Pope says some science shatters human dignity

Rant below:

Yet another condemnation of science from the religious quarter. From the Pope, no less. The crux of the matter that he raises is that sciences that tweak with life itself "shatters the concept of human dignity". Don't all sciences tweak with life, or at least some extension of it? Does not humanity progress, as a result? When we build our artificial caves, when we attempt to fly off the surface of the Earth for international or interplanetary destinations, when we breed plants or animals for goodness sake, are we running counter to nature?

Looking at history, it seems inevitable for the religion to argue for the "conservative" status-quo as moral and new technology for which society hasn't yet come to terms with as "evil". When Galileo removed the Earth from the center of the solar system, his work was considered heretical and must have struck at just the same center of "human dignity". It will likely be just a matter of time before such technology becomes overwhelmingly accepted and pervasive, and the Church invents a new codex to accomodate these advances.

Food for thought - keeping it simple, keeping it real

Feeling burnt-out? Stressed? Feel a need to keep yourself constantly occupied and busy shopping for items you don't need, 'cause once you stop you'll hear the gnawing of the emptiness and loneliness within?

Here's some timely advice:
1. Make space, keep the space and enjoy the space
2. Do one thing at a time
3. Keep it simple
4. Enjoy your life - the best things in life are free.

I'm not trying to be ironic, but these are worthy goals to strive for this new year!

Move over US -- China to be new driver of world's economy and innovation

In the face of flagging NSF/NIH grants, coupled with post-911 immigration restrictions and a tepid domestic reception to science education and issues like stem cell research, much has been made of the US beginning to lag behind in scientific research. This study by Georgia Tech indicates that China is a leading contender:

The study’s indicators predict that China will soon pass the United States in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology, turn those developments into products and services – and then market them to the world. Though China is often seen as just a low-cost producer of manufactured goods, the new “High Tech Indicators” study done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations.

I was surprised to read that China now leads the world in the publication of nanotech articles, though the US still produces more citations per article, which speaks of the quality of US publications and is probably what counts more in academia.

As posted previously though, education has traditionally been highly prized in Chinese society, and coupled with China's push on training scientists and engineers who conduct the research needed to maintain technological competitiveness, suggest that it will continue to grow its ability to innovate. In the United States, the twin forces of declining math and science education performance and strong immigration controls may result in decreased research personnel and technical innovators.

It would be interesting to see if societal and cultural change will accompany this blossoming of the creative technical industry in China. Until a further opening up occurs, with active encouragement of independent thought, I'm uncertain their progress will be more than a trickle. Creativity needs a dynamic environment on which to feed - probably these environments already exist in micro-pockets outside the reach of the PRC police. An increase in personal freedoms, accompanied with economic progress and the flowering of the creative industries, would be China's biggest gain and it's triumphant maturation on the global economic scene.

Same goes for Singapore, I hope.

Cooks Illustrated

Here's an interesting site for those foodily-inclined: go check out Cook's Illustrated! I just watched a few of their vodcasts - no-knead bread version 2.0, easy beef and veggie soup, easier butter cookies, an in-depth review of cast iron pans. These vodcasts are free at the iTunes store.

It wasn't just a plain-ol' recipe show - the vodcasts were chock-full of interesting scientific facts about food, for instance, how kneading aligns the protein strands in flour to form a gluten matrix that gives restaurant-style bread its texture. They also manage to pepper their show with helpful tips on knife technique, cookware maintenance, and even cookware reviews!

Their method was scientific and rigorous - their tests had the full complement of controls, standardized equipment, ingredients and even microenvironments. The obsessiveness with detail would certainly do any scientist proud. They analyse every recipe and come up with several different conditions under which the recipe might work, then analyse why some conditions cause failure.

Definitely a site worth checking out for more informed shopping and a rational approach to cooking! After all, if you're going to cook, might as well do it right, and know what you're doing! While most of the articles are open only to subscribers, some articles are free and clearly denoted as such. Shared subscriptions, anyone?

p.s. another book I highly recommend dealing scientifically/rationally with l'art de Cuisine Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking".

Don't worry, Be (moderately) Happy!

Just read this new report on how "moderate happiness" may be preferable to full-fledged elation. In sum, happiness is certainly preferable to un-happiness, and the state of being happy brings a whole host of benefits: health, success, and even more endorphin-rush-inducing-happiness and general well-being.

The authors wondered though, about just "how happy is happy enough". They created a 10-point life satisfaction scale, and asked people to score their "degree of happiness". They predicted that mildly happy people (those who classify themselves as eights and nines) may be more successful in some realms than those who consider themselves 10s. They reasoned that "profoundly happy people may be less inclined to alter their behavior or adjust to external changes even when such flexibility offers an advantage." A fair possibility, no doubt.

Interestingly, they found "the highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale) but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

In the more social realms, however, the 10s were the most successful, engaging more often in volunteer activities and maintaining more stable relationships.

Truly, divine discontent is that which drives human progress. It is important to celebrate successes and recognize accomplishment but we should keep striving to try and learn new things, to continually challenge ourselves to grow. Stability would lead to stultification would lead to stagnation and death. Enjoy your grass but keep hungry, and stay foolish.

Prediction Markets: how information flows within an organization

Finally got to reading an article shared by chiao. It's an NYT article titled "Prediction Markets at Google: A Guest Post" by Justin Wolfers.

Essentially, it touches on how information flows within a corporation. The author, in collaboration with Google employees, found that sitting within a few feet of a person tended to facilitate information flow between those persons. Sitting on the same floor as someone barely had an effect. Demographic similarity was unimportant and shared interests helped facilitate information. Interestingly, employees did not necessarily consider people they traded information with as friends. Also, personal relationships tended to persist, even when people were moved away from former bay-mates.

I was struck by this: it almost seemed like a economic justification for laboratory rotations, a process I'm undergoing now. First year PhD students in US colleges generally rotate among 3 different labs a year, spending about 3 months or so in each. Some argue it is a waste of time, as students may not begin their PhD project until their 2nd year. During each rotation, they're exposed to different projects, methods and probably most importantly, they meet different people in the department. Consider it accelerated department interaction. As such, first-years are quickly inducted into the department and build a network for information trading. This can only be beneficial for future work in the department. The organization as a whole works more efficiently.

I'll leave you with a quote from the author - does this reflect your academic environment? :

I don’t know about your firm, but we academics are too self-important to ever sit in cubicles. Our research suggests that this may be unfortunate, and perhaps many of the best ideas in economics never occur, because the idea is waiting for us at a water cooler conversation at which we never arrive. I would love to see my colleagues brainstorm more often and more freely. If we can’t tear down the physical walls between our offices, how can we all change our workplaces to encourage the free flow of information and ideas?

The Tree of Life loses a branch

No poetry here - just a report by Norwegian and Swiss Biologists (taxonomists?) who claim to have eliminated a branch of the Tree of Life by joining two previously separated branches of eukaryotes (all non-bacterial/archaeaen organisms), shrinking the number of eukaryotic branches from 5 to 4.

The eukaryotic branches are now:

• Plants (green and red algae, and plants)

• Opisthokonts (amoebas, fungi, and all animals—including humans)

• Excavates (free-living organisms and parasites)

• SAR (the new main group, an abbreviation of Stramenophiles, Alveolates, and Rhizaria, the names of some of its members)

Read the article here.

-Image reproduced from www.apollon.uio.no-

Streamlining my Gmail Inbox

As part of my drive to "Get Things Done -GTD" (read earlier post on this), I tried yet another handy Lifehacker tip: Empty your Inbox with Gmail and the Trusted Trio.

In a nutshell, the article exhorts trying to attain an Inbox with zero mail in it, creating a Trusted Trio of folders called "FOLLOW UP", "HOLD" and "ARCHIVE" and funnelling all mail into those folders. All mail in "FOLLOW UP" are mail that have to be tackled in the near future, that can't be done in 2 minutes (if it could be answered in two minutes, just do it already!). For "HOLD" mails, you're waiting on replies from others, or they contain information about events that have yet to come to pass or. Since Gmail already has a built in Archive function, we use that as the archive folder.

I did the following:

1. Searched my mail box for all mail digests that I get on a regular basis, and for which there is no archival need. These included NYT.com news digests, Friendster updates, etc. Clicked Delete - voila! My mailbox was down to a healthy 3550 messages. My system felt cleaner already.

2. Created the labels "_FOLLOW UP" and "_HOLD", with the 'underscores' to place them on top of the labels list. Also made "Good to know" and "Readings" labels to classify mail containing interesting/useful information (discounts, subject guides etc) as well as mailed interesting articles.

3. Looked through my still-cluttered inbox back along a timeline of a couple of weeks. Identified items that fell under the above labels, and classified them as such.

4. Looked at "Starred" list, labeled mails accordingly then de-starred them. Now my "Starred" list contains important/interesting email that doesn't fall under any other category.

5. Selected all mail in inbox, clicked "Archive" and hey presto! My Inbox was completely empty!

It felt a little strange at first staring at an empty inbox, after more than a year of starting using Gmail and having thousands of mail in it all the time. Oh well, I could try this scheme out and see if it really unclutters my mental slate and boosts my productivity by reducing the amount of email I have to face. Else, there's always the "Unarchive" button, though I doubt I'll go that route.

Certainly, there're those who might argue that with the amount of free storage available (6349 MB and counting..), there really is no need to Archive mail in Gmail. I used to think that too but after having done the above, an empty inbox does seem pretty elegant and liberating. I'll try and check back a while later to see if this has enhanced my life.

Now to tackle my cluttered OS desktop...;-)

Pandora Internet Radio - J'aime bien!

The title says it all. I found out about Pandora's internet music streaming service, ironically, through a Lifehacker article about "Globalpandora.com", a site setup to bypass Pandora's US-only playback restrictions.

Pandora is run by the Music Genome Project, a rather strangely-named "company of musicians". It is an internet radio-style music streaming service with a surprisingly expansive music collection.

The biggest draw for me is their customisable music "stations". Users are able to create their own stations by specifying which artistes they like. These artistes then become the "seeds" for their new stations. Within seconds, the service plays a song sample from the artiste to verify the user's preference. It then proceeds to play songs that have similar attributes to the seed artiste.

What I found pretty impressive were their very comprehensive musical catalog and cataloging. For instance, I managed to find Corrinne May, a Singaporean chanteuse based in LA who's a personal favorite of the Fiancée. Also, the artistes' styles are very vividly described: "strong acoustic sonority, heavy use of harmonies, drifting riffs of strumming". Certainly, these don't sound like standardized descriptions used to classify music en-masse, but rather like carefully curated song selections by music aficionados. They also include a simple thumbs-up/down ratings system that enables you to train the system to play songs that are really close to what you enjoy hearing. At the end, users can name their stations and share them with others, akin to playlists.

And did I mention that it's all free?

I like the fact that it's highly customisable, internet-based (high portability), free and plays a huge collection of music in high quality. Already, I've heard full-length songs from several artistes that I'd never had the chance to hear elsewhere on my "Damien Rice Radio Station". E.g. Jonas and Plunkett, Mick McAuley and Winifre Horan. Who knows? These may actually lead to purchases

Try it now! 3 thumbs up to a viable radio replacement! :)

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular

As always, Japan is at the bleeding edge of technology-led social change. In the country that gave the world its first novel - "The Tale of Genji" - millenia ago, a new form of novel is taking the charts by storm: the cellphone novel.

The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.

The article can be found here on the NYT.

China's biotech industry: An Asian dragon is growing

Long viewed as an artful copier but certainly no innovator, China's foray into the knowledge industries (Biotech here) is inevitable if it is to sustain the roaring growth of its economy. The government has decided to pump money into this ascendant area. Official funding can only go so far though: private venture capital is needed to sustain the long-term growth of the industry. VCs are wary of investing owing to an uncertain financial climate and limited exit strategies.

Notably, the twin Asian giants, China and India, have different strategies regarding biotech: India's efforts are largely on process innovation to improve affordability of existing products while China is gunning for big new products. Both are equally important and laudable and it will be interesting to see which strategy proves to be more successful.

It will also be interesting to see how Chinese scientists might leverage on their vast heritage of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) therapies and use western-style science to legitimize TCM in the international therapy scene, where it is still viewed as pseudo-medicine. Increasingly already, I see many papers on Pubmed on the biochemical mechanisms through which various chinese herbal medicines work on curing diseases. (An example here). The approach works well : Chinese medicine loses its mystical aura and gains from a rational, systematic approach that is verifiable, and the world gains from a vast array of ancient medical knowledge.

The article also discussed returning "sea turtles": Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs trained overseas who return home with scientific talent and international credibility. ("Whales" anyone?) This "reverse brain-drain" was also important for Taiwan's huge dominance in the electronics industry. Might we see the same thing here? Taiwan has had the benefit of an exuberantly democratic political climate though - will China's repressive policies prove to be a stumbling block?

The original Eurekalert article here.

Get Things Done - GTD

I first discovered the idea of "GTD" from my friend Elia Diodati's ironic post on "Zen Advice". You learn something new every day, particularly with the kind help of Wikipedia.

Getting Things Done (commonly abbreviated as GTD) is an action management method of The David Allen Company, and the title of the book by David Allen which describes the method.

GTD is strictly defined by David Allen on his website [1]. Unlike other time management experts, Allen does not begin by emphasizing setting priorities. Instead, he promotes two key elements in time management — control and perspective. Allen advocates three major models for gaining control and perspective:

1. A workflow process
2. A framework with 6 levels of focus
3. A natural planning method

The first major model is the workflow process, which is used to gain control over all the tasks and commitments which one needs or wants to get done.^[1]:20 The workflow process consists of five distinct phases:

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organize
4. Review
5. Do

The details of each of the phases are here. I think I do loosely practise this sort of time management but I need to be more disciplined in deciding what I need to do right away. The fiancée would agree.

How to Afford Anything

Here's a useful something I gleaned from Lifehacker. It's an article on "How to Afford Anything" written by Ken Rockwell, a photographer whose site I visited quite a while back when I was surveying the market preparing to buy my first DSLR camera.

The title certainly makes a big promise. Ken makes the distinction between cheap and frugal: cheap is paying the lowest denominator regardless of quality, while frugal is going for quality and making sure you're getting the best deal for that quality. He also reminds readers to take a good hard look at their lives to see what's necessary, and what's really just a luxury, what's a good investment (things that give you pleasure, have intrinsic value and come at a good price) and what's not (cars in general). Also, that many billionaires are extremely frugal, and unashamed to be so. The best way to be rich is not to have many possessions but to actually have lots of money after all.

The man dispenses his wisdom in an honest manner and drops some gems. For instance, if you're young, to go work on a cruise boat because staff supply is low, demand is high and the pay's great (5 figure salaries for crewmen and 6 figures for a captain!) and that Hawaii and the Caribbean are much better when you have money.

True, true.

Baby steps - the carrot laden path to PhD completion

A tad early perhaps but hopefully this will come in handy in the future?

From the Academic Productivity blog:-
How to complete your PhD (or any large project): Hard and soft deadlines, and the Martini Method

The argument against Conscription

I stumbled across an extremely interesting article on conscription today. The same Bryan Caplan @ Econlib, who below praised Singapore's reduction of employer's CPF contribution as a way of reducing labor costs, asserted that he would not move to Singapore for the simple fact that it has military conscription.

Beyond his lambasting the unpleasantness of military service - "State slavery/full-time Physical Education" - he mentions briefly the existence of textbook arguments against the draft as economically inefficient. Now, that's potentially a rational argument, more substantial than the usual griping I was used to during my time in the same "hell on earth". He links an August 2005 paper by David Henderson titled "The Role of Economists in ending the Draft".

The Henderson paper gives a rather longwinded account of the historical events leading up to the abolishment of the US draft system in the early 1970s. What I found most interesting were the nuggets of economic arguments buried in the history-noise. For instance, one of the first empirical studies of the economics of the draft and of ending the draft was apparently produced by Walter Oi, an econ don then at the Uni of Washington and later at the University of Rochester's Graduate School of Management. Oi argues as follows:

Oi distinguished clearly between the budgetary cost of military manpower and the economic cost. Oi granted the obvious, that a military of given size could be obtained with a lower budgetary cost if the government used the threat of force to get people to join—that is, used the draft. But, he noted, the hidden cost of this was the loss of well-being among draftees and draft-induced volunteers. Using some empirical methods that were sophisticated for their day, Oi estimated the loss to draftees and draft-induced volunteers and found it quite high— between $826 million and $1.134 billion. While this number might seem low today, Oi’s data were in mid-1960s dollars. Inflation-adjusted to 2005, the losses would be $4.8 billion to $6.6 billion.

Other economists who contributed to the literature at the time were Stuart Altman (1969), the late David Bradford (1968), Alan Fechter (Altman and Fechter 1967), Anthony C. Fisher (1969), and W. Lee Hansen, and Burton Weisbrod (1967). Their articles appeared in such prestigious economics journals as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The main idea was that "Conscription is a Tax", elegantly described by William H. Meckling, an economist who was head of the Gates Commission and dean of the University of Rochester's Grad Sch of Management, below. In essence, he argues that the opportunity-cost of military conscription on the general population is a non-equitable tax that exacts a greater toll on the poor than the rich. The actual paragraphs are reproduced below:

Any government has essentially two ways of accomplishing an objective whether it be building an interstate highway system or raising an army. It can expropriate the required tools and compel construction men and others to work until the job is finished or it can purchase the goods and manpower necessary to complete the job.

Under the first alternative, only the persons who own the property seized or who render compulsory services are required to bear the expense of building the highway or housing project. They pay a tax to finance the project, albeit a tax-in-kind. Under the second alternative, the cost of the necessary goods and services is borne by the general public through taxes raised to finance the project.

Conscription is like the first alternative—a tax-in-kind. A mixed force of volunteers and conscripts contains first-term servicemen of three types—(1) draftees, (2) draft-induced volunteers, and (3) true volunteers. Draftees and draft-induced volunteers in such a force are coerced into serving at levels of compensation below what would be required to induce them to volunteer. They are, in short, underpaid. This underpayment is a form of taxation. Over 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin, in commenting on a judicial opinion concerning the legality of impressments of American merchant seamen, recognized the heart of the issue, and even estimated the hidden tax. He wrote: “But if, as I suppose is often case, the sailor who is pressed and obliged to serve for the defence of this trade at the rate of 25s. a month, could have ₤3.15s, in the merchant’s service, you take from him 50s. a month; and if you have 100,000 in your service, you rob that honest part of society and their poor families of ₤250,000. per month, or three millions a year, and at the same time oblige them to hazard their lives in fighting for the defence of your trade; to the defence of which all ought indeed to contribute, (and sailors among the rest) in proportion to their profits by it; but this three millions is more than their share, if they did not pay with their persons; and when you force that, methinks you should excuse the other.

“But it may be said, to give the king’s seamen merchant’s wages would cost the nation too much, and call for more taxes. The question then will amount to this; whether it be just in a community, that the richer part should compel the poorer to fight for them and their properties for such wages as they think fit to allow, and punish them if they refuse? Our author tells us it is legal. I have not law enough to dispute his authority, but I cannot persuade myself it is.

It seems likely though, there are several key assumptions underlying the argument:

(1) a large enough population exists for there to be sufficient numbers of people won over by the monetary incentives to volunteer for the military yet not disable other sectors of the economy.

(2) the supply of people is elastic - the population will respond to incentives to join the military. This is untenable if the population has severe cultural biases against joining the military, like in a population with a majority of Seventh Day Adventists for instance.

Right now, I still can't persuade myself that Singapore's population is big enough for probability to allow a big enough army. Would sufficient incentives (a substantially higher pay, greater prestige) bring in enough people to compensate for the drain from the loss of the draft?

Singapore: "Automatic Stabilizers" Done Right

Here's some rare praise for Singapore on the international scene. There're some merits to a strong government that isn't afraid to do what's fiscally correct and not what's politically expedient. Strong governments are needed to for harsh corrective measures. For instance, think of India's feticide problems: strong laws and active enforcement are needed to break the cruel cycle that roots in the unreasonable dowry each family pays for its girls to be married out, and which ends in active sex selection and feticide.

In a sense, Singapore's government really does strive for the best of both worlds - a strong government with pervasive societal influence and active spending on it's people but also pro-business.

Now, if only the Singapore government would release the wing-clips on the population's political maturity...different forms of government for different stages of a society's growth eh?

From Bryan Caplan @ Econlog,

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that Singapore has figured out a stunningly clever way to use tax cuts to reduce unemployment. Instead of focusing on stimulating demand, Singaporean tax policy hits the margin that matters: labor costs. When there is a surplus of labor, they cut employers' share of the payroll tax (known in Singapore as the CPF). Details appear in Henri Ghesquirre, Singapore's Success:

The government directly intervened to temporarily lower the cost of business in Singapore through... its power to lower the CPF contribution rate of employers...

Elsewhere, substantial nominal currency devaluation is often the last and only resort in the face of downwardly sticky nominal wages, often with higher inflation as an undesirable side effect. In contrast, Singapore uses the direct intervention methods at its disposal. In addition, there is built-in wage flexibility, because an important portion of workers' remuneration is automatically lowered if GDP falls short of target.

With flexible wages, of course, it doesn't matter who legally pays the a tax. But the whole problem with recessions is that wages are somewhat sticky - you can have surplus labor for years before wages fall enough to restore full employment. By cutting employers' share of the tax, the Singaporeans greatly speed up the wage adjustment process.

We should expect the Singaporean system to work very well. Suppose we conservatively assume that labor demand elasticity is only -.4. Then a 1 percentage-point cut in employers' share of the payroll tax will roughly increase employment by .4 percentage-points. With a more optimistic elasticity of -1.0, every percentage-point cut in taxation would raise employment by 1 percentage-point. This approaches the Lafferian dream of tax cuts that fully pay for themselves. (In savings-obsessed Singapore, unsurprisingly, they also raise the payroll tax during booms).

The original article can be found here.

A New Day

Out the Door,
the Night's talk still fresh in my head.
The world seems different somehow; softer.
It's cold,
but not unpleasant.
The mists shroud
the harsh earth -
a pall on my discontent.
Gazing through the gauze
into today's future
as I move bravely forth, happier still.
Who knows what today will bring?

Breaking the impasse

Here - my first post! Fleetingly written to quickly break the mental impasse that's damming the torrents of thoughts withheld mentally.

I had plans to produce an auspiciously literary gem for a first post. However, all those castles in the air were quickly causing inertia, a reluctance to actually post something for fear it wouldn't live up to its designer's grand designs.

This blog will be a digital repository for my reflections, ruminations and shared readings. It may contain random observations and photographs. It is a bid to mature creatively from a passive consumer of information to an active producer of content.

So here it is - and let the games begin!