Today, Vice President, Prof. Kar Yan Tam came as a guest speaker at the ISMT101 class.  He gave some very nice arguments about how IT is needed in the industry and how students can benefit from a degree in IT.  Some numbers are worth taking down:

The students in “Global Business” track are the students came in with highest  scores, followed by “Quantative Finance”. At the point of graduation, the “Global Business” students indeed obtain the highest entry salary, around HK$14,000/month.  However, the runner-up in terms of highest paid graduates is not QF, but IT.  Other majors, like accounting, etc. lags behind to get an average salary around HK$11,500.

The other speaker Leroy Yau from Ernst&Young also reported something interesting about IT auditing.  When he joined the firm 10 years ago, there were only 5 people working in IT auditing, then 5 years ago, his group had 20 people.  This year, the number of people is more than 200, and it is still increasing at the speed of 30-50% per year.

I suspect we are going through a period for IT jobs similar to the one for IT investment that confused  practitioners and academics alike: the Productivity Paradox period.  (c.f. Robert Solow)

Maybe the IT jobs are shifting toward more sophisticated IT professionals rather than staying for the programmers.  Similar for the case of shifting from blue-collar jobs to white-collar jobs in the past.

David Autor from MIT wrote a paper long time ago about skill content: The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration (David H. Autor, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murname, November 2003, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4)) . Another his famous paper is :Wiring the Labor Market. (David H. Autor, Winter 2001, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15(1))

I think these all point to one direction: IT job is in great need, but people need to be prepared to change the mind set.  They are not about programming.  They are about using IT effectively in the corporate context, and a good understanding of both IT and business/management is needed for these jobs.

IT auditing is probably a good marriage between IT and accounting, I can think about other good examples: IT&Marketing, IT&Finance, IT&OM, in fact IT can be used in all aspects of the business world, and a good knowledge in these surely creates a nice competitive advantage over other potential combinations.

Using the worst artistic tool (a.k.a Microsoft Paint) to draw Mona Lisa, very impressive.

This one draws John Locke from “Lost” in  Photoshop.

Youtube clips appear quite often in my recent blog entries.  I do it only because I can (with this Viper’s Video plugin).   A deeper reason is that you can find a lot of extremely creative works in youtube.

A little boy was doing his math homework. He said to himself, “Two plus five, that son of a bitch is seven.
Three plus six, that son of a bitch is nine….”
His mother heard what he was saying and gasped, “What are you doing?”
The little boy answered, “I’m doing my math homework, Mum.”
“And this is how your teacher taught you to do it?” the mother asked
“Yes,” he answered.
Infuriated, the mother asked the teacher the next day, “What are you teaching my son in math?”
The teacher replied, “Right now, we are learning addition.”
The mother asked, “And are you teachingthem to say two plus two, that son of a bitch is four?”
After the teacher stopped laughing, she answered,
“What I taught them was, two plus two, THE SUM OF WHICH, is four.”

This cartoon is from Friday Funnies by Scott Stantis .

No thoughts, sorry. I decide to remain silent for this one.

Came across the fascinating website: Prime Number Spiral

Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center. The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side: Figure 1 If we continue winding for a while and zoom out a bit, the result looks like this:

If we zoom out even further and remove everything except the dots that indicate the locations of integers, we get the next illustration. It shows 2026 dots:

Figure 3

Let’s try making the primes darker than the non-primes:

The primes seem to cluster along certain curves. Let’s zoom out even further to get a better look. The following number spiral shows all the primes that occur within the first 46,656 non-negative integers. (For clarity, non-primes have been left out.)

Figure 5

It looks as though primes tend to concentrate in certain curves that swoop away to the northwest and southwest, like the curve marked by the blue arrow.

On the next few pages of this website, we’ll investigate these patterns and try to make sense out of them.

The young generation may not appreciate Michael Jackson’s music, but when I was young, his music video was the first I have ever got on hold and really liked. (The sample may not be representative for me as by that time in China, all music are the same, and they are meant to praise something). Anyway, it was refreshing to watch the fatastic dance.

My favorate music of MJ? To me, it was “Heal the World”, I really like the soft melody.

小豆辛辛苦苦的写博客, 现在很多人只是来这里看她的文章 (当然看我的文章需要一定的语言,文学,科技,艺术,文化等功底及相应的智商).

我决定给她一个新的域名和一个专属的博客, 于是 “小豆一家” 就诞生啦.

http://jade.mikezhang.com

一行人等放家在家， 除了小豆飞去了北京。 可是冻，冻死银了。 我现在手脚冰凉的敲着键盘，萱萱在睡觉。

要是这个香港的天气还真奇怪呢。

一个月前偶们就热的半死，以致于我把过冬的衣衣通通收了起了， 以免长毛长霉什么的。

二周前偶们一家大小还夏天的打扮去了海滩吹了吹湿热的海风‘

一周前，小豆还作摸着这夏天可咋过啊，才3月就热的浑身粘呼呼的了，对偶十分有意见道：我没有衣服穿啊（他其实是有穿衣服的），太热了， 我得去买衣服了！

我呢对着镜子上被太阳晒的雀斑倍增的脸发愁：这要是倒了7，8月，我的脸。。。。太恐怖了。不行！！！我像小豆宣布：我要去美容！你看，你看！我的脸啊！

萱萱倒是美滋滋的每天要穿dress， 也没人栏着。

 薇薇呢，被可恶的蚊子在小胖腿上咬了数个包（这种蚊子咬的包巨痒无比，包是又红又硬的，一般也得痒至少两周）。小家伙没事想起来包来，就颠颠地去拿了药水，然后给偶，自己在躺在地板上，把个小肥腿抬的老高，小脚恨不得要伸倒偶得鼻子下了（如果有那么长的话）。小东西一只手用力的抓着包，另一只手不停的指指刚给偶的药水，再指指被自己抓的红红的大包，嘴里还的哼哼的示意着。虽然不会说话，可是已经表达的100％清楚了：那意思让偶给她涂药水。你要是晚了点，小同志会很着急的。当然也可以理解：是很痒的。 一天小家伙得想起这么几次来。我每次给她涂药得时候都看着她乐不可支：小样的，心里还挺明白，咬了包还知道涂药水。

前天，昨天，今天竟然降温降了15度。才13度， 这要是Eastgate都得来暖气了。哎哟, 可是冻死偶了。尤其是家里，特阴冷。翻出了几件衣服套着穿，手还是很凉。

萱萱连着咳嗽了几天，夜里也咳咳地睡不好，今天早晨还是满床打滚的边咳嗽边喊着：我太热了，我要穿裙子。 气得偶鼻子都歪了。好说歹说也不管用，只好威胁她，大小姐这才把嘴撅得跟小猪似的穿上了一裤子，有哭诉道: mama我痒，我穿的太多了，就混身痒。然后就浑身上下的抓。我这叫一个火冒三丈，对自己默念道：冷静冷静。然后恨恨的对她说道：那你就都去穿裙子好了，反正你咳嗽好不了，我就没法带你去海洋公园。你要是再喊再跺脚，你就3天不能看电视。管用！威胁是很管用的，总之小朋友虽然还是不乐意，心里还是想裙子裙子的，也就只能想想了。你说，咋办啊。我气的肚皮都要爆了。这五岁的小女孩咋这么难缠呢。

Today, I wanted to search for a Harvard Business Review article on online collaboration. So I typed “Harvard Business School” as the search term, below is what got returned.