tim's experiment

I see the people who proposed that young couples should be housed in containers parked under fly-overs have retired hurt, having heard a lot of criticism of their proposal. Maybe the critics were right: housing schemes of this kind are a technical matter on which lay opinions are not worth very much. But the people who suggested this were right about the big picture: we need to think of something.

The hard fact about housing in Hong Kong is that it is no longer feasible for young people even to dream of a home of their own unless they have rich parents. Prices, even for tiny flats, have outrun the sort of salaries most people can hope for in their 20s, and indeed for many the sort of salary they can hope for ever. This has a variety of bad effects, ranging from acute unhappiness, frustration and alienation in the people directly affected to important social effects like the declining birth rate, as couples put off babies in the hope of finding accommodation fit for two and a half people later in their lives. This is not a problem which is going to be solved by dickering with the stamp duty rules, or by poking about for bits of community land which can be reclassified as housing. Nor will it be solved by market forces. Mainlanders will always be willing to pay silly prices because for mainlanders it is worth paying a premium to get their wealth into the outside world where they can spend it without being arrested.

Hong Kong used to have a reputation for creative solutions to housing problems. This was not for our new towns or public housing, which closely followed models in other places, but for a thing called Temporary Housing Areas. These were a creative solution to a shortage: unused patches of land of the kind which now tend to become open-air car parks were paved and fitted with a set of roofs. The occupant was allocated his roof and built the rest of the hut (these were hardly big enough to qualify as houses) himself. Toilets and showers were in communal blocks. THAs were not confused with paradise but they accommodated a lot of people without costing much money. At the time they filled a need. A lot of visitors from places with housing problems (and perhaps a bit more space than we have) came to look at them and were impressed.

I do not suggest that THAs should be revived. But they emerged from the sort of creative spirit we need now and are not getting. Last time I was in London I stayed in a place which had been converted from an office block into a sort of budget flat hotel aimed at the student market. We had one room for living, sleeping and eating, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom which was actually quite big because of a quirk in the shape of the building. This sort of thing would not be anyone’s dream first home but it would beat living with the in-laws hands down. Are there no buildings in Hong Kong which would fit this sort of treatment? Dare I suggest the West Wing?

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Among the criticisms levied against the Mandiant report on mainland hackers was one which caught my eye. The writer (who was trying very hard to rubbish the report) complained that it “had not been peer-reviewed”. This demonstrated a serious misunderstanding which I have occasionally detected in my colleagues. Peer review is an attempt to secure a minimum of quality in academic publications. It is a characteristic of academic publications that market forces do not work in the usual way there, because the writers want to be published, even if they are not paid. Also there are no readers worth speaking of.

In the real world people who write do not submit their work for peer review. They write on the understanding that they will be paid. If their work is not up to snuff they will not be asked to write again. In many ways this is a tougher regime than the one to which the academics are subjected. When I became an academic I found it rather easy, though time-consuming, to get things published in peer-reviewed journals. One does not see many academics switching to journalism, and those who do are usually historians, who are expected to be able to write properly even by their peers. As far as Mandiant is concerned this is a company which sells its research, I presume for large sums which customers would not part with if they thought they were getting garbage. The company’s peers are its competitors. Obviously it does not want to distribute its work to them free. And clients may prefer to have exclusive use of much of the output. But this company must in general be doing good work. Otherwise seriously greedy people would not be paying for it, and the company would go out of business.

Actually journalists seem to be rather impressed by peer review. Whether a finding has been published in a peer-reviewed place is often mentioned in science stories, even as the import of the science itself is mangled. Last week, for example, the Post reported a palpably peer-reviewed finding that playing of violent video games was associated with real-world violent behaviour. Unfortunately the headline, and indeed the comment crop incorporated in the story, proceeded on the assumption that the research had proved that violent video games CAUSED violent behaviour. Which it had not, and which the researchers had carefully not claimed. This is why the word “associated” was used. The fact that A and B are associated is interesting. It does not prove that A causes B or that B causes A. Actually it would be surprising if people interested in violence in the real world were not interested in violent video games. What is really going on may emerge eventually, or it may not. People are still struggling with the influence of other kinds of media on behaviour.

Either way, though, peer review is not much help. The reviewer (I have done this occasionally) is not expected to repeat the research, so there is a limited range of issues he can usefully look at. Does the research answer the question which the researcher says it answers (surprisingly often a tricky point)? Has the work been reported in sufficient detail to allow interested scholars to repeat the experiment? Do the sums add up? The reviewer is not supposed to, but frequently does, defend the conventional wisdom by giving the thumbs down to anything that questions it. Great diligence is not to be expected because the peer reviewer, like the author, is not paid. And the peer reviewer dos not get a by-line.  This is not much of an attempt at quality control. The real quality control, in fields where such things are possible, is to repeat the experiment. As well as a long string of trail-blazing discoveries vetoed by reviewers there is also a long string of stories about pieces which passed peer review with flying colours, only to disappoint when people tried to repeat the work in their own laboratories.

This sort of event has become surprisingly common. Pharmaceutical companies which are constantly on the look-out for interesting new work report that in between 70 and 90 per cent of cases when they try to repeat work reported in a learned journal the experiment fails. A careful piece of research into duff science reporting looked in detail at 12 stories reporting breakthroughs in the treatment of ADD (a fashionable disorder of children). In each case the original report was in a prestigious refereed scientific journal and was lavishly reported. In 11 out of the 12 cases subsequent research disclosed that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough. These disappointments were not reported in the press. But they were not reported in the prestigious scientific journals either. Repeating somebody else’s experiment and getting a negative result is not the sort of thing they publish. The people who do it have to send their work to more humble newssheets.

If this sort of thing goes on in the hard sciences you can imagine what happens in “softer” fields like sociology. Academics are not rewarded for doing research; they are rewarded for having research published, which is not the same thing at all. Pleasing editors and peer reviewers is just a fatal to the open experimental mind as pleasing yourself. And in the statistical stuff you are allowed what is known as a 5 percent confidence level. That means you can show that the possibility of your result being entirely due to chance are 5 percent or less … or one in 20. This seems a reasonable standard if you are looking at one piece of research. If you look at the industry as a whole it is terrifying. If there were 10,000 articles published last year that allows for 500 which were entirely spurious, mere consequences of chance or coincidence. They were probably the most newsworthy ones.

Another problem is the disproportionate enthusiasm and autonomy accorded in academic circles to pure theory. Plenty of people have warned about this. Karl Popper said that philosophy became barren and pointless unless it considered questions which arose outside Philosophy. Clausewitz said that the green shoots of theory should not be allowed to get too far from reality, which was their proper soil. The modern view is that theory is an interesting and worthwhile thing in itself, and much more interesting and prestigious than practical matters. I fear it must also be said that a body of theory tends to be defended as a matter of interest and instinct by people who spent years mastering it in their youth and want to see potential competitors do the same. It’s like the British Admiralty’s attitude to steel warships in the 19th century – innovation should be resisted as long as possible because when it arrives everyone starts from the same position and advantages accumulated over the years become worthless. The most interesting front at the moment, at least to me, is the one where the psychologists are demonstrating that classical economics is based on a wholly erroneous view of human nature. The big battle of the future will be between the sociologists and the biologists, who are developing a whole new set of explanations for society.

Lusty blows can be expected from everyone concerned. All contributions, on both sides, will of course be peer reviewed.

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When I was a student, which was admittedly quite a long time ago, the organisation of picketing, protests and petitions was done by us, entirely off our own bat. True the government paid student union fees for most students, but this wasn’t really intended to encourage political activism. Meanwhile the university administration tried to keep out of the line of fire and not look too embarrassed. This is not the way things are done at the university where I still, intermittently, work. Here the protests, petitions etc are organised by the university administration, encouraged beforehand and thanked afterwards in emails from the Vice Chancellor. Huge banners have appeared whose production values bespeak an origin in the University PR budget. I found a Dean – no less – collecting signatures the other day.

This is all intended to put pressure on the authorities over the rezoning of a piece of land which the university has had its eye on for some time. If the patch is rezoned it will be used for housing. It is quite a small patch of land. The proposed use for housing was part of the new administration’s gesture politics. There may be a shortage of housing in Hong Kong but putting a few up-market flats in Kowloon Tong is not going to solve it.

For geography fans, my university is the Hong Kong Baptist one. Alongside our long stringy campus is the former premises of the Lee Wai Lee Technical Institute, which has moved. At the moment the buildings are being used as overflow accommodation for two universities which, having only had ten years to prepare for the arrival of four-year degrees, have found themselves short of teaching space.  The official proposal is to allocate the northern half of the site to Baptist, and use the southern half for housing.

Of course this is silly. In housing terms it’s a trivial site. And it doesn’t make sense to put housing there because apart from the nearby hordes of students there is also a fire station next door which is quite noisy. The university’s anxiety is understandable, because it is sandwiched between a hill and the vast empty space formerly known as the Prince of Wales barracks and now occupied, or rather unoccupied, by the PLA. The chances of expanding within walking distance of existing buildings are very limited.

Whether the government will take kindly to being pressured in this way remains to be seen. The Institute of Education succeeded in a rather similar campaign to keep its independence. And they are still being punished for it. I also wonder where else this stirring up of popular fervour may lead. Student activism is an uncontrollable force and the genie, once out of its bottle,  may be difficult to put back.

I do think, speaking as one who mis-spent quite a lot of his youth on this sort of thing, that the university made a serious tactical error by announcing that it wanted the new plot for a Chinese Medicine Teaching Hospital. This made a rather simple question – housing or education – more complicated by introducing other questions, such as whether Hong Kong really needs a Chinese Medicine teaching hospital, and if so whether Baptist U would be the best institution to supply it. This part of the campaign seems to have been downplayed lately. It is now a simple choice: flats for mainland money launderers or teaching space for Hong Kong students. So if the petition comes your way, please sign it.

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It is an interesting rule: from time to time we are treated to a rousing speech about the importance of an independent and fearless judiciary, and the good fortune we enjoy because of our possession of such a thing. Uncannily the appearance of such a speech is followed by a judicial decision that has you reaching for the airsick bag.

The  decision of the Court of Final Appeal on domestic helpers rights to apply (not to enjoy, just to apply) for permanent residency is manifestly unfair. Of course judges may argue that the law has nothing to do with fairness, but in that case they can hardly claim, as they often do, to embody and preserve our most cherished values. The decision is also objectionable because it panders both to official paranoia and public racism.

It also appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the facts. It is simply not true that domestic helpers are required to return home at the end of their contracts. This rule floats around in the contract verbiage somewhere, but it has not been enforced for 30 years. A helper who reaches the end of one contract can simply start another with the same – or another – employer the following day. Her accrued holiday rights can be exercised at a time convenient to both parties. Only those employers who are very picky about their pound of flesh insist on the helper working for two years before she has a chance to go home. Many helpers go home every year. These are perfectly sensible arrangements and it is a bit of a puzzle that the judges were misled about them.

Perhaps the Department of Justice needs to spend less time throwing old ladies into jail and more pondering the finer points of forensic ethics.

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Sometimes we could be forgiven for thinking that our government is staffed bu nutcases. Consider recent events on the matter of population and pregnancy.

Our Financial Secretary is concerned about the future size of the government’s income. In fact, though he is sitting on what is probably the largest pile of government reserves in the world, he want to consider “tax reform”, which is not intended to sound like good news for those of us who think we are paying quite enough already. The reason why a fizcal abyss looms in a decade or two (we shall pass over in a charitable silence the folly of a man who cannot predict his financial future a year ahead making predictions decades away) is that Hong Kong women are not having enough babies. This means that the proportion of non-working elderly drones like me in the population will grow and the number of people working to support them will fall. This is a scary prospect, if you can believe any prediction from Mr Tsang.

Meanwhile the Chief Executive says that the government will never allow private hospitals to entertain pregnant mainlanders again, because the resulting offspring might wish to live in Hong Kong, putting an intolerable strain on our education etc. systems. And the question which this raises is, of course, do these two gentlemen every talk to each other?

I mean if we are hurtling towards bankruptcy because we are not having enough kids, might it not actually be rather a good idea to persuade people to have babies here, and indeed to hope that the resulting kids will in fact stay in Hong Kong? What is going through CY Leung’s mind, one wonders. After all the line about strain on education and such systems is a con. A lady who can afford to give birth in a private hospital is probably going to send her sprog to a private school. So what is the problem? I suspect we are dealing here with the visceral unease that people in left-wing circles feel whenever anything comes along which reveals that actually the People’s Paradise is not a paradise, and many people are quite eager to get out of it. The easiest way of suppressing this embarassing revelation is to ban the move involved.

This must then be explained as a step taken in defence of Hong Kong people’s interests.  Is anyone fooled by this, I wonder?

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So glad the NPC meeting and associated gabfests are over. The front page of the Post has been thoroughly irritating, featuring a succession of daily leading non-stories from Beijing, evidently selected on the basis that any story from the NPC, however boring and irrelevant, must be accorded its official status. It’s like reading the China Daily.

Mind you it’s not as boring as watching the proceedings on television. I had a strange sense of deja vu when ATV treated us to a glimpse of the hall. Rows of elderly heads bent over some mysterious piece of paper, all with pen in hand. What were they doing? Surely they don’t all follow the printed version of the speech to make notes when the speaker diverges from the script? Yet they were obviously doing something important, because not one of them was reading a newspaper, listening to an MP3 player, texting messages on his mobile phone or playing a video game. Clearly not a university lecture, then. The sense that I was watching something eerily familiar was no help when I tracked it down. The scene reminded me of the time long ago when I worked as a bingo caller. Rows of elderly heads, pen in hand, eyes glued to a piece of paper … But I presume the delegates were not playing bingo, though no doubt they were hearing a lot of meaningless numbers and some of them will get rich. I suppose they must have been voting. This is a surprisingly unanimous affair. So unanimous, in fact, that if the “no” vote gets into double figures it is a major news event, though the total number of votes is in the thousands.

This brings me to the point I was discussing with a local editor the other day. He was worried about some of the usual cliches which appear in the Western media. Was it China’s second peaceful transfer of power, he wondered? Surely there had been more than one before? Feeling dubious about this he had deleted the phrase wherever it occurred. I told him I thoroughly approved of this policy because power was not transferred at all. It had become increasingly clear that Jiang Zhemin was still pulling the strings, and would continue to do so until he popped his clogs, just as Deng Xiaoping had done. Only the puppets were being changed.

My friend had, though, kept – despite some misgivings – the standard phrase “China’s rubber-stamp parliament”. On this we disagreed. The NPC is not a rubber-stamp parliament. It is just a rubber stamp. It has none of the characteristics of a parliament. Not even the name. This is an advance on many other Chinese institutions, whose names are thoroughly confusing. When teaching mainland students about the Hong Kong legal system I have to explain as tactfully as possible that China does not have a legal system in the sense that this label is understood in the rest of the world. The courts are not courts, the law is not law and the judges are not judges. The only part of China’s legal structure which conforms to the label is the prisons.

This is harmless enough as long as everyone knows what the underlying reality is. Unfortunately the flow of propaganda sometimes leads to confusion in the strangest quarters. One of the Post’s non-stories announced that the new Secretary/President had urged Hong Kong people to “unite behind CY Leung”. This betrays a serious misunderstanding of the way things work in places where people are free to form their own opinions. Hong Kong people do not want to be behind CY Leung, or for that matter in front of him or anywhere else in his vicinity. He is widely regarded as a duplicitous weasel who only got the job because Henry dropped the ball. This is unfortunate. It will not be remedied by fatherly advice from the leader of a regime which depends on 100,000 secret policemen to stay in power.

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Well I’m glad I was not the only one who thought that the imposition of ten-year jail sentences on small potatoes convicted of participating in money laundering was Draconian and excessive.
In Sunday’s Post a senior criminal lawyer ventured the polite comment that the present law makes it easy to prosecute people and hard to defend them. The problem is that the Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance makes it an offence to deal in property “knowing or having reasonable grounds to believe” that it is the proceeds of an indictable offence. Prosecutors have been having an easy time persuading courts that money with no known antecedents should have been regarded by the accused (in one case a 61-year-old housewife and in another a 22-year-old middle school drop-out) as providing  reasonable grounds to believe it was the proceeds of a serious crime merely because it was being laundered. The prosecution does not have to prove that a crime has taken place, or that the money was the proceeds of it.
In response we had Mr Kevin Zervos, the Director of Public Prosecutions, whose minions no doubt take a pride in the forensic excellence that allows them to send elderly ladies to prison for 10 years. Mr Zervos illustrated the interesting legal skill of missing the point when it is not helpful to your side of the argument. The law was justified because “we are dealing with proceeds of serious crime”, he said. But that is exactly what the prosecution does not have to prove. Actually there are a number of reasons not involving serious crimes which might lead people to launder money in Hong Kong, perhaps the most obvious possibility being to get round regulations in some other places which forbid people from taking their money out of the country, whether it is the product of serious crime, honest toil or luck.
There are a number of other problems with using this part of the Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance against nobodies who move money for other people. One is that there have been a number of high-profile cases internationally in which big banks admitted money-laundering on an epic scale. Yet somehow no banker winds up behind bars on these occasions.
Another problem is that while the old lady in the street can get 10 years for money laundering through the use — or abuse — of a law intended for major criminals, the bank or money changer caught providing this service will probably be prosecuted under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (Financial Institutions) Ordinance. The maximum penalty under this ordinance is jail for seven years.
A further problem, from the point of view of the non-lawyer surveying this scene, is that some very large loopholes remain unplugged. People can still buy flats, no questions asked, with suitcases full of cash. There is some reason for supposing that the willingness of buyers to pay stupid prices for Hong Kong flats is due to the SAR’s willingness to accommodate money which might otherwise be trapped in the mainland. Similarly, cash betting at Jockey Club facilities is subject to no checks and large wagers are welcome.
Or of course you can go to Macau…

Naturally we are all against serious crime. But most people do not regard moving shy money as a serious crime in itself. The prosecutorial authorities might usefully spend more time on the pursuit of serious criminals. Failure to ask where money came from should be regarded as an infringement of procedure, like putting a false address on your company registration form. I notice not one of the well-publicised examples of this offence has been prosecuted yet. Department of Justice too busy beating up old ladies, no doubt.

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What would this interesting eyesore be, plonked into the middle of my morning walk? This is a large object. It is taller than I am. It is a monkey trap. Evidently intended for rather large monkeys.

We have always had occasional visits from monkeys becausc we live close to the edge of a country park. Monkey herds which usually prowl well-known visitor spots like the Shing Mun Reservoir or the Old Taipo Road can visit us without crossing any roads. They usually come once a year. I suppose – because monkeys are said to be good at this sort of thing – that some local tree reaches an edible stage and the monkeys stay long enough to strip it. This year for some reason they hung around a bit longer. My suspicion is that they found another source of food … like an insecure dustbin. But I may be doing my neighbours an injustice. Perhaps some shift in monkey territories elsewhere has made our locality more attractive.

Anyway for some reason the monkeys made a few return visits. They certainly on one occasion explored the Clubhouse roof. Rumour in our estate has it that one domestic helper had to shoo a monkey out of the kitchen where she was working. Then the monkeys went again. We have not seen them for weeks.

Meanwhile, however, the bureaucratic wheels were turning. It seems that people who wish to complain about monkeys address themselves to the Agriculture and Fisheries Department. I am not sure why. Monkeys are not agricultural in the usual sense and they are certainly not fish.  Weeks after the last monkey had disappeared the department produced the eyesore, which is clearly labelled as a monkey trap.

This is an imposing piece of machinery, apparently operated hy electricity. It has a sort of double-ended arrangement. There appear to be two gates which close in the middle, so that unwary m0nkeys caught in one end can watch while other simian suckers are caught in the other. But the gates have been fixed open with ziptapes, so I suppose this is now just one big sociable trap with two entrances. I do not think the monkeys actually used this part of the path, but the trap is an awkward monstrosity moved on eight small wheels. More plausible monkey haunts like woods and hillsides are clearly beyond it.

Further doubts about the effectiveness of the machine are raised by the absence of bait. Soon after the trap first appeared it was visited by an AFD team in a van, who threw a load of fruit in it. Over the ensuing week, though, this was gratefully consumed by small animals and insects unthreatened by the trap. So it is now empty. Only a terminally stupid monkey will ever go in it.

Unfortunately this is not the end of the matter. I do not object to the trap because it is ugly, though it is. Nor am I concerned that it will not catch many monkeys, though I shall be surprised if it catches any. I do object that it is dangerous. This is not my view alone: the labels on the machine itself say that it is dangerous. But there it sits, a mere ten yards from the busy footpath which connects the local public car park with the Lions’ Lookout, a small tourist attraction but one which produces a steady stream of visitors. The area is much frequented by unleashed children and dogs. They are more likely to end up in the trap than any monkey. The department has in the past deployed smaller traps which could be put on hill-sides and behind fences. The monstrosity should be removed.

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A nasty little accident occurred on the op-ed page of the Post on Thursday morning. The scene of the mishap was a rather long opinion piece called Smart Thinking. It was illustrated with a picture of a thoughtful looking young lady wearing an academic gown and holding out one of those flat hats that people wear at graduation ceremonies. I am not sure if she is supposed to be thinking or begging. If the latter this was an entertaining comment on the article.

The piece was written by one Paul Yip, who is a professor of Social Work and Social Administration (it is difficult to get academics to make choices) at the University of Hong Kong. The burden of the piece was rather unsurprising. Higher Education, like many other industries in Hong Kong, supposes it would be in the public interest if more public money was thrown at it. Since Mr Tsang had unaccountably failed to hose gold in the general direction of local universities when he had the opportunity to do so in the recent budget, he had missed an opportunity.

So here we have a professor at our premier university waving his credentials and starting the article like this: “As an alumni of the University of Melbourne…” As an alumni? Alumni is a Latin word. It is a plural. The singular is “alumnus”. The whole set is carefully documented on the parts of the internet where language pedants gather. Alumnus is the masculine singular, alumna the feminine singular, and alumnae the feminine plural. Whether the masculine plural, alumni, is acceptable for a group of graduates of both sexes is a matter of some squabbling in America.

It would I suppose be grossly unfair these days to berate a professor – especially a professor of social work – for not knowing his Latin. One can though, I think, complain that professors, like other writers, should not use a language if they do not understand it. “Alumni” is unnecessary. “Graduate” or “former student” will do just as well, and reduce the risk of looking pretentious.

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