But given that fare structure is a lot more complicated than that, it would be overly simplistic to model fare changes using a normal distribution. At such, I am curious to the type of statistical model used to derive this 2.5%. I also question the sampling size used in their calculation as the press release did not mention anything about that. I also wonder about the huge standard deviation that could be inherent in the calculation. If there are people who experience a fare increase of 43.8%, it must indicate that the standard deviation is pretty big.

I think it is the big standard deviation that is worrying. And it is even more worrying that it is senior citizens who experienced a fare increase of 43.8%. A retiree traveled from Sengkang to Dhoby Ghaut. It used to cost her 73 cents. Now it cost her $1.05.  The difference of 32 cents brings about a fare increase of 43.8%. So let’s say this person travels on this route once a week. So $0.32 x 2 x 52 (return trip) = $33.28. If she travels on this route twice a week, the fare increase goes up to $66.56. I don’t think it’s very fair that senior citizens should bear the brunt of fare increase, especially since most of them are not working.

Unless of course such senior citizens are in the very rare minority, and that a lot of people experience fare reduction. But I don’t see how the sums add up. I also wonder why people who take buses to town centres would experience should experience fare increase of 17.4% as well. It used to cost me just 69 cents. Now it will cost 81 cents, with a fare increase of 12 cents. So for aunties who need to travel to town centres every morning to do their grocery shopping, this isn’t good news at all.

So, let’s talk about the tertiary student who travels to NUS from Bukit Batok. It used to cost him $0.88. Now it will cost him $1.01 per trip. That’s a fare increase of 13 cents or 14.77%. So he goes to school everyday. That’s a fare increase of $1.30 every week. This is 4.3 times that of the average increase ($0.30) that should be experienced by commuters. Again, the question is not fare increase, but the huge deviation involved, and who it impacts more.

The lowest increase in fare that I found is 1 cent. This person travels from Sembawang to a place in Newton every day. It used to cost this person $1.60. It costs this person $1.61 now. So that translates to an increase of 10 cents a week.

So let’s do some Math to find out the people required to experience fare increase of just 10 cents. Let that be y.

(0.1y + 1.3)/(y+1) = 0.3
0.1y+1.3=0.3y + 0.3
1=0.2y
y=5

So what that means is that for every person who experiences a fare increase of $1.30, 5 people must experience a fare increase of just $0.10 for us to get the average of $0.30. Although this is probable, it does suggest to me that the redistribution effect is quite large.

I hope more information could be released soon, otherwise there should be a centralized location for people to enter their old fares and current fares - and do a proper statistical model. I wouldn’t want to wait till the end of the year to read about huge profit gains for the transport companies in Singapore. Not that they shouldn’t make a profit at all, but the profit shouldn’t be so high. Anyway, they aren’t in the red last year.

Note: I do not have any real life example of people who experience reduction in fares, and thus this analysis is in itself limited. I suspect, however, that people who change bus/trains 2 times or more who may experience a fare reduction.

Adult life can often seem like a maze, with doors to open and traps what we may fall into. There are different destinations, and different routes. Borrowing an analogy from The Pilgrim’s Progress, we may find ourselves at a junction, with 7 doors in front of us. How are we to choose which door to open? While we once navigated through the maze in darkness, we now have a helper to assist us. Yet, the sheer possibilities and sometimes desire to be right with God can drown out the very voice that seeks to guide us.  Thus we make a wrong turn, and end up taking a route that turns out to be the opposite of what we expected. Yet, the voice never gives us; it prompts and it tugs till we listen again.

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn’t go to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the great things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying…his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the piety of a friend.

An old meditation, cited in pg 158 of Long Journey Home by Os Guinness.

The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

Soren Kierkegaard’s Journal

And the biblical faiths say, “Follow the call of your Creator” - there’s no greater purpose and fulfillment for anyone than in discovering and living out the design for which God created us and sent us into the world. (pg 209)

How then do we travel the journey purposefully and finish well? The way to make the most of the journey of life and faith is to answer the call of our Creator, and in so doing discover the purpose for which we were created and to which we’re called. The great Creator alone creates completely out of nothing - fruitfully and prolifically. He alone knows our reason for being, by which he calls us into a life of purpose. (pg 212)

What is meant by “calling”? Simply that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service. (pg 213)

Dallas Willard writes, that all of us have “a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe.”

This truth - the call to be followers of the way, with the entrepreneurial vision and energy it provides - has been a driving force in many of the greatest “leaps forward” in history; the constitution of the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai, the birth of the Christian movement in Galilee, the sixteenth-century Reformation and its incalculable impetus to the rise of the modern world, and the abolition of slavery and slave trade in the West, to name a few. (pg 214)

…calling is the most comprehensive reorientation and the most profound motivation on the human journey. Answering the call is the way to find and fulfill the central, entrepreneurial purpose of your life as you journey home. (pg 215)

There are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. There are others who desire to know in order that they may be known: that is vanity. Others seek knowledge in order to sell it: that is dishonorable. But there are some who seek knowledge in order to edify others: that is love [caritas].
St. Bernard of Clarvaux

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as “good” as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what is meant for the Son of God to “become flesh and dwell among us.” Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focussed on before whom all hearts are open.
Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

While I may not get there, it is something for me to bear in mind.

When we think impatiently, with bias and in anxiety, we know we cannot trust the results. Insights gained in ecstasy - and sometimes they are - need to be subjected to the contemplation of temperate, not necessarily cold, reason. When we have arrived at a settled conviction of the truth of what we seek to know, there is indeed both a “freedom from littleness” and bigotry and a sense that what we know is as certain as the convictions of our faith. - pg 62

“This Intellectualism first and chiefly comes into collision with precept, then with doctrine, then with the very principles of dogmatism; - a perception of the Beautiful becomes the substitute for faith”

To put this in biblical terms, “Knowledge puffs up” (1 Cor 1:18). As Christians we must not substitute the mind for the whole person. All is to be under the lordship of Christ. The intellect itself must be reborn. Newman put it this way, reflecting on John 3:7:

“Your whole nature must be re-born; your passions, and your affections, and your aims, and your conscience, and your will, must be bathed in a new element, and reconsecrated to your Maker, - and the last not the least, your intellect.” (in Apologia per la vita sua) -pg70

“When the heart is rooted in God, the mind is free to play.”-Mary Jo Weaver. Humour, punning, laughter: these foster humility. They lighten the load a true intellectual begins to feel when the burden of truth - disagreeable as much truth about the human situation is - becomes too heavy to bear. For the “truth” is that, save God alone, no person - intellectual or otherwise - has all the truth. The one who thinks so is not only insufferable but just plain wrong. - pg82

“When St. Paul suggests to the Christian: whether you eat or drink or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God, must apply to the Christian in search of light. For him the true is the glory of God: he must keep it always in mind, submit to it in everything.”-A G Sertillanges (The Intellectual Life)

Holiness is being set apart for the glory of God, for God’s glory is holiness, his set-apartness from all else, his Otherness…. So first of all, to be holy is to be set apart for God’s service. And second, to be holy is to be characterized by the character of God - that is by the image of God in which he made us. To the extent that we are in God’s image, we are holy. When the Word became flesh himself, he showed us what  the image of God is like in its fullest expression. To have a passion for holiness then is to have a passion to be like Christ. Since we find ourselves even at our best to be only broken images of God, we are in a fix we cannot fix. If we are to be fixed, it will be God who fixes us. And he does. But he does this not just by redeeming us through the death and resurrection of Jesus but through restoring us into his image. A passion for holiness is a passion for God to remake us. This is done through gradual means, the means of grace, the disciplines of the Christian life: baptism, Holy Communion, worship, fellowship with other believers, prayer, study and meditation on him and his written Word, fasting, solitude, service. - pg90

Dangerous indeed it is to cordon off the intellect from a devotion to God and a passion for truth and holiness. Sertillanges says it well:”Purity of thought requires purity of soul; that is a general and undeniable truth. The neophyte of knowledge should let is sink deeply into his mind.” -pg95

“When men begin all their works with the thought of God, acting for His sake, and to fulfill His will, when they ask His blessing on themselves and their life, pray to Him for the objects they desire, and see Him in the event, whether it be according to their prayers or not, they will find everything that happens tend to confirm them in the truths about Him which live in their imagination, varied and unearthly as those truths may be.” - John Henry Newman

If we are bent on knowing the truth and are committed to obeying the truth as we come to know it )that is, if we are morally attuned), we can come to know truth about God and his world. -pg95

“As the Bible constantly teaches, “obedience to the light we possess is the way to gain more light.” Nor must our obedience be anything other than unconditional: “till we aim at complete, unreserved obedience in all things, we are not really Christians at all.” -Newman

“The Christian is prepared to say [when he or she reads the text], ‘I don’t like the sound of this, but golly, if this is what it really means, I’m going to have to pray for grace and strength to get that into my heart and be shaped by it.’ ” - NT Wright

Epistemology: Becoming intellectually virtuous by W. Jay Wood
1. Acquisition virtues: passion for truth
inquisitiveness
teachableness
persistence
humility

2. Maintenance virtues: passion for consistency
perseverance
courage
constancy
tenacity
patience
humility

3. Application virtues: passion for holiness
will to do what one knows
love
fortitude
integrity
humility

4. Communication virtues: compassion for others
clarity of expression
orderliness of presentation
aptness of illustration
humility

Thus it has been a lesson for me, and JT hit the nail on the head today to drive home the message that I still have a lot to learn. That we should sing as a constant reminder of our joy in the Lord is a message so simple that it’s easy to overlook. Yet, it contained gems of truth - why should we let the odds of life rob us of our smile in Christ? Behind the beauty of the sentence is an entire theology of the finished work of Christ.

It is not surprising that I would struggle in this ordeal. Our motives are never pure, and I’m not even sure how much self-interest/self-protection/selfishness rear their heads as I attempt to swim in the torrent of mad ethical confusion. I have little confidence that my actions and reactions when I deal with the situation are pleasing to the Lord, not even to mention glorify Him. I can only pray that the Lord will be merciful and gracious to me. But even as I plummet to the abyss of confusion, God did send various people to encourage me, to remind me of timeless truths, and to advise me. For that, I am thankful, even when the situation remains unresolved; I still need to fight every step of the way.

And as to the service of God, if your heats are spiritual, you may enjoy much communion with God in your very employments, and you have some intervals and respites for that purpose. Have you not more spare hours than you employ to that end? - pg78

Sin brought in sweat (Gen 3:19), but now, not to sweat increases sin. He that lives idly cannot live honestly, as is plainly enough intimated (1 Thess 4:11-12). - pg77

Do not be slothful and idle in your vocations…The command to Adam (Gen 3:19) no doubt reaches all his posterity, and Gospel-commands bind it upon Christians (Rom 12:11, 1 Thess 4:11). If you are negligent, you cannot be innocent. -pg79

And yet do not be so intent upon your particular callings as to make them interfere with your general calling. Beware you do not lose your God in the crowd and hurry of earthly business. -pg79

Remember always the success of your callings and earthly employments is by divine blessing, not human dilligence. “Be thou shalt remember the Lord thy God; for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth’ (Deut 8:18). The devil himself was so far orthodox as to acknowledge it: ‘Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands’ (Job 1:10). Recommend therefore your affairs to God in prayer. ‘Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass’ (Ps 37:4-5). And do not meddle with that which you cannot recommend to God in prayer for a blessing. pg77-80

Be well satisfied in that station and employment in which Providence has placed you, and do not so much as wish yourself in another. ‘Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called’ (1 Cor 7:20). Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good that you could do had you been left to your own option. pg 80

It pleases the Lord often to try and exercise His people this way, and make them cry: ‘How long, Lord, how long?’ (Ps 12:1-2). These delays, both for spiritual and temporal reasons, are frequent, and when they befall us we are too apt to interpret them as denials, and fall into a sinful despondency of mind, although there is no cause at all for it (Ps 31:12, Lam 3:8,44). It is not always that the return of prayer are despatched to us in the same hour they are asked of God; yet sometimes it falls out so (Isa 65:24, Da 9:23). But though the Lord means to perform for us the mercies we desire, yet He will ordinarily exercise to wait for them, and that for these reasons: 1. Our time is not the proper season for us to receive our mercies in. 2. Afflictive providences have not accomplished that design upon our heart they were sent for when we are so earnest and impatient for a change of them; and till then the rod must not be taken off (Isa 10:12) pg 138-9

It is usually found in the experience of all the saints that in whatever ordinance or duty they have any conscious communion with God, it naturally produces in their spirits a deep abasement and humiliation from the sense of divine condescension to such vile poor worms as we are. Thus Abraham, ‘which am but dust and ashes’ (Gen 18:27). the same effect follows our converse with God in His providences. Thus when God had in the way of His providence prospered Jacob, how does he lay himself at the feet of God, as a man overwhelmed with the sense of mercy! ‘I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth with thou hast shown they servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands’ (Gen 32:10). Thus also it was with David: ‘Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that thou hast brought me hitherto?’ (2 Sam 7:18). And I doubt not but some of your have found the same frame of heart upon you that these holy men here expressed. Can you not remember when God lifted you up by providence, how you cast down yourself before Him and have been viler in your own eyes than ever! Why, thus do all gracious hearts. What am I, that the Lord should do thus and thus for me! O that ever so great and holy a God should thus be concerned for so vile and sinful a worm! pg 145

Does God perform all things for His people? Do not distrust Him when new or great difficulties arise. Why should you think He that has done so many things for you will now do no more? Surely, ‘the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy that it cannot hear’ (Isa 59:1); if anything put a stop to His mercy, it is your iniquities, your distrust and infidelity. ‘How long will it be ere you believe him?’ If a thousand and ten thousand trials and experiences of His tender care, faithfulness and love will cure this unbelief in you,you have them at hand to do it. If the infrequent confutations of this your distrust by the unexpected breakings-out of mercy for you under like discouragements will cure it, look back and you may see them. Certainly you have been often forced by Providence with shame and repentance to retract your rash censure of His care; and yet will you fall into the same unbelieving state again? O that you would once learn this great truth, that no man evre lacked that mercy which he did not lack a heart to trust and wait quietly upon God for. You never yet sought God in vain, except when you sought Him vainly. - pg183

We may conclude our afflictions to be sanctified, and to come from the love of God to us, when they do not alienate our hearts from God, but inflame our love to Him…A wicked man finds his heart rising against God when He smites him, but a gracious heart cleaves the closer to Him - pg202

The wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God; God is not in all his thoughts (Ps 10:3-4). Here you see Providence may give men ‘their hearts’ desire,’ and yet they never once open their desires to God in prayer about it. -pg 204

Hezekiah was a good man, but yet his weakness and corruption was betrayed by the alterations Providence made upon his conditions. When sickness and pains summoned him to the grave, what bitter complaints and despondencies are recorded (Isa 38)! And when Providence lifted him up again into a prosperous condition, what ostentation and vain-glory did he show (Isa 39:2)! David had more than a common stock of inherent grace, yet not enough to keep him in an evenness of spirit under great alterations. (Ps 30:6-7)…Paul is truly rich in grace whose riches or poverty neither hinders the acting or impoverishes the stock of his graces. -pg207

These gifts of Providence (riches, prosperity) are common to the worst of men, and are no special distinguishing fruits of God’s love. The vilest of men have been filled even to satiety with these thing. ‘Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart could wish’ (Psa 73:7) -pg 208

Deeply consider the sinfulness and vanity of torturing your own thoughts about the issues of doubtful providences. There is much sin in so doing, for all our anxious and agitated emotions, what are they other than the immediate outcome and fruits of pride and unbelief? There is not a greater display of pride in the world than in the contests of our wills with the will of God. It is a presumptuous invading of God’s prerogative to dictate to His providence and prescribe to His wisdom. -pg 216

Think how repugnant an unsubmissive attitude is both to your prayers and professions.

You pray that the will of God may be done on earth as it is in heaven, and yet when it seems contrary to your will or interest, you struggle or fret against it. You profess to heave committed your souls to His keeping, and to leave your eternal concerns in His hands, and yet cannot commit things infinitely less valuable unto Him. How contradictory are these things!

You profess as Christians to be led by the Spirit, but this practice shows you follow the perverse counsels of your own spirits. O then, regret no more, dispute no more, but lie down meekly at your Father’s feet, and say in all cases and at all times, ‘The will of the Lord be done.’ - pg 218

Chords diagram and many others

http://home.roadrunner.com/~nils

String Care

http://www.iol.ie/~murphypj/String_Care.htm

Guitar Action

http://www.theguitarfiles.com/guitarfile97.html

Guitar Music

http://www.guitarlincs.com/christmasbuskers.htm

Timing/rhythm line sample + Guitar software

http://www.transpoze.net/sample.html

Last but not least: http://www.frets.com