The Mouse That Roared

Finger pointing in the wrong direction, Lee Hsien Loong missed the quiet mice in his own team in Parliament. The brigadier general was never strong in marksmanship anyway, he was bested by his own papa at a rifle range in Brunei.

Raymond Lim obviously zipped his lips after being dethroned from his million dollar perch. He was not about to give his successor any tips on running the Transport Ministry, not for a paltry $16,000 a month anyway.

The surprise revelation - and this is according to Hansard, the name for Parliamentary records - is that Goh Chok Tong spoke only once in Parliament since he was re-elected in 2011. He finally got off his seat-warmer bum in February 2013 to support the divisive Population White Paper. He was one of the 77 PAP MPs who endorsed the 6.9 million "planning parameter".

"Regarding population size, I, too, am not sure about the idea of having 6.9 million people. Many Singaporeans cannot imagine how that can work, when their daily experience with 5.3 million people is of crowded trains and buses. It is good that Deputy Prime Minister Teo has reiterated and reassured all of us that 6.9 million is only a planning parameter and not a policy target."

If the parameter is the bull's-eye of a target, and the arrows are estimates, then a relatively high absolute value for the bias means the average position of the arrows is off-target, and a relatively low absolute bias means the average position of the arrows is on target. They may be dispersed, or may be clustered. The relationship between bias and variance is analogous to the relationship between accuracy and precision. Notice the accuracy and precision is specified to a first decimal point. Not 6, not 7, but exactly 6.9 million.

Goh's skewed understanding of the fable of the rooster that crows when the sun rises is that the feathered creature was claiming credit it could cause the sun to rise. Thanks to alternate voices, we now know the rooster was heralding the dawn of a new day.