There's no such thing as being too careful

Virus, just like its name, is one hell of a parasite. Last week’s session discussed about virus and cyber crime. First of all, I’d like to share something about virus. I usually do not bother much on this issue years ago, when I was in my first and second year. I knew that the “world” out there is as much dangerous as the real world where we live now, but I never had a thought about what hazard a virus might cause. Until few weeks ago. After reformatting my laptop for annual maintenance, I plugged in the LAN cable to connect to the Internet to download Windows update. While waiting for the download to finish, a pop-up window appeared on my screen telling me that my dial up connection was not detected. I was quite puzzled as such thing has never occured to me before, and I was pretty much sure that I had never set the dial-up connection to turn on automatically.

It turned out that this pop-up window came from a virus or spyware (I forgot its name) who can use a dial-up connection to make a long distance phone call. And boy, that only happened after I just visited Windows update website! I’ve heard someone said that even though the connection in NTU is considered secure, it’s not guaranteed that virus attack won’t happen. Well, now I have proven myself. And to quote what community poster says, “Low Crime Doesn’t Mean No Crime”. There are no such thing as being too careful. And just this morning, I received an email from IT Team from my school warning about a possible virus/spyware attack in NTU.

When Prof Gilbert discussed about Cyber Crime, particularly phishing, I remembered that I have encountered such cases before. Even though it’s not as dangerous as credit card phishing, it can still leave you with an unpleasant experience. How unpleasant might it be? Well, if you accidentally keyed in your credit card number just to check whether “someone has deducted $$$ from your card”, then you shouldn’t be surprised if few days after you “check” your card, someone did actually steal from it. In my case, things weren’t that serious. If you wish to know what form of phishing I’ve encountered, then you might be interested in clicking the following address: here and here. (WARNING: Potential spyware attack from 2^nd link. You might want to access it from a computer with powerful anti-virus or anti-spyware)

From first link, you will see that in order to help “your friend” winning a Banana Republic voucher, all you need to do is just entering your email address and the password for your email account. You can just pass if you do not wish to, but what is the harm of letting someone “importing address book” from your account to somewhere else anyway?

Second link is more hilarious to me. You will see that as “the LARGEST dating community on Earth”, Tubely offers me to import my contacts from my email accounts in Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo with just keying in my email accounts and their respective passwords. Isn’t that lovely?? (apologize for being indiscreet about my friend’s name, but you see that since this link also provide my name and my email address, discretion is something that is out of context)

Although these kind of promotions could be considered not as a phishing (since you can just “pass” anyway), I still regard this as a cyber crime. Why? Because how will you know that they won’t just break into your account and use it inappropriately? How can you be so sure that they won’t change your password so that you won’t be able to access it anymore? There is no way you can find out about this.

Podcasting is cool

This session discussed about the podcast. Though I’ve heard it before, I didn’t particularly understand about the technical concept. Here, Prof. Gilbert explained deeper on how it’s being used by major companies to promote their product. One thing I found it interesting from his lecture is the concept that podcast enables people from any walk of life to learn about something at different times and places. Imagine a situation where every participant of a society do not have a common spare time or is impossible to arrange a session to meet with each other. A class in Open University might be a good example.

When a lecture or an issue needs to be delivered by the lecturer to the students who are not all possible to attend the class, there are many methods to do this. One may suggest to send the material in a printed form. Or it might be good to send them a recorded form of the lecture series in a CD. But all these so-called conservative ways require a very high investment, particularly , a financial one.

And here comes our “hero”: the Podcasting. By recording the lectures into several tapes, and uploading them into the Internet, the lecturer has now saved several dollars from the University budget. Students can go to the lecturer’s website to subscribe his lecture in a form of podcasting. This will help them to choose which lectures they would like to hear (for many reasons, such as they might find some lectures are easy to follow so that a quick read from the notes is sufficient). Students also don’t have to be worried of losing their notes or CDs because all study materials are available online. All they need to do is just subscribing to the podcast, download it, and save it into their MP3 player or computer. They can listen to it at their convenient time, and more importantly, it doesn’t cost as much as printed textbooks.

As for me, I have been subscribing for several podcasting such as: Desperate Housewives’ and Ugly Betty’s (my two favorite shows) Podcast, as well as Ong and Liong (Alternative characters of Daniel Ong and Mr. Young) Podcast from 987FM. It keeps me updated on what is going on on the show or just simply helps me to smile after listening to lawyer's stereotype joke by Dan and Young.

Technology Plan - Proof of Concept

This session will discuss about the proof-of-concept of each group’s project. For mine, I and Damar are going to explain the more detailed idea behind the two concepts that we have introduced earlier: PlanUrTrip and TakeMe.2 (Please refer to my post with the title: Learn how to pitch)

PlanUrTrip

A complete list of tourism attractions in Singapore is available on PlanUrTrip’s website. To make the browsing step easier, these places are grouped into several categories based on their main ‘themes’. Among these categories are Natural Reserve (Singapore Zoo, Bukit Timah, Jurong Bird Park, etc), Historical Site (Civilian War Memorial, Old Parliament House, Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall), Shopping Indulgence (Orchard Road, Chinatown, CityLink), and All-You-Need-To-Eat (Lau Pa Sat, Clarke Quay). By grouping these places into categories, we believe that customers, or potential visitors, will find it easy to see which places they want to visit.

Using the list as the reference, the customer can now arrange their trip in a way a student arrange their study through the timetable. A sample of the interface of our service is shown below:

TakeMe.2 (now known as GuideMe)

As explained in my post earlier, TakeMe.2 is a mobile application which enables the customer to have a pocket-size travel guide to make their trip much more enjoyable. TakeMe.2 is a Java application for mobile phone. And as the market reflects, the use of mobile phone which supports Java environment has been increasing over the last year.

Revision and Feedback

After my group’s presentation, Prof. Gilbert gave feedback for our improvement. He mentioned that one of the problems a tourist is likely to have is that the lack of trivial information such as Taxi booking numbers. Sometimes, a tourist find himself trapped among the crowds in a public place who were waiting for the rain to stop. At this situation, Taxi booking number will be very helpful for them. So, in addition to the mobile application that we offer, we could add a feature which display all the important contact numbers needed by a tourist, such as Taxi booking number, hotels, and embassy.

A modern way to stop the disease spread

During this session, Prof Gilbert had a little surprise for everyone of us: it’s an in-class exercise! The exercise is about ASEAN Food Safety Initiative (ASFI). The project aims to overcome the problem currently experienced by livestock industry: the spread of mad cow disease in England and Australia as well as the pig virus and Avian flu in Asia. One of the idea is to introduce a monitoring system based on wireless infrastructure.

The group task is to work out a preliminary design for the information presented to the livestock inspectors working for the Ministry of Agriculture. For the background knowledge, it is identified that there will be five parties involved on this initiative: Farmer, Veterinarian, Transport Storage, Slaughter Butchering and Distribution/Sale.

After discussing for about half an hour, my group came up with the following concept. First, we are organizing the flow into two lines: product flow and information flow. In stage 1 (Farmer), the information collected is about the generic data describing the statistics of each batch of livestock. A specific tag is given for each statistics representing each batch. After carefully inspecting the validity of these sets of data and matching them with the actual field observation, the government agent will submit them to the publicly accessible database maintained by Ministry of Agriculture. One point to note is that in our concept, only those data which are in compliance with the standard set by MoA.

The next stage is Veterinarian. As vets are in charge of giving vaccination and performing routine medical check-up, their records will be needed for database update. Any particular information about the disease infecting the cattle can be monitored in the database.

So far, I only discussed about the information flow, which can only be passed to the next stage upon approval by MoA inspectors. The product flow basically goes the same way. On the Stage 3 (Transport and Storage), when the station receives a market-ready batch of livestock, they must check the tag number on the database to see whether this batch has been inspected by MoA. If the tag number do not appear on the database, it either means that this batch was not approved by MoA or it has not been inspected. Either way, the station must contact the livestock supplier and MoA. In a circumstance where it was actually not approved, the station keeper must immediately dispose the cattle, so that the product flow stop at this stage.

The same procedure applies for the Stage 4 (Slaughterhouse) and Stage 5 (Distribution Sale). By stopping the flow of a “defect” product as early as possible, the goal of AFSI could be achieved. In addition to the product flow management in Stage 4, the information flow management also takes place. During the slaughtering, the slaughterhouse must record the slaughter method they perform on the cattle. These records are then submitted to the database. This will ensure that the information on the database is updated.

And that basically completes our concept for this assignment.

Learn how to pitch

This session, Prof Gilbert discussed about Elevator Pitch. Elevator pitch is a term for marketing pitch originated from Silicon Valley. This is what I captured from Prof Gilbert’s lecture. Buildings in Silicon Valley usually have not more than 4 or 5 storeys (or levels). When a soon-to-be entrepeneurship wants to seek investors, he goes to these buildings. Usually he arranges the meeting with the potential investors in their office, mainly located in the most upper level of the building, Sometimes, the investor meet him on the lobby and take a lift with him to go to his office. And this is where elevator pitch happens. On his short trip to investor’s office, he will present the pitch to them. Since it takes only about 2 – 3 minutes, the pitch must be prepared very well. All the trivial details should not be included to give time for important ideas to be demonstrated.

Now that we’ve learnt the concept, next step is to make an actual one. In group, we are required to create an elevator pitch about Tourism-On-The-Go, the course big project. We are given about 3 – 4 minutes to present a video explaining the concept of our project. Together with Damar, my groupmate, I prepared a set of presentation slides. Our group idea is to create a new helping tool for foreign tourists visiting Singapore. The tools developed are mobile- and web-based.

Before I explained further about the tool, I’m going to explain the issue that we address. The current problem with the Singapore’s tourism is that out of 9.7 million visitors in 2006, only 34% of them paid a visit to Sentosa, one of Singapore’s tourism signature. The number grows for Orchard Road with about 67% of them went there during their trip. From these statistics, we can interpret that something might be wrong with the way these attractions being advertised, or the information given to the tourists about how to reach these place (one of the reason they don’t go is probably that they didn’t know how to get there).

So, here comes our idea. First idea is to introduce PlanUrTrip, a web-based service where everyone can go to arrange their trip just like NTU student’s arrange their timetable through STARS. On this service, they will be presented with various options of places they would like to visit. Each day during their trip will be divided into many slots, which span for about one hour. Each slot is going to be filled with the activity of visiting places they want to, or just a void, since they might not be interested to go anywhere, except café or restaurant during lunch time.

Next idea is TakeMe.2, a mobile application to guide the tourists to go from one location to other. We develop this idea since the transportation might be a problem here even though government has put many instructions and helps. This application will require a Java-enabled mobile phone for installation.

As for more details on these two ideas, I will explain it on the post about our Business Plan. For now, let’s just take a look on our elevator pitch on Youtube.

A little bird once told me ...

I completed my industrial attachment in a utilities company in Jurong Island. During everyday's trip to and from there, I will always pass this tourist attraction point called Jurong Bird Park (JBP). When I saw the sign, I found that there's something different with it. Usually when you go to some other place in Singapore especially in MRT, you'll notice that most of the instruction are given in four different language, which are English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. But that's not the case for Jurong Bird Park's sign. You'll find that there's actually some Japanese characters written on it.

And that has something to do with our project for last week. Prof Gilbert gave us assignment on how to improve the current multilingual instruction in JBP. Currently, they have multilingual support for most of the instruction, written or announced. The problem is that it costs them a lot to maintain such kind of support. So, the case was to make use of mobile technology to cater the demand for multilingual support in JBP. It's a team project, and with my friend, Damar, we were wroking together as ProCon (the name of our group).

Being totally clueless of what is going on the mobile technology world nowadays, we found it a bit frustrating to come up with some idea on how to incorporate the technology to improve the system. After a short reading and a brief discussion with my technologically gifted friend, Agung, we decided to make use of the location-based service concept for our project. But then, I just realized that we knew nothing specific about it. It'll be pointless if I mentioned something on that here, since I've done that in the class and I didn't think it turned out very well.

To start the idea, JBP must contact the three mobile providers in Singapore. They must have some kind of agreement where JBP will act as content provider for the service our group is discussing. The content would include all the brief and detail information about the birds and their life in all the available language that will be served in JBP. The list of the language would be based on previous years' statistics.

The main target for this service would be all the foreign tourists with little or no English fluency. Those who have their mobile phone with international roaming can sign up for this service upon admission to JBP. They will be asked whether they want to use such service. If yes, then they will choose their preferable language.

Next, we divide JBP into several clusters, each one containing certain numbers of cages or attraction. In every clusters and cages, there will be numerical code written on the display board. This number correspond to the input that must be fed by the users to get the information about that particular cage or cluster.

Let's say we have cluster A: Flightless Bird and cluster B: Birds of Prey. On each display board, there will be numbers, such as 1 for cluster A and 2 for cluster B. If the user just want to know the general information about cluster A, they just need to text number 1 to a certain number such as 9876, specifically meant for this service. Since they have already chosen their preferable language upon registration, they will get the information they request in that language too.

If they want to get specific details on each specimen, they can input the more detailed code to the provider. Example: If I wish to know more information on Falcon bird from cage no 12 in cluster B, then I can just text "2 [space] 12" to the same number.

I also had an idea that if they wish to see more than 160-characters information, they can dial that 9876 number to hear the instruction for requesting information. People who prefer audio media will be able to get information as well.

To conclude this very brief idea, I am going to say that I did absolutely realize that the suggestion we're giving has very little information on technology part. However, I do also realize that it doesn't need to be too technical if you can do it in a simpler way but still able to push the right button, just like we did. We believed that it will make a good business if JBP can borrow our idea.

Of course, you must already know by know that everyone will think that their solution is the best one. That includes me.

Now I know why

When I came to the third session of this subject and listened to Prof. Gilbert's lecture, I was recalling all the experience I had during every group discussion I went to in NTU.

Prof said that there are two ways to explain how decision might end: proportional to or inversely proportional to the number of people involved. Though, he said that it's likely that the first one is the most common situation, I must say that, from what I experienced, it isn't necessarily true.

First of all, of course, we need to know what and how the situation will look like. He mentioned that there are basically three kinds of problem that will require group discussion to obtain a result or decision. They are Cognition, Coordination and Cooperation. Cognition has something to do with the discussion that will end with exact or scientifically-written solution. Coordination requires the group member to coordinate their way of interacting with each other to achieve a solution. Cooperation asks for everyone to put their self-interest after everbody's goal.

You might think that as a university student, our daily situation will be something more into Cognition. That is true, if you're only talking about the main goal of the group discussion. But then, if you looked carefully, it turned out that most of the time, they are nothing but Coordination problem. It's the problem on how you should compromise your daily schedule to fit in additional time for discussion, how much time you and your group should spend so that the result is due on time, etc.

And the problem with Coordination [author's note: Coordination is already a category for a problem, and yet it still has a problem within it] is that there must be some kind of 'leader', whether you acknowledge it or not, and lesser degree of independence, because of course, you don't want to misbehave by being selfish. And these two things are already enough to make the Wisdom of Crowds concept impossible to take place.

According to James Surowiecki, the author of the book, if you want to have your decision result to be directly proportional to the number of people involved, then you must at least have these four conditions: Diversity, Decentralization, Independence and Aggregation. For further reading, please click at the link given, or simply read this book.

A real proof of Wisdom of Crowds can be seen on the concept of Web 2.0, especially Wikipedia. Since everyone has the same goal, which is to construct a free updated online encyclopedia, they have accomplished one of the four requirements: Aggregation. And since people all over the globe are contributing without any direct or indirect command coming from one of the parties involved, it is no doubt that the diversity level is pretty much diverse and no power is being centralized. We also know exactly that those who contribute are not joining in because they were told to do so. They all come together by their own will. It's all about Independence.

Now I know why sometimes I just didn't feel comfortable attending a group discussion. There were this afraid feeling of being called 'childish' or 'immature' when I was about to express my opinion. It should affect the degree of independence of the discussion. So, next time, I'm going to another discussion, I should just let everyone knows about the whole ideas in my head, but of course, I must consult first with myself to decide which one is appropriate or reasonable. After all, we still shouldn't deny the fact that we want to look great in front of everyone.