The Serial Position Effect

And there's the long queue of people again.. This time round the queue gathered in front of the transitlink office, to replace their old ezylink card with the new cepas card.

During the start of the replacement exercise in January, people also queued for the replacement though there was nine months to do so. Now the end of September, and the last day of free replacement, people once again queue up to change the cards. So where were the crowd during the remaining of the time?!

This phenomena can be explained by the Serial Position Effect. When people are asked to recall a list of words, they tend to recall words from the beginning and end of the list. The findings is illustrated in the graph below:



image taken from wikipedia


People tend to remember words from the front of the list(Primacy Effect) because they have more time to rehearse the words to themselves, allowing the words to go into long-term memory; People tend to remember words towards the end of the list(Recency Effect) because those words are still in the short-term memory. Collectively, the two effects are known as the Serial Position Effect.

How can this explain the queues? People who queued up during the January period are under the Primacy effect; people who queued up today are under the Recency effect. People tend to forget that they can actually exchange the cards during the months from February to August, though there were special booths set up for that purpose.

Conclusion:
It's amazing that people like to queue so much.

Thoughts

For the first time, I invigilated for a mid-term test instead of taking the test. To speak the truth, it's quite boring, lol. But at least I get paid for standing around.

On Monday, I saw a few youths maybe around thirteen seated at a bball court taking puffs of smokes in their school uniform. Clearly, they don't have the age but wander how they got their cigarettes.. It's quite sad to see this happening, but what can I do? Could I have approached them and start preaching to them? Nah, I doubt that will work. Change doesn't come about in a day and certainly doesn't come after preaching by some stranger. I can only hope they find someone who care for them and capable of guiding them soon.

Social Service Agency Visits

Went visiting 2 agencies yesterday and today to Shan You Counselling Centre and Student Care Service Centre. I have to be quite unlucky to get places that are so far from my house, but lucky they were interesting visits.

Before entering Shan You an elderly woman came forth and asked a girl beside me what place is this, showing that people are still generally still unaware of the help that are available?

Of the two places I went, I prefer the latter visit as there was an ice breaker session which helped me to know some other people who also went to the same visit. Think the ice breaker could come in handy for me soon too. :p

If I were to choose to volunteer for either of them, I would choose the latter as well. Cause I prefer to work with youths and children.

Anyway, after the visits, I'm supposed to write a reflection paper to be submitted. Think it's gonna be more difficult than I thought, cause it's not the first time that I had visited these agencies, and the novelty is long gone :'( It's still nice to learn about some of the programs that are ongoing in the centres, and I could join them as a volunteer in future.

After the second visit, I asked Kai and Miz out to lunch at AMK, eating at the food court of AMK hub, getting a not-so-cooked chicken laksa from the stall, condemned that stall.

Miz rushed off to school after lunch, while the remaining stayed behind for a cup of Mc Milkshake. We settled down at an open square to chat and drink the milkshake, when something interesting happened, steps away from us.

A guy grab a girl then I don't know what they do, but seem like they were tussling. After a while, they left. Just when we had finished our milkshake and wanted to leave, we were stopped by someone who said she wanted to interview us. Of course, I pushed Kai to manage her. Initially, he accepted to be interviewed, but when he saw a big camera being taken out, he didn't want to, and push me over, lol..

I didn't want to either. Anyway, the first question was what's the reason that we did not attempt to intervene. My answer would be "Their acting didn't look convincing." That's one reason why I didn't wanna be interviewed.

eat and eat and eat

The last few days was spent mostly on food. With 5 meals a day, plus going around to buy snacks to bring back to Singapore.

Well, it's still a good break to visit my relatives whom I've not seen for more than 2 years. :p Upon return, it's back to replying so many emails. Hope my students don't submit junk programs, cause I've failed to reply them in time. Good luck to them.