Leading by Example - Reflection of a workshop I attended

I had attended a two-day workshop titled "Communication, Leadership and Public Speaking Skills", which was conducted by TNC(PI) or the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research & Innovation). The theme of the workshop is instructional leadership, in which TNC(PI) shared her knowledge and experience in research grant application and evaluation, book and journal article writing and publication, administration and management in universities, postgraduate students supervision, and collaboration with external bodies. Herewith the lessons I learned from the workshop:

1. Research grant application and evaluation

After completed my PhD and returned to Malaysia, I have tried applying for FRGS two times but both failed due to the fact that I should not propose to invent product, e.g. games, applications, etc. I also failed to secure the PRGS, LRGS, and IDR grant. The application of PRGS is only valid if the applicant has completed either a relevant GPU, FRGS or ERGS. ERGS must be exploring what and where a particular theory, principles or model can be used, e.g. what and where to use GBL. However, I am grateful that I understand the reasons the failure now--it's never too late to mend.

1.1 Title

In terms of technicality of writing proposal, the research title must be specific in nature, reflecting fundamental issues to be resolved. Novelty is an important criteria in the title. The title must be brief (12 - 15 words) and reflect the content of the proposal.

1.2 Executive Summary

The Problem Statement should begin with fundamental issues, i.e. issues that have impacts on the national development when resolved. There are eight types of such impact in total:

• Environmental
• Economic
• Social
• Public policy and service
• Health
• Cultural
• Quality of life
• International

For FRGS, I must indicate explicitly what is the positive impacts on the following three dimensions of national development:

• Environmental
• Economical
• Social 

For international grants, I should hit more types of impact, e.g. UNESCO grant that promote "Education for All".

The content of the proposal should clearly indicate the following flow:

Inputs > Activities > Output > Outcomes > Impact

The Consortium of Asia-Pacific Universities, the Australian National Research Flagships and the Malaysian Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) was mentioned in the workshop, in which I must relate my proposal to the ETP and Flagships. I must include solid authoritative statistical figures and informative research-based facts in the proposal to reflect the depth of my knowledge mastery in my field of expertise.

With maximum 300 words, the executive summary should be written creatively (e.g. using different colours for different sections) to capture the attention of the grant assessor. The methodology must be as specific as possible, i.e. mentioning the use of a particular instrument that was constructed based on established theory.
Also, the expected output / outcome / implication should be linked to GDP in relevant sense.

1.3 Research Background

Unless it is a classical work, all references must be the most recent (last 5 years) related references.

1.4 Methodology

While the Methodology in Executive Summary should be as specific as possible, the Methodology section itself should be as detailed as possible.

2. Book and journal article writing and publication

Some award-winning colleagues shared their experience in writing and publishing journal articles which are indexed in Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Knowledge. Working with colleauges in oversea, e.g. friends or doctoral course mates in world leading universities would be a good channel to get articles published in indexed journals. An established scholar must have his or her researcher ID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID, Inc.), H-Index. In China, the required H-Index is 7 to be a lecturer--I think in a renown university. For proofreading, American Journal Experts (AJE) provides professional service which costs around RM600 per manuscript.

Inspired by the successful colleagues, I have created my ResearcherID (H-3569-2013) under Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge and I will start to write actively for indexed journals. My current H-Index is 3--still a long way to go to get 7...

3. Administration and management in universities

I asked TNC(PI) to share her experience of overcoming cultural shock when she first completed PhD and returned to Malaysia from US. Her story is really motivating, especially when she talked about how she conducted research with her students despite having no grant and no support from superior. I am grateful to have support from my colleagues and superiors who are keen to help me to become an established scholar, I promise not to let them down!



4. Postgraduate students supervision

5. Collaboration with external bodies.

Why should I learn Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics concurrently for SPM?

I have been reading Robert’s thesis on adult learners who choose to re-learn Math.

This actually touches the wound that I have been hiding deep in my heart—I used to fail Add-Math during my high school study. Until now, despite having a PhD in Education, I still cannot accept the arrangement which force students learning both Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics concurrently. To me, this is cognitively misaligned. I loved Math since I was in primary school, and I even won the first prize in school annual Math contest at the age of 9. All were fine until I reached the age of 17, when I had to learn Modern Math and Add Math concurrently, taught by two different teachers. I always scored in Modern Math, but I hardly score higher than 50 over 100 in Add Math. Looking back this painful experience of getting demotivating results, I believe it was the misalignment that caused the problem. Why not just speed up the teaching of Modern Math and then continue it with Add Math? Please do not tell me that both subjects are different. Come on, they are both Mathematics. I agree that they are different—in the sense of difficulty level. So it should be taught sequentially instead of concurrently. 

Reading Notes: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The End

It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. (p.1)

Every life has one true-love snapshot. For Eddie, it came on a warm September night after a thunderstorm, when the boardwalk was spongy with water. (p.10)

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river. (p.11)

How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise? (p.14)

The First Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. (p.37)

The First Lesson

That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind. (p.50)

Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young. (p.50)

Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. (p.50)

There is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. It is why we are drawn to babies and to funerals. (p.51)

Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know. (p.51)

No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone. (p.52)

The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice with laying them down. (p.59)

War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think. It’s the thinking that gets you killed. (p.62)

The Second Lesson

Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning…The way I see it, that’s what we’re getting here, soldier. That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays. (p.96)

Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter movers home to take care of her sick father. (p.97)

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else. (p.98)

“My wish was to see what the world looked like without a war. Before we started killing each other.”

“But this is war.”

“To you. But our eyes are different. What you see ain’t what I see.” (p.99)

The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. (p.109)

The damage done by Eddie’s father was, at the beginning, the damage of neglect. (p.109)

This was the second damage done, the one after neglect. The damage of violence. (p.111)

This was the final handprint on Eddie’s glass. Silence. It haunted their remaining years. (p.115)

All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done. (p.115)

Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well. We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time—we often think they began with our arrival. That’s not true. (p.130)

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their on accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. (p.134)

The Third Lesson

Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. (p.149)

The Fourth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

People say they “find” love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she’d gone, he’d let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep. (pp. 164-165)

Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive. (p.174)

The Fourth Lesson

Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or more them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. (p.184)

Life has to end. Love doesn’t. (p.185)

The Fifth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken, and Eddie knew. (p.191)

In human accounting, his body was near its end. (p.192)

Conceptual Model

The phrase "conceptual model" bothered me when I started my PhD in March 2008. I encountered this phrase again today, which prompted me to refresh my understanding.

According to Johnson and Henderson (2002), a conceptual model is a high-level description of how a system is organised and operates. It specifies and describes:
- the major design metaphors and analogies employed in the design, if any.
- the concepts the system exposes to users, including the task-domain data-objects users create and manipulate, their attributes and the operations that can be performed on them.
- the relationships between these concepts.
- the mapping between the concepts and the task-domain the system is designed to support.

Game: What the game is to players?
System: What the system is to users?

What a Conceptual Model Is Not
~ is not the user interface, i.e. how the software looks or how it feels.
~ is not the user mental model of the system.
~ are not the use-cases (aka task-level scenarios), i.e. the stories about the domain tasks that users will have to carry out in their work.
~ is not an implementation architecture.

References:
Johnson, J., & Henderson, A. (2002). Conceptual Models: Begin by Designing What to Design. Interaction, 25-32.  

Verificationism and Falsificationism

Science is based on verificationism, i.e. demands experiment-based proves.

Before science is proven valid, science must pass the test of falsification.

Interesting and memorable quotes

When I watch movies, I enjoy listening to the dialogue between characters. I even jotted down some of the quotes, and then used them in speaking and writing. Unlike Chinese language, English quotes have no temporal constraint: the divide between modern Chinese and classical Chinese--which requires "translation" and interpretation when using them. 

Herewith some of my collection of interesting and memorable quotes:

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

“So you’re living down here by your wits all you’re alone, no responsibilities.”

“Oh I am. It’s incredible. No dependents, no limits. It’s the greatest life a single guy could now.”

Manny: Guys don't talk to guys about guy problems. They just... punch each other on the shoulder.

Ellie: That's stupid!

Manny: To a girl! To a guy that's, like, six months of therapy!

“No, no, no, you’re taking this the wrong way!”

“Face it Sid. We had a great run, but now it’s time to move on.”

Fortress of solitude

Night at the Museum

Teddy Roosevelt (Robin William): Some men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them. For you, this is the very moment.

Teddy Roosevelt: The more you know about the past, the better you are prepared for the future.

Gilbert and Sullivan Opera: The Mikado

“Life is a joke that’s just began.”

Technology Creativity vs Cultural Creativity [translation & adaptation from Han (2012)]

I have read Han’s (2012) Design Thinking. I found is meaningful for the context in Malaysia. Thus I translated some of the texts for my teaching and sharing purposes.

Technology creativity	Cultural creativity
Aims to improve the quality of living through the enhancement of the performance of products.	Aims to improve the quality of living through the enhancement of spiritual fulfillment.
Grounded on technology.	Grounded on feeling.
Need knowledge as the basis, hence the notion of knowledge economy.	Need pleasure feeling as the basis.
The field of technology requires continuous innovation through in-depth R&D of knowledge.	Cultural innovation occurs through imagination.
Reply on relatively young PhD holders who are graduated from world leading universities to lead high-tech industry. Those who reach the age of 40 might have lost their innovative capability in R&D, thus they have to move into managerial positions.	Rely on heart-touching new styles to lead the creative industry, which might be started who one reaches the age of 40.
Intellectual property (IP) is the substance (本体) of civilization	Cultural creative industry is the appearance (外衣) of civilization
Need to go through vertical, inferential design thinking process within the profession, i.e. a R&D process.	Not limited to a specific boundary or profession, but requires a complete design process to integrate multiple resources, in order to achieve the purpose of commercialization. The commercialization process is alien to literati.

In the minds of agencies which manage culture-related affairs, particularly when they think about nurturing cultural creative industry, the prime focus is creative talents, i.e. those literati who are creative and innovative. Therefore the agencies thought this could be achieved by organizing some training courses or by inviting several world-renown speakers to talk about creative industry. These efforts are merely depleting budget and yet failing to nurture true creative talents, thus leaving the problem of revitalizing cultural creative industry unsolved. This is due to the fact that the actual dilemma is the absence of a creative environment; while the barrier to having the creative environment is a general lack of design thinking capability and habits in the society.  

For example, in recent years, for the sake of enhancing the quality of architecture, public and private sectors are keen to hire foreign renowned architects to design, mainly through organizing international competitions. Does it mean there is no creativity in the field of Taiwanese architecture? Of course, judging from the existing buildings in Taiwan, there is hardly any recommended designed by Taiwan masterpiece, but is this solely caused by the tack of architectural skills or talents? No. We all know that the performance of architecture standards can only be achieved through mutual cooperation between architects and property owners. What are the owners? They are the combination of the socio-cultural environment. If there is no vision that can uncover architectural talents in this society; if there is no tolerance that can indulge architects to show off their creativity; if there is no sufficient resources to support architects, we should not blame Taiwan for not having creative talents. In contrast, the required vision, tolerance and resources have been allocated to satisfy the sense of worshiping foreign renowned masters—how would such attitude establish the competitiveness of cultural creative industry in Taiwan?  

Therefore for the future of creative industry, we must first recognize and comprehend the barriers in our cultural environment, particularly those irrational factors, in order to identify the thinking method that can generalize all requirements for development. If everyone in the country is geared towards enhancing the attainment of the sense of aesthetics, while recognizing the importance of systematic thinking, then we can truly move forward to a highly developed society, where everybody takes the initiative to be a sensible person.

IP Issue: Who should own the copyright upon the design of the products?

I came across "Different point of view on the copyright of artwork between artist and engineer". This prompted me to reflect the scenario depicted in Steve Jobs' biography, where engineers were struggling to work with designers led by Steve. In a private company, the copyright would not be an issue as the company holds all the rights since both the engineers and the designers are the employees of the company. However, in R&D projects or creative production, the conflict of copyright ownership between designers and engineers could be a dispute that leads to zero-sum ending.