A Computer Scientist Among Economists

So the first week of work passed rather smoothly. I was thrown right into the thick of things, rapidly reading up on the background material and even helping to write part of a paper that my team is working on.

My job is quite interesting. It has the potential to really make a difference to the lives of Singaporeans. Well much more than a tech job would have in any case. But I guess, it's my absolute lack of background that makes me extremely uncomfortable. I'm not confident of my reasoning process, and neither do I have any intuitive feel for the matters I'm dealing with. I don't even know what I don't know.

But perhaps it is the first week at work, so all this is rather expected. However, it is rather sad though, that 4 years of training in computer science, 4 years of learning how to think like a computer scientist, how to have an intuition like a computer scientist, is going to waste. I mean, whatever they say about training of the mind - yes it is training, but whether it transcends so freely across different fields, I have my doubts.

And I guess I will wonder if yet again, I have turned my back on something which I had a passion for, and was pretty proficient in, for something that I know nothing about, something which is a more socially well-defined route to success. I guess life will have a way of telling me that I have made a mistake some how.

Noteworthy! 05

Played the 3rd and 4th movements of the Brahms Horn trio at Noteworthy! 05 last Saturday - a concert organised yearly for the RJC chamber orchestra and MEP alumni. Well I belonged to neither, but just as back in the old RJ days, I couldn't help but join in the fun :). This year, I had the good fortune of playing with 2 excellent musicians, who were incredibly good-natured and fun to perform with.

Anyway, I'm reminded again how much fun playing chamber music can be, especially with musicians of similar temperament and competence levels. Am still quite intent on getting a permanent chamber music group going, which meets regularly just to play pieces for fun. It would be fabulous if the group was big enough so that people could just get together and pick up any random chamber work just to jam. It's something that's really meaningful, but I don't see happening very much here. I think it'd be great not just for closet musicians like me, who love to play but aren't pro, but even the career musicians, especially since most end up holed up practising the solo repertoire alone for hours and hours.

ORD LOH!!!!!

And so it's finally over.

And like most supposedly momentous events in life, the actual act of ORDing was expectedly low-key. No overwhelming feelings of euphoria or nostalgia.

The journey to camp to get my IC was a totally different matter though.

In my hurry to get out of the house nice and early today, I forgot to bring, of all things, my clearance and FFI form. And I only realised this a couple of bus stops away from camp. And mind you, I live in Marine Parade, while my camp's across the road from Tengah Airbase. Yes that one that's in the bloody tengah of no where. (translator's note: tengah is malay for middle)

Anyway, seething and fuming at my own stupidity, I made my way back home. Fortunately my mum was on her way out to town so that saved me the bus journey from the MRT station back home. However, I spent a total of 4.5 hours travelling to camp. Talk about working hard for your pink IC.

Interestingly enough, I discovered that there is a limit to how long you can spend in a train station, a limit in which overstepping results in a $2 admin fee. And because I took the train from Boon Lay to Bedok and back to Chua Chu Kang without stepping out through the gates, I naturally ran over the time limit. Serendipitously, I was only charged $2 plus the fare from Boon Lay to Chua Chu Kang. The only good thing that happened in the morning.

Ah well, whatever the case, I shall repeat, once more with feeling,
ORD LOH!
You can't quite say that without a smile on your face, can you? :)

Genius vs Idiots

It occurred to me a few minutes ago while I was trying to SMS someone using predictive text, that the button-combination for "genius" is the same as that of "idiots".

Go figure.

........................
Turns out that "genius" and "idoits" have the same button-combination. Looks like there's only one idiot, and that's me.

Piano Competition

Well so I've been toying around with the idea of maybe, just maybe, trying out for the National Piano and Violin Competition, which will be held in December. It all depends how free I'll be once I start work (chances are I'll be totally swamped with work and have zero time to do anything else but work) to learn up the huge amount of music that is required. And so I came up with a possible program:

Bach: Toccata in E minor BWV 914
Debussy: 2 Etudes, "Pour les Agrements" and "Pour les Octaves"
Webern: Variations Op. 27
Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel Op. 24
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488

Well so the arrangement is that I have to specify a work for the first round, which would most likely be the Bach, and the adjudicators would request for another to be played to make up around 15-20 minutes. With my current program, I'm hoping they would choose the Debussy, so that'd leave a very nice pairing of the 2 sets of Variations for the semi-finals.

Now all this is all rather wishful thinking. There's obviously a lot of work that needs to be put in before I'd even dare to show my face on stage. So I guess all that's left to do is to work on learning up the pieces and see how it goes by August, which is the application deadline. Not that it's particularly easy. Though I deliberately avoided overtly virtuosic works (not because I'm some puritan, but cos heck, I can't play them man), it's still quite a tall order, especially the Brahms - some of the variations are incredibly tough.

In any case, the competition these days are nothing like those of the yesteryears. Back in those days, I played things like Haydn sonatas for the senior section. Nowadays, people are playing Gaspard, Waldstein and what not in the senior section. Good lord, I'd be a laughing stork to go in with what I played back in those days now.

Ah well, even if eventually I don't participate, getting some of those works under my fingers can't be a bad thing. After all, part of the reason of joining in the first place is to motivate myself to learn the works. Then again I wonder about the prudence of even thinking about participating - I've been out of high-level performance for years now, and probably am suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Hough Plays Rachmaninoff

Stephen Hough has been one of my favorite pianists in recent years. His recordings have been consistently of high quality and variety - from Liszt, to own his transcriptions, to Mompou, to Saint-Saens, and more recently the Rachmaninoff concerti. Hough's sound is also quite unique. Rather than a singing bel canto, his sound is clean, clear, bell-like and refined. There is this sec, glassy attack to it, and this incredible sensitivity to the sonorities and the decay of the sound which really works well for certain works, especially tonight's Paganini Variations. Lovely articulated runs, finely nuanced lyricism and a real sense of drama (Is there anything quite as exciting as the huge adrenaline rush right till the very end from right after the famous 18th variation?) - I'm glad I was there, especially since I only went because a friend sold his ticket to me as couldn't make it for the concert.

After the interval was Elgar's Enigma Variations which was really quite engaging. It's a really well-constructed work with such amazingly heartfelt moments - felt tears welling up right at the end. Lan Shui concluded the concert with an encore of the Pomp and Circumstance, which was definitely feeding off the emotional high of the conclusion of the Enigma - extroverted and high-energy.

A couple of issues also sprang to mind:
1) Someone should tell the orchestra members to smile when acknowledging the applause. As of now, only the principals and the conductor seem to be happy that the concert's finally over. The other players have either this dour or impatient expression plastered on their faces.

2) Someone should investigate the phenomenon of spontaneous coughing at the end of every movement. Why half the hall has a tickle in the throat that they must restrain till the end of a movement to relieve I'll never understand. I've been for so many concerts and have never felt such an urge.

Heard from a friend that an old friend is back in Singapore, after leaving to study music when she was 12, to relief-teach at her school. We shared the same piano teacher back then and I haven't seen or heard from her for more than a decade. I guess these are the people you'd really like to meet but when you do meet, it'd be really awkward.

Hear Hear!

Found this gem of a letter to the Forum, I believe, on the Vesak Day's papers:

Little Free Time in Army

I am appalled at how little time my friends in national service get to spend with their family. Most of them book out only on Saturday night and book in on Sunday evening.

While NS men are supposed to be operationally ready 24/7, is it fair to rob them of all their weekends? What happened to the five-day work week?

These 18-year-olds wake up at the crack of dawn, undergo strenuous physical activities and get to sleep only late at night. It would only be reasonable to give them the complete weekend to let them recuperate.

How enlightened! I wonder how the writer would have responded to the concept of regimental weekend duties...

At the Photocopy Shop

Was at the photocopy shop this afternoon to make a copy of the Brahms Horn Trio which I'm supposed to play for an up-coming concert.

Me: Auntie ah, can photocopy this book? Very short, only 40 pages.
Auntie: Aiyah I very busy, can leave here come back tomorrow?
Me: Er... how about I photocopy myself? You just show me how to do double-sided and I think I can manage.
Auntie: Ok lor.

I proceed to make the copies myself, on a pleasantly hi-tech machine - I didn't even have to flip to get double sided.

After I was done,

Me: Auntie can help me bind?
Auntie: Can, but can you teach my son this maths problem?
Me: Can, but got discount or not? Tuition must pay one you know.

After some cheery pleasantries, I proceeded to try to help explain how to solve the problems. Typical primary school math questions, "Six years ago, A's age was 4 times of B, and the sum of their current ages is 52, blah blah" . The kid wasn't too interested so I ended up teaching his mum and aunt in mix of English and Mandarin (wow!). Luckily for me, I had had experience solving problems via model drawing from teaching my brother just a few years back, so could still hack up some decently logical explanation. I kinda like teaching actually, explaining ideas to people and seeing the glint in their eyes when they start understanding what's going on is quite fun.

But after all that trouble (I mean, I did do the photocopying myself), still no discount. Quite cheap though, only $3.20. Man I should pirate these things more frequently. The original's probably like 15 times of that.

Hilary Hahn

Some works of music are immediately appealing - they leap out and grab your attention the first time you hear them, no matter who performs them. Others, aren't quite so straightforward, and require a strong musician to interpret the music, to bring it to life, to reveal the hidden treasures, before their beauty becomes obvious.

Before today, Prokofiev's 1st violin concerto was to me, an average work. Structurally it just isn't very tight, and some how I felt that it just rambled on and on in a semi-dazed state. However Hilary Hahn's performance of it changed my opinion of the work quite a bit. Not only was her technical assurance and tone projection astounding, but her interpretive conviction made me a lot more convinced about the work as a whole. It seems to me as if the concerto is more of a fantasy than a formal concerto, drifting from a dream-like world, to grotesque waltz, to a sarcastic burlesque, and back disappearing to the ephermeral dream world - some real psychological drama at play here. For the encore, Hilary played a solo violin movement by Bach, which revealed her amazingly sophisticated tonal range and control. Imagination, control, conviction - a good mantra as any other to keep in mind when playing.

Following the Prokofiev was Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony. I unabashedly declare it to be one of my favorites despite many claims that it's "way over the top" and "like 10 tubs of ice cream". Sure, listening to it may be like swimming in caramel. Sure, the rising sequential build-ups to the climaxes are cliched, and heave along like an overweight hippo. Sure, it was completed in 1908, when reactions against hyper-romanticism was already in full swing. But the incredible melodies in every movement just about negates every bad thing there is to say about the work for me. I remember the first time I heard the 3rd movement was in a plane on my way to the US. It was one of those moments where you just forget everything, turn the volume to the max and try to absorb every single sound that was coming out of those headphones. The plaintive, soulful melody played by the clarinet, the surging harmonies - how to resist? And what about the climaxes? The conclusion? Certainly very formulaic - apotheosizing the lyrical 2nd subject of the last movement (bringing to mind the oft-repeated phrase, once more with feeling...), a strategy he uses again and again in the 2nd and 3rd piano concerti, the 2nd piano sonata, the cello sonata etc etc, followed by a whirlwind coda. But man is it effective (Just as an aside, the earliest example I know of this device is the Grieg piano concerto. Anyone else knows of an earlier use of this?). Structurally, Rachmaninov does some cool things too, weaving the themes from other earlier movements together, motivic development, incorporation of the dies irae, though admittedly if you listen hard to his other works they do sound quite similar. I guess the bottom-line is that for all its weaknesses and deficiencies, the overt romanticism really pulls you along with it, all those emotional surges demanding physical responses. It's a bit like going to a disco and jumping around like a maniac. After the event it feels really silly, but while you're at it, the emotional and physical carthasis is all that matters.

And yes, unlike the Prokofiev, this one grabbed me the first time I heard it. :)

Sportsmanship

A few days ago, my brother came back home all pissed-off after playing in a round of the inter-schools tennis tournament.

When asked why he was so miffed, he recounted how he was playing the final match when his team was already up 4-0, which meant they had already won the series. As it was getting late, and the end-result was an already forgone conclusion, his own teammates started turning against him, encouraging him to throw the match, while cheering for the opponent, who was a clearly better player. Even the coach had left ,and the teacher-in-charge expressed his impatience. Worse still, the umpire, who was his team captain (they have this interesting arrangement where the umpire's from one school while the linesmen are from the other), started making dubious calls against my brother, just to speed up the play. How incensed my brother must have been to have his friends turn against him. Where's the sportsmanship? Perhaps the organizers should consider forgoing all matches when the final result of the match-up is uncontestable, thus preventing such an ugly scenario from happening again.

Anyway, here's an interesting link, where some guy developed a context free grammar for generating pretty pictures. The syntax is easy enough to pick up but oh man, I couldn't get anything too exciting out of it. Sigh aesthetics and me just don't quite work out.

Another very cool link, where some guys at Stanford developed a cool algorithm for generating images from the viewpoint of the projector or lightsource. Check out the video, where they demonstrate how they can use their technique to see around corners. Way cool.

The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains that though more choice gives us more options and potentially greater satisfaction, an over-abundance of choice can be detrimental. I see two main thrusts in the book: one, a socialogical commentary on how modern life has brought with it greater self-determination and opportunity to choose to the individual, which has improved the quality of life as a whole, but paradoxically reduced overall happiness; two, how such a deluge of choice affects our lives on a personal level, and how we can cope with it.
Some points

• We are flooded by choices in everyday life - from the supermarket, to choosing courses in college, to choosing what tv program to watch, to what career we want, to who we want to marry, to who we want to be. All thanks to this value we call freedom of choice.
• Choosing well is difficult
• We rarely know what we want - our expected, experienced and remembered utility rarely align, and our predictions for how we feel after an experience rarely reflects how we actually feel.
• Gathering and analyzing the overwhelming amount of information that we face today is impossible. The quality of the information is often skewed by marketing and advertising too.
• People have a tendency to give undue weight to certain types of information - the availability heuristic - e.g. we tend to value opinions from friends more than reports as they are more salient and vivid in our minds.
• Psychological effects profoundly affect the way we decide - anchoring, framing, prospect theory, loss aversion, endowment effect, sensitivity to sunk costs.
• With the growth of options, decisions thus require more effort, mistakes become more likely and the psychological effects of mistakes become more severe

• Maximizers vs Satisficers
• Maximizers seek and accept only the best.
• Satisficers settle for something that's good enough and doesn't worry about the possibility that there might be something better.
• Maximizers tend to be less happy and more susceptible to regret.
• What matters more in the quality of a decision - objective results or subjective experience?
• Why maximize? Status and inherent scarcity of certain resources.

• Choice is testament to our autonomy, self-expresssion and self-determination, but yet we still feel helpless in modern society, perhaps due to our raised expectations of what kind of choice and control we should have, and our feeling overwhelmed by opportunities that we no longer have the feeling of control.
• Certain relationships and social institutions restrict our autonomy, but this curtailed freedom actually contributes to happiness.
• We may want freedom but may not actually enjoy it.
• Why we suffer?
• Missed opportunities - more choice means more opportunity costs to consider and rue over. People would rather avoid decisions than make trade-offs. When you have too many options, you are responsible for what happens to you.
  
• Reasoning and self-justification doesn't always improve the quality of our choice
• Reversible decisions often reduce satisfaction after making a choice.
• Regret is triggered by our failure to act, near misses and responsibility for results, and is worsened by counterfactual thinking. Regret aversion is a powerful force and makes us susceptible to sunk costs.
• Adaptation reduces our enthusiasm about positive experiences, and causes us to mispredict satisfaction.
• Comparison profoundly affects our evaluation of an experience, especially social comparison.
• Increased options result in higher expectations.

• Finally, what to do about choice

1. Choose when to choose
2. Be a chooser, not a picker
3. Satisfice more, maximize less
4. Think about the opportunity costs of opportunity costs
5. Make decisions non-reversible
6. Practice an "attitude of gratitude"
7. Regret less
8. Anticipate Adaptation
9. Control expectations
10. Curtail social comparison
11. Learn to love constraints
    

What I find especially interesting is the contrast between objective and subjective utility. Schwartz argues that we have to be more aware of the costs of making decisions, and how the agony of trying to maximize our utility when making those decisions and the corresponding post-decision feelings of regret and adaptation actually subtract from the actual utility gained from the result of our choice. I guess to sum things up, all his suggestions point towards changing the way we think about making decisions so that our subjective and objective utilities are aligned.

I guess in a more CSish sort of way, we should be happy with local maxima when we're doing local search :).