e pur si muove

Today is Memorial Day, and I will dedicate this post in memorial blogo sacer to AcidFlask.

Verbatim: Word for Word archives a ST article dated April 24. I will quote two choice paragraphs.

But to NUS leaders, [having NUS placed 18^th in the Times Higher Education Supplement's ranking] was the payoff for years of strategising, hard work and tough decisions geared towards putting the university on the world’s academic map [...] A former NUS don said he had to admit now that Prof Shih ‘knew the game well’. This was a result of Prof Shih’s years as an academic at Harvard and Brown universities in the US before returning to Singapore in 1998.

Is this a blatant admission that NUS is playing the rankings game, by deliberately aiming for higher scores on commonly-used statistics? Whatever happened to putting students’ educations first, grooming the critical faculties of the mind yada yada. And is NUS considering whether the prolificity of their academic departments are really being taken seriously by other academics? I certainly hope that their next step after publishing tons of papers is to get people to actually pay attention to them other for purposes other than adding to the statistics of libraries and/or breeding silverfish. After all, Maxwell published all of eight papers; which mathematician, physicist or electrical engineer does not know his name today? (Then again, he was also a übergeek who scribbled equations on the back of postcards.)

Besides, the criteria used are hardly the be-all and end-all of all there is to the academic world. AcidFlask wrote about this half a year ago, when the THES rankings were first made public. And a NTU professor recently wrote a letter to the ST proclaiming pretty much the same stand.

Prof. Heng claims that instead of using citation rankings,

A more valid and reliable measure would be the number of high-level consulting assignments, as well as patents, inventions and discoveries by professors.

I beg to differ. Measuring the number of patents and inventions is highly specific to the technical fields; in particular, engineering. Not to diss the social sciences, but I don’t hear of many history professors filing patents to change the world. The number of consulting assignments, while certainly correlated to some extent with quality, is also highly biased in favor of faculty members with good networking skills and highly regarded guanxi.

But let’s be specific to technical fields here, and ask: how is one to quantify the number of discoveries made? If I discovered the bleeding obvious, by spending $100,000 on a medical study which shows that stapling fingers makes people bleed, does that count? Well, you may scoff, that’s “trivial” - we should only count “real” discoveries that make a difference. At what level is a discovery too trivial to be counted? And how long are we prepare to wait to make sure it’s a “real” discovery? Einstein took two decades to convince the world that relativity wasn’t just some crackpot idea. And it took the world millennia to proceed from Magnus’ discovery of the lodestone in ca. 900 BC to Faraday’s electric generator in 1832. And can we really attribute the creation of a specific discovery to a specific person, in contrast to the highly collaborative nature of science? Would Einstein have discovered relativity if not for Newton? Science really doesn’t work the way it did in strategy games like Civilization, where discoveries fall from the sky at the iron-cast rate of 8 light bulbs per turn.

The issue raised by AcidFlask, of getting metrics that actually quantify what you want to
measure, and with sufficient statistical validity, is clearly not going to go away anytime soon.

In closing, here’s another quote:

If we want our university graduates to become movers and shakers of society as future leaders, we must entrust them to people whose lives are marked by a passionate drive for social and community impact, rather than selfish acquisition of knowledge for self-improvement.

I wonder if Prof. Heng would consider people like AcidFlask “movers and shakers of society”.

In memoriam blogo sacer

The Peking Duck reports that Straits Times senior correspondent Ching Cheong was arrested in Guangzhou on April 22, over alleged leakage of state secrets. Both the Straits Times and the wife of the prominent Hong Kong journalist were warned by the Chinese government to not reveal her husband’s imprisonment, or else… Washington Post is first with the news.

I just read an article in the Taipei Times leaving me absolutely flabbergasted: The AFP in Seoul reported on April 15 that the Korean National Tax Service (NTS) was going to start auditing foreign funds on suspicions of tax evasion. Sparse details surfaced in Friday’s TODAY, as syndicated from Dow Jones.

The lowdown: GIC used to co-own a building with a US fund named Lone Star. In December 2004, GIC bought Lone Star’s portion, giving it 100% ownership. In so doing, NTS claimed that GIC exceeded the limit for which taxes relating to ownership had to be paid on that building, which GIC did not pay. Therefore NTS is investigating.

Is this the first time that it was reported in the Singapore media? Are they fully six weeks’ late in breaking the news? I couldn’t find articles in the local media published any earlier than this one. I can understand how touchy this issue is though, for an investment corporation supposedly backed by a country with a no-nonsense approach to corruption. Yet the mere suspicion of such wrongdoing is a sure eyebrow-raiser. Not to mention that if the South Koreans do uncover anything dodgy, the damage to Singapore’s clean image may be immense.

Egregrious error, legal loophole, or deliberate deception? Stay tuned for more on the billion-dollar bombshell (and annoying alliteration). Chant with me: Data! Data! Data!

Someone once told me that the day I graduate with a bachelor’s is the day that I think I know everything. That same someone also told me that the day I graduate with a doctorate is they day that I think I know nothing.

Which is perhaps a fitting context in which to talk about today’s Slashdot reading, featuring a ditty by one Scott Berkun, a logician, entitled Why smart people defend bad ideas. Describing the usual culprits of ego, groupthink and selfishness, the article features a well-written passage that struck me as very relevant to my ongoing musings on meritocracy:

That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous, a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring. [...] A bland homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.

Which caused a whole froth of questions to bubble forth? Can the current régime spell T-R-U-B-B-L-E? Is a country run by a scholarship élite from the same few institutions, majoring in the same few subjects, espousing the same few points of view that got them past the interview panels, be in deep homogenized and pasteurized doo-doo? That mandarins, taught by educators who think it’s still fitting to tell 23-year-olds not to be like that naughty classmate, can have a worldview that is so far divorced from the rest of the country that they cannot empathize with the needs of the average citizen, let alone the destitute and wretched?

That while they earn their famous million-dollar salaries by bargaining with Mdm Letchumi for reducing her son’s CPF payouts from $500/mth to $150/mth? Do they think, as they ply the roads of Districts 9, 10, and 11 in those plush chauffered, bulletproof, white Mecedes-Benzes, that it is even humanly possible for three people to survive on five dollars a day in Singapore? Yes, food and public transport is cheap in Singapore, but for crying out loud, put those math and economics degrees to work here! There’s more to life than food and buses… I remember reading about this but I can’t remember where. Did I dream this?

Maybe it’s time to write another meritocracy post. Oh wait, didn’t I just write one?

Oh well, it’s not like I’m getting paid to. I think I’m paid pretty decently for graduate life here. Which is more than I can say for this fella who got featured on Metroblogging Chicago.

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