east and west

Quite like the sound-bytes from Vincent Wong of CRHK, have listened to him every morning when I am driving to work around 9:10am from the local radio 95.8FM (they broadcast different sound-bytes and programmes from RTHK/CRHK/MetroRadio during the day mixing with their own low-budget ones in between which some of them are pure torture to both the ears and the mind). The sound-byte is like 5 minutes long but he manages to speak about something really interesting every time. In one occasion he even talks about CPPIB, which of course all shareholders of Auckland International Airport would not be unfamiliar with. His international perspectives on things have kept me listening, and today again he has raised an interesting issue.

Some researchers have studied the differences in perspective and priority between eastern and western people with some simple tools in experiments – like a picture of an elephant in a forest or a set of ball pens with 4 of them are red and 1 of them is yellow. Result? Eastern people would tend to focus on the forest and pick a red pen; while western people would be opposite in their choice. Researchers think that this has a huge implication of how eastern and western people are different from their minds to their choices and finally their actions. Eastern people is more comparative in nature, they like to compare and understand the relationship between themselves and others prior to anything else. Western people on the other hand are more self-centered, they like to understand themselves first before the environment they are in. So in an example of a particular outbreak of disease, eastern people would tend to find out how it is being transmitted first while western people would concern more about getting a vaccine. In doing business, eastern people requires trust and personal relationship establishment before they can conduct business with others; and perhaps western people would do the exact opposite. They will only form personal relationship with others once they have worked together.

I am not sure how accurate this research is, especially I have seen the alternatives from both sides, but indeed there are differences among the East and the West. Being in New Zealand for about 13 years now, about half of my whole life is here. Yet no matter how much I like the weather and clean air in this country, I do find myself not fitting in with the culture completely. What would be interesting is that one day if I am back to Hong Kong and find that I cannot cope with their culture neither, then I would be absolutely screwed! What would be the middle point between East and West then? Maybe I should consider move to Indonesia as it is mid-way between Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Actually I am not certain if New Zealand is West… maybe South-west? Wonder if there is any differences between the North and the South?

santana

Even it rained heavily outside the stadium, it was full of heat and energy for the 2.5 hours long performance from Santana! Just one night in Auckland, we managed to buy the tickets at the door (very lucky) and even they were side seats, they were not as bad as we thought. Honestly I had no idea what Santana was about or any of their music, but I always know Emily is crazy about them/him and so once I read from the newspaper about their concert tonight, immediately we tried to buy the tickets in every way we could.

I was in charge of trademe while she was trying her luck with ticketmaster, the official website for selling the tickets. It was a pretty intense process… coz one person was selling 2 tickets at the auction site which at that time we believed they were better seats than the ones available from ticketmaster. We waited till the last 2 minutes to start our bid, and the price went up from $160 to $175, then $176, $178, $180, $182, $185, $190, $194, $196, $197, $198… basically became a bidding war between me and another buyer. Originally I stopped, but in the last 13 seconds I placed $199, and so the auction extended for another 2 minutes…. and that 2 minutes was very long indeed, probably I had refreshed my browser like a hundred times while I was waiting. Finally… we won! Well $199 was the official selling price for those tickets, and so we were happy about it and wrote an email to the seller immediately after my heart calmed down a bit.

Then we waited, and waited. Wrote another 2 emails, no replies. Managed to find their phone number (from one of their earlier post in some other auctions), phoned them, no one answered. Left voice message, emailed them again… nothing! Until 6:40pm (the concert started at 8pm and we won the auction around 4:30pm) finally got hold of him from the phone, and he told me that he sold the tickets to someone else already… did not even apologize and tried to blame everything to his wife… we were so disappointed at that time… felt like being cheated in a way but could not really do anything about it (I mean there is no penalty for people listing item in trademe for sales while they do not really possess with them). At one point we thought we would not go, coz the remaining seats were looking pretty bad from ticketmaster’s website. Luckily I still decided to visit the venue and “see how that goes”.

No doubt this is the first time for me to be in a concert, where the vocals or singers are not in the leading role at all. A 60 years old guy with 2 guitars on his shoulder was the spotlight for 90% of the show, and it was pretty amazing to see him playing like his fingers disjointed from his palm from time to time… also a lot of credits to the drum player, and the base guitarist… overall, I enjoyed the music so much even a lot of them I have never heard before.

Santana said, “if I am not living in the States, this probably would be the place I want to live in.” I bet he said that in every country he visited

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.

i was elected to lead, not to read

Yeah I guess that line is a bit out-dated by now, but indeed one of those funniest moments in the Simpson’s movie is to see President Schwarzenegger making “decisions”. Perhaps a bit unfair to stereotype him like that, so today I am going to share a story that I heard over the radio about him and how he makes political decisions in real life.

Despite the negativity over all the investment banks with sub-prime loan crisis or credit crunch in the recent months, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers have both expressed their interests in operating the lottery in the state of California for a cheque of $18 billions and $36 billions respectively. While people working in the state government is indifferent about this, Governor Schwarzenegger believes it is a good idea.

Arnold: Well what are we waiting for? Let’s do this.

Associate: But the public may see that as a support in gambling from the state government for more money.

Arnold: We can pour all the money we collect from this into health care then, people will accept it.

Associate: What about the state senators? They will demand us to impose more regulations to the investment bank in how they can run the lottery. That would increase a lot of our workload, and the senators would keep a close eye on us all the time. Also that may affect the negotiation with the investment bank….

Arnold: That’s easy. We just sit back let the senators to come up with their desire list of regulations. They know it very well that if there are too many regulations then the lottery would become a less attractive investment, and so the money we get from the investment bank would be lower, hence affect the health care system that we intend to use the money for. Now the senators or the public can decide what is more important – regulating the lottery or improving the health care, and the answer will determine the price of the deal.

Associate: Brilliant! Let me go and draft this, I’ll be back!

Personally I think the governor is pretty smart to use the price system from economics 101 on top of something that is traditionally difficult to associate a price with – desire to regulate the lottery for example. After that link is created, then discussion around that can be easily understood by everybody who has an opinion about how much they would want their social health care to be improved, balance with how much they want the lottery to be regulated. I almost feel that I should try to put a price tag to every topic or assessment I have in my course, so that I can easily communicate with my students why they are doing them in the first place

professor randy pausch

“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” is the topic of his last lecture on the 18th Sep 2007 in Carnegie Mellon University. He is a professor in Computer Science, and he has been involved in EA games and Google’s software, and a huge icon in virtual reality.

I do not know any of those information about him beforehand; instead my attention is caught when I read the news this morning that he is dying from pancreatic cancer but yet has just delivered a very inspirational and full-of-humor lecture about life. He does not stop working after knowing he has about 6 more months of good health to go, instead he tells his audiences that he has achieved most of his dreams by now and he wants to share all the lessons he has learned. “It’s not about how to achieve your dream, but how to lead your life. You lead your life the right way, karma will take care itself, the dreams will come to you.” It is really a good lecture, and I wish I can share with anyone I know.

http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/multimedia/randy-pausch-lecture.shtml

Good luck Professor!

random things i learn today

8:30am – Subway is selling 6 inches sub for $3.90! Get a Spicy Italian for breakfast and feel it is so much healthier than McDonald’s for some reason.

9:30am – I find out that my tutors do share my ideology of running the courses the way I am, and they understand the value of learning about technologies in association with problem solving and business strategy. Well, I realize they work for me so in some way they may say stuff that I like to hear… let’s just stop at that! I really like to have some support in this lonely journey of teaching IT to students in business degree.

10:30am – Sky City has made an announcement saying there is an unnamed buyer indicating an interest of a 100% ownership of the casino company by paying off with cash. Even no information on the proposed takeover price yet, the share price goes up from $4.35 to $5.22 for a 20% gain. So I guess the market has sort of decided how much the buyer should pay without needing any valuation, how convenient.

12:00pm – Watch YouTube for a while and in a particular talk show there is a concept pretty funny: working for a job that you dislike is just like working as a prostitute; oh you are a high-paid doctor right? That means you are a top-graded prostitute if you don’t like what you do but only for the money. Luckily, I still like what I am doing

1:00pm – Two students call for a meeting with the BBIM director, coordinator and some staff to discuss their idea of having a social-networking facility for our degree serving all the students and staff. I think we collectively have done a really good job to make the students feeling comfortable enough in expressing their interests and ask for support from the faculty in situation like this, despite of the outcome. This feels even healthier than my morning sub! I gave them some of my suggestion and hopefully they would not feel any kind of discouragement, coz deep inside I really admire their passion and wish they can implement the tools they believe in.

2:00pm – Congrats to Brian and Espen for winning the Spark 10k competition!

3:00pm – Just find out from Lotta that in Sweden they have a name for every single day in a year and if a person’s name is the same as a particular day’s name, then that day is the named day for that person to celebrate. Very interesting!

3:30pm – While I am blogging about everything I learn today, I just notice it is about time for me to leave. Not just because it is a Friday, but mostly because I work in Uni. Hahaha!

facebook and ticket scalping

Well I don’t think they are directly related, just wanna talk about them (separately I guess).

Joined Facebook a few months and not particularly active with it. Originally I thought they’re a popular platform for researchers (at least in US), and also a bit curious on how they make money by providing yet another social networking service. After “been there” for a while I can confidently confirm that they are not for work purpose at all (unless I count that some previous students adding me as their friends is “work” related). Very soon I get invited from my families, relatives and friends as well. My sister-in-law “bites” me in Facebook and turns me into a zombie, while others want to “fight” or “gamble” me. Yeah, I think we all become kids again.

Besides from the functionalities offered by Facebook, they allow third party add-ons to be “plugged” in seamlessly as native components. There are like thousands of those and some of them are pretty interesting. For example I can do a movie quiz by giving ratings to 30-40 movies, and see how much I match with my friends in terms of movie taste. Or I can identify all the countries that I have been to so far in my life on a map. While I am filling in all kinds of information about me just for fun, suddenly I realize it is not just my friends who would be seeing them. All the data would be sent back to the companies who produce those add-ons, and perhaps Facebook would have a pretty good idea of who I really am by all the information I supply, volunteerly. Perhaps this explains how Facebook generates its revenue – acting as a platform of personal information, where each of those third party add-on is a company, capturing and trading data of all kinds for their own purposes. It is a brilliant C2B business model. I probably would never answer a survey about a list of movies and rate them separately; but if it is a quiz to show how compatible I am with my friends then I’ll spend the time to do it.

So what about ticket scalping? Recently heard a discussion about it among the hosts in radio and they were talking about ways to avoid people to resell tickets to concerts or sport events etc. People in general hate ticket scalper because they inflate the price of tickets and make them less affordable. Some even argue that they are both immoral and illegal.

Wait a minute – why do we have ticket scalping in the first place? It is because there are people believing the price set for the ticket is lower than it should be. So what should be the “right” price? It should be at a level where supply meets demand. Now, for whatever reason that the event organizer has to set the price lower than the equilibrium price level, demand exceeds supply and so not everyone who really wants to go to that concert can go. Ticket scalping is actually a mechanism for allowing the price of ticket to be more market-driven, is a way to “correct” the mistake of pricing the tickets in the beginning. Besides they are taking away some risks that the event organizer have originally, there is really little reason for them to publicly criticize their “business partner” here. “Selling the ticket below normal price to honor the fans” is just BS. Ticket scalping is simply a predictable activity in a free market, and price control is exactly the opposite of it. Changing the law to incriminate the activity would only promote it to go underground. The real problem is not ticket scalping, is the pricing of the ticket.

Hmm… maybe Facebook and ticket scalping are somehow related – people judge them by their apparent appearance, rather than their real nature!

a fullstop and a new chapter

Being 30 years old is not really as bad as I thought it would be.

Oh well, nothing has changed to start with. I am still as lazy as a pig, procrastinate, self-centered and talk more than listen. Except when filling out survey/form now I have to check the box 30-35 instead of 24-29, virtually everything else stays the same. I was thinking if I should stop wearing jeans to work; but since I am working in Uni who am I kidding? I do feel the age pressure when I notice my students are 18 years old every year while I am the only one growing older, but I guess the frequent checking of ID when I purchase liquors or entering the casino do balance things out especially when I see the “wow” look from those people browsing my DOB from my driving license. Also get a bit of relief every time after I play the brain test game in NDS, telling me that my brain age is still around 25 years old and it spins pretty fast. I like to believe that is true.

According to an old say in Chinese, people should be “standing” or “establishing” in the society when they are 30. Looking back for the last 10 years with all the little successes and big failures, not sure if I have done anything that supports me to “stand”. One thing I do feel differently today is that people can be anything they want to be when they are young; but when they pass certain point then everything they do define who they are and is kinda difficult to change anymore after that. I believe I am at that stage now, 30 or not, I have reached there. Hopefully this belief would start to make some positive changes to my actions, and so I can have some good stories to review when I am 40 years old.

In the meantime, I would just forget about the whole thing and live as 29 years and 13 months old.

P.S. Happy Birthday to my love, who is still 20 something and has nothing to worry about