Essay Writing
By Kevin
Get Cracking!
ERPZ comes up with advice about writing now and then; earlier I looked into my writing styles following advice from The Economist. Kwang Guan did a piece on adjectives, and for advice on writing Personal Statement, it's also helpful to look out for stuff applicable for normal writing as well.
For my friends who're going back to university and trying to write good, generic essays, here's some key points about essay writing that's really important. Hopefully, it'll be useful especially to the boys who are entering university only after two years of National Service and feeling dumber.
1) Cut down on needless adjectives
2) Vary sentence lengths
3) Focus on the topic at hand, don't allow yourself to stray
Yup, writing is that simple.
Chart Play
By Kevin
I learnt about Google Charts API quite a while back but didn't quite found time to explore it. I had wanted to use it to create charts to showcase certain data trends on ERPZ so that I don't have to generate Microsoft Office graphics to be uploaded. For my experiment, I decided to use the same data set for the distance fares to generate a chart using the Google Charts API. I took the following that I used in the previous entry:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By MS Office)
Using the wizard provided by Google and then tweaking the codes a bit here and there, I managed to create the following:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By Google)
It actually looks great and I guess in future, when I need to present any data on ERPZ, I'll be using this API.
Nuclear power debate
By Wei Seng
Nuclear energy: good for you?
Today I feature a debate on nuclear power on TED.com. In light of the ongoing oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico, it is good to revisit nuclear power as an alternative source of energy, especially for an energy-guzzling nation like America. Two experts argue the benefits and disadvantages of nuclear power, and this would be good for those who dont like to read academic stuff but prefer to watch it take place interactively on their iPod (or iPad, if you already have one).
Lessons to learn from Norway
By Wei Seng
Paradise on Earth?
First published in The Guardian on Wednesday, then republished in The Straits Times, Timothy Garton Ash writes about Norway vis-a-vis the European Union, and some of the lessons that can be learnt from Norway and about Norway.
The writer refers to Norway as "close to a paradise on Earth" because of high living standards and social equality. This, he says, allows many people to use Norway as an example for many things. British MPs from the Eurosceptic Conservative party claim that Norway's being out of the EU and its resultant prosperity meant that Britain could leave the EU and probably do as well as Norway could. Researchers also cite Norway as an example of how greater equality could have spillover benefits in terms of education and crime amongst other social indicators. And for those "hydrocarbonists" who support the "drill, baby, drill" faction, Norway is the epitome of how oil drilling can create prosperity and equality, since Norway's economy (and hence social democracy model) is sustained by significant exports of oil and gas drilled in its waters. And there are some who allude Norway's success to its historical and cultural links to the Vikings and their traditions and characteristics.
But the writer would like to remind readers that it is easy to draw "too-simple lessons from the experiences of other countries, or of projecting on to them lessons you want to draw for your own". In short, only highlighting what serves your own purpose and neglecting the rest. One may also fall into a trap, the frequently-commited "fallacy of confusing correlation with cause". The lessons that should be learnt need to be the right ones as well: emulating the success stories of another country in your own, in a totally different context, can produce wildly different results.
And, well, even supposed-Paradise Norway is not immune to the "shockwaves of world politics", as the country struggles (like many other European nations) to integrate its growing Muslim populace and its exports have to be imported by its European neighbours for the country to earn any money at all.
So what can Singapore learn from Norway? Maybe tips on the social democracy model that Norway champions, given that Singapore tends to be averse to some of the ideas of social democracy such as pensions because of disincentives to work. Or perhaps how the country manages to create such an egalitarian society, important given that Singapore is becoming a more unequal society as the country continues to grow and develop.
Replotting the map of Europe
By Wei Seng
How does New Europe look to you?
In yet another geopolitical write-up, I feature an article from The Economist that proposes replotting the map of Europe to group within Europe the countries with cordial relations and seperate the countries with souring relations. Sounds like an easy exercise isnt it? The Economist also provides justifications for the relocation of countries. It is quite interesting to see the map of Europe adjusted as such, as an indication of which countries have similarities or get along better.
What you see very obviously being adjusted is off the coast of continental Europe. Britain has shifted southwards next to Spain and Portugal because of "similar position(s)" in its "dire public finances". Britain has also broken up into England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, which might make governance easier. In Britain's place is Poland, "which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany" (think of World War 2 and Cold War) and deserves "the security of sea water between it and potential invaders".
In addition, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have shifted out of the Baltics to west of Ireland, forming a group of 4 countries that have undertaken "internal devaluation" to make their economy more competitive. In place of these 3 Baltic states comes Belarus, which deserves some Nordic influence to "shed (its) Soviet legacy", much as how the 3 Baltic states have benefitted from being in the area.
Another obvious change is the split of the south of Italy into a seperate state of its own called Bordello, "to form a currency union with Greece, but nobody else". Probably a depiction of the messy state of finance as well as the amount of organised crime in south Italy.
Some other still-obvious changes include:
1. The northward shift of neutral Switzerland into Scandinavia, accompanying other generally neutral countries like Sweden (which people often mix up with Switzerland) and Norway (happy to see another country not in the EU next to it)
2. Swapping of places between Belgium and Czech Republic, since Belgium suffers from so much squabbling within its fractious Flemish-French coalition government that it deserves to be in Central Europe, while Czech Republic being peaceful suffers from much of the nationalist squabbling in its neighbours. Birds of a feather should flock together huh?
More changes occur in the Balkans, and there's even new fictional countries created to fill some of the gaps created from the shifting of states. The changes here are so messy that I wont elaborate though you could check out the original article for the full explanations.
Logic of Life
By Kevin
Perfecting Rationality's Definition
I wrote a review of Tim Harford's Logic of Life a long time back. It didn't make it to the publication I intended it for and so I publishing it here:
Thanks to a huge mishmash of research done by a new breed of economists who try to take on the challenges to rational choice theory, Tim Harford the Undercover Economist is persuaded that humans are smart rational creatures working within a world of imperfect information and impossibly tough circumstances. And obviously, he has decided to write a book to convince you of that too. Harford's Logic of Life takes on the Freakonomics track - citing loads of research supporting quirky or counter-intuitive explanations for common phenomena, which is perhaps very rational given that Levitt's Freakonomics sold more than 3 million copies worldwide while The Undercover Economist have no such statistics to brag about.
Unlike Freakonomics however, Logic of Life draws upon a larger collection research and is not detailed with the description of underlying research. Harford groups the different studies with ancedotes on some of the researchers to weave incredible but true stories about how people choose their lifelong partners, why people choose to live in crowded and expensive cities when the rise in their wages doesn't justify their expense and many more. Harford sees himself as a detective, peeling away layers of complexity from issues like crime and racism and attempting to investigate the causes of the emergent patterns. This is perhaps why the chapters were further segmented with sub-headings that gives the location and date related to events or research that follows, much like the old detective movies where the establishing shot is augmented by these information.
He starts out with the most provocative topic of 'sex' and go on around what he call the 'edge of reason', actions or habits which conventional wisdom will probably declare as largely irrational behaviours. In his chapter titled 'Las Vegas', Harford connected stories of Chris Ferguson, Von Neumann and Thomas Schelling with their research on Game Theory, rationality of gamblers and other sort of addicts. He explains the birth of Game Theory and the hopes of its applications in a myriad of different fields. A similar pattern emerges in every chapter, with Harford using his journalist style of conveying economics research findings to laymen, occasionally planting his opinions and thoughts, all the while steering readers back to the main message of his book, "humans are by and large rational and takes rational actions".
Another dominant theme in his book is that irrational or extreme situations can result from purely rational behaviours on the part of individual agents involved in decision making. It is much like prisoner's dilemma being played out by an entire community of people. Prisoner's dilemma is a situation where 2 individuals rationally chooses the collectively worst outcome simply because the alternative, better collective outcome appeared impossible. Harford points out this is probably how racism is perpetuated and reinforced by rationality of both the racist and the victim race, citing an experiment at University of Virginia where 'racism' was initiated by patterns that started merely by random chances. He offers his view that the solution out of this vicious cycle would somehow involve a change in the incentives of the parties involved and would take a long time.
Having started out his book with rational decisions that affects individuals and gradually moving on to those small individual rational decisions that impact on the community or even a race, Harford paces towards the finish of his book with how countries' politics and even the history of mankind is influenced by the combination of rational decisions so far made by all the tiny little economic agents each just trying to do their own things and to get by. He ends with the wildly speculative but not wholly unsubstantiated idea that the explosion of innovation and economic growth within the last century or so is merely a result of people responding to incentives.
Logic of Life offers a huge load of interesting, nice-to-know but otherwise pretty useless (at least to you and me) facts and speculation about the world that economists have discovered or concocted; very unlike The Undercover Economist which breath life into textbook economics. And this brings us to the question of why we should even bother to read this book. Rationally speaking, Logic of Life helps us gain a deeper appreciation of the study of economics as a means of understanding the world and ourselves - it demonstrates how the subject can be used to answer questions posed by the psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist and a whole lot of specialist in other fields.
Evaluating Articles
By Martin See
Who did the writing?
You can hear the fashionable phrase research skills widely bandied about these days. The phrase amounts to doing your homework on a certain research topic, which includes finding out as much relevant information as possible by going through the existing literature, be it in paper or digital formats. It does not matter whether you are a student working on your project paper or an employee writing your report; you will constantly require these skills to excel in your work because every argument that you make or every suggestion that you raise ideally requires you to do research on them and to include current literature on those points. Note the use of the word skills in the previous sentences. Being skills, they can be learnt. This article will help you to improve an area of these skills, namely the ability to evaluate articles or sources in your work.
When you are evaluating your articles or sources, you may want to consider these key points:
a) Peer reviews
Most credible articles are peer reviewed by qualified experts in the relevant fields. It means that before the articles are published, they are subjected to intense scrutiny from their fellow colleagues, researchers, and other experts. An article published in Science, the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, would obviously have gone through more processes of regulations and checks as compared to one published in ERPZ (a really unfortunate example). The more rigorous the peer reviews, the more credible the articles will be.
b) Authorship
Before you consider any ideas/arguments made in a paper, always do a thorough research on the author. Is the author a qualified expert in the field of study? An article on the physics of fluids by a well known economist is probably a dubious work. A general rule of thumb is to use the works of authors who are authorities in the relevant research fields. You may also want to consider if the authors have any personal agendas. You are less likely, for example, to believe in a glowing report on the financial stability of Yahoo! if it is prepared by an analyst with a heavy portfolio in Yahoo! shares as compared to an independent financial institution. Some research papers may also be heavily funded by some particular organisations and this may have significant bearing on the conclusions in the paper. Would you trust a health report on the effects of smoking if it was funded by Philip Morris? It is, therefore, important to consider the authors of the articles that you are using in your work.
c) Context
Every paper or every work is written and published in different contexts. If you want a contemporary view of World War I, you would probably not want to pick a book published in the 1920s, the post-era. So carefully consider the contexts of articles before you use them in your work.
d) Recency
When you use an article or source in your work, you would want the most recent idea/argument (assuming that the quality is the same in the comparison) except in special circumstances (e.g. history). This is especially relevant if the ideas/arguments are made obsolete rapidly, such as in the industry of information technology (IT). Unless the old articles offers an unique viewpoint, it would be better off for you to find recent articles to use for your work. As a general rule of thumb, stick to sources that are five years (or less) from your work. Imagine if a work is published in 2005, the research and the data involved in the work would most likely not be from 2005 but from 2003 or 2002. That is at least a gap of 7 years from your work (2010). A bigger gap would be more adverse and you would do well to avoid that in your work.
With all these considerations, I wish you all the best in your research! If you find that there are other considerations too, please share it with the ERPZ audience in the comments section.
White in America – the new minority?
By Wei Seng
Not back to these days I hope
The last idea from the '10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years' column in Time magazine that caught my eye is one that pertains to America in particular though it could have ramifications in future for other countries facing a similar fate (even Singapore, for example).
Gregory Rodriguez writes about the "white anxiety crisis" and how "native-born white Americans" are poised to become the minority in America soon, as early as 2050 according to estimates by the US Census Bureau. This could certainly cause a backlash (amongst the white, that is) about what it means to be American, as well as attitudes of positive discrimination towards black / coloured minorities. Thus far the image of America has been one that is white, with African-Americans and Hispanics seen as the minority, the same way that the image of Africa conjured up is black while whites are the minority (usually remnants of colonial rule). How palatable (to the white as well as the black) would it be to have an America that is in proportion no longer majority white but still viewed or governed as a white-majority nation? The colouring of the United States would probably be seen as disturbing for "native-born whites" (in all honesty, the true natives of America are the native Indians, who have long been shunted and sidelined by the government). As the minority (at the moment still Hispanic and African-American, even Asian) clamour for more representation and more rights, the majority would now fight back as they see the threat of being overwhelmed in near future.
Worse still, could the threat of becoming the new minority cause the revival of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan? I shudder to think of such an eventuality, but I am quite certain white supremacist thinking in some is still alive, just as much as blacks still think that the whites still have something against them.
However, it must be noted that the colouring of America is taking place in select states such as California, such that a convoluted situation would occur: 'majority' (in terms of land size / number of states) of the United States is still white but "strong white-minority political consciousness is most likely to arise in regions that are nowhere near... becoming majority-minority". The current minority are unlikely to expand to become the majority in many states such as Montana (think of the mountainous, central states of America), but it could well be people from states such as these that might be making the most noise about the colouring of America. I am reminded of the movie The Blind Side which I watched, where the black-white suspicion-tension often surfaced throughout the storyline and where racial segregation and discrimination is still not dead. It might not be an accurate reflection of the whole of America, but movies tend to portray some form of indication of societal views as well as perceptions.
So how is this all relevant to Singapore at all? There are parallels. Frequently in the papers articles emerge with regard to the Singapore government's promotion and welcoming of immigrants into Singapore, and then there will be letters and commentary about how native-born Singaporeans are being threatened and face a high likelihood of becoming the minority (just like the whites in America in 2050). Such fears are not exactly irrational, as this article from The Kent Ridge Common suggests. Studying the figures from the Statistics Singapore website, after some rough calculation the current non-resident (non-resident refers to people who are neither citizens or Permanent Residents) proportion of the population of Singapore as of 2009 is 25% while Permanent Residents form 11% of our total population and 16% of the resident population. These numbers are not huge but they are not exactly negligible either. Whether native citizens of Singapore will become the new minority in future remains to be seen; after all Singapore was created by immigrants centuries ago... though America was also created by immigrants centuries ago.
There may be lessons to learn from how America deals with this demographic situation.
Pay Gates
By Kevin
Blocked...
I've been working on a couple of writing assignments that requires intensive research and I discovered to my horror that more journals are erecting pay gates for their articles. I subscribe to The Economist and so I don't have to worry about theirs but Wall Street Journal gives me quite some trouble.
I'm therefore actively using articles from The New York Times, Business Week and Fortune Magazine as my main sources. The Straits Times website pay gate frustrates me in particular because I want to keep myself updated on local news through their site but they're not helpful with it and worst, when I ever need an article from them, it is usually copied from New York Times or other international publications and yet they're hidden behind the pay gate.
For those working on more news research sort of stuff, note the publications without pay gates!
Fly Away
By Martin See
Away from home
Blogging from a nanotechnology laboratory in Illinois isn’t exactly what I envisioned for my post-ORD trip but reality often strikes us in the most awkward ways. Dressed in a white lab coat and a safety goggle, I shall share with you my holiday experience thus far:
Life was getting boring in hot and humid Singapore. I have just finished my national service in January. Most of my peers decided to find employment, before the start of their university term, to earn some money and to use their time “productively”. I use “” because productivity is a subjective term; while others may think spending their time at work and slogging their guts out for their employer is more rewarding than rotting at home, I think using this time for personal development by broadening your horizons and discovering yourself is far more valuable than being stuck at the work desk. Hence, I decided to venture overseas to move outside of my comfort zone and explore independent living in a foreign country.
My journey has brought me to many places. I admired the skyscrapers of Chicago, walked the streets of Times Square, and relaxed in the slow pace of life in Illinois. Saint Augustine once said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page”. So don’t stay at home. Go far away and immerse yourself in another culture of life. Get inspired in another environment. Lose your stress and worries in your new home. And take some time to organize your life.
I hope to come back with renewed vigor and a focused attitude on life. Won’t you say this is a better substitute than sitting at a work desk?