Random Question - 2

This is another question that I was asked but was unable to answer. I will like to share the question to test your understand.

Assuming you are running on a track at speed V1 for the first lap. Now, you are running the second lap at V2. What should be the speed V2 (In terms of V1 or independently) so that the average speed is 2V1 (2 * V1)?

Hint (Hightlight to see):
Average speed = Total distance / total time

Random Question - 1

I was asked by my colleague this question but I thought it will be interesting to share.

The profit of selling 15 oranges is the selling price of 5 oranges. What is the profit margin of selling 1 orange?

Have fun!

Overseas Community Involvement Programme

I suddenly felt like writing this topic as I remembered how people usually promote it as helping the less fortunate overseas. While it might be true that it helps them but I question the true value of these Overseas Community Involvement Programme (OCIP) or also known as Overseas Volunteering Programme.

Background
When I was 15 years old or Secondary 3, I joined one of the trip which is to go Chiang Mai, Thailand. Our aim was to teach the children English and so on. The trip was supposed to take place for a week. However, the trip was cancelled due to some natural disasters that either took place or was about to happen (I forgot) and our teachers decided to cancel the trip for the sake of our safety. Hence, I did not manage to go for the trip. Being young and naïve, I sought for similar chances in future where I was in Junior College as I really thought that I, will help bring about change to people's lives, no matter how small it is. However, after looking at the itinerary of the trips, I found out that sometimes, a trip of 7 days, will have about 3 days of Rest and Recreation (RnR). I wondered if that is to trip to go overseas and play or is it to really help the community. After asking people for their experiences, I found out that it is true that the trip is too short to help others. Sometimes trips such as helping the people to dig wells or to build toilets, ended up having the locals to do themselves as we are not experienced with these and the trip is too short to do anything significant. Overall, the trip seemed more like an eye opener for people like us that are born into more privileged familes rather than doing anything meaningful to help. In the end, I did not go for any OCIP trips and I guess I cannot criticise or provide much comments on the trips as there will certainly be trips which are helpful to the community but in my opinion, many just seem to be excuses for more overseas exposure and a means to boost the resume. In the end, I chose to join the Interact Club to teach underprivileged children in Singapore every Saturday but I feel that I did not do a good job as a tutor and I might have ruined their chance of having a better tutor for a year. So sorry for my shortcomings.

Therefore, I feel that people who do OCIP for the sake of doing or feeling that they do help out with the community just be exposed to this viewpoint where hopefully they will not just do these volunteering work as a one off event but consistently help so that they will be able to provide a greater help for the communities in need. In addition, I would apologise if I hit any nerve here due to this view point but I need to voice it out after seeing all the OCIP trip fund raising and so on as I feel that the funds will be used to fund the student's trip to have fun rather than the actual help given. 

Amount of Time Wasted Everyday

I need to type this post as I realise that I waste a lot of time everyday on something that I find it very hard to reduce - NEWS READING. People do tell me that it is good that I read a lot of news and I am kept up to date with the current affairs which I do think so too. However, I doubt it is very healthy to spend sometimes more than 3h reading news. Most of the time after reading, I will forget the majority of the news and only some that are more significant are remembered. Hence, I find it a waste of time but I cannot seem to reduce the amount of news that I consume.

Time I spent every weekday:
Newsloop - I tried to reduce my browsing by reading only Personal Finance and Business
The Newpaper - I read whatever that is interesting but sometimes there isn't any (not much news)
Straits Times - I read Technology, Business, Singapore, Asia and World (spend the most time here)
Estimated total time spent: 2-3 hours

Time I spent every weekend:
Newsloop - I tried to reduce my browsing by reading only Personal Finance and Business
The Newpaper - I read whatever that is interesting but sometimes there isn't any (not much news)
Straits Times - I read Technology, Business, Singapore, Asia and World (spend the most time here)
Asiaone - Read Singapore, China, Asia, World, Business, Digital (cover the ones that are not present in the other sites)
Channel News Asia - Technology, Business, Singapore (cover the ones that are not covered in the other sites, especially Technology and Business where Straits Times focus more on Singapore ones and CNA focus on the happenings in the world) I managed to convince myself not to read the Asia and World news here as it will take too much time.
Estimated total time spent: 4-5 hours (mainly on Saturday as Sunday does not have much news)

Things that I am happy that I managed to cut down on:
Instagram - Browse everyday but not much time spent on it
Facebook - Browse only once a week (I still find it too much though)
9gag - Broswe everyday (need to cut down more)

Looking at the time I spent everyday, I think I need help. However, I do not have a solution to reduce the time spent in these sites. I have other better things to do but it seems that I cannot function without reading news in the morning. Does anyone have any suggestion?

Learning Programming

Trying to learn programming is very daunting as there are a lot of things out there to learn but most of the time we do not know where to start and where to continue. Ususally, we are used to the structured nature of our education system where we know after learning A, we learn B, then to C and so on. However, when trying to learn on our own, such structures do not exist and we will have to find out on our own. It is either we take a major/minor in Computer Science or we ask someone who has experence to guide us. For now, it is hard for people to guide if they do not know what exactly you want to do. Do you want to learn Web, app making and so on? Different things uses different languages and you will have to start somewhere. A good thing about university is that it forces engineering student to learn basic C so that we can understand other languages more easily. However, trying to proceed from there seems daunting to me as I myself do not know what I want to do and hence what I need to learn Do I learn everything? (Quite impossible given the limited time that I have.)

I have tried to do some programming with my friend but I realised that what seemed easy to him is very hard for me as I totally do not understand how the thing works. Reading documentation is not helping when I do not understand. I really wonder how am I supposed to be able to catch up to at least be good enough to understand and do some simple code rather than just googling and copy pasting without really understanding the code. (This is a bad habit of mine) Also, sometimes people just conveniently say, "just google". Yes, googling may be the fastest way to go about it but sometimes, when you google something, you are unsure if it is the right thing other than trying it and wasting a lot of time, also, when you google, you might realised you don't know another 1,000 things and more googling is done and you get more confused. I might sound whiny but I do feel that even though a lot of people struggled through by googling and learning through googling, it will take too much time when there is little time available.

So now here I am confused and don't know where to start. Some of the introduction courses are too easy, and I am not sure how to proceed from here. However, I will try to commit time to learn (hopefully). This is the future, if we do not follow the current trend, future generations will overtake us and we will find ourselves useless in the job market as the younger generations are exposed to programming in school.

Further Studies

During internship, I am slowly being exposed to the further study segment. Masters? PhD?

Looking at how indecisive I am currently, it is not easy to come up with a decision so soon as I have no idea if I want to further study in Mechanical Engineering or move on to something else. However, it is one aspect of my life which I will consider as long as the tuition fees are sponsored.

Thoughts on Industrial Attachment/Internship

I have always thought that people are just claiming that Industrial Attachment/Internship is a good part of your university process because it exposes you to the working world but it might not offer much of a good working experience due to the negative experiences shared by others about their internship life. A few examples include those mundane work like photocopying and things that do not teach you much about the company or the industry that you will be in. However, after going through at least half of my internship, I realise I have gained much from my company.

My company deals with product design and the department that I work with develops the mechanical part of the products. When I started university, I thought that doing product design and development will be very interesting due to the fact that you will be able to use your imaginations to create products and hopefully not much restrictions will be placed on you. Imagine developing the next cool thing such as an IPhone. However, I realise the product development part is not as glamourous as I thought due to the need for a lot of qualification to pass some standards to suit the needs of the consumers and also to ensure that the products do not break down easily. Hence, after the initial design phase, a lot of time is spent on testing where it is really mundane and time consuming. Furthermore, due to the large size of the company, softwares are used to ensure that the products have a certain structure to them so as to ensure everyone conform to the same standards, but that also meant more administrative work has to be done. However, being a sort of large company, they have a lot of good practices such as proper documentation so that the future new workers or other colleagues will be able to pick up the problems and solutions faced by other people. In addition, you get to see how they work together with different departments but another flaw is the seemingly endless amount of meetings that the employees have to attend, reducing their producitivity.

Coming back to my point, going through this internship made me reconsider my choice of joining the product development route as the amount of administrative work and tests are mind numbing. All of the sudden, I realised that I do not know what I want to do in life in the future again. Do I want to continue in the field of product development? Do I still want to continue doing mechanical work? I am not so sure anymore