企业家的必有：智商（IQ）和情商（EQ）

昨日我妈给我发了一篇新闻讲英国的一个叫Nick D'Alosio的高中生卖了他的软件给雅虎公司，一下子就得到估计三千万美元，并且立马成为雅虎的一位雇员。当我读了New York Times^的新闻报告之后，我对他的背景起码有了初步的了解，尤其注意了他同时拥有智商和情商。他的智商必定很显然，能编出算法可以缩短长篇信息给读者轻易的读是需要高等的技术。可使他可以在十五岁就拿到风险资本家的支持是因为他有充分的情商，知道怎么跟人家说明他的想法并且可以使人家对他有信任。Brian Wong，之前世上最年轻收到创业基金的企业家，说Nick D'Alosio没有任何犹豫或不安全感，明确表达了他对Summly软件的目标。

在科技世界里同时拥有智商情商的人并不多，往往技术人员缺少情商而商人却缺少科技智商*。当我在学校时上有关商业课时，我发现学商业的学生打扮外貌和表达能力远远超过工程学生的。出了校园在各种活动上我发现并没有太多的区别，在跟某个陌生人在某个会场沟通时，我一般可以猜测这位是否是工程师或科学家。我建议缺少情商的人该把自己放到不太舒服的社交环境里，逼自己实验怎么跟外人交流！同时我也建议缺少智商的人该花时间学些技术性的知识或技术，多读读科技的报纸很文章，试试编写一些简单的程序，或做些简单的实验，这样说不定在脑子里会突然冒出个千万美元的主意！

^http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-daloisio-17-sells-summly-app-to-yahoo.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1364394786-sLelxUMGe6Xfywh43ep8uQ

*在这里，我指的智商是对科技有关的知识和技术。

Skills and Knowledge/技术和知识

While taking a shower this morning, a memory came to me of a month ago when I was editing my resume. A fellow in the oil and gas industry called me and told me that my resume needed some work since it mentioned the word "space" too many times. He told me to highlight my skills that can be transferrable across multiple disciplines.

While doing research though, much of what happens initially is not developing skills but rather building a foundation of knowledge. The knowledge give you the bricks that can form a house and the skills give you the tools to put the bricks together. Without knowledge, just having skill is not enough while with skill and no knowledge, you have to learn a lot.

My mother is a good example. When she switched from forestry to oncology (cancer research), she had to quickly build her knowledge of the human body. Previously, she only knew about plant cells so she had to learn about human cells from the bottom up. However, since she had the skills of a molecular biologist, she could still do research while learning about how the human cells work.

If you only have skills and knowledge, you can be a good scientist or engineer but not an excellent one. The last element you need is creativity. This will be discussed in another short essay later.

今早当我在洗澡时，突然想起来一月前修改简历的事情。一个在石油行业的家伙打了电话给我提议我的简历需要修改因为我在上面提到太多次“太空”这个词，说我因该强调我的可以多种行业运转的技术。

但是，当在做研究时，不少一开始发生的不是发展技术而是建立知识基础。知识会给你可以建好房子的砖块，技术可以给你工具拼合砖块。两项不能缺少一项。

我母亲是个好例子。当她从林学转到肿瘤学时，她之前只懂植物细胞，没研究过人体细胞。但是因为她有分子生物学的技术，当她在学人体细胞是同时可以做研究。

要是你只有技术和知识，你可以是个不错的科学家或工程师但不可能是个优秀的。最后需要的成分是创造力。这在以后的短篇散文再提吧。

Million Dollar Ideas

Recently, I have been rediscovering my creativity. Over the span of last year, my creative spirit has dipped, probably due to a combination of tedious managerial and organizational duties I held as well as a persistent worry about not having enough money. Now, both issues have been shelved allowing my mind to dedicate a portion of the day to share my thoughts of the future with everyone.

I have a million ideas, many of them probably capable of affecting the world. The obstacles which prevent me from achieving these million ideas are a combination of time and money. Since time is finite while money is not, time is obviously more valuable. If I have more money, I can hire people to work with me or for me to save on time while time passes at the same rate no matter what I do.

Let me first list out the projects which I plan to finish doing this year regardless of whatever else I do:

- Continue working and managing space research contract for ECAPS, LLC, the Texas research company that I co-founded last year.
- Investigate asteroid mining economics equation with colleagues and prepare paper for conferences.
- Continue writing space platypus blog.
- Work on developing and testing a renewable energy technology idea with associates.
- Finish writing articles and bylaws to help Adam Clay start the Houston New Arts Movement as a nonprofit corporation.

I'm giving these ideas out since I'm almost no sure no one is going to take them and if anybody does I can always come up with more since I'm very creative. Now, I constantly have thoughts bombarding me these days so I have listed out the creative ideas which I plan to work on either later this year or early next year that has nothing to do with what I presently do:

1. Predict Plan Website (Time Management Tool)
I started this out a while ago but stopped on it since I realized it's far more difficult than anticipated. I want to create a web application that can take your schedule and your mood which matches your schedule and analyze it through some algorithms to offer you the best schedule for tomorrow or even several days in advance. I realized after two months of working on it that I need to get another web developer to help me as well as talking to psychologists and management experts to actually develop the algorithm.

Income will be from advanced user subscriptions which will charge monthly.

2. Funny Survival Book (Print Information)
This will be a survival book which is also funny. Most survival books are terribly boring. When I'm dying or close to dying, I will like to be able to laugh at a last funny joke. I want to write a similar book with humor like Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide.

Income will be from book sales and collecting royalties. Originally, it can be sold via Amazon Kindle.

3. Subliminal Website (Social Media Website)
This website will allow users to upload a stream of images and one line of text. The image algorithm will then take the images and text and combine them in a way that the original message is lost to the conscious mind. However, the subconscious mind will still be able to decipher the message. Users can then take these messages and spread them like a virus on the web impacting millions with the hidden messages. I will need to talk to some cognitive scientists and visual perception researchers to develop the algorithm.

Income will be from advanced user subscriptions which will allow more images to be uploaded and no restriction on length of text.

4. Bottle Rockets for Kids (Social Entrepreneurship)
This social organization will help kids in poor neighborhoods build bottle rockets. I saw an inspiring video a little while ago on poor kids in slums who were so inspired by playing music made from junk. While I was sitting at the airport in France a month or so ago drinking from a water bottle, I thought to myself: Why can't the same inspiration for space can't be translated to these kids? This organization will send rocket scientists to poor slums around the world and teach them how to build bottle rockets from empty bottles and junk.

Income will be from government and private foundation donations as a nonprofit.

5. Slow Time Choices (Entertainment/Film)
Time shouldn't always go this fast. There's plenty of movies which show action scenes in bullet time. Just look at the Matrix or any John Woo film. However, what about having an entire film which plays at slow motion and yet doesn't annoy the viewer since it's so slow? What I want to do is take slow motion in short sections and string them together. For instance, the first scene can be a glass vase falling from a table crashing onto a marble floor. The second scene is a guy running  across the room towards the vase to catch it before it falls to the ground and breaks. The third scene is a closeup of the second hand on the guy's watch while he is running. These three scenes alternate between each other. The purpose of this project is to promote the idea of stopping and appreciating the nature of time.

Income will be from a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter.

Blogs That I Will Post

I was reading a post from a marketing site on how to market my blog and apparently I have been marketing it the wrong way. I have expected people to just naturally find my blog since it has unique content and I just put up on my social network such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Apparently, the much better solution is to post up relevant comments on blogs that have much greater readership than mine.

Here, I attempt to identify these blogs and organize them in various categories and popularity. Really, this is more of a reference for myself but for you, it may prove to be a helpful list of interesting blogs.

* - No one really reads it.
** - Popular!
*** - Very popular!

ART/DESIGN
Aqua-Velvet (alter ego of designer Amy Collier) *


BUSINESS
blog Maverick (the mark cuban weblog) ***
Location180 (build a business, live anywhere, achieve freedom) **
Powazek (IT entrepreneur) **
Sean Johnson intentionally (marketing and design entrepreneur) **

EDUCATION
Audrey Watters (Hacking Education) **
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog (e-learning and learning) *
Living Large (A Bigger View of Education, Career & Life) **
Mind Shift (How we will learn) ***


ENERGY
MasterResource (Analysis & commentary on energy markets and public policy) **


ENTERTAINMENT
はちま起稿 (anime and Japanese weirdness) ***
妹はVIPPER (Japanese weirdness) ***
Podimouth (music, movies and games) **


FUTURISM
FutureTimelines.net (technologies and trends for the future) **
Kurzweil: Accelerating Intelligence (futurism and technology) ***


INFORMATION TECH
Alarming Development (Dispatches from the programmer liberation front) ***
Intechnic (Chicago Web Development Company) ***
OrgSpring (Tech Tips and Tutorials) *


LIFE/PERSONAL
Adam Heath Avitable (humor and life) ***
Clint Johnson *
Erik Unger *
Igor Sestanj (science, culture, and intellectual things) *
Kartoen.be (art, love, and humor) **
The Other Asians (Asian American Blog) ***
Thoughts of Lola (Dennis A. Stone's mother's blog) *


LITERATURE
Omniglot (linguistic musings - one language is never enough) **
Paper Republic (Chinese Literature in Translation) ***
Worlds Without End (scifi) **


LOVE
Dr. NerdLove ***
Uncomfortable Soul ***


MATH & SCIENCE
Math Fail (thoughts on math) **
Science-based Life **


SELF-IMPROVEMENT
Code of Living (Self-improvement & Motivation) *
Dumb Little Man ***
Erin Pavlina (Awaken, Remember, Love) **
Kylie McGirr (A Blog for Bringing Your Inner Wisdom to Life) **
PickTheBrain ***
The Change Blog (On Changing Yourself) ***
Think Simple Now (A Moment of Clarity) **
Thought Catalog (relevant and relatable non-fiction and thought) **


SOCIAL SCIENCE
Ribbon Farm (Experiments in Refactored Perception) ***
KK.org (The Technium/Predictions on future) **


SPACE
365 Days of Astronomy **
Aerospace Projects Review Blog (Unbuilt aircraft and spacecraft projects) *
Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera (Nonfiction children's books about spaceflight from 1945-1975) *
RocketForge (thoughts on business, space, economics, and politics) *
Spaceflight Chronicles *
Tranquility Base (a small website for a big universe) *
Wired Rocket Shop **

NO LONGER UPDATED
Mike's Ramblings *

Politics: Towards a Better Government

Governments inevitably expand its control over the people with increased regulations, growing bureaucracy, and loss of freedom to its citizens which it is meant to serve. Constitutions and division of power serves as a mitigating factor to this growth in government but it cannot stop this inevitable trend. The growth is not only a consequence of mismanagement and corruption but rather is due to the fundamental nature of governments attempting to solve problems by introducing more regulations. Once a regulation is introduced, its removal is much harder since there are inevitably special interest groups that directly benefits from such regulations and they will fight hard to preserve the status quo. To counter this or to not feel left out, other interest groups also make their case and introduce their own regulations which benefits them. As the years go by, there is a snowball that grows ever larger. A government that grows too large and entrenched will inevitably mismanage its citizens due to accidental negligence or deliberate aim at control.

Such a government will also be extremely hard to reform and revolution does not guarantee any change except for those benefiting the revolutionaries. In many cases, a revolution is a convenient excuse for one group who has not been given power to seize power for itself, sometimes leading to a worse situation than before with even greater control. The solution guaranteed to work is to have periodic migrations and settlement in faraway lands where a new improved government can be built from the foundation with the culture and legislation to ensure its growth into a sprawling bureaucracy is substantially slowed. For instance, the US was built based on many of the enlightened ideas of European intellectuals. Today, currently much of the easy-to-access lands on Earth has been settled which makes it very difficult for new idealistic groups to form their own governments in distant lands. In the future, space travel and ocean settlements will allow new and hopefully improved types of political systems in self-contained societies.

Reform may be possible though if certain action steps are taken. These ideas I present are not original and have certainly been suggested in greater details by libertarians who actually understand American politics much better than I. Nonetheless, the suggestions I offer and the benefits that will happen if the actions are taken seem fairly self-evident to me.

1. Encourage private enterprise not connected with the government. This can come from tax incentives and direct funding. Often, the same service offered by the private company can do a more effective job than the government. In package delivery, FedEx and UPS often do its job more effectively than the US Post Office, delivering goods on time and charging competitive rates. In rocket launch services, SpaceX, a startup company initially funded by the personal checkbook of Elon Musk, provides launch cost at a price potentially ~$50M cheaper than that of United Launch Alliance, a company that's jointly owned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing with a much longer history and political and economic clout.

In the father of all future incentive packages since the inception of President Obama, i.e. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, $82.2 billion was spent on protecting the vulnerable while $43 billion was spent on energy and only $7.6 billion spent on scientific research. Among the $82.2 billion, about half or $40 billion, more than scientific research and energy manufacturing and research combined, was spent on providing unemployment benefits so that unemployed people can continue to collect paychecks while essentially sitting at home and doing nothing.

If the same funds was reversed and $82.2 billion was spent on scientific research or the energy sector instead, the consequences will have been substantially more positive and greater than that of Joe and Jane sitting at home in their pajamas so that they have more time to look for jobs. This money could have spurred advancements in the space or energy sector, building up the technological infrastructure and advancement that can provide billions of dollars of return in the future while also creating new jobs. A new technological breakthrough can lead to the creation of ten companies worth billions of dollars that can then hire Joe and Jane to get off of their sofa and build the building as construction workers or work at the local bar that just opened due to the sudden influx of lawyers, businessmen, engineers, and scientists in the area from the growth in business. As usual, politicians are often influenced by interest groups that hold the majority of votes but often don't have the vision to see further ahead.

2. Reduce the power of federal laws for local regions by ensuring that local laws supersede federal laws. Often, federal laws are unpopular or not applicable to particular regions or to particular groups of people. To enforce the same law on everyone across a nation often benefits only some and harms everyone else. Furthermore, offering a national government this level of power can be quite dangerous. For instance, the passing of the Patriot Act passed during the administration of Bush gives the federal government almost unlimited powers in detaining people without trial in any US state or territory. Obama has extended this Act in three provisions by continuing US agencies to wiretap its citizens, search business records, and conduct surveillance on individuals.

3. Immigration should be re-opened. America was built by the hands and minds of immigrants giving it the nickname as the land of opportunity. Its gates in the early 20th century welcomed millions to its shores, with many of them being the poor from Europe and Asia that were leaving the turmoils or poverty in their respective countries. Through several generations, many of them developed their education and business to build the America that is today. No one will say that was a bad thing. Yet, now, immigration to the US is very limited and there's only talk on restricting it more with almost no one saying the reverse. Opening up the gates will jumpstart the economy in two ways.

First, with millions of unskilled immigrants willing to work twice as hard and at half the pay, American citizens can dedicate their time to other tasks. For instance, the daycare system for kids is abhorrently expensive in the US but millions of parents will pay the money anyway since there's little choice for someone to take care of their kids at home. Second, with tens of thousands of skilled immigrants, new technologies and companies can be formed leading to increased prosperity for all and technological benefits. From what I have seen, the US university educational system is perfectly willing to offer high quality education to foreign students only to kick them out a few months or a year later since they were unable to secure a full-time job in the US in time to maintain their visa status. This loss of human capital is quite regrettable.

I will put up more thoughts in a future post but for now let me stop here. What do you think?