SESSION TWO

Brief overview/ Summary

Another great session for TWC this week :) The main focus of the first part of the lesson was on technology and its global dominance and the second part was on technology and human development. During the lesson, we viewed a video by a Swedish statistician, Hans Rosling. I viewed a video before this and I simply love and admire this guy! He is absolutely humorous in presenting the dry and boring statistics about countries and their developments over the millennium and I certainly love his videos. Anyway, we had our first oral presentations in today’s session about the topics discussed today and they went really well :)

Interesting Observations and Ideas

During the first part of the session, Prof Singh shared with us his Organizational Behavior Model for identifying Innovation leaders and Dominant players. There are 3 key players in this model, the Rising Star, Dominant player and the falling star. The Rising Stars are basically open to ideas, optimistic, hungry to learn from others and keen to invest in new ideas. On the other hand, Falling Stars are closed to ideas, pessimistic, not interested in learning from others and not keen to learn from other. I found this model pretty interesting as many events seemed to follow this model. An example is that of China. During China’s communism, the economy was at a standstill. This was so as China refused to open its economy to allow foreign investors and countries to enter. Opening up the country is crucial as there will be exchanges of ideas, new technology, and information about the current world that will benefit the economy. However, the government wasn’t interested about anything outside China. They were the example of a Falling Star at that point of time. However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when there was economic liberalization, China’s economy was thriving. They were receptive to trades, new technology, world affairs and these have resulted in a booming economy of today’s China and also a dominant player who is also a Rising Star. It fits the description of the model as when China was closed to ideas and non enthusiastic about learning from others, they found that their dominance in the world has declined. However when they were more receptive during the economic liberalization, they started to gain dominance in the world in economic, technology, cultural aspects.

The human development index(HDI) is a composite statistic used to rank countries by their level of human development as mentioned in class. It comprises of 3 indexes, Life expectancy, literacy rate and the standard of living. Basically, the longer a person lives, the higher the literacy rate of the people, higher standard of living means the HDI will be high. However, I feel that although this is a good way to rank countries according to their development, it does not reflect an accurate account of human development. If a country has a high HDI, but a big income gap, does this mean that human development in that country is advanced? The index ignores groups of people who do not have access to the same amount of resources.

Key Takeaway point

With the advent of globalization, traditional means of inculcating social values are in radical decline as quoted from reading 3. Cultures in the world are slowly eroding due to the influence of the American culture. In today’s dynamic world, social expectations are changing. Legalizing gay marriage, movie star succeeding as governor, reality TV receiving the highest ratings are some examples. Traditional narrative forms of television are taken over by reality stars flaunting their glamorous lives on programmes. Do we really want our children to grow up watching these?

Another key takeaway point today is that colonialization is not as glamorous as we thought it is. In Singapore, we were taught and brought up in a way that British were admirable as they fought the war and provided Singapore with resources that we lacked during that period of time. However, it is through the article that we found out that they didn’t give the same treatment to other colonies. Colonies like the Philippines, India were ill treated and suffered under the British and the reason why we were treated well is due to our prime location as a trading hub. Thus, I now look at the British in a different light.

Issues for further discussion

How will the world adapt to the growing dominance of the Chinese? Will it affect the dominant language used in the world, from English to Chinese? Will countries’ currencies peg to the Chinese yuan?

Personal ratings

8/10. Picked up a lot of new facts :)

FIRST SESSION

Brief overview/ Summary

The first TWC lesson turned out surprisingly well (I was a little worried as I knew nothing about this topic). We started off with self introduction which was great actually, at least we knew who we were sitting with and will be sitting with together for the many weeks to come. Prof Singh was right about the fact that we will probably recognize people by the ‘something interesting about you’ part of the introduction because now when I look at some faces, it was accompanied by the interesting facts they stated (eg, Liverpool fan, likes to eat play-doh..) rather than recognizing them by names. Well, I guess first impressions are always the most impactful. After which, we went on to watch videos of “Shift Happens” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” which can be found on Youtube.

Interesting Observations and Ideas

In “Guns, Germs and Steels”, a character Yali prompted a thought-provoking question, “Why you White Men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” It got me thinking through various reasons why this is so. Firstly, was it geography that allowed certain countries to thrive while leaving countries to remain the status quo? Well, certainly. It has been proven that towns or cities that were located along the oceans or water areas tend to flourish and thrive due to water transport systems that allowed them to carry out trade. In this way, people could buy and sell to sustain their lives and hence economy. This could be one of the reasons why the European cities thrive but not the New Guineans. Also, vast amount of land space meant that more cultivation and agriculture could be carried out. This could actually sustain a larger population and increase the labour pool. This could have possibly led the Europeans to advance faster due to a proper structure of labour force and thus, the economy expands.

Another eye opener for me was when the timeline of human civilization was discussed. Human ingenuity is really incredible, as we can see from the changes and improvements dating back a few hundred thousand years ago to today. Looking at advancements of today, I sometimes wonder how our ancestors could live their lives with such simple technology. We should be thankful we are living in an era with airplanes which we could bring us across the pacific ocean in a few hours, an era in which we could sleep in the comfort of an air conditioner. I cannot imagine spending a few months in a ship to get across countries, or tying messages on the feet of birds to send information (that was the fastest way to transmit information in ancient times).

Key Takeaway point

Change is necessary and we, as humans should embrace change. Imagine if our ancestors did not seek to improve or innovate, we would not have been where we are today. Imagine life without light, without cars or without airplanes. We should then always seek to improve ourselves and tap into our creative juices so that a better change could be introduced into human lives. Technology could thus be a tool for us to spearhead this change.

Issues for further discussion

Due to time constraints, we were not able to discuss more in depth about reading 4. I would really like to know more about the European renaissance and how they managed to advance ahead of the Middle East in such a short period of time.

Personal ratings

8.5/10. Great start for TWC :)