Building a new Singapore – virtually

Continuing the week’s theme, today’s Straits Times reports that a local programmer, Alvin Loo, has started building a virtual Singapore inside Second Life. I’ll check it out this weekend. The same article also reports that Second Life’s parent company, Linden Labs, will be opening an Asian headquarters within a year to lead localisation efforts, here in Singapore. Cool.

Famous people visit, good and bad

Wow, it’s been busy – Jaron Lanier wasn’t the only big IT name passing through Singapore lately.

O’Reilly Radar blogger Nat Torkington has been here to talk to the IDA about how to foster tech startups. Don’t know whether he gave any public talks, but anyway it’s good that Singapore is talking to people like this.

On the other hand… also visiting has been Iran-Contra conspirator John Poindexter, who has been unveiling a local version of the Orwellian Total Information Awareness program. Naturally, as someone who believes in privacy and data protection, this deeply worried me when I first saw his name.

However, the Wired piece does cover how Singapore has good and valid reasons for doing this (extreme vulnerability to epidemics and terrorism) and – importantly – that they have taken care to safeguard privacy. That’s good to know. Also reassuring is the involvement of Dave Snowden, fellow Welshman and luminary in the Knowledge Management world. I’ve admired his work for several years, and saw him once in the staff club of NTU, where he’s based. I really must make an effort to get over there and meet him some time.

Wise words

My MSN slogan is currently the same as my other blog’s subtitle, namely “Sous les pavés, la plage“. That’s sparked a conversation with a friend that led me back to the Wikipedia entry for the Situationists, where I found another great quote:

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”

- Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968

I think I may need to re-read my copy of The Society of the Spectacle….

In praise of untidyness

I’ve never been a tidy person. During my time in Africa, colleagues would sometimes sneak to my room to gaze in awe at the mess. Nevertheless, as one said, “it’s a bloody mess, but he always knows where to find things”. Once, for a joke, they tidied everything up while I was away, and I couldn’t find anything for weeks after that. I always say, it’s not messy, it’s fractal organisation. I just mention this after reading this Scotsman article, about a Dutch author who tidied up one day, and then couldn’t find the manuscript of her novel. For the next fifty-seven years.

Jaron Lanier doesn’t strike me as a tidy person, though for all I know his desk could be totally uncluttered. He’s messy in the best possible way, though, which is to say that his thoughts and ideas wander through all kinds of unrelated topics, making connections that lead to really innovative breakthroughs. How many other people would draw inspiration for human-computer interface design from the behaviour of a minor octopus species?

The lecture on Tuesday was entertaining and inspiring, and I’m glad I went. I unfortunately sat to someone who might be the most irritating person ever (with the natural exception of my teenage self), who fidgeted, coughed, writhed in his seat, fell asleep and then woke up, and so on until he almost drove me insane. Aargh. The lecture was organised by the Augmented Reality Lab at NUS, so Mr. Lanier’s talk was pretty technical for the most part – but I’m a geek, so that was fine by me. I took a lot of notes, which are mostly illegible. I really ought to learn shorthand.

There was a lot of good stuff:

• VR is competing against air travel, which needs to be replaced because of a) terrorism b) it’s a disease vector c) climate change d)decreasing land availability for airports
• haptics as a communication medium, and how we use movement to think (eg a pianist improvising)
• the homunculus, a map of the body within the cortex; the brain has evolved from multi-legged organisms, so when artificial or virtual extra limbs are added to the body, the brain adapts to use them very, very rapidly.
• why does teleconferencing never feel quite right? Much discussion of how we handle vision and communication
• VR: combines many of computing’s hardest issues in one topic

Also, quite a bit of discussion about Second Life, for which he is an adviser. He mentioned that it’s a problem that the only way avatars can communicate is through IM; he pushed for speech, and ‘lost that battle’. Here he was a bit behind the curve: just the day before, I’d seen an announcement that voice is going to be introduced soon. That will be great, but expect to see a lot more virtual fistfights! He hinted that a server will come to Singapore soon to reduce the lag, which I for one would be very happy with.

He gave the audience a choice near the end: he could talk more about the social implications of online networks, or he could take questions. In the end, he went for the Q&A, which was a pity, as the questions weren’t that great. One person even went so far as to ask whether Second Life was for losers, which is pretty stupid considering that IBM and the like are using it for business, but when you’re posing that question to the “father of VR” it’s pretty damn insulting as well. Ho hum.

And no-one asked about sex! Amazing. After so much talk about immersion, and reproducing physical sensation, I was really wondering why he was on a Microsoft Fellowship rather than one from Playboy! After all, the porn industry has driven the technical innovations in all other aspects of the internet… Heh. I might have asked that but well, I was with some of my new colleagues, and I don’t know them so well yet….

Miss Izzy was there, and I said hi afterwards. She didn’t get her interview, but she’s written a good review. She’s also wondering why Singapore doesn’t produce people like this. I think a lot of it comes back to this issue of tidiness: ‘tidy’ thinking encourages compartmentalised thinking, and neatly-defined jobs, and we all know that tidiness is a major virtue here! Innovation seems to come out of messiness, though, where people don’t stick to what they’re “supposed” to be doing.

One last comment: Izzy mentions the NTU adverts… Hehehe, while I was a student at NTU, there was a poster campaign encouraging undergrads to broaden their study topics. The tagline on all of these posters? “Pick up a minor today”, which provoked fits of horrified giggles amongst the foreigners…

Hair: not a frivolous issue

Next week I’ll be attending a lecture at the National University of Singapore. The speaker will be Jaron Lanier. (Singaporean writer and NSFW artist MissIzzy will be interviewing him for a local magazine, which should make interesting reading).

Consider for a moment Mr. Lanier’s record. He’s a groundbreaker in the field of virtual reality. He’s an entrepreneur. An excellent musician. An innovative social theorist. Not bad, wouldn’t you say?

Now look at his picture:

I’m aware that at many institutes of tertiary education here, it is a disciplinary offence for students to wear a baseball cap. Likewise, male students can be disciplined for having long hair. These rules are prominently displayed and, I understand, enforced. Oh: so is the ban on wearing flip-flops. This is in the interest of maintaining a “professional image”.

How likely is it that these institution will produce a Singaporean Jaron Lanier? It’s not impossible, of course; Singaporean youths are as naturally gifted, or not, as anybody else. But nature alone is rarely enough; nurture, education, and socialisation are critical. Are rules like this training students for the globalized, value-driven media-rich age? For the office cubicle? For the factory?

PS:

See also my earlier post regarding Creativity vs. Discipline.

Carbon neutrality

Very inspiring to see Costa Rica aspiring to become the world’s first carbon-neutral nation. Wouldn’t it be nice to see Singapore follow their lead?

Media tools, roles, and working

Too busy to do more than a few lines on each of these, but there’s a wealth of interesting content in my click-stream today!

• Microsoft’s Community Group Therapy blog had a piece on ‘Co-working‘ (found, as with so many good things, via Smart Mobs).
• This led to what was apparently the original story on the topic, in Business Week. The concept is to set up one of these rent-a-cubicle places for freelancers (an idea that’s been around for a long time), but with lounge areas and a coffee-bar. The aim is to replicate the ‘Starbucks’ atmosphere, where independent creatives tend to hang out rather than work alone at home, but with a more focused clientele that may be better for networking and stimulating creativity. This really seems like an idea that would work in Singapore: I’m pretty certain from my working experience over the last year that there would be a market. Business Week apparently identified it a trend to watch earlier this year.
• There’s a wiki dedicated to discussing co-working, and an Institute to promote it. Hmmm, I wonder how much capital it would take to get one going here…?
• Staying in Singapore, Cherian George reflects on the changing balance of power between the local mainstream media and blogosphere, and speculates on how the government may react.
• Indeed, how should mainstream journalists react? This article on Public Journalism Today gives some suggestions on introducing innovation to the newsroom.
• On the other side of the divide, NGO-in-a-box has a handy guide to using free, open-source software to produce multimedia content.
• I’ve also found this interesting blog: Innovation in College Media – likely to be a useful resource in my new job.
• And rounding up, back to where I began, at Microsoft’s Community Group Therapy blog. I’ve written a lot about the intergenerational culture gap, the Gen-X and Gen-Y approach to power distance and technology, and how this may impact management – particularly in Asia. This article is an extremely good example of the kinds of issues I’m thinking about.

Beijing buzz

Part of my occasional series of adverts extracted from the That’s Beijing classifieds feed. These struck me because they typify one of the many aspects of Beijing that fascinates me, and why I miss the place dreadfully – namely, the sizzling buzz of (as I put it once before) “adventurers, the artists, the entrepreneurs, the dreamers and the carpet-baggers from all over the world“.

招聘 – Blogger/Editor

Mirkin Group, a Beijing newly based IT startup, is building out its team in China to position itself within three major regions: China, U.S., and Russia. The company is lead by a Russian-American young entrepreneur with partners in Silicon Valley & Moscow. The company owns a network of independent sites and services and needs an editor to perform duties related to blogging, editing forums, interacting with site visitors, etc… You are an intelligent, self-driven person with a “get your hands dirty” attitude. You are generally passionate about working at different roles and are motivated to excel in them. 工作职责 • Researching consumer products ranging from technology to sports to health • Innovative fast paced blogging on different topics • Attract people through external forums – i.e. drive traffic to sites • Editing on company forums • Some web designing is beneficial 岗位要求 (without this don’t apply) • Excellent written skills in Chinese • Recent Photo • Existing Blog • B.S. degree (with proof) 联系我们 This position is based in the Haidian district of Beijing (15 minute walk to Tsinghua).. Please send your resume to jobs@mirkingrp.com. Applicants looking for internships are also encouraged to apply. Both male and female applicants are equally accepted

Intership with a TV/Film Production Company

Crimson Forest Films, is a Beijing based TV and Film Production Company. Our founders are from the U.S. and Canada, but our young and exciting company has a hip and youthful international work enviroment. Great for practicing your Chinese, and getting work experience in production all at the same time. Looking for organized and responsible college graduates who are living in Beijing and who are interested in production. An ideal non-paid internship for recent college graduates, who have a foundation of Chinese language studies under their belt. We are centrally located in Guo Mao. Please contact Christian Lee at clee@cff.tv or call at 5131 6223.

International Film Festival Coordination Interns

2007 Natural Green Heroes Festival – Featuring independently produced films and videos on the theme of real people making a difference for the environment and enhancing the world around us. Program seeks compelling stories that feature people challenging current environmental standards and conditions, encourage thoughtful questions and realistic answers, and broaden our understanding of our place in the world. Accepted works will be packaged for broadcast and distributed to Public TV stations internationally. In cooperation with the Central Academy of Fine Arts and major green orgs. Internship involves Public Relations, Marketing / Brand Management, Event Planning, Creative Services Marketing/Communications Internship The mission of the Festival is to present films that inform, enlighten, and educate the community by providing a vivid reflection of the rich cultural diversity of Beijing and the world beyond our doors. you will be responsible for: Creating a plan to develop understanding of the festival target markets, corporate messages and strategies Generating interest from sponsors and delivering content for various projects, including websites and for-print publications (brochures, programs) Planning and managing pr events Maintaining and updating web content This position requires the student to work a minimum of 12 hours per week. Internship – when successful – transforms into paid position after two months Deadline: Mon, February 8th, 2007. Short Resume photo expectations Contact: Lidy

Multi-Lingual Professional South Asian Actor

Hi Friends, I am a Multi-Lingual Indian Actor (29 years old), received professional acting training in India (National School of Drama) and in China (Central Academy of Drama 中央戏剧学院表演系), having 12 years of acting experience in Movie, TV operas and Theatre. I also have excellent command over English, Chinese, Hindi and Urdu (all languages: speak, read, write, type etc.). Also, it is extremely convenient for Chinese people to communicate with me. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I HAVE THE CREDIT TO IMPORT FIRST-EVER INDIAN TV SOUP OPERA / SERIAL TO CHINA. Please contact me whenever needed. Thanks

ReubenDotDotDot Entertainment

Hello, My name is ReubenDotDotDot, I am an Australian professional performer currently living in Beijing. I do street, stage and roving style shows including; Acrobatic and manipulation tricks, with comedy and crowd participation, usually to an English crowd, but I am adaptable. I also perform crystal ball manipulation, magical illusionary juggling, either a stage show or roving character, perfect for both large and intimate events. I have many more acts and shows, which are adaptable to most events, clubs, pubs, restaurants, festivals etc. I have been working professionally for the last 4 years. You can find my bio and show information at www.reubendotdotdot.com, I can also send you promotional videos via email if required. Regards, ReubenDotDotDot