At present, content will be divided between:

• The World Egg:  New Worlds, new humanity. This will be taking the topics of virtual worlds and transhumanism. Those of you who have been coming here for cyberpunk topics will probably find this one is for you.
• Trigram 2.0: Continues the name of this blog; will be more about Asian life, the global economy, and the telecoms sector.
• Jianghu: My martial arts blog, taking over from http://jianghu.wordpress.com
• Cymro yn y dwyrain: My Welsh-language blog on Asian life.

So: it’s not for me. Some of the tech it uses is cool, though, especially the multitouch. It’s worth reading Bob Cringely’s take on what the Macbook Air is all about, really.

I was more interested in the updates for the iPod Touch, which is now taking its first steps towards being what I would like it to be. This also turned out to be a letdown, though. Like many others, I am rather resistant to paying for what I can’t help thinking ought to be either a free upgrade, or cheaper. As for the new features:

1.  Customisable screen. Bleh. So what?
2. Mail. Bleh. I use webmail pretty much exclusively. Maybe this is useful as a way to get PDF files, etc, onto the iPod – but I would much rather have the iPod visible as an external filestore.
3. Maps. Aah, now you’re talking! This is useful – or would be, if I wasn’t about to leave for Beijing, which isn’t covered by Google Maps…
4. Weather. Useful… but not really a must-have. I can very easily check online before I go out.
5. Notes. Useful. But… I almost always have a pen and notebook with me, and frankly that’s easier than trying to use the iPod’s keyboard.
6. Stocks. Meh. Maybe this will be useful next year, but I don’t need it right now.

So, overall…. nope, not excited. Sorry, Muskie!

•  Contact lenses with virtual displays embedded;
• Monkey controls robot‘s movement with its thoughts

See also this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but absolutely true all the same, article on 10 ways online gaming will change the future.

Anyone who’s read this blog lately will know that I’ve become increasingly interested in the various virtual worlds out there, as well as in augmented reality, and in the effects it will have on business and society. One element of all this is how we construct our identity in each virtual world, how we manage any differences in what we put into each identity, and how we communicate using one identity with someone who got to know us in another.

Of course this isn’t new: the simple fact that we change anyway over time means that most of us have had the experience of meeting someone we used to know, and realised that perhaps they haven’t changed much but we have. It’s uncomfortable, having someone trying to interact with you as the person you used to be rather than who you are now.

This is likely to become more common as we inhabit more and more ‘worlds’ – and let’s be clear that many of us will live in several different realities at one time! This is what brought me back to Dave Pollard. I forget now which blog it was, but someone wrote a short piece linking to this excellent blog post: Conversation in virtual communities: what happens when you change from one medium of communication to another?

He takes the following channels of communication as his starting point for a very interesting discussion:

1. e-Mail
2. chat/IM
3. chat/IM plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
4. v2v (voice to voice)
5. v2v plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
6. v2v plus virtual presence (using a webcam)
7. f2f (face to face)

Check it out.

The event was titled “Speed Up Your Career Evolution”. There were three speakers, in this order:

• Ms. Jill Lee, Senior Executive Vice-President and CFO, Siemens China;
• Mr. Paul Davies, Regional Business HR Manager, Hewlett Packard Asia;
• Mr. Leonard Yeow, Founder President and CEO, The Eximius Group Pte Ltd (the main speaker).

Now, I have to say: all three speakers were very good, and delivered very interesting and informative presentations that I enjoyed a lot. Leonard Yeow in particular was excellent, and very entertaining. His talk was the most relevant for me as an MBA alumnus; the other two were perhaps targeted more at current course participants. Putting the three together, it was worth going to the event, and the admission fee!

The turnout was OK for a Friday-night event; I didn’t do a headcount, but I would estimate that there between forty and fifty people there. The auditorium was only half full, though: “very limited seats remaining” was, let’s say, testing the boundaries of what that phrase might be expected to mean!

So if the speakers were very good, what made me unhappy about the evening? First of all, it was a little sad that an event with this quality of speaker was organised by the MBA Alumni Association, and not by the Careers Unit. Career support was weak throughout my time in the MBA, and a few things have happened since then to suggest that the school still hasn’t got its act together in this respect; perhaps that’s for another post, though.

The second, and main, reason came during the Q&A session at the end. One of the current participants, an Indian, was concerned about his job search. He described himself as having an IT background (in fact, by the sound of it, pretty deeply technical), and no real managerial experience. He’s applying for entry-level managerial jobs (including with Siemens and HP) and getting nowhere. What, he asked, could he do to help improve his applications?

The response from the participants was unanimous: forget it, no HR manager in their right mind would hire you for a managerial position if you have no experience, MBA or no MBA. They suggested trying to find an alternative entry path into an organisation and then, after a year or two, wangling that into a managerial role. After that, it would be possible to leave and begin a career path as a manager.

I was watching the panel, so I didn’t see the questioner’s face as the answer came, but I can imagine that this was not what he was hoping to hear. Going into a non-managerial post for a couple of years is not going to help him recoup the expense of his degree – and perhaps he could have tried this approach without needing the MBA at all… I can sympathize, because I was in a very similar position – a deep geek hoping to use the MBA to change career path, and I found this out the hard way as well: my job applications to the corporate world went nowhere.

Now, the panel’s response is totally realistic and reasonable, of course. The thing is, how did that participant get so far without knowing it? Like me, he almost certainly went through the MBA application process and interviews being open with the b-school about what he wanted to do – and wasn’t told that it wouldn’t work. Why not? I can think of a few answers to that, and I don’t like any of them.

In my case, I’m luckily pretty resilient. I already had experience of setting up and running my own business; plus, I had a lot of political experience, so I had more under my belt than just my IT work. On top of that, my applications to big-name companies were more to do with being caught up in the general MBA group-think; it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. (What do I really want to do? Heh, I’m working on it; maybe I’ll have more to say in the next few months on the topic!). But, in terms of my post-MBA career, I had to do it all myself; I don’t feel that I got much meaningful help from the B-School.

In any case, that student was the reason I left the evening with a bad taste in my mouth: how can he have committed two years of his life and the cost involved in an MBA without someone having told him as honestly as the panellists did last night that it wouldn’t work?

I discovered by chance that another scientist, David Keith, gave a presentation on the topic to TED late last year. TED, or Technology Entertainment Design, is a very respectable and credible conference of designers, technologists, and visionaries. Just the sort of gathering of minds that could give the idea some legs…

The original video can be seen on the TED website here, and since it’s also on YouTube, I can embed it here to save you the click. It’s 16 minutes long, but worth watching:

It still bemuses me that this isn’t a huge industry in Singapore, where there’s a large construction sector, and a government that appears to have money to burn when it comes to investing in R&D that may bring economic benefit to the country in the future. Although they’ve taken some small steps in terms of the way they build public housing, and some regulatory requirements for private developers, I’m not hearing much about R&D into new techniques and materials. Perhaps it’s not sexy enough – or perhaps the local construction lobby is too powerful. After all, the Straits Times published a leader opposing seatbelts for the foreign workers who travel in the back of trucks – because it would impose excessive costs on the construction companies….* Of course, I would be delighted if someone better informed than me can point me towards a source of information about R&D into green building in Singapore!

* I can’t find an online source for this, but it made a big impression when I read it…

According to the London Times, scientists at the University of Minnesota have chemically stripped cells from a dead animal’s heart. This leaves only the inert protein base structure intact. This can then be used as the base for seeding with fresh, live cells from the patient. At the moment, it’s only been used on animals. However, in the future, we’ll be able to use hearts from cadavers, seed them with stem cells, and pretty rapidly – within weeks – have a functioning heart ready for transplant. It isn’t just hearts, either – almost any organ can be ‘created’ using this procedure.

Of course, the process still needs a real, human heart to provide the base. I suppose that it needn’t be as ‘fresh’ as the hearts currently used for transplant, so by providing a bigger time window between the death of the donor and the time the organ is removed from the cadaver. Also, all issues regarding compatibility and organ rejection become irrelevant.

The scientists who have developed the procedure say that it will be many years before this is ready for use on humans, but I’m not so sure – I think there’s such a huge demand amongst the boomer generation for it that money will be thrown at the problem, and the delivery date will arrive much sooner!