Kaiwen Blog 凯文的博客

I remember 10 years ago, Microsoft Windows 95 crashed so much that we have the joke If Microsoft Built Cars: "Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, accept this, restart and drive on."

Today, most operating systems have become very stable that they can run many days without crashing, but Toyota’s cars, famous for quality and dependability, are crashing left and right, even after re-call service.  Even though Toyota claims it is mechanical problem, but people widely speculates that it is a software bug from dozens of micro-chips in the car.  The computer joke is creeping into my Camry now.

Nonetheless, I think the trend of increased computer use in automobiles will continue.  Ten years in the future, after numerous trials and errors, those software bugs will be worked out and safety laws will enforce software safety requirements.  Another ten years later, because software-controlled cars are so common place and the computer can drive so much faster and safer, some super highways might allow computer-drivers or computer-assisted driving only, like some sci-fi movies.

Meanwhile, "driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of 1 percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent)", so I will continue driving my Camry, learn how to stop a gone-wild Camry, and prepare to enjoy the unexpected thrill.

The Secret Language Leadership provides rich analysis of a 3-story approach to persuasion: start with a negative story to get attention, continue with a positive story to get desire for action, finish with a neutral story to cement commitment with explanations.

The US Open is one of the world’s most highly attended annual sporting events.  Larry Bonfante, the Chief Information Officer for Its organizing body the United States Tennis Association (USTA), leads a team of 25 people to support the event’s IT infrastructure.  He gave a presentation at the MySQL meetup tonight: Shaping the Future, Leadership for IT Executives.

Larry is an energetic and no-nonsense speaker.  With a fast pace, he touched many points.  I will just pick a few here.  He explained that alignment between IT and business is foolish, because IT is part of the business, just like accounting and marketing functions.  He thinks IT leader needs to understand the business vision, be able to manage fiscal responsibilities and engage the board (using language of the board).

He thinks marketing is important, part of everything.  His example is that he was able to market his value proposition to his wife, a beautiful and intelligent woman, 25 years ago, to persuade her to marry him.  He is adamant about honesty and transparency.  He is proud himself as being able to be read like a book.

He thinks leaders should focus on helping others succeed.  His sentence of the night was: “there’s no winner on a losing team.”

He argues that leaders bias towards action.  Break complex plan to bite size actionable chunks, track progress, then celebrate and communicate progress.

A few more interesting thoughts:

• Perception is the reality, and the perception of IT being a utility is bad, because there’re only 2 times a utility is being thought of: when it’s broken and when the bill comes.
• Authenticity: be yourself, but your best self.
• What you do speaks so loud that I can’t hear what you say.

On the eve of Chinese Tiger New Year, New York Times has an article about tiger farms in China.  The author, Mr. Andrew Jacobs, highlighted that the Chinese appetite for tiger parts are the biggest thread to the largest predator in Asia, and the government’s support for the farm is fueling the market.

It is already difficult to stop Chinese from smoking (the leading cause of death, more than environmental caused cancer) due to the social environment.  It is probably harder to erase their demand for something related to health, unless their cultural identities are changed.  It reminds me the human organ market, originating from Israel.

The video link provided in the article is in Chinese.  It argues that the farms are helping preserve tigers, incurring a cost of millions of dollars a year for feeding 1500 in the largest farm in Guilin.  After more than 18 years in operation, it seeks economic sustainability by tapping tigers from natural death (aging and fighting).

It seems to me that might be reasonable, but transparency and supervision are required.  I also need to think through the numbers to see if it makes sense.

Google revealed a prototype of Translation with Google Goggles yesterday.  A few weeks ago I was thinking if it makes sense to use twitter style translation service to connect foreigners with willing native speakers using mobile devices.  The system can implement several layers:

• Machine intelligence (OCR, machine translation, etc.) acts as first response if no human helper is immediately available.
• Fellow users translate and rate translations.
• Human translations feed back to the machine translation data.

Recently I stumbled upon an enlightening presentation given by a Stanford Business School professor Chip Heath on the topic of what makes ideas stick.

He first asked the audience if anyone has heard that the only man-made structure visible to the eyes in outer space is the Great Wall of China. Many people raised their hands. He then said he was originally fooled by this urban legend himself too! Yes, the Great Wall is very long, but it’s also not very wide. So if it is visible from outer space, any 8-lane highway will do.

Professor Heath’s point is, without advertising budget and coordinated marketing effort, urban legends are able to stick to many people’s mind and spread far away. How can we learn from them to create messages for something as meaningful as helping countless children in poor areas of China? Professor Heath described the SUCCES formula in the book “Made to Stick” he co-authored with his brother Dan Heath. SUCCES stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.

On the authors’ website, they provided some supporting materials for the book.  One of their handy PDF readings mentions the message from the Girl Effect organization:

“The world is a mess. Poverty. AIDS. Hunger. War. So what else is new?
What if there were an unexpected solution that could turn this sinking
ship around? Would you even know it if you saw it? It’s not the
internet. It’s not science. It’s not the government. It’s not money…”

Go to http://www.girleffect.org to find out what that is!

I believe both girleffect and CTEF focus on helping the children in need to become successful world citizens of the future. As CTEF has focused its effort on China’s poor rural areas, meaningful results are everywhere on its website and keep coming in all the time. By the way, my definition of a successful world citizen has 3 criteria:

* They are self-confident and self-reliant. They have faith in themselves and their future.
* They have empathy and respect for others. They care and unite others.
* They understand the world enough so that they know what will bring them true happiness and fulfillment. They know what they want, and know that when they relentlessly pursue their goals they’re also making the society better, better for their own future, for their family, and for everyone.

I want to work on my little definitions to make them meet the SUCCES criteria. I can definitely pick up tons of concrete examples from all the works done by CTEF.

We have 3 levels of potential disasters: level 1 within our body (virus, genes), level 2 among ourselves (social break-down, war), level 3 beyond us (natural disasters).

Stories and movies have been rehearsing many of these possibilities in our consciousness (virus break out, wars, alien invasion, end of the world, etc.). However, all rehearsals are missing effective and systematic approaches to solutions. We depend on ourselves to avoid mistakes that lead to level 2 and ignite level 1/3 before they happen. We rehearse ourselves to prepare for and save ourselves from all 3 levels.

Both level 1 and 3 disasters have the potential to invoke level 2. To prevent level 2, using the power of identity is more effective than the power of consequence. Refer to The Power of Fear and Texas driver in the Made to Stick book.

We empower ourselves when our knowledge is holographic, as each individual knows all major knowledge, like each cell contains the genetic information for the whole body.

Education: use history as the main theme for introducing systems of knowledges.

A recent scientific finding published on the journal Cell describe a gene in female, FoxL2, which when turned off, can unleash the male gene Sox9. The ovaries of a female mice without FoxL2 become testes, producing same level of testosterone as male mice. Minnie becomes Mickey.

That caused me to think some social issues. First, China has a problem with preferring boys over girls. Because of deep cultural tradition and perception of a son over daughter in elderly care, parents want to have boys. But when the boys grow up, there too many boys, and they need girls to get married. What if, with the switch of a gene, the hospital switch the gender of babies when they are little. When they grow up, they switch back, so everyone is happy. It is just like some of the fish which can “switch sexes at times when there is a scarcity of either males or females”.

Second, what if we turn on FoxL2 in male? Will that turn off Sox9 gene and testosterone in male, turning man into woman? It is a fact that, compared to women, men are predominantly the aggressors in the society, causing various social problems (crimes, wars, etc.). Rather than keeping men in prison, what if we give them a gene therapy, just turn off their Sox9? Is this a humane solution?

Certainly, there are broader considerations for both of these solutions. The China population issue, the real solution might be to give people real insurance when they grow old, and to change the cultural view on girls. For the crime solution, education might be more fundamental than mere gender switch.

I stumbled upon Warren Buffet’s 2003 article about U.S. Deficit.  The deficit simply cannot run forever, as it has negative consequences for both the US and foreign countries that are manifested in current economic debacle.  I like Buffet’s idea of using the Import Certificate (ICs), a market-force friendly way, to achieve trade balance for U.S. import and export. The idea is that the US government issues ICs to all US exporters in the same amount of their export value. The exporter then sell their ICs to US importers or foreign exporters to the US, probably in a market.

I have a few additional thoughts on Buffet’s idea.  First, the 1-for-1 ratio is too dramatic to get started.  We can think the ratio as a continuum from the current actual ratio to the target ratio of 1-for-1.  Thus, at the beginning, we can start issuing ICs comparable the current trade deficit ratio.  With a target date when the trade balance should be achieved, say 5 years, we adjust the ratio month-by-month gradually toward the 1-for-1 target.

Second, different countries may have different deficit ratio now.  We can let the beginning ratio to be specific to each country, while keeping the same pace for merging into the target ratio.

Third, we can have an even gentler ramp-up period, where we start the ICs ratio equal to the previous period’s deficit statistics.  When the deficit reduce, we continue to adjust the ratio, but never adjust with any deficit increases.  When the market is warmed up to the ICs, say in a year, we start the time clock to drive the ratio towards our 1-for-1 target.