One of the simplest and best precepts Katharine Graham got from his father Eugene Meyer for parents to live by

"What parents may sometimes do in a helpful way is to point out certain principles of actions. I do not think I would be helpful in advising you too strongly. I do not even feel the need of doing that because I have so much confidence in your having really good judgement. I believe that what I can do for you once in while is to point out certain principles that have developed in my mind as sound and practical, leaving it for you yourself to apply them if your own mind grasps and approves the principles.'" --- Eugene Meyer

Book review: The age of the unthinkable: Why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it by Joshua Cooper Ramo, ISBN9780316118088

The book covers a lot of new thinking in the current economics and political sciences:

• Eric von Hipppel Democratizing Innovation
• Ricardo Semler and his new management practice in his company Semco
• Per Bak and his self-organized criticality phenomenon
• Isaiah Berlin: Hedgehogs thinker vs fox thinker
• Masako Watanabe: Styles of reasoning in Japan and the United States: Logic of education in two cultures
• Richard Nisbett: The geography of thoughts
• Mike Moritz and secret of successful venture investment in Sequoia Capital
• Aharon Farkash's tenure at Israeli military intelligence unit IDF
• Shigeru Miyamoto's creation of Wii and revival of Nintendo
• Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola's invention of camouflage in World War I
• Dan Kaminsky's discovery of DNS flaw and innovative way of fixing it
• Anselm Kiefer's painting Deutschlands Geistesheldon
• Tony Moll's leading anti HIV efforts in South Africa and re-emergence of TB due to failure of patient education
• Gertrude Stein and her role in new art movement (Cubism) in 1910s
• David Kotz with Fred Weir Revolution from above: The demise of the Soviet System
• C.S Holling and Simon Levin: Two ecologists
• Bill Broweder's Russian investment strategy and his early detection of 2008 financial meltdown

Security vs Privacy

Privacy is gaining attention from C-suite, "it is all about data, stupid!" But how privacy initiative plays with security initiative?
"You can have security without privacy, but you can't have privacy without security" - Michael Howard

What separate a security amateur and security professional

"A security amateur can tell you how to secure something, a security professional knows when you don't need to." - Michael Howard

Book review: The cod's tale by Mark Kurlansky and illustrated by S.D.Schindler, ISBN0399234764

What: A picture book about history of cod fishing and cod trade and its contribution to the sea voyage and discovery of America
Best for: Intermediate reader grade 3 to 5
Rating: 5 of 5
Review: A enchanting history of cod and cod fishing and cod trade masterfully told and illustrated. And the author threads the information about cod and its impact on history is subtle and brilliant. If all history and trade book can be written this beautifully ...

Book review: One witch by Laura Leuck and illustrated by S.D.Schindler ISBN0802788602

What: A beautiful picture book
Best for: Beginner reader Pre-K to 2nd grade
Rating: 5 of 5
Review: Crispy color, beautiful illustration, simple and rhymed Halloween themed stories. Any young reader will fall in love instantly.

Book review: The discovery of the Americas by Betsy and Giulio Maestro, ISBN 0688068375

What: A picture book about the discovery of America
Best for: Intermediate reader (grade 3 to 5)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Review: Beautiful illustrations and clear simple languages make this saga of discovery as fascinating to six-year-olds as it will be to older readers. Very informative material.

Fall's line

Fall's line

Vivek Ranadive: How to win anything

The video is here.
Three winning rules:

• Think out of the box
• Play by your own rule, not other people's rule
• Work harder than anybody else

The tricky business of transforming a culture

The unifying and stabilizing force in western culture is the law. Law is the foundation. It provides a stable platform to evolve and change. And it may also be the reason why western civilization is leading the pack.
For China, the unifying and stabilizing force and foundation is Confucian's concept of family. Family is not just the household, whole kingdom is a big family. Family is why China as a culture still maintains its sanity and dignity (although very vulnerable) after all the indignities suffered during last couple of centuries. And closeness and inward looking nature of family may also be the reason why China missed the opportunity for industrialization(outward exploration+open competition) and scientific advancement early in the twentieth century. And Chinese people realized that family may not be a good foundation for China to enter the world market and compete any more. China may need a new foundation to be able to catch up and lead.
The challenge is really in the transformation. While China is searching for new culture launchpad, we cannot throw away the current foundation (family) yet, otherwise the house will crumble down and collapse. We especially need a strong foundation during this time of great change. Chairman Mao tried to rid all the old and rebuild a new one from the ruin, and it led to twenty years of setback and chaos. Deng Xiaping learned the lesson and vouch to maintain Communist ruling as a stable foundation.

Tons of witches and bats and a bat girl

Tons of witches

There are lots of bats,arggg

And then there is a bat girl :-)

Book Review: The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden ASIN: B009Y4JPTA

I haven't even started book yet. I picked up this book because another Pagden book. I was trying to answer: Why Western world got the enlightenment while Eastern world missed it? What was the secret ingredient that was missing from Eastern culture that prevent enlightenment's birth? From when such ingredient was lost in Eastern history?
[Update] Page 269 to page 292 alone is worth the cover price. This part of the book talks extensively about key figures of Enlightement especially Leibniz and Montesquieu opinion on China and Chinese culture.Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws categorized Chinese government as despotism, a governance that is "one alone, without law and without rule, drags everything along by his will and his caprice". Montesquieu identified three possible types of government:

• Republics, either democratic or aristocratic, which the "people as a body or ionly a part of the people" exercise sovereign power
• Monarchies,where sovereignty is held by "one alone" in accordance with "fixed and established laws"
• Despotism, where "one alone, without law and without rule, drags everything along by his will and his caprice"

Of the three, Montesquieu thinks only the first two were truly legitimate. Despotism is a condition in which "there are no laws, so to speak, there are only customs and manners, and if you overturn them, you overturn everything. Laws are established, customs are inspired." And in his opinion, the immobility of Chinese government structure was the result of Chinese emperors smart use of "manners" and "customs" to rule over their citizens. Customs are generally those long-accepted practices of a community that hold it together on a daily basis. Manners are the routine social exchanges between individuals and the code of behavior that all but real savages need in order to negotiate their daily lives. Both of them are superficial, carry no meaning of virtue or vice. Unlike laws which reflects a consensus and changes as circumstances change, customs and manners are not examined and exist only for the sake of they always existed. And Chinese rulers have been using Keju (科举), a meritocratic system to enforce manners and customs, and by promoting Confucian the Chinese emperors upped these manners and customs to the sacred and secular level, a religion which "fear added to fear", and exempt those manners and customs from change or criticism. It is very similar to Muslims choosing Qur'an as their "sacred book that acts as a rule". The Chinese seemed to have gone one step further than any other "Oriental" despotism, in that their legislators have successfully "confused religion, laws, mores, and manners" thus emptying the concepts of vice and virtue of any real meaning. The outcome of all this was to make of the nation one single, indivisible character, so tightly bound together as to be impervious to any change. In this way China had come to resemble not a society but an immense family, and it was an image that Chinese philosophy had worked hard to present as a reflection of a perfectly harmonious world."The Emperors of China are very eager for the people to believe the maxim of the Chinese philosopher that the empire is a family and the emperor its father". It is an illusion fostered by despots and work to their ruling advantage."a spider's web, with the emperor like the spider at the center. He can not move without everyone else moving, and no one else can move without him moving also". Despotism of this kind, however can only exist in isolation. And China's isolation was reinforced by the Chinese system of writing, a non-alphabet system of more than three thousand unique characters for daily usage, a symbol system that demands life learning to be able to read, a system so burdened and heavy that Chinese had neither the resources nor the inclination even to interpret much less challenge the received wisdom of past centuries. What science the Chinese had was thus reduced to little more than "the knowledge of language" and of a language "barely sufficient for daily life".
[Update, 11/10/2013] To read this book will require a strong discipline resulted from a set of urgent problems. The writing does not lend to a easy read.

Book Review: My beloved world by Sonia Sotomayor ISBN 0307594882

Being a minority in the States, I am always interested in success story of minorities. Sonia Sotomayor was born in a Puerto Rican immigrant family from New York city public housing, went to a Catholic middle school and high school, got into Princeton University under Affirmative Action, went on graduating from Yale Law School and became Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is a story of talent, well thought out plan and perseverance. I didn't finish the whole book, only reading her high school years and college years. Several things jumped out from the book:

• She is extremely talented. She got into Princeton under AA, but she graduated summa cum laude and awarded Moses Taylor Pyne Honor prize, the highest honor awarded to undergraduate. Undoubtedly she has a very high IQ.
• Although she came from a unprivileged upbringing and she experienced first hand such deficiency costed her, there was not a single trace of bitterness in the book. She definitely has a very high EQ too. This is a stark contrast to another book I read and reviewed on this blog Paper Daughter.
• She stays the course throughout her college and law school and didn't detour much. A supereme court justice is highest point of a law career and she made it to there in a very straight line.

To Bootstrap or not to Bootstrap

Check out these Bootstrap showcase sites to see if you find any style you like, then remember to check out 5 reasons not to use twitter bootstrap

To Breeze or not to Breeze

What Breezejs can offer you is a good overview from a MS viewpoint

To knockout or not to knockout?

Want some pointers ? Check out Knockout vs Backbone The question is: How do you build large client app with a good structure when using Knockoutjs? Still thinking about it, but here are some pointers: A walkthrough using KnockoutJS and AMD AMD(Asynchronous Module Definition) vs CJS(CommonJS Modules 1.1) What a world of fun and thrill...

Tech gotcha of the day: kogrid needs knockoutjs version 2.2 and above

If you have been using knockoutjs for a while and then you heard of a beautiful grid that will work well with knockoutjs, aka kogrid, forewarned: To use kogrid successfully, you have to update knockoutjs to version 2.2 and above, otherwise you will get an empty webpage with no grid and when you F12, you will see a JavaScript funtion error of something like the object doesn't have a method "seek".

Mentorship

From Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg ISBN 0385349947, instead of "Get a mentor and you will excel", "Excel and you will get a mentor".

Matchmaker, friends and funny bunny

Some of latest arts from in-house artist Cindy...

Book Review: Worlds at war, the 2,500 year struggle between east and west by Anthony Pagden, ISBN 978-0199237432

Why I read this book: With ascent of Chinese economy, a lot of discussion are centered on how china will evolve its political structure, following the foodsteps of western democracy or continuing single party structure. And I think there are a lot of history lessons we can learn from reading the eternal enmity between east and west, which is the focal theme of this book. For an China-centric view, check this one out 李世默:兩種制度的傳說 Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems
What is this book about: This dome is 600+ pages long and ambitiously tried to cover a span of 2500 years history of conflicts between East (Asia) and West (Europe), starting from Persian invasion of Athens by Darius and continued to Alexander the Great conquer of Asia and goes all the way to America's invasion of Iraq in 2002. I am still long way to go to finish it, but just want to add some thoughts while I am still reading it.
1. The author seems to think East (Asia) always prefer despotism or oligarchy and West (Europe) prefers individualism and democracy. Not sure it is a widely held belief but looking back in Chinese history it seems the pattern holds.
2.In western history, there seems always be multiple power centers to check and balance each other. In Roman empire, Senate vs Caesar and church vs king post Rome, and in current days US, it is tri-power structure: White house, Senate and Congress, and then Superium court. On the contrary, in Eastern history there seems always a single controlling power: either it is king or it is Muslim religious leader. Is it due to geographic reason or homogeneous race?
3. In chapter 5 The coming of Islam, during 712 to 833, there was a period of "Arab Renaissance", when Muslim scholars(most notably among them were Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Riruni, Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufayl) translated and annotated many Greek and Roman(/Byzantium) scientific and philosophical writings. This period of "Arab Renaissance" precedes the later European Renaissance and provided European scholars insight into Greek era ideas and knowledge. So the big question is: Why can it happen? Why doesn't it happen again? One explanation from French theologian Ernest Renan is that Muslim derived their culture and education wholly from Islam, and he believes all the monotheistic religions (this include both Islam and Christian) are incompatible with the progress of modern sciences. And he believes "Arab Renaissance" was the result of non-Muslim scholars work during a rare moment of openness during Islamic rule in Euroasia.
4. In Chapter 8 Science Ascendant, religion provides 1st permanent settlement for for human race on the earth, ie. Islam for near east, Christianity for west and confucian for far east, and science provided human means to explore the surrounding of their settlement and help them find out where their home is and where they can go further.
5. Chapter 9 Enlightened Orientalism, Voltaire asked if the East had been "the nursery of all the arts, to which the Western would owes everything it now enjoys,", why was it that the nations of the West "seemed to have been born only yesterday ... now go further than any other people in more than one field?". Answer: Ownership society. Francois Bernier, who had spent 12 years as physician to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, in his book A New Division of the Earth According to the Difference Species or Races Which Inhabit It, states that Oriental despot did not rule over but actually owned the state (《诗经》『溥天之下，莫非王土；率土之滨，莫非王臣』). In the West the status and identity of an individual were to a great extent determined by his or her ability to own property. In the East, however, everything was owned by the sovereign, and it was this that lead to the same fate for all Oriental empires: tyranny, ruin and desolation.Only in the Orient did there exist what Montesquieu termed "political slavery", the absence of any freedom to act or express oneself independently of the sovereign's will. And the sovereign's will was enforced not through honour,as occurs in monarchies, nor through virtues, as is the case in republics, but through fear, which is why in despotic states, in particular those in Asia, religion is so important, for all religion is always "fear added fear". Oriental despotic societies resembled not states but large families (家天下）. All the Eastern countries "had one thing in common: they were all, in their different ways, ruled by despots, enthralled to systems of government upheld by religious whose objectives was to persuade the masses that neither nature nor any of their gods offered them any other way of living. They were societies composed of hordes, not individuals. And as long as they remained immured behind their self-imposed walls of ignorance and apathy, nothing could help them. For them, time and progress had little meaning; the truth of everything, including what Europeans looked upon as science, could be established only by reference to the past". Think about North Korea and Cuba.
6. Chapter 12 Epilog , 启发民智，始于民生，吃饱穿暖，再谈民选，帝制压抑，积弱百年，自由民主，循序渐进，小民可教，需要时间

Book Review The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley ISBN 1451654421

Before getting to the specific book, this is the first book I finished reading on eReader device. In my case it is Kindle. Somehow I still cannot quite equate reading on eReader with the experience of holding a paper book on hand. The sense of possession of the knowledge is just not as much holding a electronic device as holding an ink-on-paper book. Maybe it is just me.
Now back to our subject. The book is about 300 pages long, but excluding a lot of notes and references, it is a bout 180 pages. It is an enjoyable read about why American kids not faring well in PISA test and tracking three American high school exchange students experience in PISA superpowers Finland, Korea and Poland. If you are European parents or Asian parents living in America with high school kids at home and interested in education issue, you probably already had the same conclusion as the authors and there is really little gain reading the book.

Bat queen and king

Cindy is five, and she is a natural born artist. Here is her latest master piece: a bat queen and king

Can you guess who is queen and who is king?

Grasshopper

A good size grasshopper waited patiently on our screen windows this morning

Here is a picture from another angle

Book Review of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Cliff Stoll was an astronomer who temporarily worked as a network administrator due to funding shortage at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(LBL). The first assignment he got as network administrator was to figure out a 75 cents discrepancy in Unix system's user computer usage. His investigation led to the discovery of a foreign hacker breaking into US military computer systems and first fully documented case of computer espionage. As a scientist, Cliff Stoll did an excellent work explaining the technical side of computer hacking without losing the entertaining side of a good story telling, and he also artfully blended in his opinion on network security and privacy. The espionage happend in 1986 and the book was published in 1989, but it doesn't feel outdated reading it today. With recent Edward Snowden case of NSA eavesdropping on US citizens, the book seems ever more relevant.

鹿鸣翠谷

摄于公司院内

书评： 《神权，民本， 民主： 二千五百年的竞赛》 郑楚材著 ISBN:978-957-41-4915-5

书的作者是住在华府的一位内科医生和风湿病学家，写历史人文方面的此书纯粹是兴趣，但很显然是下了多年的功夫，所以读来很有收获。作者认为中国从秦汉至现在走的是儒家：以民为本，以仁爱为中心，以中庸为方法的作者称之为民本政治，对比与西方民主国家的”For people, by people"的民主政治， 两家之外就是宗教立国如阿拉伯国家即作者所称的神权政治。另外作者认为中国在民国以前更具体的应该定义为帝制民本政治，因为汉武帝以来的帝王绑架了儒家民本思想以服务于帝王朝的稳定，但帝王却没有任何监督和约涑，只有自上至下从君主对臣民的约涑却没有自下而上臣民对君主的约涑。另外作者认为现在的中国不应生硬照搬西方民主政治，而应把儒家民本思想从帝王或一党专政的枷锁中解放出来，取民主政治的长处，走自己的政治道路。民本政治实际是精英治国，好处是效率高，成本底。但当民本政治，民主政治和神权政治的精英都出自Harvard, Yale等Ivy League时，不知作者的政治分类还有没有意义。 另外大概由于作者的自然科学背景， 书中做了一些关于中国历史有趣的统计, 比如：“从秦使皇到轻宣统共218个皇帝（五胡十六国的皇帝未计算在内），77个皇帝未达18岁即以登位，其中34个10岁以前就登基，竟有11个在5岁以前就登皇位，2个仅1岁也登上皇位，甚至3个月大的婴孩也做了皇帝，“，”仅26位皇帝活到60岁以上，其中14位是开国皇帝，6位功业彪炳，但这20位所谓英明贤君都在晚年犯下严重错误，其余6位乏善可陈，宣统帝溥仪5岁被废后活了61岁，阿斗刘禅56岁被废，继续活到64岁。在总数26个末代皇帝中，仅此2人享此高寿，其余竟有15个末代皇帝都死于非命，其平均年龄只有19.6岁。在218个皇帝中竟有81人活不到30岁，占总数的37.2%.位上被弑36人，被废34人，被废后遭杀12人， 被逼禅位6人，自杀3人，他杀2人，战死1人，被俘3人，总之居皇位未能善终的高达85人，占总数39%。死于非命的有54人，几近总数的25%。“总括言之中国二千一百多年的帝制民本政治仅有四百来年的天下太平人民受惠，只占总时期的18.5%"。仅这些统计功夫， 就可以给作者5分。

EV charger

书评： 《被利益集团拖跨的王朝》

先讲两句题外话， 这本书是2011年出版， 可依然延续了中文书的痼疾， 没有索引， 文中引用典故不注明出处。白玉微暇。
《被利益集团拖跨的王朝》是世界知识出版社出版的《同舟共进》杂志精华系列的一本，ISBN 978-5012-4105-7。这是一本文集， 文章评点中国历史成败兴亡， 借史喻今。启发很多， 容我分别道来。
网上国人每谈及中日历史纷争，算我在内， 很快就热血沸腾，杀气腾腾，情绪压制了冷静的思辨。李扬帆文<<中国近代之败，实为意识之败-两千年中日交往中的反思>>细数历史，结论：中国不了解日本，日本摸透中国，中国必败。记得小时候看李默然主演的〈甲午风云〉，心中不平，恨一颗鱼雷，击沉致远舰，似乎于日本的胜负全系于那一颗鱼雷上。后来又看冯小宁拍摄的电视剧《北洋水师》，约略明白甲午海战，中国不止输在那一颗鱼雷上。读了此文，终于明白，中国输在，我们中国人口口声称与日本是一衣带水的邻邦，却从没有认真的去了解我们这位邻居。日本有阿倍仲麻吕，高杉晋作，宗方小太郎， 长期居住中国，考科举，学中文，考察经济，社会，文化，把中国摸个底透；可我们中国人，却对日本一无所知，了解依然停留在日本是中国文明的分支，是小亲外戚。有多少中国人知道日本国策自丰臣秀吉到伊藤博文的演变？有多少中国人知道日本民族称雄世界（不只是东亚）的野心？日本人学习中国，是为了文化上独立于中国文化。此文对我最大的提醒是：日本有个思想家福泽谕吉，他比我们中国人更理解中国文化，也因次他提出日本“脱亚”，于西方各文明国家共进退。一旦看到日本文化的这个转变，你就会理解为什么日本对二战侵略罪行躲躲藏藏。因为他们认为自己是西方一分子，西方从未对亚洲认错，为什么你们让我日本认错？对我们这个邻居，在未来很长的时期，我们都无从避开，或合作，或对抗，但我们应该记住此文作者的警告： 请别漠视你的对手

Financial engineering: necessary evil

I have read a lot about financial engineering after 2008 financial crisis. Books like All the devils are here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, The big short:inside the doomsday machine by Michael Lewis, Hedge Hogs: The Cowboy Traders Behind Wall Street's Largest Hedge Fund Disaster by Barbara T.Dreyfuss, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson. Some of the pioneers of financial engineering are Noble Laureates who essentially invented Wall Street money machines. My take home message is: Financial engineering is like germs on our body, they plays a critical role in the health of global financial system if under control and regulation, but they will destroy the whole system if let grow unregulated.

What drives an investment property value: demography

So you bought a investment property, and you are looking for cash flow and appreciation. There are a lot of rules and calculation to guide you for a non-negative cash flow . But what drives up the value of the property? I think it is human. To be more specific, the demographic composition of the area your property resides. If the area is composed of highly educated people, the long term economic prospect will be good and property appreciation will be high. In an extreme case, if you turn your investment property into an incubator and rented out to entrepreneur, the payback and appreciation from the property can be huge.

What sets a great Chinese entrepreneur apart from a great entrepreneur: Confucius ethics

Yang Yuanqing, CEO of PC vendor Lenovo made news lately by sharing his $3.25 million bonus with 10000 Lenovo staff. Lenovo overtook HP to become world's biggest PC vendor, and Yang earned his bonus, by market standard. According Wikipedia's profile of Yang, he grew up in China before western market economy was introduced to communist China, and I assume he was influenced by Confucius philosophy in his upbringing. And his sharing of his bonus money with his staff manifests core belief in Confucius ethics, the superiority of personal exemplification over explicit rules of behavior. With market economy takes its root in China and more and more Chinese people are looking into Confucian ethics and philosophy for their identity in world stage, we can hope more and more great Chinese entrepreneurs like Yang will emerge, successfully blending western management acumen with eastern Confucian ethics.