The Star Online: Business
The Star Online: Business |
| Posted: 02 Sep 2011 10:34 PM PDT TOTAL logistics service provider PKT Logistics Group Sdn Bhd's sprawling RM160mil state-of-the art centre called the "one logistics hub" in Shah Alam which spans over 27 acres is a far cry from its humble beginnings as a customs broker operating out of a simple two-storey link house in the mid-70s. PKT was established by Datuk Tio Sook Keo and was originally called Port Klang Trading in 1974. In 1996, Tio's son Datuk Michael Tio (PKT group chief executive and managing director) who was studying and working in Britain returned to Malaysia to take over the reins of the business from his father. "When I came back to Malaysia, I realised that companies here (in Malaysia) did not provide one-stop logistics services, unlike in other countries such as Japan or in Europe. "With that, I set out to change the way this company operated to offer total logistics services," says Michael. A self-proclaimed admirer of former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's "Look East Policy," Michael looked to countries such as Japan and South Korea to expand PKT's business. |
| Posted: 02 Sep 2011 10:31 PM PDT UNIVERSITIES award bachelors and masters degrees in different areas of learning, but regardless of the starting point, the apex of academic training is the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. So when I am asked what my doctorate is in, I would say "philosophy". This would be followed by an awkward silence before we change to a more comfortable topic of conversation. It is awfully difficult to talk about philosophy, and the modern degree of PhD is not about classical philosophy. While watching an old movie The Wizard of Oz with my granddaughter, it dawned on me that The Wizard of Oz had the answer. In the movie, the wizard reacts to the scarecrow's desire for a brain by explaining that the brain is actually a very mediocre commodity every living creature has one. What the scarecrow really needed, and which the wizard grants, is the degree of ThD or Doctor of Thinkology. Voila! Thinkology the art and science of thinking that is surely what the PhD degree is all about. Ordinary thinking is what every creature does, each in its own way. But the thinking that goes into becoming a Doctor of Philosophy is very different. What a PhD candidate does is to select a topic for research, and proceed to work on it in an organised and disciplined way. The end product will be a thesis, which would be a new book on the topic. Up to the level of Bachelors, or even Masters, one acquires knowledge from books written by other people, but in a PhD programme, the candidate writes a book for others to use. To emerge from a lifetime of reading books to writing one's own book requires a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but it would be an intellectually traumatic experience. Many candidates burn out in the process. The candidate cannot simply copy what is in other books. That would be plagiarism and a plagiarist faces total disgrace if found out. The PhD candidate has to become totally familiar with the present state of knowledge of the topic by immersing himself or herself in what has been published about it, but in a critical way questioning previous interpretations and assumptions and re-evaluating the evidence. At the same time, the candidate looks for new evidence or generates new data by experiment. Finally the candidate has to write a book to make all previous books on the topic obsolete. The topic of a PhD thesis is not as important as the critical thinking skill that is acquired. Its aim is to generate more knowledge about the topic. Whether this results in solving a problem is secondary. It is assumed that by generating more knowledge on a topic, other benefits will follow. Now and then, an Einstein produces a thesis that revolutionises the state of knowledge of an entire topic, but in most cases, a successful thesis is merely the starting point of a career in disciplined thinking, provided that the new Doctor of Philosophy is employed in a university, a research organisation or a think-tank, where he or she can continue to do disciplined thinking. It is not necessary to have a PhD degree to be a disciplined thinker but for employment in an intellectual or academic position, the PhD has become the normal requirement. But how do we know if PhDs are doing what they are paid to do? The only way is to enforce a publication rule. Under this mechanism, people employed to think have to show proof by publishing their work as "papers" in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-review means that the editor of the journal will send each submitted paper to at least two persons known to be knowledgeable in the topic, for review. The submitted paper is examined like a mini-thesis: it has to be original (not a rehash of previous work), and it must significantly contribute to new understanding of its topic. Only papers that pass peer review get published. A productive average rate of publication for a serious researcher is two papers a year. Once a paper is published, the title of the paper and its contents, together with the names of the authors and their institutional affiliations (institute and country) are captured in global databases. The papers that attract attention would be referred to "in citation" by other scientists, and all such citations are captured in global databases. This has made it possible to keep track of the number of times each paper is cited after its publication, to provide a measure of the impact that each and every paper makes on the global intellectual community. By tracking the number of times an author is cited, one can get a measure of the impact that the author has made. Such information is used to analyse the performance of authors. It is often used in making decisions on appointments, salary increments, promotions and terminations. Scholarly journals are themselves ranked every year by the frequency of citation of the papers they publish. The ranking of journals, usually announced in June, is anxiously awaited by editors to see how they have performed from year to year. Editors strive to improve their journal ratings by imposing higher standards on the papers they publish. It is the editors who enforce and manage the peer-review process. The body of data on publications and citations, sometimes in combination with other indicators, is also used to rank universities, and such ranking has become an annual global affair. In 2004, in an interesting and innovative use of publication databases, Sir David King, chief scientific advisor to the British Government ranked countries according to their output of scientific papers. He found that 31 countries produced over 97% of the worlds' output of scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. These are the developed western countries, with the United States in the lead. Of the non-western countries, Japan and Russia are prominent in the list. Of developing countries, China, Brazil and India moved into the top 31 recently. China is showing the fastest rate of growth in number of papers published, but in quality, as measured by citation rate, it is still far below United States. Nevertheless, the rise of China, Brazil and India confirms the close linkage between economic growth and scientific performance, first observed in the rise of Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the rise of US, Japan and Russia. The remaining 162 countries including Malaysia contributed a combined total of only 2.5% to the growth of scientific activity in the world. Through the global tracking of publications, made possible by powerful computers, intellectual activity has become open, measurable, and thereby manageable. The main tool of management is the application of the rule "Publish or Perish". An academic community that has never been subjected to this rule will strongly resist attempts to apply it. This is the challenge that Malaysian institutions face. ■ Botanist and researcher Francis Ng is the former deputy director-general of the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia. He is now the botanical consultant to Bandar Utama City Centre Sdn Bhd and the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre. |
| UK struggles to check inflation Posted: 02 Sep 2011 07:46 PM PDT LONDON: The Bank of England will struggle to return inflation to target due to its failure to raise interest rates, hawkish former policymaker Andrew Sentance told Reuters. Sentance, whose term on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) expired in May, warned that high inflation was damaging the BoE's credibility, and added that a further round of quantitative easing would not boost sluggish growth. "I think the MPC over a period of time will struggle to keep inflation at target. It will be above target and that will be a problem over the medium term," he said in an interview with Reuters Insider television conducted on Thursday. British inflation has been at least a percentage point above its 2% target since January 2010, and the BoE itself forecasts inflation will hit 5% later this year. Sentance said his policy stance had not changed since he left the MPC, and that he still believed interest rates should rise, despite financial market turmoil and signs of a global economic slowdown in the intervening three months. "While we do need relatively loose (monetary) policy ... we don't necessarily need monetary policy as loose as at the depths of the crisis,' he said. "I don't think that financial markets and the policy debate have moved on far enough from the world where we were in 2008 and 2009. If we continue in this fire-fighting mode that in itself will undermine confidence," he continued. The central bank is not expected to raise interest rates from record lows of 0.5% until next October at the earliest, a Reuters poll found this week. The other two BoE policymakers who supported higher interest rates while Sentance was on the MPC, Spencer Dale and Martin Weale, dropped this call last month, and there has been growing speculation that the central bank could embark on a second round of asset purchases. But Sentance said that supply side reforms were needed to boost growth, and thought more QE could be counterproductive in boosting corporate morale. It is not going to make businesses think. "Wow, I must go out and undertake that investment," he said. BoE governor Mervyn King has defended keeping interest rates steady in the face of rising inflation by saying that higher CPI was due to one-off factors, and pointing out that the MPC's mandate also called on it to avoid economic volatility. Sentence said the MPC had stretched the latter argument to breaking point. "I think the MPC has overused this flexibility and is in danger of stretching the credibility of the inflation target." Reuters |
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