Voilah!
High Tech and Innovation: Connecting France and Singapore Symposium
The panel discussions were pretty thorough although a lot of what was discussed was rather expected and understood, but to not leave anyone in the dark it was necessary to go through everything. However, there were some points that stood out.
- A question a businessman posed was on how to decide where to position their R&D centers, as considering the two rising economic powerhouses where the cheap labour and growing market is, your patents risk getting copied in one, and not recognised in the other. The speaker cheekily answered “Choose Singapore!”. But his stand was that it doesn’t matter, as long as its near a university so that there can be collaboration.
The speaker was Prof. Claude Allègre, French Geophysicist and former Minister for National Education, Research and Technology for France. Apparently rather well-known in Europe. He’s quite brilliant, and was a professor at MIT as well, therefore it was surprising that his english was quite limited, and it greatly hindered him from expressing him opinions. Some of the things he says is that no one can dictate that something will succeed. Giving example of Harvard and MIT which just happen to become renown, and it was not any board that chose them. He was actually contrasting it against France’s methods of trying to achieve academic excellence, but i feel that it is also very pertinent to Singapore.
He also went over global warming and the energy crisis, as well as what technologies he sees as viable (recycling, CO2 to limestone, 4th Gen nuclear fission) and what is rubbish (solar panels disallowed in some French cities as they are unsightly, bio-fuels), unafraid to make controversial statements.
- Although it may be an event where Singaporeans are not the majority, i still expected more contributions to the questions posed to the panelists. Instead, most came from other nationalities, a lot of them foreign students from out local Universities. China, japan, Hong Kong, US, Africa. I admit I’m guilty, but in consolation is did ask a speaker after the discussion.
- One of the panelists was the NTU Deputy Director of Center for Multimedia, Network and Technology. All the other speakers, although French and do not have such good command of English, could at least deliver a well planned and executed presentation, as well as entertain questions. She, however, spoke super fast, rushed to finish her part, committing many presenting mistakes, as well as with her voice quavering throughout, and furthermore also didn’t have a good command of the language. Irritatingly, she has a habit of tapping very hard on the lecturn with her nails which is very audible because of the microphone. Honestly, i expected better from a Deputy Director.
- According to the Deputy Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore has it’s own strain of Dengee, different from those in the neighbouring countries. That’s great news. We can stamp a made in Singapore logo and use it in our Uniquely Singapore branding.
- The Assistant Director, IT Security Division, Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) introduced a all-in-one pass/key that is in the works. E.G. It will hold all your passwords, as well as ezlink card, and be able to pay for purchases electronically, and also read RFID tags and transfer information with other such devices better than bluetooth. It’s suppose to improve security and convenience by having less chance of losing something. Although he did mention that its still just an idea seeing as he didn’t mention what would happen if you lost that bao-kah-liao (all encompassing) key.
Also, there is something called DORIS, which is an abbreviation of what i can’t remember, which is a security measure that can either read RFID (or other) tagging to verify authenticity, as well as plug into the computer via USB, and it will automatically open a virtual keyboard to use to enter usernames and passwords to beat keyloggers, as well as run applications that do not leave traces like IE and outlook from the drive a la http://portableapps.com/ or U3 thumbdrives. Except that the virtual keyboard is supposedly different from the one already in windows, and the drive is supposedly able to “intercept the bytes” so that everything goes onto the thumbdrive and nothing is recorded onto the computer. So this makes it secure to use any computer to do private actions like banking. This i have to check out whether it’s possible as i have my doubts as to its viability and validity.
- Lastly, Medical Director Asia Pacific of Sanofi-Aventis, Dr. Benedict Blayney, handled a tricky question of whether it is against the interests of drug companies to produce prevention drugs (only 1/6 of R&D is on prevention). He said people don’t like to pay for medicines when they are healthy, although he would gladly welcome the scenario where people pay doctors to keep them healthy and do not pay when they get sick. Its not that drug companies do not want to produce prevention medicines, but there just isn’t the market for it. People are more willing to pay for medicines when they are sick. Citing the huge demand for slimming pills when people should just watch their diet. And i find this very true, that people would rather get a cure and not think about prevention.
