smart ple

12 Habits of Genuinely Intelligent People.

1. They don't talk about how smart they are. They are busy growing their minds.

2. They learn best by studying what works and try it.

3. They try to figure things out themselves. They use a lot of experimentations and problem-solving approach to figure out things. 

4. They're always hunting knowledge. They focus on what they want to know, not what they already know.

5. They don't brag about what they know. They apply their knowledge instead. 

6. They connect the dots. They look for connections between dissimilar things, read across fields and disciplines.

7. They are curious and ask lots of serious questions.

8. They abstract from their experiences.

9. They seek out puzzles and paradoxes.

10. They have no problem with failure.

11. They don't try to sound smart.

12. They don't always use big words. They use the right words, when necessary, both big or simple, but focus on clarity and simplicity.

crucial sleep

TOKYO – Sleep deprivation has long been seen as a badge of honour in Japan, where people can commonly be found catching 40 winks on their daily commutes or even at work, with their fatigue deemed a measure of their diligence.

Many surveys have shown that the Japanese sleep the least among those in developed countries.

In October 2023, the Health Ministry was so alarmed by its own findings that only one in two were getting six hours of sleep a night that it issued guidelines urging people to sleep a minimum of six hours, along with other tips such as to avoid heavy meals or drinking alcohol before bedtime.

Nonetheless, there is a groundswell of social change prompted by a nascent but growing shift in lifestyle behaviour towards better personal well-being. This has catalysed a domestic sleep industry that is forecast to grow from 1.3 trillion yen (S$11.8 billion) in 2021 to 5 trillion yen by 2030.

Products that promote sleep include Tential’s Bakune eye mask, which retails for 3,850 yen, while a basic single-bed airweave mattress costs 115,500 yen.

The products go beyond mattresses and sleepwear, with companies developing sleep algorithms, supplements, and even games, including one by fan-favourite Pokemon.

There is also a loose alliance of companies that swear by the philosophy of a good night’s sleep, and have instilled a positive attitude towards sleep among their employees, such as by encouraging them to switch off and avoid excessive late-night overwork.

Studies cited by the Japanese government have shown that a lack of sleep can cost companies a loss in productivity of as much as 1.03 million yen per person a year, and is tied to increased job turnover. United States think-tank Rand has estimated that the economic loss due to sleep deprivation in Japan is as much as 15 trillion yen annually.

For individuals, not sleeping enough can lead to a vicious circle of further stress, depression, and other health problems like high blood pressure and stroke, experts have found.

As someone who has long cherished the value and benefits of quality sleep, I struggle to fathom why anyone would regard it as a necessary evil.

I wear a ring from Finnish health technology firm Oura that scores sleep quality, measures heartbeat, and tracks daily activity including number of steps taken and length of idle time. Surprisingly, in what I see as a sign of growing awareness of sleep technology, some friends and even my hairdresser either use the ring themselves, or can recognise it.

I also swear by the eye mask developed by home-grown start-up Tential, whose store in Tokyo’s Toranomon business district was doing brisk business during a recent lunchtime visit.

When I began using it more than a year ago, I noticed an immediate difference in sleep quality, waking up with my eyes more refreshed.

Value of sleep

Tential, founded in February 2018 by Mr Yutaro Nakanishi, 30, has seven stores across Japan on top of an online presence.

It sells functional recovery items, such as pyjamas – under its Bakune label – that use a proprietary fabric scientifically proven to promote blood circulation and better relaxation. They have also obtained Japanese government certification as a “home medical device”.

Professor Masaki Nishida, who heads Waseda University’s Sleep Research Institute, studied the product and found the material favourable for quality sleep.

He says: “By making it a habit to sleep while wearing recovery wear, everyone from busy businessmen to athletes can get better quality sleep, reduce stress, and achieve efficient recovery.”

Tential’s chief research and development officer Kenta Funayama, 35, is a national kick-boxer who left a top pharmaceutical firm to join the start-up in May 2022, hoping to focus on preventive care given that lack of sleep has been linked to a host of health issues.

Clothes in Tential’s Bakune series are made using a proprietary fabric which promotes blood circulation and better relaxation and, hence, deeper and more optimal sleep. PHOTO: TENTIAL/INSTAGRAM

He tells me that being an athlete makes him very sensitive to slight changes in his physical condition, which is influenced by sleep.

“Now that it is possible to track and analyse sleep, it is my personal hope that this will catalyse a mindset change towards better personal well-being and care, for society to regard sleep more holistically,” Dr Funayama says.

His colleague Shinnosuke Yoshimoto, 32, was once dismissive about sleep and blighted with issues such as serious insomnia and depression, but becoming a father changed him.

The communication director says: “I don’t want my children to experience what I went through, and better sleep is the key ingredient to a healthier and more positive society.”

A pioneering Japanese company in the sleep space is airweave, which was founded in 2004 and gained global fame at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics for its cardboard bed frames that were mocked as “anti-sex”.

Dr Kenta Funayama (left), a professional kick-boxer and Tential’s chief research and development officer, and communications chief Shinnosuke Yoshimoto in Tential’s store at Toranomon Hills in Tokyo ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Founded by Mr Motokuni Takaoka, 63, the company is again a sponsor at the Paris 2024 Games, where it will provide 16,000 fully recyclable mattresses and cardboard frames for the athletes’ village.

For the Games, each mattress is divided into three blocks – for the shoulder, waist and lower body. The thickness of the blocks – soft, moderate, firm and extra firm – can be mixed and matched according to an athlete’s needs, which are determined using artificial intelligence.

The company was born in 2004, when Mr Takaoka took over his uncle’s fishing-line business that was on the brink of bankruptcy. Having suffered a neck injury in a traffic accident in his 20s, Mr Takaoka had a eureka moment when he realised that the polyethylene material used to make fishing lines could also be used to create an interwoven mesh for sleeping on.

Published studies have shown that airweave mattresses, with their interwoven mesh, can evenly distribute body weight and regulate temperature. This was proven to help athletes run faster and build up faster reflexes, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports.

Mr Motokuni Takaoka, 63, founder of airweave, jumping on a bed sample that was contributed to the Athletes’ Village for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, in this file photo taken in 2021. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Gamification of sleep

Even telecommunications giant NTT is innovating and investing in sleep.

Just as Japan Airlines pioneered the Japan Sauna-bu Alliance of 206 companies that share a love for sweating it out, NTT is the driving force behind the “sleep network hub” Zakone that was launched in September 2022 and now has 102 members.

The Japanese word zakone (雑魚寝) literally means to sleep together on the floor in a huddle. Zakone’s community director Midori Sasaki, 35, says they had taken a leaf from the book of their sauna-loving friends.

Zakone gives businesses a platform to meet, network and discuss collaborative ideas over their shared values of a good night’s sleep. It hosts regular sleep seminars by experts, and other public events.

Ms Sasaki is among four leaders who are driving NTT’s sleep tech business, working with the start-up Brain Sleep founded by Professor Seiji Nishino of Stanford University. Together, they are building a sleep algorithm that helps users visualise their sleep quality, via a Brain Sleep Coin device that can be clipped onto pyjamas.

Her colleague Takahiro Umeda, 31, has even got himself certified as a sleep health consultant.

(From left to right) Mr Teppei Ogata, Ms Midori Sasaki and Mr Takahiro Umeda are part of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT’s sleep tech business. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Mr Umeda, who used to sleep less than five hours a day, now clocks at least eight hours every night. He ensures a better sleeping environment by using warmer-coloured lights and avoiding screens at night. He no longer feels tired in the day, even without drinking coffee.

“People hardly notice a dip in performance due to a lack of sleep, though it is easy to notice the leaps and bounds in improvement during peak performance,” he says.

I ask how he squares the fact that sleep preferences vary by person. Some may prefer a harder pillow, for instance, while others may prefer to sleep with air-conditioning on. He says that at the root of these individual variances is hard science that can be quantified, with improvements that can be tailored to each person.

NTT is monetising its sleep tech business through consultancy services to companies that are eyeing a foray into the sleep space, says team member Teppei Ogata, 35. This could be in any field, from aromatherapy and music to food and education.

An event to promote quality sleep was held in conjunction with World Sleep Day in March 2023, organised by the Zakone sleep network hub and involving 10 of its member companies. PHOTO: ZAKONE

There is an added element of gamification to promote sleep, through “missions” for users to soak in the morning sun or have a protein-rich breakfast. This, Mr Umeda says, can promote the production of the sleep hormone melatonin.

Also in the sleep space is The Pokemon Company. In July 2023, it released the Pokemon Sleep app that now has 15 million users worldwide, of whom half are in Japan. There are 65,000 registered Singapore players.

The app was developed with sleep expert Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba.

Players who use it daily can score points and learn about their sleep patterns through popular characters like Snorlax, known as the Sleeping Pokemon.

A screenshot from the Pokemon Sleep app, developed by Select Button in conjunction with The Pokemon Company. PHOTO: GAME FREAK INC

Project leader Kaname Kosugi, 35, tells me that the game has, anecdotally, helped players identify sleeping problems. The app records sounds players make during their sleep, and some players have sought professional help after realising, through the recordings, issues such as sleep apnea, when no breathing sound could be heard due to a cessation of breathing.

“During our market research, we found that many players regard sleep as an obligation. We wanted to change that image to something more positive,” he says, adding that the game focuses on sleep duration and consistency.

Sleep is tracked using a smartphone’s in-built gyro sensor, with the phone to be placed face-down next to the pillow when one sleeps. Plans are in store to link the game to wearable devices like the Fitbit or Apple Watch in the first half of 2024.

Sleeping 8½ hours is worth 100 points, and through the game, users have reported sleeping up to an hour longer each day on average.

Stress factor

Sleep can be affected by stress, which increases levels of the hormone cortisol, which is involved in the fight-or-flight response and makes it more difficult to relax.

To help users manage stress better, Yakult rolled out probiotic beverage Y1000, which has the highest concentration of its proprietary lactic acid bacteria Lacticaseibacillus paracasei strain Shirota yet. Y1000 packs 100 billion bacteria in a 100ml bottle, or 10 times that of the Yakult product sold in Singapore. Product developer Osamu Watanabe, 45, says Y1000 was born as research emerged of the health benefits to the brain-gut relationship with a higher concentration of the bacteria.

Y1000 is so popular that it once sold out, with some stores still imposing purchase restrictions despite ramped-up production.

Yakult’s Y1000 is said to reduce stress and improve sleep quality. PHOTO: YAKULT

The wellness subsidiary of beverage giant Suntory Holdings in 2022 released the sleep supplement Kaimin Sesamin.

It taps the compound sesamin, found in sesame seeds, to maintain melatonin levels.

Mr Umeda, NTT’s sleep consultant, says: “There was a time in Japan when it was wonderful to work long hours without sleep. But as that generation retires, I hope Japan can embrace a culture where individual performance can be promoted by encouraging everyone to get a good night’s sleep.”

And that is a lifestyle message that, I hope, can be heard loud and clear in other sleep-deprived nations, including Singapore.

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sleep impt

Humanity’s tormented 21st-century relationship with sleep raises a great many questions. Most can be dealt with as follows: No, not nearly enough; yes, but that would require a wholesale transformation of lifestyle and socio-economic context; okay, but that seems extortionate for a mattress.

Yet the most basic question of the lot – how does tiredness work, and what makes us sleepy? – remains tauntingly and magnificently unanswered. Cracking its secrets, says the neuroscientist who has arguably come closest to doing so, could transform the waking and sleeping world as we know it. Professor Masashi Yanagisawa and his team have taken a bigger step towards solving the puzzle than anyone yet, but it remains (for now, at least) a flat-out mystery. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.

Which, while we wait for the next scientific breakthrough, is exactly what is happening.

Sleep is big business. Competition for our wakeful spending has fought itself into ever smaller corners of wallets and imaginations. The battle for the third of our lives that we spend asleep, meanwhile, still feels wide open to further commercial exploitation.

Bedrooms as sanctuaries, bamboo pyjamas, sensor-laden bedding, high-end wellness tourism, sleep consultants. The industry, in all its ingenuity, has honed ever-greater skill in casting sleep as both the pathology (terrible things happen to the individual and the economy if you do not get enough) and panacea (amazing things happen if you do) of modern life.

Judging the current scale of the sector depends on what you count, but it is arguably in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The global mattress and bedding markets are together reckoned by some to be worth over US$150 billion (S$204 billion); add in bed accessories, sleep-tracking smartwatches, sleep labs, smart alarm clocks, apnoea treatment devices, sleep-related medicines, dietary supplements, sleep monitors and temperature control equipment, and the figure could be approaching US$300 billion.

A great part of the current and projected growth of the industry derives from how comprehensively sleep, and the lack of it, are entwined in the broader discourse of health and the prevention of disease. National and supranational organisations produce surveys and recommendations on sleep, and the prevalence of smartwatches and other devices is providing an unprecedented glut of data on how well we do it. Generally, sleep seems to be clawing back the respect it has historically ceded to the demands of long working hours.

In Prof Yanagisawa’s home country of Japan, where he is director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine and a powerful advocate for more and better sleep, the realisation of what happens when a nation collectively scorns its importance is hitting home.

The government’s most recent (pre-Covid-19) figures found roughly 40 per cent of adult men and women in the country got less than six hours of sleep a night. A 2021 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development survey found that Japanese people get, on average, the least among the 33 nations polled. The Pokemon Sleep app, now downloaded by 10 million people around the world, confirmed those findings.

By the time they are in high school, about a third of Japan’s children, a University of Tokyo study revealed in March, are getting less than six hours a night and falling victim to “social jet lag”.

In this situation, Prof Yanagisawa finds himself with two roles. As one of the world’s great sleep scientists, he is a natural and charismatic proselytiser. But, in the long run, his work could make a practical difference.

Its focus is on the mechanism in the brain that controls the quality and quantity of sleep – the heart of the mystery about what happens during waking hours that later builds to sleepiness. For something so fundamental, he says, it is far more complex than people imagine. Scientists are broadly agreed on the concept of a switch that flips a person between the states of wake and sleep. The puzzle is how it works and how the brain “counts” the accumulation of sleepiness.

In 2021, a team from Prof Yanagisawa’s institute discovered that an enzyme called salt-inducible kinase 3 could be central to how sleep is regulated – and is possibly the clue everyone has been looking for.

Prof Yanagisawa, sitting in his modest office in Tsukuba, Japan, is measured but excited. If science can work out how our sleep switch works, and what controls how long and well we sleep, the practical consequences could be vast.

“We will be able to start manipulating this mechanism. You could develop an entirely new class of medicine that, when necessary, keeps you awake, or when necessary gives you all the hours of sleep you need,” he says. Miseries like sleep deprivation and insomnia could, overnight, become things of the past.

The sleep industry might be on track for its biggest revolution since the pillow. FINANCIAL TIMES

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kr

Outside the town of Yongin, 40km south of Seoul, an army of diggers is preparing for what South Korea’s President has described as a global “semiconductor war”.

The diggers are moving 40,000 cubic metres of earth a day, cutting a mountain in half as they lay the foundations for a new cluster of chipmaking facilities that will include the world’s largest three-storey fabrication plant.

The 405ha site, a US$91 billion (S$124 billion) investment by chipmaker SK Hynix, will itself only be one part of a US$471 billion “mega cluster” at Yongin that will include an investment of 300 trillion won (S$296 billion) by Samsung Electronics. The development is being overseen by the government amid growing anxiety that the country’s leading export industry will be usurped by rivals across Asia and the West.

“We will provide full support, together with SK Hynix, to ensure that our companies won’t fall behind in the global chip cluster race,” South Korea’s Industry Minister Ahn Duk-geun told SK Hynix executives during a meeting at the Yongin site in March.

Most industry experts agree the investments at Yongin are required for South Korean chipmakers to maintain their technological lead in cutting-edge memory chips, as well as to meet booming future demand for AI-related hardware.

But economists worry that the government’s determination to double down on South Korea’s traditional growth drivers of manufacturing and large conglomerates betrays an unwillingness or inability to reform a model that is showing signs of running out of steam.

With the country’s economy having grown at an average of 6.4 per cent between 1970 and 2022, the Bank of Korea warned in 2023 that annual growth is on course to slow to an average of 2.1 per cent in the 2020s, 0.6 per cent in the 2030s, and to start to shrink by 0.1 per cent a year by the 2040s.

Worries about the future

Pillars of the old model, such as cheap energy and labour, are creaking. Kepco, the state-owned energy monopoly that provides Korean manufacturers with heavily subsidised industrial tariffs, has amassed liabilities of US$150 billion. Of the other 37 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries, only Greece, Chile, Mexico and Colombia have lower workforce productivity.

Park San-gin, professor of economics at the graduate school of public administration at Seoul National University, notes that South Korea’s weakness in developing new “underlying technologies” – as opposed to its strength in commercialising technologies like chips and lithium-ion batteries invented in the US and Japan respectively – is being exposed as Chinese rivals close the innovation gap.

“Looking from the outside, you would assume that South Korea is extremely dynamic,” says Prof Park. “But our economic structure, which is based on catching up with the developed world through imitation, hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1970s.”

Worries about future growth have been exacerbated by an impending demographic crisis. According to the Korea Institute of Health and Social Affairs, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be 28 per cent lower in 2050 than it was in 2022, as the working age population shrinks by almost 35 per cent.

“The Korean economy will face big challenges if we stick to the past growth model,” Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok told the Financial Times earlier in April.

Some hope that the expected global boom in artificial intelligence (AI) will rescue the South Korean semiconductor industry, and perhaps even the South Korean economy at large, by offering solutions to the country’s productivity and demographic problems.

But sceptics point to the country’s poor record in addressing challenges ranging from its plummeting fertility rate to its outdated energy sector to its underperforming capital markets.

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That is unlikely to improve in the near future. Political leadership is split between a left-wing-controlled legislature and an unpopular conservative presidential administration, with the victory of left-wing parties in parliamentary elections earlier in April raising the prospect of more than three years of gridlock until the next presidential election in 2027.

“Korean industry is struggling to move on from the old model,” says Mr Yeo Han-koo, a former South Korean trade minister now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It hasn’t worked out what comes next.”

One of the reasons it is proving so hard to reform the “old model”, say economists, is that it has been so successful.

The achievements of South Korea’s state-guided capitalism, which took it from an impoverished agrarian society to a technological powerhouse in less than half a century, have come to be known as the “miracle on the Han River”. In 2018, South Korea’s GDP per capita measured at purchasing power parity surpassed that of its former colonial occupier, Japan.

Mr Song Seung-heon, managing partner of consultancy McKinsey’s practice in Seoul, notes that South Korea made two great leaps – one between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the country moved from basic goods to petrochemicals and heavy industry, and the second between the 1980s and 2000s, when it moved to high-tech manufacturing.

Between 2005 and 2022, however, only one new sector – displays – entered the country’s list of top 10 export products. Meanwhile, South Korea’s lead in a range of critical technologies has dwindled. Having led the world in 36 of 120 priority technologies identified by the South Korean government in 2012, by 2020 that number had dropped to just four.

Mindset drift

Prof Park says the country’s leading conglomerates, or chaebol, many of which are now overseen by the third generation of their founding families, have drifted from a “growth mindset” born of hunger towards an “incumbent mindset” born of complacency.

He argues that the present model reached its apogee in 2011, after a decade during which Korean tech exports were driven by the related twin demand shocks of the rise of China and the global technology boom, as well as by massive investments by Samsung and LG to seize control of the global display industry from their Japanese counterparts.

Since then, however, Chinese tech companies have caught up with their Korean competitors in almost every area except the most advanced semiconductors, meaning that Chinese companies that were once customers or suppliers have become rivals. Samsung and LG are fighting for survival in the global display industry they dominated just a few years ago.

Prof Park adds that many of the headline-grabbing gains made by the leading conglomerates have come at the expense of their domestic suppliers, who are subjected to price squeezing through exclusive contractual relationships.

The result is that small and medium enterprises, which employ more than 80 per cent of the South Korean labour force, have less money to invest in their employees or infrastructure, exacerbating low productivity, slowing innovation and stifling growth in the services sector.

“The rationale used to be that the chaebol should be sheltered from disruption at home so they can focus on disrupting rivals abroad,” says Prof Park. “But now they are the incumbents, they are both stifling innovation at home and highly vulnerable to disruption themselves.”

The country’s two-tier economy – in which, according to Prof Park, almost half of the country’s GDP was delivered by conglomerates that employed just 6 per cent of South Koreans in 2021 – also feeds social and regional inequalities. This in turn feeds spiralling competition among young South Koreans for a few elite university places and high-paying jobs in and around Seoul.

That competition is helping drive down the country’s fertility rate even further as young Koreans wrestle with mounting academic, financial and social burdens. The country has the widest gender pay gap and the highest suicide rate in the OECD.

South Korea also has one of the highest rates of household debt as a proportion of GDP in the developed world, according to the Institute of International Finance. The average newly-wed couple in South Korea has combined debts of US$124,000.

While South Korea’s government debt to GDP is relatively low by western standards, at 57.5 per cent, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts that it will triple over the next 50 years in the absence of drastic pension reforms. Forty-six per cent of South Koreans are projected to be over the age of 65 by 2070, and the country already has the highest rate of elderly poverty in the developed world.

“Slowing growth has fed the declining birth rate, which will lead to even slower growth,” says Mr Song of McKinsey. “We are in danger of getting stuck in a vicious circle.”

The Yongin mega cluster illustrates South Korea’s challenge in sustaining an economic model that was first developed at a time when the country was much poorer and less democratic.

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The project was announced in 2019, but was delayed for several years due to wrangles over construction permits and the site’s water supply. Once the first cluster is completed in 2027 – more are planned for later – it will face a shortage of qualified labour. Without a sufficient supply of renewable energy, and without a bipartisan consensus on building new nuclear power plants, it is unclear how the cluster will be powered.

Despite the uncertainties that surround it, the plan reflects confidence that an expected boom in demand for AI-related hardware, including the Dram memory chips needed for large language models, will justify the titanic investments. Shares in SK Hynix have more than doubled over the past year amid investor excitement over its “high bandwidth memory” chips used with Nvidia’s cutting edge processors.

Ahn Ki-hyun, executive director of the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, says the country needs to press on with the Yongin project as potential rivals are making their own large investments.

He singles out the US and Japan’s efforts to revive their own chipmaking capabilities with generous subsidies. “We could lose our status as a chipmaking powerhouse if our companies continue to build plants abroad, but if facilities are concentrated in our own country, our competitiveness will increase,” he says.

Last week, Samsung announced a US$45 billion investment in Texas to meet expected AI-related chip demand, while SK Hynix is building a high bandwidth memory facility in Indiana.

In the long term, however, executives worry about US rivals absorbing Korean knowhow, as well as the risk that the proliferation of chip clusters around the world will lead to chronic oversupply and inefficiencies that could further undermine profitability.

Samsung’s Texan investments, which have benefited from up to US$6.4 billion in federal subsidies from Washington, also highlight how the Korean government is struggling to match the incentives on offer in other countries.

Divided on future prospects

Some see in the coming AI era an opportunity for South Korea to lift its sights beyond manufacturing and the preservation of its biggest players.

Mr Park Sung-hyun, chief executive of AI chip design start-up Rebellions, notes the country already has capabilities in three of the four pillars needed for AI – logic, memory, and cloud service providers – and now has the opportunity to secure reciprocal access to the world’s most sophisticated AI algorithms, the fourth pillar.

“Our strength in hardware is important, but if we are to progress we need to move up the value chain into design and software,” says Mr Park. “That means investing our money in strategic partnerships with the makers of the world’s leading large language models.”

Mr Park’s argument resonates with those who worry that South Korea’s continued emphasis on manufacturing and hardware – both in the chip sector and beyond – will prove unsustainable as costs continue to rise.

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But Inseong Jeong, a former SK Hynix engineer and author of The Future Of Semiconductor Empires, a book about the Korean chip industry, says the country should focus on its existing strengths. “The world will always need hardware, and the world will always need chips.”

He adds that by remaining at the cutting edge of chip production, Korean companies will be more likely to benefit from future breakthroughs in AI.

“The moat between hardware and software is hard to cross, but it works both ways,” says Mr Jeong. “For example, our memory chip companies would be the main beneficiaries of a breakthrough whereby AI chips would more closely resemble the workings of a human brain. There are no guarantees that AI will run on Nvidia GPUs forever.”

Some observers regard warnings about South Korea’s economic future as overblown, noting that many western countries bitterly regret abandoning the kind of advanced manufacturing base that Seoul has managed to preserve.

The “tech war” between the US and China, they argue, is playing into Korean hands as Chinese rivals in the chip, battery and biotech sectors are restricted or barred from entry into growing western markets, while concern about Taiwan’s security feeds demand for Korean alternatives.

South Korean companies in areas ranging from defence and construction to pharmaceuticals, electric vehicles and entertainment, have shown themselves to be more adept than many of their western counterparts in reducing their exposure to the Chinese market and seeking out growth in south-east Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

The Bank of Korea has also said that the most doom-laden scenarios regarding the country’s demographic crisis and growth prospects can be alleviated by bringing the country up to the OECD average on a range of metrics, including urban population concentration and youth employment.

But others argue that while there is much that South Korea could and should do to alleviate its problems, its record on reform is poor.

Spending on private tuition continues to climb as competition for university places grows fiercer, while the fertility rate continues to fall. Pension, housing and medical sector reforms have stalled, while longstanding campaigns to curb the country’s dependence on the conglomerates, boost renewables, raise corporate valuations, close the gender pay gap, and make Seoul a leading Asian financial centre have all made little headway.

But Mr Choi, the Finance Minister, retains his faith that the country’s economy can be reformed, insisting that “dynamism is embedded in the Korean DNA”.

“We need to redesign policies to unleash that economic dynamism again,” he says. “But the miracle isn’t over.” FINANCIAL TIMES

Additional reporting by Song Jung-a

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work out for wt loss and decline in cognitive

NEW YORK – Growing up in the Netherlands, Ms Henriette van Praag had always been active, playing sports and riding her bike to school every day.

In the late 1990s, while working as a staff scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, she discovered that exercise can spur the growth of new brain cells in mature mice. After that, her approach to exercise changed.

“I started to take it more seriously,” said Dr van Praag, now an associate professor of biomedical science at Florida Atlantic University. Today, that involves doing CrossFit and running 8 to 9.6km several days a week.

Whether exercise can cause new neurons to grow in adult humans – a feat previously thought impossible, and a tantalising prospect to treat neurodegenerative diseases – is still up for debate.

But even if it is not possible, physical activity is excellent for your brain, improving mood and cognition through a plethora of cellular changes, said Dr van Praag.

Exercise offers short-term boosts in cognition. Studies show that immediately after a bout of physical activity, people perform better on tests of working memory and other executive functions. This may be in part because movement increases the release of neurotransmitters in the brain, most notably epinephrine and norepinephrine.

“These kinds of molecules are needed for paying attention to information,” said Dr Marc Roig, an associate professor in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University. Attention is essential for working memory and executive functioning, he added.

The neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin are also released with exercise, which is thought to be a main reason people often feel so good after going for a run or a long bike ride.

The brain benefits really start to emerge, though, when people work out consistently over time.

Physical activity improves cognitive and mental health in all sorts of ways. ILLUSTRATION: NYTIMES

Studies show that people who work out several times a week have higher cognitive test scores, on average, than people who are more sedentary. Other research has found that a person’s cognition tends to improve after participating in a new aerobic exercise programme for several months.

Dr Roig added the caveat that the effects on cognition are not huge, and not everyone improves to the same degree. “You cannot acquire a super memory just because you exercised,” he said.

Physical activity also benefits mood. People who work out regularly report having better mental health than people who are sedentary. And exercise programmes can be effective at treating people’s depression, leading some psychiatrists and therapists to prescribe physical activity.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week is a good benchmark.

Perhaps most remarkably, exercise offers protection against neurodegenerative diseases.

“Physical activity is one of the health behaviours that’s shown to be the most beneficial for cognitive function and reducing risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia,” said Associate Professor Michelle Voss, who specialises in psychological and brain sciences at University of Iowa.

How does exercise do all that? It starts with the muscles.

When people work out, they release molecules that travel through the blood up to the brain.

Some, like a hormone called irisin, have “neuroprotective” qualities and have been shown to be linked to the cognitive health benefits of exercise, said Dr Christiane Wrann, an associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who studies irisin.

Good blood flow is essential to obtain the benefits of physical activity. And, conveniently, exercise improves circulation and stimulates the growth of new blood vessels in the brain.

“It’s not just that there’s increased blood flow,” Prof Voss said. “It’s that there’s a greater chance, then, for signalling molecules that are coming from the muscle to get delivered to the brain.”

Once these signals are in the brain, other chemicals are released locally. The star of the show is a hormone called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, that is essential for neuron health and creating new connections – called synapses – between neurons.

“It’s like a fertiliser for brain cells to recover from damage,” Prof Voss said. “And also for synapses on nerve cells to connect with each other and sustain the connections.”

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A greater number of blood vessels and connections between neurons can actually increase the size of different brain areas. This effect is especially noticeable in older adults because it can offset the loss of brain volume that happens with age. The hippocampus, an area important for memory and mood, is particularly affected.

“We know that it shrinks with age,” Dr Roig said. “And we know that if we exercise regularly, we can prevent this decline.”

Exercise’s effect on the hippocampus may be one way it helps protect against Alzheimer’s disease, which is associated with significant changes to that part of the brain.

The same goes for depression – the hippocampus is smaller in people who are depressed, and effective treatments for depression, including medications and exercise, increase the size of the region.

So, what kind of exercise is best for your brain? The experts emphasised that any exercise is good, and the type of activity does not seem to matter, though most of the research has involved aerobic exercise.

But, they added, higher-intensity workouts do appear to confer a bigger benefit for the brain.

Improving your overall cardiovascular fitness level also appears to be key. “It’s dose-dependent,” Dr Wrann said. “The more you can improve your cardiorespiratory fitness, the better the benefits are.”

Like Dr van Praag, Prof Voss has incorporated her research into her life, making a concerted effort to engage in higher-intensity exercise. For example, on busy days when she cannot fit in a full workout, she will seek out hills to bike up on her commute to work.

“Even if it’s a little,” she said, “it’s still better than nothing.” NYTIMES

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wt los

NEW YORK – About five years ago, when she was 39, Australian actress Rebel Wilson faced a dilemma.

She had just had a string of successes, having made US$20 million (S$27 million) for her comic roles in Pitch Perfect 3 (2017), Isn’t It Romantic (2019) and The Hustle (2019).

But a visit to a fertility doctor had filled her with self-doubt.

Her weight – then about 102kg – could make it harder to retrieve viable eggs, the doctor suggested. After the appointment, she was devastated and called her talent agent, and said she planned to get healthier.

Her agent was not thrilled.

“The agency liked me fat because they got hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for each film where I played the fat funny girl,” she writes in her new memoir Rebel Rising.

Losing weight, she worried, could jeopardise her “multi-million-dollar pigeonhole”.

In Rebel Rising, which Simon & Schuster released on April 2, Wilson details her struggles with food addiction and writes with disarming candour about intimate episodes from her life.

Raised in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, as the eldest of four, Wilson had an unconventional childhood: Her family ran a pet product business and bred show beagles, and she had her first brush with show business as a junior dog handler when she was eight.

Success did not come easily. She was rejected five times from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, and auditioned for nearly 30 screen roles in Hollywood before she was cast in the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids, a performance that launched her film career.

The memoir has already generated controversy, particularly her account of making the 2016 comedy Grimsby – released in the United States and Canada as The Brothers Grimsby – with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Wilson writes that during filming, the English actor-comedian made her uncomfortable by asking her to appear nude in the film (they hired a body double instead).

She also alleges that he urged her – when they were in character and filming a sex scene – to stick her finger up his rear end, which she refused to do, while others who were present recorded the encounter on camera phones.

Through a representative, Baron Cohen, 52, has denied Wilson’s account.

“While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby,” a representative of Baron Cohen said in a statement.

Rebel Wilson and Sacha Baron Cohen in Grimsby. PHOTO: GOLDEN VILLAGE

There are also stunningly personal revelations in Rebel Rising. Wilson writes about being a late bloomer who lost her virginity at 35. She details her secret romantic relationship with a female professional tennis player, her experience of meeting and falling in love with her fiancee – fashion entrepreneur Ramona Agruma – and having a baby with a surrogate.

In a recent interview in midtown Manhattan, Wilson spoke about how her weight loss has affected her career and public image, and fighting for her Pitch Perfect 3 payday.

Have you experienced any negative repercussions or backlash from the weight loss?

There were some people who were, like, “Oh, we don’t think she’s funny any more” or “Now she’s lost me as a fan because I can’t relate to her any more”.

But I think if they read the book, they will understand my journey with weight and health. Obviously, I have a sweet tooth. That is my vice. And in times of stress, I’d dealt with it by eating. I don’t think that will ever go away.

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Which parts of your memoir are you most anxious about going public with?

The part about losing my virginity at 35. That was something that absolutely nobody knew. And I was, like, “Should I put it in the book?” But then I thought, “Maybe there will be other people out there who were late bloomers who might find solace in that fact about me.”

Because really, there was nothing weird or wrong with me. It was just growing up in a very Christian background, and then not really wanting a relationship and focusing on my career. And then I thought: “If I’m doing a memoir and writing about everything, I’m just going to put that here as well.”

Probably the biggest headlines out of the book so far have been your description of working with Sacha Baron Cohen, who you say humiliated you on set. He has disputed your account and, recently, footage of the scene that was not in the movie and which shows you acting out the sex scene together in character, has been published by The Daily Mail. What do you make of his response?

I’m sure they are never going to release the iPhone footage of him asking me to do it, to insert my finger up his a**, and me saying, “No, why are you doing this? Why are you asking me to do this? Where’s the director?” Of course, they are not going to release that footage.

What is your response to his denial?

Just knowing his character, I obviously expected that. I knew he was not going to take it, proverbially, lying down. This is not about cancelling someone. It is part of my story – my memoir. And I’m allowed to write about what happened to me and how that made me feel.

You are very frank about money and describe how you were able to negotiate US$10 million for Pitch Perfect 3 after you learnt that the studio did a market research survey that showed how much people loved your character Fat Amy.

Universal Studios are incredible, but did they make a ton of money from the Pitch Perfect movies? Yes. So, despite me absolutely loving all those folks at Universal, did I use that leverage to my advantage? Yes. And in the eleventh hour, I go, “You know, that’s a lovely offer of US$9 million. But I need one more to make it 10.”

That’s a big milestone when you’re an actor. To receive an eight-figure offer, for a woman, is huge. Sometimes, women don’t like to talk about that. Whereas I don’t think the guys have any issues saying they get US$20 million a movie.

You also write about a strange experience that inspired you to seriously pursue acting, when you were living in South Africa and got malaria and had a vision.

It was a full-blown hallucination that I was an actress and I had won an Academy Award. It changed the whole trajectory of my life. When some people would say, “But how did you keep going?” or “You always seemed to have this self-belief”, I would go, “Because I saw it happen.”

I clung to that, despite the constant rejections and how hard it was, starting in the theatre and performing when there might be 10 people in the crowd. But I saw it, that I was going to be successful. And coming to America, I mean, the odds of making it in the entertainment business, first in my own country, then in Hollywood – I think the odds are better that if I were a guy, I could make it to the NFL. It’s millions and millions to one, but I thought I was the one. There are plenty of Australian actors who are way better than me and haven’t made it over here.

Maybe because they did not get malaria.

They didn’t have the malaria vision. NYTIMES

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health is impy

Mr Graham Ambrose has never felt stronger. He can barbell back squat 145kg for four sets of six repetitions and bench-press more than 100kg for a single rep. His friends and colleagues notice that his clothes fit tighter, and he’s fond of posting mirror selfies on Instagram.

But Mr Ambrose isn’t a Gen-Z attention seeker: The 55-year-old is a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group. The London-based equity franchise sales specialist also has his own podcast, where he waxes lyrical about the benefits of picking up heavy things alongside his personal trainer who calls him “G-dog”.

A Goldman MD is not exactly man-of-the-people, but many will find Mr Ambrose’s fitness experience more relatable than that of influencers in their 20s who don’t have as many work and family commitments. His message is one that finance workers absolutely need to hear, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

People who spend their working lives trying to manage risk in return for long-term financial gain often fail to apply those lessons to their own health. That’s partly because balancing personal well-being and professional success can be difficult in an industry that valorises long hours and now wants workers back in the office. But while finance hasn’t become a walk in the park, there is more awareness of the need to keep physically healthy and mentally resilient.

And strength training should appeal to bankers, as the payoff in terms of well-being – and ultimately longevity – can be profound.

The good news is Mr Ambrose is increasingly preaching to the choir. When we Zoomed in January, he said clients and colleagues pepper him with questions about his routine and that “recently it’s been very difficult to find a free squat rack in the Goldman gym”.

Indeed, he isn’t the only Goldman weight-training evangelist. Mr Jonny Fine, head of global investment-grade debt at Goldman, posts videos on Instagram of himself deadlifting at cult New York gym Dogpound, where an annual membership costs up to US$36,000 (S$49,000). (Mr Fine’s personal best barbell deadlift is 183kg for one rep, he told me via e-mail.)

American Psycho satirised bankers pumping iron for aesthetic reasons in the 1980s, but the reality was often an intense, high-stress and largely sedentary job whose long hours were punctuated by boozing and drug-taking.

Former Citigroup trader Gary Stevenson’s recent memoir The Trading Game describes the exhaustion, chest pains and depression that led him to quit the bank in 2014, aged 27. As recently as 2021, junior Goldman employees were still complaining about 100-hour work weeks, little sleep and deteriorating physical and mental health.

Nowadays, though, most banks have top-notch fitness facilities and some even provide workout clothes. It’s not uncommon for finance professionals to train with clients rather than go for a steak dinner.

‘Genuine change’

“You don’t need to ask permission to go to the gym because you’ll see your manager there too,” says Mr Ambrose. “It’s a real, genuine change in the way people are interacting across the (Wall) Street. It’s also incredibly unifying: The boss could be learning to squat, while a first-year analyst is squatting 160kg.”

The tone at the top has improved too. Goldman boss David Solomon talks about his early morning exercise habit, while Morgan Stanley’s executive chairman James Gorman admitted in 2023 to struggling with nausea-inducing stress early in his career, which he defeated by getting much fitter.

Mr Kim Fournais, CEO of Denmark’s Saxo Bank, is a fan of weightlifting and krav maga (a notoriously intense self-defence method), while the boss of Deutsche Bank’s investment arm DWS Group, Mr Stefan Hoops, carries around a chest expander and hits the weight room most mornings (his one-rep max bench press was 140kg when a German finance podcast inquired in 2023).

Of course, finance types aren’t the only ones to have caught the gym bug. A big chest and washboard abs have become as essential as owning a yacht for Hollywood actors and tech billionaires like Mr Jeff Bezos and Mr Mark Zuckerberg. But this isn’t only a pastime of the super rich and nor is it just a guy thing.

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A decade ago, it was rare to see women doing strength training. Partly this was due to a misperception that doing cardio was the best way to lose weight – in fact, having more muscle increases metabolic activity, meaning you burn more calories throughout the day.

There were also unfounded worries that lifting weights would make women bulky. But encouraged by inclusive strength-focused workouts such as Crossfit, aspirational imagery on social media and a wealth of advice accessible online, the ratio of women to men in the weights area of most gyms is now closer to 50-50. Fitness centres have responded by removing treadmills and elliptical machines and devoting more space to barbells and weighted sleds.

“There are definitely more women at the gym getting stronger, which is amazing to see,” says London-based equity research analyst Eleonora Dani, 38, who got started in 2015 after reading a Bloomberg Businessweek profile of a female Goldman banker who did Crossfit. “It seeded the idea that you can be a woman, be in finance and be strong,” she tells me by phone, requesting her employer not be identified. After losing 20kg and gaining 4kg of muscle in one year via a combination of personal training and Hyrox (a mix of cardio and strength training), Ms Dani can now deadlift 105kg for five repetitions.

If you think about the different aspects of weight training, it makes sense why Wall Street types would want to get strong. It helps that sessions can be relatively short: Unlike training for a marathon, a 45-minute strength workout is plenty. Building muscle also requires increasing the number of repetitions or weight each session, carefully planning meals and monitoring progress – something of a scientific approach that appeals to those in data-driven jobs. And there’s a huge sense of personal accomplishment when you finally achieve a goal like deadlifting double your body weight.

Of course, people lift weights to look good and feel more confident, but the benefits go far beyond bulging biceps. For Mr Mike Mayo, a banking research analyst at Wells Fargo, it was the ability to strengthen bones weakened by osteoporosis and combat age-related muscle wasting (sarcopenia) that sparked his pivot from running and cycling to powerlifting – a mix of deadlifts, squats and bench press.

There are also under-appreciated mental health and hormonal advantages. “Our finance clients typically have an imbalance of (stress hormone) cortisol due to the nature of their work. Having more muscle mass gives you more control over that stress response,” says Mr Mark Bohannon, a director at Ultimate Performance, an international chain of personal training gyms. (Ms Dani is a client.)

“Meditation can be hard for some finance types,” he adds. “But if you are squatting with 100kg on your back, I guarantee you are not worrying about your next meeting. You’re thinking: I’ve got to stand up now or this bar will crush me.”

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Naturally, some folks take things to extremes. Devotees of podcasters like Associate Professor Andrew Huberman, a jacked Stanford professor and neuroscientist, embrace whatever methods might offer a mental or physical edge, such as peptides, saunas and cold plunges.

But there’s no need to gobble dozens of supplements to get stronger. The main benefits come from doing the basics right: lifting weights three or four times a week, getting sufficient sleep and eating the right foods. That obviously requires planning, especially as banks demand staff back in the office and corporate travel picks up (hotel gyms don’t typically offer much in terms of weights).

“Nobody just finds the time to work out – it has always been something I intentionally schedule just like any other meeting,” says Mr Randy Giveans, a former Jefferies Financial Group research analyst who now has an investor relations and business development role at Navigator Holdings. The 39-year-old father of three meets clients or investors for workouts at least a couple of times a month. “You can talk business between sets, and it’s also a fun shared experience.”

But making the time is worth it. “This health movement in finance started partly due to increased productivity. People thought: I could stay up longer, I could read better, and I could be more alert! But then they noticed they were also getting on better with their families and kids and becoming better people,” says Mr Jason H. Karp, a former hedge fund manager turned entrepreneur. (This point about emotional well-being is echoed in Peter Attia’s excellent book Outlive.)

Rather than dread my 6am workouts, I now look forward to weight training. It’s satisfying getting stronger in my 40s and defying the decline that otherwise comes with ageing. Once I’ve picked up a heavy barbell, whatever else the day throws at me doesn’t feel as hard.

So I’m glad Mr Ambrose and his peers are making weight training more popular – but it will take further encouragement from employers to help finance professionals live healthier lives. If I’ve learnt anything from picking up heavy objects, it’s that progress comes one increment at a time. BLOOMBERG

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uni ranking pointless

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail asking me to participate in an academic reputation survey for an organisation producing international university ranking tables. Soon after, The Straits Times reported that the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) had been rated the top universities in Asia based on the QS or Quacquarelli Symonds rankings by subject areas involving 1,594 universities in 93 countries and territories. A similar report in 2022 recapped how both also ranked well in the QS World University Rankings.

There are several other international ranking tables – like those published by Times Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and US News & World Report. A key claim made by these organisations producing such tables is that they serve as guides to help students select universities and courses. 

Many universities around the world await the publication of each round of ranking tables anxiously. They know the results come with high stakes, and may serve to boost a university’s international standing and inform its strategic goals. 

Prospective employers may watch these rankings closely as they make hiring or deployment decisions. They may also shape some prospective students’ decisions over what and where to study. 

These choices are increasingly vital as universities compete for students in the lucrative international student market. Market intelligence firm HolonIQ estimates that six million to nine million international students will enrol in foreign higher education institutions, with spending amounting to US$433 billion (S$575 billion) by 2030. 

Move to jettison international university rankings

Yet in more recent years, a number of prestigious US university law and medical schools – like those at Harvard (both of which ranked among the top 10 in their respective fields) – as well as a few undergraduate schools have withdrawn from the US News & World Report ranking tables.

The ranking system simply ran against key institutional values, including a commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion, they argued. 

Professor Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, was also cited in a 2019 CNN report as saying that “schools feel pressure to game the rankings”.

How international university rankings are conducted

The reality is that such rankings are rarely scientific studies drawing clear conclusions. The trouble lies with the computation of scores.

Most focus on broadly similar performance indicators, albeit with differing weightages being accorded to the various indicators. 

The QS 2023 rankings used indicators relating to academic reputation (teaching and research quality), employer reputation (how well universities prepare students for successful careers, and which universities provide competent, innovative and effective graduates), faculty/student ratio, academic citations per faculty member, international student ratio and international faculty ratio. 

Part of this rankings data is also obtained through potentially subjective surveys based on sentiments or incomplete knowledge. The QS academic reputation survey is sent to thousands of academics around the world each year. Respondents are asked which country/territory and geographical region they are most familiar with. 

They are then asked to provide, among other things, their individual nominations of top domestic and international institutions they think produce top research in their faculty area.

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Brewing criticism over university rankings

Such international ranking tables have attracted a great deal of criticism from academic researchers and universities in recent years. 

In 2020, Malaysian academics Muhammad Ashraf Fauzi, Christine Tan, Mahyuddin Daud and Muhammad Mukhtar Noor Awalludin demonstrated how the methodologies employed in ranking exercises can be prone to flaws, in a journal article in Issues In Educational Research. 

Historically prestigious universities such as Cambridge and Oxford tend to have higher ratings. Western universities operating in English tend to receive higher rankings than their non-Western counterparts – even domestically prestigious institutions such as the National Taiwan University (ranked 77 in the latest QS tables) – reflecting the possibility that survey respondents tend to think of the more internationally prestigious universities that teach in English as superior. 

A second problem arises because these tables do not reflect the varied purposes of higher education. Differences in each university’s key objectives in research, teaching and community service, and the great diversity of programmes offered in universities worldwide make it a pointless exercise to compare apples with oranges, durians and tomatoes. 

A more poorly ranked university – such as Universiti Malaya – may excel in teaching or in other qualities contributing to nation-building compared with universities with higher rankings. Yet, such rankings compare different types of universities as though they are identical and accord equal weightages to all of their functions and educational offerings.

Even if we assume they are directly comparable, making the composite score meaningful, the nature of ranking tables magnifies minuscule differences in scores and separate institutions with similar scores by many numerical positions in the tables.

A third issue is that the tables fail to adequately indicate the processes and outcomes related to quality teaching and learning, and that students’ opinions are hardly, if ever, solicited in this regard. 

A fourth major criticism is the heavy weightage accorded to research and institutional reputation rather than focusing on teaching quality. Academic Woo Jun Jie argued in a 2018 CNA commentary that this skewed emphasis on research may come at the cost of teaching quality as universities seeking to ascend the ranking tables are incentivised to devote extensive resources towards boosting research outcomes at the expense of adult learning.

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Some perspective on university rankings

Such rankings are rarely helpful for prospective students. The process of selecting a university, course of study and concentration, whether local or overseas, depends on a complex mix of factors.

Besides examination scores, personal interests and passions, parental aspirations and the amount of comprehensive information about the range of available options both within and outside of Singapore, other factors may include financial circumstances, family circumstances and peer influence. Some students may also consider fields that they believe are emerging areas of demand in the job market. 

Much also depends on a prospective student’s life stage and purpose in pursuing higher education. Individuals with full-time jobs deciding whether to embark on a degree programme might likely give more consideration to the pros and cons of a full-time versus a part-time degree, in view of the opportunity cost involved in forgoing their income, compared with students fresh out of junior college or polytechnic.

Adult students must think more carefully about the implications for their families and financial commitments in giving up a job for a full-time degree programme.

And what are students to think of those among the six publicly funded autonomous universities, as well as the programmes in the autonomous universities, that have not been highly ranked, vis-a-vis those that have? It would be patently ridiculous to assume that those in the former category are somehow inferior and not worth serious consideration on the basis of this one point.

In their 2017 CNA commentary, academics Pang Eng Fong and Linda Lim highlghted the lack of empirical studies linking university rankings with student outcomes such as post-graduation job placement or salary rates. They also noted that international students did not appear to prefer the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to the Singapore Management University (SMU) and other unranked universities, choosing their universities instead for a range of other reasons including costs and scholarship availability.

Singapore’s varied university landscape

University rankings are also less useful in aiding Singapore students to navigate the diverse local university landscape. 

The Ministry of Education (MOE) website indicates that these six universities can be grouped into two categories: more academically focused, research-intensive universities (the NUS, the NTU, the SMU and the Singapore University of Technology and Design, with the first two being comprehensive and the next two being specialised) and those that provide applied-degree pathways, with more hands-on experience and industry exposure (the Singapore Institute of Technology and the Singapore University of Social Sciences). 

In addition, there are also a number of programmes by private educational institutes such as the Singapore Institute of Management and Curtin University.

The diversity of providers within Singapore in terms of their institutional missions and programme offerings cannot possibly be captured in the ranking tables.

Thankfully, the QS website acknowledges the rankings are merely a starting point that cannot replace individual decision-making based on further research and information-gathering through exploring university websites, speaking to alumni and attending open-day events. Students should do their own homework rather than rely on ranking tables to light the way for them.

Similarly, employers today consider a range of other factors besides these institutional rankings when assessing the merits of job applicants and current employees. A range of non-academic skills and attributes – such as leadership qualities and communication abilities – not covered by the ranking tables matter. 

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Growing emphasis on upskilling and mental health

These ranking leagues are even less useful for local autonomous universities, as the educational landscape evolves to embrace larger goals of creating more pathways to success and empowering individuals to reach their fuller potential through upskilling.

A prominent theme emerging in recent years in Singapore discourse is that of broadening the definition of success, and moving away from a meritocracy of grades towards a meritocracy of skills. 

There is an official drive to encourage multiple entry points to study for Singaporeans from varying ages and backgrounds, while making sure that a university education remains accessible and affordable. MOE has encouraged universities to provide students with options to customise degree programmes and expand the range of modules for adult learners. Another theme is the need for individuals to take charge of their learning.

In addition to the need to promote an understanding of, and interaction with, the world beyond Singapore, other issues include the encouragement of interdisciplinary learning and the need for universities to nurture graduates who define success in terms of their contributions to the wider society. 

For this to work, cooperation rather than competition among the local universities is needed.

Speaking at the Straits Times Education Forum in February 2022, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing urged the six autonomous universities to operate as a single team, collaborating with one another and building on one another’s strengths. His remarks contrast with the tendency for the ranking tables to engender a zero-sum game mentality, where one university’s rise is accomplished only at another’s fall.

On another front, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus the importance of addressing issues related to students’ mental well-being. The pandemic has also left in its wake questions about the adequacy of home-based learning as an alternative to face-to-face instruction, thus highlighting the importance of examining the merits of diverse instructional modes.

The autonomous universities have to, therefore, move beyond the limits imposed by international ranking tables, pursue their distinctive educational missions and find fields where cooperation with the rest is of mutual interest. 

While the results of ranking exercises may prove helpful in the short term in terms of boosting institutional prestige, attracting research funding and attracting prospective students, it makes more sense instead to set independent priorities in the light of more pressing national priorities.

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A Singapore ranking table?

Some have asked whether MOE should devise its own ranking tables for the autonomous universities based on criteria more attuned to the Singapore context. 

An immediate question would be the extent to which these desired outcomes can be quantified, when such ranking tables have proven poor in lending themselves well to quantification and measurement.  

A related question concerns the desirability of subjecting the universities to yet more ranking, a practice likely to leave universities, students and employers grappling with yet more issues related to the adequacy of the ranking tables, at a time when secondary school and junior college rankings have been abolished.

In the final analysis, it is probably time for all of us to break the habit of reading more into the international ranking tables than they can tell us about what really matters in higher education. 

This includes higher education’s primary functions at both the individual and collective levels: as a means of personal growth and development, a vehicle of social mobility and national prosperity, and a driver of service for the wider public good.

Jason Tan is Associate Professor in Policy, Curriculum and Leadership at the National Institute of Education.

2027 o level exam schedule

SINGAPORE - This year’s Secondary 1 students will be the first to sit their national examinations under one common timetable in 2027.

They will sit the new Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) examinations in 2027 instead of O- and N-level examinations, said Education Minister Chan Chun Sing on March 1 in Parliament.

This comes after the removal of streaming into Normal and Express in secondary schools in 2024, and the implementation of full subject-based banding, where students take subjects at varying levels according to their strengths and interests.

With the change, students will have one written exam sitting for their mother tongue language (MTL) subject and will not be able to retake the exam, said Mr Chan during the debate on his ministry’s budget.

Currently, students are able to choose from two exam sittings for MTL, one in the middle of the year, usually in the first week of the June holidays, and the other during the O-level written exam period, usually in November.

“I understand that some may be concerned that they will have one less chance to improve their MTL grades,” said Mr Chan.

“But we need to strike a careful balance between striving for excellence, chasing the last mark, and allowing our students to learn at a better pace.”

“When we introduced the mid-year O-level MTL exam sitting in 1980, less than 40 per cent of students passed both their first and second languages,” Mr Chan noted. “So we allowed students to take their MTL exam twice, to meet the second language requirement for pre-university.”

Today, almost all O-level MTL students meet the language requirement with their first sitting, he said, adding that taking the second sitting changed the post-secondary posting outcomes for less than 2 per cent of those taking the MTL exam.

“The new system will allow our students and teachers to better pace the MTL curriculum, with four more months of learning, rather than to squeeze everything into less than 3½ years in preparation for the June sitting,” said Mr Chan.

Students will sit their English and MTL written exams in the second week of September – one month ahead of other subjects to spread out the exam load, he added.

There will also be one common exam period for the written papers of other subjects, starting in October.

Currently, N-level exams are held in September, and O-level exams in October.

Results for the SEC examinations will be released in January the following year.

Currently, N-level results are out in mid-December and O-level results are released in mid-January the following year.

The SEC will continue to be jointly awarded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Cambridge, said Mr Chan.

“Let me state that if we see our worth as being defined by exam results only, removing the PSLE will not remove stress. Neither is removing all stress our goal,” he said.

“We need to understand that exams like the PSLE and SEC are not an end in themselves, but a means to help our children find a suitable learning environment in the next stage of their education journey.”

Changes to Edusave awards

MOE will also expand Edusave awards to recognise non-academic attributes, said Mr Chan.

From 2024, Eagles, which stands for Edusave Award for Achievement, Good Leadership and Service, will recognise students’ 21st-century competencies, or skills identified as essential for the future.

These include critical, adaptive and inventive thinking, communication, as well as civic, global and cross-cultural literacy, across both curricular and co-curricular activities.

Eagles will also be expanded to Primary 1 to 3 pupils, who were previously not eligible.

Up to 5 per cent of this group can qualify and receive an award of $200 each.

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The yearly quota for the award for Primary 4 to pre-university students will be increased from 10 per cent to 15 per cent.

With the expansion, an estimated 18,000 additional students could be eligible for Eagles each year. Currently, about 25,000 students receive the award yearly.

The Edusave Skills Award – which recognises excellent professional and soft skills, along with good conduct – will be expanded from 10 per cent to 15 per cent of students in the graduating cohort.

It will also be given to 5 per cent of students in their penultimate year.

The award is available for Crest Secondary School, Spectra Secondary School, specialised schools, polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education.

About 3,400 more students are expected to benefit from the enhancement.

Mr Chan said these changes will bring the balance of academic and non-academic awards given out to about 60:40, compared with the current 70:30 ratio.

“This signals our commitment to reducing the overemphasis on academic results, and balancing that with better preparation of our students more holistically for the future,” he said.

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lose in mt Chinese from 2027

SINGAPORE – From 2027, students graduating from secondary school will no longer take the O- and N-level examinations. Instead, they will sit the Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) examinations.

The first batch of students taking the new exam are those in Secondary 1 in 2024.

With the complete implementation of full subject-based banding (FSBB) in 2024, these students take subjects at different levels based on their strengths and interests.

With the SEC, they will sit the national examinations under one common timetable, with the written exams for English and mother tongue languages held in September and the written examinations for the rest of the subjects from October to November.

There will be only one written exam sitting for the mother tongue language (MTL) subject, instead of the current two.

The SEC exam results will be released in January the following year.

With FSBB, the polytechnic year 1 admission criteria from 2028 will also change to recognise learning at different subject levels.

Will the new SEC exam have the same format and rigour as the O- and N-level exam?

There will be no change to the examination format and standards, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Education (MOE).

The SEC examinations will continue to be jointly examined and awarded by the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board, MOE and Cambridge International Education.

Students will receive a certificate that reflects the subjects and levels they were taken at.

Under FSBB, students take subjects at three levels, known as G1, G2 and G3, mapped from the previous Normal (Technical), Normal (Academic) and Express standards respectively.

The first cohort of graduating students in 2027 will take the SEC examinations at their respective subject levels.

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Will my child lose out if he can’t retake the MTL exam?

Currently, students can attempt their MTL exam twice, once in the middle of the year and the other towards the end of the year, during the O-level written exam period.

From 2027, students will have just one chance to take the exam, said Education Minister Chan Chun Sing, who announced the changes in Parliament on March 1.

He said that when MOE introduced the mid-year O-level MTL exam sitting in 1980, less than 40 per cent of students passed both their first and second languages.

The change was made then to allow students to take the exam twice, to meet the second-language requirement for pre-university.

Today, about 97 per cent of students meet the minimum MTL requirement of at least a D7 during the O-level mid-year examination, said MOE.

Mr Chan said that with the MTL written exams held in the second week of September, students and teachers would have four more months of learning.

The MOE spokesman added that over the years, there has been an increasing proportion of students whose first MTL sitting is their best attempt, while fewer have chosen to take the second sitting.

Furthermore, any grade improvement in the second sitting changed the post-secondary posting outcomes only for less than 2 per cent of the cohort who took the O-level MTL exams.

Students who do not meet the MTL progression criteria will continue to be granted provisional admission, on the condition that they meet the requirement at the end of year 1 in JC or year 2 in Millennia Institute.

With FSBB, there are more opportunities for students to customise their learning and offer subjects at a level more suited to their strengths, interests and learning needs, including for MTL, said the spokesman.

Why are there changes in the polytechnic year 1 admission criteria from 2028?

Under the current polytechnic admission criteria, students are required to offer five O-level (G3 equivalent) subjects.

The subjects include English Language, two relevant (R) subjects and two best (B) subjects, or more commonly known as the ELR2B2 aggregate score. This will continue to be used from 2028.

To recognise learning at the different subject levels, the polytechnic year 1 admission criteria will be changed when the first batch of students to sit the SEC exam enter a post-secondary institution in 2028.

By then, students can offer one “best” subject taken at either G2 or G3 level, with the remaining four subjects offered at G3 to ensure that they can cope with the academic rigour in the polytechnics.

With this change, all students will be assessed on a common benchmark of four G3 and one G2 subject instead of five G3 subjects.

Students who offer both “best” subjects at the G3 level will have the one with a lower grade mapped from G3 to G2.

As a result of the relaxation of one “best” subject from G3 to G2, the aggregate score into polytechnic year 1 will be revised from 26 to 22 points.

“The updated criteria will better recognise the different subject levels offered by students and provide options for different learner profiles, while ensuring that students have the foundational competencies to thrive in their chosen pathway,” said the MOE spokesman.

There is no change to the existing junior college admission criteria to ensure that students have the academic foundation to cope with the A-level curriculum. 

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