Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Friday, Sep 12, 2008 - 22:56 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- - -
Mega Bonus Post

changelog v1.08e
---------------
* Added individual entry viewcount display (not sure why it wasn't done before), which may have fixed a rare view counter bug.

* Tags display sorted chronologically.


No EPL (even as Manchester City become the biggest club in the world) thus no "mandatory" post last weekend, but there's no shortage of action in these parts:

Browser Warz

To begin with, Google Chrome (BETA) was released on Wednesday, with accompanying explanatory comic. Not having been won over by Firefox, I was drawn over to Chrome by its perceived speed, which is the most important measure. Near-instant loading of Gmail? Tabs hang and crash individually if ever? Pulling tabs out and pushing them into new windows? Incredible screen real estate from a minimalist design? Chrome's all that, and open source, and free.

There are some glaring omissions which were swiftly pointed out, such as a lack of plug-in support, and some little details that I personally missed. Chief among them is the inability to refresh within a particular frame, and also the lack of a warning prompt when closing a window with multiple tabs. No apparent way to choose character set encoding either, and the one-box-fits-all Omnibox isn't perfect yet, though its autocomplete feature seems reasonably intelligent. Some advanced features also don't seem to have been fully implemented (e.g. Facebook interactivity)

Possible bad news for Microsoft-dislikers out there is that Chrome may well end up gaining its market share by eating into Firefox and Safari, among others, while having less impact on Internet Explorer. It makes some sense, since this would be the adventurous or informed part of the userbase that tries out new stuff, as compared to the "I canz watch Youtube? Cool!" or "Who cares..." masses (over 70% at last count) who would never bother to question their pre-installed browser.

To give Microsoft some credit, Chrome's performance was achieved on their operating platform. It's kind of like how those television ads for brand-new sets boasting crystal-clear image quality show those pictures off on existing "lousy" TVs.


Kidneys And Bicycles For All

In what is held as Singapore's first organ-trading case, the ill retail magnate who started the whole business was sentenced to a day's jail (which would up being a couple of hours) and fined about 3% of a peanut (S$17000), while the middleman broker got 14 months and the two Indonesian (would-be) donors were locked up for three weeks and three-and-a-half months respectively.

Some would naturally see this as (yet another) case of the rich enjoying "preferential treatment" from the penalties meted out, though the magnate's poor state of health appears to be a reasonable excuse. The exchanges in the national papers between our PM's sister, Dr Lee Wei Ling, and the Attorney-General, Prof Walter Woon, should serve as a good vantage point from which to consider this issue.

Dr Lee fired the first salvo with an article on September 5 entitled "Why mete out even a 'token sentence'?", which does not seem to be freely available on the subscription-based Straits Times website, but which I managed to dig up with Factiva. The main points in her argument were:
  1. If Mr Tang (the magnate) had went overseas for his (paid) kidney transplant, "no one would have considered him guilty of any offence". But he was so sick that he had little choice but to take the risk and bring the donor to Singapore instead
  2. One day's token sentence does not make sense due to his health, in the same way that a person medically unfit for caning, though his crime might ordinarily merit it, is exempted totally and not given a "token caning"
  3. He had already suffered anguish from "waiting a full week to know whether or not he would be spending considerable time in jail"
  4. The big meanie who asked the Deputy Public Prosecutor for a jail sentence is "probably someone with little empathy and cannot imagine himself in Mr Tang's position". "No doubt" that this meanie would do the same thing and get a kidney by hook or by crook, if he were in Mr Tang's shoes. "Any one of us would have acted as Mr Tang did if we had been placed in the same predicament. He paid a price for doing what all of us might have done"
Each of these arguments has several possible counters, but before I present my own thoughts, let's see what the esteemed Prof Woon has to say:
  1. First off, Mr Tang was fined $7000 for the attempted kidney purchase, so in effect Dr Lee's first sentence in her original article, that he "...was sentenced in court this week to a day in jail for trying to buy a kidney" was factually wrong to start with
  2. The one day (two hours) was due to Mr Tang "making a false statement in a statutory declaration under the Oaths and Declarations Act" (i.e. lying under oath) which has a mandatory minimum one day sentence.
  3. (In reference to main argument 4 of Dr Lee's above) "It is presumptuous of her to assume that she knows how other people would act, or worse, that they would act the same way as she would.", since all are equal before the Law and are obliged to comply, and if Dr Lee disagrees that's just too bad, it remains the law until she gets Parliament to amend it
Before continuing to Dr Lee's response to that, let us take a look at her original arguments 1 to 3, which Prof Woon did not appear to specifically rebut:

Argument one that Mr Tang would not have broken the law for his "offence" if done overseas anyway, so he presumably should be forgiven to some extent for committing it here, does not hold water in my opinion. In many countries, spitting or littering may not be punishable under law - and indeed in quite a few places, no one would consider these offenses a real crime. Therefore, should I have the right to spit and litter here, and the fines/corrective work order be waived? Does marijuana being de facto allowed in Holland make it permissible in Holland Village? True, perhaps some would not fault Mr Tang for trying to save his own neck, but the form of the argument is problematic. Still, in the end, the penalty for this crime turned out to be a $7000 pittance anyway, and if that were the only punishment I doubt that Dr Lee would have bothered to pen her criticism on grounds of principle.

Going to the second argument on health grounds - this is more reasonable, but is also troublesome. To judge its validity appropriately, one has to consider the standard operating procedure for very sick inmates - do they continue to serve their sentence in the prison hospital, get sent to an external hospital while technically still doing time, or get their sentence cut on compassionate grounds? I have to say I am not clear on this, so if anyone could enlighten me here it would be greatly appreciated.

Furthermore, what is the cutoff point for "very sick"? Another writer has pointed out that Mr Tang was well and fit enough to adequately and officially "discharge his duties as executive chairman of a public listed company" towards his shareholders, earning over half a million bucks in the process over the past year, but somehow was presented as "helpless and terminally ill" to the court and only resigned his post after being sentenced on August 27. From this, it appears a case of "fit to sit in a boardroom, not fit to sit in a cell".

Argument three is the raw appeal to our "humanity", which should have been the main thrust of the article to begin with. The problem is that such "mental anguish" is hardly quantifiable. Most criminals have to wait before sentencing - do we then say, the crime merited a year, but since the waiting created great pain, it should then be reduced? Since this anguish is presumably quite common but hardly ever taken into account, it would be quite unfair to apply it selectively.

Also, in the same week, the court sentenced a 58 year-old man with terminal lung cancer to seven months for running massage parlours without a licence, and hiring a worker without a permit. Maybe Dr Lee indeed feels that this is an inappropriate sentence too, but in the end the fact remains that one terminally ill man got two hours in the clink and another got seven months, both for relatively minor crimes which many people probably do not feel strongly towards. One happens to be very rich, the other presumably far less so, but this may have nothing to do with anything, of course.

But back to Dr Lee. Indeed, when confronted with the point that all are equal before the law, she acknowledges it but brings up Mr Tang's health condition again, reiterating her argument that it is the only factor that differentiates Mr Tang from the would-be donor Mr Sulaiman, who went to jail for a few weeks. This by itself does not provide any new angle, of course.

Next, she brings up an interesting point:

"... The prosecution had the discretion to decide what charges Mr Tang should face. Neither the principle of equality before the law nor any other principle required the prosecution to abdicate its duty to exercise its discretion..."

Ah, discretion. A good thing to have, but a potential minefield. The whole point of having a code of law is to have a set of rules which all are supposed to follow, is it not? Otherwise, why bother to bind a judge's discretion at all, and just rest each case upon its own merits, on his collected wisdom, to arrive at the best possible sentence? There is already a range of punishments available for most offenses for discretion to be applied upon. Admittedly a balance has to be struck, but being seen to be too free in applying discretion is a dangerous thing for an authority's moral standing, especially when those who enjoy said benefits of discretion are seen to more often than not be of a certain monetary class.

But it is Dr Lee's closing paragraphs which I find the most intriguing (comments in bold are mine):

"Justice, compassion and common sense suggest the following factors should have been considered:
  • Tang is desperately sick with one or two years to live. (see above for case of a person with terminal lung cancer who got seven months)
  • He is unlikely to survive a few days in prison. (granted Dr Lee is a renowned medical doctor, but I am still not certain how justified this statement is, or how the Prison Service will take this estimation of their medical care standards. Also by this reasoning would not the sentence of judicial caning, possibly with permanent health repercussions, be excessive for non-violent crimes towards property as in the Michael Fay vandalism case?)
  • Society would not have been harmed if Mr Tang had not been jailed. (in much the same way that society would be unlikely to have been harmed had the abovementioned unlicensed massage parlour operator not been jailed; Insightful readers will likely be able to come up with more examples of "reasonably victimless" crimes. Consider for instance the case of two gay men who commit their crime of passion in their home, but were chanced upon by a police officer upon official business, who I believe would then be duty bound to report the offence, which carries up to two years. Also, Dr Lee again "presumes" to know what will or will not hurt society - would not the erosion of the principle of equality be hurtful?)
  • The Government has indicated it might legalise organ trading. There was therefore no public policy to be upheld by sending Mr Tang to jail. (Erm, so in the period when the government indicated it "might" legalise casinos, one could start a small gambling house since there was no public policy to be upheld? Then if the Government decides in the end not to legalise organ trading, should the policy then be retroactively upheld? If a girl coyly says she "might" be open to offers, is it right for a guy to force himself on her then? With all due respect, this is a particularly weak point to me, even in a collection of less than stellar points.)
  • There was no requirement in law for Mr Tang to have sworn the statutory declaration. (he could have then refused to have sworn it, no? Unless Mr Tang comes out and says he was coerced into doing it, or didn't know its significance [no legal counsel?] otherwise the fact is that he deliberately lied on oath [since he must have known well that he was not remotely related to Mr Sulaiman], plain and simple. And once the system lets people get away cheaply with lying on oath, likely few would take it seriously and it would cease to retain its value in the pursuit of justice)
The AG uses high-sounding phrases about equality before the law, but says little about compassion or prosecutorial discretion. The law must be blind as to who is before the courts. But the law does not require law officers or the courts to be blind to justice and compassion.

Fortunately, in this case, the court was compassionate."

Actually, the kicker is that on a gut level, I do rather concur with Dr Lee's high-sounding phrases about compassion before the law. I obviously do not have anything against Mr Tang, and in fact would wish him a speedy recovery if it would make any material difference. Indeed, as of now I would support a tightly regulated and anonymous organ market for kidneys, such that those in need of health would enjoy the gift of life, and those in need of cash would enjoy the gift of prosperity at the cost of a mostly redundant organ; It is one thing to talk about the dignity of the body, and another to impose it upon those who may have difficulty feeding it and those of their family in reality. I accept the can of worms this may open (why not an eye or an arm for a million dollars then?), but my estimation is that, if implemented with discretion, a kidney market would have a net societal benefit.

Indeed, if a law were specifically passed that all terminally ill people who have committed certain relatively minor classes of crimes would be automatically spared a jail sentence on equal and compassionate grounds, I would have nothing to say. Unfortunately as pointed out above, this does not appear to be the case. Granted Mr Heng's (illegal massage parlour) offence is not a direct mirror of Mr Tang's, but since it is astronomically unlikely that a case where all other variables remain constant save for the status of the offender will ever appear, this is as good a comparism to take as anything. It might be a worthwhile exercise for a wannabe Freakonomist to compare aggregate sentencing data of that of the relatively poor against the relatively rich.

Then again, being rich has other benefits before the courts, even if the judges were completely impartial - money hires good legal teams, and it would be surprising if any judge stated a belief that the quality of the lawyers engaged has totally no bearing on the outcome of a case. "Jail time in lieu of fines" sentences effectively say, you get imprisoned if you are poor, but if you are rich just cough up the dosh and walk away. The deep pocketed can afford to engage in a dollar-burning exercise with poorer opponents in the courts if they have half a legal leg to stand on, secure in the probability that the opponent would eventually have to drop their suit or face financial ruin even if they win.

This is true in almost all countries following American/British law though, and the alternatives can be worse. So how? Old question, old answer - get rich, lor!

Oh, and opposition parties in Singapore, please do your bit for society too, instead of sitting on your asses and moaning about unfairness. As a bonus, once you have an affiliated apolitical charity foundation, you can help improve the health of the general populace by being permitted to hold mass cycling events too.


Prestige Or Mill

The Straits Times ran an exposé on degree mills on 29 August, which might have blown over pretty quickly had the Chancellor of one of the accused parties, Preston University, not taken out large ads (paid by former graduates) in several local papers (including the Straits Times, letter reproduced here), and one of their graduates not pressed his case in the ST Forum.

Predictably, the Straits Times stuck to their guns and insisted that their description of Preston was justified, thus inviting more negative publicity onto the school, which I suspect would have gained some unhappy students from this affair. So, are they a degree mill?

One can sympathise with their students, since they appear to have put in some time and effort, unlike the clear-cut degree-in-the-mail-by-next-week sort of mill. It is also true that they are licensed to "award all levels of post-secondary academic degrees" by the State of Alabama ("which has the worst degree-programme oversight in the United States", says the director of Oregon state's office of degree authorisation), so technically the certifications given out are legal to the best of my understanding. Unfortunately, the value of the certifications are more suspect, not only due to a lack of accreditation, but also to rather shady past behaviour such as claiming professors to be part of their faculty when they had not even heard of the school.

While it is strictly true that unaccredited institutions may be of quality, the onus then falls very heavily on them to prove themselves, since most "good enough" institutions would presumably get accredited since it is in their interest to do so. But should we really care if such institutions give out degrees for substandard work, or sell them outright?

One could say no, let the employer beware - if an employer hires someone with such a degree and finds out that he cannot perform the job, the free market should ensure that the employer would be more wary next time (and if that someone performs satisfactorily, good on him. Also, someone with a degree from a respected university is not an absolutely sure bet too). Unfortunately, in practice employers may have a reasonable expectation that a degree confers a certain level of expertise, and be in that way misled. The opportunity cost for trying one's luck with a fake degree is also not large - for a few hundred dollars, one can pad dozens of resumes.

On the flip side, the students who honestly invested time and effort in unaccredited programmes also lose out, if they discover that it offers far less value than they thought. It would be disheartening to discover that government agencies and respected companies take a dim view of a qualification that took a year or two and many thousands of dollars to get.

And then there are the businessmen who want a Ph.D for professional reasons, or simply the prestige. Since they have shown their abilities to some extent by getting wealthy enough to buy expensive pieces of paper, this is somewhat less of a problem, though it does somewhat cheapen the effort made by those in more rigorous programmes, since to the layman one Ph.D carries much the same weight as another.

The topic of universities has also come up in another form, with a Mr Calvin Ng saying that a "varsity place (is) not an entitlement". This raised the ire of a Mr Chen, who countered that "education is a right and not a privilege", to which Mr Ng had the final word.

Mr Chen revealed that he had been rejected by all local universities, but managed to get a honours degree from Britain, which gained him admission to an NTU Masters degree programme. Thus, the (rather popular) insinuation is that there are students which are in fact qualified for a local degree course, but were not let in due to insufficient places. These students would then either have to go foreign or put their education on hold. There are similar stories in the forum, telling of local students who did well enough to get accepted by an Ivy League university, but not for the course of their choice here (which may bolster NUS/NTU/SMU's claims to be among the top in the world?)

Well, first of all, there are tradeoffs for every solution. Currently, the percentage of graduates for each cohort is 20+%, targeted to hit about 30%. If we assume that people have different levels of academic inclination, then in general the higher percentage of the cohort is admitted, the lower the overall standard. Nobody pretends that 90+% of each cohort should attend university - some simply have talents that are better utilized in other fields. If one is a great football player, chef, musician, artist, entrepreneur etc, why should he waste his time?

The standards issue can be handled in two ways - diluting all local universities equally, or creating new universities that are meant to cater to local education, and not gunning to become "top twenty in the world". The latter seems easy enough - upgrade some polytechnics and JCs to university status (expanding the curriculum appropriately), and we are done. This is not without precedent, as Britain has a bunch of New Universities, or "Universities formerly designated Polytechnics". Ta-da, fifty percent or more of the cohort are university graduates! Take that now, snobbish NUS elitists!

One question then, if this solution were implemented, would be if the new universities would then remain seen as second-class. There is a school of thought (elucidated in the comments here) that "...a degree is primarily a signal of ability and competence. If too many possess the same signal, it loses its discriminatory value". The justification is that "...for most of us, the degree we take is of minimal relevance to our future working life (except for doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even then much of the knowledge is earned on the job).", i.e. what seems to matter more is the "exclusivity" of receiving (winning) a degree under a competitive system, and not so much what is learnt in the process.

Therefore "...if the govt expands higher education, employers will find it a lot more difficult to discriminate between job candidates. They will start using other less reliable rules - where you studied, who you know, and possible social clues - accent, language, dress, address etc. Obviously all of these tilt the scales to the already wealthy and well connected, which perpetuates any social inequalities (which we don't want of any good education policy)".

In fact, I suppose that there may be a general qualifications inflation going on - today's Bachelors degree seems on the way to becoming yesterday's high school diploma. The commenter follows up by saying that "...a degree by itself is not (much of) a signal of intrinsic value, only your value relative to others ...If you expand the number of graduates, you will find that employers will be calling for 80,000 master's degrees holders instead (of 80,000 bachelor's degrees) ...The UK converted their polytechnics to universities and didn't fool employers, who continued to discriminate against graduates of former polys."

Is this view accurate? I bet there are many who would take umbrage, but it appears a fact that quite often people will be judged relative to other people - by transcripts listing one's class rank, for instance. Should it be this way? Another commentator lauds the example of "Scandinavian societies... (which) tends to view education as a measure of competence rather than a measure relative achievement ...The analogy is like a driving test where you either pass or fail a driving test. You don't have people getting first class honours or US equivalent for being the best driver of a batch. You meet a minimum requirement you pass that's it." Sounds good, but in theory the government can just set a high objective university admissions criteria (a.k.a Degree test) calculated to only let twenty percent of the cohort pass, another Diploma test calculated to let say forty percent pass, a Masters test letting ten percent pass... and we are back to the relativity of square one.

What happened to Mr Chen, from this train of thought, would be that he got bumped out of this "signalling competition" due to being a late bloomer, and therefore had no choice but to spend more to earn that "signal". It is true that poorer students may not have the means to pursue education overseas (~S$200k?) if they do not make it into the heavily-subsidized local system. This seems, in effect, to be a bet by the authorities that the positive externalities generated by an extra level of education, would not cover the costs incurred (indeed the greatest gains to productivity of an individual come from primary and secondary schooling as a rule). Whether they are correct, remains to be seen.

So in the end it boils down to the attitude of a society - it is my impression that many countries are less degree-oriented, and one can make a very decent living as say a plumber or electrician. Remember also that no matter where the cut-off point is set, there will still be those at the margin who may feel aggrieved at having just missed out.

I end this topic with a response to Mr Chen's parting lines: "The question is, if local universities do not provide a chance for Singaporeans who qualify to study at home, how will we retain our talent when other prestigious foreign universities are ever obliging in admitting Singapore students?" The answer seems quite obvious - fight fire with fire and have the local universities be ever obliging in admitting foreign talent, lor! Here it must be added that there is some unhappiness at some 20% of university places being taken up by foreigners, but the argument of having an infusion of overseas quality, against more local attendees, could fill many pages and has to be reserved for a later date.


Chapalang

Endured an inconvenient few days midweek when I woke up with a pain in my right heel. Googled "heel pain", and got a description for plantar fasciitis. Pain on the bottom of the heel? Check. Pain that is usually worse upon arising? Check? Pain that increases over a period of months?

...Uh oh.

Luckily enough, it went away by the weekend. Don't have a clue on what caused it.

Also helped a friend set up his online store, using the Zen Cart e-commerce platform. With so many quality open-source solutions for most Internet services that one might conceivably want to implement, it's getting all too easy to be lazy and hold off writing anything from scratch. Then again, it is the nature of the web that once a single all-encompassing free super-solution is unveiled in any niche, there's not much sense in reinventing the wheel, axle, bolt and nut. Just one more system-building project left in the pipeline then.

Oh, and the diligent CompClub candidate featured in the previous post? He didn't win. Guess there just wasn't a compelling enough case for people like me to spend an evening voting (too bad it wasn't an online poll), but it was an admirable and creative attempt nonetheless.



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (2) - trackback url


Next: Point and Counterpoint


Related Posts:
Timely Recess
Restarts and Reviews
Come Ten Twenty Issues
Zero Point Zero Three Five Radians
Return of the Link
Back to top




2 trackbacks

Trackback by Chinese Pre-Employment Screening
Chinese Pre-Employment Screening - Verifile China can validate Chinese Higher Education Certificates of Graduation.


May 1, 2009 - 08:09 SGT     
Linkback by

...skey="4" href="/gwt/n?oe=UTF-8&client=safari&q=Nus+life+sciences+08/09+honours+1st+class&start=20&output=wml&hl=en-GB&ei=FDYnSqiHFZjW7AP76ZS-Ag&source=m&ct=res&cd=24&rd=1&u=http://blog.glys.com/index.cgi?e=2008-12-09-mega-bonus-post"[bert's blog - Mega Bonus Post] If we don't succeed, we run the ... 5 a accesskey="5" href="/gwt/n?oe=UTF-8&client=safari&q=Nus+life+sciences+08/09+honours+1st+class&start=20&out...


June 4, 2009 - 10:46 SGT     

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.