Intimidation

This is a very interesting post.


I encourage those who feel easily intimidated to read it.


I took a long time to discover this.

Have you guys read the manga post?


Does the character Killua remind you of youself?


Do you always think that your competitor is always in his/her top condition and you being in your average condition?


Even when you are as smart as your competitor, you always think that you will screw up and that he/she will trash you.


Even if he is weaker than you, you will start to think that you might not be at your best condition and that the weaker competitor might have that "eureka" moment and end up beating you.


The worst part is when your competitor is stronger than you, for instance, some scholar or something.


So look at the above 3 scenarios, which of the 3 scenarios were you a winner?


The answer is NONE, very sad and pathetic isn't it?


So the moral of the story is, you must not only be able to tackle those who are just as good as you. But the key is here is that you need to be brave enough to face off with those that are smarter than you.


If you give up right from the start, you will never ever be able to rise to the top and beat them. Then again, I'm not saying that you must reach the top of the corporate ladder.


Its just that it is crucial to fine-tune your mentality, to prepare yourself to fight the stronger enemies.


The people at the University is good, but they are not great without the working experience. You will face even stronger competitors out there in the work force.


Don't forget the people from Google and Wall Street, the real elites.


Until you are on par with those people, you must keep pushing yourself, fighting all the competitors you face, no matter how strong they are.


You will get intimidated but you should not stop there, keep fighting and persevere.


In the midst of the battle, you might just discover the key to victory!

WGM 110101 Chinese Subs

Welcome to a new year


Will update once the videos are out











Credits -TheSoneSource19

Adrian Tan

I thought this is a really apt article to read before 2010 ends. So that we will all be prepared for 2011.


Be prepared. Its a pretty long one but definitely worth your 10 minutes of read


Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
-----

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.


Life's A Mess

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.


Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.


Be Hated.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.


Love Another Human Being

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise.Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

Google Map 5.0

The video speaks for itself

Facebook, A Marketer's best tool

Armed with your e-mail address, data miners can hit Facebook and match it up with your user ID. That key unlocks a treasure trove of personal information.




"Once you have an ID you can look up the person," said Axel Schultze, CEO of Xeesm, a social media marketing software developer. That gives you access to all the information publicly available in their profile, and from that, "you can build correlations between all sorts of other data."




Its really scary how seemingly senseless data can actually form a picture that tells a story about your life.

The technology is so powerful that it can even identify people who have talked to the particular terrorists before. All the connections will be revealed in an instant through technological tools by linking all the data together to form meaningful information.




That is the power of technology these days. 




Facebook's in an unenviable position: Its entire reason for being is to encourage members to connect and broadcast personal information. The more you share, the stronger Facebook's business model becomes. But the site is also trying to balance that against a pledge to respect its members' privacy preferences.


This is really true if we look at the Metcalfe's model that states that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of network members.


The more people there are, means that there are way, way more connections between all the members in the network. It increases the chance of interactions between strangers and they share more information in the process.


These information are priceless to the business out there.


So, Facebook definitely still has a long way to go and hopefully it will not end up in demise anytime soon.

Credits -cnn

How Tech 2010 changed E-commerce

Even Google has joined the bid for Groupon, a daily deals website. Google is also very interested in E-commerce which is the new form of shopping experience.




Long gone are the days when consumers merely crawled through newspaper ads and trekked out to brick and mortar stores. Through the power of the web, the smartphone and the tablet, they have more options than ever.




So far this holiday season, consumers have spent $27.5 billion online, a 12% increase over last year, compared with overall retail growth, which grew just 3 to 4%. And according to the National Retail Federation, e-commerce sales on Black Friday jumped 15% to make up 34% of all shopping that day. 


One of the key reasons is definitely free shipping. Almost 55% of the transactions are now free.

Clearly, the days where you have to buy so much before you get to enjoy free shipping, are long gone. They will never be back.


Now for companies who are trying to establish a competitive edge against the millions of companies online, it is imperative for them to offer free-shipping.


By giving people something for free, it will then attract them to your business. However, they had better start soon because once everyone starts to offer free shipping, then its no longer as exclusive as it sounds. It becomes taken for granted and this competitive edge will be obliterated for sure.


The next thing after free will be how fast is the shipping period and whether it is delivered on time.


Then again, it is now up to the merchants and businesses to revamp their websites to give it a nice feel. The shopping experience online, to make it come alive that is. That is probably something that will keep the consumers coming back.

Just to see what has changed on the website like how they always visit shops that change all the time.


They demand freshness and innovation. And on the Internet, you can get all the innovations you can possibly get. So, let the battle begins.


The one that will bring across the best experience wins.


Credits -cnn, -sitesketch

IT Performance

Guys, below are my current results for IT.


Class Participation 15%


Case Presentation 15%


Digital world project 10%


I swear I got a shock from the results because I just freaking woke up.

Dear Mingde,

I'll like to share with you your class performance (excluding Excel/Access Quiz and final examination). The marks for the quizes are in the process of being finalized. You will be hearing from me again about your quiz results as soon as the go-ahead is given. 



Case presentation has been of high quality throughout many groups. Your case grade of A+ ranks very well compared to all other groups. For class particiation, as promised, your effort throughout the course determines mostly your class particiation grade here. A grade of B- and above would be very well done in terms of consistency and continuous participation. Finally, for Project Digital World, assessment has been very competitive. Many groups did an excellent job here. Your PDW grade of A+ marks a superior effort indeed. 



This is just my informal discussion with you on your performance in IT up till the date of this evaluation and excluding your performance in the Excel/Access Quiz and the final examination. It is meant to be indicative in nature in giving you a guide and feedback as to your performance in the course; it does not replace and will be superceded by any formal graded report as issued by the Nanyang Business School or NTU.

21 BlackJack

I just finished watching the movie 21, BlackJack a couple of days back.


For those of you who are not familiar with it, its okay because its a really old movie. Probably a few years back.

I've always, always wanted to watch it myself because it seems really intriguing and I especially like movies that involves intelligences, gambling, top schools and moralities.


It just makes you think a lot and there are always a lot of things that you can bring with you after the movie.


The general idea of the movie is about a MIT student who goes by the name, Ben. Without a shadow of a doubt, he's a genius, he got 44 MCATS, 1590 for SATS and a GPA of 4.0 in MIT.


Then, there was this professor that specialises in non-linear equations.


His theory is that always remember to account for the variable change. This means that your decision and choice MUST NOT stay constant the moment some other externalities are suddenly involved or purged into the situation.


The apt example he chose was of course the notorious "game show" example, otherwise known as the Monty Hall problem.


Given that there are 3 doors and behind 1 of which is a car, you are supposed to choose a door.

Say you choose Door 1, then the host went to Door 3 and open the door and it's a goat. Will you change your choice?


Well, there's a variable change involved isn't it? The host went to open the Door 3 and it wasn't a car.


So immediately, if you switched your choice to Door 2, your chance of winning a car instantly rose from 33.3% to 66.7%. Confounding isn't it? If you want to find out why, you can always go and search for the theory on Wikipedia :)


Yeah, so this Professor Mickey, he recruited Ben after founding out how outstanding he was. Then later on, they went on to start counting cards for Blackjacks.


But what I found interesting here was about the variable change. You know how the moment one variable changes, the whole story changes?


But apparently, during the course of our education, we are always told that we should assume that we should ignore variable changes for academic purposes.


So at the end of the day, we just learn when everything is held constant. Well, that makes learning so much easier and way less complex isn't it ?

But that does not happen in the real word. Hence, we are theoretically not at all trained for the real world.


In order to make learning easier, we ignore variable changes. Perhaps if the education system were more dynamic, students would have found them more interesting and of course, challenging.


Nonetheless, I guess this only happens in the top prestigious colleges like Harvard and MIT where teachers are confident that students can handle variable changes.


Local schools are far from being capable of handling such a complex thing that was always underestimated and assumed.

Apparently, you can count the cards and you will be able to win for sure, yes, guaranteed money at the blackjack table but you are considered to be beating the system and obviously thats unpardonable in the casinos.


Then as usual, he got lost along the way, losing his friends, girlfriend and all his money after a while.

But in the end, he turned over a new leaf and started his life all over again and he even got admitted back into MIT and he even got the scholarship from Harvard Medical School.


It was really an interesting movie but I found some points interesting.


Like how people at MIT come together to do such stuff because there are a lot of smart people at all these top, prestigious colleges. So I presumed that it will be no surprise if other top colleges are doing similar things.


Professors and students coming together for a business deal to do bad things, exploiting each other's intelligence to achieve something that they believe is easy and sustainable at the same time.


Also, at one point in time, Professor Micky told Ben that they will be flying to Vegas tomorrow and Ben told him that he can't do that because he has to submit a Quantitative Literacy Paper due Tuesday and the professor told him that he does not.


That's because Professor Micky has already spoke to Ben's professors and he promised to give Ben an A. Then he told Ben that amazing things can happen from the inside.


So, when the professors keep telling you that they can't do much, well in actual fact, they have more than the capabilities to do so. It's really up to them if they really want to.


Another thing is that in Vegas, there's this consultant who looks at the screens all the long to make sure that no one cheats or are involved in any fraudulent acts. Because apparently the systems and computer screens cannot filter out the cheats so they need consultants to manually sieve out the cheats.


Which is kinda cool because in Vegas, its sort of the heaven for gamblers and its interesting that they hire professionals to pin down all these cheats.


Its like using poison to fight against poison.


So naturally other industries are doing the exact same thing, the police are hiring hackers to help them hunt down hackers.


Those who check for money forgery are naturally hiring the real experts out there. Instead of putting those really good ones in jail, they hire them instead to help them solve crimes.


So I thought its really kind of cool how you are using "evil" to fight evil.


Yeah, its really a good watch, definitely a lot of learning points and its a really nice movie with lots of casual links and stuff. So do check it out if you are interested.


Enjoy.






Credits -http://imprinttalk.com/?p=1417, belief,net, nydailynews

Google Docs

Wow look at what Google Docs can do


And mind you, there's no animation


I was blown away man!