Month: December 2019

2019 Non-Fiction Reading List

Non-fiction 非小说类

  1. 江村经济 by 费孝通
  2. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
  3. The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
  4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
  5. 耶路撒冷三千年 by 西蒙·蒙蒂菲奥里
  6. Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J. E. Gordon
  7. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
  8. 冯骥才随笔精选 by 冯骥才
  9. 菊与刀 by 鲁思·本尼迪克特
1. 《江村经济》——费孝通

这是 17 年书单里《乡土中国》的一本相关书籍，是费老早期的成名作品。相比于之后的抽象整理，《江村经济》从更具体的观察对象（开弦弓村）出发，详尽地描绘了一个中国近代经济基本单元“村”的方方面面、其中的发展和变化、各类习俗传统的来源和逻辑。从村庄的规划与河流、什么算本村人以及土地的所有和传承、航船作为一片居民的购买代理人（B2B2C）等等问题，可以看到一个消费生产分配交易体系以及今天的逻辑。

2. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
／《坏血：一个硅谷巨头的秘密与谎言》——约翰·卡雷鲁

Theranos 的故事估计不少人都听过，一路估值冲天至 90 亿美元，然后从 2015 年 10 月华尔街日报一则深度报道开始崩盘。这本 2018 年出版的书就是当时那篇报道的作者，将他整个调查写稿发布过程详细地描绘给大家。书的内容相当精彩，后半部分我几乎是一气呵成看完的。整本书里还有一些其它细节，比如 Murdoch，华尔街日报母公司的控股股东，放着自己在 Theranos 投的 1 亿美元不管，信任华尔街日报的判断，而不理会 Theranos 阻止报道的要求。

3. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
／《昨日之前的世界：我们能从传统社会学到什么？》——贾雷德·戴蒙德

作者在 1997 年以《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》一战成名；《昨日之前的世界》是他 2012 年底出版的近作。与《江村经济》类似，这本书以一个具体社群（新几内亚的部落）为对象展开，描述了这些独立发展出的小型社会的世界观。有时候，不抱着现成的一套观念来了解其它社会可以帮助更深层次地推导某些定义和社会行为逻辑。

4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
／《人类简史：从动物到上帝》——尤瓦尔·赫拉利

这本书应该挺有名的了，宏观地总结了人类发展的关键点。书中提出了一些有趣的观点，比如农业革命让更多人以勉强生存的状况活下去，比如一个社群共同想象力（mutual imagination）的重要性等等。这本书的信息效率很高，丰富有内涵并且能浓缩整理成简史，确实出色。

5. 《耶路撒冷三千年》——西蒙·蒙蒂菲奥里

耶路撒冷 Jerusalem 是一个人类打造出的传奇，在历史上的各个时间点，它都凭借着传奇的历史吸引着当时的人。作者从尽可能客观的视角，围绕这么一个充满争端的城市，展开了它周围的民族文化宗教变迁。也正因如此，历史上耶路撒冷本身其实是相当包容的城市 if not the most。对于有相关历史储备且感兴趣的读者，这应当是很系统的一部佳作。

6. Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J. E. Gordon
／《结构是什么》—— J.E.戈登

作者是近代结构和材料领域先驱之一。当时找到它是因为 Elon Musk 曾在 2015 年提过。是一本比较理论的工程/建筑类书，也解释了不少生活中的东西，从桥梁大坝到烤香肠为何总是长边裂开等等。

7. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
／《鞋狗：耐克创始人菲尔·奈特亲笔自传》——菲尔·奈特

很棒的 Nike 起家史，起始只是个把日本的鞋买到美国的故事。书中有创始人中途做审计和讲师来支持生活，有创立之初就很重视的 CRM，有用 “influencer” 卖鞋，有收入增长与现金流困境，有融资和与银行的拉扯，有从 Blue Ribbon 到 Nike 不得已的转变，有去台湾找工厂喝的茅台等等。干货多，内容难得。

8. 《冯骥才随笔精选》——冯骥才

原本以为会是主题多样的散文选集，结果是一本极力讲中国传统文化保护重要性的文章集锦。冯老讲到了平时没有很多人重视的遗憾：民间文化逐渐遗失缺少传承，古村落作为一个个鲜活的文化载体缺少系统研究保护等等。中国自身文化的多样性，以及对它们包容接受保护的能力，应该是未来在世界舞台更上一个台阶的重要基础。

9. 《菊与刀》——鲁思·本尼迪克特

这本书阐述总结了日本的理念、文化和行为规律，1946 年首次出版，有一些年代感，部分内容在今天看不那么适用。书中着重提到的有日本人的矛盾，有对于一切都是在计划中的执念，有“各守本位”的思想基础，有天皇的特殊地位和影响力，有以“恩”为核心的社会行为指南等等。读完可能会对现在日本电视剧动漫之类的人物设定有更深层次理解。

 

「News of the Week」China’s Amended Securities Law

Reuters – China sets out move to liberalize IPO rules to streamline listings

Caixin – China Approves New Securities Law with Registration-Based IPO System

The amended legislation, due to take effect from March 1, removes complex and time-consuming watchdog scrutiny before listings and is designed to expand registration-based IPOs.

Th requirement for a company to qualify for a new listing is lowered to being “capable of sustainable business operations,” from the previous more stringent “capable of sustained profitability.”

The revised law adds a new chapter on information disclosure.

it also contains provision for heavier punishment on stocks violations and pledges better protection for investors in general.

Dots to connect: fees for investment banks, stock performance for financial services companies, increasing power of exchanges, dropping value of “shell companies”, growing value of indexes, etc..

End of Decade Thoughts (1): An Increasingly Divided United States

This is a series about what we have seen in the past decade.

An Increasingly Divided United States

Three aspects:

1. The 2008 financial crisis provided a great opportunity for those who had equity while made many others in debt work years to recover. And the tax reform exacerbated the process.

– When we entered the past decade, prices were cheap for a lot of equities, but only for those who can buy.

– Differences were then created when the economy recovered – those who held equities enjoyed it.

– On the other hand, those who can’t buy didn’t share the growth (in any bull markets like stock, housing, etc.)

– Thus, more wealth inequalities were created. Supporting evidences could be found for a graph

2. The Republican and Democratic parties are more divided than ever – in fundamental values and action plans.

– The voters were divided before and in the 2016 election.

– It’s a result from dissatisfaction caused by the inequalities mentioned above and also from clashes over values [which is fueled by a multi-year accumulation of “opinions” mentioned below in 3].

– “Like the American public, Congress is also deeply divided. Lack of trust in the other party as well as a lack of bonds between representatives have fueled greater partisanship.” [Harvard Politics Review]

Democrats and Republicans More Ideologically Divided than in the Past
Source: PEW Research

– They are also unable to agree on what issues they should prioritize for policymaking.”

Republicans and Democrats differ over key priorities for the president and Congress in 2019
Source: PEW Research

3. Social medias fueled bias

– “Fake news” is a popular phrase. And misinformation is wide-spread. Meanwhile, social medias have become the primary sources of news.

– Machine-learning enabled “feeds” fulfills the confirmation bias among others.

– Personalization feeds “the most engaging and relevant” content for each individual user, which could easily compromise objectivity and expose human’s weakness.

– When people connect directly with their peers, the social biases that guide their selection of friends come to influence the information they see. [phys.org]

– Social medias made the discovery of “similar” peers, influencers and public accounts much easier, which again made the sources of information biased.

Summary: The econ pressure and social medias “cultivated” the public, leading further disconnections between parties, who made policies that most won’t see as “uniting” forces.

The dividing problems affect the policies again other nations, which are usually used when there is chaos inside.

The fight with the tech industry is also inevitable as political power is diminishing in driving/organizing the society. But tech is needed for overall growth and jobs – making them look more like monopolies is a good way to tackle/regulate.

Online Higher Education (3) – MOOCs

Udacity

As mentioned in the previous blog, Udacity started in 2012, with roots from free computer science classes offered by Stanford in 2011. Its co-founder and CEO Thrun, known as one of the inventors of self-driving cars, has previously founded Google X and Google’s self-driving car team.

In June 2012, Udacity pioneered the on-site finals for MOOCs for a $89 fee, partnering with Pearson.

In Jan 2013, Udacity announced a partnership with San Jose State University (SJSU) to pilot three new courses, available for college credit at SJSU for the Spring 2013 semester and offered entirely online. The courses, if taken for college credits, have a price of $150 per course.

However, six months after it launched, San Jose State was suspending the Udacity partnership as more than half the students in the first batch of online courses failed their final exams.

Udacity has focused more on the vocational courses and create materials from non-universities sources, especially in tech.

In June 2014, Udacity and AT&T announced the “Nanodegree” program, designed to teach programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level IT position at AT&T. The coursework is said to take less than a year to complete, and cost about US$200/month.

In Nov 2015, Udacity raised a $105 million Series D valued at $1 billion, led by Bertelsmann, with Scotland’s Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective and Google Ventures joining as new investors. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital also participated in the round. The announcement came as the company celebrated the one-year anniversary of its nanodegree program. Udacity reported 11,000 students are currently enrolled in nanodegree programs in 168 countries.

Coursera

In Apr 2012, Coursera raised $16 million in venture funding from KPCB and NEA. At the beginning, the company has partnered with Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania to bring professor-created classes online.

Aside from offering free courses to the masses, Coursera’s learning management service (LMS) platform can be used internally by universities to revamp their online course programs.

In Sep 2012, Coursera announced that it is working with the American Council on Education (ACE) to initiate a credit-equivalence evaluation of a subset of the MOOCs.

In Jan 2013, Coursera announced that students would be offered the opportunity to earn Verified Certificates – called Signature Track, priced from $30 to $100 on a course-by-course basis. Students will create a Signature Profile by first taking two photographs with their webcam: one of themselves and another of an acceptable photo ID document. Next, students will create a biometric profile of their unique typing patterns by typing a short phrase. When a student submits work in the course, they authenticate their identity by typing the same short phrase, which is then matched to their recorded samples. Upon successful completion of their course, students will receive a Verified Certificate issued by both the participating university and Coursera.

According to InsideHighEd, revenue from the fee-based path will be split with partner universities. A Coursera spokeswoman said universities would keep 6-15 percent of revenue from courses taught by their professors, as well as 20 percent of profits.

Some other statistics shared by Coursera in May 2013: almost 70% of the students who joined the Signature Track went on to successfully complete their course; 9,000+ students from all around the world have joined the Signature Track for their course; over 2,000 students are taking Gamification from University of Pennsylvania with Signature Track.

Coursera brought in $220,000 in the first quarter of 2013.

More recently, in Apr 2019, Coursera raised $103 million Series E, led by a strategic investor, the Australian online recruitment and course directory provider SEEK Group, with participation from Future Fund and NEA.

A summary so far for MOOCs and fee-for-certificates

As of 2019, we could see fee-for-certificates has become a mainstream business model to monetize on a subset of MOOCs users. Certificates are issued for single-courses or programs (grouped courses).

Certificates could be issued/recognized by the platform (e.g. Udacity, Coursera, edX) and/or by the organizations (companies or universities). Letting users put those certificates on social medias such as LinkedIn do provide an incentive to purchase.

At the same time, part of the materials/courses can still be accessed for free if users don’t need the certificates.

To be continued

Online Higher Education (2) – MOOCs

Developed from universities

The history of massive open online course (MOOC) dated back to 2008 (by Stephen Downes and George Siemens entitled Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge). The intention was to exploit the possibility for interactions between a wide variety of participants made possible by online tools so as to provide a richer learning environment than traditional tools would allow.

MOOCs with an emphasis on interactions and connectivity are now called cMOOCS.

In the fall of 2011, Stanford offered three courses for free online.  Peter Norvig and Sebastien Thrun offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to an initial enrollment of over 160,000 students from around the world. Over 20,000 students completed the course. These xMOOCs focused less on interaction between students and more on exploiting the possibilities of reaching a massive audience.

Nowadays, through MOOCs, anyone with internet access can take some of the most famous courses taught by world-class professors for free, such as Harvard’s Justice. And courses on updated topics such as The Opioid Crisis in America by Harvard Medical School.

Transformed to independent organizations…

Seeing their success of MOOCs, Thrun founded a company called Udacity in February 2012 which began to develop and offer MOOCs for free. Udacity is funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and $200,000 of Thrun’s personal money. In October 2012, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the investment of another $15 million in Udacity.

Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, two other Stanford CS professors started Coursera in April 2012 with three classes in fall 2011 from Stanford.

We will come back to these companies later. But let’s first take a look at a non-profit effort – edX.

edX

The establishment of edX was traced back to MIT’s effort – MITx platform. Announced in Dec 2011, MITx platform is led by Prof Anant Agarwal to offer MOOCs as a constituent program of MIT’s Office of Digital Learning.

Harvard joined forces with MIT in May 2012 when the two schools pooled $60 million in resources and renamed/spun-off the open platform component into edX, a non-profit organization. Open edX is the massively scalable learning software platform behind edX.

Since the origin of MOOCs, which are basically free for users, monetization methods are explored to make those platforms sustainable.

In Sep 2012, edX, partnering with Pearson, introduced “proctored exams” option, which would charge a small fee. edX learners have the option of taking a course final exam at one of over 450 Pearson VUE test centers.

Full fee-for-certificates models were introduced in 2013 following the industry trend.

Students can pay a fee to receive an ID-verified certificate upon successful completion of class requirements. Debuting in Fall 2013, three initial paid certificates would cost $25 for Stat2x: “Introduction to Statistics,” $50 for CS169x: “Software as a Service,” and $100 for 6x: “Circuits and Electronics.”

edX launched grouped-courses-based programs (XSeries) in Sep 2013, and MicroMasters programs in 2016, which may count as credits towards master degrees.

XSeries usually costs several hundred dollars with certificates and includes 3-5 courses. If taken separately, those courses usually can be access for free without certificates.

XSeries on edX | Source: edX
Xseries on edX | Source: edx

For MicroMasters, they are more linked with institutions and existing degrees.

As an example, the MicroMasters® Program in Supply Chain Management, can be used to apply to MIT’s SCM program which awards the Master of Engineering in Logistics (M.Eng. Logistics). The degree will also require another semester of on-campus study. The MicroMasters Program in SCM is also accepted in other universities worldwide.

The MicroMasters in SCM has five online courses. The cost to take each course is US$200. The cost to sit for the Comprehensive Final Exam is $200. The overall cost of the five course plus the final exam is US$1200. And the package can be purchased through edX with a 10% discount.

To be continued

「What’s News In China」

On Dec 17, Tencent Games and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced a collaboration to bring PC gaming in the cloud to China. NVIDIA’s GPU technology will power Tencent Games’ START cloud gaming service, which began testing earlier this year. START gives gamers access to AAA games on underpowered devices anytime, anywhere. Tencent Games intends to scale the platform to millions of gamers, with an experience that is consistent with playing locally on a gaming rig. // nvidia

SoftBank Ventures Asia, a unit under Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has led a CNY500 million (USD71.4 million) fundraising round in Chinese powerbank sharing provider Energy Monster. Energy Monster had over 200 million users in over 1,300 Chinese cities as of the end of November. Founded in 2017, Energy Monster has a 25 percent share of the domestic charger sharing market behind Jiedian with 28.6 percent and Xiaodian with 27 percent, according to figures from TrustData. // YiCai| Trustdata

Apple’s China iPhone shipments fall 35% in November and total iPhone shipments in the September-November period dropped 7.4% from a year earlier, according to Credit Suisse. // Reuters

「News of the Week」India’ New Citizenship Bill

WSJ – Modi Defends India’s New Citizenship Law as Protests Persist

[The new Citizenship Bill was passed in Dec 9]

The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in December, creates a legal loophole for persecuted religious minorities who belong to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian religious communities — but not Islam — eligible for citizenship.

Dots to connect: India’s slow-down -> IMF world economic outlook, potential nationwide registry, access to the web, etc.