One of the most successful media franchise: Star Trek

"to boldly go where no man has gone before", is the famous slogan of Star Trek episodes. This month, a new movie with the original name "Star Trek" would try to capture all the trekkers once more. Debuted in 1966, Star Trek episodes were credit with a perfect reflection of contemporary human society such as racism, religion, sexism, feminism and human rights, having a totally different view which emphasized future government and society evolution comparing to the other famous science fiction movie, Star War.

Beside the fiction story stimulating our imagination to the future, Star Trek also brought up some ideas about ideal human society and technologies. The United Federation of Planets in Star Trek represents the model civilization in cosmic space. Basically, it is the Utopia of mankind and was injected with many American values. And after almost 40 years later, its story and adventure spirit behind the scenes still fascinate many people.

The episodes evolved to many different series since the premier edition. However, the television channels in Taiwan have not introduced any new series since "Star Trek: The Next Generation" series, which is a pity to all fans. It is why the most of Trekkers in Taiwan are not familiar with the latest characters showed up in "Deep Space Nine", "voyager" and "Enterprise" series. For aged fans, boldly Kirk, smart Spock and nervous Dr. "Bones" McCoy are always legendary and un-replaceable. As for young fans, they probably love captain "Picard" and Data instead due to their era. Now, its time for these new generations to know what is true legend and what is the real meaning of "Star Trek" by the new movie.

Autodesk ObjectARX

Like any professional software, AutoCAD, the famous 3D modeling software developing by Autodesk Inc., provides APIs support for developers who want to make contribution on this platform. They named the APIs "Autodesk ObjectARX". Unfortunately, there is no any published book talking about this subject in Madarin Chinese. For developers in Taiwan, it seems the only way to gather information and technical resources is visiting the official website of autodesk.

As a software developer with over 3 years experience in Microsoft .NET solution, I am pleased that Autodesk made "ObjectARX" intergate with .NET framework. And here are some relevant links:

1. Developer center of AutoCAD
2. SDK download
3. ObjectARX

Happy learning!

Google is building a network

For many investors, Google represented a company which collects tons of genius engineers and produces many creativites. However, how to transfer these cool services into business profit was a big question. By continuously launching cross services API and cooperating with third party hardware device manufacturers, Google now shows his true ambition and strong combat ability. I can say it is obviously that Google will knock out Apple and Microsoft within next 10 years.

Google provided tons of free online services from video sharing platform, the YouTube, to geographic social platform, the Latitude. Moreover, it extended the battle field into hardware device. Google's smart move was step in mobile phone market with its open source operation system Andriod which immediately attracted many curious developers around the world to contribute more fantastic software applications to it. Different from the Apple iPhone and the Microsoft SmartPhone, developers could touch the system core direclty with no boundary.

Each time that Google intersects two of its services brings out enormous positive response and potential business profit. With such tempo and progress, the growing rate of Google is just like a geometric prograssion and it seems nobody could stop it. Recently, Google gave us another amazing service called Google Power Meter which could record, moniter and analyse the power consumption of your eletricities in real time. It seems that in the future, we would give more and more personal information and privacy to Google and let it control our normal life! For more details about Google Power Meter, check the news report below:

Kiva, a online platform for Microfinance Institutions

In order to support the poor people in developing countries around the world, many microfinance institutions have been established. Different from the massive banks or global financial organizations, microfinance institutions are usually local and only provide small loan to poor people.

I guess the most people have the same experience with me, heard about "microfinance institution" this words due to a news about the banker "Muhammad Yunus". He advocated the concept of microloan and hope it could help more people out of poverty in his country, which successfully gave rise to the attention from public. Such institutions focus on local region, accept requests from poor people and did not seek for high profit. Of course, to maintain and keep organization running needs a basic level of profit but they do their best to keep the balance by offering low interest rate to their loan.

You may ask: is it high risky to lend money to poor people? Microfinance Institutions do not supply their loan without any condition. They have their way to judge the status of each case and try to avoid any potential risk. Whatever, The idea of microfiance institution is very cool and would make our world better. The question is how do we encourage more establishment of microfiance institutions in our world? For example, people like us who have limited capital but would like to involve themselves into this field, they probably don't have enough fund to support the operation.

What if there is a online platform for these microfinance institutions to gather fund from Internet users? The only thing they need to do is to reveal the accommodator brief backgound they have on the web platform and wait for the funding from Internet users. The role of Internet users is a kind of philanthropist. The interest guarantee for them is 0%. However, all funding activities would be recorded and published on the web pages to honor their contribution. For microfinance institutions, they still offer the low interest rate loan to poor people when they receive funding from Internet users but have responsibility to monitor borrower's repayment and notice the Internet users who provide the fund. Although there are still some conditions for microfinance institutions which want to coorperate with this web platform, it is comparatively heavily reduce the finance barrier for them to operate. Sounds great right? That's Kiva! A truely social enterprise based on web 2.0 concept.

What are we waiting for? lets do our best to make this world better!


PS.

If you are not familiar with Enlgish and only want to focus on Taiwan region, there is another option for you to join social activities or involve yourself into social enterprise:

1. Flow, Inc., founded by Steve Chang, Chairman of Trend Micro, Inc., and Tom Wang, the famours writer in Taiwan. Their goal is to fund valuable social enterprise project in Taiwan.
2. Public welfare 2.0, established by online jobs service "104" in Taiwan. A very similar one to Kiva but only allows Internet users to donate.

The vicious circle in Taiwan

Let me explain the definition of vicious circle first: a complex of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop toward greater instability. (Actually I found it from Wiki) When a country fall down into such situation, it is difficult to heal and reverse the status even we got the new president. Before critisizing, I want to emphasize another circle in United States but it is a positive, good and improvable one. USA attracts a lot of people around the world for many years who are seeking the better life and would like to adapt the American dream. The economic crisis nearly did not destroy the circle but just slow it down a little bit. In my opinion, the mature democratization forms the society a tolerable environment and anyone could speak out loud his point of view without worrying radical response. People here respect to each other and have great patient to listen. In fact, they encourage people to think different, provide brandnew idea or question the exiting rules and norms. Such open-minded culture whlich creates the positive circle contributes the great and powerful America today.

Back to Taiwan. It seems that all the topics and issues have less important then the independent or united issue. All politicians here always try to tell the public that they truly love Taiwan and oppositions are not. It is ridiculous, naive and pretty much like the children fight in the elementary school. They know that doing such unmeaninful things makes no benefit with Taiwan but they keep doing so to enegize the contrast and enmity between two major groups of people just in order to win the election. These politicians only see the profit they could gain by being someone in government or a seat earning from election and raraly have the vision to the future and the passion to improve our country and society. People are misleaded by these politicians and believe the slogan they claimed thoroughly. Partial people even have great enmity against their oppositions and sometimes violent insident would be happened. It enforces the split up effect in the society and more politicians use the supporters from onesided in their campaign to win the election. Therefore, the vicious circle have been formed and constantly hurt the island.

It is obviously that the vicious circle won't be reversed in a short time because nobody wants to stop the chaos. Some people may argue that Taiwan has the diverse conditions to America's so we should not compare them. But I say that we need to reverse the vicious circle to correct the bad condition we are dealing with. Otherwise, Taiwan will be the island with hopeless and lose the ability to stop briliant people abandoning the country.