Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

As many have noticed, I’m on a blogging break and will continue to be in one for a while. 2008 has ended rather poorly but I have some great things to look forward to in 2009. (whoever stole my car on Dec 31st 2008, please return it…)

1. The NYCIML will finish its inaugural year as a student run organization under the excellent leadership of Yitian Liu and Maria Guirguis!
2. The NYMC will begin it’s second full year of operations. For 2009, we will be expanding to include programs to server the middle schools. New programs include two middle school student classes (I will be directing the program in Manhattan), and a middle school teacher program.
3. My healthcare strike team is shaping up quite nicely and we’ve finally located a project. I can’t reveal much about it yet.. but needless to say.. it kicks ass!
4. After consulting with a few friends, most notably jenniewang and Jorian, I’ve actually decided to take up Yoga. We’ll see how that goes.
5. NYCVPF made its first grant to Concrete Safari! Consider joining the organization if you are interested in social philanthropy.

Even though I am in the midst of a blogging break, I am still quite active on twitter.

In the mean time, check out this kickass Christmas card from First Round Capital.

So I just had dinner with two of my close friends, Ji Li and Dr. Wen Shi. One topic we touched on was our personal life philosophies. I assure you we don’t talk about serious stuff all the time, but sometimes it comes up! (In fact, if you had actually sat through the 3 hours, you would have thought all of us were total retards).

As a direct result of tonight’s conversation, I decided to write a few posts about my personal philosophies on life. Here is part I, my philosophy on effort.

If you read my about me section, you’ll probably see that I’m involved in a lot of different things. I often get asked how I could possibly manage having all these commitments at once. My secret weapon is in fact not brilliance, but what I like to call “compounding effort”.

The basic tenants of “compounding effort” is to simply push yourself 5% harder every year. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but the overall effect can be quite shocking. Indeed, humans in general are incredibly bad at recognizing anything non-linear. We really do not understand multiplication, and thus have very little intuition on how fast “compounding” really is. This is possibly a direct result of the environment we live in. Very few things in nature are non-linear. To add to the problem, we also have a need to see tangible results. The combination of these two qualities is that we as a race, especially Americans, rarely understand the need for long periods of sustained effort.

Take my “compounding effort” rule for example. Here is what happens to Person A’s efficiency over the course of 20 years if he / she follow my rule strictly.

That means compared to Person B who did not push him / herself, Person A is 3 times more efficient at the 20 year mark! Person A can do in a day what takes 3 days for Person B! How can Person B possibly hope to compete with Person A at that point? In fact, I can define a new quantity “effective life experience”, which is based on the amount of work a person actually does (think of it as the area underneath the curve of the effort curve).

There is something I’m sweeping under the carpet of course. Specifically, it takes time to become more efficient. Personally, I think I spend around 30% of my time just to become more efficient in the next year. So naturally this leads to an optimization question. Assuming I start pushing myself when I’m 10, and will stop working when I’m 60, how long should I push myself before the function is no longer optimized? Below, I’ve plotted a few life experience vs years curves.

Notice that for all of these curves, it is NOT worth it to push yourself forever. There is in fact a point at which you should stop pushing yourself, and use 100% of your efficiency. Also notice that the maximum life experience point, pushing yourself 5% harder a year is akin to accomplishing TWICE as much as a person who only pushed him / herself 2% harder a year, and is akin to accomplishing THREE times as much as a person who never bothered pushing at all. From the graph, it is clear that everyone should be pushing themselves until at least they are 30, which unfortunately most people do not do.

As my parting words, here is Jack’s intended life experience equation.

Shali and I were just visiting Cunningham park today and it turned out the park was playing host to the 11th annual Korean Children Festival! I tried to google for some reference to the festival online, but found none. The festival should really do a better job of marketing itself, it seems really fun for the kids!

Anyway, I had my Canon Rebel XT with me today, so I took a few pictures.

A general picture of the festival.

First Birthday Celebration (Tol). The one year old baby is presented with a table of items. Depending on what item the baby picks up, the baby’s future is said to be foretold. Read more about the tradition here.

Shali playing with a Gong.

Kids sumo-wrestling each other?

You can see all the pictures here.

I started going to Starbucks regularly in the last two year and have begun to notice an increasing number of people lounging around in the back surfing the web. When I first encountered this phenomenon, I was extremely irritated at all these bums who just won’t give up their seats… sometimes for the whole afternoon. It turns out this phenomenon actually has a name, coworking.

Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.

Apparently, many of those surfing the web not only have jobs, but are in fact working! There are quite a few bloggers and .com executives who use cafes exclusively as their offices. Now that I travel pretty extensively, I am completely sold on the idea of co-working as well. Cafes are so homely and yet usually bustling with activity it’s really quite motivating. It’s also really difficult to beat the convenience factor. I can pull up to any city’s wireless enabled cafe, grab a coffee and immediately get to work.

Heck, I’m typing this blog entry from Baltimore’s One World Cafe! (BTW, it’s chocolate chai is really quite good.).

As some of you might have noticed, I have been a fairly delinquent blogger as of late. A fair bit has happened since my last post and I’ll just make a quick update now.

I have often been accused of having a lack of focus, and I’d be hard pressed to argue that myself. So for the past few weeks, I have been thinking hard about who I really want to become in 3 years and the steps that need to be taken for me to get there. It took some time but I believe I have finally figured it out. Roughly speaking, I will be focusing on:

• Re-engaging myself in Entrepeneurship
• Re-engaging myself in Education
• Detaching myself from all other responsibilities

I have a few exciting projects in the works right now and i’ll blog about them as they officially launch!

I spent a few hours today reading Next by Michael Crichton.  Though Next was not particularly well written, it is remarkably thought-provoking.  Under the guise of a novel, Crichton attempts to show the potentially disasterous consequences of current US policies on the future of biomedical research.  The Author’s notes highlight broadly the five issues that he tackles:

• Patent on Genes
• Use of Human Tissues
• Availability of Gene Testing Data
• Government interference on research
• The Bayh-Dole Act

With one of his other works Prey, I became very excited about Cellular Automata and its potential ability to explain many of nature’s greatest mysteries.  With Next, on the other hand, I became genuinely scared and disturbed with the future of biotechnology.  The increasingly commercialized atmosphere (i.e. greed) that now pervades all the major research institutions in the US is especially troubling.  The large majority of engineers and medical scientists now finish their training without having taken a single course in ethics.  Yet, these same institutions are racing to combine the all-mighty MBA with all forms of other degrees.

I have always believed very strongly in the concept of social responsibility.  Every entity, ranging from the individual to global corporations has an obligation to contribute positively towards society.  However, with so many of tomorrow’s potential leaders oblivious about the potential repurcussions of their actions, how can we expect them to guide us?

Since I don’t have a secretary, I use a whole host of computer applications to help me increase my productivity. I’ve decided to list them all here for others to peruse. If you have a favorite efficiency application that I don’t actually use, tell me about it!

• File Management
• Amarok (Linux) - A full featured music application with full support of podcasts and bi-directional music transfers on Ipods.
• Anapod Explorer (Windows)- A bi-directional music organizer for Ipods.
• Ex Falso (Linux) – A mp3 tagger.
• Hellanzb (Linux) - It downloads from newsgroups, checks the parity files, and then extracts the files for you. What else can you ask for?
• Organizer
• FlexWallet (Windows Mobile) – Allows me to leave most of my (credit || membership || rewards) cards at home.
• Gaim (Linux) – allows me to sign on to MSN / AIM / Jabber all at the same time.
• Lextionary (Windows Mobile) – full featured on-the-go dictionary.
• Maildrop (Linux) – automatically sorts and filters my email based on my personal scale of “importance”.
• MythTV (Linux) – acts as my digital video recorder (DVR) and my video organizer. The setup was a bit torturous, but it has made up for it in all the ads I no longer have to watch (without paying a monthly fee)!
• Outlook (Windows [Mobile]) – keeps my calendar and contacts on both my laptop and my phone.
  
• Papyrus (Windows Mobile) – keeps my day to day organizer on my DASH.
• Planetplanet (Web) – aggregates all the non-private RSS streams of blogs I read and publishes it on one clean page.
• Sitebar (Web) – synchronized bookmarks wherever I go.
• Trillian (Windows) – The windows equivalent of Gaim.
• Server Management
• Amavis (Linux) – Gets rid of virus-infested / spam emails from the mail server. It is now stopping more than 1000 spams a day!
• Gallery (Web) – In my opinion, there is simply no better way to organize your photos.
• Horde (Web) – I mainly use the email portion of this “groupware”, and apparently so does a lot of universities.
• Phpmyadmin (Web) – you didn’t expect me to manage my databases all using command prompt did you?
• Phpldapadmin (Web) – Sometime last year, I thought it would be a great idea to switch my backend to ldap. Thank god for this app.
• Samba (Linux) – Allows windows and Linux computers to talk to each other in an admin-sane fashion.
• Webmin (Web) – Graphical interface for systems administration.
• Wordpress (Web) – Most of my websites now run entirely off of Wordpress (though a severely hacked version). If I still had to manage a loose collection of pages, I would seriously kill myself.

The Wall Street Journal carried an article on Thursday about the disproportionate number of immigrants who are participating in entrepreneurship:

Immigrant Innovators

Start-up engineering and technology companies that had at least one immigrant founder produced $52 billion sales in 2005 and employed about 450,000 workers, according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University.

The study surveyed 28,776 engineering and technology firms that were started between 1995 and 2005, and found that one-quarter had either a chief executive or a chief technology officer who is an immigrant. Of those, one-quarter had Indian-born founders. The biggest share of the start-ups is in California, where almost 40% of new engineering and technology companies have immigrant founders.

This is of course interesting on many different fronts, not the least of which is its implication on the current immigration reform debate (as discussed in the WSJ article). I would however like to focus on what I believe to be a different similarity that is shared by these entrepreneurs and in fact almost all successful people. I believe the real drive behind their success is hunger, hunger to prove themselves, hunger to survive, and in the rawest sense, hunger to dominate others. The immigrant population is of course very much self selecting in this trait. For someone to completely uproot their lives in the hopes of finding a better life elsewhere, you know there has to be a least a bit of hunger.

For those that are close to me, you’ll probably know that I LOVE hungry people. My good friend Rodica once mentioned that I seem to have a strange attraction towards people from a few schools like Harvard, MIT et al, and at the time I was unable to give any reson for it. But I think I now understand why, those schools contains a disproportionate number of people who are extremely hungry, it almost seem as if they are intentionally screening for this trait. Of course, just being hungry is not a sufficient condition for success. But perhaps it is a necessary condition.

So here goes the strangest holidays wishes that you will probably receive. Happy New Year everyone, and I hope you all have a very hungry 2007!

Referenced from Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

I personally spend significant amount of time on my Ipod and my E3C headphones. Naturally, it’s been quite disconcerting to see increasing anecdotal evidence of earbuds induced hearing loss. Fortunately, it seems that an industrious graduate student has come up with some concrete numbers we can use:

“Sound Output Levels of the iPod and Other MP3 Players: Is There Potential Risk to Hearing?”

Cory D.F. Portnuff
Au.D., Ph.D. Candidate
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences Dept
University of Colorado

Brian J. Fligor, Sc.D.
Director of Diagnostic Audiology, Children’s Hospital Boston
Instructor in Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School