Author: Daniel Riveong

  • 40 Years of Scenario Planning

    40 Years of Scenario Planning

    We’re All Thinking About Design Thinking For the past five years, I’ve had a keen interest on innovation processes, such as “designing thinking.” These days the “innovation” and proceses that support innovation like “design thinking” are the buzzwords de jure. The Google Trends chart above shows a skyrocketing increase in “design thinking” search from 2007…

  • Mini-Review: Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

    Mini-Review: Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

    I’m a little behind my book reviews for The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov and The Hunger Games by Suzanna Collins. To catch-up, I’ll start on the latest book: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. I have read fiction of the Balkans before – none of them happy, but each sad in their own way.…

  • China says Europe encourages “sloth, indolence.” Meanwhile in Singapore…

    China says Europe encourages “sloth, indolence.” Meanwhile in Singapore…

    Perhaps the old Conservative (and now Tea Party) concern about the “welfare state” has found a new friend…in China? Al Jazeera’s Teymoor Nabili recently interviewed Jin Liqun, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China’s $400bn sovereign wealth fund. Jin had this to say about Europe’s labour laws and welfare society: “If you look at…

  • Reading List: Fast Food Orders & Technology as Job-Killers

    Reading List: Fast Food Orders & Technology as Job-Killers

    While Occupy Wall Street goes global and sometimes violent (see Oakland), how much of the income disparity in the United States is due to technology hollowing out the American middle class? What has happened to bank tellers, travel agents and printing press shops?     “How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs” http://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141949820/how-technology-is-eliminating-higher-skill-jobs “He says machines…

  • Intermission: Lana Del Rey

    Intermission: Lana Del Rey

    I’ve been too busy to post, so here’s this: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1OV5B_JDw&version=3] If you’re confused and feel there’s something “too polished” or “too perfect” about her voice, her style, and her video, well there’s plenty of discussion about that: We crave a popstar who is authentic, who thrives because of their talent, not PR. So when…

  • Ding Ding Dong with your Vietnamese Coffee receipe

    Ding Ding Dong with your Vietnamese Coffee receipe

    The Atlantic Monthly shared a video on how to make Vietnamese Coffee, but what struck me was the music. Check it out below. [vimeo 29082556 w=400 h=225] How To Make Vietnamese Coffee from High Beam Media on Vimeo. The song is called Ding Ding Dong by Waipod Phetsuphan. You can download it via Amazon, as part…

  • Payment Sent to Emmanuel Goldstein

    Payment Sent to Emmanuel Goldstein

    Today, I decided to buy something from the UK, some clothing specifically. After checkout, I received a PayPal receipt from Emmanuel Goldstein to confirm receiving payment from me. The hated Emmanuel Goldstein? The head of the Brotherhood,  writer of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and the focus of everyone’s two-minutes of hate? I’m pretty sure I…

  • Mini-Review: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

    Mini-Review: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

    After finishing Mikhil Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir, I found myself needing to move away from my beloved dead Russian authors to living and non-Russian writers. This took me directly to Haruki Marakami’s Kafka on the Shore. The writing is airy and the story itself contains so many layers, wrinkles, turns that reveal unlikely connections,…

  • Mini Review: Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir

    Mini Review: Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir

    Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir. As Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one my favourite books, I eargerly dug into A Dead Man’s Memoir. It is a different beast of a book, so it would be unfair to compare the two. A Dead Man’s Memoir feels semi-autobiographical, a…

  • Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?

    Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?

    Via Kottke (via @atenni): An economic paper from Helsinki University on the relationship between GDP and – ahem – “organ” size: The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing…