obama and $105.30

Those are the two things I notice in this weekend which give me some degree of surprise.

First I have to say that Barack Obama is such a charismatic candidate in the campaign right now. Watching him in Ellen’s Show, Tonight Show, or in David Letterman’s Show; plus the many debates with Hilary Clinton and many public speeches… I really think he is a rare-breed in the political world. Many criticize him of just talking and doubt that he can deliver. But let’s be frank – the main responsibility for a leader is to lead and make important decision, not to execute nor to plan. Judging from his performance so far, he is absolutely ready to lead, he can motivate people and more importantly unify them. Both Obama and Clinton are going for “change”, but Obama not only looking at the policies, but also changes in the whole political system, asking for less influences from lobbyists or special interest groups and return the government back to the people. He even refuses to take donation from those groups, and accepts just $5 or $10 small donations from all over the country. This is exactly an implementation of the long tail theory outside the area of business world, and it works wonderfully for him as I believe he gathers the most funding right now. If I am living in US, not doubt I will support this guy, coz I think he can change how the world looks at US as well.

The second thing is, after I fill up my car today in the petrol station I am kind of shock with a price I have NEVER seen, $105.30. I vaguely remember about 6 years ago when I just bought my car it was around $45-$50 for a full tank. That’s like an annual inflation of more than 13%. We really need more fuel efficient cars in the market!

sudoku

This was the last remark from my supervisor at our meeting today, and I have to say I have failed him again

A month ago I was asked to write a literature review paper in the area of open innovation and open source, and to make it more fun I had to aim for publishing it (yeah there are journals for literature reviews as well). Without much prior experience, I basically went with my own guts on how to do this. I did not have a systematic way of collecting articles to review, just hit a few keywords to the search engine and downloaded the ones I could. And of course I did not document this “research process” at all. Then when I started to review those articles, I was more on the mission to identify new theories, new concepts, unexplored areas etc and was too excited doing that, instead of the old fashion reviewing.

Result? My supervisor basically said all I had done was just making some potential conclusions, for a body of research that I had not yet clearly identified, nor reviewed properly. He added that this process should be non-creative, non-exciting and very restrictive… so if I did not feel any of that probably I was not doing it right

Actually I was not that upset, because from this little incident I sort of understand myself a bit better. I have a tendency to skip all the rules of a game and try to define new ones, like as I have some sort of authority to do that autonomously. That’s how I behave as a lecturer I guess (at least most students would agree that I challenge the status quo quite often, I mean in terms of student workloads, hehe), I have the total freedom to come up with a set of conclusions for things that I think I know (or even think I know better than others), and preach those “me-idea” to the students. Research is the other way round, especially at this early stage, I have to exclude “me-idea” from my paper. I cannot read a few articles and then feel that I have the same level of understanding of the field as those people who have spent years to research there. For that, my idea does not count, and I have to do a self-filter in my mind when I write.

As my supervisor said, it was like sudoku – you have 9 numbers in the game to play with, and all I am learning now is the rules to play this game and be familiar with the 9 numbers… but not try to think about changing the games with even more numbers and how exciting that would be etc. I know in some way it does sound anti-creative, but I guess I can be creative once I go thru this stage, building a solid foundation of knowledge that I borrow from others and so I do not have to spend all the time to justify them.

I’ll try again!

long time no see

Well it was a bit hard for me to keep writing from now and then; but relatively easy to just forget about it, and I did. Not much had happened or changed from the last post I guess – except I am finally becoming a full time student again. Actually it officially started in 1st Aug 2007, but I did not feel that until now I am sharing a big office which can seat 20 PhD students together in the new Business School building. Despite a lot of complaints about the new building (e.g. the air-con behaves like there are only 2 temperature settings, either desert-like or you can almost feel like snowing inside), I appreciate the opportunity to work with my PhD buddies (a.k.a. colleagues) in the same space. I have isolated myself for just too long inside my office with the door shut, so the current working environment is pretty new and exciting for me. I know somehow my mind is still trapped a bit like inside a closed office as I was before physically; but I hope, one day at a time, I can find myself feeling more and more comfortable among other people – just like what normal people do. I know others do not believe me when I tell them I am anti-social until they know me for a while; I think I have enough for that in the past 6-7 years maybe, and doing a PhD actually gives me a chance to make some changes at a personal level too.

So what am I studying? A bit of what I am always interested in, plus a lot of stuff that I do not know before. Basically it is about open source software and innovation. Apparently a lot of researchers, even they do not have the computer science background, are really fascinated with open source. So my work now is to study the literature, understand what has been covered already, and try to identify a little place I can potentially contribute on. Not aim at changing the world, not aim for a big or crazy discovery, just a tiny bit would be my goal.

Ironically, I am working at home for the last few days coz I am rushing to finish an article…. when Brian (he is sitting next to me, teaches me a lot of stuff and he is 1.5 year ahead of me in the PhD programme) asks me why I do not come to work lately, I really don’t know…. maybe I feel I am a bit embarrassed my productivity being so low comparing with them, and if I can finish the article then perhaps I feel better sitting around. Again I know is the trapped mind speaking, but sometimes seeing him finishing like 7 pages in an afternoon (he did claim that was unusual) can be quite self-confident destroying Yeah, one of my problem is I write way too slow. And I think too much before I dare to write, not to mention I edit like crazy before I move on to the next paragraph…. all these I need to improve before I can be a good player in this game.

Anyway, I am going to finish the article draft by this week and so I fully look forward to go back to work next week in the PhD office, yeah!

P.S. Another new thing is my 15″ MacBook Pro! Alright, I know about MacBook Air but it was not released yet when I bought my laptop in November last year. As a PC-to-Mac guy, I would say the experience is totally worth it. By no mean Mac is perfect, especially I did experience freezing quite often at the beginning which I never experience that much with Vista, but there are lots of clever features they have in their OS and their apps. Especially I like the quick look feature in Mail – I mean finally I do not have to double click each image files from an email and I can view them like a slide-show. Oh also there is a feature that it will pick up dates in an email and if you right click and choose an option then a new event can be created and stored in iCal with the right date/time and default title from the email. That was pretty smart and actually a company I used to work for wanted to build something like that for Outlook too (not sure if they eventually have done that at all). Love their iLife suite and also Aperture for photo management/editing. I still need to use PC from time to time (e.g. for work reason) which means Mac cannot replace PC for me yet, but for every PC-only user it is definitely worthwhile to at least try a Mac for once.