Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Crabs


I saw this bunch of crabs when I was geocaching at Pulau Betung, a place that's located at the south western corner of Penang island. At the first glance they look like common mud crabs but they are apparently not since mud crabs live in mangrove habitat. So I decided to search on the internet to see if I could find any info about it. To my dismay, I could only see anything that's related to the study of crustaceans in this area from NUS, the National University of Singapore. Touted to be an expert in Marine Biology with a state of the art research facilities in Muka head, I couldn't find any similar guides posted on the website of USM.
It was not long ago people were creating hoo-haa about dropping in rankings of the local universities here. They came all sort of excuses why they drop in rank. Of course the most famous one is the body that evaluate the ranking is not Asian and they are more biased towards those in the west. But if you look at the list, you will find that others like Beijing University, Hsing Hwa, National University of Taiwan, NUS, Waseda, India Institute of Tech etc are all in the top 25. They are being biased? You tell me!
I am getting more and more worried about the academic future of little David. I once used to feel bad about not able to enter local U. Now, I feel blessed because I got a chance to enjoy what university life is really about in Taiwan and US! I hope I could provide such opportunity to him too.

NUS Marine life guide: http://mangrove.nus.edu.sg/pub/seashore/text/001.htm

Muka Head Research Station:http://mukahead.tripod.com/
(Take note, they don't even have their own domain name!)
Last Layout Update: 4:24 PM 9/21/2005