Happy Vesak Day to all who are celebrating. On a day that marks the birth, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha, it feels fitting to pause — not just for reflection, but for curiosity. Because if there's one thing data teaches us, it's that the most interesting stories are often hiding in plain sight. And Singapore's own national census has quite a story to tell. Singapore's Largest Religion — By a Significant Margin According to Singapore's 2020 Population Census, Buddhi

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon from Singapore recently warned about the growing problem of “truth decay”, where people form strong conclusions from fragmented, emotional, or incomplete information. His comments were directed largely at social media, where speed, virality, outrage, and selective narratives increasingly overpower context and careful thinking. Most of us immediately recognise the danger when it appears online. A short clip spreads without context. A headline trav

And what smarter hiring actually looks like in today's market You've seen this before. A stack of resumes lands on your desk — or more likely, floods your inbox — and most of them look remarkably similar. The right degree. A few certifications. Five to eight years of relevant experience. Every box ticked. So you interview four of them. They all say the right things. One gets hired. Six months later, you're wondering what went wrong. Why the Traditional Resume Has a Credibilit

Why giving students less technology might be Singapore's greatest competitive advantage I had the opportunity to coniduct a 1 hour data workshop to a group of 14 year olds. There is a student I will not forget in a hurry. During a data skills workshop I recently delivered at a learning festival, I asked a room of 14-year-olds whether they used AI. Every hand went up. I asked what for. One answer stopped me cold. "For school work." I gently pointed out that AI has been known

There's a pattern in the headlines lately that's hard to ignore. Fresh graduates sending out hundreds of job applications and hearing nothing back. Singapore businesses quietly — and not so quietly — moving their operations to Malaysia and beyond. A recruiter going viral for saying Singaporeans aren't "hungry" enough. Each story feels separate. Each sparks its own outrage cycle. But what if they're all telling the same story? We'd like to offer a different lens for reading th

What the data says when we move beyond rhetoric Few topics in Singapore generate as much emotion as housing. For good reason. A home is likely to be the largest purchase most Singaporean households will ever make. When resale flat prices rise, people feel it. When headlines highlight million-dollar flats, people notice. When younger households compare today’s prices with what their parents paid decades ago, the conclusion can feel obvious: “Public housing is no longer as affo

Singapore’s fiscal position is often discussed using a single headline number: surplus, deficit, balanced budget, or fiscal position. But when we look deeper into the data from Singapore’s Ministry of Finance (MOF), a far more interesting story begins to emerge. Recently, I visualized Singapore’s fiscal position across four different measures: Primary Balance Basic Balance Overall Budget Balance Overall Fiscal Position The resulting charts revealed something important: Data a

Why More Data Still Doesn’t Guarantee Better Decisions The Quiet Frustration Inside Many Organisations Over the past decade, organisations have invested heavily in becoming more data-driven. Dashboards became more sophisticated, reporting became increasingly automated, and teams gained access to more information than ever before. Entire functions were built around analytics, business intelligence, reporting, and digital transformation. On paper, this should have made decision

We live in a time where technology is advancing faster than most organizations can absorb. Dashboards can now be generated instantly. AI can summarize reports, create visualizations, automate workflows, and even recommend actions. Analytical tools are becoming more accessible, more powerful, and increasingly embedded into everyday business operations. Yet despite all this progress, many organizations continue to face the same underlying challenge: They still struggle to turn

In one of the sessions I was facilitating recently, a team was reviewing a dashboard that had clearly taken a considerable amount of effort to build, and you could sense a quiet confidence in the room even before the discussion started. The data had been cleaned carefully, the charts were organised neatly, and the layout itself looked polished enough to reassure everyone that the work had been done properly. Revenue trends were broken down across multiple channels, conversion