BioBusiness

BioBusiness definitely covers a wide aspects of life as most aspects of life began as bio-organism. One reason that might have strongly drove biobusiness in the past few decades might be our increasingly skepticism about chemical synthesis that drove much of our industrial growth. Many food product, health product or washing product nowadays consist of many chemical component that do not exist naturally. These chemical components are main suspects of health defects and cancers, are hard to dispose of and in the production, causes a lot of pollution. Thus, we look increasingly at understanding our biodiversity and turning to what mother nature provided us for solutions.

We are also looking increasingly towards understanding nature to fully maximise the potential of it, especially for agriculture. One example would be organic farming which depends on natural pesticides, introducing natural insect pradators and many other methods which involves addition of something that mother nature already provided us with.

Theory seems to go side by side with the emphasis on herbal medicine, 'when a disease or problem is created by mother nature, she would provide the solution too'. Some examples would be how in the vicinity of poisonous animals or plants, we can find another animal or plants which could neutralise the poison.

However, when humans tried to play god and created many synthetical problem, can natural methods resolve it? Only solution is to abandon our traditional way of trying to play god and rely on natural products.

Coincidentally, BGS on tuesday went through an article on the 'Big Pharma' or the pharmaceutical industry which is closely related to this week's topic.

One interesting viewpoint was how pharmaceutical industry tends to produce drugs that are not important or drugs against diseases that are neither life threatening nor common. They, instead, rely on lots of marketing to convince people that a common illness that does not affects us much is 'disgusting', or need immediate remedy. So much for all the R&D huh?

My Proposed outline of my individual review paper

Proposed outline

Executive Summary

Exploring how humans began by using trade and barter and eventually created money and how the application of money had evolved (been abused) over time. Money is a ‘technology’ or technique humans created to ease the trading of goods, and to reward other humans for their output or labour.

Money is perhaps the root of all problems from the financial crisis to our environmental woes. However, is money by itself bad? Or is it the way we choose to utilize money and apply it that need an urgent makeover?

Background

Illustrate how money had no inherent value by itself and yet was given values by the commodities, which its value is pegged to.

History

Describe how humanity used trade and bartering when we became more than hunters and gatherer. Discuss how money came about and the evolution of money along the way.

Explore the adopting the use of money and the difficulties.

Discuss the paradoxical nature of different currency. Bring in the idea of usury as the very basis of our financial industry in the current world.

Current

Research on how money had played a part in the rise of corporations, giving power to them.

Discuss how money had become a commodity in itself through trading, stock markets and forex trading.

Discuss on we had tried to put a price tag on even social behaviors and political decision.

Interesting examples of use of money beyond its supposed purpose

Future

Discuss how I think regulations had to be put into place to restrict the abuse of money, the power of money and corporation.

Ultimately, how we have to let money return to its true purpose of valuing goods and commodities.

Might be a bit broad but will try to not digress.

Fifth lesson on TWC!

We moved from human development to industrialisation and to what drove world change. This week, we touched on something more specific which is how info communication technology changes the world.

Was pretty confused before the class about the readings. Coudln't really understand the scope of the ICT policy they kept mentioning and what's the definition of green ICT and green policy. Prof talked about how ICT changes the world communicates and how business models have to change and adapt with accordance to the social trends. A clearer and more specific example was brought in with the video on Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Basically, the video never mention about Web 1.0 but I guess it is when the mass media first developed. When we first had the newspaper and eventually radio and television, communication was very one sided. We had them which might includes corporations and governments telling us about stuff they want us to know, watching shows they want us to watch. We simply had no alternatives and choices. Hence, communication was one sided and often degrades to mere propaganda in several countries.

Next came the internet and the emergence of P2P network which is peer to peer, that allows information to be no longer one sided. Information was no longer disseminated from a few sources but was shared between users. As technology advances, the P2P network grew stronger and stronger, communities banded together for common interest and websites like Youtube and Friendsters started gathering momentum. Eventually, mega websites with lots of users like MySpace and Facebook surfaced and these websites became a haven for information sharing. However, ultimately, you still have to search for the information you wish for or chanced upon it by chance.

Then came the idea of a Web 3.0 where websites and providers records your search, your video viewed and all other kind of history and are able to recommend and introduce websites, videos, photos, musics and all other internet resources that suits your liking. So mass media and information communication had evolved from a one sided dissemination of information to a network of users who shared information to an interactive web that can predict your preference through past activities and recommend activities and many other resources.

For example, facebook had came up with a very strong facial recognition programme that able to match facial features of a photograph to the name tagged. This had allowed an American to find his stepbrother who shared a common father to find each other in a sea of of humans. This happened because both of them uploaded a photo of their father which the system recognises, matched them together and thus recommend each other as friends suggestion.

Prof also discussed about the future of cloud computing which unfortunately stole the limelight from one of the presenters.

Ultimately, I felt that cloud computing outsources the need of big companies to have their own individual database to an external, more cost efficient company. It would be especially beneficial to big corporations who have multiple HQ spread out over the continents to have a central database that could be accessed from anywhere in the globe. Companies no longer have to be stuck with having an internal intranet set up while the internet already existed. This will solve many inherent problems and costs that intranet was infested with. Small companies without the capacity to create the own data centers can also have a common database to do document editing and data sharing. Ultimately, security of information will be an issue but I trust the companies, being specialised, will be able to hire the best of personnel and talents to create a security strong enough against any odds. The benefits of cloud computing will definitely break down many problems mega scale institutions like the SAF faced.

One example of cloud computing will definitely be google doc where multiple users are able to edit information together. This breaks down the barriers of a need to email every related personnel whenever a small changes to the document was made and the mess created out of it. The excel version online provided by msn is an example of online software that does not requires any software downloading or installing. However, the adoption of cloud computing will depends on how well we improve our internet connectivity. If the entire nation is a wireless hub, no one would hesitate or protest against cloud computing. Key issues is 24/7 accessibility.

This week TWC's revolved around Drivers of World Change and Change Management & Change Leadership.

Personally, I feel that Drivers of World Change is the broadest subtopic we had in TWC and it involved almost everything. Any single change in environment, society, economy will changes the way the world operates, redefine the direction the world is heading towards. Ultimately, it determines the trend of technological creation and innovations.

We had look at the various reading and multiple factors that drove world change. I would like to summarise the few thousand years of human civilisation into first part; seeking prosperity, defying nature and dominating the globe and the second part; seeking meaning in life, embracing nature and fulfilling our moral and ethics. Some drivers of world change would be like environmental concerns, scientific discovery and technological innovation (most common), social, demographic or cultural change, commercial or business innovation and changing expectations. We also talked about revolutionary change and evolutionary change. To me, evolutionary change would be like development, where we develop better engines from the current model and revolutionary change will be something that redefine the way we travel altogether, like what prof mentioned about creation of cars, replacing horse carriages.

Had my first presentation in ages, can't help it but started to talk in my usual nonsense context which I did in army. Was glad that the class enjoyed the more relaxed than usual style of presentation though. Was so nervous that I almost forgot what I was saying.

To be honest, the first part of the lesson, about drivers of world change made little impacts on me since I was worrying about the presentation and trying hard to go through the points in my brain. Thus, I wasn't able to absorb much into my brain =(

Second part was about change management and change leadership and it was definitely a very interesting concept. We are now looking at more than the generation of idea, more than the first brave soul that came up with a revolutionary idea, we are looking at how to develop the ideas to full bloom. Change leadership will be the usual first brave soul guy who came up with something new that totally redefine a certain aspect of life. However, we have to recognise that without proper adoption of the idea, it will eventually be wasted, like how I mentioned in my presentation that the Roman came up with the idea of a steam engine but failed to design a feasible concept for it. James Watts worked on it and gain the recognition for it, as the one who came up with the steam engine. A funny video of a guy acting like a goon was shown during class. Eventually, the second person follows and the third... and finally everyone followed. This yet again emphasizes on how important it is to convince people to change the way of their thinking, even the greatest of idea will go to waste if it's not able to be properly laid out to others. There was a saying that goes "In the world of insanes, the sanes are the insanes". Another one that we need to keep in mind that the you are a minority in the world or country of the minority.

We were asked whether Change Leadership or Change Management is more important and my answer remained the same, both of them are as important. If the idea and concept of change is not properly adopted, no amount of great ideas would work out. Like how we have so many hybrid and electrical vehicles but without adoption by the markets, without companies with foresight and capital to adopt these technology, the inventions would be useless. If the idea is thrown out to the public in the first place, there would be no change to manage. Therefore, both of them must work together and must always come in a pair to work out.

I still like my annotation that you might know your destination but without proper navigation, you will not find your way there. There are many twist and turn that the current road system imposes before we reach our destination and we can't simply bulldoze a straight path there. Ultimately, it works the same way for changes. I believe that if we start afresh, from building up a new country or civilisation, we can direct our society towards our goal more easily. However, humans have put in place a very strong system that cannot be demolished in a single day while adopting a new system. We have to work by understanding the current system, what's the advantage, what's the weaknesses and adopt change that changes the system from what we already had. It's just like how the road imposes restriction on reaching our destination.

One of my issues of discussion was whether focusing on energy carrier technology saps important investment away from renewable technology industry. I guess I wanted to said I'm afraid focusing on energy carrier technology will divert our attention from focusing on the most important aspects of renewable energy replacing fossil fuel. I guess what prof said do hit the nail. My take is that to first move away from fossil fuels, we need to remove any possible dependence on fossil fuels and thus it is very important to allow transportation or our vehicles to run on other kind of energy other than fossil fuels. It is a step towards sustainable energy development, and it is an essential steps before we can carry on with improving efficiency of renewable energy.