The BBC is reporting that the "The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum," from their article here. The other point of interest, is that Denmark is ranked first, which was rather interesting. Though this might sound like big news, it is important to check the fact instead of just taking everything at face value. The first thing that must be asked is "what were the evaluated factors?" If you don't know how these people are evaluating the countries then everything is pretty much meaningless. Besides, I was keen on trying to find out what put Denmark in first!
I popped by the World Economic Forum webpage get further details on this report, which is actually the Global Information Technology Report 2006-2007. After reading the report title, I am not very happy about the BBC's reporting! The BBC said "Technology innovation" which can mean, electronic devices, computers, jet engines, high-tech cars, whatever right? But the report they are talking about is "information technology," which means communication, data indexing, storage, computing (some) and etc. Obviously this is a misrepresentation of the report.
I've tried to find a copy of the report but couldn't find anything more than a ranked list here. No criteria, nothing. I am afraid that the report is available for purchase and no detailed information is available (other than a table of contents). Sure, I could write up a report on "Oranges are scientifically proven to be better on apples" and then charge, say $100 for it and then just say, "Oranges are better than apples for fluid content." The possibilities are dubious.
Word to the wise: If someone makes a claim, always be demanding of evidence.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
New roommate
As of yesterday, my roommate Kuni, has moved out of the apartment as he moves to Nagoya to start work with "Brother," a printer manufacturing company. Originally they started with building sewing machines and manged to move into the market. It seems that many Japanese companies have interesting beginnings.
A new roommate by the name of Hiro will be moving in to take Kuni's place. It will be interesting to see how this works out. The nice thing about Kuni, was that he lived in Canada for about a year and has become quite laid back as a result of his living experience. We just sort of stick things in to the fridge where ever there is space and do a generally good job of keeping track of where we put our stuff. There has been the occasional scenario when someone forgets whose is what and sometimes we end up leaving stuff in the fridge longer than it should be there. Yes, we've had a few "biohazard" incidents.
Well this time, it looks like it is going to be a little different. The new roomie seems to be more comfortable with his own rack in the fridge, as opposed to the haphazard way we've been doing things... same thing for the shoe rack. As long as this "organized" thing doesn't got overboard, then I should be fine. Is it really a Japanese thing? I wouldn't say so... I have met some neat-freak Canadians before. Sometimes, the idea that some behavior is "culture" based is not always the best way to describe things... sometimes, it ends up being the easiest excuse.
Anyways, it was nice living with Kuni. Best wishes to him and hopefully our paths will cross again in the future.
A new roommate by the name of Hiro will be moving in to take Kuni's place. It will be interesting to see how this works out. The nice thing about Kuni, was that he lived in Canada for about a year and has become quite laid back as a result of his living experience. We just sort of stick things in to the fridge where ever there is space and do a generally good job of keeping track of where we put our stuff. There has been the occasional scenario when someone forgets whose is what and sometimes we end up leaving stuff in the fridge longer than it should be there. Yes, we've had a few "biohazard" incidents.
Well this time, it looks like it is going to be a little different. The new roomie seems to be more comfortable with his own rack in the fridge, as opposed to the haphazard way we've been doing things... same thing for the shoe rack. As long as this "organized" thing doesn't got overboard, then I should be fine. Is it really a Japanese thing? I wouldn't say so... I have met some neat-freak Canadians before. Sometimes, the idea that some behavior is "culture" based is not always the best way to describe things... sometimes, it ends up being the easiest excuse.
Anyways, it was nice living with Kuni. Best wishes to him and hopefully our paths will cross again in the future.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Essays, Cover Letters and Google Translate
Today was the submission due-date for the online "entry sheet" papers (read: glorified cover letter) for Sony. I spent nearly 4 days working on writing out short essays in English that I would translate into Japanese for the questions I had to answer and I am going about doing this in a pretty interesting way.
Essays and Google Translate
Enter my friend, Google Translate, the best tool I have for writing essays. Though I haven't mentioned it, I have started translating some of the essays I post in to Japanese. It is no easy task for me to translate my essays in to Japanese, because the sentence structures I use in English are much more complicated compared to what I use in Japanese. This naturally poses limitations on what I am able to say in Japanese. While I may say that the translations that come out of google translate are not perfect, they more than suffice to provide me with a framework of text to fix and modify to create my Japanese version. Along the way, I learn new Japanese equivalents of the English expressions and vocabulary I use.
The fixing I do from the what I get from Google translate usually involves me moving statements around, changing predicates and reworking the essay. Google translate's main problem is that it sometimes has problems choosing the correct meaning of a word during translation. I have occasionally written the "internet" as the abbreviated "net" and what comes out is the literal translation of a "fish net" in Japanese. Suffice to say that some sentences read rather funny when it comes to "I was surfing the 'fish net' the other day..."
The other problem that Google translate has is that sometimes the translations are very literal and come off as unnatural in Japanese (when translating from English to Japanese). For example, in Japanese the main subject is often omitted and often assumed to be understood (which can make for interesting misunderstandings sometimes). When I write in English, especially in first person, I generally use the word "I" quite often to reinforce the first person point of view. Repetition of "I" multiple times in Japanese sentences is sometimes unnatural. There are of course other points I could point out but discussing all those points will take this post on a drawn out tangent. (Side note: I threw the last sentence into Google Translate and it did an OK job of differentiating the meanings of the words "point" and "points" which I used in different context, the sentence was kind of jumbled, however.)
Getting a job and why new grads in Japan don't use cover letters
So back to the cover letter for Sony. Recruitment into large companies in Japan (Toshiba, Sony, Hitachi and more) consists of writing a Japanese style cover letter, taking a "Standard Proficiency Index" (SPI) test and then going through several interviews with the company. Currently I am at cover letter stage.
The thing about applying for Japanese companies, is that you *don't* know exactly what you will be doing when you get hired. When you get hired, they may show you around the many different branches of the company, have you try out several different field or fling you to somewhere where they need people. It all depends on the company, but the main point is that you will not know what you will be doing at first.
This is quite different from the way Western countries work when it comes to getting a job -- a full job description is posted complete with a list of responsibilities and required skills and then you apply directly for those kinds of jobs. If there is a electrical engineering position for MP3 players and my responsibilities will be to do the circuit design, I would naturally highlight whatever experience I have working on circuit/hardware design (I have very little experience by the way), this might include what you did designing, making and testing the device. Hopefully you would also be able to say that what you made, worked!
The problem about writing cover letters for Japanese companies is that you can't be particularly concrete about what you write because you are not applying for a specific job position. What you are instead applying to is the company entity and what you write is based on your impression of what you think they might be doing or what the company might have told during one of their information sessions which many students attend.
This is a result of the company not expecting the students to enter the company with any skills or proficiencies, because job training happens after you get into the company. What happens is that the successful applicant picks a field that they think they are interested in and start from there. Since no job descriptions are provided, it is obvious that the usual cover letter method doesn't work. So how does a company get to know who you are?
Enter the Entry Sheet
The company wants to get to know their applicants a little before having both sides spend their time and money to come out to an interview. The best way for a company to get a first impression is in writing, but if there aren't any direct job positions for the applicant to apply for, what are they going to write about? The solution is to provide a form with questions for applicants to answer, and the name of this form is called "The Entry Sheet." So what do they ask ?
Q1. "What are your goals and dreams you wish to realize at our company?"
Q2. "What is your first choice for a department to join and why?"
Q3. "What is your second choice and why?"
Q4. "What research projects did you do at University?"
Q5. "What did you work towards to when you were at school?"
Aside from Q4, I thought that these questions were very open-ended and when you don't have concrete questions, it becomes hard to give concrete answers. What I think happens, is that people end up giving very abstract answers. You might as well be answering "what is your dream" at a beauty pageant and answering "world peace" (for those of you that catch the Miss Congeniality movie reference).
So, how would you answer open-ended questions, especially in a manner to make an impact on the reader (likely the human resources manager)? I will leave it to you as an interesting exercise.
And, fear not, I am not coping out. I put quite a lot of thought into these questions and already submitted my answers. Actually, my lab members were quite shocked/impressed at how I went about answering these questions. How my writing fell into the public domain of the lab was a result of me asking some of my Japanese friends to double check my Japanese and it became quite the spectacle, but that will be a talk for another time. I have still have much to write about but it is almost 2 am, time to sleep.
Open-ended questions are tough to answer... think about how you would answer them. If you want a challenge, post your answers in the comments section.
Hopefully, my next post will be a contrast between my answering style and what my peers wrote. They told me "no one in Japan would write the way you do, but it's pretty good! It must be the western influence in you" I still need to read what they wrote to compare the difference between me and them. I wouldn't accredit my writing style to writing cover letters as a result of "western culture," it's more like practice from all the cover letters I used to write (back in university for Co-op) that helped me get better. I know that I am considerably better than how I was before... but that too is a topic for another discussion.
Hmm, it seems that I have a lot of pending things to talk about just from this post. I also have about 5 other pending essay topics to write about as stored on a list on my computer. I'll get around to it... when I have time again. Now time to really stop. I've already written 3~4 more paragraphs compared to when I said I would stop, else I'll just go on forever.
Essays and Google Translate
Enter my friend, Google Translate, the best tool I have for writing essays. Though I haven't mentioned it, I have started translating some of the essays I post in to Japanese. It is no easy task for me to translate my essays in to Japanese, because the sentence structures I use in English are much more complicated compared to what I use in Japanese. This naturally poses limitations on what I am able to say in Japanese. While I may say that the translations that come out of google translate are not perfect, they more than suffice to provide me with a framework of text to fix and modify to create my Japanese version. Along the way, I learn new Japanese equivalents of the English expressions and vocabulary I use.
The fixing I do from the what I get from Google translate usually involves me moving statements around, changing predicates and reworking the essay. Google translate's main problem is that it sometimes has problems choosing the correct meaning of a word during translation. I have occasionally written the "internet" as the abbreviated "net" and what comes out is the literal translation of a "fish net" in Japanese. Suffice to say that some sentences read rather funny when it comes to "I was surfing the 'fish net' the other day..."
The other problem that Google translate has is that sometimes the translations are very literal and come off as unnatural in Japanese (when translating from English to Japanese). For example, in Japanese the main subject is often omitted and often assumed to be understood (which can make for interesting misunderstandings sometimes). When I write in English, especially in first person, I generally use the word "I" quite often to reinforce the first person point of view. Repetition of "I" multiple times in Japanese sentences is sometimes unnatural. There are of course other points I could point out but discussing all those points will take this post on a drawn out tangent. (Side note: I threw the last sentence into Google Translate and it did an OK job of differentiating the meanings of the words "point" and "points" which I used in different context, the sentence was kind of jumbled, however.)
Getting a job and why new grads in Japan don't use cover letters
So back to the cover letter for Sony. Recruitment into large companies in Japan (Toshiba, Sony, Hitachi and more) consists of writing a Japanese style cover letter, taking a "Standard Proficiency Index" (SPI) test and then going through several interviews with the company. Currently I am at cover letter stage.
The thing about applying for Japanese companies, is that you *don't* know exactly what you will be doing when you get hired. When you get hired, they may show you around the many different branches of the company, have you try out several different field or fling you to somewhere where they need people. It all depends on the company, but the main point is that you will not know what you will be doing at first.
This is quite different from the way Western countries work when it comes to getting a job -- a full job description is posted complete with a list of responsibilities and required skills and then you apply directly for those kinds of jobs. If there is a electrical engineering position for MP3 players and my responsibilities will be to do the circuit design, I would naturally highlight whatever experience I have working on circuit/hardware design (I have very little experience by the way), this might include what you did designing, making and testing the device. Hopefully you would also be able to say that what you made, worked!
The problem about writing cover letters for Japanese companies is that you can't be particularly concrete about what you write because you are not applying for a specific job position. What you are instead applying to is the company entity and what you write is based on your impression of what you think they might be doing or what the company might have told during one of their information sessions which many students attend.
This is a result of the company not expecting the students to enter the company with any skills or proficiencies, because job training happens after you get into the company. What happens is that the successful applicant picks a field that they think they are interested in and start from there. Since no job descriptions are provided, it is obvious that the usual cover letter method doesn't work. So how does a company get to know who you are?
Enter the Entry Sheet
The company wants to get to know their applicants a little before having both sides spend their time and money to come out to an interview. The best way for a company to get a first impression is in writing, but if there aren't any direct job positions for the applicant to apply for, what are they going to write about? The solution is to provide a form with questions for applicants to answer, and the name of this form is called "The Entry Sheet." So what do they ask ?
Q1. "What are your goals and dreams you wish to realize at our company?"
Q2. "What is your first choice for a department to join and why?"
Q3. "What is your second choice and why?"
Q4. "What research projects did you do at University?"
Q5. "What did you work towards to when you were at school?"
Aside from Q4, I thought that these questions were very open-ended and when you don't have concrete questions, it becomes hard to give concrete answers. What I think happens, is that people end up giving very abstract answers. You might as well be answering "what is your dream" at a beauty pageant and answering "world peace" (for those of you that catch the Miss Congeniality movie reference).
So, how would you answer open-ended questions, especially in a manner to make an impact on the reader (likely the human resources manager)? I will leave it to you as an interesting exercise.
And, fear not, I am not coping out. I put quite a lot of thought into these questions and already submitted my answers. Actually, my lab members were quite shocked/impressed at how I went about answering these questions. How my writing fell into the public domain of the lab was a result of me asking some of my Japanese friends to double check my Japanese and it became quite the spectacle, but that will be a talk for another time. I have still have much to write about but it is almost 2 am, time to sleep.
Open-ended questions are tough to answer... think about how you would answer them. If you want a challenge, post your answers in the comments section.
Hopefully, my next post will be a contrast between my answering style and what my peers wrote. They told me "no one in Japan would write the way you do, but it's pretty good! It must be the western influence in you" I still need to read what they wrote to compare the difference between me and them. I wouldn't accredit my writing style to writing cover letters as a result of "western culture," it's more like practice from all the cover letters I used to write (back in university for Co-op) that helped me get better. I know that I am considerably better than how I was before... but that too is a topic for another discussion.
Hmm, it seems that I have a lot of pending things to talk about just from this post. I also have about 5 other pending essay topics to write about as stored on a list on my computer. I'll get around to it... when I have time again. Now time to really stop. I've already written 3~4 more paragraphs compared to when I said I would stop, else I'll just go on forever.
Friday, March 16, 2007
200% more interesting, in English
A friend of mine came back to Sendai from Vancouver just recently. It's an interesting story, but she studied at UBC while I was there but we never met up, but we became friends in Japan instead. She went over to Vancouver just recently to visit to visit friends right after finishing her masters. When I got wind of this, I promptly asked her to grab me a bag of dried mangoes from Costco. I am a sucker for that stuff!
After spending 3 weeks in Vancouver and polishing up her English, she paid me a visit yesterday to catch up, where I got to listen in on stories on a few things going on in Vancouver. Apparently, I heard that Stanley park got sort of a flood recently and a bunch of trees were knocked down during a wind-storm? The details were kind of hazy but all I know that a bunch of trees in Stanley park fell down during some kind of storm. There was supposedly a bit of a mud-slide up the highway on the way to Whistler so I heard.
Anyways, after my friend came back to Japan, we chatted in English for the most part. I do a fairly good job of bantering in English, leading to a few good laughs. My friend promptly told me that "You're much more interesting when you speak English." And yes, that is true.
I am not particularly well versed in Japanese when it comes to making funny quips or side remarks. It ends up that my Japanese is a little on the dry side because I haven't developed a sense of humor in Japanese. I speak quite logically or only about interesting ideas that pop up. But I'm not too good at interjecting humor into a Japanese conversation yet and I still need to work on making small talk in Japanese.
And so, I spent the evening listening to stories of Vancouver and cracking jokes in English. One day, I'll be listening to stories of Japan and cracking jokes in Japanese. But that'll have to wait until I make my return to Vancouver.
After spending 3 weeks in Vancouver and polishing up her English, she paid me a visit yesterday to catch up, where I got to listen in on stories on a few things going on in Vancouver. Apparently, I heard that Stanley park got sort of a flood recently and a bunch of trees were knocked down during a wind-storm? The details were kind of hazy but all I know that a bunch of trees in Stanley park fell down during some kind of storm. There was supposedly a bit of a mud-slide up the highway on the way to Whistler so I heard.
Anyways, after my friend came back to Japan, we chatted in English for the most part. I do a fairly good job of bantering in English, leading to a few good laughs. My friend promptly told me that "You're much more interesting when you speak English." And yes, that is true.
I am not particularly well versed in Japanese when it comes to making funny quips or side remarks. It ends up that my Japanese is a little on the dry side because I haven't developed a sense of humor in Japanese. I speak quite logically or only about interesting ideas that pop up. But I'm not too good at interjecting humor into a Japanese conversation yet and I still need to work on making small talk in Japanese.
And so, I spent the evening listening to stories of Vancouver and cracking jokes in English. One day, I'll be listening to stories of Japan and cracking jokes in Japanese. But that'll have to wait until I make my return to Vancouver.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Cultural Mis-interpretations?
I spent most of the day researching Japanese management and corporate culture as I am currently job hunting for a position after I graduate. The most interesting I've realized after poking around plenty of English pages about Japanese work culture, is that I can easily find huge slews of analysis and explanations about Japanese corporate culture. Much of these webpages talk about significant differences between Japanese and Westernized business culture, things such as group-think, fitting in (and then doing your own thing privately), over-time, seniority pay- structure, how things are decided top-town (and even possibly bottom up!?) and more.
Then I started thinking about how some Japanese people view Western culture. For example, I've heard from some that it's to competitive and jobs can be quite insecure, or even University life is very competitive since students can fail courses (professors in Japan pretty much pass all students in their classes). I am quite certain that not 100% of the views my Japanese peers have of western culture is not entirely correct, so I am willing to venture a guess that perhaps not 100% of the Western views of Japanese culture is correct either. I am wondering, if this is the case? It's hard to tell.
After doing all this research on Japanese culture from a Western perspective. I am rather curious to figure out what is the Japanese view of Western culture and if they line up with my own perspectives.
I have on occasion, tried talking to some Japanese friends on their views of Japanese culture and I haven't been able to get consistent answers from different people. Seems to me that many people have different views of their own culture. My conversations in the past (more like about 6 months to a year ago) have been quite numerous and varied that even I have a hard time keeping track of what I've heard. Even now, I can't think of anything concrete.
When I have some more time, I will spend some time scouring Japanese webpages on their opinions of western culture.
Then I started thinking about how some Japanese people view Western culture. For example, I've heard from some that it's to competitive and jobs can be quite insecure, or even University life is very competitive since students can fail courses (professors in Japan pretty much pass all students in their classes). I am quite certain that not 100% of the views my Japanese peers have of western culture is not entirely correct, so I am willing to venture a guess that perhaps not 100% of the Western views of Japanese culture is correct either. I am wondering, if this is the case? It's hard to tell.
After doing all this research on Japanese culture from a Western perspective. I am rather curious to figure out what is the Japanese view of Western culture and if they line up with my own perspectives.
I have on occasion, tried talking to some Japanese friends on their views of Japanese culture and I haven't been able to get consistent answers from different people. Seems to me that many people have different views of their own culture. My conversations in the past (more like about 6 months to a year ago) have been quite numerous and varied that even I have a hard time keeping track of what I've heard. Even now, I can't think of anything concrete.
When I have some more time, I will spend some time scouring Japanese webpages on their opinions of western culture.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Looking Forward to Visitors in Sendai
Looks like I'll be looking forward to some friends coming to Japan next month. As one of my friends put it "everyone fulfills their promises." Sort of an interesting story behind that one, Ida came out to check out Japan and visit me in Sendai for several days. I ended up making a promise to visiting her back in Canada the next time I returned... and so I did, turning my 10 day stay in Canada into a whirlwind tour of Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary to visit friends all around Canada.
Before leaving, I left an open invitation for friends to come out to Japan to visit me. Much of it at first was talk at first but now, I have the wonderful opportunity to welcome more Canadian friends to Sendai during their 10 day tour of Japan. Will be looking forward to it.
Rather interesting to think that the world isn't such a huge place. A German friend of mine has returned to Sendai to visit his girlfriend and he'll be staying here for month. Friends from America, Sweden, Taiwan and China have made special appearances in Japan. I've also had the chance to visit friends in Taiwan, Korea and now France.
It's nice having friends all around the world, makes the world feel like a friendly place.
Before leaving, I left an open invitation for friends to come out to Japan to visit me. Much of it at first was talk at first but now, I have the wonderful opportunity to welcome more Canadian friends to Sendai during their 10 day tour of Japan. Will be looking forward to it.
Rather interesting to think that the world isn't such a huge place. A German friend of mine has returned to Sendai to visit his girlfriend and he'll be staying here for month. Friends from America, Sweden, Taiwan and China have made special appearances in Japan. I've also had the chance to visit friends in Taiwan, Korea and now France.
It's nice having friends all around the world, makes the world feel like a friendly place.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
This guy is obviously on to something
"The problem with everything is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
--Xterm (on IRC)
Brilliant!
--Xterm (on IRC)
Brilliant!
Sunday, March 04, 2007
A well done discussion on atheism and morality
In the USA, atheists are among the least trusted groups of people in America as only 45% of them would vote an Atheist into office (source). In the same survey, 55% of them would not have problems voting a homosexual as president nor would 67% of them have any problems voting in a person on their 3rd marriage. I find it disconcerting to see such a distrust or discrimination of atheists among religious Americans.
Is it often quoted that atheists are not trusted because they have little or no sense of morals because they do not derive their morals from a scripture such as the bible. The argument goes that since atheists no beliefs in a heaven or hell, there is nothing that prevents atheists from acting immorally. I find this view to be quite unfortunate.
Just recently, I have stumbled across a very well thought out video posting on youTube discussing morality as derived from an atheist's perspective. The video goes on to make some interesting points that many of the moral rules derived are similar to those of in several different scriptures. I definitely recommend this 9 minute video by Albert Sweigart for viewing because it very thoughtfully done and non-confrontational, as opposed to many discussions that occur on religion. The video can be viewed by clicking on this link. If you did enjoy this video I fully recommend his other works as they too are very thoughtfully done. This should be the standard on how discussions should definitely be done.
Is it often quoted that atheists are not trusted because they have little or no sense of morals because they do not derive their morals from a scripture such as the bible. The argument goes that since atheists no beliefs in a heaven or hell, there is nothing that prevents atheists from acting immorally. I find this view to be quite unfortunate.
Just recently, I have stumbled across a very well thought out video posting on youTube discussing morality as derived from an atheist's perspective. The video goes on to make some interesting points that many of the moral rules derived are similar to those of in several different scriptures. I definitely recommend this 9 minute video by Albert Sweigart for viewing because it very thoughtfully done and non-confrontational, as opposed to many discussions that occur on religion. The video can be viewed by clicking on this link. If you did enjoy this video I fully recommend his other works as they too are very thoughtfully done. This should be the standard on how discussions should definitely be done.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Pictures of France!
So I finally did it, I got the album made and uploaded the pictures. I took most of the better ones which were about 83 of them and uploaded them to my Picasa account. Click on the bale of French bread to see my photos of France! Also Kai-Ling was ever so kind to also upload her pictures to Picasa and made an album of her own, click on the Eiffel tower and me for her album.
This is a shout out to Nadege and Kai-Ling two very amazing friends that took the time out of their weekend to come out and visit me in Paris. They came a long way from the west coast of France, a 2 hour express train ride, to come and meet up with me. You two are awesome.
All the best and merci. We will meet again!
This is a shout out to Nadege and Kai-Ling two very amazing friends that took the time out of their weekend to come out and visit me in Paris. They came a long way from the west coast of France, a 2 hour express train ride, to come and meet up with me. You two are awesome.
All the best and merci. We will meet again!
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Long Term Thinking and Aging
I am a long term thinker, especially when it comes to life planning. My start into this mind set originated just before graduating from Undergraduate life where I was faced with making the decision between going into the work force or continuing with a Masters. During this time, I had the opportunity to attend events where the alumni of the Engineering Physics program returned to the University for a dinner. The event was staged as a chance for the old alumni to meet up with their old friends and a chance for the current students could meet the alumni to see what future prospects hold for them. My views on the next 40 years of life was molded since that dinner.
During my time at the dinner, I spoke with many graduates that went straight into the work force. I asked several of them "Is there anything that you regretted not doing before you started working?" and several of them told me that they regretted not traveling more and one told me to "enjoy these years of your life because they will be freest years of your life." I took that comment to heart especially after he told me that after you get a job, you'll be climbing the career ladder, then you'll get married, buy a house and so on. I realize then that a person's life was generally charted out after they started working, since then I became very fascinated with financial planning and began making financial calculations and projections from the age of 23 till I retired at 65.
These weren't simple financial calculations either. I made these calculations as in depth as possible, accounting for all sorts of living expenses including transportation, rent, home purchase, living expenses, RRSP and tax calculations. My objective was simple, to be financially stable and free to do the things I wanted to do in life. My modeling also included information on how long it would take to fully pay off a house (about 25~30 years!) and to retire with at least $1 million in RRSP savings and with additional funds in my savings account. Many people go onwards in life without knowing these things until it's too late. Just saving $1 million ~ $2 million and paying off a house is a 30 ~ 40 year endeavor! If you want to do things right, then you you have to start now.
This also leads me to another interesting topic of aging. That one conversation I had with the engineer also made me realize that life is a set of transitions; your 20's is not going to be like your 30's nor your 40's. I also came to the realization that once you start your career and get married and etc, the next time that you will be free is after you retire. when you're 65. When I'm 60's, I am surely not going to be able to live it up like my 20's. The moral of the story I learned is to live up now, because time is limited!
If there is one unfortunate thing about my youth, I would have to say it was attending grade school. The earlier years of grade school falls incredibly short for preparing a person with real world knowledge and skills. I would have really liked to have picked up some real skills earlier on when it comes to solving "real world problems," the kind of problems you get to solve as a job. I could have probably started working on various things when I was 13~14, figured what exactly I liked by the time I was 17 and attend university to learn more about the things that interested me and immediately use them.
But no, this isn't how things work. We don't start learning how to solve "real world" problems until we start working, by the time we graduate out of University at ages 22~25 depending if you just did your 4 years, or +1 year for co-op and/or +2 years for a Masters. Then we try and get into a company and then start learning what jobs we might like and the skills we need to do them, while getting paid and finally starting your own life. Isn't it a bit of a late start?
It is rather interesting to realize that in the Middle Ages, children became of age by the time they were 13 ~ 14. Legally, people don't become adults until 19 and many don't experience real life by the time they are 25. I find it interesting how times have changed.
During my time at the dinner, I spoke with many graduates that went straight into the work force. I asked several of them "Is there anything that you regretted not doing before you started working?" and several of them told me that they regretted not traveling more and one told me to "enjoy these years of your life because they will be freest years of your life." I took that comment to heart especially after he told me that after you get a job, you'll be climbing the career ladder, then you'll get married, buy a house and so on. I realize then that a person's life was generally charted out after they started working, since then I became very fascinated with financial planning and began making financial calculations and projections from the age of 23 till I retired at 65.
These weren't simple financial calculations either. I made these calculations as in depth as possible, accounting for all sorts of living expenses including transportation, rent, home purchase, living expenses, RRSP and tax calculations. My objective was simple, to be financially stable and free to do the things I wanted to do in life. My modeling also included information on how long it would take to fully pay off a house (about 25~30 years!) and to retire with at least $1 million in RRSP savings and with additional funds in my savings account. Many people go onwards in life without knowing these things until it's too late. Just saving $1 million ~ $2 million and paying off a house is a 30 ~ 40 year endeavor! If you want to do things right, then you you have to start now.
This also leads me to another interesting topic of aging. That one conversation I had with the engineer also made me realize that life is a set of transitions; your 20's is not going to be like your 30's nor your 40's. I also came to the realization that once you start your career and get married and etc, the next time that you will be free is after you retire. when you're 65. When I'm 60's, I am surely not going to be able to live it up like my 20's. The moral of the story I learned is to live up now, because time is limited!
If there is one unfortunate thing about my youth, I would have to say it was attending grade school. The earlier years of grade school falls incredibly short for preparing a person with real world knowledge and skills. I would have really liked to have picked up some real skills earlier on when it comes to solving "real world problems," the kind of problems you get to solve as a job. I could have probably started working on various things when I was 13~14, figured what exactly I liked by the time I was 17 and attend university to learn more about the things that interested me and immediately use them.
But no, this isn't how things work. We don't start learning how to solve "real world" problems until we start working, by the time we graduate out of University at ages 22~25 depending if you just did your 4 years, or +1 year for co-op and/or +2 years for a Masters. Then we try and get into a company and then start learning what jobs we might like and the skills we need to do them, while getting paid and finally starting your own life. Isn't it a bit of a late start?
It is rather interesting to realize that in the Middle Ages, children became of age by the time they were 13 ~ 14. Legally, people don't become adults until 19 and many don't experience real life by the time they are 25. I find it interesting how times have changed.
Quality of Life (I had so many other titles)
How would I titled this post? There were so many possibilities...
1. What's the difference between slavery and employment? (A. Employees get paid)
2. What you do if you didn't have to work?
3. My robot army.
Actually, I just changed the title again after writing this essay. You're going to have to read to the end for everything to make sense.
Nano-technology is tedious, incredibly tedious. The processing steps are long and it's hard to keep a straight head when working on these projects. After 1~2 straight days of work I get tired of it, then I take a break and then forget what exactly I was doing in the "grand scheme of things." There are lots of little problems that pop up that needs to be addressed and these problems are addressed usually through experimentation. Experimentation is when you do something new, unfortunately we spend most of our time fine tuning processing steps to get what we want; and what a pain it is.
As a result, I have been dreaming of my own robotic army to do my bidding. What if I had robots to do all the tedious work? What if I could spend my time dreaming up experiments and have my robot army do the experimental work while I check on the experimental results? Wow, this would be excellent! I've been dreaming about this for the last half year!
I've been thinking of all the boring jobs I could automate. Seriously, have you ever done a boring job before? It rots the brain and I can't believe how many of these jobs are out there. I often feel terrible for all the people that work the registers, the store stockers, the bank tellers, the cell phone customer support people and more. As hard as I think about these jobs, I could never find any sort of satisfaction from of these kinds of jobs. I also think that many people think the same way... but it's what pays the bills. I even used to do a few!
So where does job satisfaction come from? I have no clue where it comes from for other people but I do know where I can find it for me; and in a single word, the answer is simply impact. I would be incredibly happy if I was the first to discover canned foods, find a simple way of mass producing them and selling them to sailors or travelers on the first long distance boat rides across the Atlantic. It would be incredibly satisfying for me to find a way to improve or change the way things are done and can easily imagine others feeling the same way. It would be like taking a challenging task and make it simple or finding something that we abhor doing and finding a way of doing less of it. The greatness of the impact is proportional to the degree of improvement!
This innate desire to for me to find better ways of doing things has been with me since birth. As a baby, I would chew off a chunk of the rubble nipple of a baby bottle to guzzle the milk instead of just sucking the whole time. By the age of 4 I did math drills (simple addition and subtraction) but I hated counting with my fingers to solve these problems, so I devised a clever trick of looking for all the problems that were the same, solving it once and writing the same answer for all of them! It worked great... until I got caught when I wrote the wrong answer for all of the same problem.
In grade 9, our math teacher would always give us loads upon loads of math questions... and what we didn't finish in class, we would end up doing at home. My friends and I would race each other in class to find out who could finish the fastest and I would always be looking for faster ways of getting my math work done. We all agreed at that "Math hell" would be nothing but "Tedious math!" I still think that statement rings true today and the most generalized rule would be to drop the "math" and you'd get "hell" = "tedious."
Perhaps the invention of the first cash register and the first people that used them was satisfying, but I am sure that nobody now finds any satisfaction using them (unless, you're the business owner!). Perhaps we will all be happy with the first reliable automated check out so we can move on and do better things. When thinking like this, it becomes evident to me that "quality of life" means "improving quality of life."
So what is "quality of life" anyways? I think that's an answer you're going to have to find yourself and ironically it's an answer lies within itself.
For you mathematicians and engineers out there, quality of life is a "first order differential equation!" And make sure the derivative is positive!
1. What's the difference between slavery and employment? (A. Employees get paid)
2. What you do if you didn't have to work?
3. My robot army.
Actually, I just changed the title again after writing this essay. You're going to have to read to the end for everything to make sense.
Nano-technology is tedious, incredibly tedious. The processing steps are long and it's hard to keep a straight head when working on these projects. After 1~2 straight days of work I get tired of it, then I take a break and then forget what exactly I was doing in the "grand scheme of things." There are lots of little problems that pop up that needs to be addressed and these problems are addressed usually through experimentation. Experimentation is when you do something new, unfortunately we spend most of our time fine tuning processing steps to get what we want; and what a pain it is.
As a result, I have been dreaming of my own robotic army to do my bidding. What if I had robots to do all the tedious work? What if I could spend my time dreaming up experiments and have my robot army do the experimental work while I check on the experimental results? Wow, this would be excellent! I've been dreaming about this for the last half year!
I've been thinking of all the boring jobs I could automate. Seriously, have you ever done a boring job before? It rots the brain and I can't believe how many of these jobs are out there. I often feel terrible for all the people that work the registers, the store stockers, the bank tellers, the cell phone customer support people and more. As hard as I think about these jobs, I could never find any sort of satisfaction from of these kinds of jobs. I also think that many people think the same way... but it's what pays the bills. I even used to do a few!
So where does job satisfaction come from? I have no clue where it comes from for other people but I do know where I can find it for me; and in a single word, the answer is simply impact. I would be incredibly happy if I was the first to discover canned foods, find a simple way of mass producing them and selling them to sailors or travelers on the first long distance boat rides across the Atlantic. It would be incredibly satisfying for me to find a way to improve or change the way things are done and can easily imagine others feeling the same way. It would be like taking a challenging task and make it simple or finding something that we abhor doing and finding a way of doing less of it. The greatness of the impact is proportional to the degree of improvement!
This innate desire to for me to find better ways of doing things has been with me since birth. As a baby, I would chew off a chunk of the rubble nipple of a baby bottle to guzzle the milk instead of just sucking the whole time. By the age of 4 I did math drills (simple addition and subtraction) but I hated counting with my fingers to solve these problems, so I devised a clever trick of looking for all the problems that were the same, solving it once and writing the same answer for all of them! It worked great... until I got caught when I wrote the wrong answer for all of the same problem.
In grade 9, our math teacher would always give us loads upon loads of math questions... and what we didn't finish in class, we would end up doing at home. My friends and I would race each other in class to find out who could finish the fastest and I would always be looking for faster ways of getting my math work done. We all agreed at that "Math hell" would be nothing but "Tedious math!" I still think that statement rings true today and the most generalized rule would be to drop the "math" and you'd get "hell" = "tedious."
Perhaps the invention of the first cash register and the first people that used them was satisfying, but I am sure that nobody now finds any satisfaction using them (unless, you're the business owner!). Perhaps we will all be happy with the first reliable automated check out so we can move on and do better things. When thinking like this, it becomes evident to me that "quality of life" means "improving quality of life."
So what is "quality of life" anyways? I think that's an answer you're going to have to find yourself and ironically it's an answer lies within itself.
For you mathematicians and engineers out there, quality of life is a "first order differential equation!" And make sure the derivative is positive!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)