Thang Nguyen 555
Cultures on Collision Course
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Tag: Google
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The world’s poor seem to bear the brunt of typhoon destruction more than the world’s rich. They live in The Ring of Fire. Can’t afford to move anywhere and now can’t go home. Disaster relief is needed. But long-term and sustained recovery takes time. We have come up with pre-fab housing that can withstand heavy…
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By now, you can still see a few weather-beaten cyclos around albeit restricted to tourist quarters. I still remember the sound of horse carriage in the streets of old Saigon. My kid will be lucky if she knows what a cyclo is. She knows Google though. Paperless and painless search. Now with semantic search. My profile, age in particular, triggers online ads on…
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The Post is now under new ownership. So is the iconic Newsweek. Both incidentally got taken over by jungle-like entities like Amazon and the Beast, respectively. New world order (or jungle order). The “barbarians” are once again at the gate. New totem pole. New titanic shift, from analog to digital, from print to online. I…
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It’s only been a bit more than 15 years since the Internet entered our homes (You’ve Got Mail). Before that we got to run errand, with multiple stops e.g. at the library, bookstores and retail stores. Now, just Google it. Price-comparison shopping, or just ordering it online. We find friends online, learn online and practically…
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I once met a man who got a big screen TV. It was oversized given the small dimension of his living room. Since nearing retirement, he must have figured that it was worth the investment. He would be projecting himself onto that screen a lot, so might as well “live” large. A recent study about Facebook‘s Likes shows that on average…
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Saw him at an Orange County club back in 1989. He was already rowdy and his parties disturbing to conservative neighbors. And now, after all these years, shows up in North Korea, on a basketball diplomacy tour. Dennis Rodman, NBA defender. HBO’s VICE has done a surprising job of casting for sports diplomacy (Google x-CEO would…
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Post-holiday blues. Cabin fever. And the return of routine. And the Oscar goes to…… We weeded out unwanted inventory and unfriended people. Clearing the deck and crank up the engine. Sports Illustrated illustrates tan and skin underneath winter jacket. While Readers Digest finally suffers inDigestion. Books of the Times and books of the Post. New…
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Vincent Cerf is a case in point. He is perhaps the oldest employee at young Google. Before that, a lifer at MCI. But you need someone who has been there, done that. Who could connect the dots (or see them at all). Start-ups got money and the juice. Most of, start-ups got the goods and…
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The war novel with similar title was surprisingly good. I have known about it for a while, but couldn’t get myself to “carry” it home. Until now. Until it’s translated into Vietnamese. It’s the opposite of reading Bao Ninh‘s The Sorrows of War in English. Both novels had the same setting, same period, same conflict, same ending…
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On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”. The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now. She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America,…
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