A Question to Indonesian Academic Culture: With or Without Skripsi?

On January 27th, 2012, the Ministry of Education and Culture (Kemendikbud) through Directorate General of High Education (DITJEN DIKTI) under the tenure of Mr. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a regulation in Letter of DITJEN DIKTI No. 152/E/T/2012 that undergraduate students had to have paper publication in scientific journal. This regulation was proposed and thus constituted because the scientific paper publication in and from Indonesia was very few in number.

Compared to other countries in South East Asia like Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, Indonesia is left behind. According to SCImago Journal and Country Rank (www.scimagojr.com) Indonesia is now ranked 57 out of 239 countries; meanwhile Singapore is 32, Malaysia 36, and Thailand 43. This rank is determined by the number of documents published and the citable documents from 1996-2014. Indonesia has the total number of 32.355 documents and 30.770 citable documents.

How Movie’s Message Shapes Our Children Today

In spite of its cute animated appearance and the fact that most of the audiences are children, some of my friends argue that Inside Out is not movie rated for children. One of them has told me that the movie may even “slap” children waking them up to realize that life is full of sadness, not only wonderful days.

In the movie, Joy keeps trying to make Riley happy everyday, allowing her to only have good memories and cheerful personality. The experiences Riley gets through everyday are represented in memory balls. Little Riley mostly has yellow, the color of Joy, memory balls everyday because Joy rarely lets other emotions take control over Riley.

It is until Riley is 11 and her family must move to San Francisco due to her father’s job, everything changes. No matter how much Joy tries to bring up good past memories to her, one way or another keeps leading Riley to other emotions like Disgust, Fear, and Anger. The unexpected peak of this tragedy is when Sadness keeps touching various memory balls and the core of memory when Riley is at new school for the first time, and she eventually cries in the middle of her introduction as she misses her good times in Minnesota.