TWC session 6

Time flies....

Its week 6 and we are halfway through TWC. Session 6 topic was about healthcare and bio-medical science.



Before this session I always thought bio-medical science is all about cells, diseases and anything related to the human body but I am so wrong about it. Bio-medical is one big industry that includes stuff like

 Diagnostic equipment


 Medical devices

Dr Shahi showed us a video about Microsoft ideal hospital in the future would be and I'm totally fascinated by the video. This would streamline so many processes and healthcare is more readily available. The part on e-dollar is interesting. What if we were to lose our card?

Now lets move on to driving forces of bio-medical industry. As technology advances and people become more affluent, our lifestyle starts to change. Change in lifestyle and technology advancement are some driving forces of bio-medical advancement that I would like to touch on.

How does a change in lifestyle drives the advancement of medical industry? In the past, when humans were still hunters and gatherers, work were physically demanding. Now, people sit in the office and rarely move about. Furthermore, with the advent of junk food like MacDonald, people are growing obese.



So what does that mean? We see a rise in diseases related to obesity such as high blood pressure and diabetes. ( Just some fun fact : From World Health Organization, overweight and obesity are linked to death more closely than being underweight. Start shedding those weight!)

Lets move on to technology. How does technology advancement drives the advancement of bio-medical industry? With technology advancement, the probability of contracting communicable diseases drops. People have access to safe drinking water and clean food. Moreover, vaccination eliminates the risk of contracting such diseases. Some interesting examples are " The Black Death" and America "Yellow fever" outbreak.

So one thing I learnt is that as people become more affluent, the rate of chronic diseases rises while the rate of communicable diseases falls. It is the opposite for the poorer countries.
Some fun fact again.

  The fun fact is about rice. In the past, the hunter gatherers did not have rice as their staple food. However, with technology advancement, this thing known as rice was discovered and it gradually becomes a staple food. Rice is actually cooked sugar and what happens when we do not burn away the carbohydrates that we consume is that it is stored as fats. I'm not trying to say that we should not eat rice but if we are already on the risk of being overweight, we should cut down the intake of rice.

Next we look at areas of medical innovation.

The one that particularly intrigue me the most is prosthetic and stem-cells. Why is it so? Somehow I believe with research and development in these 2 aspects, one day humans may achieve immortality.




1) Using stem-cell to create artificial brain and body?
2) Using prosthetic to create parts of the artificial body?
This picture explains it all.

So how does bio-medical answer the question why some countries are so backward and some are so advance? Lets look at the human development index. One of the criteria is life expectancy. By giving the poor countries the necessary bio-medical technology, they are able to live longer and thus, fulfilling their potential and contribute to society. However, it should be noted that there are consequences to it such as having an obese population.

I would rate this session a 8/10. I enjoyed the individual presentation as the topics were interesting. However, I believed what can be improved is that we dwell deeper into topics like bio-medical weapons.


                                                        

TWC session 5

After reading some of my TWC classmates blog, I decided to try a new approach to my blog

TWC session was about ICT



Yes, I decided to put in pictures after reading other people's blog.

ICT encompasses of many different aspect. I'm not going to list everything as it is too expansive. However, I'm going to list down some of the areas that fascinate me.

Gaming



The advancement of ICT has seen gaming industry taking over the music industry and is catching up with the film industry. Will it one day dominate the entertainment industry?

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a system which every information are stored in one database. Technically, you can let people to gain access to such information and you can access it anytime you like as long as you have access to internet. Examples of Cloud computing would be like Gmail, iCloud and even our own SMU Elearn. However, cloud computing has it issues too such as security and privacy.

So the question is have we maximize our potential with ICT. The answer is not yet.
So why not?

Key observation
Despite the fact that ICT has helped streamline many processes in the industry, our productivity gain only multiplied by 5, whereas in the past, a revolution would see a productivity gain of at least 25 times.

One main reason that we have yet to fully maximize our potential is that we have not yet bridge the digital divide.


The divide is real and a copious amount of people, especially in the third-world country has no access to ICT. Even with access to ICT, the older generation may not be able to embrace it as easily as the younger generation like us.

Furthermore now it is still too early for us to fully tap on ICT. There are still fundamental issues that need to be addressed such as hacking and espionage. I would like to cite a recent case of Gmail password being leaked onto the internet. (Looks like a strong password does not matter now). Also there is the Playstation Network Outage on the year 2011 which Playstation Network users' credit card details were leaked online

Take-away point
How does ICT helps in addressing the issue of why some countries are so backward while some are so advance. With ICT, a whole new industry is being created and this provides opportunities. I would like to cite the gaming industry as well as how cloud computing has allowed small companies to have an equal standing with large companies. However, a system needs to be in place before the poor countries start to ride the wind or they will get swallowed by the waves.



ICT has its downside but most of it arise from human actions. Issues such as hacking and pornography are all cause by humans. The internet cannot hack and post derogatory remarks by itself. After all technology is just a tool. Education is very important to teach us about internet etiquette.

Some interesting fact here: Some studies have shown that pornography actually reduces the number of rape cases. Alright back to issue here.

There are a few people who shun away from social media as there is a risk for loss of privacy. However, in the 21st century, do we really still have privacy left? Our IP address are traceable, spying devices are ubiquitous and of course we always have friends that will secretly take picture of us and "tagged us".

Rating of session 
I would give the session 8/10. I like the video about Project Natal. That was the first time I actually heard about the project. Kinect derives from Project Natal. However, there are some features that the Kinect do not have which Project Natal is capable of. I was thinking if Project Natal was real, I would just need to flash my examination question to the artificial intelligence and get it to do for us.

Link to individual topical paper
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12S7fwCmCpG1cdyNp57skCcUNMSxZ1rDSaWyAwII9go0/edit

Individual topical paper outline

Individual Topical Paper Draft

Human Cloning
• Executive Summary

1. What is cloning?
• Simple definition of cloning is copying (Raeburn, 2002)
• Creating identical genetic copy of an organism ( Staicu, 2012)

2. Reproductive cloning vs Therapeutic cloning
• Reproductive cloning , Creating another identical individual (Saint-Paul, 2003)
• Therapeutic cloning , Creating human tissue (Saint-Paul, 2003)

3. Arguments for and against cloning
• Identification
• Curing chronic diseases
• Ethical issues
• High-ability offspring

4. Where are we heading?
• Laws and regulation of different countries
• Leaning towards therapeutic cloning

Background and introduction
• History of cloning
• Dolly the sheep (1997)
• Cows by Japanese and French Scientist (1998)
• Mice (1998)
• Pigs (2000)
• Year 2002, genetically engineering allows pig organs to be transplanted into humans
• Process of cloning
• Somatic nucleus transfer
• Stem-cell cloning

Arguments against cloning
• Implications of cloning
• Destruction of embryos. Equivalent to killing a human. “Humans are created since conception” (Pope John Paul II quote)
• Risk of failure. Embryo implanted with donor’s nucleus will have the same length of chromosome as the donor. Chromosome shorten as we age. (Saint-Paul 2003)
• Potentiality – Every embryo has the potential to become a human. However, scientist has argued that the potential is zero as the embryo is not place inside a womb (Brown, 2009)
• Identification – Uniqueness issue. However, claims are inaccurate and does not explain in situations of embryo splitting. E.g twins. (Morales, 2009)

Arguments for cloning
• Medical Benefits – Treating chronic diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson. (Raeburn, 2002)
• Eliminating the risk of organ rejection. (Brown, 2009)
• Test of medical drugs – Does not needs to test on animals, streamlining the process of drug’s development. (Zneimer, S.D, 2014)
• Infertility – Infertile couples are able to have children that are genetically identical. However, there are new fertilisation progress such as In-vitro fertilisation (Staicu, 2012)
• Eliminating recessive genes and create high-ability offspring (Saint-Paul, 2003)

Changes in the biomedical industry
1. Revolutionary change in the development of new drugs. Increasing accuracy and efficiency of drugs. Eliminating uncertainty. (Zneimer, S.D, 2014)
2. Disruptive changes in the industry. Removing the need to search for suitable donor. Old treatment methods are render obsolete. E.g Treatment for cancer (Zneimer, S.D, 2014)

Where the world is heading?
• Greater recognition in the research of stem-cell technology.
• Research is not limited to embryonic stem cells; there are alternative stem cells such as induced stem cells and somatic stem cells.
• More stem-cell research agency set up globally E.g Stem Cell society Singapore

- Striking a balance between ethics and science
- U.S lifted the ban on stem-cell research at year 2006. Reproductive cloning research is criminalized in the U.S
- England allows the use of embryos under the age of 14 days
- California stem-cell research agency only uses embryos age 5 days or below
- Ban of reproductive cloning by the international society for stem-cell research

Conclusion
- There are many beliefs that supports or are against human cloning E.g Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and etc, and we cannot ignore them.
- Life is govern by belief. Even law is created by human’s morality and belief
- However, as technology advances, mind-sets are changed. The development of therapeutic cloning has seen a paradigm shift. Laws are re-written and countries starts to invest in this industry.
- Efforts are made to ensure ethical issues are not compromise. E.g using adult stem-cells and sustaining embryo.
- Endeavour in this field of research to raise quality of living (Human development)

Session 4

Date: 8 September 2014

1200H

TWC session 4 started with a brief summary on how the past sessions help to answer the questions on why some countries are more advanced than the others and how can we solve this problems.

The first part of the session was about driving forces. Some examples of forces of changes discussed during the session were globalization, demographic issues, competitions and etc. Change is the only constant. Change is inevitable. Next we discuss how changes occur. Changes primarily occur in 2 ways - reactive change and the foresight to change. Reactive change is changes that occur when something happens. Lastly, there is this term called disruptive change. Disruptive change is changes that makes past changes totally pointless. A revolutionary change does not necessary means a disruptive change.

So how does that answer our questions? Studying the driving force of change allow us to understand what countries did to adapt themselves to the ever-changing world. The understanding of disruptive change means that developing countries does not have go through what the developed countries do in the past so as to be advance. Personally, I felt that the developing countries' leaders also need to adapt the mentality of having the foresight to change. If they do not take the initiative to learn and improve, they will always be trapped in their current position.(Reference from session 2 on global dominance and human development)

1400H

The second part of session 4 was about change leadership and management. How is leadership and management related to TWC? Leaders gives the idea and the management executes it. Quoted by Edward Deming, change is not compulsory since no one cares whether you survive or not.Leaders and the management decisions affect the progress of an organization.Its up to them to decide what type of changes they want to embrace. I felt that this part is closely link to the first part of the session. In order to initiate the change in them, the less fortunate countries need a good leader and its' team of management. A person with ideas is just a visionary while and a poor management team will not deliver the idea. Dr Shahi then shows a video of a boy dancing. I think the video is very effective in delivering the idea of what leadership and management is. A good leader provides great idea but success comes from the management - they executes and get people to follow the idea.

Lesson went significantly beyond 1500H and not everyone presented yet. Somehow I felt that the benchmark for individual presentation was raised every session. Session starts to get more boring for me as it continues but it grabs my attention again when Dr Shahi shows us the boy dancing video. Overall rating 6/10

TWC session 3

1st September 2014 Monday, I had my third TWC session.

The first part of the session was about sustainable technology and the second part was about innovation management.

What is sustainable technology? It is technology that benefit us without compromising the benefits of the future generation. Why is there a need to develop sustainable technology? The reason is that we are living on a finite planet.

In the past, the economy works in a system such that there was a trade-off between economical well-being and ecological well-being. The system used was linear; it started from production and ended at consumption. This system was destructive as we live in a finite planet where resources are scarce and eventually one day the resources will be depleted. There was a need to change the system from a linear model to cyclical model which means after consumption, it goes back to the production stage. However, the model should be cost competitive at the same time as well. No companies would want to invest in a business that is a guarantee loss.

The first presentation by Shi Wei was on modular devices. It was an interesting topic as modular devices help to preserve the environment by eliminating wastage. The only problem is whether it is feasible for companies to embark on the idea of modular devices. Sustainability should be cost competitive and ecologically sound. Shi Wei only brings up the example of phones. What about bulky items like television? Is it logical to keep upgrading a single television at the same time? Jian Sheng mentioned in his presentation that television actually went through multiple upgrades. Cheng En oral presentation was about sustainability in Jamaica. I was quite disheartened when his question for discussion was about challenges to achieve sustainability and people just regurgitate his points on Jamaica's solution to achieve sustainability. Will education be effective? Can the Jamaicans do anything about it after receiving the education?

The second part of the lesson was about innovation management. It literally means management of creating something new. There are a few interesting observations that I would like to highlight. Firstly is the pipeline of innovation by Dr Shahi. It described the process from research to application. In between will be the obstacles that companies have to overcome. Since there is so much obstacle to overcome during the development stage, there will be no point in innovating something which others can easily copy and compete with you. Hence, there is this model by Dr Shahi that shows the "hotspot" of innovation. Smart people will innovate in the "summit" areas as shown in the model because at "summit" there is a high barrier to entry for competitors to enter and has high return rates. Next Dr Shahi talks about the 4 "smarts" that results in a successful innovation. I like the idea how all these link with one another to show what is a successful innovation. Jian Sheng presentation was basically about a description of how television has evolved while Nigel topic is on acquisition. I would like to address one of Nigel question on "Does acquisition stifles or drives innovation". I take the stand that it drives innovation. With acquisition, companies are able to take over ideas and refined it with their own ideas to come up with something new. It can be argued that with acquisition, companies now have larger global shares and may be more lazy to innovate but they should have this fear of competitors coming into the market. Look at the "hotspot" of innovation. Everybody wants to be at the "summit" but it is just difficult to reach.

Overall session was meaningful with many key take away lesson. Time was well manage and session did not end extremely late despite so many presentation. Rating of session 8/10