Session 2-22/8/2011

 

A short video summarizing the history of humankind kicked off my second session in TWC. This video could be regarded as an illustration for the timeline Prof Gurinder showed everyone on the first day. The whole class then moved on to a discussion about several dimensions of global dominance, such as the cultural dimension or economic dimension. After a while, Prof suggested some dominators in each arena, which I list below:

·        Cultural dimension: American/Chinese culture

·        Economic: China

·        Military: the NATO/the US. There used to be the Warsaw pact acting as a counterpart to the NATO led by the US.

·        Information: Facebook

·        Industrial: China/the US. China is in some sense considered the largest factory of the world, metaphorically.

Prof also mentioned a very interesting yet ironic fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the organization supposed to keep the world peace, are among the world top weapon sellers. This piece of information just reminded me of a sad truth that there will never be complete justice and fairness in this world, the ones who are more powerful than the others are naturally granted the right to decide the others’ fates. At the moment that “one” is the USA, though the bipolar order of the world has long been eliminated as well as China is developing rapidly. To illustrate, the UN headquarter itself is located in the USA, and most of the UN’s fund is contributed by the USA. Hence, the influence of the USA on the UN is beyond doubt very great. Virtually, the lives of many countries around the world are in the hand of Uncle Sam.

Then, Prof introduced the model for identifying innovation leaders and dominant players. 

Actually, the model is just a demonstration of a fact that every being has to go through three phases during its life, including developing, peaking and deteriorating and those that let the deteriorating phase last too long will eventually become extinct. The rise and fall of hundreds of dynasties in many countries all around the world are excellent examples for this fact. As can be seen from what is happening in the USA, namely the downward development of its economy, I’m quite sure that Uncle Sam is soon to become Sam – the old man.

After an hour, Jannah replaced prof to become the main lecturer. She gave an oral presentation about the effect of Google on people, specifically the way people think. I agree with most of what she said, such as the role of Google is becoming bigger and bigger in our lives or that Google changes the way we define intelligent people. She also raised some questions at the end of the presentation, one of which was that if Google would make us assimilate with one another since now nine out ten people turn to Google for help if they come across any problem, and they tend to read only a couple of links listed near the search bar. In my opinion, Google doesn’t really have that capability because despite the aforementioned fact, the ways people form their own thoughts and opinions based on the information they get from Google are very different. Overall, her presentation was very thought-provoking and was pretty well made in terms of the slideshow as well as the way the presented.

There were also two other presentations, one made by Mengxie and the other by Davinia. Both of them also presented very well and I felt quite intimidated then for fear that I’m not going to present as fluently and concisely as they did. One of the presentation is about immortality and this one didn’t really catch my attention since I’m not a fan of living forever or the like while the other mainly focus on designer babies. The latter was better at drawing my attention since in my home-town, there is a trend which young parents usually want their kids to be boys, and they spend a great of money to fulfil their desire. This trend is also very popular in countries with people of Chinese ancestry since in Chinese culture, children usually bear their fathers’ name, which means the clans of the fathers still exist while the clans of the mothers is discontinued.

On the whole, this session is very interesting and meaningful, and I would rate it 8/10.

Session 1-15/8/2011

This was my very first class in TWC and frankly, it has successfully accomplished its role as the first class of the course. Firstly, it helped to break the ice between people thanks to the brief introductions from everyone in the class as well as Prof Gurinder’s spontaneous humour which lifted up the atmosphere of the class quite a few times during the session. Secondly and most importantly, this session has provided some interesting points about the correlation between the development of technology and the world change, which resultantly ignites the desire in me to know more about this issue in the upcoming sessions.

During three hours in the seminar room, Prof showed all the students two videos, and I was left chillingly amazed after watching both. From the first clip ”Did you know: shifts happen”, it was quite interesting to learn that China will become the number one English-speaking country thanks to its giant population or that the jobs in highest demand in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2006. It can also be inferred from this clip that technology is the main engine to push the world forward nowadays and anyone who can get hold of it will have an upper-hand on the others. That makes me pretty worried since I’m not a fan of most of the new technologies.

 The second clip,”Guns,Germs and Steel-part 1”,whose content was based on the book with the same name written by Jared Diamond, brought all the students to the partly untouched jungle of New Guinea where the people are still quite uncivilized, most of whom still wear diapers made of leaves. Seemingly, all of the people in New Guinea are not aware that they are left far behind by other countries in terms of technology and living standard, except for one man. His name is Yali who concludes this clip by a very intriguing question ”:Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?”. There was a myriad of answers given by students in the class but there were only two of those I believed to be the most convincing. First and foremost, it is because New Guineans live in islands which are isolated from others continents or countries that hinder the exchange of goods, culture as well as technology between them and others. Next, since the jungles New Guineans live in nearly provide them all of the basic necessities such as food and drink, they are not motivated to come up with anything new to improve their life.

Prof Gurinder also presented the timeline of the world since its beginning of Earth's life fourteen billion years ago! It reminded me of quite a few of interesting events over the course of humankind’s history, such as the first use of fire some 100000 years ago or the four greatest inventions of ancient China( gunpowder, papermaking, compass and printing). The session ended in a very relaxing atmosphere when Prof showed us a picture depicting the development stages of humankind, starting from an ape-like creature and ending with an obese man!

Generally speaking, this session was a nearly perfect one to a new student like me for the reasons I stated above. It could be further improved if there were more discussion about some points such as how to boost the technology development in New Guinea. Hence, I would rate it 9/10.