My thoughts on AGT 09 so far...

This is the best act I have seen so far in AGT this year. Unpretentious. Great voice. I put my money on him winning the competition. One thing that puzzle me is the lady below who appeared in both Kevin Skinner's and Lawrence Beaman's auditions. Who is she? If the clips are genuine, she and her friends (near her) must be working for the producer of AGT that they can afford to jet-set and attend auditions in different cities in America.

In Beaman's audition, she sat behind David Hasselhoff on the front row, swaying her body when Beaman sang. Skinner came in EP 3 when the auditions were held in NY and Beaman, EP 5 in LA. And in between these cities, AGT went to Houston. The clips looks so similar that I am encourage to believe it is only real for Beaman. I wonder when these audition clips were first made available to the public.

Anyway, another comment I want to make is that had Simon Cowell been one of the judges, half of the act that got throught the next stage would have been kicked out. Like The Texas Tenors and Timez 2. The judges have to commit to say "NO" more often to audience who are easily moved by county nationalism with little regards whether their support is aimed at real talent. Simon knows when to do that when the audience fails to discriminate craps from talent.

Lastly, what do AGT and American Idol teach us about learning? How you assess shape the kind of gems that will come out through the education system. You would not get to see that phenomenal talent of Kevin Skinner and Susan Boyle from the idol format. So again, it is meaningless to talk about how the effectiveness of educational intervention when assessment could not assess the learning afforded by the intervention. Just my thoughts...

I'm so exhausted : /

I'm in such a bad state now. Weeks of energy-sapping work have taken a toll on my health. In the past 24 hours I had spent more that 12 hours sleeping. Still, I woke up felling more exhausted. The only thing that occupied me in sleep these past few days was work. Crazy. I even think about what I plan to do the following day in my sleep. I had no bandwidth to blog these days and I still had not completed the last 3 sections (from a total of 9 sections) of my methodology chapter. Arrgghhhh.....

Ok. Calm down. I'm on mc tomorrow. I'll spend the whole morning tomorrow finishing off the tail end of what that kept me busy. Then I will start working on my dissertation and hopefully over the weekend, I can finish 2 more sections of the methodology chapter. And yes, I hope to start blogging again.

Oh yes, I got news last week that I will be posted out the end of the year. I need to find time to update my cv and submit application. I'm tinkering where I should go. My guiding principle has always been that when you pursue a part-time graduate study, try your best not to make life-changing decisions, like changing job, move house, etc. Keep everything constant so that there would be no disruption to your study. Well, getting posted out is beyond my control. Where can I go where I can create a false sense that nothing much has change in my job and working environment? Hmm...tricky.