Chicken crossing (!)

Camera-phone series #2 - carpark of Sin Ming Drive.

View from the Supreme Court

Camera-phone series #1.

Leaf at MacRitchie Reservoir

Treetop walk

_

(Yes, that loupe is meant to show you my monkey friend sitting afar on the suspension bridge...)

This incurable dampness in the air

I thought, as I was hiking through the tropical wilderness of MacRitchie with Mr CC today.

Considering meritocracy

It's nice to reflect on how comparatively just society is today. In the distant past, when you saw a rich or successful person, you could reasonably assume that he or she attained advantage through some unfair means ' by killing someone, or inheriting privilege or being in a monopoly. But for the last few hundred years, politicians have been striving to build a society which we in the west nowadays call 'meritocratic.' That is, a society where if you have something to say, if you have talent and energy, you'll be able to achieve on a more or less level playing field.

But this sense of social justice has brought one big problem with it, for if you genuinely believe that the successful merit their success, you have to believe that the unsuccessful deserve their failure. In a meritocratic age, a sense of justice enters into the distribution of poverty as well as wealth. Low status comes to seem not merely regrettable, but also deserved. The rich are not only wealthier; they could also be plain better.

[...]

The great cruelty behind the idea of meritocracy is that it's crazy to imagine that we'll ever build a society where you'll be able to rank everyone in order of goodness and reward them accordingly, the rich being the best, the poor the worst. A wiser course might be to be inspired by the traditional Christian idea that the merit of others is in fact so hard to judge that only God is up to the task, and even He can only start work on the Day of Judgment with the help of a thousand angels and a large pair of scales'. A crazy idea from a secular point of view but a useful corrective to the view that you can just look at someone's resume and judge how good he or she happens to be.

None of this is to say that merit is equally distributed or indeed theoretically immeasurable, but simply to insist that you or I are in practical terms unlikely ever to know how to do the measuring properly and hence should display infinite care before acting or thinking in ways that presume we can.

Source: Alain de Botton interview by »Editred, via Mr C

Thoughts from my 40-minute commute -

• Meritocracy is to be used an ex ante tool to guide the allocation of limited resources. It cannot be reasonably used as an ex post explanation to account for a given state of affairs (why you are rich and I am poor), for far more is at play in bringing about the latter. Highly disagree with his premise [in bold].

• The decision of our society to rely on the resumé as a proxy for measuring 'merit' is unfortunate, but is one that reflects poorly on the choice of proxy rather than on the idea of meritocracy itself. Since we will never be able to have a thousand angels or large enough a pair of scales at our disposal, every proxy remains a proxy and we must bear in mind de Botton's strong caution. Agree with his conclusion [last paragraph].

• I appreciate that in this world, luck, intellectual endowment, inheritance size and history differ. Correspondingly, meritocracy is destined to be an imperfect solution for such a world and we should not deceive ourselves otherwise. But I find it difficult to believe that meritocracy is more cruel or deterministic than a caste- or pedigree-based system, especially if we consider that meritocracy does not have to be implemented exclusively of other socialist concepts. So let's have meritocracy with a good dash of compassion* please.

*But without systemizing incentives to slack. Maybe it is an Asian (Singaporean?) concept, but effort matters - I cannot help you unless you help yourself. Your best might not be good enough and life might be unfair, but try and we take it from there. I »still take as my premise that humans have a natural propensity towards the path of least resistance, which is only restrained in some people by honour and morality.

Hopscotching with miu miu

Sunday at Old School

The beautiful »Old School on top of Mt Sophia. Check out the sunny blue skies of Singapore.

Sweet poetic justice

Ripton, Vermont, prescribed poetry, of all things, as punishment — and we hope rehabilitation — for 25 teenagers (townies all) who broke into Robert Frost’s old summer house in the woods last December. They trashed it during a snowy night’s bout of drinking and partying.

»New York Times

Discovered

The other day, I discovered that toes tend to have a singular response to life - they curl in pleasure, and they curl in pain.

4.41 am is a perfectly good time to fly kites on the bund

It must be good luck to start early, because there is more than one of them.

回顾上海

离开上海的那天，我首次起得比上海早。

昼夜原来只是半小时之差

2008年6月3日04点24分。

2008年6月3日04点54分。

起飞了

起飞了。是时候走了。

不舍，其实只需要一句话勾起。一句 “Safe travels, wo de peng you" 、一句 “Keep on being so nice, and so glamourous"。

擦干眼泪，向前走，往前看。

小杨生煎

A delightful afternoon with Mr V eating the famous 生煎包 from 小杨生煎 for the first time. I was truly impressed at how soupy the inside of the bun could be (it's as soupy as 小笼包）while the base still maintains such crispiness. And at 2 RMB each... I regret I didn't find out about it earlier.

It's funny, how memory of a place can be coalesced into a single taste. Of Zhongdian, it was the fluffy homemade 馒头 at the inn; of Shanghai, it would have to be 小杨生煎包.

Ciao for now, Shanghai

62538720 retires

Today is May 31. Key-handing day.

离开

在上海最可爱的初夏离开，果真是不明智的选择。

尽管三个月前已预见到了，但先知还是无法赋予准备。

Another idiomatic equivalence

English: "Do you want to be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond?"

Mexican: "Would you rather be the tail of a lion or the head of a mouse?"

Altitude sickness

Above 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) most people experience a periodic breathing during sleep known as Cheyne-Stokes Respirations. The pattern begins with a few shallow breaths and increases to deep sighing respirations then falls off rapidly. Respirations may cease entirely for a few seconds and then the shallow breaths begin again. During the period when breathing stops the person often becomes restless and may wake with a sudden feeling of suffocation. This can disturb sleeping patterns, exhausting the climber. Acetazolamide is helpful in relieving the periodic breathing. This type of breathing is not considered abnormal at high altitudes. However, if it occurs first during an illness (other than altitude illnesses) or after an injury (particularly a head injury) it may be a sign of a serious disorder.

»OA Guide to High Altitude via »Wangjianshuo's blog

That was me when we stayed overnight in Zhongdian (3,200m) - I woke up in the middle of the night with a start because I couldn't breathe. A bit scary. It probably didn't help that I was already having a flu and the temperature was down in the single digits at night.

The Wangjianshuo blog article above makes a nice linkage between high altitude and religion. The very unfortunate incident that happened on his trip also makes me think that travelling with a large party to high altitude may not be the best idea. The »OA Guide advises:

Keep in mind that different people will acclimatize at different rates. Make sure all of your party is properly acclimatized before going higher.

Unfortunately in reality, most trip itineraries are pretty tight and people tend to say "I'm ok" so as not to be the one who slows the the party down. On the trip to Zhongdian, I was the only one (of ten) who was having altitude sickness when we started ascending the Blue Moon Valley. I had the luxury of a halfway station at 3,500m where I could say, 'You guys go ahead. I'll stay here.' Had I no such option and the party had to turn back for me, I think I'd have pushed ahead, to the detriment of myself.

Meanwhile, here is the walking trail and view of the Blue Moon Valley I missed:

{Awaiting photos from cousin J}

Spork

We love Japan.

I will miss my Shanghai bathtub

I probably take a soak in my bathtub only 10 times in a year*... But I like the possibility of being able to take one anytime, and I adore it each time I do.

An idea, a plausible one: perhaps the reason why I run off from Singapore often is not because "I can't stand it" (in words of cousin J, but which are not true) or because the pasture is greener outside, but simply because I like the possibility of taking a bath anytime.

I will miss my Shanghai bathtub.



*Mainly out of time and ecological considerations... Or maybe the luxurious feeling from one bath lasts me more than a month.

印象云南

2008年5月2日 ｜ 早晨6点15分 ｜ 昆明至大理途中

天微微亮了，音响播着老歌，外边是云南的山峦。第一次体验了国内的夜班车。这硬卧的条件比我想像中的好，还是相当可以接受的。

尽管这班列车晚上很吵（火车与轨道的摩擦声），我还很喜欢坐火车的感觉 —— 那清晨摇摇晃晃、渐渐被晃醒的感觉...


2008年5月5日 ｜ 早晨11点30分 ｜ 宝山石头城

我们期待追溯忽必烈的脚步走到太子关，却被烈日打败了，只走到对面山的小村。古人的力量实在是不可低估的。

One giant spider, two dancing worms, mountains after mountains, we are in Yunnan through and through.


2008年5月10日 ｜ Banyan Tree Lijiang

A glass of wine, some chirping birds. No more clanging of metal and walkie-talkie.

What a queenly enjoyment to 发呆。

Note #2 to little cousins, nephew and niece

Professors often don't have students' best interests at heart. Why should they? After all, once they have tenure, they can't be fired... Professors sometimes abuse this power, such as when they choose textbooks based on kickbacks they get from publishers. And have you ever wondered why all the "good" classes are held at the same time, in the middle of the day? Possibly it's because those tenured professors want to come to work late and leave early. The result? You can't get the class you want. And even if you got it, you might not learn much. Faculty members generally aren't promoted based on their teaching skills, but rather on their prestige and the research dollars they generate.

(From the same Thomas Sowell below - who is a professor himself.)

And to the extent that you can generalize that professors in big-name universities are more focused on generating research dollars and upkeeping prestige, this would confirm my observation all along that »my professors at Madison were much better teachers of economics. It would also support why in terms of selecting classes, you should not let titles ("lecturer" vs "professor") affect your your choices. (Some of my best classes were taken with »this memorable lecturer.)

The chess-piece fallacy: why you should not study what is hot

Adam Smith chastised people who thought they could "arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess board." Yet, more than two centuries after Smith's warning, policy makers still try various forms of “social engineering.” Usually such schemes don't work because, unlike rooks and knights, people have wills and desires that often conflict with social engineers' theories...

- Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies

Or, facts can change such that engineers are no longer as in demand after you are told that four years ago that engineering is a hot thing to major in.

Note to all my little cousins and nieces and nephews please.

Muji chronotebook

Diary schedules are arranged in lines and grids, which are difficult to see and has little flexibility. This notebook makes it clear, intuitive and easy to plan and see your daily schedules.

Such simplicity, but how brilliant!

Of immortal crabs and roosters' eggs

Speaking of crabs and Mexican in the previous post, I am reminded of a lunch conversation when I said, "A penny for your thought?" and Mexican Mr V and Columbian Mr F looked at me blankly.

Turns out that they don't have a similar expression in question form, but they have superb answers to the question. The Columbian answer is "thinking about the eggs of the rooster", and the Mexican one, my favourite, goes:

"Thinking about the immortality of crabs".

Crabs! How magically realistic!

When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale

...Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says "the die is cast", a Mexican says "the rice is cooked". The proverb "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" becomes, in Russian, "When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish," which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant. (I admit, though, to being baffled by the cruder popular version of this phrase, "When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale.")

»Living in Babel

I also don't get how the arse can be related to a nightingale, but in Chinese, our 生米已煮成熟饭 is identical to the Mexicans'. Amazing.

《土豆先生的伤痕》

现展于莫干山路的»Outstanding Art画廊。

画家是位26岁的满族人，名字很特别，叫宫鹤。

原来每一次的呼吸都是很宝贵的

Ferragamo opening

___

»Museum of Contemporary Art.

X plate taxis in Shanghai

One little tip to share about Shanghai taxi: try not take any taxi with BX in the car plate.

Any car in Shanghai has a car plate, like this: 沪B-X1234 [...] if there is a car without these characters [U, V, W, M, N, X] on plate, and pretend to be a taxi, you will know it.

Among all these plate, X is very special.

X plate taxi are private taxi plate, while all the others are company owned taxi. A company owned taxi means the taxi is owned by a taxi company, and the driver is hired by the company to drive the car, and the driver needs to pay about 450 - 500 base fee to the company everyday. Their earning needs to pay this fee, gas fee, and all kinds of maintaince fee for the car before he can get a profit.

X plate taxis, or private taxis, are owned by individual persons, and they don't belong to a company, so they don't need to pay anything. Recently, they are required to join a company setup just for the management propose of private taxis. The management is as low as 150 RMB per month, v.s. 15,000 for other taxi drivers.

So the owner of an X plate taxi earns huge profit.

However, their service quality is the worst among all the taxis, just because they are not afraid of any customer complain at all - there is no company responsible for it. Their service standard is also pretty low. The rule of thumb (although with a little bit discrimination) is, if you feel very bad about a taxi driver, chances are, it is a X plate taxi...

»Full article

Interesting tidbit and I'll keep a lookout for X plates . But as the daughter of an unaffiliated cab driver, I must speak up to say that unaffiliated drivers are not all bad eggs. (At least not in the context of Singapore.) For one, consumers can complain directly to the Land Transport Authority, a move that likely has more impact (or repercussions from the perspective of the driver) than just calling the cab company. And secondly, it is safe to say that yellow-top cab drivers are the old guards who have been driving around for 20 years and actually know the roads.

双双对对

春雨后

流水无情

去年的»落花有意。

梅花二弄

满乡的油菜花

婺源三重唱

The shochu which listens to music

Japan is the land where cows are massaged as they drink beer and shochu* listens to music as it is bottled.

We love quirky Japan.



*The square bottle shochu at tucked-away Mokko Bar. Apparently, music vibrates the bottle which makes the shochu better.

Teenage Stories

It was a gorgeous spring day at »MoCA today.

More on »the Teenage Stories series and »Julia Fullerton-Batten.

A day bed to curl up in

On this rainy day, I want to curl up here, read a book, then drift off to sleep...

Sorry-o!

In many areas of southern Nigeria where the Yoruba predominate, an "o" is added to the end of a word to add emphasis, a practice in the Yoruba language. Most noticeable is a shout of "Sorry-o!" to someone who trips or suffers another misfortune. -- via »IHT

An example sentence for Shanghai:

The construction next block is very loud-o! I haven't slept well in many day-o!

Grime at le petit xiaoxiao

http://lepetit-xiaoxiao.eco.to/

Those heady days of summer

I was enamoured by 《颐和园》 （English: "Summer Palace"; French: "Une Jeunesse Chinoise"*) the day I read »its NYT review. Following a »second review on the Shanghaiist, I tried to locate it a second time and this time I was successful.

蒹葭苍苍，白露为霜。所谓伊人，在水一方。
溯洄从之，道阻且长。溯游从之，宛在水中央。**

Those heady days of summer... Those alluring days of intellectual debates, of passionate belief in ideals, of heads buried in pillows and tears, of joints smoked in caravans, of hungrily devouring Barthes and Nietzsche and love alike.

And we clamour to live again, those those heady days of summer. Even if we abandon years of a steady life in quest for it. Even if it leaves us with a gaping void afterwards.





* I like noticing the different translations for film titles in different languages.
** Can I repeat for the nth time just how poetic the Chinese language is?

Bund bridge

Day 1 of the demolishment.

And we will never be able to curve into a spectacular view of the bund on a cab again.

S is for Spiderman

S is also for Superman, Spiderwoman, Santa Claus, Skeleton Gal, Sleepyheads, Miss Sheriff, Miss Splendid and Miss Siberian!

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___

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Of welfare, systems and the intrinsic goodness of mankind

»This article reminds me of the terribly heated argument I had with Mr C a few months ago, and I wonder if it may help to explain why our viewpoints are so divergent and polar. Out of the blue from 1 to 3 am, we started discussing, then arguing about welfare vs self-help, unemployment benefits vs rainy-day savings, luck vs hard work, high tax vs modest safety nets, and more generally, capitalism vs socialism. I remember a fitful night of sleep with all these big social concepts floating in and out of my brain, with the last remnants of the duel continuing into the next day and ending abruptly with a "do not tell me I know nothing about drug problems because my college best friend was a victim of drugs and to this day, I don't know whether she is dead or alive."

Being a disciple of behavioural economics and being from Singapore where "welfare state" is a taboo word (but as I tried to explain to Mr C for 20 minutes, we do have a welfare system), I am a firm believer that human behaviour is shaped by incentive. Therefore, social systems must be designed such that they do not contain incentives for people to cheat. For instance, I am pro-rainy-day-savings and anti-unemployment-benefits: the latter contains incentives for people to be slack about finding work. On this, Mr C attacked me for for the bourgeois assumption that people have money left over for savings. Many lower-middle class people need to count their pennies before ordering a pizza in the last few days of a month, he said. To which I countered, then there must be an underlying problem somewhere else if this is happening. If it is an alcohol abuse or depression problem in the family, there should be social support for that. If it is high rent or too-low wages, we must tackle that bigger economic problem instead. In short, I believe governments should help those in need but I also believe we cannot just hand out cash to support alcohol habits or laziness.

I remember to this day how this part of the argument ended - with a barbed chastise from Mr C:

"You are really blind to the whole problem here. You are successful, you have a good job and you assume that everyone can have it too. But sometimes, it is not about effort. It is about luck."

I couldn't respond during the moment, partly because I was still reeling from the sting of the barbs, partly because I also agree with the last statement - that luck often counts more than effort, and indeed I have been lucky in life. Yet, that is a separate issue from the fact a system cannot systemize incentives to cheat, and I could not see why Mr C could not see that.

In the following weeks when I pondered this on and off, it became clearer to me why.

Fundamentally, my beliefs had two premises: (1) most of mankind is ruled by an intrinsic profit (i.e. self-interest) motive ; and (2) the welfare system is able to correctly identify those in need. Mr C's premises are the exact opposite: he believes that cheaters are the minority and he would rather have a system that gave welfare checks so that no one will die from cold or starvation, even if it meant a few people cheating. I, on the other hand, think that cheaters are in the majority and will cause the bankruptcy of the system. We could both be right though - maybe those people he has seen in Europe are intrinsically nice / altruistic / non-cheating, whereas those I have seen in this part of the world are not.

Soon after, »a NYT article about a welfare recipient who starved to death in Japan made me re-think my position on (2) and see Mr C's point. Systems fail. The question is that when they fail, which side do we want to err on?

And the bigger question is: during the times that they do not fail, what is the cost of the cheaters (summated over time) that we are willing to put up with? This, unfortunately, is a dynamic* equilibrium model which is sadly impossible for a half-baked economist like me to solve.



*Because cheaters will increase over time when non-cheaters see cheaters succeed.

If I didn't have to worry, I'd be studying languages and anthropology

via »AWAD newsletter #291

Here in Japan, the light does not turn "green", it turns "blue"!

The Japanese word for green is "midori" (yes, of liqueur fame), and the word for blue is "ao", however, as I understand it (though I am no lexicographic historian), midori is a much younger word than ao. For reasons few seem able to articulate, Japanese historically had a somewhat limited verbal palette for the infinite variety of colors, though it is augmented by such natural constructions as "ha-iro" for "ash-color" (gray) or "mizu-iro" for the blue color of water.

Traffic signals are the same color as in the U.S. (a blue-green), but are universally referred to here as "ao-shingo" (blue light) (nothing to do with K-mart).

It's not just that they choose to label one ambiguous color as being on the other side of the line; "ao" simply has a broader meaning. Green tree frogs are "ao-gaeru", and one's youth may be referred to as "seishun" (blue spring).

I could go on about the colors of tea and others, but that's enough for now.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language

When I was learning Japanese, I did notice that the kanji for blue 青い is green, but didn't think about it after that since it caused me no confusion at all. Maybe it is not confusing because we have the same blue-green conflation of the word in the Chinese language as well.

Cinderella loses her sock

A crescendo of fireworks

My country is small, but it is nice

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The cab business in Japan

Via »Japan Inc Newsletter, 30 Jan 2008

In 2001, getting into a Tokyo taxi for the first time, I remember being surprised by a number of things. The door opened before I could get a hand to it, the driver was wearing white gloves, puffing a cigarette, and when I got in, he didn't seem to have a clue where the Japanese address that I handed to him was. After a short interchange on the radio, with who I assume to have been HQ, he said 'OK' and drove me off to my destination leaving me generally rather impressed with the cleanliness and politeness of the experience.


Since that time, taking taxis in Japan has become a part of life that I spend little time dwelling on. However, there are some interesting facets to the business and culture of taking cabs here that have changed significantly in recent years. The most recent change is of course the smoking ban that has been imposed on most cabs in Tokyo this month. The two main taxi associations, The Tokyo Taxi Association and the Tokyo Kojin Taxi Association have implemented a ban covering 52,000 taxis out of the reported total of 53,619 cabs. The ban has not been extended nationally yet but will most probably be complete by the autumn. A breakthrough for the anti-smoking lobbyists, like all such regulation, the ban will rile smoking drivers and passengers and be met with applause by their non-smoking counterparts.

One thing is for sure, the trademark cigarette for cab drivers will rapidly become a thing of the past. However, while this might be referred to as 'regulation' the industry at large has been locked into a trend of deregulation for over 10 years. Before then, since the 1970s, the industry had faced major restrictions that in part resulted from the sudden surge in demand for cabs during the period of economic consolidation in the 1960s. The government was so concerned by issues such as taxis refusing customers for short distance trips that it brought in the Emergency Measures Law for Optimization of Taxi Services, in 1970.

»Read more...

Together with the existing 1951 Road Transport Law, this gave the government almost absolute control of fare prices, the number of taxis on the road, licenses granted, operating hours and allocated patches.


During the 1990s however, reformers came into power and started to deregulate across a specturm of sectors. A paper from the Kyoto Institute of Economic Research argues that the first manifestation of deregulation in the taxi industry occurred in July 1993 which allowed for a dual price structure in Osaka allowing most cabs to start from 600 yen but some from 540.

By the turn of the century, excessive demand had turned to an excess of supply; worried that the restrictions might fuel less than savory modes of competition, and also as Diet reformers initiated a more thorough general program of deregulation, the Road Transport Law was reformed in 2002 making it much easier for new firms to enter the market.


Taking advantage of the new legislation, many operators set up fleets and the number of taxis on the roads increased dramatically. Firms such as MK Taxi, kept their prices low and managed to grow their business substantially. Liberalization thus created more jobs and introduced more competition into the industry. However, much to the confusion of economists, the government's release of control over supply and demand has not exactly gone as planned. Firstly, although the supply levels have risen, demand has actually gone down. This has led to deteriorating conditions and pay decreases for drivers and apparently there has been a downturn in the level of service.

As a recent paper by Walter Skok and Sakoto Kobayashi (in Knowledge and Process Management) observes, the reforms were intended to 'improve service quality as a result of increased competition. However, the resulting situation is the opposite to that expected.' They continue: 'Although the number of cabs has steadily increased, the demand has correspondingly decreased. This paradoxical situation may be explained by the damaging effects of the recession that had an adverse impact on personal spending power.'


Others argue that it was also the result of 'excessive competition' in the industry as a consequence of deregulation. This explanation is possible but ignores the nature of the problems that regulation caused in the first place; attempts to control supply and demand can be futile in the face of oscillating consumer spending power and discourages sorely needed entrepreneurialism. But it is also arguable that the liberalization has not really gone far enough. In particular,prices are still controlled by the government and taxi companies had to fight hard for the right to rise to 710 yen in Tokyo, effective from last month. If the government allowed companies to control pricing, this would give firms more freedom to carve out budget or luxury niches. On the other hand, when it comes to prices, passengers tend to go for the first cab to stop rather than look out for the cheapest one. Companies such as Nihon Kotsu, one of the big three companies has got around this by introducing taxi ordering services that respond to one ring of a mobile phone.


The recent fare hike has had a mixed reaction and arguably favors the bigger companies. The Nikkei reported that the fare rise was driving customers away. This can put the squeeze on the smaller operators and it has been the case that the larger
companies have been acquiring increased numbers of their smaller competitors in the last few years. Smaller operators are the least likely to be able to keep fares low and even if they do, their fleets are too small to derive major benefit from this. Last July, Nihon Kotsu bought its smaller rival Toyo Kotsu, and lower down the food chain, several midsized firms have bought out smaller ones. In terms of labor too, big companies find it easier to get staff and therefore keep expanding - another
industry paradox is that despite a falling wage, demand for drivers has gone up with the increasing number of operations.

Perhaps further deregulation would allow for more independent operators and smaller companies who could sustain their business by providing a more tailored, targeted service-once the playing field is more level.

This snow is not getting too fun anymore

Okay, this snow is not getting too fun anymore. The transport system in China is near paralysis and I am not sure if my flight tonight will fly. Fingers crossed.