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Monday, Nov 19, 2007 - 21:18 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Reading (And Doing) Week

The final report for CS5340 Uncertainty in AI just got completed, so there's just one optional lab assignment remaining for CS3212 Programming Languages, which should help in revision anyway. From prior experience, trying out past year problems instead of just reading them helps more, so I am not sure if Reading Week is well-named, but whatever.

Two modules are already over - UROP will be recorded as IP (in progress) for this semester, while Uncertainty in AI effectively has replaced an official final examination with two earlier examinations, which are done. Again, the two Econs modules don't count towards my Computing CAP, and I think I won't really fail even if I took the finals right now. That leaves Programming Languages (quite a tough nut) and Management & Organization as my real concerns.


Brought to you by the mrbrown show. Completely hilarious (and appropriate?)


Local stuff: After the infamous "insensitive, not bullying" Brit idiots picking on an old trishaw uncle video, there's the "Ang Moh versus girl" incident. The second is admittedly a one-sided account, but together they may be indicative of a worrying syndrome which Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong identified as "cracks in Singaporean society".

The figures are there - an increasing number of new immigrants are accepted each year (over 70000 last year, as stated in the linked article), and while I personally do not mind more people - the more the merrier, right? - there is a price to be paid. Transport crunches and increased property prices may be problems, but I would say that the biggest fears are probably over integration and jobs.

Cultural incompatibilities aside, there may be a perception that some PRs view Singapore merely as a temporary stepping stone. This may be politically incorrect to suggest, but there, I've said it. Alas, this is the age of the global citizen, and it is the prerogative of any human to change his nationality as he sees fit, pending the acceptance of his chosen host of course.

The government can no more than a private entity determine beforehand which prospective new citizens are "peaches", the real deal, and which are the "lemons", or country-hoppers, and in the case of the especially skilled, bright or rich, no government has a hold over them anyway. Hence the unbonded scholarships to graduate students probably in the hope that at least some will sink their roots here. The hunt for talent is the same everywhere in the world.

But few Singaporeans would begrudge a Nobel winner the chance to be one of us, or even just reside here as a Permanent Resident, I gather. The trouble arises when citizens feel shortchanged due to the perceived advantages of PR-ship as compared to full citizenship (here's a partial list of pros and cons) since it appears that PRs can enjoy most benefits of citizenship without the corresponding obligations, with National Service oft stated as an example, and see "talents" that are not really that special happily come in and enjoy them.

Of course, the "ask not what your country can do for you..." line of thought says that one is unworthy and unpatriotic even to consider it in such terms, but in practice it is a two-way relationship. When people identify deeply with the ideals and hopes of a country, the will to defend it comes naturally. If they do not, then they don't. Expanding on the NS gripe, it is a common complaint that employers often see the liability as an inconvenience, and for good reason. Imagine that you've installed someone in a critical position, and then out of nowhere during the busiest period of a project, boom - recall. Why not take an approximately equally qualified foreigner instead? This can be chided as an excuse by losers, but there is some reason in it.

So, if a major goal of National Service is to foster togetherness, why not a couple of weeks each year for new male PRs to enjoy buddyhood too? Of course not the full course, perhaps a PES C version or something. Or, if they are reluctant to directly help us defend them in interesting times, some short courses in useful skills at the Civil Defence may turn out to be very helpful.

In short, the dilemma is of PRs being "us", but not really "us". It may be a surprise, but citizens may not make up even two-thirds of the population, and it appears that they are lumped together with PRs as "residents", which helps the impression that the distinction is not even important enough for a separate category, especially in matters of job statistics.

This is neither new nor unique, though. For instance, in the USA, "...each new wave of immigrants was treated with contempt and hostility by earlier immigrants who feared for their jobs. The Irish, for example, would often refuse to work with Poles and Italians. Later the Poles and Italians were equally hostile to Mexicans..." (Source: Norman Lowe's Mastering Modern World History, p. 380). And to top it off, Singapore is one of the newest countries existing, both in terms of significant habitation and in case of official nationhood. Assuming a generation takes twenty years, even a person who can trace his ancestry back to Raffles' founding is at best a ninth-generation "Singaporean", with most people probably rather less. And our forefathers were all "quitters", remember? But if we do not yet have the glue of history to bond with, it is hardly our fault.

And as for jobs, the complaint is that FTs drive wages down. For blue-collar locals who perform relatively unskilled jobs, this is a big problem since one pair of hands is as much as good as another. Two hundred Singapore dollars a month, say, may be a big deal in developing countries where if remitted could feed a family, but it sure doesn't go far here. This also permeates through to some extent up the ladder. Why try to come up with two thousand bucks for a local coder when his position can be happily filled for a thousand?

The sad reality though is that I do not see how the country can protect most of its industries to any large extent. For all that might be said about favouring citizens, lower cost is lower cost, and each dollar saved is a dollar added to the profit column. This is as much a case of cannot as will not, for competitiveness' sake.

No EPL this week, only Israel doing England a huge (and perhaps undeserved) favour by upsetting Russia 2-1 at home. They probably also did the English economy a huge favour, as Euro 2008 without the perennially overhyped Three Lions would take a substantial financial hit, to the tune of three billion bucks. Sure makes the £50000 Mercedes prize for Omer Golan, who scored Israel's winning goal, by a British bookmaker pale in comparism.

It appears that spoilsport Israeli officials are preventing him from collecting the car (worth half a year of his salary), but meanwhile he basks in the adulation of all England, including but not limited to the titles Sir Omer Golan OBE MBE QVC, a pint in Watford anytime, two offers to sleep with him and on top of all that being said to be "an all-round great chap", on Wikipedia minutes after his goal. Not a bad consolation.

That really, really rubbed it in for the Scots who had seen Italy dump them out with a header from a horrible free-kick decision.

Page 28 of today's New Paper had a slightly EPL-related bent as columnist "Dr Money" Larry Haverkamp, also a lecturer at SMU, shared the findings of some top projects with readers. The gold medal went to a team who discovered by regression analysis that higher team salaries in the NBA made absolutely no difference to their win/loss record. My curiousity piqued, I set out to duplicate their findings.

First step was to find out the NBA team salaries for the 2006-07 season. This was easy enough, the Americans seem transparent on these things. Then the win-loss records (82 game regular season), which obviously are publicly available. It remained to plonk the data into Excel, whip up a nice chart and apply the Regression tool:



Note the nearly horizontal line of best fit, which confirms the students' findings. The Mavericks did have by some distance the best regular season record with the second highest wage bill, but the top spenders by far, the New York Knicks, threw three times as much money as the Charlotte Bobcats and ended up with exactly the same (losing) record. In the end, the San Antonio Spurs won the Finals while having a very average wage bill, with the third best regular season record to boot. Their Finals opponents, the Cleveland Cavaliers, were no big spenders either.

Dr Money commented that "a wonderful extension to this study would be to see if it applies to football as well." So be it.

Full financial figures were more difficult to come by for the EPL, at least without paying fifty pounds for the information. The top six wage bills were stated in the highlights, however, and they are Chelsea (who else) at £114m, Man Utd at £85m, Arsenal at £83m, Liverpool at £69m, Newcastle at £52m and Spurs at £41m (though one may ask Spurs if it was money well-spent, given their results so far).

It is easily noted that the top three spenders have won fourteen of the last fifteen EPL titles (the exception being Blackburn, then amply financially supported by steel baron Jack Walker), so this hints that money is a big factor, unlike in the NBA. Some Googling turns up a relevant research paper, the figure on the last page reproduced here for convenience:



As suspected. Almost all clubs out of the Big Four spent about half to at most two-thirds of what the Big Four spent, and none of them approached the Big Three in points. The obvious reason for the discrepancy is that the NBA is a franchise and draft system while the EPL is free-market capitalist, and if I were told to make this a project I would dig further.



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Next: GG England, We Won't Miss You


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1 comment

C.wenhoo said...
make this a project


November 20, 2007 - 21:13 SGT     

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