Tuck Business & Society Conference

Last week, amidst the coldest weather I’ve endured since Haerbin (-23 degrees!) Tuck hosted speakers from across the U.S. for its leading graduate student-run annual conference on sustainability and responsible business.

Thanks to our panel managers’ keen eyes for talent, and the moderation of our professors-in-residence, discussions were kept “pithy, provocative, and particular” – not to mention humorous.

But, while most panelists yeah-sayed in reply to this year’s theme (“Is Capitalism Sustainable?”) what really struck me were two recurring points raised throughout the conference:

1) Capitalism fails to effectively deal with externalities and long term horizons; and – perhaps more importantly

2) People value consumption, not efficiency.

Either one of these notions is a discussion unto itself but the second point is of specific interest and – having worked for a company that promotes efficiency – concern. As our GEM (General Accounting for Managers) professor instructs us that ‘pushing out the PPF’ (Production Possibilities Frontier – aka “the hill of happiness”) is always better I can’t help but wonder: is it?

Every time technological advances have increased energy efficiency, for example, increased consumption has pushed energy use back out to its original level or beyond. But can we continually increase our consumption without consequence?

I think, quite clearly, the answer is no. So where do we go from here?

Double Secret Probation Rope Swing

Double Secret Probation Rope Swing, originally uploaded by harryalverson.

Once upon a time, when the local river wasn’t frozen over, a few brave (read: foolish) Tuckies trekked into the woods and goaded each other to dangerous heights on a rickety platform…

What to Believe?

On the heels of the CNN reported ‘Cardboard-in-Beijing-Buns’ story, a new headline appears:

China reporter held over cardboard-in-buns story

So, is Beijing pulling a cover-up here, or is the story really fabricated? And, since this is a time of “intense international scrutiny” for China regarding food-related scandals will this reporter be unduly executed… I mean punished?

A Water Crisis You Say?

According to a the Harvard Business Review (Scorched Earth, June 2007):

“International standards define a serious water shortage as the availability of 2,000 cubic meters or less of water per capita per year; 1,000 cubic meters per year is considered the minimum for existence. Currently in Northern China – which stretches from Shanghai to Beijing and contains nearly 40% of China’s total population – the average amount of available water is only 1,100 cubic meters per capita per year, and the water table for the entire region is dropping precipitously.”

I have an idea that might help: stop hosing down the damn trees!

It’s been humid and pouring rain for the last few weeks and yet… someone on city council feels that spraying high powered jets of water into the air is a good idea. Please allow this photo and video to elaborate on a particularly wasteful, sonically atrocious, likely toxic and generally ludicrous Shanghainese activity.

We assume it’s a pesticide dispersal system of sorts. The same truck has been patrolling up and down the French Concession neighborhood for several days warning off pedestrians with fairground tunes and leaving a soaked path of mystery in its wake.

Start the Presses – China’s Internet Less Bad (before 2010 no less)

Perhaps there’s a visiting dignitary, a shift in national policy, an intense WTO wrangling session in process or maybe someone in the Great Firewall is just playing for trix… whatever the cause, Wikipedia works today and that makes it a good day.

Better yet, the wordpress.com blogging platform also works, allowing me to bring you this exciting news from my sorely neglected internet home, which has sat in digital jail for most of the last two years. Huzzah.

And, in keeping with the theme of good triumphing over the annoying, Germany has chosen not to allow Tom Cruise to film at one of its military bases on the basis of his being a Scientologist. So says the NYTimes: “The German government has long been at odds with Scientology, which it does not regard as a religion but as a dangerous sect.” (okay, okay, this is old hat and may yet be resolved… but leave me my dreams)

In other news, China continues to make outlandish claims that it will solve all the mysteries of operating a harmonious society by 2010. If I had a dollar for every goal to be accomplished by that date…

One Number to Rule them All… now by Google

Just a quick note… the super cool site GrandCentral.com, a lust-worthy online centralized phone forwarding service (and so much more…), has just been acquired by Google.

Being back in the US, I was finally able to procure myself a much wanted account (you can’t register from an overseas IP) but while I love the features I have so far been hesitant to pass on the number due to a worry that, while cool, the site wouldn’t be around long.

Worry no more. It’s not convenient to change your telephone number but switching to, or at least phasing in, GrandCentral is now worth the hassle for all it’s amazing features and its new Google-backed future reliability.

Among it’s awesome abilities: simultaneous or scheduled ring-through to your home, cell or work phones; online accessible voicemail that will notify you by text message or email; personalized incoming ring tones for your callers; ability to listen in on voice messages as they are recorded or even take the call in the middle if you want; and, not to mention, one phone number… forever… for all phones.

Oh yes, and it’s free!

www.grandcentral.com

Back in the U.S.S.A.

 

Hello World. It’s been a long Net-absence but I’m back in the US for a lavish second time in as many months, and this time for a proper holiday. Lindsay’s wedding to be precise, which simultaneously affords one week of wonderful life on Cape Cod along with a yoyo’d international group of childhood friends. It stands to be an excellent time all around.

The trip over was a hellish 28-hour odyssey starting with a delay in Shanghai and then thunderstorms upon arrival in Chicago. The delay turned into a partial blessing since I ended up arriving before my sister and Louise who had departed before me on a parallel United flight (I took AA). They arrived amidst the worst of the storms and were grounded for two hours at nearby Rochester. All of our ensuing connections were cancelled and we didn’t get to Logan Airport until 3am, 7 hours after we were supposed to be on the Cape (… still a two hour drive away). Lily didn’t make it out to DC until the next morning and “slept” on a baggage carousel.

On the upside, the car rental lady took pity on us and we drove down in muscle car style with a bright red Mustang. Would’ve made my friend Steve proud. But on the further downside, our first day was wasted since we pulled up my driveway just after daybreak and collapsed into bed until 4pm. Naturally, I’m now wide awake when I should be face down in my pillows.

A good time to blog I say. So, thusly back in a land where my favoritest sites WordPress.com and Flickr are not blocked, what do you suppose I might ramble on about (aside from my travels)?

Rats and cucarachas of course! I thought I’d briefly relate a recent ‘life in China’ story and refer you to an interesting blog posted by my friend Kaying regarding the intersection of globalization and unconscious racism in The Netherlands. You are referred.

And now the insects:

On my way to meet Lily and Liz at the Pudong Oriental Pearl Tower (yes indeedy, that’s two sister (√) and no parents (X) who have visited me in the Middle Kingdom) I walked through one of People’s Square’s many snaking exit tunnels.

Upon entry, at the first landing, I noticed a crowd of people gathered in a semi circle against one wall. Now, this typically means one of three things: there is an accident and everybody has stopped to stare (but not help), there is a fight and everybody has stopped to stare (but not intervene), or there is someone selling something very interesting.

I had happened upon the later. Draped across the ground was a printed poster depicting text I could only partially decipher and pictures of six common household pests: mice, rats, cockroaches, centipedes (see my recent Hangzhou pictures for reference), snakes, and spiders.

The sales-pitch that accompanied this unusual sign clarified all in an inhumane but extremely effective manner:

For 10rmb a piece, the vendor appeared to be turning a brisk sales of small heart shaped night-light that glowed blue when plugged into his portable generator. Six feet from the vendor was a rather large gerbil in a rather small cage spasming in awful fits corresponding to the plug and unplug.

Vendor:

“Does it work? See for yourself!” ZAP! [gerbil spasms] [Sale]

“Rats, Cockroaches, sure… it keeps them all away, just look!” ZAP! [gerbil runs to other side of cage, slams into the bars, falls on its back and spasms] [Another sale]

I know this kind of thing must be outlawed in most developed countries but it was a very convincing demonstration. Perhaps I’ve been living in this country too long, or maybe it was the two inch roach that I discovered on my towel after a shower last week but I almost found myself reaching for my wallet. Almost.

Huashan Video

I shot this using Lauren’s digital camera from the gusty top of Huashan’s “Plank Path”. I’ve never posted a video before, so bear with the quality. Hope you enjoy!

(Incidentally, I tried to do this using YouTube, but couldn’t get the clip to upload, so I ended up going with Google Video. Nice to have options)

Cat Laps

It was a week of reunions and re-goodbyes here in Shanghai. Mathieu was back in town after a trek about China (he leaves today – but we expect him back), as was Pierre, and so too the festivities that go along with great personalities. Dinners at Dongbei, drinks at Cotton’s and Senses, and few more exotic events.

Last Sunday (Sept 3) Mathieu organized a group to head out and enjoy the Shanghai Boat & Yatch Club’s “Open Day” on Lake Dianshan (淀山湖) – SBYC’s base of operations about an hour from Shanghai. The lake sits exactly over the border to Jiangsu Province, with Suzhou just on the other side. After a pancake breakfast (pics later…) and a bus ride past some fairly strange mushroom and elephant shaped buildings (no pictures, unfortunately) we found ourselves to one side of the Shanghai Olympic Aquatics Training Facility.

The gorgeous weather brought a near-record turn out, 70 people (fortunately we made it into the first bus), and the day kicked off with everyone clambering for spots on too few boats. Our team (ahem, Steve) mis-interpreted the whiteboard’s “cat” for catamaran and we unexpectedly found ourselves on Bill Crampton’s tubby New England cat-boat. Bill won’t mind me saying this because while the Monicat isn’t a trampolined speed machine, she does indeed embody the pleasurable antithesis of an adrenaline thrill ride and we owe him a big thanks for an incredibly welcome and relaxing experience – even if he did make us scrub the decks… literally A fine day out day she does provide.

Apparently, Bill’s uncle, Hans Christian, is a semi-famous boat designer in the New England area and Bill and Hans custom designed and built Monicat at a local factory in Shanghai. She and her newer sister are probably the only cat-boats in China. The factory, thanks to Bill, is now a successful boat manufacturer.

We spent the day tacking back and forth just off-shore, playing chicken with enormous concrete buoys, observing fleets of floating backhoes dredging a new channel (the entire 62 sq-km lake is only 3-5 meters deep), heeding the confusing calls of local fishermen, dodging unusually placed iron pipes sunk into the lake floor – and lurking just beneath water level, and admiring the remnants of an elaborate network of fishing nets that used to cover the entire surface of the lake before it was officially designated an aquatic recreation zone in about 1998.

Among the lake’s other strange attractions is an old Russian Ekranoplan, aka Ground Effect Vehicle, anchored at a PRC army recreational facility (the one we saw didn’t quite look like any of these, but it’s an interesting technology that’s still being researched). Though it hasn’t appeared to move in the last four year, the Ekranoplan can evidently reach the other side of the lake in just 8 minutes while flying at an altitude of about 2 meters. GEVs were originally used by the Soviet army to transfer ground troops across the Caspian Sea. They’re still used in some parts of the world, especially Australia, as an efficient form of travel over smooth bodies of water.

Back on shore, this land lubber finally re-joined a gym, not Your Gym this time, but Fitness First.

Last Wednesday we had the old gang around, avec Pierre and Mathieu, for some internet-delivery Thai food from the friendly folks at Thai FoodStation (we discovered TFS a few months back at another newish Shanghai pleasure, the Garden Bookstore flea market – every 3rd Saturday of the month). Lou baked up a tofu chocolate storm and Mathieu shared his incredible new – and plasmotically fresh – tattoo.

Stories from this weekend’s apartment hunting and Dino-beach “Splash” experience will have to wait. The highlight: Shanghai has suddenly become quite chilly. I’ll check in soon with new pictures. In the meantime I’ll be pulling my sweaters out of storage; I’m suddenly having trouble believing this season will bring an “Autumn Tiger“.

Drug Certification Acronyms

Not that most people reading this blog will be particularly interested, but I was unable to find an easy, consolidated resource for these acronyms today so I thought I’d post a few as a possible future convenience to others. The universe of abbreviations related to this topic seems pretty small (and yet still hard to find) so I may have covered most of them here.

COS Certificate of Suitability issued by the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines (EDQM)

CTD Common Technical Document OR Comparative Toxicogenomics Database

DMF Drug Master File

EDMF European Drug Master File

FDA Food and Drug Administration (USA)

GMP Good Manufacturing Practice

The following site was quite useful, but not wholly complete:

http://www.pharma-lexicon.com/medicalabbreviations.php