Personal Blog

I admit it.  I was taken by Shanghai.  I would move there in a minute.  (Anyone wanting to make me a job offer there should write immediately!)

For me, Shanghai is one of the fabulous places where East meets West and it comes out just right.  As I understand it, Shanghai existed as a Chinese village for centuries.  Since the 1800's, though, it has been a major trade center and attracted people from around the world.  So, it has long been a very cosmopolitan city.

I love big cities, and Shanghai is big (more than 2,000 square miles and about 20 million people).  It's full of movement and sounds and smells and sights like all major cities of the world.  I was only there briefly but I was smitten.  Along the banks of the river at night, the city is magical; I think of it as New York meets Las Vegas -- skyscrapers in every direction decorated in lights. 

For tourists, there is shopping for every pocketbook.  Along Nanjing Road, I saw the largest mall I've ever seen, an interesting Asian Disney store, and elegant boutiques.  There were restaurants of every cuisine and the familiar-feeling old buildings renovated into new tony streetlife at Xin Tian Di.  There are also the beautiful pagoda pavilions, reflecting pools, and twinkling lights of Yuyuan (which offers shopping, a 400 year old garden, and a terrific Shanghinese restaurant from the 1800’s where I tried eel, lotus root, and a number of other exciting new things).

Another delight is the Shanghai Museum.  It’s a ten year-young building right in People’s Square and houses the greatest collection of Chinese art I’ve ever seen.  (I’m a reasonably big fan of such materials and have been to a lot of museums).  I had a limited amount of time but did get to spend some time looking at the bronzes and ceramics. 

 

This was my first trip to Asia.  Our first stop was Beijing.  We got off the plane into a modern, world class airport.  My first impressions were of lots of glass and light, people movers, and the feeling that things were clean and fresh.  The next thing I noticed was the amount of English.  Signs for baggage claim and billboards had Chinese and English messages. 

I was curious to see what Customs and Immigration would be like.  In fact, it looked pretty much the same as in any country.  The first room was a huge space with counters and extra forms off to one side.  There was a bit of a challenge at this stage because our airplane had not had enough forms in English and there were none in the racks.  Luckily, I had taken a form with the questions in Chinese and was able to find out a partially filled out English form in the trash.  I read those questions and made my answers on the Chinese language form, hoping that the questions were the same! 

The lines moved pretty quickly, luggage came nearly right away, and currency exchange was easy to find.  We road by bus for an hour or so into Beijing.  The highway looked like a major highway in Europe or the US.  It appeared well-maintained, also had signs in Chinese and English, and had a landscaped border.  I was surprised to see that license plates use "arabic" numerals rather than the Chinese characters. 

Our hotel, the Grand Hyatt Beijing would be a five star hotel anywhere.  Some
noticeable differences between this level of US and Chinese hotel were the significantly higher number of staff (presumably due to the lower cost of labor but equivalent room rates) and the broader range of food choices (I was very happy with mis-matched dim sum, tea egg, and bacon breakfasts).  It is located within a short walk of the Forbidden City and Tienamen Square and is just around the corner from the deluxe shopping of Wangfujing.

I did have a chance to do a little shopping and discovered another significant difference between the US and China.  In China, clerks show you goods and then hold them after you make your selection.  They give you a mult-carbon slip to take to a cashier.  After you pay, you bring the receipt back to the clerk, who gives you a wrapped package.  Although I wondered if there would be any bait-and-switch problems, I had none and heard of none. In Beijing, I bought the obligatory Beijing Olympics souvenirs, a Yixing teapot and many yards of traditional silk (from a company I today discovered has been in business for 120 years) for a quilt I'll make someday.  I admit that much of the reason for shopping was simply to try out the small Chinese vocabulary I'd learned before traveling.  Although I'm sure my tones were not always correct, most Chinese were able to figure out what I was saying and were quite good natured about helping me muddle through.

Some of the other joys of Beijing were: the discovery that a small ivory turtle-dragon I've owned for years is a Chinese mythical symbol for longevity (I saw this one at the Forbidden City); the surprised faces and giggling whispers of groups of old men whom I greeted with "ni hao" or "zao"; the street performance of a group of waitresses who appeared to be soliciting customers; the barbeque delicacy of scorpions on a stick; and the man who wiggled his girlfriend's foot at me in a universal explanation for why he was carrying her on his back.

I had the opportunity to take quite a few walks in the city, generally in the early morning hours.  My favorite walks were through the long garden to the east of the Forbidden City and in the park surrounding the Temple of Heaven.  The former is behind a high brick wall that runs along the street (Dongchang'an Jie) and I think most visitors miss it.  It's a peaceful traditional garden with a meandering brook, arched bridges, a water lily pond, and large scholars stones.  What I'll remember most about the Temple of Heaven is the primal yells in the early morning fog, known as kiap or ki-hop and used to focus the chi while performing tai chi.  To me, it was reminiscent of the coyote calls at home.

As previously mentioned, I've recently been on a whirlwind tour of China and India.  I only touched on a half dozen cities, so I'm aware that my perceptions are skewed, but here's what I saw.

In the major cities in China, I was struck by the fast growth of infrastructure - roads, power, subways, buildings, etc.  I wish I had counted, but I think a highway merge I was on in Beijing had more than 20 lanes in each direction.  In 16 years, the rice fields of Pudong across the Bund have been replaced by skyscrapers rivaling Shanghai on the opposite side.  The theory in China appears to be that if you have sufficient infrastructure, the businesses will have a foundation on which to grow and, as a result, expand the economy.

And, I was doubly struck by the amount of English.  There was English on all major highway signs, street signs, at least 1/3 of the billboards, and subway maps, making it relatively easy for me to navigate.  I think this is a very intelligent way to attract international business.  I remember my friends traveling to Japan for business in the 1980's and early 90's and being completely unable to navigate without assistance because they could not read the characters.  I've had the same experience traveling a little in Russia and the Ukraine, where at least I could carry a copy of the cyrillic alphabet that I've reordered to correspond with the English alphabet so that I can sound out words.  In China, I discovered that a little bit of strategically placed English goes a long way towards making one feel comfortable and more likely to return.

In India, I saw a different model.  Rather than big government infrastructure projects, I saw individual enterprises building regions of infrastructure.  A single company will build a campus with offices, housing, recreation, etc. as well as its own power generation and water filtration systems.  The process here appears to be that as Indian companies capture outsourcing dollars from the rest of the world, the money will trickle down through the economy. For example, if the successful IT professional buys a car, then he is willing to pay people who will put gas in the car, service the car, and wash the car.

In the major cities in both countries there is a tremendous amount of confidence among people that their countries are in the ascendancy.  Taxi drivers, hotel workers, store clerks, when asked, will talk about the increasing opportunities for education and advancement for their children.  Business and government officials talk readily about the increasing competition for qualified professionals and the rapid escalation of salaries. (Perhaps it is a bit like the US during the heady early days of the space race and nuclear power?) Over the next ten years, it will be interesting to see whether one of these two models prevails. 

The final act of the Sloan Fellows drama was a trip to China and India.  The experience was amazing and I will try to describe quite a bit of it over the next week or two.  In the meantime, I posted a couple of new photos.

There's little to be said about the end of the MIT academic experience.  The time went by so fast and the pressures were so great that I wrote no blog.

I did, however, write a really fun thesis.  The abstract is posted under the professional tab and I hope to post the whole document soon. 

 

The Wall St. Journal today reported on a number of software products that could be added to email to enhance security. Here are the features I want most:

* Smart Threading

Since I won't read a Blackberry during meetings, when I come back to my office at the end of a day, there can be 200 new emails in my inbox. Often, there will be many emails on a single topic. Yes, I can sort by subject line, but I want more.

 

At the end of a long day, I don't want the inefficiency of opening and closing all the "me too" responses. It is already technically possible to have the software figure out the unique text from emails with the same subject line and let me read just the unique text and relevant headers on one screen. Then, I want to be able to respond as appropriate to any iteration and file all the copies at once.

 

Later iterations would be smart enough to pick out same subject emails with new subject lines and new subject emails that just keep using an old subject line.

* Recipient Tags

At work, I often send the same email to a group of people but I don't want the same thing from all of them. For one recipient it may be a work assignment, for another it's just an "FYI."

 

About a year ago, I experimented with beginning every subject line with an all capital letter tag indicating why it was relevant to the recipient and got very positive feedback. They could look at their inboxes and know what was due today, next Friday, and what could be put off to the someday pile. It was a lot of work, though, since I had to send separate copies of the email to each recipient.

 

* Social Network Security

At work or at home, I'm willing to share certain confidential information with certain people. After thinking about it a while, I realized that those groups of people generally end up on email copy counts. For example, people working on the same project get copies of material and drafts about the project. People who get pictures of my last vacation always get pictures of my vacations. So, why not be able to use the social network analysis of my email to identify the appropriate group with whom to share?

 

The technology already exists to give me an easy-to-understand and easy-to-manipulate drawing of my groups of contacts. So, how about something that lets me establish access permissions with two clicks - one click on a network and one click on a file folder or directory?

 

Later iterations could notice when a network changes (someone leaves the company and drops off of cc lists) and ask if you want to change corresponding permissions.

 

(date of blog altered; original 2006 prior to 5/1)

The month of March was marked by moving in different directions. 

In the first half of the month, we finished the first half of our final semester.  At MIT Sloan, there are half semester courses and I'm happy to report the end of Systems Dynamics.  As I've mentioned before, it was a great course, but a lot of work. We each had to develop a personal project and mine was an analysis of the cycle of the growing volume of data in the world, wanting to improve data privacy, and the creation of new data in an effort to protect privacy.  (I didn't solve the problem but I did learn from this course that I tend to see intractable problems as vicious cycles.  This gives me a lot of insight into how to address them differently in the future.)  The most impressive output of the course was an analysis of the problem of violence in the Middle East jointly prepared by a citizen of Saudi Arabia and a citizen of Israel.

Two weeks of the month were out of class and away from Boston.  One week, we took a trip to San Francisco/Silicon Valley and heard from some of the country's leaders of technical innovation.  We also had a chance to meet some of our Stanford counterparts (there is another Fellows program there) over lunch.  That was enjoyable and informative -- it turns out that we have a lot of the same experiences and concerns.  I also got to sneak in some time with a Stanford member of the TAMI research team - Deb McGuinness - and help with the preparation for the AAAI presentation.  All in all, March was a time for a lot of of private consulting and some intense thesis drafting, so there wasn't much "break," but I did get to do a bunch of my work at home on the back porch in the Arizona sunshine with the dog at my feet. :-)

Ok, I'm now the proud owner of an iPod.   Imagine my surprise after bringing home $785 in cool Apple stuff that the only thing between me and iTunes nirvana is middle age.  I've already downloaded content in iTunes in my laptop.  I've got the Altec/Lansing mobile speakers set up and in their sleek carrying case.  I'm uploading the iPod software when, it asks me for the serial number from the back of my iPod.  Whooa!  Dead stop....

Can someone please tell Steve Jobs that the rest of us baby boomers can't actually see 5 point type in white ink on a reflective silver surface?

Spring (final) term has begun.  There's a weird tension in the air -- we all seem to be leaning forward towards our return to fulltime, full-focus work while trying to pull back on the reins and make this fantasy year last a little longer.  Some are slowing down the pace of school and gearing back up on the work front, accelerating the transition.  Others are throwing themselves into school full-throttle, wringing every last ounce from the experience. 

Our biggest time sink this half-term is Systems Dynamics, an interesting discipline that applies engineering to problem-solving any issue. I've been loking forward to this class since I came to visit the school in the fall of 2004.  It provides a methodology for forcing assumptions, competing values, hidden costs, and delays into the open.  And, the diagrams are great to look at!

In addition to core classes, working, and research, I'm taking two other fabulous classes this term.  "Corporations at the Crossroads," brings in CEOs of companies from many different industries to talk about the challenges they face.  So far, we've seen a Fortune 100 and a Fortune 1000 CEO and have enjoyed some very frank comments about satisfying shareholders, finding new markets, redefining the business model, etc.

And, there's "Generating Business Value from Information Technology" taught by Peter Weill, Director of the Center for Information Systems Research.  This class really bridges the business/IT gap, showing how to focus both parties on the legitimate benefits of well-governed IT -- documented increases in Return on Investment.  You may recognize Professor Weill from the extremely popular book on IT Governance that he co-authored with Jeanne Ross.  They've shared with us a part of their next book (coming out in June) and I think it should be a hot seller based upon what they've shared with us -- an easy-to-understand, easy-to-apply model for discussing management goals than can readily be translated to IT priorities.

Like everyone else, I'm also focusing on the things that I had hoped to do while here at MIT.  So stay tuned for the possibility of a little start-up and/or a technology & public policy project!

January is Independent Activities Period (IAP) at MIT - 30 days of learning, excitement, and spontaneity! 

IAP offers accelerated for-credit courses for its matriculated students.  But, the magic is in the non-credit events open to, and taught by, MIT students, faculty, employees, and family members.  This year, IAP had 700 HUNDRED events scheduled! 

Some of the fun included

- the Chocolate Tour of Boston (actually, a search for "chocolate" returned seven events though I'm still confused by the one that compared karate and chocolate chip cookies)

-  a sleep-deprived, weekend long Mystery Hunt which apparently drew scores of puzzlers from elsewhere

-  lots of robotics:
    - a month long class that teaches robot design and ends with a public competition
    - an opportunity to build an underwater remotely-operated vehicle and keep it!    
    - meetings of the Mars Society  to discuss the robots that will be needed when humans settle on the red planet

- courses only MIT would offer - "How Baseball, Poker, and Fermat Teach Us the Best Way to Elect the President"

I definitely did not do enough of these!  I did, though, get some work done on my thesis (see the current state of the draft under the Professional tab), spent some time at home, and made a quick trip to Washington.

And, I had a great weekend in Stowe, Vermont with about twenty members of the extended Sloan Fellows family.  A group of Fellows, partners, and children went for a weekend ski trip.  Even though the weather's been warm, there was enough snow for neophytes like me to take a lesson.  Truth be told, I was pretty unsuccessful, but could see how much fun it would be.  Navigating reminded me of counter-steering on a motorcycle.  And, I'm sure with another lesson, I would learn how to stop!