Luddite
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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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Thomas Moore (double O’s) was quoting Thomas More (single O) in his book, the Re-Enchantmet of Everyday Life. He came out with a bang in Care of the Soul. Essayist, therapist, monk and philosopher who hit the marks. Those marks point us back to Nature, Magic and Intuition. Qualities of life . He treaded carefully, staying…
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BlackBerry was blamed for London Summer unrest while tech proponents gave it credits for Arab Spring. Tech is just out there, with its incremental and osmotic effect. What society chooses to do with it is entirely different. There will come a time when we do need to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, paint our roofs white and…
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The paper announced “a A student committed suicide for not passing Vietnam‘s first IBM-graded SAT“. So, my classmates showed up at my house the next morning for condolences. True story. Not having seen the column the day before, I was completely taken aback. Hence, my first exposure to bad journalism, and Vietnam’s first trial run…
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We just saw an aftershock in Japan at magnitude 7.0. In and of itself, it’s a major earthquake. But, since it had been preceded by the big one (9.0), it is pale in comparison. As to culture shock, a man from the Amazon who got transported to Seattle, WA will only hear one thing in common: Amazon.com. The…
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MSNBC interviews a blogger from Good magazine on automation nation. The take away: automation is moving beyond manufacturing sector (e.g. Google test drove an unmanned vehicle in California, or Italian researchers tested a driver-less van, from Italy to China) to service sectors, such as health care . Japan has been deep into robotic technology, a national policy…
Thang Nguyen 555 