FB Group - Day 5 of experiment

Day 5 of experiment

There wasn't a Day 4, as I skipped writing yesterday. The official reason was that I was on a phone call with my relative, but the real reason was that laziness kicked in and I wanted to take a break.

However, I felt quite guilty for not writing anything despite still being quite enthusiastic, and so I ensures I would spend time today to write. With a rest day, I am more confident with what to write and more engaged when writing, and didn't mind putting the time in writing at all.

I still have enough content and topics to write about, so I wasn't being careful about today's topic and might have involved a few topics in one article - if I were a professional writer this might mean ruining my livelihood by amalgamating a few articles into one.

After writing about this, I feel like writing the next one, but of course I don't have time and also believe that I should keep to the habit of one a day instead of burning out all enthusiasm in a day.

Am I worried about not attracting my other friends? Only my wife has been reading, and I feel slightly disappinted. It's a good FB group topic and I kept the articles brief and also took care to include pictures, but no one read it! Why? Not really disappinted, but anxiety did kick in in hoping someone would at least take interest

FB Group - Day 3 of experiment

Day 3 of experiment

Despite yesterday's excitement and planning for today's article, there is a bit of writer's block and laziness also kicked in. The excitement wore off a bit and it just felt like a chore to start with, lifting my fingers to start typing was not that enjoyable. Of course, once I got into the flow, all the negative feeling went away, as I am still fresh with ideas and have a mine full of content to write about. It's not really a writer's block.

I decided to write about a more mundane topic of tea-brewing tools, as I didn't feel that motivated to choose a chatty and exciting topic like types of tea leaves. As I was writing, I noticed that the tone, vocabulary and style was quite similar to the previous two days', and I was longing to make some variations in style and wording but I struggled. It wasn't a comfortable feeling when re-using so much compared to the previous articles. I wish I could do more, have more variety, try out new things, but given that I have selected a theme and a path, making such a change is not easy.

I fear that as I walk along the path and make articles on similar themes, wording and styles, I will start to feel the repetition and lose interest. That's why I have to pre-empt tomorrow's topic at the end of this passage, just to give myself some continuity.

FB group - Day 2 of experiment

Day 2 of experiment

I already knew what to write about today since yesterday. I was excited about opening my FB group, and as soon as I had written the first article, the second one simply dropped out along the thought process. I am going to write an intro to different types of tea leaves based on their grain size, and after this I will start writing about the proportions of different tea leaves in a brew, and then write about the impact of brewing time of taste etc etc etc. The starting days are always easy - I decided on the project's purpose, of course I would have implicitly considered its viability in terms of the first few days' or weeks' content.

The writing was smooth as well. The topic was decided, then I was simply writing out my mind and my existing experience. Time was taken in typing out Chinese on Google Translate, nothing else. After posting this passage, I almost wanted to start writing the 3rd article and not wait till tomorrow. It's just so exciting and I already have the content in my mind! Why wait?

Apart from my wife, no one has read any of my articles, even though my personal posts would normally attract a few likes from distant friends. Am I bothered or concerned? Not really, I am in an excited state and the lack of audience and any positive feedback is very far down my list of priorities. I just want to write write and write, there are a lot of content to be shared with other people!

FB Group snippet - Day 1 of experiment

Day 1 of experiment

I decided to open a group on sharing my experiments in brewing Hong Kong Milk Tea. After much pondering, Facebook seems to be a better option than Meet-up or Blogs - I want my friends to see it and join, I want my activities on the group to be publicised and maybe more people outside of my friends' circle would join and read about it. More crucially, I want people to contribute, interact and help to widen and deepen each other's knowledge in milk tea-brewing.


This is the FB group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1467012226704058/

So far, so easy - deciding on the name was the hardest part, and whether to post in Chinese or English. I decided on Chinese to brush up my skills, and also to suit my audience. My first inclination is to find a place to write down the objective of why I decided to open the group, which hopefully will help to solicit more members!

I put up a FB page photo, and made a few standard posts - just to get myself into the mood of posting and interacting.

I don't know whether people will join, whether people will like the direction I am about to embark on, and whether my posts and photos will help to illustrate my idea (and vision) for the group and entice them to join. So far, I don't care - the greater urge is for me to express what I have always wanted to do (to share my experience in brewing so far), getting it in the right "commercial direction" so to speak and getting more people to join is low down the priorities. I just want to start, spit out my excitement, put something on to get myself into the momentum, and think about what I want to tell people next? Let's leave positioning to a later date.

I already have ideas on what to post/share, but I don't want to run dry, and so I will leave the posting to tomorrow. I am sure I am excited about creating new posts tomorrow. It's a new start after all!

Will more people join? Would be good to get people in, that would be satisfying.

Reading Snippet - Review of Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan

Cuisine and Empire - neat high-level framework on world's culinary history, but full of glitches

I am an amateur cook and likes understanding the stories behind different cultures' and countries' food and culinary practices. One day, I came across this book on a Chinese book Facebook page, and decided to buy the original English edition. It is my first book on global culinary history, although I have read some books on gastronomy and dining practices in Chinese Song dynasty.

It didn't take long for me to finish reading this book, for three reasons - the length of this book was not excessively long, and there had been no junctures when I felt the author has dug too much into the details or dwelled on a topic for too long, but neither did I feel lacking upon conclusion of a section. The writing was designed to flow for a lay person instead of being semi-academic for trained historians or people starting on a culinary history course. Most importantly, the sectioning of chapters and topics within each chapter was highly logical and simply went from one period to another like TV drama episodes, giving me a sense of continuity as I progressed. I didn't feel that there were major gaps.

The basic framework adopted by this book was to put world history into approximate major periods similar to "renaissance", "nationalism" and "post-commuist era". It started with early human civilisation in which culinary was associated with cosmology and divinity through cooking's transformation of food; this then progressed to the "imperial era" sophisticated dynasties appeared and imperial high cuisines emerged together with the associated ceremonies & philosophies and counter-cuisines. It then devoted a number of chapters towards the "global religion era" during which the major religions went global and spread their culinary philosophies together with their religions, and that different geographies adapted the philosophies based on their own territories' capabilities and constraints. The final two chapters were devoted to the rise of modern cuisine especially the Anglo cuisine that went hand-in-hand with industrial revolution (modernity) and then the food debates and movements since 20th century when industrial food processing went in full swing.

As the author admitted at the start, this secondary-school-curriculum style synopsis and super-high-level framework is necessarily simplistic and may contain generalisation which some people will find uncomfortable. Nonetheless, just like a secondary-school curriculum, it helps novices in creating an overall picture that allows them to subsequently get deeper into the details, or simply stop at this level satisfied with the abstract truth. The queries and concerns that came with this approach didn't bother me. However, there are a number of points which prevented me from trusting the book fully or extracting the most from the book.

If you were a European or North American with little knowledge of other cultures and regional history, you wouldn't spot it. But as a Chinese, I realised that the Chinese name translations were non-uniform. There are places that adopted Cantonese translations, other places with the Communist pinyin translations, and yet some places with the Qing dynasty/republic era Latin translation. My guess is the author air-lifted the specific name translations from reference sources and inserted directly when creating the narration. It is simply uncomfortable reading that feels a hint of laziness lurking around, creating suspicion that some other laziness might have led into over-zealous generalisation or un-cross-checked facts or theories.

This is a culinary book, and given the huge differences between the medieval or even imperial cuisines and our current cuisines, it is very difficult to visualise her descriptions of the old food, old culinary styles and ingredients. She talked about "sauces" liberally throughout the book, but are these sauces people integrate into a dish (like sweet and sour sauce), act as an accompaniment (like gravy), provide complementary tastes for those who wish (like ketchups) or act as a stand-alone to be enjoyed (like jam)? Surely, sauces would serve different purposes for different cultures at different ages, yet it was generalised into one. She talked about the use of almonds in creating white sauces, and described chicken korma in Mughal era - it would be good to see actual recipes, photographic illustrations or rich paintings! I read through the descriptions sometimes unable to tell the difference from one to another, or to picture them in my head to my satisfaction. Especially given the proliferation of food programmes on TV and well-illustrated cookbooks, readers do expect illustrations that make them "get it".

Nonetheless it is a well-written book. More importantly, her ability to NOT put Europe and North America (and Roman & Greek history) at the centre of her framework or describe from European/North American pint-of-view should be commended. Too many world history books have simply ignored their non-European/American readership, practically lined historical theories with European examples (or are these theories set along the European contour alone?) or assume primacy of European history with "other world" history as secondary or a result of reactions to European events.

Good book, really worth reading, but could have been improved.

Politics Snippet - enable entrepreneurship, but not in an economic context

Enable entrepreneurship, but not in an economic context

Since the start of the economic crisis in 2007/08, governments in the developed world (and some developing countries) invariably started to promote entrepreneurship, especially amongst the young generation.

As we all recall, the starting point was to digest the graduates who struggled to find decent work. The expansion of tertiary education allowed a higher proportion of students to attend university, and this initially meant more workers to fill the higher-paid jobs. But this virtuous chain started to dry out in early 2000s when the expansion of professional job fizzled out, and the economic crisis simply finished it off. Those who have a few years' work experience or graduated with professional qualifications (lawyers, accountants) could continue to find high-paid jobs, but those with arts degrees or niche degrees such as drama could not compete in a job market which preferred the already-skilled without additional training needs.

The luckier ones could study a top-up degree and get the required qualifications for specific industries, but those ladened with debt could only find low-paid jobs with a potential to transition into a professional career path, or simply settle with jobs that do not require university qualifications. To absorb youth unemployment and to preserve the incentive for students to pursue university education, start-ups were encouraged to get graduates into employment or activities.

Of course, by early 2010s, some start-ups have become hugely successful and this created another virtuous circle that encouraged young professionals already in good employment to try out their ideas. The success stories also made governments' promotion of entrepreneurship schemes easier, with young graduates readily considering this path and venture capitalists entering the fold by establishing incubator schemes. The start-up scene became well-developed and a viable career in its own right. Graduates would not be considered "failures" if they went into entrepreneurship, and corporate employers were very willing to employ people coming out of the scene with or without success stories.

By now, in 2016/17, while the entrepreneurship circle continued to flourish, governments continued to promote this as a way out for young people, and recruiters very willing to source ex-entrepreneurs or start-up employees, the reason for building up the circle has shifted again. In addition to the employment issue that continued to plague the nations, the longer term impacts of artificial intelligence, greater internet connectedness and robotics are now leading a major change in societies' formation. Traditional knowledge-intensive jobs which are also process or rule-based, such as accounting and legal services, are now facing direct threats from artificial intelligence, further eroding tertiary education's prospects. To the governments, you either become an early adopter to transform and replace traditional knowledge-based economic activities with new creativity-based economic activities, or your traditional jobs get replaced by foreign firms' services. It's a new space that require new companies to enter and experiment, hence the encouragement of entrepreneurship.

These are sensible policies, but are they enough? With the rise of greater role of internet and digital services, it is not just commercial services that need to change, but public service provision and democracy and community as well. Funding crisis looms large in UK's health service and education, there are open demands for more relevant curriculum and teaching methods but the schools dare not make a change for fear of compromised league table ranking or funding shortfall. Creativity with new technology or quicker circulation & utilisation of information to synergise new solution allow communities to bring constituents together or generate new communities to meet hidden needs.

The above examples highlight how entrepreneurship and the spirit of experimenting with new technologies, methods and mentalities could bring value to the society, but these activities do not directly lead to profitable start-ups that could scale rapidly. They may be projects that fulfils its purpose and spirit away, or non-profit-making operations that require participants' continuous efforts to keep it running. Their value is apparent, but the monetary gain is elusive. Under the current entrepreneurship atmosphere, you may just as well not bother, as success is measured by fundings raised or annual growth %.

If profitability is the only yardstick, these alternative methods of utilising technology and knowledge would not scale, and their benefits could not be reaped. Arguably, that also shrinks the market size of new technologies and development potentials through more use cases by a wider audience. Should this kind of entrepreneurship not be encouraged? It simply sounds unwise.

So the challenge comes down to - how can governments encourage non-economic entrepreneurship, so that people are motivated to use new technology for even more purposes to make their and other people's lives better, but not necessarily making lots of money out of it.

Society Snippet - What's the difference between training and education?

What's the difference between training and education?

This is an often-discussed topic, and I do not claim to have any new information. When I was studying economics in university, one of the lectures touched on this and gave an answer from economic's point of view. Training is specific and usually offers little direct value beyond the workplace, whereas education usually provides transferrable skills in other workplaces or in life, and so the employee should also contribute towards the cost.

It's not a bad answer but is too narrow and confined to the "who pays for it" aspect of the question. I want to re-think an answer based on the current education & training landscape and people's opinions.

10 years on since that economic answer was given, there are a lot more education & training channels online, including university-sponsored course portals such as Coursera, corporate-internal training portals for their employees, industry or field-specific for-fee training courses like Treehouse, gamified apps like Duolingo, and course listing platforms like Udemy or teachable. These channels are content-intensive, curating a lot of course materials to instruct, coach and test on specific skills. If you subscribe to an online software coding course, you will read lectures, followed by exercises which you may seek help from fellow students or tutors, and you may also be tested to ensure you have grasped the concepts and the associated practical skills.

Needless to say, the success of these content-intensive sites is due to users' desire to learn new skills directly relevant to their existing or new job roles, hobbies or concerns that would benefit from more rigorous information-intake than reading news articles or websites (such as nutrition), and general interest in their daily life (such as taking an intro course into machine learning after reading from newspaper). However, despite all these new channels, people are still complaining about the out-datedness of the mainstream education system - primary and secondary schools, universities, their selection & competition criteria, the curricula, teaching methods, and how they are funded. There seems to be a gap between the unregulated adult/leisure learning vs. the regulated industry which is fundamental to citizens' well being.

The current criticisms on mainstream education system is that the mentality is frozen in the late 19th century, with excessive focus on learning information, heavily partitioned subjects, competition through exams, and mass education provision that does not account for each person's capabilities and suitability. In some extreme cases, the narrow range of subjects and the primacy of exams mean that students are learning purely for the sake of getting to the top, the content of education has become mere "currency" that is dealt out in the great exam game.

However, would a typical parent drop out of mainstream education system? There is a rise in popularity of home schooling, but it is still a minority. Would top private schools spear-head an upside-down change in how they arrange subjects, how they teach, and how they value external exams and university competitions? Quite unlikely. Parents and private schools add value alike through providing more tutoring for students who need to catch up, adjust the method of instruction based on what their small class of students are suited to, and provide more extra-curricular learning (music, sports, literature) to enrich their education. But other than these supplementary measures, everyone toes the existing methods under the current macro setting.

Of course, the macro setting is for the education authorities and governments to set. But under the current (and prolonged) economic uncertainties and heightened competition among countries, the emphases on productivity-yielding subjects and assessment-centric education methods are on the rise, so as to generate young minds who can go into high-value employment and start working immediately. Gone are the days when people would study a history degree before taking a master in jurisprudence, and gone are the days when teachers have free time to teach topics not on the syllabus or spend more time to experiment with new teaching methods. When students are assessed every month and they are expected to attain a specific standard, all the freedom is squeezed out by time pressure and lack of imaginative space in schools.

So despite all these complaints and the macro setting becoming more skill-oriented, the general population would rather send themselves and their children to school, and the expensive part time and distance learning degree courses are as popular as ever. Does this hold the clue towards differentiating education training?

If so, my hypothesis would be that education provides an immersive environment that goes beyond the string of skills directly imparted to the student from the course materials. In a full time primary or secondary school, you are learning more than what the subject syllabus is designed to teach you - you get to make friends, discuss irrelevant affairs in between (or during) lessons, participate in after-school activities, and hang out together during holidays. But it's not just these human interactions that add flavour to the experience, the course structure itself also synergise for more value-add. There is a difference between studying an "Intro to Accounting" short course versus studying the same course in the context of an MBA degree, during which you would be studying "Intro to economics" and "Basic Management" and afterwards you would be expected to study "Operations Management". Even if you are studying a distance learning MBA, this kind of course management would have imposed a structure and immersive environment on you that distinguishes an MBA study from a loose set of short courses that you pick up over the same time period.

There is also another distinction. When you pick up online courses short courses, they are expected to be all inclusive, meaning that you go through the course material (video, presentation, notes etc) and you should have obtained the target content and be ready to try out the tasks. In a more formal university education, the prepared materials only form part of the course content - you are expected to go beyond the notes and read from the latest papers or chapters from textbooks. This gives you a variety of perspectives and narratives for the same topic, multiplying the dimensions of immersion. If you need to work on essay-type assignments or a thesis, then the need to read widely to distill some ideas is even more acute.

To summarise, despite the increasing emphasis on skills and training by the governments, the value of education in the form of immersive environment provided beyond the mandatory skills is treasured by parents and students, such that they remained popular and had been shielded from direct competition with online channels. It's not in an ideal situation, but it is still the most suitable amongst the options.

Here comes the question - can we start developing another way of delivering the immersive environment, so that students can get the best of both worlds, i.e. they learn from new methodologies that are more relevant to the current world, and yet benefit from this immersive environment?