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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Pandas to soothe your nerves; Huge housing task; Are Malaysians creative naming them?

Pandas to soothe the nerves

As Malaysia rolls out the red carpet for the pandas, it is hoped that China’s panda diplomacy can also help ease political tension in the country.

ANYTHING about the Giant Pandas are a big hit and when it was announced by our Natural Resources and Environment Ministry on Monday that China had decided to loan two endangered baby pandas for a 10-year period, it made instant world news.

Pandas, from the bear family, are about the most easily recognised and loved animals in the world.
They evoke excitement from viewers who line up for hours outside the zoos from London to New York, Tokyo and Singapore, to get a glimpse of these furry and cuddly animals.

The baby pandas, about a year to three years old, are part of the loan system China has worked out since the early 1980s after concerns were raised over their loss of habitat, endangered status and the difficulty of breeding in captivity.

They are only loaned to countries that China has established strong and friendly relationship with or those that figure very highly on the list of countries deemed important to China.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak had made the request when he met his counterpart Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in April when the two leaders opened the joint Malaysia China industrial park in Chengdu, Nanning.

The loan of the pandas, estimated to number about 1,600 in the wild and 268 in captivity, is an important gesture from China to Malaysia as well as commemorating the strong diplomatic ties between the two countries.

It is also to commemorate 40 years of relationship between China and Malaysia.

The political overtones are unmistakable.

Najib’s father Tun Abdul Razak made a path-breaking visit to communist China in 1974, shook hands with Mao Zedong and returned to call a snap election which the enlarged, new coalition Barisan Nasional won handsomely.

It was the first election after the May 13 riots in 1969 and the alienated Chinese community had backed Razak in the hope that the new Barisan Nasional he headed would usher in a new era in politics.

Forty years later, Najib is not hoping to win over the Chinese voters – most of whom are backing his political opponent Pakatan Rakyat – with his “panda diplomacy” with China but the successful arrival of the furry creatures is expected to definitively lighten the divisive atmosphere in the country.

Overall, Najib’s engagement with China and the continuing importance he is giving to China in trade, cultural and education matters will have a desirable effect on voters, including Chinese voters.

Having said that, pandas have always figured importantly in China’s diplomatic efforts.

The practice reportedly existed as far back as the Tang Dynasty when Empress Wu Zetian (625–705) sent a pair of pandas to the Japanese emperor but in modern times, “panda diplomacy” really took off after US President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.

China gifted two pandas – Ling Ling and Xing Xing – following that visit and the pandas generated world headlines and a mad craze in America.

Millions of people lined up to see them in Washington and in one stroke, China scored an instant diplomatic victory.

Japan reportedly dispatched two military aircraft to guard “Lan Lan” and “Kang Kang” when they entered its airspace on arrival from China as part of the now fine-tuned “panda diplomacy”.

West Germany rolled out the red carpet for its pair of pandas in 1974.

In the years since, the rare pandas have become firmly established as an important piece of China’s modern day diplomacy – to break the ice, ease tension and promote goodwill.

But it is not all diplomacy with pandas.

They have to be kept in special enclosures being built at the wetlands park in Putrajaya.

Pandas do nothing but laze around and eat special bamboos shoots (about 20kg a day) – their favourite and only food, which has to be imported from China or specially planted here.

They have to be kept in special, fully air-conditioned enclosure with climate controlled at temperatures ranging between 18°C and 22°C and humidity controlled at 50% to 60% all year round.

Ambient conditions have to be adjusted to simulate the four seasons similar to their natural habitat in south-western China.

According to one estimate, the cost can run up to RM20mil but the returns in the form of gate collection, research and diplomacy, far outweighs the cost.

The reverse is also true. Any mishap will spark a diplomatic uproar and ruin relations as well.

On arrival, the pandas will be quarantined for a month and five more months for acclimatisation before they are opened for public viewing.

Malaysia, the third country in South-East Asia after Thailand and Singapore to get the pandas, will also get the chance to name the pandas in a nationwide contest.

Hopefully, the arrival of the pandas, celebrated for breaking the ice between nations and exciting people, will also ease the tensions and divide in our nation.

COMMENT BY BARADAN KUPPUSAMY baradan@pc.jaring.my

Huge task in housing pandas

By FLORENCE A. SAMY florenceasamy@thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: The arrival of the two pandas is exciting news but housing them here is no easy task and requires a big commitment, experts said.

For a start, the Wetlands Park in Putrajaya, which has been announced as the preferred location, would need to construct a proper indoor habitat for the two baby pandas which are of opposite genders.

The enclosure needs to be air-conditioned as the adorable but endangered mountainous animals are not used to living in a tropical climate.

“It must include a playground for the pandas to exercise and a den for them to sleep in. There must also be a back-up for the air-conditioning system as the pandas cannot wait for it to be repaired if the air-condition breaks down.

“It is better for a local keeper to head to China to be trained and be with the pandas for at least six months to study its habits, likes and dislikes before they are brought here,” experts said.

There must also be sufficient bamboo plants for them and it needs to be of a certain species.

A local team will head to China to study the bamboo species.

Chinese conservation experts are also here and will visit the site and outline strict specifications for the enclosure, sources said.

The park also needs to consider building a nursery and possibly an incubator for potential baby pandas since the two animals will be here for 10 years and may procreate.

China had agreed to loan the pandas to Malaysia for 10 years in recognition of the good bilateral ties and in conjunction with the countries' 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties.

The Natural Resources and Environment Ministry announced the news of the pandas' arrival on Monday.

The Government will sign the agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA) tomorrow.

Singapore, which is expected to receive two pandas later this year, is building a 1,500 sq m enclosure at its new River Safari park.

Wetlands International Malaysia senior technical officer Lee Shin Shin said the team in charge of the pandas' care should be properly trained and adequate allocation should be provided as it would be a long-term commitment.

She is however disappointed that huge amounts of money would be spent to bring the pandas over and said it could have been used for local conservation.

Her views were echoed by Malaysian Nature Society president Prof Dr Maketab Mohamed who disagreed with bringing the pandas here and said priority should be given to conserving local endangered animals.

Malaysians are getting bear-y creative

By TERENCE TOH
terence.toh@thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: From the run-of-the-mill to the outlandish, Malaysians have been ringing The Star radio stations to suggest names for the giant pandas from China.

Fatimah and Abdullah, Duri and Riang, Satu and Malaysia, Teh and Tarik Malaysians are a bear-y creative lot!

The radio stations under The Star media group had invited listeners to suggest names for the lovable animals. They were inundated with colourful and cheeky responses.

Amused: Yi Hui taking suggestions from listeners for names for the pandas.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak also received an enthusiastic response when he invited followers of his Ah Jib Gor on his Chinese Facebook page to suggest names for the pandas.

Najib's invitation drew 222 replies from the public as at 8.15pm yesterday.

Among the names suggested were Fufu and Yaya, Ali and Ahmad, Left and Right, Flower and Bing Bing, Salt and Spring and Nini and Lola.

At Red FM, deejay Lil Kev said many callers suggested the pandas be named after local heroes (Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat), famous couples (Romeo and Juliet), popular local food like Kaya and (roti) Tisu, Puttu and Mayam), and even after local politicians.

Athena Tan, better-known as DJ Yi Hui to listeners of 98.8FM, said many callers made references to popular Chinese phrases.

She said examples included Xing Xing and Fu Fu (from xingfu, the Cantonese word for happiness) and Sam Sam and Si Si (from sam si, meaning to think twice).

Yi Hui said she liked the sound Tuan Tuan and Puan Puan.

“I think that's really cute,” she said.

“Plus, it's a must-learn phrase for anyone coming to Malaysia.”

The loan is part of an agreement between the Malaysian Government and the China Wildlife Conservation Association to mark the 40th anniversary of the diplomatic ties between the two countries. The agreement will be signed tomorrow.

To celebrate the event and the arrival of the pandas, there will be a nationwide contest to name the animals.

Related Stories/Articles/posts:
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Giant Pandas are coming to Malaysia

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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

New Internet top-level domain name claims

Icann reveals new internet top-level domain name claims

Icann has received applications for .music, .miami, .insurance and .online among others

US-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to the body in charge of the expansion.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) said it had received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.

By contrast there have been 40 such applications from the UK, 303 from the Asia-Pacific region and 17 from Africa.

Details of who applied for what will be revealed in London later.

Ahead of the press conference, Icann also revealed that 166 of the claims were for what it termed "internationalised domain names" - generic top-level-domains (gTLDs) that are not in the Latin alphabet.

"That means that if you're a person living in China or in somewhere in India then you might have the opportunity to use the internet purely in your native script," Icann's president and chief executive, Rod Beckstrom, told the BBC.

"It's going to make the internet more approachable for people. Also we're seeing a trend on mobile devices to people liking short names and there will be opportunities for shorter names here, just because what was previously a second-level name now becomes first-level."

An example of this would be if the web address www.canon.com/products switched to www.products.canon.

Generic names

The Japanese camera maker is just one of several organisations to have confirmed it has paid the $185,000 (£118,800) fee to take part in the application process.

International breakdown

North America: 911 applications

Europe: 675 applications

Asia-Pacific: 303 applications

Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications

Africa: 17 applications

(116 in non-Latin alphabets)

The not-for-profit .uk domain name manager Nominet has also revealed it had applied to run .wales and .cymru while Google said it had applied for .google, .youtube and .lol.

Other less well-known bodies are also taking advantage of the move.

The firm Top Level Domain Holdings has spent more than $13.5m applying for 92 applications on itself and clients. These include claims for .hotel, .cricket, .london and .music.

Dubai-based Directi told the BBC it had also applied for 31 "mass market" gTLDs including .law, .bank and .baby.

Conflicting claims

Organisations face a minimum $25,000 annual renewal charge to keep their suffix, but not all applications will succeed.

"Community-based applications" - those from trade associations or other organisations representing recognised, sizeable groupings - will take precedence over "standard applications" - those from stand-alone businesses and others.

So for instance, if PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and the Grocery Manufacturers of America have all applied for .cola, the GMA should be given priority.

If two or more applicants of equal status have requested the same name a resolution process is triggered.

"We would notify them that they have been approved and who else has been approved and say they have 60 days to go figure out how they are going to resolve this," said Mr Beckstrom.

"If they don't resolve this in 60 days then we are going to put it up for auction where each of them can bid for the term. The proceeds of that auction will go to a new charitable or non-profitable entity."

The process has proved controversial. 87 companies and business associations sent a petition to the US Department of Commerce last year claiming "excessive cost and harm to brand owners" and the "likelihood of predatory cyber harm to consumers".

But it will take a while to find out if such fears prove true.

Because of the volume of requests Icann plans to divide and evaluate the applications in batches of about 500.

It says the first is expected to go live some time between April and June 2013.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Truth About Honesty and Dishonesty

Dan Ariely

I’ve been fortunate to be following Dan Ariely’s career since before his first book became an international phenomenon back in 2008. The book, Predictably Irrational, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2010, he released a follow-up book called The Upside of Irrationality. His latest book is called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves and it comes out on June 5th. Dan is also a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. In this interview, he talks about why people lie in some situations but not others, why students cheat on tests when they know they could suffer later in life, and more.

What makes somebody lie sometimes and tell the truth other times?

When people face this question about why people lie sometimes and don’t lie other times, the common answer has to do with something about the internal state about the person. The person is hungry, is tired, is exhausted and there is some truth to that. There is some changes that happen to us internally that make us cheat more or less. In particular, one of the things we find is being mentally exhausted gets people to cheat more, and here is the finding: There is something called depletion. Depletion is the idea that when we exercise self control, when we try to resist temptation, we try to resist a cake and a cookie and Facebook and Youtube and saying something nasty to someone and so on. As we try and resist temptation more and more and more our ability to resist temptation diminishes until eventually we kind of collapse and give in.

Dishonesty is one of those things. As we get tired by resisting temptation in all kinds of aspects of our lives we end up falling to temptation to a higher degree and cheat and lie to a higher degree. So, going back to the question about why people lie sometimes and not other times, there are clearly changes that happen within a person over time, but what we find is that an even bigger effect has to do with the environmental circumstances that are around us. So, often we think about people as agent, so we decide and we act, and we act on our preferences and we are kind of executing our own internal state, but the reality is that the decisions people often make are best described by the environment in which they are placed. When we place people in some environments they are able to cheat to a higher degree and when they are placed in a different environment, that same person with the same mindset ends up cheating to a much lower degree.

So what are those environmental influences?

One of them has to do with the degree to which we can justify our dishonesty and, in particular, the distance of the dishonest act from money. So for example, in one of our experiments we found that, the basic experiment looked like this, people have a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that they can solve all of them if they had enough time, but we don’t give people enough time. We give people only five minutes, we give them the sheet of paper, we say “work as hard as you can” and when the five minutes are over we say “please stop and count how many you questions you got correct, remember that number then go to the back and shred that sheet of paper. Then come back and tell us how many questions you solved correctly and we’ll pay you accordingly, a dollar per question.” Now, what people don’t know is that we played with the shredder, the shredder only shreds the side of the page, but not the full page and we can jump in and find how many questions people really solved correctly.

So what did we find? We find that on average people solved around four problems and report to be solving six. Okay, that’s a general finding, and we find that the six is not comprised of a few people who cheat a lot, instead it’s comprised of many people who cheat a little bit. But, in another condition, what we do is we ask people to shred the piece of paper, and when they come to us not to say “Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems, give me X dollars”, but to say “Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems, give me X tokens”. Now, people look into our eyes and lie for pieces of plastic and not for money and what we find was the people basically doubled their cheating. What that means is that when we have an environment in which people can distance themselves from the act of cheating, they’re not cheating for money, they’re cheating for a piece of plastic, all of a sudden this environment can facilitate to a much higher degree. There are many other influences like this and what this means is that we need to think about the environment, we need to think about regulation, we need to think about rules, we need to think about professional cause of ethics because those things eventually have much more to do with how people behave than individual personality.

Why do students cheat on tests when it will effect them later on in their lives?

So first of all, I think that students for sure, but most people in general, don’t think much about what will happen later in lives, we have this general problem of thinking about short-term and not thinking about long-term and this is everywhere, right, it’s about why we over-eat and under-exercise, and under-save and text and drive, don’t take our medication on time and have unprotected sex, all of those behaviors are due to the fact that we don’t think about long-term.

In the rational framework of course people always think about the long-term and in the rational framework of cheating people think in the long-term, but in reality we find that people don’t think so much about the long-term. And this means, by the way, that the rules and regulations and laws that rely on the long-term, that rely on prison sentences, and probability that someday somebody might catch you are much less effective then we think because when we are creating the rules and regulations we have in mind a rational agent who thinks in the long-term and human beings are not like that and college students are of course the same.

Can you name a situation when somebody was dishonest and it backfired on them? What about when somebody was honest?

So of course there are many cases where dishonesty has backfired and I think the best example of this is the financial crisis. When Greenspan went in front of Congress he said that he thought that companies would self-regulate themselves, right, that the individual traders and bankers of course have an incentive to be dishonest because they get to pocket a tremendous amount of money from this activity- something that is good for them in the short-term, but maybe not so good in the long-term. But, for the companies this is really bad, the companies can go bankrupt. I mean, in fact there was just a story recently of a trader who basically caused his bank to lose 2 Billion dollars by misbehaving.

So, there’s lots of examples like this when individuals are misbehaving dishonestly in the short-term and not thinking about the long-term and companies are not sufficiently successful in regulating this behavior. In terms of being honest and it backfiring, it depends on what you mean by “backfiring”. So, of course, if you work in a bank and your bank people are perfectly honest, and then you have other banks where people try all the funny procedures and they don’t have Chinese walls and they sell stocks that are not good to their clients to take them off of their hands and so on. All of a sudden if you’re honest, you would do well by your clients, but you would be less wealthy.

And actually, one of our findings is that people’s standards for morality are dramatically influenced by the behavior of people around them and I think that if you have a situation where bankers are friends with bankers and politicians are friends with politicians and they see people in their social circle misbehaving in a dishonest way there is basically a temptation to match that behavior and find a similar behavior, find it socially acceptable, follow up on it and continue behaving this way. And of course, the really sad thing about it is that those things have a propensity for a slippery slope and escalation, which I think is exactly what we’ve seen over the past few years and sadly I have not seen any serious attempt to stop this escalation and even to reset it, but we have to because we are getting into a worse and worse situation over time.

Based on your research, what motivates people to behave dishonestly?

What we basically find is that people are a nice combination of economic incentives and psychological incentives. Our economic side of us wants to benefit from cheating, because cheating benefits us in the short-term. Now, it might not work for us in the long-term, but because we don’t think about the long-term, we focus on the short-term. On the other hand, we have the psychology side of us, which makes us want to feel that we are honest, moral people. We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves. It turns out we are a combination of both of these forces. Now, you could say that you could do one or the other, you could look in the mirror and either feel good about yourself or you could be dishonest, you can’t do both. But, it turns out that due to our flexible psychology, we can do both as long as we cheat just a little bit.

As long as we cheat just a little bit we get to benefit from cheating, just a little bit and we get to think of ourselves as honest people. So the way to think about it is, imagine that you went with a friend to dinner 10 times over the last year and then you ask yourself, can you submit those things as expenses to the IRS on your report and, you know, maybe you would not feel comfortable submitting all 10, but two or three you would feel okay with. And that’s basically what we find, people kind of make their own judgment and as long as we cheat just a little bit, we benefit from cheating a little bit, but we can still think of ourselves as honest, moral people. It’s this psychological game that’s all around rationalization that is incredibly important to understand because that is where dishonesty in the market comes from and if we hope to stop it, we need to stop this ability that we all have to cheat a little bit and quickly rationalize our actions.

What can your book teach us about how we should manage our careers?

Well, it’s about managing our career and other people’s careers. You can speculate that there are basically bad apples out there, that some people are bad and some people are good. All the only thing you want to do is make sure you are a good apple and not a bad apple and that your company doesn’t hire bad apples and that you don’t have bad apples as friends. But, the reality what we shown in the research is that we all have the capacity to become bad apples. Of course, there are some psychopaths out there, but outside of those very very few individuals all of us basically have the capacity to start misbehaving and over time increase our misbehavior step by step until we become quite rotten. The question of course is how do we stop it because it is not as if people start their lives wanting to end being corrupt and having a chance of being caught and going to jail, but we do it step by step without thinking too much about what we are doing.

It’s as if, I’ll give you an example of an accountant who I talked to at some point, this was the CFO of a big company and their company was making money, but one quarter they were shy of Wall Street expectation and the CEO came and talked to him and said “oh, you know, we’re so close, we’re almost, can you make the books a little better?” and without thinking much, without thinking they were doing anything really bad he kind of fixed the book just a little bit because they were actually making money, they were making money, they were very close, they were almost there, it was just a question of how they formulate the books and think about it. Of course, they found justification for that, but of course the next quarter was harder to justify and harder to justify until things became too bad. Eventually he ended up in jail.

He wasn’t thinking when he started that this would be the end game, but it did become the end game because it was time after time after time, slightly one step after the other without thinking about the end game. I’m not saying that we’re all likely to kind of behave as badly as this CFO, but the reality is that we have a much higher capacity for this behavior than we realize and we really have to create very strict rules and regulation to protect ourselves against it. And, by the way, the same thing works for me and the same thing works for science. We often think that rules and regulations are to protect other people from our misbehavior, I think they also have an incredibly important meaning to protect us against ourselves.

They are basically to protect us against misbehaving in ways that we, ourselves, wouldn’t want to. Finally, I should say that I think of dishonesty as one, but great, example of irrationality, there is many irrationalities, we have many odd and curious instincts and many odd and curious quirks and motivations and dishonesty is one of them. If you think about it from this perspective, it is something that acts on us not within the rational framework. There are things that are rational that don’t influence us and irrational influences that do influence us. On top of that, we don’t exactly understand how it works on us and because of that we really need to rely on science and findings, rather than our intuitions when we come to think about how to create a better environment or better regulations or how to protect ourselves.

Dan Schawbel , Forbes Contributor

Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm. He is also the #1 international bestselling author of Me 2.0 and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. Subscribe to his updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel.

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Giant Pandas are coming to Malaysia

China to loan 2 pandas to Malaysia for 10 years

Images for Giant Pandas

PETALING JAYA: Malaysians will soon be able to see the iconic but endangered Giant Panda in real life. China will loan two baby pandas to the country for 10 years.

This follows an agreement between the Government and China Wildlife Conservation Association, in commemoration of the countries' 40th anniversary of diplomatic relationship, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said in a statement yesterday.

The agreement will be signed on June 15.

The pandas will be placed in a special exhibit in Taman Wetland, Putrajaya. Malaysians will also get the chance to name to pandas in a nationwide contest.

The ministry said the cooperation would enable Malaysia to conduct conservation research, adding that the presence of the pandas would promote public awareness on China's panda conservation efforts.

“This agreement shows Malaysia's commitment towards China's effort in increasing the number of endangered Giant Panda which is endemic in China, estimated currently about 1,600 only.

“This is in accordance to Aichi Targets 2010 under the Convention on Biological Diversity which promote conservation efforts in preventing species extinction,” the statement read.

The ministry said the close relationship between the two countries had enabled Malaysia to attract more foreign investment from China to boost the country's economy further.

“Through this cooperation too, Malaysia can conduct conservation research on the Giant Panda.

The strength of our local expertise will be enhanced through technology transfer by PRC in the field of artificial insemination, genetic and behavioural study on the Giant Panda,” it said.

The agreement was made following Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Nanning, China, last April.

Najib had made the request during his visit there to open the Malaysia-China industrial park.

China news reports in April reported that Malaysia would spend a whopping RM20mil for the upkeep of the pandas.

The budget is expected to cover for the construction of an air-conditioned sanctuary for the pandas, importing bamboos from China for their meals as well to train local handlers for the animals.

By JOSEPH KAOS Jr joekaosjr@thestar.com.my

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Tuesday, June 12, 2012