gets you out of bed in the morning? We all have things that keep us going, whether we are conscious or not of what they are. Okinawans have the term ‘ikigai’, or that which makes existence worthy, to describe…