Time Managing

    How would you manage the time when so many things happen at the same time? Assuming that you're not going to avoid anything to make it not to happen, how would you stay cool among those annoying thins bothering you and still remember to make a phone call to your parents telling them you're fine without any hesitation? This is the hardest time that I've experienced since the first day of graduate program started on September third. I got two mid-term exams, a presentation, five-hour mathematic classes in two weekends, six essays, and unsolved argument with my girlfriend. What needs to be worried is that those happenings are suppose to be held in these two weeks.


    This is my first semester of graduate program in the United States. Very different from the ESL program that I've taken in the United States though, now I'm really fighting not only for the language challenge, but for the future. In terms of the graduate program, which might be the last degree program of mine, I should thank God that I finally got the opportunity to study the major of financial economics in Boston University after being rejected by many universities I've applied. Just because it would be the last chance to pursue higher level of education, I took seriously choosing majors, unlike being chosen by the education system in Taiwan ten years before, despite of the world's trend which usually confuses students when choosing majors. 


    Being a graduate student in one of the exclusive universities of New England, I should be proud of myself at first. Time managing becomes significantly important than ever when the first day you enter the graduate program. If I were accepted by any university in California, I would be given a lecture about time managing before getting the graduate program started. That's the joke that I often talk to my friends. Studying in universities on the east coast, I don't have to spare my time choosing which party is funnier to go. According to an English teacher of mine who comes from New York, east coast is a please for students who really eager for knowledge. Even though I considered that's what he wanted to say to make me feel better after being rejected by University of South California, I stared to believe in him after participating several boring activities held by certain people. Maybe they spend too much time studying rather than create attractive activities.


    When so many things jammed at the same time, I have to make sort of determinations to get them well dome. At least I know what's the most difficult thing that I'm struggling with. A great deal to make myself less stressful is try to get rid of the most bothering thins I have. I decided to be concentrated on the next mid-term exam, which affects my grade badly. Further more, it's one of the most important core courses of my concentration. It doesn't mean that other classes are not important, but means that it helps me to build self confidence to get them done.


    What about the dangerous situation between me and my girlfriend? I decided to put it aside until the next weekend. I think it's a positive opportunity for us to calm down for a while seriously. Everything is gonna be alright. 

Media Should Be Carefully Regulated

Media has been dominating the way of audiences’ thoughts for decades, especially since the television has created in 20^th century. A terrible fact, which still exists, is that somehow the multifarious media easily influences people, which is unwise that some of them don’t choose positive programs. Or some media is inclined to influence what people think, just like brainwashing effect, are now highly taken account by anthropologists and certain group of people. The media should be carefully regulated base on the diverse of culture backgrounds and ethics issues.

 Children and teenagers are groups of people who are likely highly affected under the certain amount exposure of TV programs. That is, they are not mature enough to choose the programs, which are suitable for their age. Consequently, parents often pay much attention to the TV program choosing for them. Nonetheless, it’s impossible that parents can spend 24/7 watching their children, so that’s why GIO, Taiwan[1] classifies TV programs into many levels and regulates some of them only can be played after midnight.

In addition, there are so many disagreements about ethics, religions, and political issues among people in a country. It’s media industries’ responsibility to reduce the opportunity that can cause people fight for any susceptible subject. For example, people in Taiwan are sensitive about political issues, which are bickering for so many years between two major political parties, Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party. The obvious preference can be shown easily in Taiwan’s society, and this unique phenomenon sometimes is visible in TV stations and newspapers. People can be misled due to some subjective comments and rumors. Unfortunately, I can see many Taiwanese like to fight against someone who has different political opinions rudely. As a result, it is easily to kill someone verbally or to cause unnecessarily argument if we don’t carefully regulate the media.

TV series and movies are often considered as art. They became popular since the television has been created and the film making technique has been well developed in 20^th century. They sometime make impressive shows to help people to recall some memories, whatever they’re positive or negative. In contrast, some of them create the story that is not true and will probably cause conflicts among people. For instance, a popular movie, Angels and Demons, which is revised from its original novel version, uses the idea of a historical conflict between science and religion, particularly that between the Illuminati and the Roman Catholic Church.[2]Such critical topic should be careful used in whatever literature or dramas, or it will bring significant conflicts to us.

In short, media or any artwork has crucial influences to audiences verbally and visually. Carefully choosing TV programs helps us to absorb inappropriate information. It’s not even morally fair to entertain people by making movies to step on someone’s pain, so it is also important for filmmakers to consider all the sensitive issues that may offend audiences before making movies.

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[1] Government Information Office, Taiwan

[2] Angels and Demons, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_and_demons

New Chinatown

The renewal of Chinatown not only amazes the residents in Boston, especially during the great recession which causes job loss and hurts people’s faith, but also surprises me. One of my Chinese classmates put an advertisement on electronic bulletin board telling that his uncle who starts a new bakery in Chinatown. I firmly believe that this is the positive news not only for people who live in Chinatown, but also for the depressed business atmosphere that has been lasted for a considerable period of time.

As the only historic Chinese area, which was formed by Irish, Jewish, Italian, Syrian, and Chinese immigrants in New England, Boston Chinatown has multiple cultural features represents it’s historical meanings[1]. We can see now it is not only served with eastern products and food, but also with other cultural merchandise, such as Japanese and Vietnamese food. Even though it is not specifically supply products all from Chinese region, for example, the Chinatown in New York City, it shows a significant role in cultural combination in this historic region, New England.

In terms of the population of international students, New England area has the most diverse culture of international students. Especially in Boston, an “incipient global city”[2], contains many exclusive universities, such as Harvard University, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts, and so on. The cheerful news like “Chinatown’s good fortune”, which reported by Boston Globe on October 8, 2009, told that other than those businesses were suffered from this recession, in contrary, more than 15 shops had opened in Chinatown in recent months. There is no doubt that not only local residents, but also international students in Boston area will be benefitted from that.

However, the weather condition will be one of the biggest challenges to those new sprung businesses and shops in Chinatown. The new restaurants and bakeries are going to face severe cold weather coming in late October. That is, we will see if the renewal will be a flash in the pan or not, depends on how those business owners keep their customers’ loyalty. In addition, because of the economic recession, people are losing their consumption capability. This is also a serious problem which caused many businesses went bankruptcy. As a result, business owners are forced to re-discuss the policy in pricing in order to keep their customers and to generate cash flows.

The renovation of Chinatown will make the occupancy of the area toward a positive improvement, which means the development of city population will be benefitted from it. Living in Chinatown will become more and more convenient than ever, so real estate companies can easily taking advantage of the opportunity. More and more job opportunities will be created as well.

In summary, thanks to the remarkable geographical advantage, New England region has outstanding condition for starting businesses. International students shall feel lucky about the good news that happened in the area where they live in. While celebrating the new opportunities for business owners, they will also face new challenges to deal with.

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[1] Chinatown, Boston, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown,_Boston

[2] A study group at Loughborough University in England classifies Boston as an “incipient global city” in 2004.

Weekend Business on 10/02

This week I would like to share my expression to the current situation of the U.S economy, job loss, which is one of the most crucial problem and now it is striking many individuals and families. Second, a perspective view will be given about e-book, a hot feature, which is making significant impacts upon book manufactures and technology innovations.

If you still remember the news happened last two weeks that Hyatt hotels laid off hundreds of their housekeepers in Massachusetts, were you considered the program that the government held to create more job in order to beautify the unemployment rate was a good idea? Although I’m not an economist, my gut tells me that is not a positive attitude should government take into account. The essential difficulty threaten against the unemployment, in my point of view, are illegal employment and immigrants, who are limiting legal residents rights of finding jobs. Because the U.S government looks like they had never taken those problem seriously, especially to those illegal immigrants for many decades. President Obama made a promise during the presidential election and sited that he will solve the problem in the future. Let’s see if it will give a great help to the U.S economy.

In Taiwan, how do people find the way out to deal with the high unemployment rate? Nowadays many freshmen, who just graduated from high school, tend to set up their carrier plan earlier as the result from the economic crisis. Some of them start to prepare for qualified exam one or two years before graduating from college to get the chance working for government. In other words, they look for any job relates to government-run organizations, such as TPC (Taiwan Power Company)1, CPC Corporation2, Taiwan, civil servant, etc. Of course, volunteer army is an option. Those are the jobs that you can earn stable wages and hardly to be laid off. All you have to do is get a higher score then you can work for government for twenty years and benefitted from exclusive welfare. It’s kind of keen competition though, but it worth to give yourself a try in Taiwan.

According to this week Weekend Business, e-book, a newly developed feature brings an excitement to the Internet technology and makes publishers nervous about file sharing technique. In my perspective, it’s still not the time should publishers worry about the sales decline. As we know, Amazon.com brought a new e-book reader called “kindle”3, which allows customers download e-books to the high capacity reader, kindle, and save more spaces from managing hard copy books. However, I believe most of people, like me, prefer the reading pleasure by holding a “real” book on my hands. I can’t imagine how do we consider “reading” without flipping pages. Hence, se don’t need to worry about the piracy problem as much as sharing music on the Internet yet.

In summary, it needs time to get rid of the job lost problem as long as the U.S government can take the right medicine to cure Uncle Sam’s illness. We still have to be optimistic to get through the economic crisis. Plus, I really want to take a look at “kindle” and see how it works.

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1 Taiwan Power Company

2 CPC Corporation

3 Kindle, Amazon.com

The World's Next Super Power?

China is well known of its military power and distinct political situation compare with other democratic nations. After reviewing the news, China Celebrates 60 Years of Communist Rule, as a Taiwanese, I would like to share you some subjective and critical view points regarding some China’s political activities and its attitude toward Taiwan and other countries of the world. But all of the comment or point of view will be concentrated on the Chinese government itself.

I wasn’t surprised while observing china’s outstanding and modern weapons on the military parade for celebrating China’s nation’s 60^th anniversary for some reasons. First, it’s China’s 60^th anniversary, which is a memorable decadal celebration of course. It’s reasonable that any country would celebrate for such a big day. Second, China just reached a milestone of its space technology. China’s scientists successfully sent their astronauts into the space and accomplished a very significant achievement, spacewalk, on Sep. 27^th 2008[1]. In spite of the hesitation from critics, who doubt on the authenticity of china’s space mission, China surely blew the world away this time. Third, by the pressure from the United States, China is eager for competition of military development with them in terms of some political issues. The United States has been the imaginary enemy that China would like to surpass for decades.

Why did China have to bring such powerful weapons and stuff to the street on its 60^th anniversary and troops, as we seen, shown their uniformed formation to president Hu? In my opinion, because of China’s different policy toward the people of China, including the bias to Falun Gong[2], the cross strait relationship, and the conflict with Tibetan, China faces the significant pressure from other democratized countries. In other words, those countries like U.S, United Kingdom, European Union, etc., they don’t really like the way China treats its people. Furthermore, there are many strong neighbors, such as Russia, India, and North Korea, have highly developed military power. China is forced to make itself stronger to build self-defensive military force.

It’s understandable that governing a country with thirteen million people is the challenge for China’s democratization. China government may has figured out the urgent affair is its economy. There’s no doubt that China’s economic power is improving by import/export business and OEM technique. However, it will be better if China can remove the missiles, which were targeted on the Taiwan, and put money into it’s inland economic development, such thoughtful action might have a great impact on Chinese living quality. It’s no need to waste time making conflict with Taiwan, because Taiwan is considered as an independent country by many developed countries, after all. Moreover, Taiwan loves peace, and has never shown hostile attitude to any country in the world.

Power has to be built on the basis of peace and democracy. Building military power is not the first consideration. Hopefully we can observe China’s democracy achievement at the next decadal anniversary one day.

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[1] Shenzhou-7, Wikipedia

[2] Falun Gong

To Make Wrong Things Right?

People who under the age of 18 can’t take driver’s test for motor vehicles in Taiwan, but my first time riding a motorcycle was under 18, which is riding illegally. Most of my friends shared text books with classmates and made multiple copies illegally when I was in college. Millions people download copyrighted music on the Internet frequently without paying. We’re doing many things spontaneously even though we know they’re not legally to be done. Also, people usually prepare plenty of reasons to modify those immoral activities for which they’ve done. Here are the reasons we commonly used.

Have you ever driven through a red light in a situation when there is no police guarded, or when you’re driving at midnight? I was taught that I shouldn’t eat candies before having meal when I was a child. However, very often, I sneaked in my mother’s room and took candies in the closet where she usually kept snacks in. Self control is so difficult that still challenges us on every stage of our lives. It needs us to take time to reach the achievement because sometimes it’s hard to restrain the developing desire, such as hunger and curiosity. Somebody might consider that if the action won’t hurt anyone, they would rather do that anyway.

In terms of downloading music and movies on the Internet, we upload the file to several free Internet spaces, make copies for publication, and share them with P2P file sharing[1] softwares. Some people download an unfamiliar song, consider it as an audition version, then they will purchase if they really like it. Others might just keep what ever they want to listen. Very often, most people choose the second, because they don’t think it worth to buy a CD for fifteen dollars with only one or two songs they preferred.

In addition, nowadays many singers copy others ideas to become their own music. Listeners are sick tolerating their excuses for copying what ever melody or lyrics. It’s not the way should they put their “creativities” in to CD albums and make profit. Further more, I don’t understand that why CD price goes higher and higher to an irrational price, like fifteen and sixteen. If songs were sale separately, I would definitely buy a single album instead of other kind of album.

Most of singers don’t rely on CD albums only for making money, they make money from advertising, acting, and TV shows. Downloading music is only for fun and I do believe that it doesn’t hurt anyone if we just download it and enjoy it, but not selling it to make profit. However, I don’t always “steal” it; I still buy music albums of my preferred singers. I support any kind of good music that I think worth to appreciate the high quality of voice through our players.

¹ File Sharing, The Free Dictionary