Jungle Tracking

On page M3 of the Media Permata of 24 March, I read that some school children had been involved in Jungle Tracking. I wondered if this is a mistake for jungle trekking. Malay speakers of English often do not distinguish between /e/ and /æ/ (the DRESS and TRAP vowels), so this kind of confusion is expected.

Or is jungle tracking a different activity from jungle trekking? I just looked up both terms in the COCA corpus, and there is one token of each. Then I looked them up in the British National Corpus, where I found one token of 'jungle trekking' and none of 'jungle tracking'. So this is pretty inconclusive.

I guess the meaning of jungle tracking is fairly obvious, so even if it is an error for jungle trekking, it is unlikely to cause any misunderstanding.

University Abbreviations

It seems to be the common practice for universities around the world to adopt three-letter abbreviations. So you find UBD and ITB in Brunei, NTU and NUS in Singapore, MIT in the USA, and HKU in Hong Kong.

While these might work well locally, this does not seem to be such a good idea globally, as there are too many institutes using the same three letters. For example, in Singapore NTU stands for Nanyang Technological University, but in Taiwan the same three letters refer to National Taiwan University.

I was reminded of this when I was asked to supervise a student doing his third year internship at ITB. Great, I thought, I'll just pop down the road to the Institute of Technology Brunei, about five minutes away from my office, to see how he's getting on. Unfortunately, he is in Indonesia, at the Institute of Technology in Bandung. I guess I won't be able to visit him after all!

Passwords

This week, I registered for TelBru's e-bill facility, which lets me monitor my usage of the internet as well as pay my telephone bills electronically. It is a really useful facility, as it enables me to ensure that I do not exceed my usage quota in any month.

In registering, I wanted to change my passport from the default password I was sent (Abc123!@#). And I discovered that not only was I required to have at least one number and both upper-case and lower-case letters, but I also had to have at least one punctuation mark. It seems that the requirements on passwords are getting stricter and stricter, resulting in them becoming less and less memorable. There seems little choice but to write them down.

The funny thing is that, for this e-bill account, the only two things I can do are monitor my internet usage and pay my telephone bill. Now, I really don't care if other people find out about my usage; and I would be absolutely delighted if someone decided to pay my bill for me! So why do I need such a secure password? Bizarre!