Food prices | An expensive dinner | Economist.com: "Today about 850m people, mostly women and children, remain chronically hungry while 1.1 billion are obese or overweight"
The WFP’s food costs increased by more than 50% over the past five years. Ms Sheeran predicts that they will increase by another 35% in the next couple of years too.
Ms Sheeran refers to this as the post food-surplus era.
不幸的，在電腦前看很久沒時間看的journal，看到接近午夜。
邊想著明天要早起跟海外老闆conferece call，邊結束跟友人的線上討論，一個個把應用程式關閉時，看到海外老闆來郵，說，「你寄來的檔案我都不能開，你用PPT或是excel格式吧，不要用html格式」。
原來午夜關電腦的儀式其實是要更明快點。我一邊把所有的檔案全數轉成PDF檔，一邊想著。
「我把所有檔案全轉成PDF檔，再寄一次。我也會用gmail再寄一之，請你收到後，讓我知道行不行哦！」
午夜，我把所有本來就不是html格式的檔案全轉成PDF，全數寄出，再用gmail寄了一次，在很緩慢的網路連線下，也收到了自己公司寄給gmail的備份。打開一看，全是正常格式的檔案。
於是我百無聊賴地等著，這個局就這樣僵住了，時間一分一秒地過去了，下棋的人會知道卒子的時間經度嗎？
by Gary Pisano
Pisano 教授指出，生技產業在過去三十年間，研發表現並沒有很大的進步，主要的原因在於系統缺失及科學與商業之間的張力，主要的概念如下：
1. 生技產業未如預期，卡在科學與商業之間的目標與需求的衝突
2. 生技產業需要重新調整經營模式、組織結構及資金的安排，讓他們可以著重於長期學習而非短期智財權的兌現
3. 給管理者的建言：避開進行許多小的交易，著重在關係的深化。
在Harvard Business Review 的專訪裏，訪問者問道，生技在過去的三十年間，並沒有給投資者太多的回報，但投資仍然源源不絕，這是什麼道理呢？
Pisano當下的回答是，好問題，這是個謎！他說，平圴報酬是很低，但獲得報酬的則是很大的報酬。大部份的人相信，在投入這麼多研發資源之後，未來應該是光明的。
「在回答『科學產業』的挑戰時，我們要先回答一個問題：『什麼是科學產業？』 本書中所指的科學產業指的是產業裏的企業本身就在參與科學的進展及創造。 例如：『Genetech在1976年成立之後，就專注於解決基礎科學問題，如何複製基因及在細菌細胞裏表現蛋白。Kary Mullis，Chiron顧用的科學家發明了polymerase chain reaction，研究基因最重要的技術之一，且因此得到諾貝爾獎。Celera和龐大的官方資助計畫競賽進行人類基因體的定序』..等。
『當民間企業參與愈來愈多的基礎科學研究，大學及教學醫學中心則有參與愈來愈多跟他們研究有關的商業活動： 哥倫比亞大學的recombinant DNA技術專利在二十年間帶來3億到4億美金，最多曾經到一年1億美金的收益。 Massachusetts General Hospital，哈佛醫學院的同盟。在2003年因為授權得到4千3百萬的營收，其中一半來自於一個產品（Enbrel.2）的專利。』
I am preparing something to be presented in some government related agency and initiated a discussion with a senior colleague who has worked with government agency for some years. While I was thinking methodologies to get things done more efficiently and correctly, he suggest me turning direction to "people issue".
I worked as project manager (of products) in electronic industry for some years. Our goals are generally clear. We have to make profits out of our projects considering time to market, cost and quality requirement. Very often I needed to have many conversations with different departments of the company, of the customers and sometimes of vendors several times just in one day. I used to think it's a complicated job requiring good personal skills to be able to move things around among many stakeholders, when their personal interests are not inline with cooperate interests. When I was promoted to a higher level, my boss put a line on my annual performance review card that I need to improve my personal skill. I was confused what personal skills she might really mean. I'd managed well, I thought.
Later on I realize there are some differences. The first thing is when you are at different hierarchical position, personal skills have different meanings. On the surface level, it's all about satisfaction of personal needs such as to be alive, to have achievements, to feel safe and so on. However when you move to a higher ladder, the tools and linking networks become complicated. In order to drive people, you'd need to understand the more complicated network people live within and tools they exercise. I realize later that it's still rather simple inside a cooperation. In the end of day, cooperate objective is to profit. Everything evolves within that framework.
It gets incredible complex when I left industry to work on some government related project. Suddenly I felt myself like a junior high (or even at elementary school level). The incentive systems in government agencies are complicated. There are multi-layers of hidden agendas. It's a complicated web of interest groups, political parties, governmental agencies and personal interests. The rewards are not only in one or two simple forms such as monetary or position power but in various forms.
The system becomes so complicated that it almost can't be described or taught in a systematic and explicit way. It has formed an intangible entry barrier. Those who have survived in the systems have developed huge implicit system knowledge, bureaucracy's know how. This implicit system knowledge has become their biggest and unbreakable valuable asset that prevents competition.
The thoughts organized in different way in this world. I thank God that I might not stay in this world forever. (or maybe I'd developed my personal implicit knowledge and create entry barrier for other people, wouldn't I?)
I've been reading a report from TIER president about Taiwan's economic development experience and prospects and another article about Taiwan's innovation system. Both have interesting facts to look at. There are some of interest summarized below:
Technology investment
High rank in innovation index (based on WEF)
Taiwan US patent number rank world No 4 (2004)
Taiwan patent number/per person rank No 2 (2004)
R&D investment share of GDP ranks world No 10 (business R&D)
LCD patents rank No 5
R&D investment in service ranks low
Patent mainly in semconductors, electrical devices, and consumer goods & equipment
TFT-LCD ranks world No 2
ICT share of industry GDP: 35+
HW industry ranks world No 4
Semiconductor ranks world No 4
Taiwan has many world No1 industry (in terms of economic scale)
Low paid royalty/IPR income rate (lag behind 14 countries)
Trading amount ranks world No 15 (export + import)
GDP share: Service>industry>mfg>agriculture (Real GDP share: 73.3%, 25%, 21.4%, 1.7%)
High rank in enterprise efficiency (6 /IMD)
Low rank in government efficiency (19/IMD)
Increased IPO purchase
Slowed GDP growth from 1995 - 2004
Low labor productivity below OECD average (GDP/employment)
I've been using Google notebook for some time even though I don't necessarily go back to all the notes I kept from reading stuff on web. Nevertheless I found it useful to save the source and information easily.
This morning I was reading an article about how New York Times and The Washington Post buy Google ads to put their coverage on searchers' search result page, I found it interesting and put it in my Google notebook for further reference.
Something to my surprise has happened. I saw a advertisement banner in my Google notebook thread, just right in the middle of the quote I copied from the article.
After all there's no free lunch in the world. I can understand Google develops its services and needs to profit from them. But I think Goolge can do a better job to have the ads in a nicer way.
Google had provided services changing how information gets distributed. We wouldn't know if that would had happened if Google hadn't done so. However I constantly think that Google might have become information monopoly. It archives conversations, publications, pictures and everything going on the web in every country in the world. It reads (supposedly the machine does this.. ) our readings, thoughts, exchanges with friends and family photos.
I used Flickr before but am gradually turning away from it now. Why do I need a Yahoo account to access a service I had used for long? What if I don't like to have a Yahoo account, what choice I have under this circumstance? If I had used Flickr for even longer time, with all my photos ALL in Flickr and no where else, what power I have to fight against the new policy?
This has made me thinking about what "market failures" and government intervention would really mean when there's no border in the Internet world.
北卡經濟系副教授林環牆教授的"福爾摩沙政經評論"中，常可以見到以較多事實與較完整的邏輯對台灣經濟問題進行論述，正是在網路開放空間裏少見的，只可惜沒有其它的經濟學者與之進行觀點的論戰。經濟成長理論、模型眾多而複雜，到底什麼樣的政府政策才是對台灣長期永續經濟成長有益，在台灣罕見經濟學者對此進行論辯，台灣的民眾只好每天被專業有限的名嘴與新聞媒體餵養偏頗的觀念。最常聽到的是因為執政黨的關係，造成台灣經濟成長趨緩。這樣的論點如果要成立的話，首先要假設不管哪個執政黨執政，台灣會維持之前的經濟成長率，這樣的假設很難符合經濟成長受到眾多內外在因素影響，且這些因素不停變動的事實。（台灣的選擇：談經濟需要知識與邏輯也有提到林的觀點）
林教授的反擊「中國熱」的台灣經濟發展藍圖提出了台灣經濟成長問題的有趣假說，他認為台灣的經濟發展藍圖應正面處理「中國熱」的問題。他認為台灣的經濟已步入「固定資本邊際報酬」的遞減階段，要將資源轉入「人力素質」與「技術創新」投資，才有可能為台灣建構創造高工資就業機會的經濟體。林同時認為，台灣對海外與中國進行投資，必須和島內的垂直創新取得動態平衡，「前者把台灣技術帶出去，後者則把先進國家的新穎技術帶進來，讓台灣在全球技術階梯，往上爬升。當島內資源過度不對稱地流向低成本導向的對外垂直整合時，中國，無論是做為世界工廠或市場，都是台灣的『威脅』，而不是『機會』」
不過在閱讀林教授的文章時，保持客觀與邏輯仍是重要的。在中國熱的文章裏，林教授提到的因為投資中國與海外，造成內部創新資源的排擠效用，需要有更多的證據來支持這個論點。另外他在技術創新，台、美、日最閃耀中以各國在美國申請專利件數為創新的指標，也有爭議之處。專利件數是否為好的創新指標，或是專利的引用為較好的創新指標，也有討論的空間。（Measuring innovation這裏有有趣的討論與聯結）
但林教授的政經評論blog仍是很值得閱讀的
The report titled " Foresight 2020: Economic, industry and corporate trends is published in 2006 by Economist Intelligent Unit. There are not many new things in the mega trend. However it's still interesting to read through it's forecasting facts.
For the record, this is their forecast of world GDP growth, of course with a note to say that GDP growth is policy dependent.
Google Gooses Big Media | TIME:
"Now 'we've got to get used to an environment where people access our content in a variety of different ways.' Thompson sees this as an opportunity--the BBC signed a deal in early March to set up three new 'channels' on Google's YouTube site to show short video clips from its programs and share in the ad revenue YouTube generates. 'One of the things no media organization can do now is cancel the future,' he said."
Major Ma had quoted report from the "Cheers" magazine to say that university graduate wage standard in Taiwan is only half of it in Korea. The word got spread via news media and caused some serious concerns. I was very suspicious of that information when I heard it. Here's a research report for reference to clarify some of the facts. It's a report done by STPI, a quango organization for technology policy research.
事實上，由南韓與我國的相關薪資統計去推估，南韓全體勞工平均名目月薪僅高出我國約兩成左右，況且，對照南韓官方統計數據，該媒體引用數據顯然有所偏誤。經進一步檢視，其所引用之數據在著以下幾項偏誤：一、樣本在企業規模等變項上不具代表性。二、樣本定義不同(KEF之定義為初任人員而非大學畢業社會新鮮人)。三、月薪計算基礎不同(KEF之統計包含非經常性薪資)。四、匯率換算誤差可能性。雖然該數據明顯誇大，但南韓近年薪資大幅成長，其主要原因包括：匯率變化、經濟成長率、企業規模與工會力量、員工分紅制度、工時差異、勞退新制實施、物價水準、高等教育與人力供需等因素。
Andrew Brown goes offline: "I am coming to suspect that the internet will be to my generation of journalists, and to any younger ones, what alcohol was to our predecessors': a destroyer first of thought and then of productivity, destructive both of the capacity to reflect, and to react, blurring everything into a haze of talk and endlessly repeated variations on the same experience. Just like alcohol, and even cigarettes once were, it seems an inevitable part of the job, one of the things that distinguishes it from all others. Stories are chased and found on the net just as they once were in bars."
It's an interesting project to provide on line historical GDP records for cross broader comparison. Although the records are only up to 2000, it's still interesting to play around.
I use the data to compare GDP growth patterns between Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. It's quite amazing to see what Ireland had achieved in the past years. There are more parameters to play around if you have time.
Other interesting sources:
Historical statistics
The world fact book
GDP Rankings - Current Exchange Rate Method (Numerically by Ranking) (unfortunately, Taiwan is not on the list)
Foreign direct investment (FDI)
Going back to the university to work 8 hours a day at age of thirty something, and not being a student or professor, there's an advantage to it. You have the chance to look at the system with different perspectives, especially if you are involved in some of the tedious administration stuff. You realize the system is designed with a big flaw.
Then you start thinking, how can a system run by top scholars could have gone wrong. Until you read how Umberto Eco, the semiotic professor and famous columnist, spends his time. You see precisely where the system went wrong. They just don't spend time running universities.
I summarize it with percentages of possible working time noted in below table. The total hours available for one person a year is 8760 hours. Excluding sleeping and getting around in the city, there are about 4000 something hours possible working time. Unfortunately, they don't have time to play. (people usually assume their works are pretty much things they play).
| Tasks | hours/y | % of working time |
| 3 classes a week, 1 afternoon advising students | 220 | 6.9% |
| exams | 24 | 0.8% |
| examining theses | 12 | 0.4% |
| faculty meetings and committees | 78 | 2.4% |
| correting students' papers | 235 | 7.4% |
| journal editing | 50 | 1.6% |
| direct six books a year | 300 | 9.4% |
| Review translation of his own work | 500 | 15.7% |
| original writings | 300 | 9.4% |
| weekly magazine column | 156 | 4.9% |
| mails | 624 | 19.5% |
| attending conference | 372 | 11.6% |
| travel for conference | 323 | 10.1% |
| sleep+shave, dress.. Meals | 4197.5 | - |
| 2 hours for getting around the city | 730 | - |
The User Innovation Revolution
A nice small on line book about user innovation revolution.
The work was contracted by UK national commerce council. The author of this book is Charles Leadbeater, whom I firstly heard from friend TM about distributed knowledge. Take a look at this short e-book, it's a good introduction to the user innovation and implication with business.
Following is a summary of the practices to profit from user innovations:
Those six rules of thumb can be read as a checklist organisations can use to think about user innovation:
Identify
• Have you segmented your customers by how much you learn from them?
• Have you explored the passions, pastime and hobbies of your staff to understand which of them are lead users of products and services you make?
Communicate
• What kinds of conversations do you have with users of your products to listen to and enlist their ideas?
• Are they conducted in your language and terminology or in the language of users?
• Who hosts these discussions: your company, the user-community or third parties?
• What can you do to facilitate and encourage collaboration among your users?
Remove barriers
• Is there professional resistance within your organisation to listening to user views and acting on them? If so how can you overcome this?
• Is it difficult to accommodate user innovations into your systems for making products or services? What can be done to make it easier?
• Do you have mechanisms to propagate valuable user innovations?
• Do you have a system to identify and manage the potential risks of user innovation?
Incentivise
• What incentives can you provide to users to encourage them to innovate?
• Can user-innovators get recognition from their peers? If not, how can you facilitate this?
Enable
• What tools can you provide user-innovators to help them innovate?
• What kind of intellectual property does your organisation control – software, protocols, tools, designs, music, film – that could be freely revealed to users to spark innovation from them?
• What training can you offer lead users to help them become more effective innovators?
• What spaces can you provide for lead users to prototype, experiment and test their innovations?
There's a Yahoo on line poll about how Taiwanese people (well.. i assume only Taiwnese people could take this poll) see the development of real estate market in 2007. Currently more people (38%) think the price will increase slightly than those who (24%) think to drease slightly.
But interestingly, there are some interesting findings when I look at the cross analysis charts.
People who are older, richer, with higher education tend to think the market will be worse rather than better. Who are more optmistic about the real estate market are those who are below 18, between 19-30 years old.
People who make less money (for no income to less than 50,000 NTD per month) tend to think the market will become "better".
Irnoically, the market becomes "better" (in Chinese) means better for the real estate investors and construction companies rather than people who are going to buy hosues. Those people who think the market will become better are those who just graduated or just started their career for few years. The "better" market means higher prices and heavier mortgages.
For those young people seeing the better market, did they actually forsee higher housing prices and decreased chances for them to buy a house? Therefore they are actually more pessimistic rather than optimistic?
"Researchers discovered that when the product first flashed on the screen it activated the nucleus accumbens, a section near the middle of the brain that has been implicated in the brain's reward center, effectively appraising the item. When the price appeared, the scientists noticed activity in the mesial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain known for higher executive functions. Its activity seemed to vary according to the difference between what someone would pay for an item and its actual cost, as if in error adjustment. Finally, the response of the insula (a lateral section of the brain's cortex known to activate during responses to negative stimuli) depended on the purchasing decision--activity there increased when a participant nixed a purchase. 'What we're looking at is not so much the brain's reaction to products and prices as a person's subjective reaction to the products and prices,' Knutson says. 'Is the product preferable? And is the price too much?'"
We got into this discussion about innovation. How can innovation happen. There are lots of researches, theories and writings about this. I have my own version.
I believe that innovation can not happen from nowhere. Creativity s not a telnet given when one is born. It's a 'recomposition' process. Whether one can be successful in this depends on two things, one is how many 'components' exist in the external world; the other is the components exist in the 'internal' world.
If one is given a piece of white paper, what he can do with this paper is less then when he is given a piece of white paper and a pen. This is what I called external components. The internal component are about what he has stored in his brain. The more components stored in his brain (such as shapes, stories, processes.. ), the more he might be able to construct from one piece of paper and one pen.
However the abundance of internal components doesn't guarantee the success of innovation. They are only seeds in different jars. The only way they can grow into a diverse forest is to have fertile soils and open space. Below picture is how I imagine this fertile ground, a place where different elements can interchange, interact, collide and hybrid.
Well.. to be honest, it's a curiosity how a person can write on the most tedious things. Maybe it makes sense when that person is a professor of semiotics. (which you can find a very detailed explanation in wikipedia)
Although the small things are really samll, the writing itself nevertheless is very amusing.
For example, in the "How to use the Taxi Driver", how Eco writes about taxi drivers in different countries is really funny.
> ... instead of the corner of Seventh and Fourteenth, you want to go th Charlton Street. The driver will then have a tantrum, slam on the brakes, and make you get out, becuase New York drivers know only the streets with numbers and not those with names.
Paris taxi drivers, on the other hand, do not know any streets at all.
In New York, as far as I can tell you can't summon a taxi by telephone to some club; in Paris you can; but they don't come. In Stockholm you can call them only by phone, becuase they don't trust any old stranger walking along the street.
German drivers are courteous and correct. They don't speak, they just press the accelerator. When you get out, white as a sheet, you realize why they come to Italy for relaxation and drive in front of you, doing sixty kilometers per hour in the fast lane.
There are several ways to prepare good coffee.... Each coffee, in its own way, is excellent. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide..
.... Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usally made from rotten barley, dead men's bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels.
