09.04.06
Posted in Freakonomics, Readings at 8:36 am by ngkaboon
I have been reading books specifically recommended to me by people. I also have spoken to a friend on the type of books I like.
 (This post has spoilers…)
In general, books that appeal to me would have a main thesis showing ALL of the following characteristics:
1) Contrarian to a point of being controversial
2) Non-obvious
3) Based on sound reasoning (subjective).
Take the book, ‘The World Is Flat’. It is a highly recommended book.  It introduces a few non-obvious ideas but the problem with this book is that though there are many anecdotes that do not stand up to scrutiny because it covers an area where I have personal experience in. Things on out-sourcing and China are not as close as I what I have experienced. Therefore, it scored low on having sound reasoning and in places where the writing is believable, they turn out to be knowledge already obvious to me.
Take another book, ‘Economic Hit Man’. This is a recommended book but it is written in a controversial style. On surface, the prose and style it is written in give you the feeling that the material is exaggerated (ala Michael Moore).  In reality, having little experience with most of the countries mentioned, I find the material hugely entertaining.
Another book I am reading is ’Guns, Germs, and Steel’. This book re-introduces an old idea on the reason behind the world powers today but the reasoning approach is interesting. Instead of basing the reasoning on the existing European powers, it focussed on the lesser known geographic regions and explained why they could not flourish into current powers.
I am a lazy and impatient reader. The thicker the book, the better it has to be. For example, it was a real pain struggling through “The World is Flat” compared to a possibly fluffier book say “Freakonomics”.Â
One thing I also realized is the age of the books. Old books that are recommended tend to be better than the new books that are recommended.
Having said that, I am not saying that books I like are good books and neither am I saying that the books I dislike or are neutral with bad books.
Neither am I truly scientific. I have a tendency to believe ideas that are controversial easily with little evidence. As a computer scientist, I am more interested in deduction and inferencing and would care less about statistics. Hence, well-crafted anecdotes explaining cause and effect is sometimes sufficient to convince me. Convincing statistics, on the other hand, raises my suspicion.
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08.11.06
Posted in Technology Adoption, Corporate Life, IT management at 8:23 am by ngkaboon
Recently I visited a dentist for a root-canal treatment. I have always hated visiting a dentist all my life. In fact, I gave advice to a colleague for her kids, (1) Bring the kids to friendly dentists so that they will not be afraid of dentists and (2) Make sure their teeth are in proper arrangement so that it will not suffer from dental problems in the future.
Recalling my work as an IT professional, I realized I am sometimes being perceived as a dentist. People, over the years in dealing with misappropriate IT professionals, have become afraid of dealing with IT people. And like visiting a dentist, once you are on a dentist chair, there is nothing you can do to complain (at least not through your mouth). Does it not sound like the inept helpdesk that we keep encouraging our user to call? In a long session like a root-canal treatment, you do not even know what happen if the dentist keeps on working on your teeth. Drawing on the analogy, it would seem that it is important for your users to find an avenue to raise their discomfort (like raising hands in a dental session) and it is important to provide constant feedback on what is happening in the session.Â
As for the earlier pair of advice, there is nothing much I can do about exposing first time users to the right IT. And for the latter advice, the closest analogy would be to fix the information problem and make sure the information is well-organized. In this way, even when system upgrades, the migration would be simpler.
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07.05.06
Posted in Cognition and Learning, Corporate Life, Behavior, Politics at 8:31 am by ngkaboon
What exactly is experience? And why even with significant experience, you could still make mistakes?
Experience, to me, is having done something before and “experiencing” the outcome. Scientifically, it only works for very repetitive activities that you do a fair number of times. In practice, there are a lot of things that we decide and do only a few times and does having experience with the few occassions really help? (In fact, sometimes it makes it worser especially when wicked variables team up and work against you, giving you false sense of associativity.) Furthermore, these decisions/actions comprise a lot of different variables that somehow make each situation unique.
From a management perspective, academics talk about the ability to see the context and generalize the principles. Acquiring this ability, strangely but surely enough, requires experience. Then, based on this principle, one way to accelerate your experience acquisition is through varied experiences (as opposed to repetitive experiences). By experiencing the spectrum, it should help you to identify the true constants, the nearly constants, the variables and entirely ill-defined non-functions.
One general footnote: People who enjoy power dislike power being taken away from them and when that happens, they would exercise/exaggerate their remaining power.
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06.21.06
Posted in Cognition and Learning at 8:19 am by ngkaboon
I must have written a lot of times on this topic but I am fascinated by it, especially from a scientific point of view.
My current belief is that learning happens when
1) there is a clear reason for new knowledge/skill aquisition
2) there is safety for making mistakes
3) there is constant repetition and mistakes making
4) there are interactions in terms of mimicking of actions and exchange of ideas.
5) regular guidance
(it is from most important to least important.)
Between (3) and (5), I tend to believe more in (3) because learning is easier if it is self-taught because you know best what is best for you. (That is a big assumption by itself.)
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06.13.06
Posted in Corporate Life at 2:31 pm by ngkaboon
As someone who has worked for BOTH a startup and sizable American MNCs, I think I am in a position to clear some misconceptions.
1) Start-up hours are not necessary longer than MNC hours.
2) Both start-up and MNC can offer you a large variety of work, including dirty work.Â
3) Start-ups do not necessary give you more freedom than MNC. Dress down in MNC can be quite relaxed.
4) MNC welfare is better than start-up welfare. Pay, for example, is paid regularly.
5a) A lot of time is spend on talking in an MNC vs a startup.
5b) A lot of time is spend on doing rather than talking in a startup.
5c) Neither is really good.
6) There are less policies in a startup. Your notebook is as close as it get to become your private asset.
7) The level of technical work in MNC is ridiculously low. Most of the problems deal with people.
8) The amount of technical work in a startup overwhelms until it becomes uninteresting.
9a) I left MNC to join startup to have more say in the work I do
9b) I left startup to join MNC because I thought I had more say in the work I do in an MNC.
9c) Finally, I realized, your say is dependent on your relationship with your boss and the influence of your boss.
10) You do not need to be in sales/marketing to prepare slides to communicate with people in an MNC (I included this one…because I like making slides 
)
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05.15.06
Posted in Leadership, Behavior at 8:11 am by ngkaboon
The world is unfair but a lot of times it is not because of the inherent unfairness of it all. It is unfair because people have different models of fairness. Fairness is defined by the individual.
Personally, I myself have been the one making “unfair” decisions and not knowing about their impacts until a fallout incident occurs.
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Posted in Meta at 6:33 am by ngkaboon
I am currently trying out different themes to see how things work out. In general, all fonts are too small. But let’s just stick to this one for the time being and see how it goes.
The tag thingy (known as categories in wordpress) also does not show for this one.
It does. Right on top. Interestingly, Becca, who’s the designer of this theme, is a 20-year old HK gal. Maybe one day, I would be using Athena designed themes.
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05.10.06
Posted in Meta at 5:57 am by ngkaboon
I have changed the name of this blog to reflect the nature of this blog. I have more desire to write about things that I like to write. Lesson learnt. You can be very good at pretending to be somebody else to get certain type of attention but that is only for the old-skool marketing and is clearly not fun for new-skool hacker-marketer.
I am going to revamp the design somewhat too shortly.
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Posted in Corporate Life, Behavior, Startup at 5:45 am by ngkaboon
I edited these points briefly for something i wrote elsewhere. Maybe it’s applicable to real life and largely inspired through 20% startup - 80 % corporate exposure I have.
- Do a little everyday. A little step is better than no step at all. You can program. You can read and research about the vision. You can establish the values on how the project would be runned.
- Communicate everyday. If you cannot, communicate through documentation is better than none at all.
- Communicate with yourself through documentation.
- Communicate with everyone else because they are your potential users.
- To have content for communicating, you have to read. 80% of what you communicate is your interpretation of ideas from somebody else.
- Keep an open view. Seek out opinions. No one knows for sure on which decision is best given everyone is living this particular scenario for the first time.
- Trust your instinct of understanding the users and tranform the product to meet what your instinct guides you to understand from the users.
- Do not translate directly from what the user want to your product
- Understand yourself because you are your first user.
- What you do is revolutionary, be it the peopleware you are establishing, or the product you are releasing, and this what will be the why to guide your how.
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05.07.06
Posted in Singapore, Behavior, Politics at 11:18 am by ngkaboon
With the elections just over, it is interesting to do the analysis of the Singapore politics over the years. The biggest change was in the 1984 election when the popularity votes started to depart from the 70s percentage to the 60s percentage. For the last 22 years, the percentage held stable (with oppositions sometimes winning more, sometimes less) with the exception of 2001, where the election was held after September 11 (The percentage was in the 70s). Interestingly, as a 1970s kid, I saw the remnants of the third world Singapore as a young boy. From 1980s onwards, Singapore has been pretty developed.
In 22 years, the people who were 20s had turned 40s and the 40s had turned 60s. Yet interestingly, in almost a generation, the percentage stood firm. Recall that we were brought up with old jokes like “PAP - Pay and Pay, WP - Why Pay, SDP - So Don’t Pay”, and despite the cynicism drummed into most kids I played with, as a whole, the behavior had not changed. Also, interestingly, though I cannot quote the exact figures, the university degree holders must have increased significantly over the 22 years and should have tilted towards more opposition (It is widely known that the educated are the ones who tend to lend support to an opposition movement). But, this shift has not happen.
Also an interesting statistic was the contest of Cheng San GRC in the 1997 election. The WP featuring JB and TLH actually did about the same as the WP featuring Sylvia and Gomez (actually they did better but they did contest with lighter-weight PAP candidates.) The fiery style of politics actually did work for about 16 years where JB first won a seat in Anson to the time of his last participation in Cheng San GRC. Of course, CSJ, on the other hand was not entirely sucessful in this type of execution. The intellectual style seemed to be preferred in recent years especially with the strong showing of WP this round.
However, the key question was why that in over 22 years, where supposedly there were a lot of changes in Singapore, everything remained the same politically. Here are some history snippets I remember and bother to search the internet to confirm the exact dates. The first MRT came in 1987 from Toa Payoh to Yishun. Singtel was privatized in 1992 and the telecoms industry was deregulated in the year 2000. The Keppel-Tat Lee merger happened in 1998. COE was introduced in 1990. GST was introduced in 1994.
On one hand, it is also important to look at how the ruling party defended on the 60s percentage of popularity votes. The three successful strategies are (1) consolidation of constituencies into larger entities, (2) money disimbursement to the population (first, through Singtel shares) and (3) upgrading (upgrading came in the GCT era).
With the opposition wards rejecting a combined $180m, upgrading as a strategy seem to have reached the end of life. I think in 10 years, people have come to realize that upgrading is very unsettling. I stay in a block currently undergoing upgrading, many residents are actually quite unhappy about it (from the conversations you have/heard in the lift). There is little gain in net result. Financially, the property did not go up too much (very much like renovations to a HDB flat, which adds little value). Despite the new facade, an old flat is an old flat and I would still get cockroaches in my apartment.
On larger entities, it is still not clear whether the opposition has finally figured out how to tackle a GRC and it is still quite possible to redraw electoral boundaries. One clear tactic for the opposition would be to move towards single constituency voting again.
Money disimbursement is a good strategy and will continue to happen, and if PAP could do it on a continuous basis without bankrupting the country, it enforces the right positive feedback loop in which the elected party improves the country and bring the money back to the voters.
Sometimes, I wonder what change will trigger another political change in the next 20 or so years. In the first 15 to 16 years of the last 22 years, I believe there is a net increase in the level of income (despite the 1997 financial crisis) but in the last 5-6 years, there is little increase partly due to CPF reductions and structural changes in the economy. It is hard to imagine the kind of salary growth we have experienced in the 80s and 90s, persisting the next 15 or so years. Perhaps, the population is willing to accept the fact of little or no growth or perhaps, they have not see the light of this no-growth situation. Or maybe, there is still substantial growth to be seen, which I highly doubt (also shared by the PM incidentally).
I end this post with a note that Singapore as a population in 1984 is still pretty much the same as the current population in 2006 based on the election results. The stability could be attributed to the ruling party strategies (co-evolving with the population). As a result, the academic but probably useless conclusion is that Singapore as a closed system has remained largely unchanged over 20 years.
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