Friday 29 November 2013

Cambodia: Poor Education Could Cripple Business Growth


By - November 29, 2013 (The Cambodia Daily)

Low-quality education is jeopardizing business growth in Cambodia, and local graduates will not be employable in skilled jobs if the government does not quickly implement educational reforms, business executives warned Thursday at the Cambodian Market Intel 2013 seminar in Phnom Penh.

During an hourlong panel discussion among five foreign business executives and the secretary-general of the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC), the businessmen said Cambodia would struggle to attract foreign investment without improving the quality of secondary and university education.

Martin McCarthy, managing director and country representative of oil and gas conglomerate Total, said his organization has trouble finding local engineers capable of working on its projects.

“Total has its own university and courses at local universities, because university is too late. We must start reforms at ages 14 or 15with math, physics and chemistry,” Mr. McCarthy said.
“We tend to find that students spend the first two years in university finishing what they learned in high school, and then once they graduate, we have to train them again,” he said.
“We then wait another two years before sending them out on a project because they are not prepared,” he added.

An International Labor Organization (ILO) report released Thursday shows that less than half of Cambodia’s 7.2 million workers had completed primary school, while 35.5 percent had completed secondary education and just 3.8 percent had a university degree.

“The speed the country is growing at with the gross domestic product, and a middle class that needs better products and servicesis challenging,” said Rami Sharaf, CEO of RMA Cambodia, an international trade firm that brought brands such as Ford, Jaguar, Dairy Queen and Costa Coffee to Cambodia.

“With this growth, the pool of applicants and workers cannot keep up,” he said.
Mr. Sharaf said that Cambodia would struggle to compete within the Asean Economic Community, which is set to create a single market among the 10 Asean nations by 2015, if it does not take steps to make its workers more employable through high-quality education.

“We need to focus on the universities to help guide students and invest in applied sciences. What is needed here is to build the right task force within ministriesso we can have a proper roadmap to see what workers are needed. Currently, there is no proactive approach,” he said.
Sok Chenda, CDC secretary-general, said that the private sector also had a responsibility to ensure that workers are qualified.

“I’ve talked with the prime minister about this…. We take it very seriously. But education and vocational training is not a government affair alone,” Mr. Chenda said.

In response to Mr. McCarthy’s comment regarding the lack of qualified workers for Total, Mr. Chenda said there needs to be more confidence that jobs in the oil and gas sector will be available.
“How can we from the government side or parents from their side think about engineers yetwhen, for example, we don’t have enough oil and gas to provide jobs in that sector. You need to show there is more confidence in that sector first,” he said.

Mr. Chenda also said the government is drafting a new investment law, which he would make sure includes a provision requiring investors to train their employees.
“Investors must provide proper training to do something for vocational training. We will add it to the new law,” he said.

Grant Knuckey, CEO of ANZ Royal bank, who moderated the panel discussion, said jobs in the banking sector have increased 20 percent in the past year, and to keep up, he is leading an initiative with the Association of Banks in Cambodia to train future bank staff.
“People are coming into the sector without vocational skillsfinancial analysis, risk analysis…. We aim to recreate an efficient body to provide fundamental-level training for entry-level bankers,” he said.

Gordon Peters, managing partner of Emerging Markets Consulting and another panelist at the discussion, said his company has been working with the ILO to conduct a regional study on employers’ views of their staff.

Mr. Peters said that a majority of employers said that recent college graduates were not equipped with the skills they needed for employment.

“Preliminary data in Cambodia show 20 to 30 percent of firms are reporting college graduates don’t have the necessary skills to meet their needs,” Mr. Peters said.

Cambodia: ILO: women still lag behind in education



Despite making some gains, Cambodian women continue to fall well short of their male counterparts when it comes to education and position in the labour market, a study released yesterday by the International Labor Organization reports.

Men account for just five per cent more of Cambodia’s approximately 7.4 million-person workforce, but earn about $25 per month more than women, the study says.

That disparity is likely linked to inequality in education received, said Ros Sopheap, executive director of NGO Gender and Development for Cambodia.

“There are some changes if you compare to 10 years before, but the changes have not come as far as we want,” Sopheap said yesterday. “In Cambodia, they believe men have an important role in the family to study higher education.… Girls are encouraged to stop studying, to contribute to the household income.”

The ILO’s Labour Force Report, which surveyed Cambodia’s labour market and child labour last year, says that more than 1.14 million women reported never having attended school. That figure is more than double that of men surveyed.

Reasons the women provided to surveyors for never attending school fall closely in line with Sopheap’s hypothesis: 12.7 per cent said their parents would not allow it, the study reported. Other reasons included the inability to pay for schooling and living too far from a school.

Although more women than men have completed primary school (by a margin of more than 525,000), they account for only 43 per cent of the Kingdom’s secondary school graduates and 32 per cent of those who completed university.

A decreasing ratio of women to men attending school from primary education to higher levels places them in a more vulnerable position when they enter the workforce, Sopheap said.
“When you get higher education, you’re not subject to exploitation,” Sopheap said. Cambodia’s garment industry provides an example of women’s precarious position in the labour market, she added.

More than 80 per cent of Cambodia’s unionised garment workers are women, according to ILO’s report. But factories are known country-wide to offer poor working conditions where fainting is endemic and the $75 per month minimum salary falls well below the Asia Floor Wage Alliance of $281 per month.

But despite the numbers, women who never attend or drop out of school are largely aware that education begets more opportunities, and want to further their education, Sopheap said.
A rising literacy rate among working-age (15 years or older) Cambodians, may reflect this desire. The Kingdom saw a two per cent increase of literate workers according to the report, but the largest increase in this category came from rural women.

Malaysia: Federal Court Dismisses Ex-USM Student's Application For Leave To Appeal (University and Political Rights)

Source: BERNAMA (National News Agency of Malaysia)

PUTRAJAYA, Nov 28 (Bernama) -- It's the end of the road for a former Universiti Sains Malaysia student to pursue her legal challenge on the constitutionality of a section in the Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 (UUCA), in a bid to clear her school record of disciplinary misconduct.

This is because Soh Sook Hwa, 31, Thursday failed in her attempt to obtain leave from the Federal Court here to appeal against the decisions of the High Court and Court of Appeal which were not in her favour.

Soh, a former communications student, was given a reprimand and fined RM200 by the university's disciplinary board who found her guilty on Dec 2, 2004 of breaching the UUCA for allegedly campaigning for Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) during the 2004 general election.

A five-member Federal Court panel chaired by Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak Tan Sri Richard Malanjum unanimously rejected her application to be given the nod to appeal.

In his decision, Malanjum said leave could not be granted to Soh to appeal as she failed to satisfy the threshold requirement of Section 96 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964.

Also presiding on the panel were Federal Court judges Tan Sri Abdull Hamid Embong, Tan Sri Suriyadi Halim Omar, Datin Paduka Zaleha Zahari and Datuk Jeffrey Tan Kok Wha.

Soh, currently a personal assistant to Sungai Siput Member of Parliament Dr Michael Jeyakumar, filed a judicial review application on Aug 16, 2005 to challenge Section 15 of the UUCA which bars students from being affiliated with political parties and associations.

She also sought for a mandamus order to quash the higher education minister's decision in disallowing her appeal to set aside the university's disciplinary board's decision to reprimand and fine her.

She named the higher education minister as respondent in her judicial review application.

On June 4, 2010, the high court in Kuala Lumpur dismissed Soh's judicial review application after ruling that she did not have grounds to challenge Section 15 of the act as it had since been amended in 2009.

Soh lost her appeal at the Court of Appeal on April 19, this year which ruled that her appeal was academic because Section 15 had been amended.

Section 15 was subsequently, repealed last year and replaced with a new Section 15.

Soh graduated in 2005 and is currently the deputy treasurer of Parti Sosialis Malaysia.

She was represented by lawyer Ang Hean Leng while Senior Federal Counsel Noor Hisham Ismail acted for the minister.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Big Brother is watching closely



The United States taps the telephones and monitors the emails of everyone in this region.
No one is immune: not you, not me, not Prime Minister Hun Sen or opposition leader Sam Rainsy.
We know it because of the revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, now in exile in Moscow.

As The New York Times noted this month: “The NSA has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest, now or in the future, should be done.”

It called the NSA “an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets”.

In this way, Washington monitors not only communications from dodgy regimes like Myanmar and Vietnam, but also from treaty allies like the Philippines and Thailand.

In Phnom Penh, the NSA’s Special Collection Service operates out of locked rooms in the massive US Embassy near Wat Phnom, where it snags all Cambodian messages and those from Laos and Vietnam.

Perhaps it’s not unexpected nor anything to fret about.

As Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador, wrote in The Guardian: “How serious is the invasion of privacy? The NSA can vacuum up huge quantities of data, but that does not mean it is useful.”

He added: “Most of us lead lives that are of no interest to any intelligence agency and, even for people of interest, most conversations and email are of no intelligence value.”

Well, maybe, but let us pause a moment and appreciate that while what Galbraith said has some validity, it is also undeniable that many people do lead lives of great interest.

Recently, the Bangkok Post pondered the probability that Washington listens to Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s phone conversations.

It concluded that US President Barack Obama could well “have received details of confidential conversations before his trip to Thailand last year”.

Big deal, you may say; but think again and forget the boring political policy talk and consider more portentous personal issues.

For instance, after eavesdropping on Hun Sen and his ministers and election officials, as well as on Sam Rainsy and his men, the US will know for sure whether the July election result was fixed.
It will also know whether Foreign Minister Hor Namhong really did show a draft of the final ASEAN Ministerial Meeting communiqué to the Chinese for approval last July.

Likewise, the US spy agency will be aware of just how involved the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was with the beautiful Mongolian model Altantuya Shaaribuu, who was subsequently murdered.

In fact, they will hold the answer to many rumours, such as whether the alleged flirtation of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi with the young MP-elect David Hla Myint did cause the revered party strategist Kyi Maung to quit.

And they will know for sure if the 2010 assassination of the renegade Thai General “Seh Daeng”, who backed anti-government Red Shirt protests, was the work of army snipers based in the Dusit Thani Hotel.

Such information is invaluable to a foreign power. It is the ultimate deterrent and the ultimate enforcer: Do what I say or be prepared for unsavory revelations.

An example of how it works is now unfolding in the Philippines, where the NSA has long had the dope on every political figure, including the veteran leader of the Senate, Juan Ponce Enrile.

Right now, Washington is keen to station troops once again in the country; but while President Benigno Aquino backs the idea, Enrile does not.

Suddenly, there are revelations that Enrile has stolen public funds and he is charged with plunder. Where did the information come from?

And will the charges be dropped if he stops objecting to US troops coming back?
It’s a potent reminder to all leaders that someone is watching, and if they do something naughty, it may be revealed. And that’s no bad thing.
 

បង​ធំ​កំពុង​តែ​តាម​ដាន​យ៉ាង​យក​ចិត្ត​ទុក​ដាក់

Thursday 31 October 2013

9 things you should consider before embarking on a PhD: The ideal research program you envision is not what it appears to be

If you are planning to apply for a PhD program, you're probably getting advice from dozens of students, professors, administrators your parents and the Internet. Sometimes it's hard to know which advice to focus on and what will make the biggest difference in the long-run. So before you go back to daydreaming about the day you accept that Nobel Prize, here are nine things you should give serious thought to. One or more of these tips may save you from anguish and help you make better decisions as you embark on that path to a PhD.

1. Actively seek out information about PhD programs

Depending on your undergraduate institution, there may be more or less support to guide you in selecting a PhD program – but there is generally much less than when you applied to college.
On the website of my physics department, I found a page written by one of my professors, which listed graduate school options in physics and engineering along with resources to consult. As far as I know, my career center did not send out much information about PhD programs. Only after applying to programs did I find out that my undergraduate website had a link providing general information applicable to most PhD programs. This is the kind of information that is available all over the Internet.

So don't wait for your career center or department to lay out a plan for you. Actively seek it out from your career center counselors, your professors, the Internet — and especially from alumni from your department who are in or graduated from your desired PhD program. First-hand experiences will almost always trump the knowledge you get second-hand.

2. A PhD program is not simply a continuation of your undergraduate program.

Many students don't internalize this idea until they have jumped head-first into a PhD program. The goal is not to complete an assigned set of courses as in an undergraduate program, but to develop significant and original research in your area of expertise. You will have required courses to take, especially if you do not have a master's degree yet, but these are designed merely to compliment your research and provide a broad and deep knowledge base to support you in your research endeavors.

At the end of your PhD program, you will be judged on your research, not on how well you did in your courses. Grades are not critical as long as you maintain the minimum GPA requirement, and you should not spend too much time on courses at the expense of research projects. Graduate courses tend to be designed to allow you to take away what you will find useful to your research more than to drill a rigid set of facts and techniques into your brain.

3. Take a break between your undergraduate education and a PhD program.

You are beginning your senior year of college, and your classmates are asking you if you are applying to graduate school. You think to yourself, "Well, I like studying this topic and the associated research, and I am going to need a PhD if I want to be a professor or do independent research, so I might as well get it done as soon as possible." But are you certain about the type of research you want to do? Do you know where you want to live for the next five years? Are you prepared to stay in an academic environment for nine years straight?

Many people burn out or end up trudging through their PhD program without a thought about what lies outside of or beyond it. A break of a year or two or even more may be necessary to gain perspective. If all you know is an academic environment, how can you compare it to anything else? Many people take a job for five or more years before going back to get their PhD.
It is true though that the longer you stay out of school, the harder it is to go back to an academic environment with lower pay and a lack of set work hours. A one-year break will give you six months or so after graduation before PhD applications are due. A two-year gap might be ideal to provide time to identify your priorities in life and explore different areas of research without having school work or a thesis competing for your attention.

Getting research experience outside of a degree program can help focus your interests and give you a leg up on the competition when you finally decide to apply. It can also help you determine whether you will enjoy full-time research or if you might prefer an alternative career path that still incorporates science, for example, in policy, consulting or business — or a hybrid research job that combines scientific and non-scientific skills.

I will be forever grateful that I chose to do research in a non-academic environment for a year between my undergraduate and PhD programs. It gave me the chance to get a feel for doing nothing but research for a full year. Working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the Space Division, I was the manager of an optics lab, performing spectroscopic experiments on rocks and minerals placed in a vacuum chamber. While my boss determined the overall experimental design, I was able to make my own suggestions for experiments and use my own discretion in how to perform them. I presented this research at two national conferences as well — a first for me. I was also able to learn about other research being performed there, determine which projects excited me the most, and thus narrow down my criteria for a PhD program.

4. Your current area of study does not dictate what you have to study in graduate school.

You might be studying the function and regulation of membrane proteins or doing a computational analysis of the conductivity of different battery designs, but that doesn't mean your PhD project must revolve around similar projects. The transition between college or another research job to a PhD program is one of the main transitions in your life when it is perfectly acceptable to completely change research areas.

If you are doing computation, you may want to switch to lab-based work or vice versa. If you are working in biology but have always had an interest in photonics research, now is the time to try it out. You may find that you love the alternative research and devote your PhD to it, you might hate it and fall back on your previous area of study — or you may even discover a unique topic that incorporates both subjects.

One of the best aspects of the PhD program is that you can make the research your own. Remember, the answer to the question "Why are you doing this research?" should not be "Well, because it's what I've been working on for the past few years already."While my undergraduate research was in atomic physics, I easily transitioned into applied physics and materials science for my PhD program and was able to apply much of what I learned as an undergraduate to my current research. If you are moving from the sciences to a non-scientific field such as social sciences or humanities, this advice can still apply, though the transition is a bit more difficult and more of a permanent commitment.

5. Make sure the PhD program has a variety of research options, and learn about as many research groups as possible in your first year.

Even if you believe you are committed to one research area, you may find that five years of such work is not quite what you expected. As such, you should find a PhD program where the professors are not all working in the same narrowly focused research area. Make sure there are at least three professors working on an array of topics you could imagine yourself working on.

In many graduate programs, you are supposed to pick a research advisor before even starting. But such arrangements often do not work out, and you may be seeking a new advisor before you know it. That's why many programs give students one or two semesters to explore different research areas before choosing a permanent research advisor.

In your first year, you should explore the research of a diverse set of groups. After touring their labs, talking to the students, or sitting in on group meetings, you may find that this group is the right one for you.

In addition, consider the importance of who your research advisor will be. This will be the person you interact with regularly for five straight years and who will have a crucial influence on your research. Do you like their advising style? Does their personality mesh with yours? Can you get along? Of course, the research your advisor works on is critical, but if you have large disagreements at every meeting or do not get helpful advice on how to proceed with your research, you may not be able to succeed. At the very least, you must be able to handle your advisor's management of the lab and advising style if you are going to be productive in your work.

The Harvard program I enrolled in has professors working on research spanning from nanophotonics to energy materials and biophysics, covering my wide range of interests. By spending time in labs and offices informally chatting with graduate students, I found an advisor whose personality and research interests meshed very well with me. Their genuine enthusiasm for this advisor and their excitement when talking about their research was the best input I could have received.

6. Location is more important than you think — but name recognition is not.

At the Asgard Irish Pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Andy Greenspon talks with fellow graduate students at an Ask for Evidence workshop organized by Sense About Science. (Photo by Alison Bert)

At the Asgard Irish Pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Andy Greenspon talks with fellow graduate students from Harvard and MIT at an Ask for Evidence workshop organized by Sense About Science. He grew up near Boston and chose to go to graduate school there. (Photo by Alison Bert)

The first consideration in choosing a PhD program should be, "Is there research at this university that I am passionate about?" After all, you will have to study this topic in detail for four or more years. But when considering the location of a university, your first thought should not be, "I'm going to be in the lab all the time, so what does it matter if I'm by the beach, in a city, or in the middle of nowhere." 
 
Contrary to popular belief, you will have a life outside of the lab, and you will have to be able to live with it for four or more years. Unlike when you were an undergraduate, your social and extracurricular life will revolve less around the university community, so the environment of the surrounding area is important. Do you need a city atmosphere to be productive? Or is your ideal location surrounded by forests and mountains or by a beach? Is being close to your family important? Imagine what it will be like living in the area during the times you are not doing research; consider what activities will you do and how often will you want to visit family.

While many of the PhD programs that accepted me had research that truly excited me, the only place I could envision living for five or more years was Boston, as the city I grew up near and whose environment and culture I love, and to be close to my family.

While location is more important than you think, the reputation and prestige of the university is not. In graduate school, the reputation of the individual department you are joining — and sometimes even the specific research group you work in — are more important. There, you will develop research collaborations and professional connections that will be crucial during your program and beyond. When searching for a job after graduation, other scientists will look at your specific department, the people you have worked with and the research you have done.

7. Those time management skills you developed in college? Develop them further.

After surviving college, you may think you have mastered the ability to squeeze in your coursework, extracurricular activities and even some sleep. In a PhD program, time management reaches a whole new level. You will not only have lectures to attend and homework to do. You will have to make time for your research, which will include spending extended periods of time in the lab, analyzing data, and scheduling time with other students to collaborate on research.

Also, you will most likely have to teach for a number of semesters, and you will want to attend any seminar that may be related to your research or that just peaks your interest. To top it all off, you will still want to do many of those extracurricular activities you did as an undergraduate. While in the abstract, it may seem simple enough to put this all into your calendar and stay organized, you will find quickly enough that the one hour you scheduled for a task might take two or three hours, putting you behind on everything else for the rest of the day or forcing you to cut other planned events. Be prepared for schedules to go awry, and be willing to sacrifice certain activities. For some, this might be sleep; for others, it might be an extracurricular activity or a few seminars they were hoping to attend. In short, don't panic when things don't go according to plan; anticipate possible delays and be ready to adapt.

8. Expect to learn research skills on the fly – or take advantage of the training your department or career center offers.

This may be the first time you will have to write fellowship or grant proposals, write scientific papers, attend conferences, present your research to others, or even peer-review scientific manuscripts. From my experience, very few college students or even PhD students receive formal training on how to perform any of these tasks. Usually people follow by example. But this is not always easy and can be quite aggravating sometimes. So seek out talks or interactive programs offered by your department or career center. The effort will be well worth it when you realize you've become quite adept at quickly and clearly explaining your research to others and at outlining scientific papers and grant proposals.

Alternatively, ask a more experienced graduate student or your advisor for advice on these topics. In addition, be prepared for a learning curve when learning all the procedures and processes of the group you end up working in. There may be many new protocols to master, whether they involve synthesizing chemicals, growing bacterial cells, or aligning mirrors on an optical table. In addition, the group may use programming languages or data analysis software you are unfamiliar with.

Don't get discouraged but plan to spend extra effort getting used to these procedures and systems. After working with them regularly, they will soon become second nature. When I first started my job at Johns Hopkins, I felt overwhelmed by all the intricacies of the experiment and definitely made a few mistakes, including breaking a number of optical elements. But by the end of my year there, I had written an updated protocol manual for the modifications I had made to the experimental procedures and was the "master" passing on my knowledge to the next person taking the job.

9. There are no real breaks.

In a stereotypical "9-to-5" job, when the workday is over or the weekend arrives, you can generally forget about your work. And a vacation provides an even longer respite. But in a PhD program, your schedule becomes "whenever you find time to get your work done." You might be in the lab during regular work hours or you might be working until 10 p.m. or later to finish an experiment. And the only time you might have available to analyze data might be at 1 a.m. Expect to work during part of the weekend, too. Graduate students do go on vacations but might still have to do some data analysis or a literature search while away.

As a PhD student, it might be hard to stop thinking about the next step in an experiment or that data sitting on your computer or that paper you were meaning to start. While I imagine some students can bifurcate their mind between graduate school life and everything else, that's quite hard for many of us to do. No matter what, my research lies somewhere in the back of my head. In short, your schedule is much more flexible as a PhD student, but as a result, you never truly take a break from your work.

While this may seem like a downer, remember that you should have passion for the research you work on (most of the time), so you should be excited to think up new experiments or different ways to consider that data you have collected. Even when I'm lying in bed about to fall asleep, I am sometimes ruminating about aspects of my experiment I could modify or what information I could do a literature search on to gain new insights. A PhD program is quite the commitment and rarely lives up to expectations – but it is well worth the time and effort you will spend for something that truly excites you.

Opinion: Confucius Institute Enhances Chinese Language Education, Cultural Exchange in NW Cambodia

  Please read from the Phnom Penh Post Please read from the Cambodianess  Confucius institutes have been playing a vital role in promoting C...