gmtPLUS09 | live from Seoul

It’s been a while since I posted last. A lot has happened.

This will hint what I am doing and where I’m doing it at: “delivering results that endure”.

In this Wired article, civil engineers have found that disobeying authority was instrumental in saving lives in the 9/11 attacks. Case in point, after both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. The use of elevators (which goes against the recommendation of using stairs in case of evacuation)  coupled with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2500 lives.

The disobedience was not a representation of mob panic, the report documents how people stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, as well as offering emotional comfort. Experts call these actions as a whole "reasoned flight".

The organizational behavior as seen in this group brings up a point in Chapter 3, Surowiecki writes about a group of army ants who are
moving in a huge circle with a circumference of 1200 feet. Taking each
ant 2.5 hours to complete the loop. A "circular mill", which is created
when army ants find themselves separated from their colony. Once they
have become lost, they obey a simple rule which is to follow the ant in
front of you.

Ants as a species are hard-wired to know nothing, yet they are able to as a crowd efficiently run their colony. What is significant of course is that the simple tools that has enabled ants to survive (locating food sources, completing work/task, and reproduction) are also responsible for the demise of the ants who get trapped in the circular mill. Every decision an ant makes depends on what its fellow ants do, and an ant cannot make decisions as an independent, which could help break the "march to death."

Therefore, the individuals in the two towers who so choosingly broke away from the pack (disobeying orders) and their ‘independent’ decision saved their lives. One thing to remember is:

Independence doesn’t mean isolation, but it does mean relative freedom from the influence of others. If we are independent, our opinions are, in some sense, our own. We will not march to death in a circle just because the ants in front of us are doing so.

One of the lessons all have learned during childhood is, particularly after facing punishment for participating in a misdeed: if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you follow?

So I was talking to my old friends back at Hyundai. They were telling me about how upper management is proposing doing away with individual PCs and issuing instead terminals (monitor and input devices) for each employee.

This is interesting because firstly, it’s Hyundai Motor that is thinking about implementing a huge internal undertaking [sarcasm], and secondly, because this plan symbolizes largely in part the rising threat Korean firms are facing from the Chinese.

As there has been a rise in corporate espionage of employees selling sensitive product planning information to emerging competitors (namely the Taiwanese/Chinese), Hyundai Motor and Samsung Electronics have been highly sensitive toward this trend. Communications of employees are highly scrutinized, like the use of MSN Messenger is limited to off-operating hours.

Just as a single user can log in to a PC that supports multiple users, Hyundai’s plan is just on a scale of hundreds of users.  There was no mention of USB or other accessible exterior ports, but this would be one way of limiting sensitive information from being leaked out.

I remember hearing about a similar plan by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems a while back. He envisioned users would login with their company IDs at a terminal. The benefit would be that users would not be holed into a single location, they could be literally be mobile throughout the campus, as long as there was a terminal available.

But a question arises, what would happen if there was a coordinated attack (virus, worm, etc.) against the main server that would be attacked from within? Any attack on a hub-and-spoke architecture can be near-fatal. Also, because the user would not "own" his or her tangible PC and the data that is stored on it, would this signify a 1984-like world?

Today’s somewhat of a slack schedule has allowed me to post for the 1st time this week.

Considering that I started re-reading Guns, Germs and Steel today on the subway, worked on some patent and trademark issues,  and then picked up The Wisdom of Crowds during lunch, my thoughts and interests have covered all bases it seems. I guess I can’t help myself picking up different things at random moments and steps.

For some looking into my head, my process is hugely wasteful and ineffective, but I personally believe each person has their own system that can harvest unique patterns/characteristics of value.

My previous post about the Brownian motion.

This thought entered my mind the other day.

Having backgrounds in design and planning/marketing, I figured my next step would relate to business design or strategic planning, yet here I am now doing IP law related work (that’s intellectual property, not international policy or international processing^^). There are some points within IP that links design, but it seems oceans away from what I had originally set to do. It amazes me the twists and turns my life has taken the last 4 years.

Anyway, something to ponder about is…will I ever return home?

Just the other day my mom called to say they were thinking about selling the house which I grew up in, but haven’t permanently lived in since graduating high school which will be exactly 10 years ago on June 9th.

….