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When I was a Ph.D student, it seemed a very lonely and strange career path. Frankly speaking I would not recommend anyone to contemplate doing a Ph.D and doing a research career, or worse, becoming a Professor. In terms or ROI or “return on investment” (time, energy, money) I think it is one of the worst career choices. Nevertheless, for those crazy or strange people (like me) who have passion to be a researcher, one advantage of the internet age is to be connected with other young researchers. This site is an excellent resource for young researchers.

I came across this story of a person who had a kindergarten friend, a girl who grew up to have a glamorous but tragic life. The words of a person remembering being just four, reminded me that my own daughter seems so small, but she really is a person of her own. I wonder what life my daughter will have. Time goes so fast and soon she will be grown up. Of course I hope she has a happy and wonderful life.

aceconference:

The Creative Showcases Demonstrations track is open to a large variety of submissions including, but not limited to:

* Technical demonstrations of prototype technologies of advanced entertainment technology
* All varieties of video and computer games
* Web and mobile-based computer…

aceconference:

New for 2012!

In line with the theme of this year’s conference, “Entertaining the Whole World”, we are inviting position papers, games or other forms of entertainment, and interactive works of art showcasing the diversity of art and culture found in today’s digital artifacts. Contributions are…

aceconference:

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ACE 2012: 9th Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Conference incorporating DIMEA 2012 (7th Digital Interactive Media Entertainment and Arts Conference) Venue: Kathmandu, Nepal, 5-7 November, 2012

IMPORTANT…

I just received this notice from shortmail. Having 12,000 UNREAD emails in my inbox I am desperately looking for how to solve the almost impossible problem of how to deal with these emails. I read a book a couple of years ago called “The Tyranny of Email” and I agree. It is a tyranny. A simple calculation shows that just reading through 12,000 emails even for a few seconds to get rid of the rubbish will take years if I actually do real work and not 24 hour a day emailing. I find that maybe 10% of emails need some related action which could take hours to days to finish. So it is not as simple as just going through, read, and delete. Although I am soon getting to the stage of really following others in “email bankruptcy”.

Anyway I will use this new tool. I hope it can “suck away” the useful email and leave the rest for deleting.

You have been granted access to a new feature: Gmail Vacuum.

Many of you have told us that you would love to view and respond to your Gmails through the simpler, more streamlined Shortmail interface. So we went to work, and now you can! We call it Gmail Vacuum and it pulls in all your Shortmail-compliant Gmails (500 characters or less) into your Shortmail inbox!

To try Gmail Vacuum, sign in at Shortmail.com and go to Settings (the gear icon) > Advanced > Add a Google Account!

Here is a collection of videos from the Mixed Reality Lab.

A very interesting article in the Foreign Policy magazine about the relevance of Davos. I was fortunate enough to attend and speak at two Davos conferences. I have to admit they were amazing experiences, and I will never forget meeting Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckenberg, and Presidents of leading universities such as MIT, Harvard etc. However in the back of my mind I did feel some guilt that this was some kind of talk-fest and party for the ultra-elite (and the parties are incredible), and I am not sure it achieves much for the world. However for those who are lucky enough to be there it is definitely a life changing event. So one must think honestly about whether attending is really for the world’s benefit or for ones self benefit.

I had the pleasure to meet Professor Ricardo Hausmann and listen to his lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School as part of a course for WEF Young Global Leaders. One of his main thesis is that the well being of a country is directly tied to economic complexity, having a multitude of interrelated and complex economic sectors. This ties in very well with the idea that well being of an economy is tied to creativity and knowledge, because to have economic complexity requires doing different things, and creating new sectors and products. 

On this web site is interactive graphs which look at the economic complexity of countries, and also a free to download book. This book is an excellent resource and it is amazing that it is released for free. 

The main aim of the book is to explain and examine economic complexity which can be summarized by a quote in the opening chapters:

“Economic complexity, therefore, is expressed in the composition of a country’s productive output and reflects the structures that emerge to hold and combine knowledge.”

I highly recommend anyone who wants to understand about the essential need for creativity in society to read this book.