Hikado

Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, “Outliers” focuses on re-evaluating our views on success. He suggests variables such as when someone is born, their upbringing, and who they know influences whether they will fail or succeed in life. Although some if his views on success may be controversial, he does provide an interesting evaluation on how we view success in contemporary society. Take for example, the world famous Microsoft king, Bill Gates. Most of us would agree he is a computer wiz, because he dropped out of high school and now he has a billion dollar money making software company. He did all of this without a formal education! At a very young age, Bill’s parents invested $3000 in a computer for their son to use, when most people didn’t have access to a computer. He was exposed to technology as a young boy so he was given this advantage over everyone else. The outside world sees Bill Gates as a success but his success is based upon a series of advantages and luck.

One of the first advantages he discusses is what month someone is born. In the NHL, a large number of players happen to be born in the earlier months of the year such as January and February. These children have a time advantage over children born later in the year like in November or December, because the cut off time for minor league drafting is Jan 1st in Canada. Children born earlier in the year have more time to practice so they will perform better when it comes time to demonstrate their skills for the hockey draft.

His case study is based on the assumption that every child is equally determined and hardworking, but not every child born in the earlier months of the year will be as hardworking and dedicated to get a spot on a major league hockey team. Amongst the group of children born in January and February, you will have some people who might be lazy and less motivated than others to achieve goals in life.

His second advantage explores how our childhood and upbringing will influence our success later on in our lives. For instance, conditions like whether you are of upper, middle, or lower class will have an impact on our achievements in the future. A list of the world’s most famous and wealthiest individuals such as Cleopatra, Caesar, and King Tutankhamun are just some of the names he pulls out to support his argument. During ancient times it was much more important to have valuable connections with delegates and government officials in order to achieve success, but in our contemporary society this degree of emphasis may not apply.

Malcolm’s most recent book is very interesting and imaginative. His writing style is always pleasant to read. Although I did not always agree with his theories, I’d still recommend people to explore his ideas.

This Christmas there is a record breaking about of snow here. These weather conditions created havic for people during the holiday season. Many people got the opportunity to experience a "wind chill", effect for the very first time. Geographically, our region always has a mild rainy winter with little or no snowfall.
This bizzare weather pattern also makes me question Al Gore's argument of global warming in the Inconvient Truth movie. It appears that the icebergs in Alaska are still standing despite his dooms day like senario he presented to the world.
Maybe the world isn't going through global warming, but rather a natural cycle of El Nino and La Nino.

This year Halloween was a blast. I was greeted by a goblin as I entered into the haunted house. A ten foot figure resembling Notradamus stood outside at the entrance way and a crawling corpse clawed its way towards trick or treaters as they made their way towards to the haunted house enterance. As I glanced inside, the main living room a white spooky ghost weaved around me with a cold, deep BBBooooo....tone.

The party was a blast and the LA DJ did an awesome job playing and mixing tunes for everyone.

Happy Halloween Everyone!

"The Greeks ground up dried rhubarb root and used it as a laxative," The Daily Telegraph says. "Knowing the British were also partial to rhubarb, the imperial Chinese commissioner Lin Zexu wrote a letter to Queen Victoria in 1839 threatening that unless Britain stopped sending opium to China, the Chinese would refuse to export powdered rhubarb, thereby killing her citizens by constipation. The Queen appears not to have had the letter translated. But [Lin] hadn't realized that rhubarb grows abundantly in Britain."

The Globe and Mail. "Social Studies" June 27, 2008.

"Buttons were originally nothing but ornamentation sewn onto clothing," Christa Poppelmann writes in 1,000 Common Delusions. "The first may be traced back to 2000 BC, and even in antiquity otherwise plain togas and tunics were ornamented with sewn-on buttons. It was only about 1300 AD that the idea arose of using the buttons as fasteners. The immediate result was a rise in particularly close-fitting fashions. During the Renaissance, a veritable 'button mania' broke out. Many pieces of clothing were inundated with hundreds and even thousands of buttons, and they all needed to be buttoned up."

Two recently published dictionaries are dedicated to deciphering the slang of Japanese teenagers, Reuters reports. Dubbed KY, the teen lingo is created by spelling out Japanese phrases using the English alphabet and then abbreviating these words to form acronyms. KY stands for kuuki yomenai, literally translated as "can't read the air," which means "not in tune." The phrase KY appeared in the mainstream media last year, when the cabinet formed by previous prime minister Shinzo Abe after an election loss was called the "KY cabinet" - not in tune with voters. Other KY slang:

HR: hitori ranchi, lunching alone.

PK: pantsu kuikomu, I have a wedgie.

JK: joshi kosei, female high-school students.

CZ: chakku zenkai, your fly is unzipped.

KW: kimochi warui, gross.

Since Facebook opened to the general public in 2006, anyone can become a part of Mark Zuckerberg's booming social network. But if users aren't satisfied to merely create a Facebook profile, Agriya Infoway, based in Chennai, India, offers another option: Create your own Facebook.

Agriya sells what it calls "Kootali," a $400 software package that lets developers replicate Facebook's design and features, complete with friend networks, photos and "mini-feeds"—even Facebook's font. Fifty copies of the software have been purchased in the last six months, says Agriya's chief technology officer, Aravind Kumar, though he says many hundreds more have been distributed on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

Kumar isn't concerned about the legal implications of piggybacking on the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network's success. "We haven't stolen any of Facebook's content or images, so we haven't done anything wrong," Kumar says. "We're just giving Facebook's look and feel to our customers."

Those customers, mostly unknown sites like Faceclub.com and Umicity.com, don't pose much of a competitive threat to Facebook. But, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Agriya's cloning software represents a more general problem for Facebook: that any skilled developer can recreate the site's basic social networking functions. "Social networking features are a commodity," Owyang says.

In other words, Facebook's advantage is not in its proprietary software but in its massive user base. And in countries where Facebook has yet to penetrate the mainstream Web audience, that low competitive barrier may mean the site is no more likely than its copycats to attract users.

Some international sites that closely mimic Facebook's design and features are already enjoying Facebook-like success. Creators of the German look-a-like site StudiVerzeichnis—German for "Student Index"—have gathered around 6 million registered users. VKontakte, a Russian university-based networking site whose name translates to "In Contact," boasts that it's not only the most popular social networking site in the country, but with 4.5 million unique visitors a day and 13.3 million registered users, the most popular site in Russia.

The Chinese site Xiaonei, whose name means "In the School" in Mandarin, claims to have received around 15 million unique visitors in April. The site's parent company, Oak Pacific Interactive, received $430-million the same month in venture capital funding targeted at Xiaonei from the Japanese investment firm Softbank.

The copycats' explosive growth comes at a time when Facebook seems to be exploring its own international offshoots. Since January, the social network has invited volunteers to translate its pages into languages ranging from Italian to Mandarin and has launched Spanish, French and German options. Li Ka-Shing, one of Facebook's biggest investors, recently upped his stake in the company by more than $40 million, saying he saw synergies between Facebook and the telecom business of his conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa — a company that runs mobile networks in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

But Facebook's clones may have already saturated some international markets. In China, for instance, where the Web audience numbers more than 220 million users by the count of research firm BDA China, Xiaonei has already registered more than 90 per cent of college students, according to Oak Pacific Interactive's chief operating officer, James Liu. He compares Facebook to Google, eBay and MySpace, all of which have tried to penetrate China's Web market and been trounced by local competitors.

"We've seen what happens to these multinational corporations that try to enter to China," he says. "Every one has failed miserably. We don't expect any exception in the case of Facebook."

Taking legal action against international doppelgangers isn't likely to help, says Gregory Rutchik, head of the Arts and Technology Law Group. Web design, he says, is a form of expression where even minor tweaks may be enough to avoid copyright infringement. Litigating country by country, he adds, would be a long, expensive and uncertain process.

Facebook may have another reason to avoid copyright lawsuits, points out John Dozier, an Internet-focused intellectual property lawyer. Flinging copyright complaints, he suggests, might work against Facebook if it finds itself on the receiving end of a copyright suit—a likely possibility on a site where users can post any content they choose.

"Facebook is being particularly careful," Dozier says. "They recognize the danger that overly aggressive copyright claims can backfire."

As for Facebook's mimics, they emphasize small differences they say set them apart. VKontakte's founder, Pavel Durov, argues that his site's shade of blue is slightly different from Facebook's, and that it offers better location-based searching. Xiaonei's James Liu points out that Xiaonei has fewer barriers separating networks of friends, and offered instant messaging even before Facebook added the feature in April.

But Wang Xing, who created Xiaonei in 2005, admits that the site's design was originally "borrowed" from Facebook. In fact, he's borrowed it twice: After selling Xiaonei to Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum, Wang essentially cloned his Facebook clone.

Hainei, Wang's second social networking project launched near the end of 2007, is aimed at adults rather than students, but its design is practically identical to Xiaonei's—and Facebook's. In six months, it's attracted more than 100,000 registered users, Wang says.

Asked if he feels any compunction about taking features wholesale from Facebook—twice—Wang points to Mark Zuckerberg's own copycat problems. Since 2004, the owners of rival site ConnectU have claimed that Zuckerberg stole intellectual property from their social network while working as a software developer for the site.

"ConnectU accuses Facebook of stealing their idea. Does that matter?" Wang asks. "No. We don't worry about that. It's not about the idea. It's about execution."

Jane Tuv contributed to this article.

Globe and Mail