Aloysius Foo responds to our previous article by Andrew Chia, Rethinking Scholarship Diversity: The Pre-U Education of PSC Scholars. In his letter, he highlights the need to go beyond diversity, and explore the deeper issues surrounding Singapore’s social class reproduction, which has created an “Aristocracy of Merit”.

Several weeks ago, the two of us wrote an op-ed outlining the major challenges facing the United States’ contact tracing programs. We issued an urgent call to action for federal leaders to step up, develop a unified strategy, and provide critical life support to these programs. Federal leadership on contact tracing is paramount to the […]

As the new academic year begins for the approximately 130,930 K-12 schools across the U.S. and the debate about reopening schools continues to grow at the local and national level, some key voices are missing from the conversation. While school districts decide to remain online, adopt hybrid options, or embrace full in-person classes, the main […]

Minister-in-Charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing recently remarked that the diversity of Public Service Commission Scholarship recipients goes beyond race, language, and religion. This raises questions about how diverse recipients have been in socio-economic terms, of which pre-university education provides a good proxy for assessment. In this piece, Andrew Chia looks at why diversity in background matters, and explores the diversity of PSC scholars using compiled data on PSC Scholarships from 2007 to 2018.

Singapore’s current efforts in managing plastic waste are mostly focused on downstream measures, but the broader issue of plastic consumption continues to require action upstream. Ensuring responsible production processes, through policy regulation, can help to promote general reduction of plastic waste and environmental impact. To that end, Woo Qiyun spotlights the role of an Extended Producer Responsibility scheme in Singapore, to increase the accountability of corporations and government.

Advances-in and increasing use-of FRT have brought myriad concerns about the risks of such technology to the forefront of public debate.

As Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel noted in a recent interview with the Verge, “Numbers are what make Washington move.” Vital statistics, financial information, and other data transmitted over the Internet are central to how the federal government discovers social problems and shapes public policy. As COVID-19 has forced millions of Americans to work, learn, […]

It is not my pleasure to endorse tightening control over information creation and publicity. As a journalist who thrives on the vast benefits of a free press and the newly rapid pace at which news travels, only the coronavirus pandemic provided a rare moment to rethink my position on information regulation. The world, in managing […]

When the media never fully determined how to cover the first Asian-American Democrat running for president nationally, it created a plethora of challenges for Andrew Yang’s historic campaign. Despite receiving disproportionate obstacles for a candidate of his polling level, Yang resiliently left a legacy that shaped national discourse on policy and empowered other Asian-Americans to […]

We are less than four months away from a very contentious election in Myanmar. The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party is desperate to make a comeback, the case accusing Myanmar of genocide continues at the International Court of Justice, the repatriation of Rohingya refugees remains an open question, and COVID-19 has delayed the ongoing […]

While three-fourths of the world’s population has access to a basic sanitation service, only about half of the world’s population uses a safely managed sanitation service. Over the last decade, the Government of India has strived to increase access to sanitation, building 100 million additional toilets in rural India over the last five years under […]

The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically changed the way governments everywhere, and at all levels, deliver services to citizens. There has been a widespread embrace of technology, new and old, even among the most reluctant. Medical services, education and work – for many of us – have moved online, and despite initial hiccups, seem to be […]