Archive for August, 2009
Men Of Mortuaries
August 22nd, 2009 elsewhere
Men of Mortuaries, which I found in a post of Sociological Images called Attempting to Humanise Funeral Directors, is a fund raising calendar showing 14 US funeral directors doing non-funeral director activities topless. Most of them are surprisingly young: Mr January is 25; Mr February is 22; Mr March is 22; Mr April is 32; Mr May is 27; Mr June (age unknown) started his business 26; Mr July is 23; Mr Aug is 29; Mr Sept is 25; Mr Nov is 33; Mr Dec is 36 ; Mr Feb 2009 is 39. I see clear advantages for starting the undertaking business at a young age – one could do this until one needs a fellow mortician’s help but I think it can’t be easy, can it? I’ve always thought that in such a business being older (closer to stereotype) helps more than hinders. Would a young, good-looking undertaker face credibility problems just because the families needing their help assume that the chap knows nothing about their traditions since they know even lesser?
Almost Project 365
August 20th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090820 Milk Curds
20090820 Keeping the extinguisher cool
Singapore’s Innovations to Due Process
August 20th, 2009 elsewhere
My surprising friend hooked me with a quote on twitter: “A rigidly utilitarian society is a souless one, efficient n affluent, but not particulary happy or content”…is this wat we have become?”
PDF version of a paper by Michael Hor found here was to be presented at International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law’s Conference on Human Rights and the Administration of Criminal Justice back in 2000. Please read it because it will make your world a place where butterflies will rest on your noses and blue robins will help out with your housework.
Michael Hor points out the dangers of a utilitarian approach in criminal law. He explains the motivations/reasons for a utilitarian approach of Singapore’s criminal law, providing examples in drug trafficking laws. He goes on to talk about how the approach meant that processes of fact find and decision making changes from pre-trial instead of during the trial. What does it mean?
The particular fundamental right underlying this is the
presumption of innocence. In Singapore, moral arguments do not carry much weight in themselves, and with that gone, there is no compelling reason why the conviction of an innocent person is to be avoided more than the acquittal of the guilty. With the presumption of innocence out of the way, the pre-trial process can be re-structured to play the role of confirming an administrative conclusion of guilt.
…
But once the administrative decision of guilt is made, the presumption of innocence disappears, notwithstanding the rhetoric. Once again, the heavy reliance on law enforcement and prosecutorial officials is apparent. The courts step out of the way and only intervene in the most obvious cases of administrative error. It is almost as if the trial de facto is conducted by administrative officials and the courts only exercise a supervisory function of countermanding in cases of obvious mistake.
Going on to discuss capital and corporal punishment, Hor explains that in the old days, the death penalty is used as a penalty for murder – a death for death – but that has changed with drug trafficking laws.
When the government perceived that the problem was not being “solved” by existing punishment levels, the penalty went up, and the logical culmination was the death penalty.
With death penalty, there was some discussion that drug traffickers were “merchants of death” but with caning, there was no pretense, extending the punishment for illegal entry and overstaying.
No retributivist pretence was employed this time – it was out and out deterrence, personal and general.
He cautions against a utilitarian society:
A rigidly utilitarian society is a soulless one, efficient and affluent, but not particularly happy or content. It is potentially unstable – the people will treat the government and the State as they have been treated – in a calculating, selfish (“what is in it for me”) fashion. In the language of utilitarianism – there is a cost, and a potentially high one, for moral apathy.
The almost complete trust which the people of Singapore have in their government and its officials also comes with a cost. It is a dangerous symbol that the people accede to their government the right to do anything and everything for utilitarian ends. It becomes too easy to slip into a kind of “lesser included” argument: if we (the government) can detain you (the individual) without trial, cane you and even kill you, you should have no cause to complain if we do anything else to you. There is no need for a “bad” government to come to power for this to turn sour – officials are human beings who naturally believe in themselves and who will seek out easiest way to do something. The problem is that they can be quite wrong, and there will be nothing to stand between the government and the individual. The point is not that the government of Singapore in particular or its officials should not be trusted, but that no government or official should be given such latitude. If something is to stand between the government and its people when the government goes too far, then the independent judiciary is it. That is its constitutional function. We have seen how the judiciary has receded into the background in many aspects of the criminal justice system in Singapore – perhaps the time has or will come that they regain their original role.
The final point is that of the quality of the utilitarian lines of reasoning inherent in much of the reforms and innovations in the criminal justice system in Singapore. Criminology is not an exact science, but that is no reason to reject that discipline in its entirety. Many common-sense assumptions employed, especially in the context of deterrence, ought to be tested by rigorous statistical and other kinds of criminological analysis. Singapore has a wealth of data on, for example, capital and corporal punishment, but no statistics are consistently released, no studies published or encouraged. It has often been observed that one of the unifying traits of being a Singaporean is the “kiasu syndrome” (literally, afraid to lose out or fail) – to ensure the death of a fly, one should not hesitate to use a cannon because lesser methods might fail. Ensuring the conviction of the guilty can become an unhealthy obsession, and without appropriate criminological studies and a moral sense to temper it, it can get out of hand. The fly will probably be killed, but much else that ought not have been harmed would be too.
Almost Project 365
August 20th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090819 Evening Commute
20090819 After Dinner Maths
Against The Gods by Peter Bernstein
August 20th, 2009 atwork, books
Thanks, Phil for the two books!
The book began with a lot of mathematical history tracing the developments of mathematical concepts in the application to the management of chance. It was fun at first but I found the fun difficult to sustain. These math greats are often discussed on In Our Time so it wasn’t because of unfamiliarity but that brief bios and accomplishment listings become quite boring after a while.
Closer to the end of the book, I got interested again when Bernstein talked about Prospect Theory. It’s not a new theory (part of behavioral economics) but I’ve not thought about it from a risk perspective. What Prospect Theory says is that how a person chooses depends on how the choices are framed and from this, the person selects the option that gives the highest utility, which we could think about it as the least pain/regret.
This leads me to re-think about Index funds. Since indices are baseline measures to rate fund manager’s performance, perhaps to rate equity index funds as for clients with high risk appetite is not quite accurate since the risk is approximately market beta and the return for that risk is approximately market return and it might frame the fund as high pain/regret and therefore shift investments into greater proportions of bonds/money market funds that earn much lower returns.
Insurance
August 17th, 2009 atwork
From Against the Gods (Peter Bernstein):
Underwriters were willing to write insurance policies against almost any kind of risk, including, and according to one history, house-breaking, highway robbery, death by gin-drinking, the death of horses, and “assurance of female chastity” – of which all but the last are still insurable.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Almost Project 365
August 17th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20070812 Morning in the Park
20090812 Keropoke in Victoria Theatre: How?
20090814 Encouragement
Dream a little dream
August 16th, 2009 elsewhere
“A wife, if she is loving and smart, will get her husband back every time,” she wrote more than 40 years ago. “He doesn’t really want her not to. He’s only playing.” And, just as soundly:
It isn’t his wife who doesn’t understand him, it’s his girlfriend. And what she doesn’t understand is how come he doesn’t get a divorce.
It’s simple. Because of the children, because of the community property, and because in many cases he doesn’t really dislike his wife. He may be tired of her and tired of her understanding him perfectly, but basically they are pretty good friends.
Deep within Rielle—this little minx of pleasure and profit—guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman’s but breaks just like a little girl’s. As Helen knew, and as every woman comes to know, the female heart is a stubborn organ that insists on asserting itself in all sorts of situations, chief among them the sexual. It is very hard to be a single woman of a certain age, to be in a sexual relationship with a man who enchants her, and not to dream a little dream of his turning away from everything else and making a home with her.
Husbands are cut a lot of slack about such things. Wives lay blame squarely on the mistress instead of blaming the husband involved. So that they are not implicated; so they don’t have to act (divorce)? If the mistress is not possessive, the wife is accommodating, the husband needn’t hurt anyone (he enjoys both of them) and this arrangement could last quite long but I cannot imagine anyone being actually satisfied with it. Woe betide the husband who married a sensitive wife – who would go quietly mad first?
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
August 16th, 2009 theatre
I had been looking forward to the show after reading it during my musical-mad phase. It was a sweet little piece – no fancy footwork, a small music team and limited acting. The show has a goodish amount of humour and the characters were all heatbreakingly cute.
All the singers in the show did very well in their roles. I thought Johann de la Fuente made Coneybear adorable (and not sick-making). He lost focus a little when he had to switch roles to be one of Marcy Park’s gay Dad. Noel Rayos controlled his role switches better. Cathy Azanza-Dy (as Ms Peretti) sounded weak in the high notes.
Memorable songs: Pandemonium / I Speak Six Languages / I Love You Song
The Crucible
August 16th, 2009 theatre
Watching the actors /actresses on stage, I think this play is suitably chosen for The Young Company’s graduation show. The script is fantastic – a lot of drama, a lot of conflict and, I think, fairly accommodating towards bad acting. I was expecting some arm-flinging types and I found a lot of them at the start of Act 1. Most onstage were uncomfortable with the language of the play did nothing more than deliver their lines. I’m not sure more rehearsals would help – they need to spend time working out the characters on their own a bit more. Three actors stood out from the crowd onstage: Andrew Robert Ng, Rishi Parkash Budhrani and Olivia Rummel. While they didn’t express the depth of their characters, they did hold my attention and did not arm-fling. It would nice to see them again in another production.
The entire cast deserve praise for seeing the show through in the face of the simply awful audience. The audience chattered incessantly during the show, laughed inappropriately and at certain moments during the show, I was afraid for the cast that they would heckle. They are probably students and despite being yelled at during Act 1 (by Mrs Daniel Jenkins?), did not settle down. Michael Corbidge came in during the intermission, told them off and they quietened down during the second half of the show. I hope the cast did not have to suffer the same kind of audience on another night.
*Celeb sightings: Daniel Jenkins at the aisle seat of my row and Michael Corbidge. I miss watching local actors onstage.
