Shooting the Moon

I rarely checked my Hotmail email box through a browser. I use Outlook, and the Outlook team has released an add-on called Outlook Connector which makes it a breeze to access my Hotmail along with my Exchange account. However, when I used Hotmail in IE this morning, I was taken aback by something that is so glaringly wrong.

Log into your Hotmail inbox through IE, and observe that to the right of the mail listing, a piece of space about 1/6 of the entire width is used to show a bland banner of Windows Live. I couldn’t help but keep coming back to it and shaking my head. In my humble opinion, this is all very wrong:

1. It is not displaying any ads
2. When you click on it, you are transferred to www.bing.com. So what the banner really should say is Bing, not Windows Live
3. There’s already a Bing search box in the top portion of the webpage

Those are the 3 things that came to my mind immediately. It doesn’t make sense that such a highly-visible and strategically important product could have received so little care. Numbers from last year shows that Gmail has grown by 43 percent, Yahoo Mail grew 11 percent, and Hotmail actually declined by 5 percent. Hotmail was already a loser at last year end, and with 3 quarters of the current year now over, I think it will be an easy bet who’s finishing last again.

So you don’t recognize those innate, primitive growls inside your soul for ever more probing into today’s tech worlds? How about your desire to experiment with social media? What about that yearning for an iphone which you have been designing a thousand ways of utilizing in every second of your life?

Yes. I need to reinvent myself, and I need it now. Watch this kid’s website. Sam Gammon. 17-year-old, a whole 10 years younger than me. Checked out and compared, and I was ashamed. I could be doing so much more. His image that he has projected on the web is so vivid, so saturated in all the very latest web-memes technologies. Here’s what it would look like. I think I can do the same.

Had an epiphany when reading the titled quote from Ramit. Actually, this epiphany is a recurring theme in my head. Once upon a time I was one such individual who would vote with my feet to go extremely frugal on things that belong to the bottom 2 rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (physiological and safety). That kind of mindset was born out of my very own cultural up-bringing, fortified by stories of how the world’s richest men live their frugal lives. And that was until not so long ago.

Now I am having a slightly different mindset. Frugal we must be, but only moderatly. My own grandparents, parents and fellow countrymen had to be frugal, because that was the only way they could save up enough to not suffer from scarcity of food and shelter when life was hard, and it just became a habit even after life improved dramatically. How about the deja-riche who are sometimes touted by the media as leading frugal life? Well, it could be two reasons. One, the general public likes to imagine life for the super rich as Tiffany’s, Lamborghini, Tahiti cottages etc., and when any one items is missing from that list, we scream out loud expressing out admiration on their frugality. Two, they simply don’t care. There is no causal relationship between the fact that these rich people become rich and that they are frugal.

These past few days I have been re-captivated by the mesmerizing melody and lyrics of Hey There Delilah on FM106.9.  A little querying online reveals this: Plain White T’s, the band behind the song was formed in 1997, and Hey There Delilah won the Emmy awards in 2007. It took a good 10 years. If you have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier, you would instantly recognize the magic number: 10 years, roughly 10,000 hours that is required by any person to master any skills, regardless of how much talent this person possess.

*Note* I meant to titled this post as Chinese Great Depression, but then superstition inhibited my impulse. I definitely do not want China to go through anything that resembles the G.D., and therefore I shut up my “crow mouth”.

I am an absolute layman on economic/financial policy, but this wonderful article from James Fallows in The Atlantic this month fascinates me so much, that I 1. subscribed to his blog immediately, 2. forced myself to finish this and this to understand what he meant by “overcapacity” and the analogy with the U.S. Great Depression and 3. tried to follow James Fallows on Twitter (he has not yet been transported into the Twitterverse).

The key idea of his article is that China has got great potential for growth in the long run, but faces many almost insurmountable hurdles in the short term. He compares China’s current situation to that of the US in the 1930’s, aka the Great Depression. Both are alike in that both have become the world’s supplier of goods, running a trade surplus of roughly 0.5% of the world’s GDP. Both rely heavily on foreign investment and demands which fuel a domestic production level much much higher than domestic need. When the boom boom comes to halt, both are faced with a problem of how to balance out all these accumulated momentum. The US tied to remedy the situation imposing heavy import tariff (look up Smoot-Hawley Tariff), which provokes a round of retaliation from other coutries. International trade dropped 70% in subsequent years, and the US had no other choice but to close down factories, lay off people. China should not make this mistake. However, what James is seeing now, at least in Q1 of 08, China is pretty much doing the same thing, albeit much more indirect, by slowly depreciating the Yuan, indirectly impose tariff (think recent rumor on canceling out Airbus deal) etc., which resulted in net export increase (export fell 17% but import fell 43%).

However, James remains optimistic for China’s long-term prospect, using the following arguments:

1. Popular belief: Chinese people’s obedience to and approval of the central government relies on the economic prosperity. Once this assumption is no longer true, discontent will fuel into a revolt and social turmoil – Not really. What James has noticed is how much trust the people have placed in the central government, almost to a religious degree. The mass complains rather vocally at local government / immediate boss for all the unfairness they are being treated with. Further more, people have seen or are seeing much tougher times. The past few generations have seen wars, extreme poverty and social unrest, people dying en masse, revolution. There is nothing worse you could put the Chinese people through.

2. Popular belief: Being the world’s sweat shop, the Chinese are at the bottom of any globally lucrative business’ value chain. Without a new business model, these shops will close down by the thousands and never to come back – To my delightful surprise, James mentions that the goverment is keenly aware of this issue and has manifested herself in many ways trying to start retaining more values. Examples include a “retail research center” in Beijing suburb that researches on the successes of Walmart and Carrefour and the like, and also the China Research Lab of IBM, where James has seen the best voice-to-text software.

I am of course ecstatic on such an educated prediction on China, coming from a very reputable and trustable man. However, my eyes remain cautious on China current situation. I really hope that China does not make the same mistake as the US did in the 1930’s.

As to Jame’s point in the buoyant spirit of the Chinese people, I am taking it with a pinch of salt. What I have always felt is the over-optimism, at least in my generation, that is most prevalent among college students. But this post is getting too long and my eyes are becoming blurry.

This is absolutely a Tiffany-branded gem in a company teeming with ideas – Mail Gogglers. In a nutshell, Gmail pops up some mathes problems for you to solve if you attempt to send email in the wee-hours, when you are likely to be 1. extremely tired and losing your focus 2. drunk 3. already sleeping.

We can port this to cars – maths problems as sobriety test before you can start the engine on weekend nights. Quick Kumo search pulls up these statistics on alcahol-related car accidents:

• Alcohol-related car crashes kill someone every 31 minutes and injure someone every two minutes.
• In the United States, drunk driving is the leading criminal cause of death.
• More than 17,000 people are the victims of drunk driving accidents every year.
• Approximately 40% of all motor-vehicle fatalities are alcohol-related.
• Frequent drunk drivers are responsible for almost 60% of alcohol-related fatalities.
• In 2007, drivers between the ages of 16-20 were involved in 1,719 drunk driving accidents.

This must be way cheaper than putting in a breath-detector (proof to come). Speaking of which, how come car-born breath-detector is not standard apparatus in modern cars, given how serious a problem drink-drive is? Is it simply because there is never enough mercenary incentive – in which case what is the law for?

Anyway, instead of doing some maths problem, we can actually have something more effective, more interesting, less left-brained, less boring. For example, pops up a picture of people and locate a particular face, spelling out a difficult word, or nitty-gritty details of the car owner’s favorite sitcom, in a very short period of time.

Information influx. Too much information. Sounds familiar? It’s profanely cliche! But this is the exact problem that caught my attention today, among my hectic schedule.

In the beginning of time, we had human operators reading signals from the Mainframe and react accordingly, or whose job was to respond to an incoming telephone call and put the caller through to the callee. Later on machines got blazingly fast, bandwidth got unimaginably enormous, which means we had to built automation in order to keep with the information flow. Nowadays (for the past 20 years) we have the Internet. And everything exploded. I used to think actual flesh explosion (18+ Rated) if we stuff all the information inside someone’s head. What to do?

Web portal surfaced, then comes the search engine that helps sort through information. We have blogs and feeds now that we can subscribe to according to our interests. We have to be careful though in narrowing down our selection. Still we have problems.

Example: Twitter. If you have a bunch of very active people that you follow, it becomes hard to keep up with the twit flow.

Example: In a chatroom scenario, say, Microsoft Office Communications Server Group Chat chatroom, which I have intimate knowledge with, which is a form of semi-async communication, if you join in the middle of heated discussion, it becomes hard to know what’s going on.

We definitely got a problem: how to specify criteria in a smart and effortless way what our interests are so we can better have the information sorted and ranked in the first place, and how to glean the gist from a sea of words in a split of second according to the crriteria just created?

Beats me.

Birth of a name: this comes from the saying – if you aim for the moon from the onset, then even if you miss target at the end, you’ll still land on the stars. Anyway, I didn’t have the exact wording in my head, but Shooting the Moon was loud and clear and beckoning … you get the idea.

OK, I have to admit the title is abit of a hyperbole, but this topic is very interesting.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outlier”, argues that one of the contributing factors that the Chinese kids are more maths proficient than the American kids is that it is faster to say the numbers in Chinese than in English. Well, as much as I want to believe that there’s at least one aspect of the Chinese language that is practically superior, I find the logic hard to follow and fan out. Say we follow this logic, then the French people’s maths capability should be the worst in the world, because they have the weirdest / most complicated system of saying numbers from 70~99. Or if we fan out this logic in another direction, then the Chinese should build the most advanced civilization, because all Chinese characters are single-syllable / diphthong.

But those are just some immediate thoughts I have for argument sake.I want to believe there is some connection though, and I’d really want to dig into this if I have time.

FYI – Numbers in French (http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/tutorials/numbers) For example, to say 91 in French, it is quatre-vingt-onze, which literally is 4-20-11, 4 times twenty plus 11. In Mandarin Chinese, it is 九十一 (jiu-shi-yi), 3 syllables, of which the first two are pronouced as one. English is a tie with Chinese in this particular case.