The E-Entrepreneur

A number of people have approached me after my presentation at the alumni reception, and I thought I’d share this here since it’s way cooler than the traditional powerpoints.   Check it out below (mouse over  and click the bottom right arrow to proceed)

UBC Engineering Alumni Reception: Making a Difference

You can make your presentation at www.prezi.com.  It operates on a freemium model.  The presentation that I made was made using the free version.

I recently reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. A good read, lots of interesting stuff. Gladwell defines an outlier as a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. Essentially he talks about how successful people aren’t necessarily the smartest ones. You can have a high IQ, but becoming successful also depends on when you were born, your culture, your family origin, your childhood experiences and events that happen during your lifetime. Examples include Bill Gates, lawyers in Manhattan and hockey players.

He also explores other interesting facts, such as why Asians are in general better at math than Caucasians? Well the answer lies within the counting system in English vs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean. In the Asian languages, you can say all the numbers by just knowing how to count from one to ten. In English, however, not only do you need to know how to count from one to ten, but you need to know eleven, twelve, …. , thirty…, etc. You get the idea, many numbers cannot be constructed using the basic ten numbers. Meanwhile, in Chinese, the number eleven is read as “ten-one”. Hence the counting system is much more complex in English. So for little kids Asian children have a easier time learning to count and grasp the numbering system than the Caucasian counterparts. With such advantage, Asian children are able to understand math from an earlier age which allows them to accelerate in math.

Interesting huh? Take a look at this one: there is a correlation between culture and flight accidents (surprising…. and you’re going to be more careful with deciding which airline you fly with next time you book your holiday vacation). I won’t spill any more beans, but if this kind of stuff piques your curiosity, then this book is for you.

In the meantime, I’m on to his other book: The Tipping Point.

Today, I had the fortunate opportunity to listen to former US President Bill Clinton speak at the Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver.  This was the first time I’ve seen him live or heard him give a talk.  He sounded much older than I had expected — deep voice with his reading glasses at the tip of his noise.  He is a great speaker: he transitions from topic to topic very smoothly, and he’s got quite the humour too.  He spoke for about 1.5 hours without visual aids or a written speech, and the time flew by and there wasn’t one moment where I felt bored.  I walked out of the talk feeling inspired and I would like share a few things he mentioned.

Clinton raised 3 global concerns:

1. How do we deal with all the instability in the world?

We saw huge volatility in the financial market during the economic crisis.  Hedge funds, toxic mortgage backed securities… you name them.  The resulting poor economy has lead to financial instability for many.    Many people are unemployed or are forced to take a job with less pay.  Not only has their income taken a hit, but their confidence as well. The economic downturn has definitely placed instability beyond the financial sense, and it has impacted psychologically too.  But all over the world, it’s not just financial instability that exists today, there is also instability from terrorism, nuclear activities and even life in general.  The world is changing fast, maybe too fast for some people.  People feel threatened and insecure.

2. How do we deal with the increasing inequality?

We’ve all heard the rich only get richer and the poor only get poorer.  Well how do the poor really feel?  They are working hard day in and day, hoping their children would be able to live a better life.  But  they are not, and the poor are falling behind no matter how hard they work.   As a result, they start to feel rebellious and they develop distrust in the society.  This is what is currently happening in some of the poorer countries in South America.  People are getting tired from the inequality and have elected anti-market leaders like Hugo Chavez, because it is their only hope that things could turn around that way.

3. How do we deal with climate change?

This last topic has already been beaten to death.  Clinton didn’t talk much about it and I’m not going to write about it.  Basically the outcome from Coppenhagen was disappointing — countries are reluctant to act because they are unsure if decreasing greenhouse gas emissions would slow down the economy.

Last remark and most important of all: Clinton believes Canada deserved the Olympic Gold Medal.

So a while ago, I created a blog for Clinicbook from scratch using Ruby on Rails.  While it does that basic post/comment/view functions, we figured we should stick with Wordpress due to its abundant and already existing infrastructure such as widgets and plugins.   Part of the reason for a blog is to keep the public updated with Clinicbook developments and to provide a platform for users to voice their opinions.  Also, we want to push out health-related information/news through the blog which we think would be of interest to our health-conscious users.  Hence I’ve started exploring this tool called Dapper (www.dapper.net/open), which grabs content from the web.   Today, I played around with it, and managed to get it to output a customized RSS feed.  By the way, it can output different formats as well, but I just chose RSS feed so I could try it out on this site using the Wordpress plugin to display the feeds.

Congratulations to all featured rising stars! The stories are posted at: http://www.apsc.ubc.ca/stars/congregation10/

I have finally finished my undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics at UBC. It is such a good feeling, especially 5 years of hard work! Yesterday, as soon as the exam ended, all the graduating students from the class popped open bottles of champagne right outside the classroom. It was definitely a moment that I will never forget, as it marks a new beginning, but sadly it also marks the end of this Fizz group. The people in Fizz are amazing, they are definitely not the stereotypical book nerds. I have to say I feel very privileged to have been with these smart people for the past 5 years, learning together and having fun. Without them, my experience with the Engineering Physics program would not have been as enjoyable.

To all my classmates, advisors, professors, mentors, friends, family and everyone who have helped me along the way: Thank you for your support and encouragement throughout these years! I wouldn’t be who I am today without your presence. Even though some of you will be moving on to embark new adventures, we will still stay in touch, okay?

I am going to miss UBC. But life has to move on, and better things have yet to come. So what’s after this? I’m going to start a new chapter in my autobiography. I am now officially an entrepreneur, and no more of the “student entrepreneur” thing. Unfortunately that means no more student deals / discounts, hence I better start making some good money!