Tag: World Cup

Content poor

Latest study pointed to Vietnam workforce skill deficiencies, particularly in critical and behavioral skills (numerical skill was a given).

This study came not as a surprise. For years, kids have adopted a rote learning, picked up from peers and adults, who in turn, had picked up from earlier generations.

We are heading toward an era when technological platforms are abundant, but content wanting.

It is an equal of having all the stages in the world, smoke machines, sound machines, lighting machines, keyboards and sound effects machines, but no singer and composer.

Take the Beatles rooftop performance of  “Don’t let me down” as an example.

It was a winter day in England. Who would have thought of going out and holding an impromptu concert on the roof top, with “social proof” crowds gathered on the street and London police kept quite busy?

According to Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, the Beatles by then had played together for nearly 10,000 hours, first in Hamburg strip clubs, then elsewhere (except Japan where they were banned) before that memorable Rooftop concert.

Michael Jackson did buy all their copyrights knowing those were treasure troves.

Now, Bill Gates and tribes have risen, with Windows and Outlook for the desktop.

In short, the nerds have taken over. And there is nothing we can do about it.

Hardware rules. Until now.

Someday we will wake up and realize, what’s happened here?

Since when do we need to turn on the machine first thing as opposed to burning the incense? Bowing at the virtual altar and not the ancestral one?

Where are our priorities? chasing after the next version of the x-box at Best Buy and whatever OEM  happen to retail at the time?

One machine that has had some staying power (because it caters to a communal need): the karaoke machine. It cuts out the band (in its original meaning) and allows the mass to pick their own content and lyrics. Voila! instant party.

Cheers.

It asks little of us: cognitive skill (knowing which song and how to encode it), behavioral skills (how to take your turn and compete) and of course, numerative skill (tabulating the scores if you compete in teams).

Back to our skill deficiency alarm. If kids are allowed to explore and exploit their multi-talents, whether it’s in sports (Vietnamese women soccer team might score big this year, World Cup material) or music, designing or drawing, let the thousand flowers bloom. Move them up the chain of values, and not the chain of command (do you want to wage war forever? or else, why do we still behave in cold-war fashion?).

With inter-connectedness, mobile platform and dropbox, kids should be set free to pursue and optimize their lot in life. A nation whose policy is to blossom its young is the nation of the future. Take Israel, Ireland and India. What do they have in common? A national strategy and focus on IT talent infra-structure.

I hope someday you’ll join us. And I don’t think I am the only one.

When men cry

At the last World Cup, the team from Netherlands, who lost, cried.

Ten years ago, at the World Trade Center, women and men cried (white dust on black suits).

And last night, I cried, while watching The Best of Youth, an Italian saga of a family coming of age since the 60’s. So much idealism, and helplessness.

Men don’t share the pain, and are not supposed to cry ( King Harald V of Norway cried openly, and this got a mention in Newsweek’s “What Now Little Country” piece).

They might email, text and tweet but not tears.

But this near-double-dip Recession should make both  men and women cry.

e.g how a push for sub-prime housing (NJNI , no job no income) turned the world on its head.

Now they are seeing an uptick in sub-prime auto loan (spreading out to 63 months).

When the unexplainable occurred, we blame it on the gods.

Archille. Made by the gods, and return to them.

Matteo, one of the main characters in the Best of Youth, exuded both gallantry and sadness.

He tried to carry the chip on his shoulders, at the neglect of his own well-being.

The uncompromising solution: jump to his death on New Year‘s Eve (most suicides are over the holidays).

His brother cried. His family cried. The entire Italian cinema viewers cried.

You had to be there to feel the force of emotion that had been built up from the beginning.

(the fireworks, the caller-ID rejects, the failure to pin down the bad guys who eluded justice, failure to de-institutionalize a friend…).

Last night, on PBS Nightly Business Report, a commentator was wise-cracked when suggesting we should have been thankful

that consumer sentiment ( euphemism for “when men cry”) was at its lowest just as it had been at the beginning of the Recession.

Turned out that his suggestions were not financially related at all.

He proposed thanking loyal customers who stuck around.

In short, gratitude as a substitute for economic incentives.

Meanwhile, another fresh face, the handsome man from Princeton, is to take over the top Economic Advisory post (First Harvard, now Princeton as long as they are from an Ivy League school).

Tough men don’t cry.

Only when the dream died (World Cup championship for instance).

This time around, just make sure the American dream lives on, flickering but not put out.

(At least, Henry Ford understood this when he decided on high wages for workers, who in turn, could afford to buy his model T’s).

That way, whoever imploded just went quietly. Don’t we wish an Italian-style on current malaise (where men are allowed to cry).

That way, they won’t go postal (or cut the grass violently w/ chain saw).

In today’s world, it’s hard to pin down who the bad guy is. Hence, no catharsis.

Except for one clear-cut case, this past summer, in Pakistan, when the world

agreed, that crime doesn’t pay. No tears were shed on that one, men’s or women’s.

creatures of information

“We are ‘creatures of information'”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information.

We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see through a glass darkly…”

Never enough, or soon enough, from tweets to tabloids. So we hacked into phones, into computers, even broke into hotel  and hospital, (Colson ‘s Watergate) and (Coulson’s phonegate).

Watching trial-by-jury and inquiry-by-committee.

We want to know. The tree of knowledge.

Yet we succumbed easily to “bubbles” (every five years or so).

We lock away older people behind “secure”  doors, so we can “own” our own mistakes.

Mrs Ford embodied the ERA generation, while the congress woman from Arizona, NRA‘s.

Interesting data points: Japan women soccer team won the World Cup this afternoon (Mrs Ford couldn’t have been prouder: slim, Asian, women and soccer, given her starting point in early days with breast cancer awareness).

We seek and send information at nano level while debt ceiling reaches Trillion-dollar level.

The result: Chinese consumers and travelers are here in NYC, to buy Made-in-China I-phones and hand-carry them home (suitcase entrepreneurs).

It’s been a long journey, being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

We asked for the Tree of knowledge. Now we know: knowledge without the ability to act is crippling and demoralising.

So we tuned out (having been over-exposed to repeated news from hot spots around the globe e.g. Syria, N Korea etc…)

like the character in “Being There”. We seek information past (history), and future (horoscope), we want to know from palm reading and Palm Pilot. What’s the latest tweet? (Explosion at Boston Marathon finish line?)

200 Million registered accounts constitute an Information-rich but compassion-fatigue society. In the beginning…was the Word. And that Logos must not be decoupled from Pathos.

Information-rich society should bear more responsibilities for the privilege it was endowed, or risk dumbing down, while the machine grows smarter. That “library of Babel” will reach the sky, way pass the cloud, sooner than we thought. Robust information flow, on steroid, racing across all channels: print, online, push and pull media, without BORDERS (the bookstore).

Name Change

It costs about $800 to change one’s name here in the US e.g. on social security , driver’s license and passport.

One might prefer something that has global sounding: Villa, Gaga, Shakira.

Between YouTube, Facebook and World Cup, we enjoy an unprecedented confluence of technology and globalization.

And the common denominators are football scores and music scores.

For a brief moment our world is united.

(this morning, at the gym, a stranger I was talking to couldn’t recall Argentina, who played opposite Brazil. Thanks to World Cup, we could strike small talks).

We kid ourselves into thinking that we will be forever young, and glorious .

These sport idols represent our aspiration i.e. fame and fortune. I know parents want what’s best for their children.

What they don’t know is the specifics on how their expectations fan out e.g. doctors, dentists etc.. (no one wants to dream their children grow up to be a secretary. It just happens that it is increasingly a less desirable occupation due to automation).

And as Friedman keeps reminding his children at night :”if you don’t get up early, and study hard, kids from China and India will take your jobs”.

They are already here, excelling in many aspects that involved a tool or an instrument (Yo-Yo, Lang Lang).

The elementary school I attended in Saigon was L’ecole Aurore. It’s been renamed twice, just to end up with its original translation “Rang Dong.”

Many of the French colonial street names aren’t that lucky

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/05/world/la-fg-vietnam-names-20100705

And life goes on in Shanghai, Saigon or Singapore. One street vendor FOB replaces another on that same spot.

Even banks change their names. Keep the sign shops busy. Call it unbranding or what not. Same script, different actors.

Isn’t it the same in Las Vegas, Sunset Boulevard and 42nd St! Like Friedman, I told my girls to study hard or else kids from BRIC nations will take their jobs.

They may even change their names to land an interviews. I named mine Aimy and Maily. That way, they can go back and forth between the Vietnamese world and the Anglo one. Hope they don’t spend $800 someday to switch to Gaga or Shakira. I prefer Paris if it comes to that . Might as well be bold!

Avez vous le vuvuzela?

Vietnamese soccer fans are eager to get their hands on the instrument.

It’s not surprising to see Vietnamese hot for soccer. I was there when Vietnam scored at the last-minute to win over Thailand.

But it is quite amusing to hear how vuvuzela is also making its way from South Africa to South Vietnam. Isn’t it noisy enough with millions of motor bikes honking all day long?

http://www.vnexpress.net/GL/Doi-song/Mua-sam/2010/06/3BA1D42E

Some cultures have an affinity to expressing themselves more audibly than others.

Hispanic events are always loud, so are the Filippino ones.

And Japanese events are the most quiet.

In the article, we also learned that in Hanoi, the demand for vuvuzela is lower than in HCMC .

The hotter the climate, the noisier the society.

The cold and rain tend to soothe and produce a calming effect.

The gods must be crazy in South Vietnam.

And World Cup fever is at its height. Blow the horn. Win or lose.

Meanwhile, in traffic, people also blow the horn to :

– announce their presence

– urge drivers in front to hurry

– celebrate soccer victory

In other words, honking  for all occasions.

In the US, if you honk, you will likely get a finger or trigger a road rage.

Intended and perceived message. Pure mis-communication play.

At least, the article brought up a good point: vuvuzela is not meant to be blown solo. It’s not like a sax which produces the urban lonely sound.

Vuvuzelas are meant to be blown in communal setting. In World Cup stadium. In South Africa. It’s so amazing how fast music (or sound) and sports can bring people together.

So does a simple instrument  (from the Roman Empire to today’s Arlington Memorial).  Wait until someone tries to blow it in Sapa or Dalak where nature will join in with its own hollowing echo, reverberate the (sounding) circle of life (Disney-esque) e.g. bushman and cave man, mountain man and city man, factory man and fashion man, hobo and homo: all free men.

Humanity will get its say. It just takes time. Do unto others what you would want done. What comes around comes around. I just hear the sound of one hand clapping.

What’s that sound. Everybody is going round.