A Touching Story -- Jason Brown from NFL

(12/5/2014) At the era that most people pursuing material advances and many rich people get greedier, I am very moved by this story from Huffington Post. Jason Brown, an ex-NFL football player from St. Louis Ram, shared his life now as a farmer. Our society needs more dreamers like Jason Brown who are willing to help and share.

Jason Brown

No Cross-Dressing in Haddon, NJ? Not Anymore.

(4/28/2014) Sometimes to change the society is not as difficult as you think. This comedian just acted and change the dated "no cross-dressing" law in Haddon, NJ. What an interesting activist and comedian and he changes the society in the most creative way!


Ben Kissel - Lawbreaker from Adam Wirtz on Vimeo.

A PR Lesson to Learn in the Modern Time

(4/15/2014) LOL！It only amused some local passerbys. Now they make it a international joke. A great lesson for those who are in charge public relations and communications.

See the World From the Bird's-Eye View

(4/12/2014) This photographer mounted a camera out of the cockpit. See how wonderful these views are.

Redirected from Huffingtonpost.com

Redirected from Huffingtonpost.com

Redirected from Huffingtonpost.com

Redirected from Huffingtonpost.com

Gender, Porn and Business

(2/28/2014) A female students at Duke University was exposed by a Fraternity about her porn side-job. This news now spread through the campus and caused some troubles to the students. If she can be accepted as a Duke student, why do we care about her side-job that provides some services to the society?

Let us say Hefner (Playboy's publisher) wants to attend the MBA to improve his adult business. Would the business school accept his application?

Job Hierarchy in Zappo's Is Now Holacracy

(12/30/2013) The world largest online shoes shop -- Zappo's -- has gone through some organizational structure changes. Their new structure is called "Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers." As the business continues to grow, the Holacracy introduced into Zappo's is to "scale Zappos without letting bureaucracy set in." This reorganization gets much attention because Zappo's the largest company to implement Holacracy so far. Next time when you are upset by Zappo's customer service representative, you cannot ask "let me talk to your manager!"

A Warning from Carl Sagan

(12/16/2013) This is a video originally aired on "Charlie Rose" in 1996. Carl Sagan, as an outstanding scientist and astronomer, gave us a warning about that general public not knowing science and technology. He said "We live on an age that based on sciences and technologies... if we general public does not understand sciences and technologies ... who is making all the decisions about sciences and technologies are going to determine what kind of future our children will live in."

I think what Sagan said applies to business operations too. Now the business financial and tax manipulations are so complicated, not even financial experts can figure out what's really going on. Same as the global supply chain. The consumers are so far and alienated from the real suppliers, they do not know how their purchasing decisions form the global labor and production division and show less interest to know the complexity too.

Beauty Right Next To Us

(11/26/2013) We WOW and find beauty in very large, very small, very fast and very slow because it is a world we didn't know it is right next to us and behave in that unique way......

Your Dream House Maybe Better Comes Later

(11/1/2013) Owning your dream house is a recent American dream, which also triggered the housing bubbles mid 2000's. After the biggest recession in 2008, the US employment situation grew very slowly even though the overall recovery is good.  The national average unemployment rate in the US is still around 7.2% now. People call it "jobless recovery." What is the cause of low-job growth in the economic recovery after 2008? One of the reasons maybe the higher house ownership. Based on this study of economics professor Andrew Oswald from Warwick University, the states with higher house ownership is significantly related to their higher unemployment (their research covered some European countries too). The reason: the labor mobility drops because the labor prefers a job near the house. It may sound ironic at first, but it is pretty reasonable. The global economy now just changes so fast. A booming industry in a city may move to another state in 5-10 years. The employees who buy houses during the booming years face a big change in the job market once several business employers move somewhere. Then they are stuck.

Your dream house maybe better comes later.

How Did OSU Marching Band Do It?

(10/30/2013) If you have seen some OSU's football games recently, you are probably amazed by their amazing marching figure animations. NBCnews now reveals the secret of their artwork: iPad. I can imagine that in the future the NCAA mid-game show will be a fierce competition as well.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Benefits of Yoga Practices

(10/28/2013) Many people have heard that yoga practices bring a lot of benefits to our mind and body. Here is a summary of researches (see the link) that demonstrate the various benefits of yoga. Next time, when you feel tired or stressed, maybe you should really give yoga a try (or be determinant to practice yoga regularly if you have learned). I am a regular yoga practitioner. Doing yoga and mediation make me a more efficient worker and learn how to enjoy life.

Visualize Something Very Big and Very Small

(10/26/2013) We difficulty to process something very big or something very small. Say, 9,460,730,472,580.8 km in distance, you know it must be very far, but how far? One light year. Or a length of 1.61605e-32 mm, how long is it? It's a unit of plank length, which is assumed to be the smallest unit of distance at the quantum scale. That is the limitation of our biological brain. So look at these pictures and guess what it is. Click here to know the answers and more amazing pictures in the micro and macro scales.

Crazy Innovation -- Fart Filtering Underwear

(10/24/2013) This will be the most crazy innovation of this year (maybe decade): fart filtering underwear, which comes from the United Kingdom. It says "Americans are making up the majority of our sales at the moment." OK, Wait a moment. Do American fart more than other people, or are American more ashamed of it? Well, I am still not an American at this moment.

I would say the price is pretty 'reasonable,' $31 to $45 a piece (The Calvin Klein designer male underwear can easily go above $30 per item). No wonder it says the company has experienced 400 percent increase in their order. By the way, does the fart filter has some expiration date or maximal amounts of usage?

(11/18/2014) Last year, I used this new innovation in my MBA class. Their reaction was very hilarious. However, I had some doubt about their business sustainability. I plan to use this example again tomorrow in class. Before I do, I check whether this company (myshreddies.com) still exists. Guess what? It does and seems to do pretty well. I would recommend they sell their patent to all major underwear makers. Check out how they name the product lines ( FLATULENCE, INCONTINENCE...), hilarious.

Another recommendation: they should have some thicker filter models. They will last longer and raise ('disguise') some people's butts by visually misleading viewers.

This is a new picture that used in their website homepage. Can sniffing be more fun than this? It reminds of the dogs in my neighborhood. 

Herpes and Human Migration

(10/24/2013) You may wonder what is Herpes related to business? Well, not directly. But I want to show you the data visualization and the creativity of this research. "Human beings originate from Africa" theory has been speculated for a long time, and human genome research has partly shows how human migrated out of Africa. This herpes research shows another evidence of it. Well, please read it yourself. Why do they use herpes? Their research will demonstrate the creativity of this research.

What I like to show you here is the data visualization of this research. Well, if they can compile their data along the timeline and show the changes and human migration over time, that will be fantastic.

World map featuring the geographic location of the 6 HSV-1 clades with respect to human migration.

Phylogenetic network of Herpes.

Most Advanced Data Storage, Processing and Accessing in the World

(10/18/2013) Do you know which field has the most advanced data storage, processing and accessing technology in the world? It is in the scientific research of the Universe. Each day, there are "700 terabytes of data are expected to rush in" and collected. Definitely, we are in a 'world' with significant details that have more than we can conceptualize and understand. Can we really comprehend the whole universe with so much data to process? How much more details we need to know the Universe? I wonder what the most 'efficient' way to probe the Universe is.

Budget Airlines and Pickpocketing Gangs

(10/11/2013) We know budget airlines are very popular in Europe. You can fly between German and England with 10 euros. The tickets are so cheap, the members of pickpocketing gangs just fly out of Romania, do their works, then fly home with their loots. They don't stay in one city and they can do a lot of sight seeing and traveling. What a great life, right?
I think these thieves probably have cumulated quite a lot of mileages on the budget airlines. Do they redeem their mileages?

Inspiring Speech - From Online Dating to CRM?

(10/6/2013) This woman reminds me of Nate Silver. Interestingly, both them are jewish. Not only her speech is very inspiring, I am thinking some of the techniques might be useful for customer relationship management (CRM). What are the algorithms used by those online or mobile marketers? Maybe they should watch this speech.

No Jerk, Please!

(10/4/2013) We probably all worked with jerks sometime in our life. It is pain in the ass and we just try to avoid any encounter with that person. If "No jerks, please!" is the sign on a job description, what would you think of this company? It seems now some firms dare to take a firm standing saying that: we don't want jerks to work with us. Life is too short to deal with jerks, isn't it?

LucidChart for Business Education

(9/24/2013) Today I introduced LucidChart (a cloud-based diagramming software) to our SIMBA students. It was a blast. I found this platform last year during my first year of MBA teaching and briefly introduced it to them. But this year, I had more time to prepare and decided to introduce Lucidchart in the first class of OM/SCM introduction.

It was a blast because our students are very creative. After I showed them more diagram shapes (other than the basic flow chart shapes), it's like releasing school kids in the playground. From the diagrams they built and shared with me, I was 'forced' to learn more about LucidChart. I studied on LucidChart.com and found more...

Not only Lucidchart has process engineering, venn diagram, and iPhone, iPad and Android mockups, it also has organization chart, Cisco Network icons ..... You can share with your teammates (students or teachers), you can also link with your google account and construct Lucidchart diagrams directly from Google Drive. And the most important thing is it is free for academic usage, I have applied for 45 accounts that my students in their learning with me can also use it free. LucidChart.com has a community that users share their application and creativity.

(10/31/2013) Today, the same company just release another tool - LucidPress.com. I have not used it yet. It seems to be a cloud-base collaborative reporting tools that now they provide FREE to educators and students. Check it out.

A LucidChart diagrams drawn by Chris in 30 minutes, a high school student who took URITC Summer Academy with me in this summer. Great job, Chris. 

Simulation of War and Evolution

(9/24/2013) I found this research -- War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies -- very interesting though its claim might be too much for many historians to accept. You can find the original full paper and supporting documents here. I wonder whether the methodology can be applied to other aspects of business activities.