Ris Low: Miss Singapore World

Ris Low won Miss Singapore World. This is, apparently, a competition to determine the prettiest girl in Singapore in some respects. Unaccountably, this girl with a lopsided smile, won. I find this odd, in itself, since I have seen, since I arrived in Singapore, many a better looking person...but heh, perhaps those others didn't want to enter.

Anyway, Ris Low, has become more famous for her personal "qualities" than for her "beauty". When first elected to the crown of Miss Singapore World, she was heavily criticized for her risibly low command of English. She seems to speak her own version of "unintelligible". In truth, she is a heavy Singlish speaker with an original style. Ris Low classics include "bigini" for "bikini"; "leopard preens" for "leopard prints" and "zipbra" for "zebra". She can't even pronounce "red" which she says as "RAD". At times, her speech departed so much from communicative norms, in any language, that she simply could not be understood - even by Singlish speakers.

Ris Low embarrassed Singapore through her poor grasp of English. Many felt that she made Singaporeans look uneducated. (Well, she does...) However, her poor English could be forgiven on account of her presumed risibly low intelligence. She has, yet, in her public appearances never given any evidence of being a thoughtful person. Now, however, she has given much evidence of being a thoughtless one. Ris Low, believe it or not, has been convicted of multiple charges of credit card fraud!

Seeing her lopsided smile in the My Paper, with the words "Guilty of Credit Card Fraud", felt rather surreal. It was as if someone was saying a bad joke twice. We have already heard the joke about her English...now we have to hear the joke about her morality.

Rather astonishingly, Ris Low stole credit card details of PATIENTS while working as a patients' service assistant (that is SOME service) in a healthcare facility. She then went on an idiotic spending spree buying such necessary items as two gold anklets for a $1,000, a $698 mobile phone and dining out at an upscale restaurant. In total, SIXTY charges were taken into consideration for her sentencing. She was convicted of five charges of misappropriation (akin to stealing), cheating using illegally obtained credit cards and IMPERSONATING the identities of the card owners.

What really astonished me about this case was the lightness of her sentence. She was given two years supervised probation. It seems clear that the fact that she is a beauty queen seems to have had some influence over her sentencing.

To my mind, a beauty queen should be more than a pretty face (and I don't think that Ris Low is even that, since, by my standards, she is not good enough to even be an entrant in such a show). A beauty queen should also be a decent person with integrity and heart. I say this because beauty queens represent their countries. As representatives they should show the BEST of their countries...not only in beauty (she is not the best) but in character (she is not the worst).

Ris Low fails as a beauty queen precisely because she fails as a human being. She has proven to be dishonest. She is so risibly low in moral character, that she thinks it OK to steal from hospital PATIENTS to buy herself gold ankle chains. It is absolutely revolting. The people she stole from have enough worries and stresses in their lives dealing with their illnesses, not to have to deal with the sudden knowledge that someone has been using their credit cards fraudulently. Just imagine the shock of those patients to discover that it was a HOSPITAL staff member that had stolen their cards? It is appalling.

Ris Low should not represent Singapore in anything. She shows, if anything, that Singapore is a place of poor moral standards. Ris Low grew up in Singapore. Therefore her almost unintelligible speech and lack of a moral sense, are the products of her Singaporean upbringing. Both facts, make Singapore look very bad.

Singapore should take more care in its choice of "Ambassadors", if it wishes to be seen in a good light. Then, again, perhaps it is more truthful of the true nature of young Singaporeans today, that someone like Ris Low should be an ambassador. Perhaps her character is no more than a reflection of a generation who seek short cuts in all things; who value materialism above morality - and who think that they can get by on looks alone, with no other redeeming quality or ability at all. Ris Low, therefore, represents the Singapore of tomorrow: characterless, amoral, far from bright and not really that beautiful.

So, Singapore has a decision to make. Either it should show Singapore as it is becoming (see Ris Low's description above), or as it would like to be seen.

I have a view on this. Generally, I think a country should show the BEST of its people. It should highlight the exemplars. In doing so, it gives all people of that nation something to aspire to - but it also shows what that country and its people can achieve. This is not lying about a country, for everyone knows that not everyone is as beautiful, talented, honest etc.

Ris Low is not the best that Singapore has to offer, in any sense of the word best. She is not the most beautiful person in Singapore. She is not the smartest person in Singapore (in fact, she is not the smartest person anywhere). She is also not the most honest person in Singapore (nor is she anywhere). If Singapore wants to show its young people as they can be, then show Ris Low to the world. If Singapore would like to show its young people as they SHOULD be...then get someone else. Anyone else would be better than this risibly low choice of a human being.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

Do you want to live forever?

Who wants to live forever? Do you? If people are honest with themselves, most people would answer "yes" to my question. Yet, since time immemorial this wish has co-existed with its hopelessness. To live forever, has been, for all this time, an absolute impossibility. Indeed, for most of the history of Mankind, to live to adulthood was unlikely enough, since most didn't achieve it. So, why do I ask this question, then? I do so, because we live in a time of change...a time in which it may soon, indeed, be possible to live forever.



At this point, I may have lost half of my readers. Well, to the half that remains, I would like to say this: thank you for being open-minded enough to read this far.



Now, as long term readers of my blog will know, I never broach a topic without much thought upon it and justification for my views. Today is no exception. You see what makes living forever less of an impossibility these days is the considerable progress made in understanding aging, the considerable proofs that it is possible to extend life (in a huge range of laboratory animals) and the nearness of drugs to achieve just that. Something else has changed too, in some quarters of the anti-aging world: the philosophy of how to approach the issue of preventing aging, debility and death. One such change is the proposals of Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University scientist, formerly a computer scientist, latterly a self-taught biologist with a PhD to prove it. Aubrey de Grey is, by the way, a most appropriate name, I think, for a man concerned almost solely with the prevention of aging! How serendipitous to find himself so named and so preoccupied! Anyway, Aubrey de Grey has proposed an approach to end the tyranny of aging and death. He calls this, quite attractively, SENS, (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). What this means is, quite simply, the ways and means to stop you getting old...ever. His strategy is revolutionary in that it doesn't seek to understand aging, in the way almost all gerontological scientists are trying to do. No. He seeks, instead, to REPAIR THE DAMAGE done by aging. His contention is that it is much easier to repair the effects of aging, than to understand the underlying causes of aging and its mechanisms so as to be able to intervene to stop them in the first place. That problem, he admits, is far harder. By repairing the damage, rather than preventing it in the first place, Aubrey de Grey envisages a world in which periodic treatments would prevent people from getting old. They would, potentially, live not for seventy or eighty years, but for thousands of years. That is right, we could live for millenia. Some people indeed would never die. (There is a non-zero change of someone literally living forever if the safety of the environment increases and risk of death lowers over time, according to Aubrey de Grey's work).



Unfortunately, for us all, Aubrey de Grey's work needs funding. The SENS initiative is fairly radical and, in this world, radical ideas are slow to attract the funds they need, since most funding bodies prefer near term, safer options. However, there is something you can do, today to help. There is a competition running between SENS and a rival. They are in competition to see who can secure the most comments on a site. The winner receives $5,000 US dollars as a prize which will be used for research. The money doesn't sound like much...but it could be enough for a researcher to try out an idea and to put one more brick in the edifice that is SENS. A step forward will have been made - so it is worth it. The other side of it is that if enough people post comments in support of SENS (please try to think of something interesting to say...but it is OK if you don't...the comment itself is helpful), then other funding bodies may see that the cause is popular and come forward to support it.



To help research into stopping aging and help us all live longer, all you have to do is to go to this link and either sign in to the site and then comment - or, sign in to your GOOGLE account (the one that comes with GMAIL) and then register a comment. The latter is probably easier for many people.



http://www.facebook.com/l/65f50;3banana.com/m/0JQ/-kDPA_iEv7i



Please help SENS win this competition. You never know, it might be the step that prevents your own aging and gives you a much longer life...



Ask your friends to sign in and comment, too. Why not post the initiative on your facebook pages and get other people to sign in, too and comment. Let them all understand that it is a way to raise money for anti-aging research. It costs them nothing...but could benefit everyone.



Please let me know in the comments below, if you have made the effort to comment at SENS (and perhaps you could copy your comment below, to let me know how it is going). It would help me to know if this kind of initiative is of interest to my readers, since there are other things I could write about this area, in future, if people like it.



Thanks, in advance, for your help in supporting SENS rejuvenation research.


P.S: There is a time limit to the competition and I don't know when that is...so hurry. If I have posted too late...sorry, but I tried. Thanks.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

Tiarnan's uncanny book choice.

The other day, Tiarnan, three, was in the library. Now, unusually, perhaps, he concerned himself not with a book for himself, but a book for Daddy.

He wandered about the shelves, with his observant eye scanning the options on display. Suddenly, he pointed at a particular book and got his mother to get it for him.

"This is for Daddy.", he announced, clutching the book.

Can you guess what Tiarnan had selected out of all the books in the library, for his Daddy to read?

Have a good think about what he might choose.

Well, he selected: "The 100 most influential scientists", by Britannica, with an introduction by John Gribbin. I thought it was a most uncanny choice. It was weird because it is a close match to my interests...yet how on Earth could he have known? I have never read a book like it, in his presence, since he was born. Yet, he managed to choose something I would genuinely be interested in, out of all the books in the library.

On the cover is an image of Albert Einstein, staring mysteriously into the camera. I thought, maybe, he connected that face to Daddy's interests...yet the photo is on the front, not on the spine which would have been facing outwards.

Anyway, for whatever reason he chose it, and by whatever intuition he was guided to make the choice, I was touched in two ways: firstly, that he thought to choose a book for me at all - and secondly, that he ended up making such an appropriate choice.

Thank you, Tiarnan, for thinking of Daddy!

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

A sense of personal safety.

I saw something really odd today. The oddest thing about it is that no-one else thought it was odd.

I was standing in a queue at the bank and, directly in front of me was a young woman of about 22, carrying a shopping bag from Watson's. After a while, she reached the front of the queue and was called over to a teller. She had to be called, because she was daydreaming. Given what she was carrying you would rather think she wouldn't be daydreaming.

Anyway, when she got to the teller, she handed over her shopping bag. The bank clerk looked within and began to pull out bundles of cash. The whole shopping bag was filled with money. Admittedly, it wasn't a large bag...but still, that was a large amount of money for a young woman to be carrying around in a plastic shopping bag.

I was rather startled. I was startled that the young woman was not, in fact, two large, burly men, wearing helmets, padded jackets and carrying guns. You see, in most countries that would be who would be delivering such a large sum of money to the bank. In Singapore, however, it was quite clear that a shop (as I assumed the money was from) felt safe sending a young shop assistant to deliver the funds.

I looked around...but no-one else was paying the girl any particular attention. No-one thought it was odd, in the least.

I realized then, that I was watching a scene that was quintessentially Singaporean. Only in a country in which people were ABSOLUTELY convinced of their personal safety would a shop send a young woman, alone, to deliver the day's takings to the bank. In any other country, burly, armed security guards would be doing the job. Or, at the very least a couple of beefy guys, alert and ready for trouble. In Singapore, however, they sent a daydreaming girl who was quite unaware of her surroundings, to carry thousands and thousands of dollars to the bank. I was flabbergasted.

In Singapore, there is a definite sense of personal safety. This is not entirely an illusion, for violent and personal crime is quite low. However, you should note that we have been stolen from THREE times in our eight years in Singapore...so this girl was not really as safe as she thought she was. I think theft is quite high in Singapore, since I have never been stolen from in Europe or America...in the other 33years of my life not spent in Singapore. So, if anything, theft is higher here, than where I spent most of my life. At least, that is the experience of my life.

Yet, it is true that people are quite safe in Singapore. Indeed, Singaporeans believe that they live in the safest country in the world. Now, this is not true. Even the Republic of Ireland has lower crime (particularly violent crimes, like murder) than Singapore (it is ranked the least violent country in Europe)...so there are other places with lower crime than Singapore. However, Singapore does have relatively low crime and that can only be a good thing.

More impressive though than the actual relatively low crime rate is the BELIEF people have about their personal safety...there is a definite sense in which people really feel safe on a daily basis. There is an absence of fear for personal safety that cannot, for instance, be felt, at all in the USA (a place which always puts me on edge, for obvious reasons).

For me, today's experience in the bank was a marvel. It brought home to me just what kind of place this was. It is a country in which people so strongly believe in their own personal safety that they give it no thought whatsoever. It is a place in which young women feel safe carrying thousands of dollars in cash, in a plastic shopping bag. I can't think of anywhere else on Earth, in which someone would actually do that. Even in the safer places than Singapore,such as Ireland, people are not so sure of their safety to do so (or perhaps not so naive...).

Of course, this leads me to wonder just what would happen to a girl like that, if she were to move to London, or New York. I don't think she would live a week. Her behaviour would be so naive it would only be hours before she would run into trouble. So, there is a downside to this. Singaporeans should not forget that the rest of the world is not such a controlled place as Singapore. To live and think like a Singaporean outside of Singapore (except for a few places) would be a really stupid thing to do. In some respects, it is pretty stupid to think like this girl, too, even inside Singapore...but that is another issue.

Nevertheless, today left me with an indelible image of a young woman, quite inattentively carrying a very large amount of cash, without any concern at all.

How odd.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

Selamat Hari Raya 2009

Selamat Hari Raya 2009, firstly, to my wife, and all her relatives. Secondly, selamat hari raya to any and all of my readers around the world who are celebrating it, today.

In Singapore, Hari Raya is celebrated by visiting relatives, eating traditional Malay foods and catching up on a year's gossip.

I have just returned from a house full of guests - all day long - at my mother in law's house. It was good to see how everyone was. I had not seen some of them since they were kids...and now they are adults. That was quite a surprise. It was a sharp reminder that I have passed many years here, in Singapore. Anyway, I had a great day.

I hope you all have a great day, too.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

The third anniversary of my prodigy blog.

Somehow, day by day, I have managed to write my way to the third anniversary of my blog. More precisely, Saturday, 19th September 2009 was the third anniversary exactly, from my very first post.

Last year, to this day, I set myself a target in terms of readership. That target was for me to secure as many readers in my third year, as in my first two years of blogging put together. Well, the total number of visitors to my blog, over the past three years, was, at the stroke of midnight at the end of September 19th 2009, exactly 222,714 visitors. The total at the end of the first two years had been 105,716 visitors...so, I succeeded! The total number of visitors to my blog in my third year was 116,998 readers!

Let us look more closely at what that means. I exceeded my target by 11,282 readers or, putting it another way, I surpassed the target by 10.67%. Another way of looking at it is year on year growth: last year I had 72,621 visitors in the year; this year I had 116,998 - this represents an increase of 61.1% over last year. This wasn't as great a percentage increase as the change from first to second year, which represented a 119.4% increase (from 33,095 readers to 72,621 readers), however, in absolute terms it is a much greater increase.

I am pleased with the readership my blog has garnered over the years even though, in absolute terms, that readership is not vast. There are blogs coming out of Singapore, for instance, that feature little other than skimpily clad girls talking about their shopping trips, boyfriends and plastic surgery. These blogs attract something like 50,000 readers a day, so my annual readership is but three days of visitors, for them. Yet, I hazard, the aggregate intelligence of my readers, on one day, probably exceeds that of all the readers, of their blogs, in an entire year. My blog is not aimed at the salivating masses - but at people who want to read something a little more thoughtful. I have found, in correspondence with readers through comment posts, that many of my readers are, themselves, thoughtful, provocative, experienced and intelligent. This has made blogging a great pleasure, in many ways, for it has given me the chance to correspond with a fair number of interesting people.

I would rather have the attention of one intelligent person, than a vast horde of the ignorant. Thus, it is, that I write in the way I do. My thoughts are unlikely ever to appeal to those vast crowds that flock to the type of mindless blog I have written of, above, but I am satisfied if they meet with the interest of those whose own interests lead them to want to read them. That is enough.

When I began writing three years ago, I did not know that I would be still "penning" my blog, on an almost daily basis. For those who read regularly, I apologize if I sometimes miss my daily posting - sometimes a busy life intervenes and precludes the time required to sit and post. My intention, however, is to post daily.

I am conscious that my preoccupations are niche interests and so it is gratifying that my readership continues to grow year on year. However, I am also aware that they ARE niche interests and so there is a limit to growth. Only a small proportion of people ever give a single thought to the gifted - which is why, in many countries, the gifted struggle to receive the resources they need to meet their potential. Yet, even so, that is no reason why I should not continue to write from the perspective of one interested in all matters, gifted. In fact, it is all the MORE reason to write about the gifted. Clearly, since so many gifted people are in the position of having to fight for resources, it is clear that not enough is being done for them, worldwide. Writing about the issues involved can only help therefore, even if only indirectly, through raising awareness of all the relevant issues.

My average daily readership per day, this year, was 320.5 readers per day. This is quite a lot for a blog these days, considering how many tens of millions of them, there are. However, this average is bulked up by one incredible day on which I had almost 10,000 visitors. This was because a major German newspaper (Bild, one of the biggest in world circulation) linked to my blog, from an article they had written. So, on that day, I received 10,000 German speaking visitors who, presumably, couldn't read my blog very well, because it was in English, looked around for a bit, in a rather puzzled fashion - and never returned to read it again. Nevertheless, they contributed to my annual readership total.

For comparison, you should note that the average blog on Livejournal (and there are 12.5 million such blogs) has only 7 readers per day. Should that be an average readership for all blogs worldwide - and there is no reason to think that it would not be typical - then my blog is 45.8 times more successful/more popular than an average blog. In comparative terms, therefore, my blog is a minor "best seller"...since anything which is 45.8 times more popular than average is doing pretty well. So, though my readership seems modest, it is not, really, in relative terms, because there are only so few readers and so much to read, so attracting over three hundred a day is a real victory.

Another metric which is quite surprising is the number of page views that my readers have clocked up. Since my blog began there has been 489,922 page views. Now, this is quite an impressive (to me) total when you consider that one page represents one week of posts (since I have allotted one week per page). This means the true number of posts read is potentially 3,429,454 posts. That is a lot of words...billions of them, when you consider the average length of a post. New page views for the past year totalled: 224,066 page views. That corresponds to 1,568,462 posts read in the past year. Last year's page views were 160,169, making this year's tally an increase of 40% over the previous year.

These figures make me realize just how effective a communication tool a blog is. I have transmitted billions of words worth of my thoughts, into well over a hundred thousand different heads, in the past year. Only the publishing of a successful book matches this delivery of thought. Yet, a blog is far easier to accomplish, since there are fewer barriers to entry.

My aim for the coming year is just to exceed what I achieved this year. It is not a spectacular aim - but it is a realistic one - because I know that what I write is not of universal interest. The number of people who visit my blog from the search engines is not likely to change much - because searches for giftedness, prodigy and the like always have much the same frequency. The only thing that can change over time, is repeat visitors - people who like what they read and decide to stop by, another time, to read some more. I am hoping, therefore, to attract more regulars over the coming year - for that is the only way my readership will ever grow. It will grow if people like what I write and recommend it to people they know, by word of mouth and by linking to my site from their own sites. That is all.

So, if you have enjoyed any of my articles, over the past three years, why not recommend my blog to others, link to it from your own sites...and stop by to read again.

I will continue to write about my gifted children. I will still discuss all topics related to giftedness, prodigiousness, talent, and human excellence in all its forms. I will also stray into general social and educational topics, as and I when I feel moved to do so. Over the course of a year, I shall write of many different things...so keep an open mind when you read and you might be surprised at what you find.

I would like to thank those who have made my blog one of their regular reads. I would also like to thank anyone who has linked to my blog, or any posts - or recommended it to others. Your patronage is appreciated.

I don't know what posts the coming year will bring...but I will just try to keep on writing and see if this blog can make it to its fourth anniversary. (In a way it is a big achievement to get to my third anniversary, since most blogs fall silent pretty early on...there are a lot of dead blogs out there).

So, to my readers from all over the world: thanks for reading...and I will try to keep writing.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

IMDB is the Internet Movie Database for film and tv professionals.If you would like to look at my IMDb listing for which another fifteen credits are to be uploaded, (which will probably take several months before they are accepted) please go to: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3438598/ As I write, the listing is new and brief - however, by the time you read this it might have a dozen or a score of credits...so please do take a look. My son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, also has an IMDb listing. His is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3305973/ My wife, Syahidah Osman Cawley, has a listing as well. Hers is found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)