BUNKA Jr Secondary School – KIEO – Tokyo Japan Visit – March 16, 2009

March 16, 2009

The next  2 days were supposed to be spent with KIEO students. Our first pitstop was BUNKA junior high school, under KIEO university.

So our journey starts with a small bag with a few clothes enough for next 2-3 days and we set out on the morning of 16th.

Pretty dust bins I saw on the roadside shop, 4 types, one for each category of waste.

See this one ( and we thought we only hung our stuff outside in our balconies.
 

When we reached the main gate of the school we saw this. The sign was designed by the principal of the school himself!!

Students discipline starts the moment you enter. You have to take out your shoes and put in the rack exactly in the same direction, and wear red coloured slippers inside.

We were welcome by a opening speech by the principal of the college Akira Watabe. The student to his right is Hiro, who helped in translating to english. He also had taken up the responsibility of being the leader for the day.

Post this we all gathered in a auditorium cum basketball stadium of the school. There were interaction sessions. Students were sitting there, most of them clueless as to what is happening. Some of us spoke about India and Indian lifestyle through a simple presentation.
 

These guys are singing there school song for us. We loved the song. Will try to put it up here some time.

Each of us was assigned one classroom to interact with and talk to the students. I was excited. They love Indian culture, especially hindi. If you say namaste to them, they will immediately flock around you and do a V sign, and echo namaste loud and clear. Here is how the class room look from inside.

Each classroom has a AIM of its own which as a class activity they put up on a board. Noticeable is that each student also has a short term AIM to be fulfilled which he articulately draws and puts on the board.

Was wondering do we find these in Indian schools?

12:30 PM. Lunch time. Ate this->
  Was very nutricious, I would say. Looks very less in amount, but it made me full. Japanese are known for consuming highly nutricious food. This one was rice with seafood, seafood soup and milk and a fruit.

Interestingly, extra curricular form a very important part of their school life. School nurtures the talents. Every open space all around the school on every floor had paintings, sketches, stories, poems written by students and pasted open.
 

This is me(center), with Ukita Waru(left to me) and other Japanese student.

This lot of girls were screaming out NAMASTE (hello) and BAHUT ACHHE (very good) when I greeted them similarly.

 

After a lot of enjoying and talking with them, we left for our next stop which was KiraKara Street.

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Break the rules

Albert Einstein says:

Man tries  to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligent picture of the world; he then tried to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and this overcome it.

Rules are like religious sentiments that have been built and nurtured over a long period of time and having being passed over generation to generation without the context.

Einstein again says:

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

 

We all want to

We forget that a ripple in water is created because something happened, something was disturbed, something broke…

The silence of the water was broken

To create ripple one must

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Digsby - The Best all-in-one Social Media Organizer and Integrator

  I recently installed DIGSBY on my XP powered machine and completely forgot about it, till today. I got a notification about the recent new release of the software and went ahead to test the various claims that its making.

I was actually surprised and happy to find that the claims were really true and not just blasphemous axioms. Here is all that you can do with it:

1. Configure GMAIL, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, GTalk, YTalk, LinkedIn - all in this single client.
2. See all the feeds real time from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn right on your desktop.
3. Edit your status on them right from your client.
4. Set different status for different networks.
5. See incoming unread mail right there in the client window.
6. Delete, Archive the mail right from the window.
7. Send mail right from desktop.
8. Sweet black theme.
9. Dockable on right side of your desktop.

The performance is highly satisfactory and I have not encountered any issue since I installed it.

I would say Digsby is THE BEST All-in-one IM Social Media Organiser and Integrator Client available so far

Some of the features that can be incorporated:

1. Group chat enabling
2. Mail preview feature/ Mail open feature in a separate window rather than opening the mail box in the browser which it currently does.
3. Allow comments for facebook feeds right from the window.

P.S.Its beauty lies in the fact that your use of left clicks (and right clicks for the left handers) is reduced tremendously thereby saving your hand and your mouse.

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"Personality Not Included" by Rohit Bhargava

Came accross this book "Personality Not Included" by Rohit Bhargava while searching for SMM (Social Media Marketing)

This is his presentation about the making of the book.

[slideshare id=773629&doc=makingofpersonalitynotincluded-1227226837853151-9]

Did you notice the simplisitic nature of this presentation and yet so powerful it is!!

I personally am looking forward to reading this book soon.

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Yahoo Big Thinkers Series - Automated Economy and Prediction market

At the 2nd of the lectures in the Yahoo Big Thinker Series, which happened yesterday at the Hotel Leela, Dr. David Pennock talked on how the internet and search engines have developed and are developing to make the economy more automated.
http://bangalore.yahoo.com/bigthinkers/events_09/event_june12_09.html

David is Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo. More about David is here:
http://research.yahoo.com/David_Pennock

What David discussed was about how search engines have evolved from being just word searchers to being auctioneers for what people are searching.

There are people who are willing to sell products, services and information, other people are searching. One of the key areas that David talks about is Continuous Double Auction.

Prediction market utilising CDA was also discussed. weatherbill.com gives insurance to customer against bad weather, and the cost of which is calculated based on the prediction that the customer does. There are levels of severity of prediction that can be chosen from, and the website provides options to calibrate your prediction.

Intrade.com is another success e-commerce that is based on predictions. You trade the predictions about events happening around the world, you can buy and sell them based on what your current take on them is. To know about how it works ->
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/help/index.jsp?page=howitworks.html

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A variety of questions were raised as to would this really work, if someone trades on a prediction like
"Would terrorists attack on ___ time?".
Such kind of predcitions themselves are not worth enough to trade about.

But the amount of intel such a model generates is enormous. Karthikeyan Iyer ( Director, Crafitti Consulting Pvt Ltd, www.crafitti.com ) asked me how would one monetize such kind of a model.

The prediction market is generating info about what is the current mind set of people and whether the prediction that is in hand is on the right lines of not.

Take an example : A hybrid car which generates more power than it
consumes will be ready in an economically viable state by 2015

The amount of response to this prediction gives a rough estimate how many people like this idea. If the P-value is > 50% it means there are fair chances of people buying such a product and companies like Toyota, Honda can basically utilise this intel to know where there target markets are.

Take another example : A Red coloured shampoo which is not harmful,
if eaten accidentally, will be a big hit

Now clearly an example of radically different idea that can be worked upon, especially from the point of view of children. But if the market is not positive about this prediction, this might be because of any of the things -> color, edible nature etc. This is a simple example, but complex predictions can be formulated to make sure that the intel generated is good enough to find out if a particular product is viable or not.

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Point to ponder :

How prediction market concept can be utlized inside organisations to improve productivity of processes as well as employees?

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P.S.:
See the image at the top of the post.
Me and my friend Vishal were discussing about the various interpretations of it when this is what came up:

How big can YOUTH INK?


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Books I am currently reading

These are the books I am currently reading

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Six Thinking Hats - Visual Map

A Visual Map of the Six Thinking Hat framework that I made sometime last month.
This is helpful if you want to quickly find out what are the faces under each of the six hats.