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Monday, May 10, 2010 - 22:00 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Holidays Over

Fair's fair since the stipend continues even when school's out, and I seriously should be looking to get published real soon, lest I get stuck in academic no-man's-land. With that in view, I sat in on a seminar on paper-writing today. But first, the news while it's fresh:


PSLE 2+1?

On the subject of mother tongue at the PSLE level, the suggestion for a two-choose-one formula, where students can pick between their mother tongue or science to count towards their aggregate score, was mooted in the local papers. Quick: is this an everybody-wins scenario?

I would say no, as this would now benefit "specialists" more than "generalists", with the kids who are able to juggle more types of studies disadvantaged compared to those who can handle fewer (but possibly do better in those). There might be less dissent, however, as not many self-identify with these groups (unlike the English-vs-Chinese-educated divide), and for the students themselves, I can't see how essentially dropping a quarter of their workload is going to be unpopular with them.


Die Die Also Die

The next major item of interest in the local news would be the Law Minister's remarks on the death penalty. Here, I quote the first paragraph of Today: "The mandatory death penalty for serious drug offences here is a 'trade-off' the Government makes to protect 'thousands of lives' that may be ruined if drugs were freely available."

The minister reasoned that safety and security comes as a trade-off with "this framework of the law", which I believe to refer to the death penalty, and that this trade-off is not always apparent. Quote: "You save one life here, but 10 other lives will be gone. What will your choice be?".

He continues by arguing that if young traffickers such as Yong Vui Kong were spared, drug barons would respond by sending more such people with sob stories, i.e. abused adolescents or weeping mothers, and that there would be "a whole unstoppable stream of such people coming through".

Here, I assume that Today has accurately reported the minister's words and intentions, a liberty that I enjoy only thanks to the government's history of diligent prosecution of any publication that would irresponsibly misrepresent them, through due process of the law.

With that settled, one might then respectfully point out the fact that the choice is not between killing traffickers or setting them free, but that alternatives such as life imprisonment are available. For the sake of this discussion, let us pretend that the penalty has been changed to, say, a mandatory minimum of thirty years, perhaps with caning, which itself is no joke.


No noose is not necessarily good news (Source: filipspagnoli)


The question then is: Would being locked up for at least thirty years prove less of a deterrent than death, and if so, how much less of a deterrent would it be? (Since either punishment would protect the public from the risk of the criminal reoffending, this factor should not come under consideration)

This is a classic debate issue, not the least since statistics on its effects have been inconclusive (refer also to an academic paper, interestingly written by a mathematics professor). One might then think that, if we are unsure of the deterrence effect, shouldn't we err on the side of (relative) mercy, as capital punishment will inevitably be applied to innocent victims, if it exists? Apparently no, at least here.

There is a clear difference between capital punishment and life imprisonment in at least one respect, though; for capital punishment, the cost is but a length of rope, which is generously supplied by the state (don't knock it, they make the guy's family pay for the bullet in some other places). If you lock up a guy, in contrast, the state has to pay for his food, lodgings, medical care, etc - and this does not come cheap, contrary to expectations. For the USA, the cost is over a hundred bucks per prisoner per day, and I'm not sure if it costs much less in Singapore (give me a moment here to get over the fact that prisoners collect more benefits than graduate students...) [N.B. it appears the cost argument may not apply in the USA (see paper before), but if this is true in Singapore too, there should be even less call for the death penalty]

Then, the second question is, if life imprisonment were implemented instead, who pays? Easy enough - the state, and therefore the public. Would the general public be willing to pay higher taxes to support criminals who, despite possible mitigating circumstances, sought to damage their society?

I do not know. One way to look at it is that far better people have and will continue to die for far worse reasons, and if funds are available, there are certainly far more deserving citizens to spend it on (an area in which the government has been very prudent, but which given the debt crises in Europe, perhaps been wise). However, while I am all for tough justice, long decades of incarceration is tough enough for me.

A related third question is that, if deterrence and social repercussions are key considerations, why does 30g of cocaine carry an automatic death sentence, while wilfully driving while drunk, for instance, results in a jail term of just six months? Readers are invited to mull over this and comment.


Power Papers

Finally on to the seminar (link to presentation), chaired by my pattern recognition professor from last semester. Other than the small matter of it stretching to two hours instead of the scheduled one, it was really quite pleasurable.

If there is one thing that researchers in any field have to do, it is write, and it is undeniable that good writing helps, or more pointedly, bad writing hinders the chances of a researcher getting published, quality and content of the work aside (by the way, this was mentioned by Wenhoo of the Hidden Blog Which May Not Be Linked) - the prof revealed examples of praise received from reviewers on the language used, although sadly enough those papers were still rejected.

At this point, having seen in my time a few papers which could stand to be tidied up heavily, I have to comment that having a poor mastery of the English language is one thing, but obvious spelling errors is another - when mistakes which could have been corrected by Microsoft Word, or heck, even OpenOffice Writer for the penniless, remain in a submitted paper, I can only imagine how well-disposed the reviewers will be towards it. Perhaps somebody should popularize a TeX editor with spellcheck built in.

That and basic grammatical errors aside, one wonders if researchers might consider hiring English majors and grad students to tidy up their writing - it looks like pure win-win to me, given that funding for the arts is usually not as easy to come by, it might well make the difference between getting published or not for the scholar in the sciences, and I can't see this as cheating by any means. I know what I would do if I had to publish in French, or maybe even Chinese.

Another little gripe on one of the main functions of a paper being to allow others to reproduce the results - I would much prefer some code uploaded to the Internet in almost all cases, and thankfully this seems to be pretty widespread in CS, if not quite common enough yet.

An exercise on identifying the good and bad aspects of two introductory passages followed, with one of them being a wholly negative example, complete with Random Capitalization™ (however, you can get away with Small Details like that, and alternatte spelings, if you're Chaucer).

Next up was on choosing a title, and in this respect it seems that the research community is getting cooler than I ever expected it to get, with papers entitled "Six in the City", "Smile, you're on identity camera", "An eye for an eye" and the winner, "Finding Naked People", cited no less than 285 times, despite being by no means very accurate, which might indicate that inexplicably getting lucky with the correct subfield is as important as a witty title. Who would have thought?

[N.B. Just for interest, Google SafeSearch works not by analysing the images themselves, but the text (and other) content of the pages that the images are on, to the best of my knowledge. Or perhaps Google have perfected the naked people algorithm; they have certainly succeeded in turning me into a Google Conduit whenever somebody asks for my help on a technical matter]

As is my habit, I will end off by deliberately plagiarizing one of the speaker's best moments, in which the amazing capacity for English to compress information is demonstrated.

It involves a rookie reporter who is given the task of covering a crime story, where an inmate escapes from a mental asylum, chances upon a woman hanging clothes out to dry, rapes her and steals some of the clothes before running away. The reporter dutifully interviews the asylum, the police, the victim, her neighbours and the inmate's parents, only to be informed that due to an impending visit by the President and an earthquake, his original one-page spread would be cut down to one headline and one photo. The headline?




Smart Hamsters


(Source: occ/Cuteoverload.com)


N.B. Mr. Ham has approached his local union after viewing the video.



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