A dream life that Bill Gates has

Always enjoy watching any TV coverage about Bill Gate as in tonight's PBS Charles Rose program. He has made his personal mission and used his fortune to try to eradicate top five diseases in his lifetime; constantly and diligently read books in various disciplines; devise thermos to people in Africa that can keep vaccines cool for 50 days without any electricity; have brainchild to make toilet without the need of sewage system in Africa to prevent the spreading of epidemics. He has never been a bon vivant but is so happy to spend $30M USD to buy the original manuscript from da Vinci for his ingenious engineering works. What a dream life that he has!

A sobering epiphany?

Cannot help to join the ranks of online thrust-and-parry debate for the Taiwan-Philippines contention.  To my surprise, not every Filipino is obstinate and self-willed.  Part of my post on the bloomberg.com was "It is a sobering epiphany to see PH has devolved from the 2nd richest country in Asia in the 1960s to a Blanche Dubois economy with 10% of GDP coming from the remittances from expatriate workers.  I respect the hard-working and tender-hearted Filipinos but denigrate their kleptocratic government."   And the response from a Filipino was "It really is sad that the Philippines has gone so far down. It had really been left behind by its neighbors. I cannot deny that there were several administrations that were corrupt and unjust, but what I can tell you is that the government is slowly but surely trying to recover."

Privacy, a misnomer in nowadays?

Imagine that you enter a store and 5 seconds later, your cell phone rings and informs you that one of your FaceBook favorite items is on sale today. This is the in-person experience of CBS "60 Minutes", A Face in the Crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity." Face recognition technique is so advanced that many companies start to use surveillance cameras to capture passers-by and relate their faces to their social media profiles. The room of the so-called "privacy" has been eroded day by day.

A Face in the Crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity

www.cbsnews.com

Even if your picture isn't on the Internet, computerized facial recognition makes it virtually impossible to keep your "faceprint" p

To cure cancer or to cure matted frizz?

An inspiring episode of today's CNBC "On the Money with Maria Bartiromo". If the science can be used to cure cancer, why it cannot be used to cure hair frizz? It is a huge market, especially tailored to lucrative women's beauty applications. M.I.T. prominent professor, Dr. Robert Langer, a president science medal recipient, teams with Hollywood star, Jennifer Aniston, to commercialize a frizz-curing product with a huge ballyhoo of high-tech in a should-be banal frizz-curing beauty product. It is probably not a bad gonzo journalism since college professors' researches should not just stay in the ivory tower. If the end results of esoteric research are on the faces of women, why not? It definitely makes the world look more beautiful!

On the Money

www.cnbc.com

Maria Bartiromo hosts a half-hour syndicated financial news program airing every weekend.

Not all Wall Street's money-makers are money-grubbers

Tonight's CBS "60 Minutes" had an episode about Robin Hood charity organization (www.robinhood.org". It is basically an organization with top 1% in NYC helping the bottom 1% in NYC. It has doled out $125M last year and more than $1B in the last decade to feed the poor and gave full financial support and better learning environments for disadvantaged kids in education. It is as respectable as Taiwan's 慈濟 and it is always good to know that not all Wall Street's money-makers are just money-grubbers.

Highest paid CEO has the lowest performance

CEO pay is outrageous in the US? It seems like it is true. New law requires US companies to report their CEO compensations and the average workers' pay. BusinessWeek has the following table for ratio of CEO pay to the average workers' pay. The average ratio for the top "lucky" CEOs is 495 and the average ratio for SP 500 companies is 204. The #1 CEO is Ronald Johnson from PC Penney with a staggering ratio of 1795. You will love to read the following information for Mr. Johnson. He was hired in late 2011 from Apple and the stock price of PC Penney plummeted since he was hired. He then was fired one month ago. The highest paid CEO has the lowest performance!

Employees as parts and replaceable

Recent issue of Time magazine has a featured article about the iconoclastic CEO, Tadashi Yanai, of the Japan's famous casual clothing brand, Uniqlo. His maxim, "to change or to die", has transformed his tiny menswear shop into a globally well-known brand, including one flagship store on the Fifth Avenue in New York City. His success and his non-Japanese-style management has made him the modern Akio Morita, former iconic CEO of Sony in the 1980s. I am especially struck and actually deeply empathetic by his statement, "Traditional Japanese companies treat their employees as family. Uniqlo thinks employees are only parts and something replaceable". This is how I feel in the U.S. and this philosophy of "employees as parts" may, unfortunately, be a better adopted methodology in this highly competitive 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2142492,00.html

替代能源

最常被提到的替代能源是太陽能和風力發電. 核四可每年產生 240 億度電力. 太陽能如果要代替核四, 粗略算了一下, 這至少需要 150 平方公里太陽能面板, 相當於百分之五十五的臺北市面積. 臺灣不可能有資金和土地來建造一個如此巨型的太陽城. 

至於風力發電, 雖然風力常被提到是最有可能替代核能的選擇, 但 wind farm 吵得要命, 所以只能建在荒郊野外或近海地區. 風力發電效率僅有6% (30% 的轉換效率乘以20% 的相容於現有穩定電力的傳輸效率). 想要和核四電力相當, 那 wind farm 很可能在近海地區會將臺灣圍得"風洩不通". 美國億萬富翁, T. Boone Pickens, 曾投下巨資在渺無人煙的德州建造一座大型 wind farm. 目標是將電力輸往加州. 這"義舉"也曾讓美國媒體大加吹捧. 但是在兩年多前, 就因電力傳輸問題和價格競爭力問題而打退堂鼓了. 

即使在美國紐約市附近也有一座老舊的核能電廠. 半年前的 Sandy 颶風也曾讓紐約媒體杞人憂天式地擔心 "這個老核電廠經得起吹嗎?" 反核或擁核永遠是歸諸於 "核四安全嗎?" 而不是無謂的意識型態爭執.