Why the dung beetle is his hero

Jul 20, 2012

THE LONG INTERVIEW | CHANGE-MAKERS

A man given to startling pronouncements, Alexandra Health group chief executive Liak Teng Lit gives Susan Long the lowdown on what ails the health-care system today: over-treatment, over-specialisation and over-generous subsidies.


A 78-YEAR-OLD nursing home resident was wheeled into hospital in a comatose state. He suffered from dementia, had one leg amputated and the other was gangrenous due to poorly controlled diabetes. He had no known family members.

Mr Liak Teng Lit, then chief executive of Alexandra Hospital, was discussing with over 200 doctors and health-care professionals whether they should proceed to amputate his remaining leg.

Two-thirds voted 'yes'. Doctors, after all, are under oath to save lives. When he asked how many would want to be operated on if they were the patient, two said 'yes'. The rest said 'no'.

It was a moment of epiphany, he says. 'We discussed why we do things for our patients that we wouldn't want done to ourselves. The answer that came back was, 'I don't know what he wants, so I do my best. My best is to prolong his life.' But if we were the patient, we wouldn't want those kinds of extra days.'

The human body is designed to die eventually, he says. Fighting death hooked up to ventilators and fed through intravenous tubes results in the patient having 'unnecessary procedures which do nothing but extend pain'.

'But it's easier to overdo than to underdo, because if you overdo, nobody is going to scold you.'

In April, the straight-talking 59-year-old was appointed group chief executive of Alexandra Health, a health-care cluster that serves northern Singapore.

Sitting in his office in the award-winning Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH), whose construction he oversaw, he muses that this is the age of overdoing, especially for the well-heeled desperate to buy more time with loved ones.

The father of three children aged 23, 22 and 14 has given strict instructions to his wife, a pharmacist turned housewife, that the day he can no longer recognise his family is when he does not want any form of artificial intervention such as tube feeding or even oral antibiotics. 'When the end comes, it should come,' he says, adding that many doctors and nurses choose this path because they, more than anyone else, understand the limits of medicine and 'have seen enough'.

When his mother died at 78 of advanced colon cancer in 1993 and his sister at 56 of late-stage liver cancer in 2008, both opted for palliative care rather than further treatment. 'They had a good death, surrounded by loved ones. There was no unnecessary pain and we had a little celebration of their lives,' he recounts.

The runner, who clocks 25km a week and has finished eight marathons - his first at age 51 - says his preferred way is to die during a race. 'That's exactly the way I want to go, being healthy and fit,' says the man known for making jaw-dropping statements with a deadpan face.

Doing too much

BESIDES over-treatment, what ails the health-care system here is over-specialisation and subsidies, he charges.

Even though pay structures incentivise it, he disapproves of the specialist and sub-specialist tracks that doctors take early in their careers. Today, he laments that many doctors have become 'technicians' of a very small part of the body and operate in 'silos'.

The eye doctor no longer looks at the whole eye. Some do only cataracts, some look after the retina, others the tear duct. Typically, a patient comes in with a host of issues effecting multiple organs. He or she is worked on by six different 'technicians', each focusing on one sq cm of the body, who don't have time to talk to each other, and end up asking the same questions and ordering the same tests. 'Even if they do talk, who's to decide what is the overall thing to do for the patient?' he asks.

What is needed, he suggests, are more 'T-shaped' doctors who have a broad-based foundation before they specialise.

He frowns upon how subsidies have inflated the demand for health care and led to shortages: 'The truth is when we go for a buffet, almost all of us eat a little bit more than we normally do. If you subsidise something, at the margin, there will always be more demand.'

Subsidised wards are so cheap, some children may prefer their elderly parents to stay a day or two longer. But if every patient delays discharge by just half a day, Singapore will need to build another Singapore General Hospital that costs $2 billion, and about half a billion a year in subsidies, to run.

The demand for subsidies is a 'bottomless pit', he warns. 'If you're going to subsidise my petrol, I won't drive the Toyota Prius, I will drive the Lexus 460.

'Follow the British National Health Service? That may mean that the Government has to increase the goods and services tax to, say, 20 per cent to cover the cost of these additional beds,' he says, adding that Singapore's 3M framework - Medisave, MediShield and Medifund - is sound.

As diseases are increasingly diagnosed at the molecular level with more expensive drugs, costs will shoot through the roof.

His fear for Singaporeans today is that they clamour for their rights but disown their responsibilities. 'In cyberspace, there are howling monkeys who scream, shout and demoralise others.

'My worry is that everybody is screaming about his rights as a citizen to get subsidies, but he doesn't feel he has a responsibility to contribute or pay his taxes. They have the right to treatment but don't have a responsibility to take care of their health,' he says.

One speed system

THE Ministry of Health, he says, should be renamed the 'Ministry of Illness' because most of its work is in illness care. Health - how individuals live their lives - is what takes place outside the hospital, he says, pointing to the HDB blocks in Yishun Central.

The problem with hospitals here today is they are a 'one-size-fits-all' model trying to do 'fast medicine' everywhere, but 'doing nothing well'. Singaporeans rush to the hospital with minor ailments, routine vaccinations or check-ups that can be done by GPs, dieticians and nurses.

Alexandra Health is trying to do it differently by integrating its work, facilities and staff fully with the community. He wants the health cluster to offer 'head-to-toe lifelong anticipatory health care of the whole person', with a team caring for the whole person, not each doctor caring for one body part.

It has six nurses who run up to the neighbouring blocks to check on frail people and change their tubes. It is also exploring virtual consultations for bedridden patients who would otherwise need an ambulance to be brought to hospital to see a doctor. Bank call centres are his prototype, as half of all banking transactions are now handled by phone. His target for health care: 30 to 40 per cent.

He is also planning the upcoming Yishun Community Hospital (to be ready in 2015), where an elderly person, after staying at KTPH for three days for a knee replacement operation, can move into for two weeks to get used to new medicine and a new routine. In the works is also an off-site specialist's centre - for outpatient and day surgery - at Admiralty MRT station by 2016.

But his end goal is really to enable someone who is bedridden to stay home until the end, minimising visits to the hospital. He hopes that slightly younger neighbours in their 60s, who are still fairly fit, will step up by helping to prepare an extra meal and sponge bathe them for a monthly fee of say, $500.

Work like hell

IRONICALLY, the man who ended up overhauling many hospitals and the face of health care here was turned down for medical school. He was the free-spirited seventh out of eight children of department store owners, who spent most of his time building aircraft models and catching fish in the drains of Johor Baru.

His report card through primary school was 'a sea of red with very few islands of blue'. He only bucked up nearing his O levels, making it to Victoria School here to do his pre-university, then the National University of Singapore (NUS) to study pharmacy, his second choice. He topped it off with an MBA from NUS and a masters in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Aston in Britain.

The man whose mantra is 'learn from everyone, follow no one, look for patterns, work like hell' was involved in restructuring major hospitals, including the National University Hospital, KK Women's and Children's Hospital and Singapore General Hospital. He was chief executive variously of Alexandra Hospital from 2000 to 2010, Changi General Hospital from 1997 to 2000 and Toa Payoh Hospital from 1992 to 1996. From 2010 till earlier this year, he was chief executive of KTPH.

He ruffled feathers two years ago when he said excess weight might weigh down a health-care worker's career prospects.

Around KTPH, signs abound encouraging people to take the stairs. Healthy options in the hospital canteen, such as brown rice, are priced cheaper. He methodically picks up every piece of rubbish in sight, disapproves of bicycles not parked in assigned bays and clears tables of cups left behind.

Change, he believes, starts with himself, then getting the right people on the bus with him, then 'slowly inching towards perfection'. He has set bold benchmarks for his hospitals: to be as verdant as the Singapore Botanic Gardens, to orientate guests as well as Ritz-Carlton Millenia hotels, to operate with Ikea's efficient simplicity and to turn beds around as fast as Singapore Airlines does cabins.

The man who subscribes to Buddhist philosophy has this advice for aspiring change makers: Don't expect any support from higher-ups or people around you. 'All laws, all rules, all organisations, all systems and processes exist to maintain the status quo.' His goal is to plant a million trees and do his part to make Singapore 'a city in a tropical rainforest'. He reckons he has so far planted or commissioned the planting of over 300,000 trees - about a third of his target - through all the projects he has undertaken to bring healing nature everywhere.

He says straight-faced that his hero is the dung beetle, which feeds on faeces. 'They walk the ground, burrow underground, clean up the environment, recycle nutrients and improve soil aeration. Most of all, they solve problems others leave behind.'

suelong@sph.com.sg

Confessions of a former foreign misfit

Jul 13, 2012
 
By Asad Latif

ONE problem with foreign misfits - immigrants who love Singapore's wealth but not its people - is perception. They believe that Singapore is an extension of their lands.

I know because I used to be one of them myself.

When I came to Singapore in 1984, I brought along the baggage of history. Modern Singapore had been established by Stamford Raffles of the East India Company in 1819 and ruled as a dependency from Calcutta till 1867. Since I, too, had arrived from Calcutta, I came with a vicarious sense of entitlement.

I was incensed therefore by signs of cultural attrition. Roti prata was an unbearable tautology because prata is a kind of roti. When I heard what sounded like roti jaan, I thought that I had stumbled on a recipe by Umrao Jaan, the famous Lucknow courtesan. The briyani in many hawker centres was both a semantic and a culinary misnomer. It was nothing like the real briyani found in South Asia, where the meat is cooked in the rice and not added as a South-east Asian afterthought.

In my case, I realised quickly enough that these were Singaporean realities. They made the place different, authentic and exciting. It was futile to look for India in Singapore, as it was to look for Singapore in India. Singapore is itself because it is not India, and vice versa.

That is true of every other country as well. Singapore is not a distant cousin of China or the younger brother of Malaysia. Britain, China, India and Malaya are all a part of Singapore's history. But they are not Singapore's history.

Similarly, most Singaporeans are the descendants of immigrants: They are not immigrants themselves, floating forever up and down some imagined diasporic sea. Singapore's culture is not an imported commodity; Singapore's identity is not a derived one. It is what real people living on this actual piece of land have constructed, merged, changed and preserved over seven durable centuries.

The problem with foreign misfits, I suspect, is often that they look for the countries they have left behind. And if those countries have played defining roles in Singapore's history and culture, they believe that they have a right to judge Singapore in the light of their own national histories and cultures.

They are looking for the wrong things in the wrong place.

Of course, to go to the other extreme and deny the international provenance of modern Singapore would be equally wrong. It was mostly the labouring masses of the foreign-born who literally built Singapore and turned it into a global city of the time.

But the crucial point is not that they came but that they stayed. They were the proto-Singaporeans to whom we owe our historical depth and our cultural breadth as a people.

The moment I realised that, I repatriated the expatriate in me. On a day that was like a rebirth, I became a citizen. I became one of us.

Immigration angst

MY HUMBLE story bears a little on the angst over immigration today.

While competition for jobs, education, transport and living space is a genuine issue, it can be addressed by fine-tuning policies. What no policy can do is determine the culture of a people and hence the degree to which immigrants can be integrated. That culture comes from a people's sense of its place in time and from the habits of the heart produced by the everyday sharing of a common space.

When Singaporeans respect their authenticity and integrity as a people - a people with their own history and culture - they are less likely to feel that they will be absorbed into the lifespans of ancestral countries such as China or India.

Even a city-state will keep its place between the orbital pulls of continent-size and civilisation-long countries. Immigrants from them will not pose a cultural threat within Singapore.

By contrast, defensiveness is the opposite of confidence, just as arrogance is the alter ego of insecurity. As more foreigners look to make Singapore home, strident anti-foreign sentiments create a very poor impression of Singapore. Indeed, they make Singapore look parochial when in reality it is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.

At the end of the day, it is the self-confidence of Singaporeans that will preserve them and protect the common space into which newer Singaporeans can fit.

After all, it is cultural self-confidence - ranging in attributes from accent and historical awareness to non-negotiable social norms - that makes America and Australia two of the most powerfully integrative societies of our time. It is not their size.

That should be the yardstick for integration in Singapore as well. One does not necessarily have to pass the durian and Singlish tests: I personally would have gone on hunger strike and adopted a vow of silence if forced to do so. But durian and Singlish are a part of Singapore culture and must be accepted.

There are more substantial norms that have to be respected. Singapore is a multiracial, multi-religious meritocracy and a secular Republic. It is not perfect but its people generally judge themselves by these standards.

Those to whom these standards appear alien will always remain alien in Singapore. Those who find these norms appealing will find a home in Singapore.

The writer, a former Straits Times journalist, is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Do business schools incubate criminals?

by Luigi Zingales

Todayonline
Jul 18, 2012

The recent scandals at Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other banks might give the impression that the financial sector has some serious morality problems. Unfortunately, it's worse than that: We are dealing with a drop in ethical standards throughout the business world and our graduate schools are partly to blame.

Consider, for example, the revelations about two top executives at the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Co, which has avoided public vilification despite the transgressions of its former employees.

McKinsey Director Anil Kumar - a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School - pleaded guilty to providing insider information to hedge-fund manager and fellow Wharton alumnus Raj Rajaratnam.

Rajat Gupta, a graduate of Harvard Business School who served for nine years as McKinsey's worldwide Managing Director, was convicted of insider trading in the same case.

Although Gupta had long left McKinsey when the actions leading to his conviction took place, it would be shortsighted not to take the problem seriously. While every firm can have its bad apples, when these bad apples are at the top, it suggests that a company has either a corrupt culture or a defective selection process, or both.

This is particularly troubling at a company like McKinsey, which cites the integrity and quality of its consultants as key advantages. "Keep our client information confidential" is one of its credos proudly displayed on its website.

Where did Gupta, Kumar and others get the idea that this kind of behaviour might be okay?

ETHICS CLASSES - OF A SORT

Most business schools offer ethics classes, which are generally divided into two categories. Some simply illustrate ethical dilemmas without taking a position on how people are expected to act. It is as if students were presented with the pros and cons of racial segregation, leaving them to decide which side they wanted to take.

Others hide behind the concept of corporate social responsibility, suggesting that social obligations rest on firms, not on individuals. I say "hide" because a firm is nothing but an organised group of individuals.

So, before we talk about corporate social responsibility, we need to talk about individual social responsibility. If we do not recognise the latter, we cannot talk about the former.

Oddly, most economists see their subject as divorced from morality. They liken themselves to physicists who teach how atoms do behave, not how they should behave.

But physicists do not teach atoms and atoms do not have free will. If they did, physicists would and should be concerned about how the atoms being instructed could change their behaviour and affect the universe.


TEACHING GREED, UNINTENTIONALLY

Experimental evidence suggests that the teaching of economics does have an effect on students' behaviour: It makes them more selfish and less concerned about the common good. This is not intentional. Most teachers are not aware of what they are doing.

My colleague, Dr Gary Becker, pioneered the economic study of crime. Employing a basic utilitarian approach, he compared the benefits of a crime with the expected cost of punishment. While insightful, Dr Becker's model, which had no intention of telling people how they should behave, had some unintended consequences.

A former student of Dr Becker's told me that he found many of his classmates to be remarkably amoral, a fact he took as a sign that they interpreted Dr Becker's descriptive model of crime as prescriptive. They perceived any failure to commit a high-benefit crime with a low expected cost as a failure to act rationally, almost a proof of stupidity. The student's experience is consistent with the experimental findings I mentioned above.

In other words, if teachers pretend to be agnostic, they subtly encourage amoral behaviour without taking any responsibility. True, economists are not moral philosophers and we have no particular competence to determine what is ethical and what is not. We are, though, able to identify behaviour that makes people better off.

When economist Milton Friedman said the one and only responsibility of business is to increase its profits, he added: "So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." That is a very big caveat - and one that is not stressed nearly enough in our business schools.

Lobbying to secure a competitive advantage from the government certainly does not represent "open and free competition". Similarly, preying on customers' addictions or cognitive limitations constitutes deception, if not outright fraud. Not to mention using clients' confidential information for personal gain, manipulating a major interest-rate benchmark such as Libor or selling financial products you know to be flawed.

The way to teach these ethics is not to set up a separate class in which a typically low-ranking professor preaches to students who would rather be somewhere else. This approach, common at business schools, serves only to perpetuate the idea that ethics are only for those students who aren't smart enough to avoid getting caught.


MAKE IT A VITAL CORE SUBJECT

Rather, ethics should become an integral part of the so-called core classes - such as accounting, corporate finance, macroeconomics and microeconomics - that tend to be taught by the most respected professors.

These teachers should make their students aware of the reputational (and often legal) costs of violating ethical norms in real business settings, as well as the broader social downsides of acting in one's individual best interest.

Of course, no amount of instruction can prevent some people from engaging in bad behaviour. It can, however, contribute to a social consensus that would discourage diffuse fraud, like the widespread misreporting of Libor rates or the wilful self-delusion and dishonest dealing that helped turn the sub-prime crisis into a global financial disaster.

The daily scandals that expose corruption and deception in business are not merely the doing of isolated crooks. They are the result of an amoral culture that we - business-school professors - helped foster. The solution should start in our classrooms. BLOOMBERG


Luigi Zingales is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.

Minimum wage (still) doesn't work

Jeff Jacoby

Todayonline
 Jul 16, 2012

The United States Congress enacted the first federal minimum wage in 1938. A provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, it covered about 6 million workers and set a wage floor of 25 cents per hour.

It also cost a lot of people their jobs. The Labor Department reported that as many as 50,000 employees, mostly poor Southern blacks, were thrown out of work within two weeks of the law's taking effect. And the carnage spread.

"African-Americans in the tobacco industry were particularly hard hit,'' wrote Mr David Bernstein in his 2001 history of labour regulations and black employment. "In Wilson, North Carolina, for example, machines replaced 2,000 African American tobacco stemmers in 1939."

The economic pain inflicted by that first minimum wage law hasn't stopped Washington from repeating the same folly over and over.

In the 74 years since the lowest hourly wage at which most Americans could be hired was set at 25 cents - the equivalent in purchasing power of about US$4 (S$5) today - Congress has raised the amount 22 times. The federal minimum wage is currently US$7.25 an hour, and a push is underway to raise it yet again.

On Capitol Hill, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin has introduced legislation that would hike the minimum wage in three steps to US$9.80 per hour, a 35-per-cent increase. A more radical proposal by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr of Illinois would increase the wage floor immediately, to US$10 per hour.

At the state and local level, too, legislators have been pushing for minimum-wage hikes. In New York City, a "living wage" measure passed over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto would require companies that receive public subsidies to pay their employees at least US$11.50 an hour, or US$10 plus benefits.

Yet no matter how much politicians and activists may battle over minimum-wage laws, the real minimum wage in this country has never budged. It is $0.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is the hourly wage being earned right now by 12.7 million Americans - the 8.2 per cent of the work force that is currently unemployed.


LEAST-SKILLED SUFFER MOST

The pain of unemployment isn't evenly distributed among all population groups. It is much more severe among those with the least experience and skills.

As of last month, the unemployment rate for black Americans had climbed to 14.4 per cent; among teenagers it stood at nearly 24 per cent. And the unemployment rate for black teens - the least skilled, least experienced subset of the workforce - was 44 per cent.

Minimum-wage laws are typically thought of as a mandate on employers. In reality they constrain employees. As it stands now, the federal wage law tells workers that unless they can find a company willing to pay them at least US$7.25 an hour, they can't get a job.

That may not seem like much of a barrier to Mr Harkin, one of Congress's wealthiest members, but it might as well be the Berlin Wall to an unskilled teen or young adult with no high-school diploma or employment history whose labour is only worth, say, US$5.50 an hour.

No matter how much that person might leap at the chance to work for what he's worth, the minimum wage forbids it. Should Mr Harkin's bill become law, life will become even harder for those seeking entry-level employment.


THE VALUE OF ONE'S LABOUR

With the best intentions in the world, lawmakers cannot raise the value of anyone's labour to US$9.80 an hour merely by passing a law. Making it more expensive to hire workers who are just starting out doesn't advance beginners' prospects, it worsens them.

Decades of economic research and empirical studies confirm what common sense should tell anybody: Boost the minimum wage beyond what low-skilled workers are worth, and more low-skilled workers will be priced out of a job.

That is why minimum-wage hikes are so devastating to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Minimum-wage laws are not cost-free. When legislators raise the price of low- and unskilled labour, it's usually low- and unskilled labourers who end up paying the price. As 50,000 Americans found out in 1938, jacking up the minimum wage turns the least employable into the unemployable.

It may not be easy to survive on US$7.25 an hour. But life gets a whole lot harder when your hourly wage is nothing. THE NEW YORK TIMES


Jeff Jacoby is an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe and recipient of the Thomas Paine Award of the Institute for Justice in 2004. Follow him at @jeff_jacoby.

Why boys fall behind in education

Jul 11, 2012

by David Brooks

Henry V is one of Shakespeare's most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older.

But suppose Henry went to an American school. By about the third week of nursery school, Henry's teacher would be sending notes home saying that Henry "had another hard day today". He was disruptive during circle time.

By mid-year, there would be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry's parents should think about medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it and they find school much easier.

By elementary school, Henry would be lucky to get 20-minute snatches of recess. During one, he would jump off the top of the jungle gym, and, by the time he hit the ground, the supervising teachers would be all over him for breaking the safety rules.

He would get in a serious wrestling match with his buddy Falstaff, and, by the time he got him in a headlock, there would be suspensions all around.

First, Henry would withdraw. He would decide that the official school culture is for wimps and softies, and he would just disengage.

In kindergarten, he would wonder why he just couldn't be good. By junior high, he would lose interest in trying and his grades would plummet.

Then he would rebel. If the official high school culture was uber-nurturing, he would be uber-crude. If it valued cooperation and sensitivity, he would devote his mental energies to violent video games and aggressive music. If college wanted him to be focused and tightly ambitious, he would exile himself into a lewd and unsupervised laddie subculture.

He would have vague high ambitions but no realistic way to realise them. Day to day, he would look completely adrift.

WORSE AND WORSE

This is roughly what is happening in schools across the Western world.

The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: One who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who do not fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling. Far from all, but many of the people who do not fit in are boys.

A decade or so ago, people started writing books and articles on the boy crisis. At the time, the evidence was disputable and some experts pushed back.

Since then, the evidence that boys are falling behind has mounted. The case is closed. The numbers for boys get worse and worse. By 12th grade, male reading test scores are far below female test scores.

The eminent psychologist Michael Thompson mentioned at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few days ago that 11th-grade boys are now writing at the same level as eighth-grade girls.

Boys used to have an advantage in maths and science, but that gap is nearly gone. Boys are much more likely to have discipline problems.

An article as far back as 2004 in the magazine Educational Leadership found that boys accounted for nearly three-quarters of the D's and F's.

PERFORMANCE GAP

Some colleges are lowering the admissions requirements just so they can admit a decent number of men. Even so, men make up just over 40 per cent of college students.

Two million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The performance gap in graduate school is even higher.

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic. The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things.

After all, boys are falling behind not just in the United States, but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they cannot pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he will sit quietly at story time.

If schools want to educate a fiercely rambunctious girl, they cannot pretend they will successfully tame her by assigning some of those exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas. Social engineering is just not that easy.

DIFFERENT HONOUR CODE

Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: Not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honour environmental virtues, but teachers who honour military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programmes that work like friendship circles, but programmes that work like boot camp.

The basic problem is that schools praise diversity but have become culturally homogeneous. The education world has become a distinct subculture, with a distinct ethos and attracting a distinct sort of employee. Students who don't fit the ethos get left out.

Henry has a lot going on inside. He is not the unfeeling, uncommunicative, testosterone-driven cretin of common boy stereotype.

Little Prince Hal is just inspired by a different honour code. He does not find much inspiration in school, but he should.


THE NEW YORK TIMES

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist.

The God(less) particle

Jul 11, 2012
 
By Andy Ho

THE scientific world was abuzz last week with the 'God particle'.

Or, at least, that was how the world media hyped it up. Scientists at Europe's US$10 billion (S$12.7 billion) Large Hadron Collider called a press conference to announce their discovery of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson.

A Nobel laureate in physics decades ago gave it this evocative name, which scientists now hate. But the legions of non-physicists who logged in to follow 'live' the online streaming of their press conference on July 4 must have largely been attracted by this moniker.

Let's be honest about it: few non-physicists would have bothered with a press conference about bosons, fields and 'five sigma', terms that featured liberally in the proceedings.

To be sure, it was a significant finding. And since Big Science requires Big Money, the media coverage will work wonders for its funding in Europe. Legislators will now be suitably intimidated by (their lack of understanding of) the God particle to suggest reducing Collider funding any time soon.

Trouble is, there isn't anything particularly 'godly' about this particle. So what is the Higgs particle?

To explain it requires some backgrounding. The concept of that seeming emptiness we call 'space' actually contains fields invisible to the eye, like electromagnetic fields and gravitational fields. Every point of space said to be empty contains these fields.

Particles are packets of energy which interact with one another and with space (fields). When particles interact with fields, there is exchange of energy, which can be transformed into particles with or without mass.

This exchange of energy occurs through the agency of something called the exchange particle. For example, you may recall from high school science that when electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus drop from a higher orbit to a lower orbit, a photon - which is a massless particle or packet of light energy - is emitted. When a photon collides with and absorbs another, an electron can jump up to a higher orbit. Thus the photon is an exchange particle of the electromagnetic field.

All exchange particles are species of what is called a boson particle. The Higgs particle is one type of such a boson. Scientists came up with a theory that such a particle must exist, in order to explain why some particles like photons have no mass whereas others like protons and electrons which make up matter do have mass.

Using their best model called the standard model, physicists can describe every kind of particle in the cosmos and how large their masses should be, including no mass. But the model cannot explain why mass should exist at all.

To get around this, physicists postulate that there is something called the Higgs field in 'empty' space that produces mass. If particles (like neutrinos) moving through this field can interact with it, the 'drag' gives rise to mass. If particles (like photons) moving through a Higgs field cannot interact with it, then they won't have mass.

Now all you have to do is prove that Higgs fields do exist.

Using the standard model, physicists know the mass that a Higgs boson must have - if it exists. If you detect Higgs bosons of this precise mass, then you would have proven that Higgs fields do exist. This is what the European scientists said on July 4 that they had achieved.

How is the Higgs boson related to the Higgs field? It's somewhat akin to the relationship between the pattern of vibration of a guitar string to the string itself. To find out how tightly strung up the string is, just pluck it, and the sound (waves) emitted will tell you so. Likewise, to know about the Higgs field, collide one proton with another as they did at the Collider and study the waves that result, which are Higgs bosons.

Because such collision data is very complex, errors creep in very easily. To be sure that a particle's mass detected is that of a Higgs boson and not random statistical chance, scientists use a measure called sigma. One sigma means there is a 32 per cent chance that your results are due to happenstance and not the real phenomenon. Two sigmas equal about 5 per cent chance your data is not real. This drops rapidly so that at five sigmas certainty, you are 99.999 per cent sure you have really found what you were looking for, that your results did not occur by random chance. This is what the Collider scientists declared recently, that their data was five sigmas sure to be correct.

So they were almost 100 per cent sure they had found the Higgs boson, which proves that Higgs fields do exist. And this, Dr Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University says, explains how all mass and matter came into existence out of nothing since space is nothing - though it really contains fields.

In his recent book, A Universe From Nothing (2012), Dr Krauss, like many in the field, explains that the Higgs field permeates all of space and brought into existence, through the Higgs boson, the stars, planets and people. Some may consider it the 'God particle' for explaining how mass formed. But Dr Krauss views it as the 'God-less' particle that would explain the existence of everything without a Creator.

If we live and move in a universe that came out of nothingness, the meaning of life changes radically and all religion is claptrap, Dr Krauss asserts.

Yet proving that Higgs fields exist (because you have proven Higgs bosons do), thus explaining how mass came into being, simply pushes the question back one step. We now must ask: 'Why were there Higgs fields - and particles - there in 'empty' space in the first place?'

But Dr Krauss takes for granted the laws of quantum mechanics, which Higgs fields have to obey and do obey for mass and matter to come into existence. He only alludes to these laws of relativistic quantum field theories in passing in the last few pages of his book. He does not ask where those laws that govern what arrangements of quantum fields are possible and which aren't come from.

Did some other property - animate or inanimate - give rise to those laws or to the fact that the universe is made up of particular kinds of fields? So the Higgs boson discovery does not prove creation from nothingness. Nor, of course, does it prove the existence of a Creator, despite the media dubbing it the God particle. What it proves is just that mass comes from Higgs fields, which is a long way from proving whether there is a Creator or not.

andyho@sph.com.sg

[Thanks Dr Ho for explaining the issue so clearly. Although the last defensive bit about the Creator was unnecessary. :-) ]

China and the map of nine dotted lines

Jul 11, 2012

By Wang Gungwu

THERE has been much debate about the Chinese map of the South China Sea with its nine dotted lines denoting an area where China believes it has legitimate claims. How these lines came about has been a subject of much speculation.

What is clear is that the lines marking Chinese interests were drawn after World War II when Nationalist China saw the end of Japanese naval power and watched the Western imperial powers leaving the region or being forced to decolonise. After 1949, the successor state, the People's Republic of China (PRC), retained the map to show its territorial limits.

During the Cold War that followed, moves were made by new states in the region to register territorial claims, but the Chinese map seemed to have aroused little international interest. Far greater matters of how the world was to be divided were at stake.

It was only in the 1970s that the disputes over islands, rocks and waters of the South China Sea attracted wide attention. Reports of oil and other mineral resources provided the trigger. Many international meetings and agreements have been held to sort out the complex legal issues ever since.

China and others turned to historical records to justify their claims. Prior to that, little notice had been paid to what ancient traders, pilgrims and envoys made of their journeys through those waters.

When I wrote my study in 1953-1954 of the early trade of the Nanhai (South Sea), I saw only references in Chinese to how dangerous it was to head towards open seas. The first routes on record show that ships sailed close to the coasts. They noted the landmarks, the safe shelters and, of course, the ports selected for their markets.

No one claimed any kind of territorial or developmental rights in the oceans before modern times. It was not until Europeans brought their rivalries to the region that someone like Hugo Grotius began to develop the idea of the open sea in which legal or political claims drawn from European experiences need not necessarily apply. Instead, rules governing the freedom of navigation began to evolve.

South-east Asian and Indian Ocean shipping had long sailed in the South China Sea. So had Chinese fishermen and then their trading vessels long before the great naval expeditions of Admiral Zheng He. But everyone had been content with setting out and returning safely with the sketchy route guides that they used.

In the 19th century, the world's oceans were mapped and it was assumed that, unless agreed among the powers that constituted what was international authority at the time, the seas were all open. Hence all claims, if any, were irrelevant.

Before World War I, the borders of the South China Sea were the coasts of China, Japanese-held Taiwan, the American Philippines, the British and Dutch empires in the south, the kingdom of Siam, and French Indo-China. No one talked of having sovereign rights over the seas between.

Earlier, the British had used superior naval power to quell all acts of piracy in waters close to the sea lanes. Thereafter, French, Dutch and British colonial officials noted overlapping interests but were content to apply European navigation rules where necessary.

In any case, throughout history, no country had ever controlled the coastal lands of this zone. It was not until 1942-1945, when the Japanese empire controlled the coastal lands of Taiwan and southern China, the Philippines, northern Borneo and the Malay Peninsula and all the islands to its south. At that time, it also indirectly controlled the still nominally French 'Indo-China' and a subservient Thai kingdom.

For more than three years, the South China Sea could be said to be a Japanese lake. The maps certainly show the South China Sea as the watery heart of their vast empire.

Nationalist China noted all this helplessly. It had been in a state of growing hostility with Japan off and on since 1894. During the half century, Japan had moved from Taiwan to dominate the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong, and took the British colony of Hong Kong in 1941. By that time, Japan was in total control of both the East China and South China seas.

The Chinese knew the Japanese well. They had fought off Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese pirates during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and the Tokugawa decision to limit maritime adventures had been a great relief. As a result, they relaxed their vigilance along the coast.

For that, they were taught a bitter lesson during the 19th century when one naval defeat after another left the country totally vulnerable to foreign attack. By the 20th century, they were determined to regain control of the seas off their coasts.

In that context, Nationalist China saw Japanese naval power as its greatest threat. Thus, when Japan lost the war and all its conquests were returned, Chinese forces crossed the strait to Taiwan and looked both north and south at the seas they now wanted to control.

They had noted that Japanese maps included all of the South China Sea. As the colonial powers departed, the decision to determine a line marking Chinese interests was made.

The Nationalist Chinese felt a new awakening about the vital importance of maritime power. They had been quiescent too long and must now take the initiative. In 1947, the map with the dotted lines covering the South China Sea was drawn.

The PRC inherited the map and did no more about it. Eventually, its historians were asked to justify Chinese claims and several reports were done. Similarly, Vietnamese and others also looked at the historical records. All claimants then turned to international agreements like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to which China is also a signatory.

The reasons for the Chinese map of 1947 cannot resolve the complex issues involved, but the background to how the claims originated and why it is so vital to China remains important.

The writer is a University Professor at the National University of Singapore, and chairman of the managing board of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.