Blowin' In The Wind

Have you seen my new blog?

Hi, please visit my new website. It's called pressrun.net.

That was the domain name or URL to which this blog, Blowin' in the Wind, was mapped. What happened was I started Blowin' in the Wind on rana.typepad.com -- the URL or website address you are seeing now -- but then changed the URL to pressrun.net. You can do that on TypePad, which allows domain mapping.

You can find out more about domain mapping from the wonderful people at TypePad, who do a great job. TypePad knows some of us want our blogs to have our own domain names and not have a website address like this blog now: rana.typepad.com.

But I found out I could have a TypePad blog on my own domain name only after I started this blog, which I called Blowin' in the Wind, because that's the title of one of my all-time favourite songs. So I did not rename the blog pressrun.net even after I had my own domain name. I wanted my readers to continue reading my blog. Thank you, dear readers.

However, I have now moved the blog to a new website. So I have changed the name to pressrun.net because that's the domain name -- address or URL -- of my new website.

But it's the same old blog. If you check the tagline below the name, pressrun.net, you will see it says: The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind. It still uses the same RSS feed. You can click here and subscribe if you like. Everything is still the same. Only the name of the blog and the picture you will see below the title have changed. So why not give it a go?

The only other thing that had to change is the Facebook page. I am still using the same Twitter username.

I have disconnected the RSS feed from this blog and blocked search engines from visiting this site because I am now on pressrun.net. Do visit me. And tell me what you think on pressrun. net. Thank you and have a great day.

Singapore Pools OK, not the casinos?

How much money does the Singapore government make from the lotteries run by Singapore Pools and its other bookmaking activities?

Today reports that Singapore Pools will give S$164.8 million to charity over the next three years. The money will be put into the Tote Board Social Service Fund for the National Council of Social Service to use.

What the report doesn't say is how much money Singapore Pools collects from the punters every week.

Singapore Pools and the Singapore Turf Club are both owned by the Tote Board,  a statutory board under the Finance Ministry.

That puts the government in the same business as the casinos, from which it is trying to protect Singaporeans.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr & Singapore media

Facebook is the most popular social network in Singapore. But how popular is microblogging and Twitter? And are the Singapore news sites holding their own against the social networks and blogs?

Here are the traffic estimates for Singapore mainstream media websites provided by Google Trends and Double Click Ad Planner. We look at AsiaOne, the top site, followed by the Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia, which are almost in a dead heat, Today, Stomp, HardWare Zone, and the stragglers, Business Times and The New Paper. You can also see the estimated number of users of Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Twitter in Singapore.

Times on the Net: You can't beat the traffic

The New York Times is the newspaper with the best website and gets around four million daily unique visitors (estimated cookies) – way above the other newspapers I checked on Google Trends and Double Click Ad Planner. (See the charts at the end of this post.)

The Straits Times resembles the American, not the British, newspapers shown in the charts in one way.

The world's biggest selling newspapers

The internet is said to be taking its toll on newspapers, but circulation is still healthy in highly wired countries like Japan and South Korea. Tokyo seems to be the newspaper capital, boasting the two most widely circulated newspapers in the world: Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.

Tokyo has, in all, four of the 10 most widely circulated newspapers in the world. Two are published from London: the News of the World and the Sun. One is German: the Bild. Two are in China. And the other one is the Times of India.

So why aren't any American newspapers on the top 10 list? It can't be because of the internet. The internet is as widely used in Britain, Japan and South Korea as in America.

How 'paranoid' small countries succeed

TechCrunch columnist Sarah Lacy, who attended the World Economic Forum's three-day "Summer Davos" meeting in Tianjin, China, has written a great piece on How small countries outperform others. She mentions Israel and Singapore and says:

NTU 69th, NUS 84th in Economist MBA rankings

I was shocked to read in the Straits Times today that Singapore's Nanyang Technological University was found below average in teaching in the Times Higher Education world university rankings. NTU dropped a hundred places to 174th spot this year while the National University of Singapore fell only four places to 34th.  You can see the rankings here.

The Economist magazine, however, rates the Nanyang Business School higher than the NUS Business School.

The Nanyang Business School is 69th and the NUS Business School 84th in this year's Economist rankings of MBA programmes. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, is 85th. INSEAD, which has campuses in both France and Singapore, is 23rd.

The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business is first and Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business is second. The University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business is third and Harvard Business School fourth. "America rules the roost," says the Economist. See the full rankings here.  Click on the links there to see short profiles of the business schools, showing their fees, student-faculty ratio, their strengths and weaknesses, the starting salaries and career prospects of their graduates.

MM Lee at 87

Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew turned 87 today. "I know if I rest, I'll slide downhill fast," he said in an interview which appeared in the New York Times last week, and now he is visiting Moscow and Paris.

An election seems round the corner with the government listening to the people, tightening immigration, offering more Housing and Development  Board (HDB) flats.

So, I have been wondering today, will MM Lee stand in the next election?

He will be in his 90s when the next parliament is dissolved.

Even then he won't be the oldest lawmaker on record.

That honour goes to Strom Thurmond, who was a senator representing North Carolina when he died at the age of 100 in 2003. He had been a senator since 1956.

The oldest US senator now is Robert Byrd, in his 90s, who has been representing West Virginia since 1959.

Born in November 1917, he is five years older than MM Lee.

MM Lee was only 35 when he was elected prime minister in 1959, much younger than Obama, who became president at 47 in January 2009.

NUS 34th, NTU 174th in Times university rankings

The National University of Singapore is 34th and Nanyang Technological University 174th in the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings powered by Thomson Reuters, released today.

American universities swept the board. Here's the list of the world's top 100 universities.

Singapore average earnings fall, not unemployment

Average earnings fell while there was no drop in unemployment in the second quarter of this year, according to the Singapore labour market survey released by the Manpower Ministry today.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rates remained unchanged at 2.2 per cent overall and 3.2 per cent for Singapore residents, said the report.

There were 84,400 unemployed residents in June 2010. About 16,500 of them have been out of work for more than six months.

Average nominal earnings fell from S$4,310 a month in January-March to S$3,819 a month in April-June.

Average real earnings fell from S$4,263 to S$3,733 as consumer prices rose. The consumer price index was up 3.1 per cent in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. (See the Singapore Statistics Department data here.)

Generally worst off were the 182,300 people in the hotels and restaurants business, with average nominal earnings of S$1,451 a month. See the tables below showing the average earnings and occupations of Singapore's three million working population.

Why Yale-NUS won't give Yale degrees

Yale president Richard Levin said Yale-NUS College graduates will not receive Yale degrees because administrators cannot ensure that the education on the Singapore campus will meet the standards upheld in New Haven, reports the Yale Daily News. It says: