Tag Archives: idea

CS3216 Week 2 Updates

Ideas are really cheap?

Later year, I witnessed two CS3226 projects named NUSAnswers competing with each other. Never had I imagined that the same thing would happen to me in CS3216. We got the same idea as the other group. And we only found out after the the mid assignment submission. I never really liked competition, I am more of a peace kind of person so I avoid fighting with people as much as possible. This time as well. When our first attempt to negotiate and cooperate failed, my thoughts were not direct competition, but market segregation. Continue reading

CS3216 Week 1 – Ideation

This is the most hectic week 1 of my entire university life. And much of it is because of CS3216.

Ideas are cheap, until you run out of good ones

I thought I had this all covered by recording down my random interesting ideas into my phone for the past few years. But when I took out my phone and read through the long list of “ideas”, most of them sound ridiculous or impractical. We also discovered that some ideas buried in my phone already have working products in the market. There were some practical ones but not suitable for the short-period of time of 2 weeks, so we decided against them. Continue reading

Linear Progression and Stages – Belief or fact

Linear progression is a good concept, it assumes that things go from stage 1 to stage 2, then to stage 3, and eventually reach the final stage. However, the fact that it is simple and nice does not justify its correctness.

In real life, many things do not go through linear progression, say the development of the country. One may argue that a country can only develop according to the sequence of stages in the development model, i.e. pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial. However, this may not be true for some countries which jump from pre-industrial to post-industrial by some alternative ways. Also, common linear progression has an end point which is definite, but this can be a belief rather than a fact. For example, a U.S. citizen may think that capitalism is the end of the stages for ideology, whereas a PRC citizen may think communism is the real end. Clearly if the perceived end is different, the progression is not clear any more. A U.S. citizen may claim that U.S. is at the final stage of development, whereas a PRC citizen would reject that and say U.S. has yet to go through socialism to reach communism.

In fact, building on that idea of indefinite end, we will never know if the progression has come to an end. For example, current computer technology has evolved to a stage where ordinary people can get access to a computer easily. Is this the end of the progression for computer’s accessibility? I think not, one possible subsequent stage of development would be a “computer” planted inside each person. And even at that stage, we cannot conclude that we have come to the end of the progression.

Progression can also be in terms of humans’ development. A person goes through different stages as he/she grows up. It would be logical to think that everyone follows a linear progression of life, biologically, from young to old. However, the real maturity of each individual may develop in a non-linear progression. Some people grow up with care and love from parents hence slowly turn from immature to somewhat mature, then finally mature. Others may not have such privilege, they have to become mature immediately because they do not have such luxury of time to go through transition before facing the serious world.

Now if we take a step back and redefine linear progression as always going from early stages to later stages(like jumping from stage 1 to stage 3 and skipping stage 2, but not the other way round), would it be perfect to fit everything inside? It appears so. However, now the hard part would be to define the stages clearly so that they follow a total order. Progression like EQ or maturity are hard to define stages as there are just so many factors to consider.

[Good Article] Taking a “War of Words” Too Literally

I want to share an article that has influenced me a lot. This piece was given to me during one of the GP lesson when I was in junior college.

The following is adapted from Deborah Tannen’s Taking a “War of Words” Too Literally, (March, 1998), Washington Post

Everywhere we turn, there is evidence that, in public discourse, we prize contentiousness and aggression more than cooperation and conciliation. Headlines blare about the Star Wars, the Mommy Wars, the Baby Wars, the Mamography Wars; everything is posed in terms of battles and duels, winners and losers, conflicts and disputes. Biographies have metamorphosed into demonographies whose authors don’t just portray their subjects warts and all, but set out to dig up as much dirt as possible, as if the story of a person’s life is contained in the warts, only the warts, and nothing but the warts.

Continue reading