Second chance for Charity?

Ever since the NKF fraud came to light, steps have been taken to guarantee that the organizations have proper checks to ensure the funds raised are totally put into good use and not embezzled by the chairman.

In the past, organization that initiate fund raising appeared to be good people who put others’ needs before self, and do not mind taking their own time off to collect funds for the less fortunate. However over the years, the problem started surfacing as the human greed proves to be unable to withstand the temptation of having a large sum of money in their care.

Fund raising organized by charity are supposed to be of a good cause, but the situation now is that people no longer believe in flag days. They are only willing to donate money to any organization, after carrying some sort of verification. In fact, the public is encouraged to enquire about the organization that approaches them for donations. They also have to ask for proof of authorization. This is all to ensure that people will not get con by them.

The problem with charity is that nowadays, people rarely trust the organizations whole-heartedly; for fear that their hard earned money donated will be misused by the so call fund raisers. This cripple the system of fund raising in public, as the mistrust built up will eventually lead to a series of trouble brewed for the people.

Personally, I have been doing flags days since 2003, but today; I noted a drastic change to the response of the public. In the past, people seldom enquire about the authenticity. Now, people get overly suspicious about the purpose of the beneficiaries of the organization. It is okay to ask about them, but some end up losing faith in every single one of them, and even those with the proper procedures carried out by the dog watchers.

In the process of this mindless fight, the true people in need may be at the losing end, as they are the ones suffering, not the corporations that try to raise funds. The needy that do not get the required treatments, will then become the burden of the society. Singapore is not a welfare state and since we do not try to help the organizations, the government will have to do more for them and in this way, the tax imposed on the general public may also increase.

It is therefore essential to set up a trusting society that is able to help both the people in need and also the organizations such that they will not be tempted into pocketing the money. This is what the watchdog is for.

As there is a guardian in charge of overseeing the whole process, they are less likely to be having itchy fingers and end up doing all sorts of things. With the precautions set up, there will be more transparency and the public will tend to trust in organization, in turn they will be more willing to donate money.

Under good leadership, the general public can be assured that the money that they donate will be put into good use. The faith will then be increased such that they will be more willing to donate. Those who really need help will then receive the required aid.

The cooperation between organizers and public should be maintained to ensure a cohesive society whereby the people of Singapore will leave in trust and harmony. The fund raisers should follow the ethics, and keep to their promises, while the donors should show their continual support for them. All this is essential to ensure the progress of Singapore.

Virginia Tech Massacre

16 April 2007, this would be a devastating memory for human history, and its implications would take years to dissolve. Meanwhile, debates will continue, discussing why he killed 33 hopeful lives, including his own.

Despite the heated arguments on his actions deeming what he did as either forgivable or unpardonable, people do not realize the hurts of the victim's families and friends. Let's face it. We may know the name and face of the killer, but of the 32 victims, how many do we know exactly?

These 32 lives are each, a budding flame of hope. Many have great aspirations, and inspiring lives. For one, there is Liviu Librescu, who endured through the Holocaust as a teenager, and during Monday's shooting, he used his own body to block the door, buying time for students to flee. This heroic act is commendable, but the family members must have felt desolated.

Human are essentially selfish creatures, when trouble boils, few are willing to sacrifice themselves for others. However, those who do so, often do it on the expense of the family members. Although seen as hero in the eyes of those saved, he would more or less be blamed and called selfish or dumb by the family. It may seem ironic to call a selfless hero selfish, but that is often the case. Being selfless, they gave up their lives for the victims, but have they spared a thought about their family, which needs them? Not all family members are able to understand, and some of them do not forgive the people that the hero did help.

As outsiders, we may see it clearly, the hero puts others' need before self, and thinks that the family will feel proud of him, and will understand. However, some do not, and end up hating the hero, and those that he saved, might feel guilty as they indirectly caused his death. Ultimately the issue of whether heroes should sacrifice their lives is another big controversy on its own.

Indeed, many would argue that the killer, Cho Seung-Hui is selfish and that he should not have blamed the world, just for a few bad experiences. If we look back, we can recognize that he has actually left obvious leads to his plots. For one, he displays odd character and writes violent scripts. This alone stands as concrete evidence to his instability of his mind.
Somehow, some people around him did realized and try to help, but they did not follow up with the case, and ended up in despair instead. His cold attitude towards other led to a worsening of situation.

To me, it really is a vicious cycle. People are afraid of him, find him weird, and go all out to avoid him. Apparently, he feels that people around him did not care enough as despite his efforts to attract attention, he fails to get it. Overtime, this hard truth hit him, and he built up a mindset that people are generally insincere and fake. The more he feels that people do not care the more he tries to act in a promiscuous way. To his dismay however, this resulted in more people shunning him.

No matter what is said now, it will not alter the fact that 33 lives have been destroyed and that there is nothing we can do to revive them. What we can try to help is that, we can identify people with similar characteristics as him, make friends with them with a sincere heart. All we can do is share our love with them, and hopefully, they will learn that the world is not the evil after all. With these preventive measures done to reduce the number of depressed people around, we might be able to control and anticipate the school violence.

Even though we should befriend those who seem lonely, it is not right to just plainly be their friend. What they actually need, is a listening ear, a reliable friend with a pair of willing listening ear. If everyone in the society plays their part by making friends with a person with not much friends, we will be able to reach out to a lot of people. This, my friend, might be all it takes to avoid more lives lost.

Nowadays, the mass media do not report the news; they make the news. Discuss this with references to recent events.

Recent events, from what I see it, ranges from the latest happenings, to events that may have occurred months, or even years ago. Perception of time is a subjective issue, so what might seem to be recent enough to one, may not seem so for another person. Moreover, the scale of the incident is also a crucial point to decide if it should be classified under recent events. For instance, the discovery for a new theory in Science, made a decade ago, can be considered recent. On the other hand, buying a book a year ago would not.

In today’s context, media plays a significant role in our lives, as it tells us the happenings around the world. Besides the conventional uses, media also shapes our thinking and mentality. We tend to just absorb whatever information we rip from the news, without processing them or fully grasping the hidden intention behind it.

Our minds are being manipulated in the process of news-watching, as we go on an auto-pilot, not thinking on our own. Instead, we openly declare that we borrow ideas from TVs, newspapers, etc. This habit of human to accept things for what they are is actually the cause of downfall of human minds. We get too comfortable with having information placed before us, such that we do not bother to consider of we fully agree. There may be certain things that we do understand, yet we just do not want to exercise the juices of our processing unit to give them a thorough thought to consolidate our opinions.

Anyway, there are many examples for media which falsely plays up issues, so as to attract peoples’ attention to buy and read their news. Just to name a few, there is the “sand ban”, and the “shootings that occurred at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia".

http://www.siiaonline.org/better_than_the_ban

From this name of the website, we can clearly note the stand- ban is not right. From it, we can learn that the sand ban has some benefits as well as some negative aspects on the ban, with the negative outweighing the positive. The writer in this case, asks rhetorical questions like, why have the ban now, and if the ban it will work, going on to explore and highlight the gloom side of it.

After the ‘shooting’ of the ban, it goes on to suggest possible alternatives other than having a ban. A close analysis of the news will enable one to come to a conclusion that it is actually against the ban. As this is a Singapore’s website, it rightfully wants to escalate the problem, so the media may tend to blow things to above the real scale of problem. By doing this, it will then spur up feelings among the target audiences, and arouse a displeasure.

The point of making news instead of reporting a neutral piece is normally to propagate people towards a particular idea or belief. As it will be circulated, the content will have to be of appropriate depth, the setback is that, we cannot control the biasness of the source. We are actually required to filter off whatever information we deem as not agreeable, thus ignoring it.

Another kind of making news would be the gossips and tabloids news. There are many examples to these, when reporters seem to return to primary schools once again, as they do “composition by interpreting a series of photographs”. Unethical photographers tail movie stars and sometimes, “unintentionally” take pictures of them with some other artist of the opposite gender. You can almost be sure that if the rumour seems feasible enough, the write up will definitely be published in magazines.

http://www.hollywoodrag.com/index.php?/weblog/britney_spears_shaved_her_head/

In other cases like the case of Britney Spears who shaved her head, the media came up with many different interesting stories to why she did that, and speculated a whole lot of creative theories. They took some facts that she did shave her head, enter and drop out of rehabilitation, but they twisted these, and formed them up with their own ideas, which they eventually made into headlines. Perhaps they do not realize that the stars are also human beings who do need some privacy, and also respect.

Who in the right mind will want their own lives to be published everywhere? Yes, I do mean the nitty gritty details of where you ate for lunch, with whom you went with, and how much fat contents or the calories count. Sometimes, gossip writers tend to stretch their limits a little off, causing a whole lot of waves, regarding the incident that they blew up. This all sets to be a domino effect, as another company may read what you have written, do some editions; add in more salt, before releasing it to the public once again.

http://newsfromthewest.blogspot.com/2007/04/media-subterfuge-and-school-shootings.html

As for the school shooting incident, it may come across as natural that the gun man who shot 30 students and 2 lecturers cannot be subdued so easily. However, because of the way news is, they try to cover up the fact that the other students involved in subduing him also carry guns. And by not reporting the fact, many will not bother to link up, that the rescuers are also armed.

These are just very basic examples of how mass media make news. By only extracting the bits they want, they can actually alter meanings of quotes, or twist an incident in a way they want it to be. If they are doing this for the sake of covering up facts, it would be pointless for the news to be there. Or worse, if they are exploiting quotes from people to earn that extra bit of revenue, then the whole essence of news reporting will be going down the drain.

2) “The real innovation that Youtube provides is that --- individuals and groups can produce entertainment. The lawsuit is one of the Great Battle

I do feel that the true innovation that Youtube provides is that laymen like us are able to produce entertainment. Youtube in itself is not really a pioneer in this history of uploading videos online, as there are other websites that enable people to do so, just that they are not as popular as Youtube. However, I do not agree that which company provides the service really matter much. As long as there is one party maintaining the traffic and playing some simple roles of management, it is sufficient.

The breakthrough of this new age provided by Youtube is such that users, be it young or old, are able to upload homemade videos online, to be viewed by anyone with the access to Youtube. This freedom of uploading of content of any kind onto Youtube appeals to people the way blogs does. Though one may not see it, but Youtube is in a way, similar to online blogging. It enables people to pause for a moment, and get out of reality and enter into the virtual world.

Bloggers get to pretend to be journalists, as they report on news, or any bits and pieces of their lives. Some may also create poems or songs, hopping that by chance, people will get to hop be, and acknowledge their works. However, the crude truth is that, not all blogs are regularly read by a loyal bunch of readers. To the self-made journalist, this may not matter, as some of them do not check the number of hits on their blogs. Instead, the fun is not in the crowd of avid readers, but in the fact that they can escape with a moment of peace, not being themselves.

Similar in some ways, Youtube is a platform for self-made directors to publish their works online, to be viewed by the internet community. It does not have to be a product of famous people - Home videos from the public are popular picks as well. Lay people get to showcase their music or whatsoever talents by recording short clips of themselves, and posting it on Youtube. Some others also get together to gig and have it filmed to be flaunted online.

These people who upload the videos online are not the only ones having fun. Others who take their time off to linger on the site and video-hop will get the joy of viewing productions of people from all walks of life. This either results in them rolling on their stomach for the plain stupidity, or be convicted of some hard truth that never hit them before.

Whatever the case, this is a serious form of entertainment, as it does blast people to fame, having their videos viewed a few millions times. Some truly gifted people may even get talent scouted in the process. On the other hand, famous people are also made fun of, as their ugly actions may be caught on camera, thus posted as well. This leads to heated arguments, or even bans, as in the case of the recent issue over the 44-second film showing graffiti over the Thailand King's face was aired.

On a more serious note, Youtube has also been hosting video resumes, which are becoming the hot talks among corporations, as many companies view these before approving the people concerned to be interviewed. The quality of your resume, the way your present yourself, or even the software you used will count.

These are all arguably proper businesses. Without proper management, talents may be left unnoticed, interview would remain as a long taxing process, and the key figures of the world would be freely insulted. Thus, good leadership is essential to govern this so called ‘free zone’, where information is exchanged. With this, it leads us to yet another debate of who should govern it, and to whom the access shall be granted.

As it is now, Google invested $1.65 billion and purchased Youtube, but the management still remains in the hands of the Youtube founders. The Youtube team enables people to post any kind of videos onto the system to be viewed by all, but certain videos that are being flagged by any user will then be reviewed, and appropriate actions will be taken. For example, if any pornographic material is being put up, and flagged to catch the attention of the management, it will then be taken down swiftly. The ones that are relatively harmless may then be flagged as inappropriate, but remains on the site. Though it is so, those aged 18 and below are still denied access.

To say a system can function without a propelling force and kept at equilibrium, I would be lying through my teeth. This happens, provided it is at the best case scenario where everyone who uses the system plays a part in keeping the contents healthy. At the same time, they must abstain from pirating copyright materials. If this really happens, we will all become angels, and float around with our halos, as this is too good to be true. Not everyone will be law abiding, and thus, the need for effective management.

Note that I am just stating effective management, which is only implemented when there is healthy competition among organizations to fight for the rights to govern the system. Without any impetus input, there will not be any positive output. Since Youtube is such an established site, many would fight for the honour and prestige of running it, well, at a certain level. Competition should not be feared or avoided, as I had mentioned earlier, it simply spurs them to strive harder.

In this 21st century, we are talking about liberty, so it should only be proper that everyone to be given the opportunity to have access to whatever websites they want. For the country that are more conservative, they may then request for certain sites to be banned. It all boils down to the attitude of the people. If they are easily swayed by ideas, then the government would want to prevent their reputation from being tarnished, so it is okay to protect it.

On the whole, Youtube is indeed worth a few cents of thoughts. It highlights the needs of the new generation, which constantly seeks attention and fame. Unfortunately, certain users are not discreet, but abuse this privilege, by posting obscene content onto the free-access-zone. Therefore, leading to the desire for leadership, to control and at the same time grant the other users the safety which gives them the faith in the system. However, which leadership is behind the maintaining of system does not matter, as long as they are able to do a good job out of it. Youtube is indeed an innovative idea that brings forth a new medium of entertainment, and should be taken seriously with due respect, and authority.