Ideals of Good Citizenship and Economic Progress

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Carlos C. Tapang
A question that is frequently asked but rarely answered correctly is this: Why does the Philippines remain a backward country? One answer I often hear from fellow Filipinos, especially those who live here in the U.S., is because Filipinos are lazy and have very low ideals of good citizenship. Well, the results of a worldwide survey does indicate that on average, Filipinos have high ideals of good citizenship; and so it seems we sell ourselves short in this regard. We are not lazy, and we are better citizens than those in most other countries.
 
Why does the Philippines remain a third-world country then, if its citizens have one of the highest ideals of good citizenship? Shouldn’t those high ideals result in economic progress? I think it should, but having civic-minded citizens is only one ingredient in the overall recipe for economic progress. It is necessary but not sufficient.
 
I believe what we need is more economic freedom. We need freer markets. I don’t pretend to be a full-pledged economist, but this is an area I have been thinking about since college days. The site www.freetheworld.com defines economic freedom in terms of the following elements:
  1. personal choice
  2. voluntary exchange coordinated by markets
  3. freedom to enter and compete in markets and
  4. protection of persons and their property from aggression by others.

Each of these four elements can be measured; and according to these measures, the Philippines is not as economically free as newly liberalized economies such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. To the degree that each nation in the world is economically free, its citizens (including its poorest citizens) also enjoy roughly as much prosperity. FreeTheWorld.com has an annual ranking of all countries that report on all four measures, and the data does support the idea that free markets mean economic progress.

Let’s go through all four measures of economic freedom:

  • The first and most important measure in my mind is the degree to which private property is respected by the government and the laws of the land. A free market system requires strong but simple laws regarding property ownership. Until China grants full respect to property rights, for example, it cannot call itself a free market system. Unfortunately in the Philippines, we subscribe to the idea of property ownership as "stewardship", which has resulted in the watering down of the principles of private property. In the Philippines, your title to land you own is not as sacred a document as it is regarded here in the U.S. by way of laws, traditions, people’s habits, etc. In Pinas, your tenants, for example, can grab your land from you by way of land reform laws.
  • Personal choice is the next important component of freedom. A system of rules and enforcement like local traffic laws demand strict adherence to those rules, but nowhere in the rules should it prescribe my DESTINATION. The purpose of traffic rules is to prevent us from killing each other in accidents, but never to dictate WHERE we are supposed to go.
  • Voluntary exchange means that ideally you and I, or Costco and I, or you and Sam’s Club can enter into mutually beneficial transactions without interference from government. The percentage of sales tax, then, is inversely proportional to this freedom. 
    Voluntary exchange also means that I can work for anybody I wish, and in exchange for my labor get paid accordingly. As long as the employee-employer relationship is beneficial to both parties, employment continues. I can leave the company I work for anytime, and they can fire me anytime also ("at will" employment).
  • Freedom to enter and compete in markets means there should be no laws governing WHO can enter a business. I can be crazy enough to compete with Microsoft myself, and nobody can stop me even to protect myself from financial ruin. Microsoft, in turn, is not constrained to crush me. On the other hand, anybody, even a newcomer such as Google, can topple Microsoft because there are no special rules about entering its business.
The U.S. is not the freest market in the world, but compared to the Philippines, the system here is far superior. That’s one big reason we are here, you and I. However, things may change for the better in the Philippines, and I am really hoping it will.
 
We had a high total measure of economic freedom in the year 2000 (7.1); it declined to 6.6 after that; and roughly remained there until 2005, the last year for which data is available. If President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had been successful in fighting corruption and rules-based bias against freedom (as she promised in 2001), then we should at least have been back at 7.1 by 2005. I guess we should be happy it is not any number below 6.6. The battle for freedom is not easy, but in time I expect our economic freedoms to increase.
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Talking about Can photo clues lead to camera’s owner? – Gadgets- msnbc.com

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Carlos C. Tapang

  A great little story. Thanks to the Associated Press for writing about it. This is one story which would not have a happy ending without the Internet.

Can photo clues lead to camera’s owner? – Gadgets- msnbc.com
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Posted in Computers and Internet | Leave a comment

Rendering the Surface of Reality

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Carlos C. Tapang

Personal Computers, especially those for game playing, have become powerful enough to render the surface of reality. "Rendering" is the process of mathematically converting an abstract world model into images projected onto the computer screen. It requires supercomputer capabilities, which means that those graphical processing units (GPUs) in your graphics card are really a supercomputer in every sense of the word. (Not exactly general purpose, but optimized to perform rendering operations.)

Many people assume that because the personal computer can render the surface of reality, it should also be able to do what our brains do when playing a game or just taking a walk in the park: recognize objects and react to those objects. This is not true. Image processing is a much more intractable problem than rendering. Computers still can not "see" the way we do. At best, the image processing that computers can do now can not even compare to that performed by birds. Birds can perceive the surface of reality, and even navigate in it solely based on its perception of reality. Computers still can not process a series of frames in real time and react to objects the way a bird can.

There are some webcams currently in the market that are supposed to be able to track human faces. The idea is for you to be able to move around the room while being live in the internet. The camera should track your face. Even this simple task is not easy for the computer to do, as evidenced by the face-tracking webcam I just bought: it fails to track my face even if, while being seated, I simply lean on one side and then the other.

Driving your car in a busy street is a very, very complex operation. You have to be aware of what’s going on around you, and be able to react in a split second. Computers can now drive SUVs on a mountain road (with a lot of help from GPS satellites), but still are not qualified to obtain a driver’s license.

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The Surface of Reality

Posted on August 4, 2006 by Carlos C. Tapang
Working with map editors for first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Half-Life 2 latched me on to the idea of the "surface of reality". When playing a FPS game, one is immersed in a certain reality which mimics the real world: the laws of Physics apply in this reality as much as the reality we interact with in our daily lives. But this immersion is only skin-deep because what we see and what we hear are only the surface of that certain reality.
 
When watching a movie shot in a studio, we never see beyond the surface. The moviemakers make sure that we don’t. They take great care that what we see is just the surface, because beyond that surface there is nothing. Beyond the walls of a cozy bedroom is just the ugly superset of reality which is the studio, with wires hanging everywhere and braces here and lighting props there.
 
In a FPS game, we can move around in the map, and even bump on the wall and hear the effect of that. When going inside a room, the imagery is so real we can almost touch the light bulb and see the effect of doing that to the shades and shadows in that room. When we go near a wall, we can almost feel its texture. However, it can be that the computer model of that room does not go beyond a wall. If we are able to cheat the game and allow ourselves to go beyond a wall, we will experience a discontinuity because there would be nothing beyond that wall. The experience is like jumping into an abyss, into nothingness.
 
A child learns early that the opacity of an object such as a box can hide a doll behind it, but that the doll continues to exist even when it is out of view.
 
An animal can survive being aware only of the surface of reality.
 
When interacting with reality, we deal with it only on the surface. We don’t need to know what is under a bridge while driving a car on it, as long as we are confident that the bridge remains structurally sound and that the car won’t suddenly fall through. We also don’t need to know how the car itself works or feel how much pressure is in the engine combustion chambers, as long as we know that when we step on the gas pedal the car accelerates at the expected level.
 
The surface of reality is what our perception deals with whenever we are awake and alert. Our perception is acutely sensitive to the laws of physics: instinctively we take it for granted that an apple can fall from the tree. But until Newton asked the question why an apple should fall at all, as human beings we did not understand what gravity is. Understanding nature affords us the potential to conquer more of reality, but it is not required for us, nor for any animal for that matter, to understand in order to function. A dog can catch a frisbee in flight without first learning the physics of frisbees. Much of our perceptive abilities are prewired in us, and we did not need to learn them.
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