all you need to know

This week’s reading of “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman, was very compelling on many different fronts. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Ireland has become a power of a country, I would have never guessed that. I found it very interesting that they offer basically free college for their people. By them doing that they eliminate the stress of losing jobs to cheaper labor, and stress the importance of having a well-educated labor force. The country as a whole decides they need to make changes, and by doing so they have seen where they need to improve, where they did and still need to. This country has done great, but my argument is the fact that they only have 4.6 million people as of 2013. The U.S has 316.13 million as of 2013. My argument is that we can’t hope to use the same tools they did to become a better country in the flat world. We have to go through the same growing pains they did before we can fully embrace and understand what we should do. I feel that education is paramount to us being able to move forward in the future. Every country that has been able to thrive in the new flat world has realized it, and we still need to as well. I just wanted to talk about Rob Watson, I felt he made a good point by saying there are “far more environmental lawyers and scientists than environmental businessmen”. This just shows you can make a difference in the world by just thinking about what is best for our environment. I also have respect that he went back to school to find out how he could make a green business more profitable. Our world is something we should care for far more than saving a few cents here and there. This has to become a standard at one point to help make our planet livable for others in the future.   

Some countries have been able to do more with the same possibilities at hand. The main reason is that development is a voluntary process. The people in power of this country hold in their hands the outcome of what can happen when it comes to trying to develop their countries.  After they become invested in wanting to develop their country they must do four basic things. One, they must try to improve their infrastructure. Two, become more invested in the importance of education in your country, this will create a more educated labor force. Three, having good governance will help attract companies to your country by having flexible labor laws and low corporate taxes. The last but not least is having an open economy for open foreign trade. Some regions of the world shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to why they cannot attract business to them. They chose to let their culture get in the way, these cultures chose not to be open to changes that could help them out in the long run. The regions that have cultures that chose to be open and willing to change have a great advantage.

 A self-directed consumer is a consumer that wants the feeling of every product and serves being tailored for them. This has made companies have to offer much more options for the consumers, but it also gives them the ability to give us a buffet to serve ourselves. As a company you can not only offer what you want consumers to buy anymore. Now with the rise of self-directed consumers we can serve ourselves anywhere to see what the best prices are. The rise of the self-directed consumers has made buying from the internet much easier to do. Essentially you are taking away the retailer from the buy experience, you become the employee by simply checking yourself out. This saves the company money by not having to pay for work that is ultimately done by the customer. I can honestly say I am a self-directed consumer, but I like to be in control so I will never change that. I just like to always have control of how I can buy and this gives me that control.

When I was thinking globalization I wondered what other countries felt about it, and what scared them most about it. But after reading this week I was dumbfounded to find they felt that the American cultural would overtake their own, and that they would lose their beloved culture. But this did not happen until the world became flatter and brought with it the diversity of the entire world. With the use of the internet, cultures became even stronger. You could now communicate with others from thousands of miles away with ease. We can now see that Americanization has not happened like everyone had thought it would with globalization. But rather the opposite, an equal flow of cultures in to the world is now more of what could happen with globalization.

Sorry kids your in trouble

Free trade is when governments do not restrict imports or exports from other countries.  Free trade is important to the whole world, our country is a very big consumer of imported goods. I feel our country needs to look at the big picture of how we can capitalize from this. We keep thinking that all of these other countries are taking our work, but this is just how the world works and as a country we must change with it. The fact is why some businesses would pay much more for low skilled workers. The real change that I see with free trade is the shock that people are still in over it. In the world of free trade we need to start the movement of trying to tap into these huge new markets of China, India and so on. The fact is that we have so many new niches to get into in almost every field imaginable. We need to go back to our roots as a country of being the world’s most innovative country. The truth is if your job is a fungible job you should look to gain new skills so that if your job becomes taken over by technology or lower cost labor force, you can thrive in the new job opportunities given by the free trade market.

 The new middle class is being taken over by people that have been able to use these skills. First being able to be a manger that can bring out the best in their team, this skill makes you much harder to replace. Another attribute is having good people skills, it can make all the difference when dealing with your customers and team members. The next thing is having collaborative skills. This makes work horizontal with others much easier for everyone involved. The overall theme of the new middle class is just being great at adapting, and having a versatile set of skills so that you are never left behind. The new middle class is able to see the true value of mathematics, this class sees the ever changing world and that you will need to have this skill to move through life. After reading chapter six of “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman, I can see why the math requirement in college is math 1050 now. The simple fact is we might not see that this skill is needed for our degree, but how can you know it will be needed for your job ten years from now. I personally like math, but I would not say it would be in the field I want to go in to. That being said I do know that almost all jobs will change throughout the time we are in them, so I do see the merit in mathematics.

    CQ + PQ > IQ is a formula that states that CQ-curiosity quotient plus PQ-passion quotient are greater that IQ-intelligence. This equation is very important it shows passion and curiosity outweighs the benefits of intelligence. I found this formula to be spot on, I personally want to become a dentist, and I have talked to a lot of dentists about what skills I should try to work on. The same answer was given by everyone “Intelligence can only get you so far, but passion and hard work really make the difference.” My personal view on passion and curiosity is that you can do anything with those two things. Being intelligent is great, but you have to have passion in something to really want to do it. I personally feel in college, passion and curiosity have helped me to achieve my goals I have set for myself. I also have taken class based on if the professor is well liked from prior students. I don’t mind taking hard classes as long as the professor can make the classes more than a vague outline that is hard to interpret. And so far I have had all professors using input from sites like http www.ratemyprofessors.com.

I just wanted to go in to chapter 8 vaguely, I found a point I would like to talk about. Chapter 8 the education gap talked about how the U.S has fallen behind in advance math and science. To me, I found this to be a lack of interest from students and a lack of good attractive material. I feel that our k-12 has not changed some of its core work for like 50 years. The biggest change needs to be met in math, there are so many different ways to teach this, but we chose to use the same style. Why not have two different classes with different styles, that way every person learns differently. Using the same books year after year just means the text you are using is out of date. We could even use computers and go to websites like www.khanacademy.org. This shows you so much more than any class I have ever been to for math.  

blame game

The triple convergence is the adding of new players to a changing playing field that has brought about a better process, and caused new habits to form in business to be able to adapt.  The triple convergence is making the super power business from the past reinvent themselves to be able to keep up with the up and coming new players. The changes have shown how our country has become stagnant in innovation and other fields related to it. Our country did not change as fast as others did because we were not able to advance at the same rate given the fact we were still hung up on old technologies. Many of the new players in other countries did not have to be weaned off old technology, instead they were able to just jump in to the new technology and thrive. One of the most important aspects of the triple convergence is that the U.S is not able to poach talent from other countries as easily as they could in the past. This helped further the gap and this lack of ability has made the U.S have to only count on its own countries men and women to improve our chances. But if it is an arms race for intelligence between China, India and our country, we are already losing. Both China and India have stressed the importance of education way more than the U.S has ever been able to.  Also their populations are much larger than ours, so by just sheer numbers they will always have a much deeper talent pool of education. The only real way I feel our country will compete is to stress education in K-12, and go back to our roots of being the most innovative country. We need to adapt and conquer, but the only way to do that is to use all of the tools given by the triple convergence.

The story about India and Indiana is about who exploited who and which one was exploited. After reading this I really came out thinking this is just not as black and white as this is who was exploited and the exploiter was. The fact is that both sides have good reason to hold their ground and feel they are right about their perspective. I can see why the Indians felt they got the short end of the stick, they give the best bid, and still were not given the ability to finish the job. But I also can see the point of the people from Indiana, they felt that their government should keep the work in the U.S even at the cost of saving money. This subject is something that I feel is too complex to only feel one way about. The fact is that both sides of the argument are no better than the other. It’s easy to say that we should not offshore jobs, but that is the world we live in today. The fact is we have to offshore jobs to keep up with the world as we know it now. But there are just some jobs that need to be locked in our country to help ourselves out. I could write a pros and cons list on this subject for days, but let me just end it here with this it is not as easy as the blame game in this case. After reading the story 3 times I have no more real understanding of who is doing what to one another.

 Intellectual property is the innovation and or work of someone’s creative mind, that can result in profit of the work or just help others with it. Intellectual property is things like music and other things that take creativity to invoke.  Intellectual property is not always something you see, it can start as just an idea. The importance of it is that some laws give you the power of how you would like to use it. You can choose to paten or cross-license, these are only a few options that you can do with your Intellectual property. Many people choose the path that the most money can be made from. Overall Intellectual property is at its base intangible property. It can be sold to the highest bidder.

I found this week’s reading of “The World Is Flat’ by Thomas Friedman to very enlightening on all fronts. The subject that stood out to me was that we are battling ourselves when it comes to consumers vs citizens. We want it all, the low prices for consumers, the best heath care for citizens, but we must see that the two do not match up. The sad truth is that we can’t cut fat from one and hope it grows back without any changes. There has to be some accountability from us to see we need to think as both to make any changes that can be felt in our day to day lives.

Let me pick your brain

The job I chose to talk about was computer programming, but I found myself asking what computer programming was. Before this paper I had a very vague amount of knowledge on the subject, so I will illustrate on the subject at hand. From what I have learned it is the process of creating computer programs. This may sound very self-expiatory but there is much more to this then that vague intro. A program gives the computer a set of instructions that make the computer fulfill the task given by the program. The computer programmers use languages to relate there instructions to the computer through the programs. The most common used are Java, C, C ++, PHP,VB, C#, Python. Those were the most popular that I found throughout my research but that is not to say there are tons of other good ones.  This will give the reason of programming, ‘The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate performing a specific task or solving a given problem.[citation needed] The process of programming thus often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic”( Wikipedia).

I must confess I only chose computer programming because I have a good friend that is in this field. So I asked him what makes a good programmer and this is the list he gave me, “They are able to do program languages, scripting languages, program principles, production of principles and personal skills”. I felt this is a great list, but it felt like it was just too generic. So after some pushing and prodding I said what skill has helped you most in the work place. The answer was, “problem solving, logical thinking, having a good attention span and, being self-motivated is paramount”. I found the interview to be a great look into what has helped my friend to be a good computer programmer, and what to try to improve on if you chose to go in to that field.  The one thing that stood out to me was the fact you need a good attention span, so I chose to do some research and found that writing the code is a respective action which is easy to get lost in. The interview showed me that the skills my friend had learned from his time in school made the job so much easier and much more enjoyable. The fact that after reaching his goal of becoming a computer programmer and the roots of what has given him the job of his dreams was the time spent in school improving, self-motivation and addition span.

After doing the interview and research on computer programming I have seen that this job is for a well-educated and self-motivated person. Being able to write source code is somewhat of an art form, being able to paint a picture for the computer to be able to see and understand the meaning of it is not an easy task. The readable of source code is very impotent for both the computer and the programs. The programmer spends a lot of their time on reading and understanding the source code to be able make changes on the program. I found this to be comparable to writing a paper, you first write a rough draft and then go back through to check the readability of your paper to others. Being able to discover and implement efficient algorithms makes the programs work much better. This job takes a lot thinking to be able to make the best programmers you can, so being able to understand all of the small details make a world of a difference.

My overall view on computer programming is that I still have a lot more to learn on the subject and that I could have spent years learning about this field. The knowledge I have learned on the subject has just scratched the surface of the topic. After all the research and the interview, I have a much higher respect level for the field of computer programming. I also would like to thank them for making all of our lives that much easier. We all use the work of the computer programming throughout our day without noticing it, but we sure would notice it if it wasn't here.