Daily Lessons from Life 30 May 2009

Thought I made an entry last night but apparent not! Must be getting old!!

I went for a long 13-14km job on a humid and warm evening yesterday and lost 2kg of fluid in the process and got the weight down to 75kg! It showed once again that there is NO SUBSTITUTE for discipline if we want to achieve our goal consistently.


"Sat, May 30, 2009 The New Paper - We didn't cancel the trip because...

ASSOCIATE Professor Mark Chong has had his hands full since returning from New York city on Tuesday morning.


He had led the Singapore Management University's Business Study Mission (BSM) to New York city with 20 students. Now one of those students, Miss Theresa Wee, 22, has become Singapore's Patient Zero.

The professor has been put on home quarantine, which he thinks will last about six days if he does not come down with Influenza A (H1N1). He had been called to Tan Tock Seng Hospital for a check-up. At about 11pm, he was waiting for a Cisco van to take him home where he lives with his parents. 'I've been told I can't just walk out of the hospital,' said Assoc Prof Chong, 43, who teaches corporate communications at SMU.

But why did the group proceed with the trip knowing that there were H1N1 cases in New York?
When the group proceeded on the trip, the Ministry of Health had already lowered the alert level from orange to yellow and H1N1 appeared to be mild, said Assoc Prof Chong. The spread of H1N1 cases in New York then was also contained and localised in the borough of Queens. There are five boroughs in New York city. Queens was not part of their itinerary. As an added precaution for personal hygiene and responsibility, each student was equipped with N95 masks and a personal thermometer.

'We took our temperature daily while in New York,' said Assoc Prof Chong.

An SMU spokesman said that the trip was optional for the students in the New York BSM. Provisions would be made to adjust the grades for those who decided not to go. 'The students who are still there have been told to take their temperatures twice a day. Once any of them has a temperature of 38 deg C or higher, they have to check themselves into a hospital,' said Assoc Prof Chong.

Miss Wee has been suffering a high fever of 39 to 40 deg C. She has been put on Tamiflu medication and should be on the mend soon, said Associate Professor Leo Yee Sin, clinical director of the Communicable Disease Centre."

Interesting case stud on: Making Decision!

Lessons for me are:

1. you can never get it right all the time with making decision since we do it based on whatever information we have on hand then and with certain assumptions. e.g. flu alert was lowered to yellow from orange, Queens is not on the agenda, precaution taken, etc;

2. it would be good if we at least apologized for the result since in this case the result was 1 student down and 1 maybe also down. The good thing is, at least up to now, the H1N1 virus is not as deadly as the SARS case even though SARS supposedly has the fatality rate 1%, the same as that of a normal flu! (Though it hardly seemed that way with some many deaths recorded during that short period!);

3. grown up adults make decision for themselves. Often time, we have the tendency to think: it will not happen to me. If we do have that thinking, it will be good to think deeper and say: IF it happened to me, I will take responsibility and I will go through all the 'inconveniences' to myself, and apologize for the inconvenience I will cause to the people who care about me, work with me, and the organization. If you do that, then you have really prepare yourself well and make the decision knowing the full consequences.

May Ms Wee recover quickly and well. Life moves on ...