week 4

i have fallen quite far behind in my postings and so this is going to be a consolidated account of week 4.  after a long break (only 3 days, but it's relatively longer than normal weekends), it was time to get back to work!  and more food.  don't remember much about this meal except for the watermelon at top right.  it was spicy!  can't tell what the rest is from the picture but it does look nice doesn't it?

and i'm a sucker for the desserts here.  they always look so good.  even the cookies are fabulous.

this is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of HP (Hewlett Packard), who came to give a talk.  a CEO is the person who runs the company.  he may or may not be the owner.  if he is the owner, and he runs it, he is the CEO.  but he could also choose to hire someone to perform that role.  for companies that are owned by a group of people, usually there is a board of directors who looks after the company but as they may hold other jobs, they cannot be involved in the day-to-day running of the company.  this job is usually entrusted to someone who is hired as CEO.  

this HP CEO spoke about HP's dominant position in the PC (personal computer) market and what the future of the computing would be.  one of the most important developments currently is the cloud.  what is the cloud?  well, as far as i know, the simplest explanation is that it is a kind of personal storage space that is out there on the internet so that wherever you go, as long as you can log into the internet, you can have access to all your documents, including music, movies etc.  apple has just recently launched their version of it called (what else?) icloud.  of course you have to pay for this convenience.  so no more worries about your computer crashing and losing data.

this is an ice cream bar.  not bad.

one of the rare asian days at lunch.  this was indian food, which was great.  can you spy what is on top?  bak kut teh!!!  someone came back from singapore with the spices and the chef made the soup for us.  i only managed to get one bowl as it ran out quickly.  the ribs were really good but the soup was a bit salty.  still, it was good to taste something from home.

this was an optional lecture i really enjoyed.  it was by professor neale, who used to be a marriage counsellor, and then turned to academia.  she now teaches negotiations and it was funny that one of the first things she said was to rubbish a book recommended by another professor in the program - the book was titled "getting to yes".  basically the book's premise was that there was a better way to approach negotiations other than with the view that it is a zero-sum game.  a zero-sum game simply means that what can be won is finite, i.e. there is only so much to be won.  if one wins, the other must lose.  in the book, the author writes that often, there are "win-win" scenarios, i.e. both sides get what they want, or at least are satisfied.  (this can happen because we don't know what the other party actually wants.  they may have settled for something less.) 

professor neale disagrees.  she said that in negotiations, the main goal must be to get what you want.  of course if the other party is willing to compromise, that's their problem.  and she says that most of the time, people end up with bad deals because they want to reach a deal, and are often ill-prepared, such that they don't even know what they are prepared to settle for.  and in their eagerness to reach a deal (they think that "no deal" is worse than a "bad deal"), they settle for something far less (especially if the other party is more skillful at negotiating).  

we played a game which illustrated how funny results can occur when people are not clear about what they want out of the deal.  we paired up - one party plays a recruiter, and the other is a job applicant.  the job applicant obviously wants more pay, more vacation days, while the recruiter wants to pay less and so on.  what we didn't know was that there were some areas of negotiation where our interests coincided e.g. we would prefer the applicant works in new york, and so does the applicant (but we don't know this).  the game is scored based on points awarded for each area negotiated and we were free to decide that we could not reach a deal. she had the results analysed and pointed out how strange it was that there were some who reached a deal in which the choice of city was not new york when it was something both parties wanted!  that was a very powerful lesson.

friday and yet another theme party.  this time it was the turn of the europeans.  this is the biggest dish (pile?) of paella i have ever seen.  it was really good too.  below you see a magician (in stripes).  he would give you a box to place a die and he would guess which number was facing up.  because he sportingly performed the same trick so many times, it gave us a chance to figure it out.  normally, in magic shows, preserving the illusion is one of the most important things and so if they do it well enough, you would not be able to figure out how they do it, or even if you could guess, there would not be enough information to confirm your belief.  he also did this trick in which he would write a number, then ask you to think of a number and show you the number you were thinking of.

for the die in the box trick, he probably had some kind of electronic gadget in his pocket because he would always put his hand in his right trousers pocket before guessing the number.  for the trick where it seemed like he could predict what number you were going to think of, he basically wrote the number with his thumb while holding the writing pad close to his chest - AFTER you had told him the number you were thinking of.  but there were other tricks in which his hands were so fast that i was astonished at how he did it.  in one of them, i held a container in my palm, and did not notice when he put in a card!

ice carving of a train at the dinner.  the party went on till quite late and from my room, i could hear the music go on till almost 11.