Historical GDP

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)

How a professor spends time

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	-

You can see how little time one professor can spend on faculty management and teaching students.

User Innovation

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?

Housing prices in 2007

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?

Brain and shopping

This Is Your Brain on Shopping -- An fMRI study determines where the brain appraises products and evaluates prices:

"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?'"

Interesting finding. However how much we find it too expensive to spend on one thing is not absolute and subjective to external influence.

I remember when I heard how much my friend had to pay on her apartment, I think it's outrage to pay so much for so little space. However, after I seriously look into the real estate market in Taipei, I realized the average prices might be just about that. So I stopped raising my eye brow when I hear the price I might need to pay for a new apartment in a building with elevator in Taipei city. I wonder whether my insula cortex is less activated now then before when I am consider how much mortgage we have to pay every month.

There must be somewhere that really important about how we change our synaptic connections for buying!! Well, if we can find it out, maybe we can exercise it to ease the pain when we can't afford what we dream for and live on.

Fertile soils for innovative ideas

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.

Writing about small things -- how to travel with a salmon

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.

Nice, huhh?

In the "How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell", he writes about coffee. Here he goes

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.