Buy happiness? Oh yes, you can

Three researchers recommend ways of spending money to make one happy

By Goh Eng Yeow, The Straits Times, 6 Jan 2013

Most of us spend our time trying to make more money - whether by chasing the next promotion or business deal, or devising a sure-fire investment strategy.

But one question I've pondered over the years, after writing countless articles advising readers on how to invest profitably, is that old chestnut of whether more money makes a person happier.

Certainly, some of the happiest moments in my life have not revolved around money.

Some have been simple experiences like doing taiji in East Coast Park early in the morning, with the gentle sea breeze caressing my face, or a spectacular sunset I saw once at Hangzhou's West Lake, as the sinking sun lit the water a golden glow.

It leads to another question: Why doesn't having a whole lot more money make us a whole lot happier?

In a thought-provoking article, three researchers - University of British Columbia's Elizabeth Dunn, Harvard University's Daniel Gilbert, and University of Virginia's Timothy Wilson - offer an explanation after spending decades studying the subject.

Their conclusion: "If money doesn't make you happy, you are probably not spending it right."

They note that people fail to realise that having more money allows them to live longer and healthier lives, buffer themselves against worry and harm, have more leisure time to spend with their friends and family as well as control the nature of their daily activities. These are sources of happiness which tend to be taken for granted.

Bring back the kampung spirit of kindness

If we want a kind and gracious Singapore, we must find ways to promote the spirit of give-and-take

By William Wan, Published The Straits Times, 5 Jan 2013

ONE thing stood out last year in Singapore's effort to be a more gracious nation: high-profile incidents involving inconsiderate behaviour, and the subsequent reactions to them that were no better than the initial conduct itself.

From quarrels (and worse) on public transport and racist rants on social media to rude children in nursing rooms, 2012 was replete with bad behaviour. Concerned and well-meaning parties wondered if it was time to return to government-led courtesy campaigns. Or even if there should be laws to mandate good behaviour.

But there is a limit to what laws can do. While legislation has worked in the past to stamp out practices like spitting in public, kindness and graciousness are intrinsic values, more akin to a state of mind than a set of actions.

Laws to govern social behaviour are also difficult to enforce.

Take the "reserved" seats on the MRT meant for the elderly, pregnant or frail. Singapore is hardly the first city to consider appending penalties. In cities like New York, Toronto and Ottawa, those who refuse to give up their seat to a person entitled to priority seating can be fined.

But such regulations are hard to enforce, requiring a huge number of officials to patrol and mediate disputes - and would still not stamp out such behaviour.

Other social behaviours are simply beyond enforcement. We do not imagine a state enforcing us to greet each other with a smile, or to show appreciation for each other with a word of thanks.

Shanmugam meets gay activists

Discussion with women gay rights' group part of ongoing engagement

By Tessa Wong, The Straits Times, 5 Jan 2013

LAW Minister K. Shanmugam has held a meeting with activists from the women gay rights' group Sayoni, in a move which he said is part of an ongoing engagement with the gay community.

Mr Shanmugam confirmed he discussed issues on gay rights, like the anti-homosexual law Section 377A, with the activists in late November.

"As for LGBT citizens, this is not the first time I have heard representation from them. It will certainly not be the last," Mr Shanmugam said in an e-mail response to queries from The Straits Times. LGBT is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual.

I recently met up with some activists from Sayoni, a Singapore-based platform for lesbian, bisexual and transsexual...
Posted by K Shanmugam Sc on Saturday, January 5, 2013

He added that whenever anyone approaches him on issues, "I try and meet them to discuss". He has met animal activists, bloggers and young street dancers before.

Sayoni revealed their meeting in an online post last weekend. Mr Shanmugam said he initiated the meeting after Ms Jean Chong, 37, a Sayoni founder, asked him on his Facebook page if LGBT citizens are unwanted in Singapore.

"I responded to her that this is not the case. So I decided to engage them to hear them out," he said, adding that the discussion was "very useful".

The one-hour meeting took place in Mr Shanmugam's office at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and was attended by Ms Chong and two volunteers.

SDP's Wijeysingha apologises to Tan Chuan-Jin

Minister's lawyers want damages from SDP's Wijeysingha
He deliberately twisted facts in defamatory post which damaged Tan Chuan-Jin's reputation, they say; sum to be given to charity

TODAY, 5 Jan 2013

Opposition politician Dr Vincent Wijeysingha today apologised to Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin for making defamatory comments about him, but the question of damages to be paid remains.

In a letter of demand dated Dec 22, 2012, Mr Tan's lawyers had asked for an apology and a retraction to be made over remarks in an article posted on Dr Wijeysingha's Facebook account on Dec 2 on the illegal strike by SMRT bus drivers in November.

Describing Dr Wijeysingha's words about the Minister as "severely defamatory" and his points "untrue" and "made dishonestly", the lawyers also demanded that he remove the Facebook article and all comments linked to it, and undertake to "pay suitable sums to our client as compensation for the damage to his reputation and the distress caused".

Whatever sum Dr Wijeysingha pays will be donated to charity, it is understood.

In their letter, the lawyers said the Singapore Democratic Party's treasurer had impugned that Mr Tan was dishonest and deceptive, and that he had been "been bought by monetary and material inducements".

They said Dr Wijeysingha had "deliberately twisted the facts", and had published his comments "maliciously and recklessly".

In his apology, which was posted today, Dr Wijeysingha did not address the issue of compensation. He acknowledged that he had made allegations that were "wholly untrue and false". "I withdraw wholly the Allegations, and apologise unreservedly to the Minister. I undertake not to repeat the same or similar Allegations, or cause such same or similar Allegations to be published, in the future," he wrote.

Blogger Alex Au apologises to PM Lee

Channel NewsAsia, 5 Jan 2013

Blogger Alex Au has apologised to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong for comments deemed as defamatory about the sale of computer systems used by town councils in his article, "PAP mis-AIMed, faces blowback".

He said in a blog post on Saturday that he recognises that the article, when read with the comments or by themselves, meant or were understood to mean that Mr Lee was guilty of corruption in relation to the transaction between the PAP-run town councils and Action Information Management Pte Ltd.

He admitted and acknowledged that these allegations are false and completely without foundation.

Mr Au apologised unreservedly to Mr Lee for the distress and embarrassment these allegations have caused.

The article in question has also been taken down.

Mr Au's apology came a day after he received a letter of demand from Mr Lee's lawyers, asking him to remove the posts, as well as apologise on his site.

Beating odds to be longest-surviving dialysis patient here

Strict routine cited as factor in his survival for 33 years

By Janice Tai, The Straits Times, 5 Jan 2013

IF LIFE is a big gamble, Mr Richard Tay has the odds stacked heavily against him.

After spending his first month of life behind bars, because his mother was breast-feeding him while serving her prison sentence, he went on to be warded in hospital until he was six, because of a blockage in his bladder.

When he got out, he was teased continually by his classmates for being smelly, as he could not control his bladder.

These obstacles made him even more determined to make good; he studied so hard for his diploma despite ill health that he collapsed after his final paper and slipped into a coma for three days.

But when he received his hard-earned diploma, doctors told the then 19-year-old that his bladder problem, which caused urine to flow back into his kidneys, had resulted in kidney failure. He would spend a significant part of the next 33 years hooked up to a machine to sustain his life.

Despite such overwhelming circumstances, the 51-year-old is Singapore's longest-surviving dialysis patient - and one of the longest surviving in the world.

Mr Tay is the only patient in the National Kidney Foundation's 44-year history to cross the 30-year mark. The average lifespan of kidney patients after going on dialysis is about 12 years - although one patient in London was known to have passed 39 years.

"I guess I am lucky. I am not scared of death, but I want to see how far I can go," said Mr Tay, a sales director at a medical equipment company.

Those who know him well, however, would argue that luck has had little to do with his battle for life. His highly regimented life has probably been more of a factor in his longevity.

Our brain rewired

THANKS TO SOCIAL MEDIA & THE NET

Development of memory, focus, empathy seems to take back seat

By April Dembosky, Published The Straits Times, 5 Jan 2013

I AM flying. No plane, no wings, just me soaring over rooftops with a mild flip in my belly as I dip closer to the grid of city streets. I lean to the right to curve past a skyscraper, then speed up and tilt left to skirt by a tree. There has been an earthquake and I am looking for a lost child who is diabetic and needs insulin.

This is not a dream. I am awake, wearing my normal clothes - no cape or leotard - standing squarely on both feet in a room of the virtual reality laboratory at Stanford University.

About 70 test subjects have done the same simulation, half of them flying in a virtual helicopter, the other half granted the virtual superpower of flight. Half from each group have a mission: find and save the lost child.

After the simulation, head gear returned to a hook on the wall, a researcher reaches for her clipboard to ask a few questions. She accidentally knocks over a tin of pens. In sociology studies, this is a classic trick for measuring altruistic intent. The test subjects who flew Superman-style rushed to help clean up the spill. They responded four seconds faster and picked up two more pens on average than the helicopter passengers.

"If you are flying, you feel very powerful, so the sense of having power made people more generous, more altruistic," says Dr Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who helped design the study, currently under review at the e-journal Plos One.

"It could also be that the desire to be helpful was directly related to conscious or unconscious associations to Superman," she adds.

Many new technologies begin with such virtuous goals of making the world a better place and its citizens better people. But many come with hidden costs that take time to surface. Now that mainstream Internet sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are all in close reach with a few touches of the smartphone in your pocket, the human side effects of being constantly connected are starting to emerge.

There is growing concern that our emotional and empathetic pathways are being eroded by all the screen time. We spend so much time on our computers and gadgets that we are starting to think like them.

Brain circuits are being rewired to accommodate these tools of modern life. We process more bits and bytes of information, and we are quite fast at it. But there could be a trade-off - our motivations to act like Superman are diminishing.

Marriage and Parenthood Study 2012

Say 'I do' one day? Yes, but...

Most singles are either waiting for right partner or delayed by career

By Tessa Wong, The Straits Times, 4 Jan 2013

WHILE the number of singles in Singapore continues to rise, the yearning to tie the knot one day remains strong, a survey has found.

What stops them from getting hitched, however, is that they either have yet to find their ideal soulmate, or they want to focus on their careers or studies first.

Married couples appear to face a similar gap between the ideal and the reality when it comes to parenthood: Many end up with fewer kids than they had originally intended, with financial worries topping the list of reasons.

This was the picture painted of Singapore's marriage and parenthood scene by the results of the National Population and Talent Division (NPTD) survey, which were released yesterday.

The 2012 study, which is the latest in a series of surveys conducted on the issue, could help policy planners in their efforts to boost the nation's low birth rates. It also comes ahead of a package of measures to encourage marriage and parenthood that is expected to be announced later this month.

The survey, which covered 2,120 singles and 2,526 married people, found that a high proportion of singles - 83 per cent - want to get married.

S'poreans joyless? Gallup survey was flawed

Gut instinct, not wilful, explicit responses to surveys, is key to understanding human nature, says brain scientist Gemma Calvert

By Cheong Suk-Wai, The Straits Times, 4 Jan 2013

IF BRAIN scientist Gemma Calvert has her way, surveys such as the recent Gallup poll that found Singaporeans to be joyless, or at least chary of expressing what they feel, will be a thing of the past.

Professor Calvert, 44, a visiting don at the Nanyang Business School (NBS) here, says that is because such face-to-face or even telephone surveys are usually awkward for respondents, who would naturally avoid giving precise or revealing answers lest they have to explain themselves further.

The questions Gallup posed in that poll, including "Were you well rested yesterday?" and "Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?", can be curious, if not confounding, she notes. They would invite anything from bland off-the-cuff remarks to shocking off-the-wall retorts because different people interpret such highly subjective queries differently.

She says of surveys in general: "There is too much reliance on people's explicit responses when we know from psychology and neuroscience that most of our behaviour is driven by non-conscious feelings and emotions."

Brain research in the past 15 years has shown that the decisions people make actually stem from their subconscious, not rational thought.

She says: "Descartes' thinking man, who is above all other animals because of his unique capacity for thought and language, was completely overturned in the late 1990s when magnetic resonance imaging technology helped us see just how strong the decision-making areas inside our brain were attached to its emotional parts.

"The old reptilian part of our brain - which we'd always put down as being something to control or suppress - was now being shown to be largely responsible for almost everything we do."

She has devised ways to capture a gut response to any issue, before the analytical part of one's brain has time to kick in and censor, shade or whitewash it.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic designs navigation app for visually impaired

By Monica Kotwani, Channel NewsAsia, 3 Jan 2013

A team of Ngee Ann Polytechnic lecturers and students has designed a mobile application for the visually impaired to help them navigate their way to their destination.

The app, called the Travel Assistant for the Visually Impaired (TAVI), is believed to be the first of its kind in mapping specific locations into an app.

It comes with large fonts for the partially visually impaired, and audio feedback for those who have lost their sight completely.

TAVI allows users to click through options, choose between the sheltered or the shortest path, and eventually navigate their way to the destination.

It even gives directions like where to turn after walking certain distances.

TAVI was created early last year by lecturers and students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of InfoComm and Technology.

There are other apps in the market that use GPS technology to help the visually impaired get around but these have some limitations.

Choose your pace of life

By Bryan Chow Weng Keong, Published TODAY, 3 Jan 2013

I read with interest Mr Heng Wei Xiang's I Say piece "Strawberry dreams forever" (Dec 28), on talk of polytechnic students wanting a stress-free society.

He is right in noting that as our society progresses, we must have more compassion for the less fortunate and greater respect for all members of society, regardless of their social standing.

However, calls to systematically remove stress from our society, for segments of the population to pursue our epicurean pleasures, are irrational. Proposals such as a four-day workweek or to reduce examination stress are idealistic at best and naive at worst.

We cannot insulate ourselves from the current climate of increasing globalisation and competition, be it from the international flow of talent, movement of investments into or out of Singapore or from Asian powerhouses such as China and India.

There is also heightened awareness of economic instability in the West, and Singapore would not be spared the reverberations of any financial collapse. This is the time to improve our labour force and to hedge against uncertainties in this postmodern world.

Ultimately, nothing is stopping any of us from getting more involved in society and giving back to worthy causes. But the country should not slow down to accommodate individuals who would not want to be left behind just because everyone else is outpacing them.

To call for a reduction in the pace of life here would be to contend with a lower living standard, which not all of us are prepared to accept.

We should not view stress as being innately unhealthy. Neither should we accept the pursuit of monetary rewards as being intrinsically at odds with our non-material needs.

Singapore and the world, in 2013 and beyond

by Simon Tay and Nicholas Fang, Published TODAY, 2 Jan 2013

The optimistic view - if you can call it that - is that crisis will be avoided in 2013.

The euro zone remains unsolved and messy, and American politicians have contrived their own financial cliff. But the Europeans have now so repeatedly avoided disaster that this alone brings some measure of hope. And despite Washington DC's beltway politics, there are some underlying signs of economic recovery in the United States.

Shocks can, of course, come from elsewhere and, given global fragility and interconnectedness, even seemingly distant and small sources can have outsized impacts. Argentina's economic slowdown and sovereign debt issues, for example, could possibly be a future Greece.

Non-economic issues can also spook nervy markets - such as a missile from Pyongyang or Tehran, or worse, an incident at sea between Chinese and Japanese vessels. Continued instability in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring could also create flashpoints of heightened tensions that would have global ramifications.

If these should come to pass, Singapore as an open and global economy will feel such impacts keenly. Yet even if such crises do not erupt or are quickly contained, the current outlook is for a slowdown and indeed the economic doldrums in 2013, with 1- to 3-per-cent growth.