Kevin L, Author at Kevin Low

Ruin & Farms

As The Economist reports on the need for a whole scale re-invention of the state of Michigan, an investor in Detroit has come up with an interesting proposal to utilize the unused land in the largest city of Michigan and attempt to restore economic activity in the city that is hollowing out.

There is much potential in building up engineering capabilities of the population of Michigan to kick-start newer, more tech-intensive industries. The small start-ups may be slow to hire and would begin with the best brains, subsequent growth would help raise employment figures. Like what is mentioned in The Economist article, the state has no quick-fix to return to prosperity and will have to toil long and hard to develop newer industries. This could be considered a punishment for having lobbied so hard to maintain the inefficient automobile industry and the refusal of firms in the state to carry out restructuring.

On the other hand, the urban farming idea in Detroit might be a good start given that it might offer the chance to warm up the construction industry. Nevertheless, reviving Detroit would do little to help the state of Michigan if the other towns and cities don’t come up with new ideas on how to rise again. Moral of the story of procrastinating change: Someone will have to pay the bill someday.

Internet & China

With so many people obsessed with the Internet in China and yet even more obsessed with curbing the addiction of them, Google should be making money in China. But apparently it didn’t quite beat Baidu.com that much and thus decided on a ‘New Approach‘.

The Economist discusses the issue at length, citing how Google has come to this after experiencing hackers attacks. They also talked about the similar kind of problem other big sites are facing from China.

Tech Crunch noted that Google’s stance in this case is more about business; perhaps the hacking attacks have been around for a long time and Google has gathered the evidence but lately, they reviewed their business and decided that the cost of maintaining the engineers and censorship is too heavy given the gains they made.

Groupthink

Clive Thompson from Wired wrote a great piece on Groupthink; the main question is whether you can persuade people to like something by convincing them that others also like it?

And the experiments cited in the article gave interesting results that leaves us somehow worrying if our ‘destinies’ are determined by pure luck. It appears that for the very best and very worst, evolutionary forces would more or less elevate or eliminate them in long run but for most of the ones in the middle, their fate could be a matter of chance.

The article seem to imply there’s little way out of the problem of groupthink of such grand scale; it is suggested that the use of social cues for many decision-making is wired into our nature.

New Home

When our Climate Change summit comes up with a result that is claimed to be “Better than Nothing“, and that we have to somewhat console ourselves what an underwhelming Copenhagen accord have been or might be useful, we might actually want to find a new planet. One to live in of course.

Fox vs Time Warner

Days ago I stumbled upon a recent dispute between Fox and Time Warner Cable. The basic idea of the dispute was that Fox wanted more money from Time Warner for carrying their channels and Time Warner didn’t want to. The whole thing ended up with publicity campaigns on both sides (Rolloverorgettough.com for Time Warner Cable and Keepfoxon.com for Fox) to make use of TV viewers’ support to raise their bargaining power. They eventually settled the dispute so viewers will continue seeing Holmer Simpsons munching on doughnuts.

It is interesting how Lauren Collins explained in The New Yorker how Time Warner Cable was basically using a forced-decision device since there’s a spectrum of other options available to them. Time Warner Cable could have just absorbed the price increases and sacrifice their profits. By running the Ad campaign, they’re signaling to Fox that they’ll not accept any changes to the pricing of the deal – either get paid the same or no more screenings of Fox programmes; effectively introducing a Morton’s fork. At the same time, like what Collins mentioned in the article, “The strategy in a nutshell: couch potatoes as human shields.” The company handling Time Warner Cable’s campaign, Purple Strategies is pretty amazing; they are basically specialist in positioning stand in public for organizations or political bodies in ways that allow them to maneuver themselves under different circumstances.

The incorporation of strategic movements in corporate lives is going to become increasingly common, which gives us more reason to check out Dixitt and Nalebuff’s Thinking Strategically or their newer Art of Strategy.

More Wars

The day Google Nexus One came out, my co-workers were looking at the features and thinking to themselves, “When is this going to come to Singapore?”. While it didn’t take long for people to start complaining about the confusion and frustration created by the weird relationship between Google, the handset-maker HTC and the mobile operators.

Perhaps the somewhat disturbing problem is that Google have started becoming somewhat ‘evil’; The Economist reported on how they were telling everyone they weren’t intent on having their own phone but eventually came up with this awesome one. Google’s model for developing the phone is typical of course, using an open source mobile phone operating system, contracting the hardware development to an experienced handset manufacturer in an emerging economy with loads of hi-tech industries (in other words, Taiwan).

This contrasts starkly with the Apple model of production, which involves enclosed development. Perhaps this war of phones and wider consumer electronics will demonstrate which model of development would prevail in long run. I tend to think Google’s strategy is more robust but Apple should be able to hold out for quite some time still. Being a Mac user, I’ve confidence in Apple’s ability to churn out products that they would eventually manage to market to the mass market and aid consumers to love them. Google might want to spruce up their ability to do just that.

Layout Re-org

ERPZ now have a permanent homepage! We are still working on it and hopefully, we’ll be able to feature a couple of articles on the homepage each day. The new system of navigation is designed to give the articles and resources put on ERPZ roughly the same exposure and also to allow first-time users to learn more about ERPZ before going on their search for academic resources.

We hope this would be an improvement over the former blog sort of navigation system layout.

Copenhagen – not so bad after all?

An article from The Economist in its first issue of this year proposes that the Copenhagen climate change summit that just took place at the end of last year could turn out to bring more benefits than perceived despite its being “underwhelming”.

Sure, the whole accord was just a political, non-legally-binding statement and lukewarm at best in its promises for all to do their part for the environment. But at least both developed and developing countries signed up to the Copenhagen accord, considering how these two warring factions were split because the developed countries felt the developing countries needed more cuts while the developing countries felt the developed countries were responsible for all the emissions and hence to bear the brunt of the costs of cleaning up. Not that the rift has narrowed significantly but at least the process and product were not totally derailed.

Another reason for optimism is in “the development of political structures better suited to the challenge”. The complexities of climate change, from all the industries it affects to all the political issues it brings, need to be dealt with under a new body and in more creative manners. And the regulation of so many greenhouse gases from so many sources makes it even more difficult. This brings to mind the possibilities of another Montreal protocol that sought to regulate only CFCs, which turned out to be a much bigger success than even Kyoto was. The Economist proposes that there will be “new pluralism in climate politics”
as different groups come together to deal with different specific issues such as “slowing deforestation” or “stemming emissions from shipping”, that might yield better results than a gargantuan, labyrinthine treaty that regulates every single issue without specifics or generalises the whole complexities of climate change.

A huge barrier to any improvements on Copenhagen could be the US. The Senate will decide upon legislation that will set up “a cap-and-trade system to put a price on carbon”, and whether they succeed will impact post-Copenhagen discussions to finalize cuts in emissions. The upcoming Senate elections may put in place more Republicans and upset the Democrats’ super-majority that will prevent fillibustering of bills like that of health-care reform and cap-and-trade. The Republicans have been rather against the cap-and-trade, and they may derail the whole post-Copenhagen process should cap-and-trade crash and burn in Senate.

Just Reading

Just last week, I was recommending that you view lectures on Academic Earth if you find TED.com not academic enough; this week we’re recommending just one video for your weekend. It’s going to be pretty intriguing and I’m sure you’d be glad to be an audience. Recently, Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, lectured on ‘Justice’ in Harvard and his lectures are available online at Youtube! Sandel begins his first lecture with the hypothetical scenario involving a moral dilemma that some of you might be familiar with and got his students thinking about moral reasoning. Sandels issued his ‘warning’ for students of Moral/Political Philosophy:

Philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know; there’s an irony, the difficulty of this course consist the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we already know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange. […] Once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again.

Sandel also gave a good reply to the doctrine of Skepticism, suggesting that we should not give up moral reasoning just because the ancient and modern philosophers are unable to solve them; in fact, the continual emergence of the same old problems require that we constantly revisit these questions. He cites Kant’s remarks about skepticism; Kant describes skepticism as a temporary resting place for the mind from reasoning – that skepticism can never triumph the restlessness of reasoning.

The lectures gives us too much to think about so I strongly suggests that you take a step at a time and limit yourself to just an hour of the video each day.

Culture & Phones

Trapped on our little island of Singapore, we hardly wonder what our handphones are capable of; here in Singapore we typically use it to text, call, surf, as a phone book to retrieve contact details of people, a personal organizer and even a camera. Singaporeans makes extensive use of their phones and our preferences are varied, a reflection of our melting pot of diversity. And as the briefing in the latest issue of The Economist shows, mobile phones are indeed a great reflection of the culture of the people using them.

The article mentioned a couple of interesting quirks about people using mobile phones around the world:

Japanese use their phones to text and surf intensively because using phones to make or receive calls on board trains and some other public places are thought to be extremely rude.

Spaniards reject voicemail because they think it’s rude not to receive calls from others when they call, even when the receiver is busy with matters.

Chinese will interrupt conversations to receive calls because they are afraid to that they’d miss a business deal; at the same time they use knock-offs handphones that often have extensive functions, even capable of using two SIM cards.

Americans are willing to endure limited cellular coverage; perhaps fearing the hassle involved in changing operators.

Italians, Greeks and Finns would switch operators if they find their coverage limited and yet are fearful of the effects of electro-magnetic radiation, which probably is more ubiquitous than in America.

Indians use mobile phones as torchlights.

Africans usually use ‘beeping’ (ie. give the person a ring) to contact people and signal them to call back when they’re low on pre-paid credits.

Indeed, mobile phones are changing everyone’s lives everywhere; one just needs to know the name given to these devices in different societies and cultures to understand their importance. In fact, Iraqis thought more highly of the proliferation of mobile phones as a result of the American invasion than their supposed liberation.