Group items tagged

Of course, ST reserves the right to edit my letter for clarity and length. When said statistics in question were directly taken from their original article, though, one has to wonder if there hasn’t been a breakdown in communication over there. I’m dreadfully sorry, forum editors, I should have double-checked my original source (your journalist Ms Rachel Chang) before sending my letter.

take a look at how my pride in our meritocratic system in my originally letter has been transfigured into awe at Dr Ng’s background, for example! Dear friends, when an editor takes the time and effort to not just paraphrase but completely and utterly transform your piece in both intent and meaning, then what can we say but bravo.

There are surely no lazy slackers over at the Straits Times; instead we have evidently men and women who dedicate time and effort to correct their misguided readers, and protect them from the shame of having their real opinions published.

Chee also questioned Yap's claims that The Straits Times' integrity had been damaged by the SDP's articles, citing how the Singapore media was already ranked lowly in international press freedom rankings.

Yap wanted Chee to retract his statements about the integrity of The Straits Times, and that the newspaper would withhold publishing his letters in the forum pages until he did so.

What's the answer for environmentalists? Change the message and frame the issue in a way that doesn't trigger unconscious opposition among so many Americans. That can be a simple as using the right labels: a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that Republicans are less skeptical of "climate change" than "global warming," possibly because climate change sounds less specific. Possibly too because so broad a term includes the severe snowfalls of the past winter that can be a paradoxical result of a generally warmer world. Greens should also pin their message on subjects that are less controversial, like public health or national security. Instead of issuing dire warnings about an apocalyptic future — which seems to make many Americans stop listening — better to talk about the present generation's responsibility to the future, to bequeath their children and grandchildren a safer and healthy planet.

Group identification also plays a major role in how we make decisions — and that's another way facts can get filtered. Declining belief in climate science has been, for the most part in America, a conservative phenomenon. On the surface, that's curious: you could expect Republicans to be skeptical of economic solutions to climate change like a carbon tax, since higher taxes tend to be a Democratic policy, but scientific information ought to be non-partisan. Politicians never debate the physics of space travel after all, even if they argue fiercely over the costs and priorities associated with it. That, however, is the power of group thinking; for most conservative Americans, the very idea of climate science has been poisoned by ideologues who seek to advance their economic arguments by denying scientific fact. No additional data — new findings about CO2 feedback loops or better modeling of ice sheet loss — is likely to change their mind.

The bright side of all this irrationality is that it means human beings can act in ways that sometimes go against their immediate utility, sacrificing their own interests for the benefit of the group.

Our brains develop socially, not just selfishly, which means sustainable behavior — and salvation for the planet — may not be as difficult as it sometimes seem. We can motivate people to help stop climate change — it may just not be climate science that convinces them to act.

The whole point of Samuel Wee’s letter is to present Dr Ng’s statistics from a different angle, so as to show that things are not as rosy as Dr Ng made them seem. As posters above have pointed out, if 50% of poor students score in the top 2/3s, that means the other 50% score in the bottom 1/3. In other words, poor students still score disproportionately lower grades. As for the statistic that 90% of poor students do not make it to university, this was shown a graph provided in the ST. You can see it here: http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf

Finally, Dr Ng did say: “[Social mobility] cannot be about neglecting those with abilities, just because they come from middle-income homes or are rich. It cannot mean holding back those who are able so that others can catch up.” Samuel Wee paraphrased this as: “…good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.” I think it was an accurate paraphrase, because that was essentially what Dr Ng was saying. Samuel Wee’s paraphrase merely makes the callousness of Dr Ng’s remark stand out more clearly.

As to Mr Wee’s: “Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students”, there was nothing in the Minister’s speech, Straits Times and all other media reports, that quoted the Minister, in this context. In my opinion, the closest that I could find in all the reports, to link in context to the Minister’s faith in our meritocratic system, was what the Straits Times Forum Editor edited – “Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship”.

To the credit of the Straits Times Forum Editor, inspite of the hundreds of letters that he receives in a day, he took the time and effort to:- Check the accuracy of the letter writer’s ‘quoted’ statistics Find the correct ‘quoted’ statistics to replace the writer’s wrongly ‘quoted’ statistics Check for misquotes out of context (in this case, what the Education Minister actually said), and then find the correct quote to amend the writer’s statement

Kind sir, the statistics state that 1 in 2 are in the top 66.6% (Which, incidentally, includes the top fifth of the bottom 50%!) Does it not stand to reason, then, that if 50% are in the top 66.6%, the remaining 50% are in the bottom 33.3%, as I stated in my letter?

Also, perhaps you were not aware of the existence of this resource, but here is a graph from the Straits Times illustrating the fact that only 10% of children from one-to-three room flats make it to university–which is to say, 90% of them don’t. http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/pdf/20110308/a10.pdf

The writer made it point to say that only 90% did not make it to university. It has been edited to say 50% made it to university AND POLYTECHNIC. Both are right, and that one is made to make the government look good

In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.

as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.

The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.

In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.

I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”

Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.

Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)

Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘

K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.

with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece

with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”

What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.

there is a tendency to conclude that govts with the best expert advice have made this decision because there is a real danger of something sinister happening. But remember govts are also under pressure to act because they are made up of politicians - also they may be making precautionary moves because they have little to lose and have to be seen as being pro-active. How real is the danger of harmful radiation reaching Tokyo and should you leave if you're in Tokyo? There were many people doing a "wait and see" before Wednesday but once the US & UK govt called for a pull-out, the fear factor rose several notches and if you're a Japanese in Tokyo watching all the foreigners "abandoning" your city, you start to feel some anxiety and later panic. One EU official used the word "apocalypse"[Link] to describe the situation in Japan and the fear index hit the roof....then a whole herd of experts came out to paint more dire scenarios saying the Japanese have lost all control of the nuclear plants. All this lead the public to think that calamity is the most likely outcome of the unfolding saga and if make a decision from all this, you will just run for the exits if you're in Tokyo. All this is happening while the Japanese govt is trying to calm the people and prevent a pandemonium after the triple disaster hit the country. In China, people have emptied the supermarket shelves of iodized salt because of media reports that the consumption of iodine can block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by thyroid glands causing thyroid cancer. There are also reports of people getting ill after ingesting iodine pills out of fear of radiation.

2. Your original letter “His (Education Minister Dr Ng) statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination. “ Reason we edited it: Factual error

“His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort. (Para 3 of Ms Chang’s March 8 report). (Visa:  THIS IS NOT A FACTUAL ERROR. If 50% of a group score in the top two-thirds, then the remaining 50% of the group, by simple process of elimination, must score in the bottom third!)

You can assume that the stats are wrong, but you CANNOT CHANGE it and CONTINUE to use the contributor’s name! Where is your journalist moral, ethic, and basic human decency? Since it is YOUR meaning, and not the writer’s, don’t it mean that you ABUSE, FABRICATE, and LIE to the public that that was by Samuel?

Either you print a news column or delete the letter. At least have some basic courtesy to call and ASK the writer for changes. Even a kid knows that its basic human decency to ask. HOW come you, as a grown man, YAP KOON HONG, can’t?

“So we edited it for sense ……. That was why we replaced the original statistic with the only one in Ms Chang’s March 8 report that matched your elation ……” and “So, we needed to provide the context to the minister’s statement in order to retain the sense of your meaning.” These are extraordinary statements. My understanding is that editors edit for clarity and brevity. It is extraordinary and perhaps only in Singapore that editors also edit for “sense”.

50% make it to university therefore the other 50% did not make it. This kind of reasoning only works in primary or secondary school maths. In the real world, academia and journalism, the above would be considered a logical fallacy. To explain why, one must consider the fact that not going to university is not the same as “not making it”. World class musicians, sports, volunteer work, oversease universities, travel, these are just a few of the reasons why we can’t just do a simple calculation when it comes to statistics. Bill Gates didn’t go to university, would we classify him as “not making it” Sarcasm has no place in journalism as it relies on visual and vocal indicators to interpret. I live in Washington, and if the above letter was sent to any newspaper it would be thrown out with all the other garbage faster than you could say freedom of speech. At least the editor in question here bothered to try his best to get the letter published.

“we felt your opinion deserved publication” Please, Yap Koon Hong, what you published was the very opposite of his opinion! As you yourself admitted, Samuel’s letter was ironic in nature, but you removed all traces of irony and changed the statistics to fabricate a sense of “elation” that Samuel did not mean to convey!

Muller's data (black line) tracks pretty well with the three established data sets. This is just an initial sampling of Muller's data—just 2 percent of the 1.6 billion records he's working with—but these early findings are incredibly consistent with the previous findings

In his testimony, Muller made these points (emphasis mine): The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make the best possible estimate of global temperature change using as complete a record of measurements as possible and by applying novel methods for the estimation and elimination of systematic biases. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends. Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.

For the many climate deniers who hang their arguments on Muller's "doubts," this is a severe blow. Of course, when the hard scientific truths are inconvenient, climate denying House leaders can always call a lawyer, a marketing professor, and an economist into the scientific hearing.

Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of "fail small" and "fail fast"), the U.S. government should stop supporting dictatorial regimes for the sake of pseudostability and instead allow political noise to rise to the surface. Making an economy robust in the face of business swings requires allowing risk to be visible; the same is true in politics.

Both the recent financial crisis and the current political crisis in the Middle East are grounded in the rise of complexity, interdependence, and unpredictability. Policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States have long promoted policies aimed at eliminating fluctuation -- no more booms and busts in the economy, no more "Iranian surprises" in foreign policy. These policies have almost always produced undesirable outcomes. For example, the U.S. banking system became very fragile following a succession of progressively larger bailouts and government interventions, particularly after the 1983 rescue of major banks (ironically, by the same Reagan administration that trumpeted free markets). In the United States, promoting these bad policies has been a bipartisan effort throughout. Republicans have been good at fragilizing large corporations through bailouts, and Democrats have been good at fragilizing the government. At the same time, the financial system as a whole exhibited little volatility; it kept getting weaker while providing policymakers with the illusion of stability, illustrated most notably when Ben Bernanke, who was then a member of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, declared the era of "the great moderation" in 2004.

Washington stabilized the market with bailouts and by allowing certain companies to grow "too big to fail." Because policymakers believed it was better to do something than to do nothing, they felt obligated to heal the economy rather than wait and see if it healed on its own.

The foreign policy equivalent is to support the incumbent no matter what. And just as banks took wild risks thanks to Greenspan's implicit insurance policy, client governments such as Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt for years engaged in overt plunder thanks to similarly reliable U.S. support.

Those who seek to prevent volatility on the grounds that any and all bumps in the road must be avoided paradoxically increase the probability that a tail risk will cause a major explosion.

In the realm of economics, price controls are designed to constrain volatility on the grounds that stable prices are a good thing. But although these controls might work in some rare situations, the long-term effect of any such system is an eventual and extremely costly blowup whose cleanup costs can far exceed the benefits accrued. The risks of a dictatorship, no matter how seemingly stable, are no different, in the long run, from those of an artificially controlled price.

Such attempts to institutionally engineer the world come in two types: those that conform to the world as it is and those that attempt to reform the world. The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to intervene in an effort to alter their world and the outcomes it produces. But government interventions are laden with unintended -- and unforeseen -- consequences, particularly in complex systems, so humans must work with nature by tolerating systems that absorb human imperfections rather than seek to change them.

What is needed is a system that can prevent the harm done to citizens by the dishonesty of business elites; the limited competence of forecasters, economists, and statisticians; and the imperfections of regulation, not one that aims to eliminate these flaws. Humans must try to resist the illusion of control: just as foreign policy should be intelligence-proof (it should minimize its reliance on the competence of information-gathering organizations and the predictions of "experts" in what are inherently unpredictable domains), the economy should be regulator-proof, given that some regulations simply make the system itself more fragile. Due to the complexity of markets, intricate regulations simply serve to generate fees for lawyers and profits for sophisticated derivatives traders who can build complicated financial products that skirt those regulations.

The life of a turkey before Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares for it -- until the last day, when confidence is maximal. The "turkey problem" occurs when a naive analysis of stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007.

The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another. Humans simultaneously inhabit two systems: the linear and the complex. The linear domain is characterized by its predictability and the low degree of interaction among its components, which allows the use of mathematical methods that make forecasts reliable. In complex systems, there is an absence of visible causal links between the elements, masking a high degree of interdependence and extremely low predictability. Nonlinear elements are also present, such as those commonly known, and generally misunderstood, as "tipping points." Imagine someone who keeps adding sand to a sand pile without any visible consequence, until suddenly the entire pile crumbles. It would be foolish to blame the collapse on the last grain of sand rather than the structure of the pile, but that is what people do consistently, and that is the policy error.

Engineering, architecture, astronomy, most of physics, and much of common science are linear domains. The complex domain is the realm of the social world, epidemics, and economics. Crucially, the linear domain delivers mild variations without large shocks, whereas the complex domain delivers massive jumps and gaps. Complex systems are misunderstood, mostly because humans' sophistication, obtained over the history of human knowledge in the linear domain, does not transfer properly to the complex domain. Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel, but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be one of those properties.

The system is responsible, not the components. But after the financial crisis of 2007-8, many people thought that predicting the subprime meltdown would have helped. It would not have, since it was a symptom of the crisis, not its underlying cause. Likewise, Obama's blaming "bad intelligence" for his administration's failure to predict the crisis in Egypt is symptomatic of both the misunderstanding of complex systems and the bad policies involved.

Obama's mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chains -- that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect. The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA is as foolish as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

Most explanations being offered for the current turmoil in the Middle East follow the "catalysts as causes" confusion. The riots in Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to stifling and unpopular dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya are countries with high gdps that can afford to import grain and other commodities. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting. It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied -- what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the terrain are studied rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

When dealing with a system that is inherently unpredictable, what should be done? Differentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead to meaningful differences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type, changes in government lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes.

Humans fear randomness -- a healthy ancestral trait inherited from a different environment. Whereas in the past, which was a more linear world, this trait enhanced fitness and increased chances of survival, it can have the reverse effect in today's complex world, making volatility take the shape of nasty Black Swans hiding behind deceptive periods of "great moderation." This is not to say that any and all volatility should be embraced. Insurance should not be banned, for example.

But alongside the "catalysts as causes" confusion sit two mental biases: the illusion of control and the action bias (the illusion that doing something is always better than doing nothing). This leads to the desire to impose man-made solutions

Variation is information. When there is no variation, there is no information. This explains the CIA's failure to predict the Egyptian revolution and, a generation before, the Iranian Revolution -- in both cases, the revolutionaries themselves did not have a clear idea of their relative strength with respect to the regime they were hoping to topple. So rather than subsidize and praise as a "force for stability" every tin-pot potentate on the planet, the U.S. government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with political agitation. It should not fear fluctuations per se, since allowing them to be in the open, as Italy and Lebanon both show in different ways, creates the stability of small jumps.

As Seneca wrote in De clementia, "Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." The imposition of peace through repeated punishment lies at the heart of many seemingly intractable conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Furthermore, dealing with seemingly reliable high-level officials rather than the people themselves prevents any peace treaty signed from being robust. The Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man under Roman law could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can be trusted to abide by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a conflict tend to survive. Just as no central bank is powerful enough to dictate stability, no superpower can be powerful enough to guarantee solid peace alone.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, "A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom." With freedom comes some unpredictable fluctuation. This is one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise -- and no stability without volatility.∂

However, if you look at the placement of the three photos and the choice of headlines, it also tells you something else has not changed. The top photo is of a People’s Action Party (PAP) leader, in a pose resembling that of a victor acknowledging the people’s acclamation. Only sitting under it are pictures from the Singapore Democratic Party’s rally and the Workers’ Party’s.

Arguably, an objective measure of newsworthiness would suggest that the biggest news story from the evening before would be the size of the crowd at Hougang, the traffic jams leading up to it, and the way people were responding to the Workers’ Party’s “star candidate” Chen Show Mao, making his first rally appearance, and not what who-and-who said. After all, plenty of candidates were saying all sorts of things. Why was George Yeo’s the leading choice for front-page headlines?

On the rightside column is another story that gives a sum-up of (most) of the rallies the night before. You can see the text of it here. What I was more interested in was to analyse, using the internet version of the same article, the share of mentions devoted to the respective parties and their placements. I think my annotations on the left side of this graphic say it all.

In a nutshell, the editorial policy is this. While giving more space to opposition campaigns this time around (and perhaps fairer reporting angles as well) the pole position is still reserved for the PAP. You see this in the relative positions and sizes of the front page pictures and in the text share within the column above.

You also see this policy at work in terms of the allocation of the inside pages. Two whole pages (pages 4 and 6) are devoted to the PAP:

Deeper in, pages 8 and 9 are devoted to opposition parties:

The first thing you’ll notice is that there is a bigger version of the Hougang rally picture, for which I am estimating a crowd of about 100,000. This indeed confirms the view that wide-angle pictures can no longer be suppressed. Or can they? What we don’t see are comparative wide-angle pictures of other parties’ rallies, particularly those of the PAP’s. And this is not likely to happen until netizens also publish such pictures. The problem with that of course, is that netizens are in the main uninterested in attending PAP rallies, so having pictures out in cyberspace may not be a likely thing. But surely, until we see comparative pictures of other parties’ rallies, one cannot fully judge the significance of the Hougang pictures.

That said, having two pages devoted to the PAP and two to the opposition parties, seems relatively fair. It would be nice though if on some other days, the opposition’s pages came before the PAP’s.

Can any Singaporean honestly say the she/he can conceive of a fellow Singaporean setting himself or herself on fire along Orchard Road or Shenton Way, as a result of desperate economic pressures or financial constraints? Can we even fathom the social and economic pressures that mobilized a whole people to protest and overthrow a corrupt, US-backed regime? (that is, not during elections time) Singapore has real problems, the People’s Action Party has its real problems, and there is indeed much room for improvement. Yet such irresponsible reporting by one of the esteemed newspapers from the UK is utterly disappointing, not constructive in the least sense, and utterly misrepresents our political situation (and may potentially provoke more irrationality in our society, leading people to ‘believe’ their affinity with their Arab peers which leads to more radicalism).

The reductive move is completed in this next sentence: “Parallels with the Arab spring are striking, even if revolution is not just around the corner.”

She writes, “Most murmurs of discontent can be found online: fears of reprisal are diminished for anonymous bloggers. On internet forums, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, grumblings about high housing prices, the widening gap between rich and poor, immigration laws and the salaries of government ministers (among the highest in the world) are hot topics.” The most popular online newspapers, barring the Temasek Review, are The Online Citizen, mr. brown, Mr. Wang Says So, Yawningbread, etc. All these are run by people who publicly reveal their names, which increases the credibility of these sites and also instills a sense of responsibility in their writings. This is part of the reason for their enduring popularity.