BioBusiness (again)

Hi everyone. Back with me again in this second lesson of BioBusiness. I was surprisingly enjoying this lesson, though I have to admit that I am not into this kind of sub-topic.

"When we are able to grow the resources we need, we will finally be on the road to sustainability." 

    -Gurinder Shahi-

That quotation from Prof intrigued me. I was wondering how and when will that happen. Are we able to grow all the resources we need by ourselves? If yes, when? Is it too late by then?

Dr. Norman Borlaug : the unsung hero. I have never heard that name before nor I was interested to know him... at first. However, Prof showed us a video, short yet meaningful, that conveyed that this man, Norman, was the one who proposed the idea of the concept of "Green Revolution". Green Revolution saved billions of lives, and yet, little appreciation has been given to Norman compared to others. 

There I provided a link from Wikipedia, in case you are interested in knowing more of Green Revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Peers presentation

There is one presentation from my peer that is I personally think quite interesting. Michelle's short presentation about cows was really intriguing. She talked about how genes played important roles in breeding cows. I have never personally care or even think for a minute where do my burger come from... As long as it tastes good, I don't complain :p. However, after that brief presentation, I have to admit that now I am beginning to wonder where do all my food comes from. Are we now consuming GM food more than natural food? Is it good or bad for us? Well, I hope someday I will be able to find out the answer.

6/10. The four points missing are caused by my lack of interests of this particular sub-topic. Prof's idea and my peer presentation made the day!

BioBusiness !

It was raining. Prof was late. So did I.

"Ouch". That was the first word I said when I heard the word BioBusiness. Though I was not interested in this topic at first, I found the presentation of my peers quite eye-catching.

Firstly, we watched two parts of a video summarizing key innovations in wellness and disease management. That was a great, concise, worth-watching video, considering that it was made by Prof's former students. What a way to start the lesson

Then, Prof showed us some surprising data about global burden of disease. What have been the leading causes of death and disability in 1990 are now changing. Lower respiratory infections or diarrhea diseases that have been the two leading causes of death in 1990 now are the fifth and sixth cause of death and disability in 2000. This improvement proves us one thing : there has been a significant progress in improving world's general health. However, it is far too early to stop what we have been doing so far.

Peer's presentation :
Ethan's presentation is so far the best presentation our class have. The slides were awesomely neat and organized. The content itself was concise and interesting. mHealth or mobile health is indeed very useful in developed countries. However, we have to consider the fact that the global health improvement plan is dedicated to developing countries, which hardly can afford mobile phones or internet to be implemented globally. Well, in a nutshell, I think the concept of mHealth is innovative. Mobile phone has now become a necessity, instead of a luxury like it used to be.

Future possible discussion :
What do you think as students, or Profs, can we do to improve our own health? To do big things, we have to start from the small ones.

I will rate this session 6/10 since I honestly don't really have an interest for this subtopic...

TWC Paper Outline

How Keyboard Affects Our Way of  Recording Data

Historical perspective :

Tracking far back to the stone age, where people write by carving on a piece of stone using berries or animal blood, we can now breathe at ease that someone invented paper and ink. However, with the invention of Keyboard, we now advance ourselves from writing to typing. (I also am going to provide a timeline)

Rationale for selecting this :

The invention of keyboard has brought a revolutionary change : we now type rather than write.  People now type more than write : employees, students, don’t write letters and documents, they now type documents. Every little thing in our lives that can be replaced by the usage of keyboard is now being replaced by keyboard.

Current issues :

Usage : keyboard technology is applied on desktop, laptop, handphone, smartphone, security doors, calculator(?).

Advantages : neater, faster, more efficient, eco-friendly (no ink or anything to type things down, only fingers).

Drawbacks :

Keyboards make people ‘stupid’, Chinese and Japanese people are losing their identities, they type more than they write : some people forgot how to write in Chinese or Kanji (Kanji Amnesia). Some argue that we are losing our identity as our writing is replaced my mere alphabets being typed down.

Practicality and pragmatism.

Future outlook :

New innovations such as eye-movement keyboards and virtual keyboards that enable people to type things down by only moving their eyes or moving their fingers in mid-air.

ICT is Changing the World

What a topic... Though we have been hearing and discussing this topic for a long time, we have not stopped discussing yet. Why? I believe it is because ICT is always advancing even as we are writing our blogs. Information communication technology, or ICT for short, is one of the fastest-growing technology we currently have.

There is, however, an idea that Prof threw out in the beginning of the session that catch my attention. "When we use technology, who we are is extended". When we play badminton for instance, the racket is considered to be our 'part of body'. When we do Kendo, our wooden sword is our extension of our hand. Or when we play football, there are times we the ball become our extension of our foot. Then, what is it to be human? To be human is to be a person, I believe, with every technology attached. Be it a racket, ball, or even people with artificial limbs, I believe that our identities as human are not yet lost. We are who we are!

Okay. Another intriguing question. Have we captured the full potential of ICT? This is a quite ironic question. Take the millennium goals for instance. There are many things that we can do with ICT! Imagine the possibilities we can do with ICT : we can apply online health monitoring, for example, to people in Africa or we can use ICT to apply e-learning to people who are not able to go to school. However, UN, until now, haven't tried hard enough to make us of this ICT to its maximal potential. We can say that UN only barely skin the surface. I think instead of donating some money or giving food, UN can instead allocate the resources  it has to do a further research on ICT focusing on helping those people in need.

The presentation of one of my peer that made my day is actually the first one. I just realized how important TV to me. I can't imagine a whole week without watching my TV. The thing is, how will TV be in the future. Will it be as cool as it is depicted? I am quite positive about it! Just as the new Sony TV innovation, the 360 degrees screen, we can see that the sky is the limit for this TV related technology!

Future possible discussion :

Is ICT a double-edged sword? If yes, what is the worst case scenario if it strikes us back?

Uncertainty is the only certainty

In this 4th session of TWC, this time... I found the ideas are everywhere. Though I am a little blur at first, I was finally able to catch all the ideas at the end. I couldn't help but writing down all the things that Prof said and what my peers said in discussion.

Firstly, I want to thank Prof (again) for sharing with the class a great illustration about eagle and ostrich. When problems come or when opportunities appear, we have to decide : be an eagle or an ostrich. Look closely, observe, and immediately take action fast like an eagle, or just look around, hide its head, and pretend nothing happen like an ostrich. I definitely agree that we have to be proactive and reactive in dealing with the changes that occur from time to time. Be it is a revolutionary or an evolutionary change, we have to plan ahead, be ready to face it, and execute our plan at the right place and the right time.

By the way, I found that the concept of revolutionary and evolutionary changes, as well as 'wild cards' rather interesting. I just realized that there were so many shocking events that totally have changed the way people behave and appreciate things. Take Japan as an example. After the unexpected earthquake stroke Fukushima months ago, Japan is forced to look for of a new source of energy that is safer and more sustainable. Not surprisingly, Japanese (and the rest of people in the world) are also changing their way of thinking : they are now more skeptical about the safety and the benefits of the usage of nuclear power. Hopefully, Japan or any other country can come up with a brilliant and fresh ideas that can solve this whole energy problem. Will we be able to find an alternative energy? In my opinion, in this case, the problem is not whether we can or we can't, but whether we have enough time or not. Given the current technology we possess and the advanced way of thinking we now adopt, I believe sooner or later we will come up with a brilliant idea that hopefully can solve this problem.

One presentation that I thought was captivating is the one discussing about the drawbacks of social media. How social media has corrupted us in the sense that it also gives us some negative impacts? According to my peer who is presenting, the two drawbacks are : losing identity and shortening of attention span, which I don't really agree. Let us see the bigger picture here. Social media, as well as internet, is technology that is just and good; it is a media to express our opinions, ideas, or point of views. The main problem lies within ourselves : we sometimes, undeniably, can't control our own behaviors that we end up playing games, checking our emails unnecessarily, blogging, etc. instead of using the social media wisely. Regarding the 'losing identity' statement, I have to admit that there are people who are really into the virtual world to the point they wish that the reality world doesn't exist. However, given the wide range of people who can access social media, we, the users of social media, are indirectly enriched by the so many cultures that are shared through social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, or WordPress. So, in my opinion, I'd rather suggest the term 'enriching our culture' rather than 'losing identity'.

Further Possible Discussion
Talking about social media, we have seen many breakthrough that dramatically changed the market of social media. From the first invention of Friendster to the Facebook amazing breakthrough, we have to admit there are so many things are changing. What do you think of the change management of Friendster's focus from social media to social gaming in response to Facebook amazing features that enable Facebook to thrive in the social media world?

Go Green?

In this session 3 of TWC class, I found some ideas which I never questioned before. As usual, prof provided us with some interesting topics and my peers presented great presentations about many fresh topics.

The first topic that prof brought up was to create a 'cyclical' business and industrial models in order to be sustainable in this fast-moving world. I totally agree with the opinion that our world is now becoming more and more exploited rather than preserved. What we should be doing now is thinking (hard) how to preserve our resources so our future generation will be able to enjoy the same resources we are enjoying currently.

Just like the EU has been doing for the past years, Asia, especially Singapore should be doing the similar thing as well in order to ensure the sustainability of our business and environment. However, I have to admit that we are now living in the world full of hypocrisy : we ought to think that the next generation, instead of our generation, is the generation that should be able to think of a breakthrough to this sustainability problem and this thinking cycle has been occurring for a long time. This kind of point of view hinders our world to become a more sustainable workplace.

In the next session, there was a quotation, which I have known before, that caught my eye. "Life is pretty simple : You do some stuff...The trick is the doing something else." - Tom Peters. What is doing something else? The something else is indeed a thin, however extremely important, line that differentiate between creative successful people and ordinary people. From the presentation of my peers, I found the "Green Sky Thinking" is quite interesting. As the pace of our world is going faster, people also move frequently. Tourism, working requirement, education pursuit, and many other reasons required people to travel far away from their home. Airplanes, which is the fastest with the least possibility of accident vehicles, are now being used more than ever. If only the concept of "Green Sky Thinking" is applied on every airlines, I believe that it will dramatically reduce the air pollution. However, I am still skeptical about this matter : it is the matter of priority, whether we put economical issue first or eco-friendly issue first.

Further possible discussion : 
What do you think Singapore should do? Should our small yet advanced country regulate the Green Sky Thinking? Should Singapore and its citizen put environmental sustainability as a top priority rather than economical issues? What can we do as students, as we embark on our education journey in Singapore?

-TWC Session 2-

A new week. Another interesting class. I was amazed by the new perspective that I received from the readings as well as from the Professor. I am now able to distinguish between 'a rising star' and a 'falling star', terms which I find rather confusing at first!

Well, in the beginning of the class, I clearly remembered the Professor said something similar to this,"If you think you are the king of your hill and then you sit down, you are indeed going down." It made me think that perhaps that kind of attitude is one of the reasons that can explain why the West is slowing down. On the other hand, the attitudes of a 'rising star', which are optimistic, open to new ideas, and keen to invest in new ideas, are the exact kind of point of view and behaviors that everyone-every organization-every country needs most in order to thrive in this race.

There was, however, one intriguing discussion about Google that I found rather fascinating. Is Google really making us stupid and lost of identity? I have to say that I strongly disagree with the author of the article. Google and other search engines are definitely not the only driving factors that affect our identities. Years of life experience and our own point of view as well as attitude towards our surroundings possess a much more impact than what information Google can provide. Google may become the 'universal' tool for searching information, but nothing more. It will not, and can not, make us lose our identities, rather enrich them. By using Google, our knowledge will be broaden and our way of thinking will be changed as we, the users, will encounter many articles whom authors have different point of views.

One last sentence to end this post : I have a feeling that even though this TWC course is going to be tiring, this course will benefit me greatly !