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Saturday, Aug 01, 2015 - 22:49 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Thesis Submitted

Well, it took all of six years, but it's done. At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, I lugged the required four soft-bound copies, together with accompanying PDF file in CD-ROM format and the signed submission form, to the Graduate Office, and turned them in. Fortunately, the printers had a rush-job five-hour turnaround time option (tip: you can save somewhat by giving them a week, and by having fewer colour pages - they cost seventy cents apiece, compared to only five cents for black-and-white [regular thesis length assumed])

I suppose it could have been done with earlier had I set my mind to it, seeing as all the technical findings were basically finished up last year, but all's well that ends well.

The recurring story of much research, I'd say, is the development of algorithms that work... but agonizingly, not work sufficiently better than existing ones. Still, the process has never being boring, what with the speed at which the field's moving. In any case, a large part of what attracted me to CS was the conviction that it would be the discipline that would, directly or indirectly as support for other fields, have perhaps the greatest impact on our lives, for this era. I still hold to that assessment. Oh, and gaming (though I haven't touched Dota 2 for months, even as it gets bigger here too)

To give a random example, just the past week has seen scientists postulate that human intelligence is heavily general and influenced by the same set of genes, and a Chinese superstar proposing a billion-dollar project to unravel individual genes' influence though, you guessed it, big data. Indeed, another paper from last month has suggested that many traits are linearly determined from one's geneset, though the search for the exact genes is anything but easy, with past experiments suggesting that traits are governed by "...thousands of genes (each) with tiny additive effects".

On the slightly more mundane end, near-fully automated factories have begun to spring up in... China. Yes, land of half a billion workers. I'm not sure how many more ways the deck can get stacked against the less-endowed - they just realised that having reserves (i.e. being rich) encourages risky entrepreneurship, no joke, and that income predicts college enrollment - even before genetic engineering comes into play. Hopefully some new economics will allow the world to cope.



Anyway, pending celebratory dance!



Dr. Chang Returns

Dr. Chang: Assuredly, assuredly, my dear chap.

Me: Welcome back, Mr. H... Dr. Chang. It's been almost a year. So how are things going?

Dr. Chang: Well, it's been a busy month, what with the continued stock market brouhaha and debt quality concerns, reflected in 97% of their firms being given at least a double-A credit rating by domestic agencies, compared to the majority of firms having a single-A rating or below by Moody's, which should be close to that offered by S&P and Fitch too. Of course, this might be partly due to market idiosyncrasies, such as having only firms confident of securing top ratings seeking them out - but the gap remains huge.

Me: There's an underlying assumption that their debt is backed by the authorities, I gather?

Dr. Chang: There's that, but I'll return to this point later. For now, let us observe that your Prime Minister has just backed up our analysis last year on Singapore's demographics vis-a-vis China, right down to the conclusion that while Singapore's issues can at least technically be fixed for some time by immigration, this is not feasible for China due to its size.

Me: That's not especially contentious, I'd say.

Dr. Chang: Yep, population trends have an enormous inertia. The other major point of similarity between Singapore and China, the effective primacy of a single party, has also been addressed, as being due it it being "a system from which everyone benefits", also in line with our then-observation of "...as long as enough people are making money, they don't complain".

Now, even ignoring the implications of putting the needs of citizens in opposition-held wards last, which was always iffy to begin with because of the large minority of incumbent supporters inevitably living in those wards - what are they supposed to do, move? - the unspoken corollary is that the people better be making money, then.

Me: Which is why economic slowdown is such a concern.

Dr. Chang: Of course, nobody likes recessions, but in countries with long liberal democratic traditions, they can - and routinely do - just turf out the incumbent political party when that happens. Now, I'm not saying that this is effective, or that the newly-in-charge administrators will be able to fix the problems, just that everyone knows that it can be done; it is oft-said that the true hallmark of democracy is not elections, but the peaceful handover of power.


Just to clarify, we're against it.
(Source: edition.cnn.com)


Here, China and Singapore diverge somewhat. While the incumbent parties in both countries are adamant that they are synonymous with the state, the mechanism for political transition is at least embedded in Singapore's system, even if opposition is curtailed in practice.

Which brings us to a third point - in both countries, an image of the party's authority being absolute has been carefully cultivated, even in matters where such a claim is probably untenable. The recent stock bubble can, for instance, be attributed in large part to the CCP implicitly guaranteeing continued returns, with the People's Daily - a The State's Times analogue - cheerleading the start of a bull run even as the domestic stock indices doubled in less than a year, despite there being no obvious rut to recover from.

One does not have to search very far for the local equivalent, "HDB values will never go down", which a number of commentators have long recognized as odd, given that HDB housing is on a finite lease, with the ability for prospective buyers to get loans decreasing markedly as the lease winds down, and there being only an expectation that the thus-far generous buybacks will continue for all flats, despite only having being offered to a tiny percentage of the entire stock.

Me: Personally, I am expecting either the number of citizenships granted picking up as the bulk of HDB developments enter SERS territory, which I'm estimating will come within a couple of decades, to provide a supply of new buyers; that, or HDB purchase eligibility will be extended to non-residents, if the government persists with its prevailing "come work here on the cheap, then eff off to retire" vision. I'd gather that either approach would be potentially incendiary, but then, twenty years is a long time.

Dr. Chang: The point is that with a one-party state, there is a huge pressure to maintain the image that the party is infallible, whether that is in fact the case - probably not. The fundamental question is whether the benefits of having a singular, "unified" drive is superior to having multiple tenable parties slug it out and check each other. On current evidence, I'd say that this is at least worth a debate.

It doesn't stop here, of course, and parallels abound for those that care to look - elderly upkeep/CPF concerns, the social compact of getting wealthy together riven by a widening wealth gap and leading to capital flight, likely leading to anti-foreigner tensions and continued doubling down on what worked previously...

Me: Well, everybody has problems - it's not as if the USA and Europe are without their own worries.

Dr. Chang: Certainly. But, to borrow an analogy - I'd describe multi-party democracy as the constant burning off of underbrush, while with one-party states, it tends to look all nice and pretty for a long time... and then a big inferno. I'm sure there are those who will disagree, and there are certainly exceptions, but that's my read.

And speaking of fires, there's something to be said for being the cleanest dirty shirt, from what's going on up north...


Verbatim: "Only waste paper was destroyed,
and *not* secret documents relating to ongoing investigations."
(Source: news.asiaone.com)


[To be continued...]



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