Vietnam Living Standards

“A Picture is Worth A Thousand Statistics.”

A typical family with all their possessions in the U.K., an advanced economy.

Real GDP per capita: $35,100 (2007 esp.)
Life expectancy: 76.37 years
Adult literacy: 99%

A typical family with all their possessions in Mexico, a middle income country.

Real GDP per capita: $12,900 (2007 esp.)
Life expectancy: 73.05 years
Adult literacy: 92.4%

A typical family with all their possessions in Mali, a poor country.

Real GDP per capita: $1,000 (2007 esp.)
Life expectancy: 48 years
Adult literacy: 53.5%

Unfortunately, there is not a picture for VN but I think a typical VN family is not much difficult to find around VN countrysides or provinces. The chosen family could be one which has average income per person = $2,600 per year ($216 per month) within an area which has life expectancy = 68.52 years and adult literacy = 93.9%.

Those numbers tell us approximately how much, on average, productivity and well-being of a country. They don't tell us how healthy people are, are they happy and joyful, does their country have beautiful landscapes or famous history, are people brave and intelligent, do they have stable and effective government, how are their institutions, infrastructure, education, technology, innovation etc... Yet, the cause and effect reasoning could be applied to deduce the answer. GDP is not the perfect number but there are reasons (both obvious and subtle) to explain why such a country has that level of productivity. Well-being of a country relies on strengths, weaknesses of each and relationship of 3 economic entities: individual, organization and nation in which nation plays a governed role with underlying input factors: economic and political systems, transparency, political stability, international relations, history and culture...

However, VN government transparency is still a major problem. How much critical red-tape, bureaucracy and bribery issue is? Is wastefulness of government spending becoming nationwide? How much burden of government regulation? Is there reliable social supervision (television broadcasts, newspapers, radio, ...) which directly informs what are the citizen-government problems, how many VN citizens believe and happy with their government operation?

Why do people in so many places protest, sue government officials for their land dispute but our media communication still keeps silent? What law is this to arrest journalists? Is that Truong Sa, Hoand Sa islands already sold to China? How is VN national security system? How much is spent on education, infrastructure? Where tax revenue, FDI budget is going? The country interests and well-being are based on and being served for majority honest, sincere Vietnamese or just being served for small group of corrupted individuals?

Lots of questions but certainly any neutral Vietnamese could come with some similar, common answers. More important questions for the future are: could Vietnamese people organize into such a big, cohesive group to demonstrate their legitimate interests? Would we still have stable government institutions for the next 30-40 years when the background conflicts are becoming more and more profound? What are considered costs for VN (a country with beautiful landscapes, rich natural resources along with many peaceful, gentle, honest, intelligent people) to become a rich, developed country?

"When much is wrong, much needs to be hidden." At the individual, organization or nation level, a good life for many citizens is a strong, transparent and efficient nation for all.

Khuong Nguyen

References:
CIA - The World Fact Book: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vm.html
Essentials of Economic (4th Edition) - N. Gregory Mankiw
3x3 Economic Integration Model (Tran, Schafer, Ogburn & To - 2002)

FireFox add-ons and Google services

How does your FireFox look like? How many Google services are you using? I pick up some Firefox toolbars, add-ons, Google services which I usually use. Common things for these stuffs: 3F (fun, fast, free), convenient and helpful.

(1) Google Reader: Subscribe feeds from any interested website. Make information goes to you in 1 place instead of looking for information in many places.
(2) Delicious bookmarks: Bookmark, share and access your bookmarked websites in 1 click. No matter wherever you are, your bookmarks are in 1 place, ready to access.
(3) Google toolbar: to google "anything". Where is my team member? Where did I put my key, mobile phone? :D
(4) Save webpage as PDF for offline review
(5) Stumble: randomly choose website as per your interests
(6) Proxy toolbar: bypass firewall to access to webpage you want
(7) Google notebook: take note whenever you see any interesting thing on nets: nice pictures, quotes, pop-up ideas. Notes are kepts with URL so that you can access later. I'm comparing this with Evernote to see which one is better.
(8) FF add-on multi-language dictionary

Many more things like: IE tab, Flashgot, Slideshare, Wiki, Google Map, Google gadgets, ... The fact is that there are abundant of 3F web2.0 services out there to increase users' productivity. Thing left is choosing the best ones and applying them to our working and studying.

Financial Literacy

I shortly composed a slide about finance literacy followed the concepts of Rich Dad & Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki). Applied Finance is the topic I've loved to learn since I was in 2nd year of university and have been practicing so far.

view presentation (tags: finance)

CaseMaker

A test case design and test data generation tool – which supports the black box techniques.

CaseMaker offers for free all the ISTQB Certified Tester a full license for a year. Using CaseMaker for free you can set the learned techniques in your projects and this can be also a motivation for the managers and also for the tester to make the certification.

Advantages:

1. Orienting to apply basic black box techniques techniques such as: Equivalence Partitioning, Boundary Check, Decision Tables and Pairwise in the real project
2. Helping to design the test case systematically by dividing into small components or input business rule logic
3. Creating a pretty big amount of Test Data
   

Disadvantages:

1. Does not cover White Box and Some of Ad-hoc testing.
2. Unfriendly UI
3. Pretty heavy software
4. Limited range of target users (users must have a back ground of Software Testing in order to use this tool effectively.)
   

A simple tool of Time Management

• quadrant I — manage: the quadrant of necessity; things are both urgent and important
• quadrant II — leadership and quality: the quadrant of focus; things are important but not urgent
• quadrant III— (AVOID): the quadrant of deception; things are urgent but not important
• quadrant IV—(AVOID): the quadrant of waste; things are neither important nor urgent

A No uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a Yes merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Learning 2.0 with Web 2.0

I couldn't believe learning could be (in fact has been and will be) so much fun, convenient and enjoyable like this with Web 2.0

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Motivation

What is motivation? Yep, it's just the simple word and is so straightforward that everybody can say right away its meaning. Say, motivation is encouragement, is just what motivates, right? Yet, if we think more about it, we can see how important motivation is to our life.

"Motivation is which makes us take action towards our desired goals and which gives purpose and direction to those actions." Thus, what motivates a poor student to get high scores? What encourages an employee to work? What inspires an artist to be creative? What urges an entrepreneur to develop and run their business? No matter who they are, successful people share a common thing that they all have strong passion, strong motivation that like a power, long lasting, unlimited-energy engine to boost them overcome any challenges and advanced many others. If one wants to be successful, they must always keep motivated. People see someone got top graduation, award; someone got rich from limited availability and wonder how did they do that? Don't learn from their tricks, luckiness, their available advantages because you're different, situation changes overtime and it may not happen to you. Instead, figure out what are their motive forces and try to make your own ones. The underline factor is just motivation which includes passion, inspiration, love, competition, responsibility... anything which can naturally push you to get started and go ahead.

Every now and then, we lose our motivation and we allow procrastination to dominate our life. Without motivation, we stop taking action, lose focus, wander around, circle our thumbs... We feel we're in the middle of nowhere, useless, dumb, inane, stupid, ugly... all the worst thing we can think and feel about. Just along with motivation, we feel that we have to do something, learn something to achieve our goal and enjoy our lives with happy working, studying and entertaining. We start to try, achieve things that we really want to and believe that we are capable of becoming whoever we want to be.

So just brainstorm and list out anything which can motivate you. Favorite songs, compliments, intimate friends, caring, meditation, sight-seeing, competitors, lovers, parents, self-esteem, ego, ambition, money, comfortable working environment, kind and talented coworkers, classmates, movies, successful stories... or just some motivation quotes sometime for a while. Every successful people have motivation quotes to whisper to themselves and share with others. Pick some for your favorites, the ones that you contemplate the philosophy and stir up your desire to get moving and take action.
-- (Khuong Nguyen)

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. (Mark Twain)

The best motivation is self-motivation. The guy says, “I wish someone would come by and turn me on.” What if they don’t show up? You’ve got to have a better plan for your life. (Jim Rohn)

People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success. (Norman Vincent Peale)

Luck and Opportunity

This is the short article I read last night about how to increase your chance to get lucky. Some interesting things to learn and to share.

How to Get Lucky (Richard Wiseman)

Live a Charmed Life

To investigate scientifically why some people are consistently lucky and others aren't, I advertised in national periodicals for volunteers of both varieties. Four hundred men and women from all walks of life -- ages 18 to 84 -- responded.

Over a ten-year period, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, personality questionnaires and IQ tests, and invited them to my laboratory for experiments. Lucky people, I found, get that way via some basic principles -- seizing chance opportunities; creating self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations; and adopting a resilient attitude that turns bad luck around.

Open Your Mind

Consider chance opportunities: Lucky people regularly have them; unlucky people don't. To determine why, I gave lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to tell me how many photos were inside. On average, unlucky people spent about two minutes on this exercise; lucky people spent seconds. Why? Because on the paper's second page -- in big type -- was the message "Stop counting: There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." Lucky people tended to spot the message. Unlucky ones didn't. I put a second one halfway through the paper: "Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250." Again, the unlucky people missed it.

The lesson: Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they're too busy looking for something else. Lucky people see what is there rather than just what they're looking for.

This is only part of the story. Many of my lucky participants tried hard to add variety to their lives. Before making important decisions, one altered his route to work. Another described a way of meeting people. He noticed that at parties he usually talked to the same type of person. To change this, he thought of a color and then spoke only to guests wearing that color -- women in red, say, or men in black.

Does this technique work? Well, imagine living in the center of an apple orchard. Each day you must collect a basket of apples. At first, it won't matter where you look. The entire orchard will have apples. Gradually, it becomes harder to find apples in places you've visited before. If you go to new parts of the orchard each time, the odds of finding apples will increase dramatically. It is exactly the same with luck.

Relish the Upside

Another important principle revolved around the way in which lucky and unlucky people deal with misfortune. Imagine representing your country in the Olympics. You compete, do well, and win a bronze medal. Now imagine a second Olympics. This time you do even better and win a silver medal. How happy do you think you'd feel? Most of us think we'd be happier after winning the silver medal.

But research suggests athletes who win bronze medals are actually happier. This is because silver medalists think that if they'd performed slightly better, they might have won a gold medal. In contrast, bronze medalists focus on how if they'd performed slightly worse, they wouldn't have won anything. Psychologists call this ability to imagine what might have happened, rather than what actually happened, "counter-factual" thinking.

To find out if lucky people use counter-factual thinking to ease the impact of misfortune, I asked my subjects to imagine being in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters and fires a shot that hits them in the arms. Unlucky people tended to say this would be their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. Lucky people said it could have been worse: "You could have been shot in the head." This kind of thinking makes people feel better about themselves, keeps expectations high, and increases the likelihood of continuing to live a lucky life.

Learn to Be Lucky

Finally, I created a series of experiments examining whether thought and behavior can enhance good fortune.

First came one-on-one meetings, during which participants completed questionnaires that measured their luck and their satisfaction with six key areas of their lives. I then outlined the main principles of luck, and described techniques designed to help participants react like lucky people. For instance, they were taught how to be more open to opportunities around them, how to break routines, and how to deal with bad luck by imagining things being worse. They were asked to carry out specific exercises for a month and then report back to me.

The results were dramatic: 80 percent were happier and more satisfied with their lives -- and luckier. One unlucky subject said that after adjusting her attitude -- expecting good fortune, not dwelling on the negative -- her bad luck had vanished. One day, she went shopping and found a dress she liked. But she didn't buy it, and when she returned to the store in a week, it was gone. Instead of slinking away disappointed, she looked around and found a better dress -- for less. Events like this made her a much happier person.