Random Travel Notes 12

The twelfth installment of Random Travel Notes (to Singapore and Back edition)!

Finally: Progress. Was surprised to discover that the Philippine Bureau of Immigration introduced a new departure card since the last trip overseas. Was even more surprised to learn that this new card is at least on its second iteration already: we were asked to fill out different ones since those we'd already accomplished from the travel agent were apparently outdated. In some small way, it's nice to know that there is some process improvement going on at the airport, however superficial.

How the Other Half Lives. Curious: do airlines decide to have passengers disembark by moving past the pricier cabins (First and Business Class) just so you get to see what you're missing? I wonder.

Equal Opportunity Cabbie. Upon arriving in Singapore, we managed to flag down a cab whose driver was female, Muslim, and who formerly had a desk job at some unnamed office. Personally, something about one person having this collection of attributes is simply noteworthy.

Wife in the City. Although business was the order of the day for this trip, the wife came along as well since opportunity was just too good to pass up. This posed a challenge since it was her first time to visit Singapore and I couldn't show her around for most of our stay. But she acquitted herself magnificently, managing to find her way around town on her own. She even discovered a free shuttle within the environs of our hotel that we didn't know about despite having stayed there a number of times already. Good job!

Passing on the Pohpiah. The parents (and now the wife, too) have taken a liking to pohpiah. Unfortunately, the allure is still lost on me.

Are you sure? Try this for confusing: the corporate headquarters of United Overseas Bank (UOB) is at UOB Plaza. UOB plaza just so happens to be across the OUB Centre, the flagship property of the former Overseas Union Bank, which UOB acquired in 2001. So just telling a cabbie that you have to go to one or another building tends to bring about a double take. More, if you get off at OUB Centre, one of the first things you see as you walk through the entrance is (get this) a UOB ATM. It's simple enough to just walk on over to the other complex if one happens to be dropped off at the wrong entrance, but even I have to wonder whether this is a sign that Singaporeans do indeed have quirky sense of humor.

Secondhand Designer Bags. While navigating the above OUB/UOB confusion, came across a branch of Madam Milan, a store that allows people to trade (or purchase) "preowned designer handbags." Personally, it seems like a strange proposition, but then in the age of vanity and luxury brands, it somehow doesn't surprise me.

Lights Out, Carry On. During a breakfast meeting, an electrical failure in the building we were in caused most of the lights in the restaurant to go out. I dare say that all the other diners more than took the unfortunate incident in stride: after a brief pause to take in the situation, everyone simply went on with whatever business they were doing before the interruption, without so much fanfare. It's a marked difference from how I would think Filipinos would respond if the same were to happen in the Philippines, where blackouts are nothing out of the ordinary yet are typically greeted with audible exclamations of surprise.

Jacketing. While in Bangkok for the honeymoon, the wife and I bought some books at a branch of Kinokuniya and availed of the plastic covers that they wrap on your purchases as a complimentary service. Buying some books from their branch in Singapore, we hoped to enjoy the same benefit, only to learn that "jacketing" costs an additional SG$1 per book. If this is an example of adapting business practices to local conditions, I guess this speaks volumes about the Singapore market's purchasing power. Yet whether this is a sign that the store is using the charge to discourage the consumption of plastic or instead make additional profit given customers' purchasing power, I haven't really decided.

Gaming on the Go. Offhand, I'd say I spied more people playing with PSPs than with Nintendo DSes around town, by a ratio of at least six to one. This more or less conforms with similar observations I've had in New York, although I've observed more people in the Big Apple use the PSP as a media device (whereas in Singapore, folks were actually playing games). Just saying is all.

Nobody Loves Me Anymore? At first, it looked like I wouldn't be able to meet with any friends in Singapore. But soon enough, meetings were arranged and in the end the wife and I managed to meet with all but two friends we'd hoped to see while we were in town. Funny how things work out. Good times.

Rain, Rain, Go Away. Having lived in the city previously, I was well aware of how quickly rain could set in around this time of year. True enough, during our stay we had our fair share of overcast skies and brief showers; thankfully, the weather didn't get in the way of our plans. More, the only time it really poured was on our way to the airport to catch the flight home. So all in all, good fortune does a good trip make.

The Wisdom of the Funny Pages

Ten things you learn by reading comic books:

1.) With great power comes great responsibility.

2.) Eyeglasses can be a surprisingly effective disguise.

3.) Criminals are a cowardly and suspicious lot.

4.) Your arch-nemesis is likely to be a long-lost sibling, childhood friend, former sidekick or spurned lover.

5.) Spandex never goes out of style. Corollary: Wearing your underwear over your pants is more than just a fashion statement.

6.) No one ever really dies. Corollary 1: Everyone comes back to life, eventually. Corollary 2: Unless you see the body, you can't be sure they're actually dead (and sometimes not even then).

7.) History and canon are subject to change without prior notice.

8.) Female characters are more likely to end up in refrigerators than not.

9.) The best time for the wicked cool "aha!" speech is right before your moment of triumph (which for bad guys, often precedes their moment of defeat).

10.) All secret headquarters are larger on the inside than on the outside.

False Economy

It's easy to mistake False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World for a book cast in the same mold as many titles these days about the present economic malaise. At first glance, Alan Beattie's latest does have all the trappings: Deals with a political-economic topic potentially related to the global downturn ? Check. Has a title that communicates something ominous? Check. Offers the possibility of casting one's prior understanding of world events in a completely different light? Game, set, match. Yet this offering from the Financial Times' world trade editor is anything but a book of the sort, nor does it aspire to be.

In truth, overshadowed by the sensationalism that words such as "false" or "surprising" tend to stir, False Economy attempts to be no more or less than a reader on economic history. In this regard it manages to stand out, to some extent because it offers the economic history of nothing in particular -- opting to discuss how certain economic quandaries can be explained by reviewing its political-economic antecedents -- but more because it argues against the notion that economic outcomes are inevitable. In Beattie's words, "[t]he aim of this book is to explain how and why countries and societies and economies got to where they are today [...]. But it will reject the idea that the present state of those economies, countries and continents was predetermined. Countries have choices, and those choices have substantially determined whether they succeeded or failed."

How does the book measure up against this yardstick? Quite well, for the most part. Beattie tackles topics using economic history as his lens (such as the development of cities, patterns of trade, or the purported link between development and religion to name but a few) in an undoubtedly erudite fashion. Indeed, the book as a whole makes for some maddeningly holistic reading, what with the author's knack for citing seemingly disparate episodes across time and across countries to get his point across. Granted, the result is hardly stellar each and every time, but when it strikes a chord it surely resonates.

Unfortunately, on the "predetermination" score False Economy comes up a little short, but not for lack of trying. Certainly, the book makes a coherent case that economic outcomes are merely the end result of past choices that could have gone many different ways. Yet an equally compelling argument can be made that any single choice limits the efficacy of each succeeding one, sometimes to the point that the decision tree of a country/society/economy becomes so narrow as to render some outcomes more likely than not. Inevitability? Not necessarily. But while Beattie rails against the idea, it does seem much like path dependence at work. To be fair, this really comes with the territory as such is the unending dilemma of history and the business of making sense of the past.

Overall there's much to commend in False Economy. It is a decent romp through economic history -- not a saga, by any means, but merely episodes of different stories -- that at the very least should have readers thinking about economic issues a little bit differently.

Political Concepts [Presentation Thursdays]

View more presentations from brianbelen.

Carrying on with slides on Philippine Politics and Governance, these focused on some "basic" concepts in politics.

And yes, the title is terribly inelegant. But that ship has already sailed.

Anyway, some interesting stuff in there: Robert Dahl's definition of power, splitting hairs on the notion of government and democracy, and some slides on what ideology is all about. This last topic is interesting in its own right because the question tends to come up about whether religion is ideology. Good times, though absent the lecture to put everything in perspective, the slides tend to oversimply things.

(But to answer that question -- and risk opening a can of worms -- my take would be that it isn't, if only because the notion of faith is distinctly absent from ideology, not to mention the fact that it is entirely possible for some ideologies to be reconciled with the demands of certain religions.)

Once more, I made the presentation while getting used to Powerpoint early on in my abbreviated career in the academe, so it could stand much improvement. It's clear I was still experimenting with the use of colors to emphasize points in the text and didn't put much thought into how to make the onscreen text look aesthetically pleasing. Notwithstanding this, I must say that the default template remains one of my favorites from Powerpoint XP.

[About Presentation Thursdays: Every now and then, on a Thursday, I post a presentation from my archives and include some accompanying commentary not just about the content but also my thoughts on designing it. The presentations can also be viewed and downloaded from my Slideshare page (Creative Commons license applies).]

Bing, Badda, Bust?

Microsoft has a new search engine, Bing, and I've been toying with the idea of writing about it for a while now. The problem, however, was that I could never figure out exactly what I wanted to write about it. That is, until I got it into my head recently to just play around with Bing and see how it compared to today's undisputed King of Search: Google.

With that in mind, I set out this week to see how a search on Bing would measure up to a search for the same thing over at Google (just good ol' plain vanilla Google, though, and not the "caffeinated" new beta version) just for kicks.



Here's how it went down (the screenshots open in a new window when clicked):

First, I began to wonder what would happen if you searched for "Bing" on either engine, curious to see how the Microsoft product would present itself, as well as how the reigning champ dealt with the new entrant (not to mention because I wanted to proudly say that I'd actually "Googled Bing"):




Both yielded similar results. Bing should score some points for the unrelated images immediately visible to the user, while Google gets similar props for showing other items of interest based on the search term, including news and a Wikipedia entry on Bing Crosby among the top results (because, hey, there are other "Bings" that people might be interested in). So I call this one a wash.

At this point, I started to wonder: what would happen if I searched for Google instead?



When I "Binged" Google (ha!), the search engine returned a sole result for Google.com and the rather dismissive description "Develops internet search technology" compared to the sexier description of Bing as "A search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, informed decisions." Of course, this may be more Google's fault than Bing's, considering that if you Google Google (haha!) there isn't any description remotely useful. Still, comparing what one sees searching for Google on either engine, it doesn't seem very sporting of the Microsoft product.

Then again, maybe the reason that there're such paltry results for Google on Bing is because it associates the search term "Google" with Google the corporation in its entirety -- entirely plausible, considering Bing presents search results for corporate websites in a similar way. With this in mind, I thought it'd only be fair to see what would happen if I searched for Microsoft:



Now this was somewhat amusing. As seen above, Google gets it right by listing as the first result the Microsoft Corporate Website, then a link to the Microsoft Download Center, then a link to some Microsoft Technical Support, and thereafter some news about Microsoft before proceeding to any number of other search results. But on Bing? The very first non-sponsored search result is for Microsoft Technical Support! Is this just a case of Microsoft trying to be helpful by assuming that people tend to search for help using their products, or is this a Freudian slip demonstrating that even Microsoft knows their products are chock full of bugs?

Either way, I think it's hilarious.

Just to be objective, I thought it would be good to see if I searched for other competitors. So I settled on Yahoo:



Once more, it seems that Bing isn't playing all that nice with its competitors.

But how about competitors of Microsoft? An interesting question. First up, Apple:




Seems like a wash. Next up, Linux (and thereby the Open Source movement):



Interestingly, this, too, seems like a wash. While Bing doesn't treat Linux the same way does it does a corporate website (perhaps understandably), the "regular" treatment has the advantage of coming with the usual mouse-over pop-up preview that is absent when the engine returns corporate websites.

At this point, I decided to throw Bing a curveball and search for something hard. Knee-deep in a lot of research work lately, I wanted to see what would happen if I searched for R:



Granted, a search for a single letter that also happens to be open-source statistical software is by no means easy, but between the two Bing is a little bit behind the curve.

To cap things off -- and fueled by ego -- I decided to check what would happen if I searched for myself:



Lo and behold, my blog comes up as the first result on Google, not entirely surprising considering that it's hosted on Blogger (which Google owns). In fairness, my Twitter feed also shows up on the search results, as does my blog's Wordpress mirror (further down on the page, outside the screenshot). On the other hand, while I don't rate as highly on Bing, it does manage to return my Slideshare page after my blog, which I think is great.

So what's the verdict? I'd say it's too close to call. Google should be the odds-on favorite, not just because when I search for myself my blog comes out on top (natch!) but because it seems to get the job done better. Based on the above, it comes out ahead in terms of delivering search results that matter (to me, anyway). Bing doesn't do itself any favors by coming across as dismissive of the competition, at least in terms of what was described above.

Not to mention that Bing makes Microsoft look completely incompetent by having "Tech Support" come up when searching for their parent company. But that's another story altogether.

Yet, in spite of myself, I'm beginning to warm up to Bing. The overall aesthetic of its webpage is more attractive and its search results come across as less cluttered compared to Google's. It certainly has the novelty factor going for it, and by all accounts promises to be a significant competitor to the company from Mountain View. In the end, it's performance -- speed, relevance and scope -- that matters above all else in online search, so going forward it will be interesting to see how each will strive to innovate in order to capture (or maintain) the lion's share of search queries on the internet.

Crazy Sh*t You See on the Highway

Alas, between cameraphone quality and having to take a shot of a moving object while inside another moving object (inertial reference frame be damned!), all we end up with is a blurred picture. But! A decent enough blurred picture, if I do say so myself.

Love how they took the time to tie something at the back of the ladder to warn the vehicles behind them that, hey, this motorcycle's packin' a ladder!

Now Brighter!

This has to qualify as my "WTF?!" moment of the day.

I needed to look something up on a dictionary while getting some work done this afternoon, so I keyed in Dictionary.com on my browser's address bar. Before it loaded, I switched to the original window where I'd been doing some encoding (just to finish the column of numbers I was currently on), then switched back all prepared to type in my query. But for a brief moment I was stymied, because this is what I saw on my screen:


For a moment there, I thought I'd lost my mind. Why was there an ad for detergent on my screen? Had I keyed in the wrong URL? What the hell was going on? Then after a moment or two -- probably when it sunk in that the Dictionary.com logo and the search box were still there -- did I get it: they're selling advertising on their frontpage!

Personally, I think it's a bright idea (see what I did there?), especially since the site's frontpage is usually bland. Plus, because it's unexpected, it does create brand recall: as far as I'm concerned, Cheer and its tagline are now etched in my mind (for better or worse), and I am curious as to what other advertising might make its way onto the page in the future. Of course, this comes at some cost: in retrospect, I suppose the reason my mind couldn't process what was going on at first was the dissonance between "Dictionary.com" and the ad copy's prominent tagline of "brighter in 1 wash!", which looks all the more strange in the screenshot above. But, hey, I had a good laugh, and I'm willing to bet that from a marketing standpoint that's a good thing.

So, two valuable lessons I learned from this episode:

1.) There are interesting ways to go about advertising on the web.

2.) Dictionary.com is now brighter in 1 wash! My mind cannot process seeing two unrelated things in the same webpage.

Dissertating 14

It's been a while since the last installment of Dissertating, so here's a brief rundown of how things are going (or not):

Where we were. Nailed down first real proposal draft. Sent it through the appropriate channels. Received feedback that I will affectionately call "the good, the bad, and neither." Had to think through some of the issues that were raised.

Where we are. Working on proposal draft number two. Revamped my treatment of the data to overcome some methodological concerns that came to light. Redid a fair amount of my original programming code (for regressions) accordingly. Found and added valuable sources to my working bibliography. Beginning to feel the difficulties of going through the dissertation process from long distance. Updated R from 2.8 to 2.9 and started doing some pseudo-data mining in terms of testing iterations of regression models and running simulations. Redownloaded data from International Financial Statistics since the IMF decided to re-index their data from year 2000 to 2005. Hoping to get some additional local data, was dismayed to discover that some of what I had obtained previously from the BSP website have gone missing (data available now is from 1989M1 to 2007M2; I previously got data for all the way to 2008M4). The conspiracy theorist in me says that this is proof positive that the government is fudging the numbers...because wouldn't that be a more interesting explanation? Oh, and it would appear that I now have a gimped laptop with narcolepsy. Just had to get that off my chest.

Where we go from here. Will try to find a working bilateral model of remittance flows, but will otherwise begin winding down the programming work (and thereby the regression work). Must give more thought to results from vector autoregressions. Will take time to write out results, with the end in view of having a workable second proposal in the next two weeks.

When Your Laptop Develops a Sleeping Disorder

Treat it with Insomnia.

At least, if that laptop happens to be an aluminum Powerbook G4. This much I found out none too soon.

Lately, mine had begun behaving strangely, suddenly hibernating even if not prompted. Since I could rouse it back to life and have it behave otherwise normally thereafter, I chalked it up to age (the laptop's, not mine!). But over time, it became harder and harder to keep the bloody thing from going to sleep, especially if I'd be putting the computer to task running some simulations for my research.

When it came to the point that I'd be prompting it to wake up over a dozen times in nearly as many minutes -- and that's no exaggeration -- I looked it up online and found that such narcolepsy was a common problem for Powerbooks of this variety.

My laptop had a sleeping disorder.

Like a good Apple fanboy, I hoped that resetting the Power Management Unit (PMU) and zapping the Parameter RAM (PRAM) would do the trick. Unfortunately, the problem was far more complex. Many an online forum have reported that the usual suspect for this malady is a heat sensor gone haywire somewhere below the trackpad that prompts the laptop to go to sleep and cool off. For this, the permanent fix would be to bring it in to get the logic board replaced.

So it wasn't just a sleeping disorder. It was an expensive sleeping disorder.

Fortunately, while making one last push to find a software solution to this problem I came across InsomniaX, a utility that allows Mac users to forcibly prevent the computer from going to sleep. Thus far it's been a huge help, faulty heat sensor be damned.

I also love the humor of calling a program that prevents a computer from going to sleep "Insomnia". But that's just me.

Seth Godin calls stopgap measures like this "bear shaving." Ordinarily, I'd frown against such bear shaving and agree it would be better to address the root cause of a problem and not just find a palliative for the symptoms. Just not now. It's not just the cost: as I'm in the middle of my research, I don't want to do anything that can potentially rock the boat.

I'm kind of superstitious that way.

Hence: I have a laptop. With a sleeping disorder. Being treated with insomnia.

And I'm perfectly fine with that.

[Credit: InsomniaX logo by Semaja2 (a.k.a Andrew James)]

Showing the Money

...from a project I'm working on. Hopefully I'll get to write more about this soon.

Props to those who can identify what's in the picture!