Ayub bin Ismail, a 46-year-old “bird enthusiast,” filed a police report in October 1986. His prized merbuk—zebra dove (Geopelia striata)—had gone missing from the balcony of his eighth-floor flat in Clementi, where it had been sunning itself in a cage. This was a serious incident as the bird had won 50 trophies at national and regional bird-singing contests; each win raised the bird’s value until some participants in the community placed its worth at $50,000. Newspaper reports about the disappearance mused about the creature’s ability to captivate, including an apocryphal anecdote about a man driving past the bird...

Known by the sobriquet “little fly” in Spanish and Portuguese, members of the Culicidae family—which contains two subfamilies, Anophelinae and Culicinae—have been residents of Singapore for millennia. Once humans arrived on the shores of the island, the importance of these minute creatures grew exponentially, although they were noticed initially only when they buzzed past an ear canal or pierced a layer of skin for a drink.

As fishes go, cichlids (family Cichlidae) abound.¹ They are everywhere in Singapore. They are in the drains, canals and reservoirs as well as catchments, ponds and rivers. Their presence can be seen and spotted across the estuarine zone of the island too. Brackish areas such as Sungei Buloh, Marina Channel and Pulau Ubin teem with cichlids of all colors, shapes and sizes. Cichlids are also found among the wet spaces of Nee Soon Swamp Forest.² Cichlids even populate the most unassuming bodies of water—often as a result of human actions.

Zombie startups – which neither grow nor die, but persistently breakeven and inexplicably refuse to fold – are a staple presence in startup sectors globally. While dominant business discourses dismiss them as aberrantly misguided ventures, I draw on anthropological understandings of the labour of time to show how zombies are integral to the startup sector’s temporal logics. Startup sectors run on the interplay between what scholars have termed ‘the time of investment’ and ‘the time of speculation.’ Following a startup in Singapore through five years of unprofitable operation, my ethnography shows how zombies are produced by and, in turn, contribute to maintaining these temporalities. By connecting the value that successful startups create to the unpaid labour that un-succeeding startups do to maintain the sector’s timescape, the article demonstrates how anthropology’s attentiveness to time can surface new forms of relationality that are emerging with this globally expanding form of entrepreneurship.

In response to the intensifying US-China rivalry, Singapore ostensibly "hedges", a strategy that avoids choosing between Washington and Beijing and maximizes gains from cooperating with both powers while avoiding confrontation. Hedging also extenuates Singapore's central location in Asia and its role as an established commercial and financial hub. As such, it appears to reflect the imperative of any small state: survival. However, in contrast to the argument that domestic politics does not matter in Singapore's foreign policy, this article demonstrates how the domestic imperative of legitimizing the political dominance of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) shapes the government's hedging strategy.

The influence of socio-economic status (SES) on child temperament and psychological symptoms was examined using a nationally representative sample in Singapore. Data were available for 2169 children from 1987 families. Caregivers' reports were obtained on children aged 4–6. SES was operationalized as an aggregation of household income per capita, parental education level and housing type. Compared to their counterparts from higher SES families, children from low-SES families tended to exhibit (a) higher negative affectivity but lower effortful control, and (b) higher internalizing and externalizing symptoms. In addition, children with a ‘resilient’ temperamental profile (i.e. low negative affectivity and high effortful control) were more likely to come from families with much higher SES, relative to children with other profiles. Children with high internalizing symptoms tended to come from low-SES backgrounds, regardless of their externalizing symptoms. Among children with low internalizing symptoms, those with high externalizing symptoms came from lower SES backgrounds compared to those with low externalizing symptoms. Parental warmth and distress mediated the association between SES and child temperament and symptom profiles, with the exception of distress in the SES–temperament link. These findings supported the family stress model and highlighted the novel perspective of SES's influence on configurations of child temperament and symptom characteristics.

Little is known about how social work supervisors can be equipped and supported. A qualitative evaluation of a supervision of supervisory practice (SOSp) training programme with nine supervisors with 2 years of experience was done. Benefits for the supervisors were the application of knowledge and skills that improved the supervisory practice, and the opportunity to receive feedback. However, lack of time was a major obstacle for quality supervision. Supervisees reported experiencing a more collaborative supervision and an increase in confidence and perception of competence in case management. This exploratory study highlights the importance of developing competencies in the education and support functions of supervision.

In most countries around the world, social workers assist financially vulnerable people, but they often do so with little or no training in finance. This article examines the development and pilot testing of a financial curriculum to be used in social work education and training in Singapore. Feedback from social workers informed development of the curriculum, which is practical and capability-based. The study covers two phases: first curriculum development, then pilot testing. Focus group methods are used to analyse the process and effectiveness of curriculum development and the initial training outcomes.

Scholars speak of waves of Indian mobilities outwards from the Indian subcontinent over time. There is overwhelming historical, archaeological and numismatic evidence of the early presence of Hindu and Buddhist elements — art, sculpture and architecture, music, dance, drama and literature, political and social institutions and religious traditions — outside the Indian subcontinent in regions and cultures, known post-World War II, as Southeast Asia. In the latter region, posts which served as halting stations for ships plying trade and maritime routes were located at the neck of the Malay Peninsula which facilitated mercantile and trading activities in the region. Singapore was placed firmly in regional maritime and commercial histories of these times…

Understanding when people are likely to feel ambivalent is important, as ambivalence is associated with key attitude outcomes, such as attitude-behavior consistency. Interestingly, the presence of conflicting positive and negative reactions (objective ambivalence) is weakly related to feeling conflicted (subjective ambivalence). We tested a novel situation that can influence the correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence: whether a message and a recipient’s topic match in affective versus cognitive orientation. When a person encounters a message with an affective or cognitive match to the topic, conflicting reactions may be more accessible, increasing feelings of ambivalence. Across five studies, greater objective–subjective ambivalence correspondence occurred with an affective–cognitive match between message and topic orientation. Studies 4 and 5 also demonstrated that this primarily occurred when the message was counterattitudinal. This work contributes to the literature explaining the gap between measures of objective and subjective ambivalence as well as how messages can influence attitude strength properties.

This chapter examines four contemporary texts from the Global South―India, Singapore and the Philippines―that are themed around the making and eating of food, exemplifying the diverse cultural connotations that are linked to the idea of nourishment and how these varied cultures contribute to or challenge ideas that revolve around the cooking, eating and even wasting of food. These Asian fictions explore how history, memory and food are interwoven into the fabric of people’s everyday experiences. They mediate and narrativize the varied metaphors and metonymies that surround food. In the analysis of these diverse representations, the author teases out ideas about food and their connections to cultural, and sometimes religious, perceptions to arrive at interesting insights about food in three distinct nations and cultures of Asia.

Objectives
Although the association between widowhood and mortality is well established, the impact of widowhood on mortality could differ by social support, gender, and widowhood duration. We studied the association between widowhood and mortality among older Chinese adults in Singapore and analyzed how social support, gender, and widowhood duration may modify this association.

Methods
We used data from 15,858 participants aged 61–96 years from the third follow-up of the population-based Singapore Chinese Health Study in 2014–2016. Mortality data were obtained through linkage with the national death registry through 31st December 2018, and social support was measured with the Duke Social Support Scale. We used Cox proportional hazard models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between widowhood and mortality risk.

Results
Compared with those married, widowed adults had a higher mortality risk (HR = 1.18, 95% CI = 1.01–1.38), and this risk was higher for those who were either recently widowed (10 years; HR = 1.27, 95% CI = 1.07–1.54). Among men, those recently widowed had the highest mortality risk (HR = 1.50, 95% CI = 1.06–2.13), whereas, among women, those long-term widowed had the highest mortality risk (HR = 1.26, 95% CI = 0.99–1.60). In the analysis stratified by social support, widowhood was associated with mortality among those with low social support (HR = 1.27, 95% CI = 1.05–1.54), but not among those with high social support (HR = 1.01, 95% CI = 0.76–1.33).

Discussion
Widowhood was associated with increased mortality risk, particularly among recently widowed men and long-term widowed women. Having adequate social support could attenuate the adverse effects of widowhood among older adults.