Welcome back on campus! For those who just joined us at HC in your second year, welcome to our HC family! If you are newcomers, you might not know that I send out emails every Friday during the semester to share with you my thoughts on different, sometimes random, topics (you can access previous ones on our HC website). This is not a regular Friday email, although today is Friday.
Starting off with our UM Motto, being “Humanity, Integrity, Propriety, Wisdom and Sincerity” (仁、義、禮、知、信), I hope you will bear in mind these as your personality traits and goals for your careers and life-long achievements. People often learn from experience to build and strengthen these traits. What we might not be aware of is that our experiences also tend to impact our decisions, and education can help us overcome these biases in our experience. Professor Douglas Diamond of University of Chicago, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, mentioned in his article:
“Being able to draw on different views, different beliefs, and different perspectives is important for innovation. When your thinking isn’t confined to the events of your own experience, you’ve got a major competitive advantage in an environment where you’ve got to get out first ahead of rivals… Your experiences matter more than you may realize. The key is to use them to amplify and build on your knowledge, rather than being biased by them.”
You can read his article here .
A second point I would like emphasize is that, if you are now in your second year, please do not compare your workload with that in your first year, for two reasons. Year one is a foundation year, usually with many general courses with general concepts. Year two will be the start of more discipline focused, often more demanding, courses with new concepts. Coupled with this is the additional course requirement from HC. So, please DO NOT underestimate the workload of your second year. With that, all we want from you is your participation in HC activities, and sharing with us your ideas of how you want to contribute to HC, and what you think HC could provide.
I will resume our regular Friday emails once our first year newcomers start joining us in October. Stay tuned!
See you around! Have a nice second teaching weekend of the semester!
After a long break (summer break and then waiting for the new group of HCers to join us), here I am writing to you regularly on every teaching Friday again. As a warm-up, I would like to show you two results found by Statista. Yes, if you follow my emails, you know that I often take reference to Statista, which is a very resourceful data provider, perhaps even useful for your research projects. Anyway, today’s topics include:
- The Enormous Scale of Global Food Waste: https://www.statista.com/chart/24350/total-annual-household-waste-produced-in-selected-countries/
- Energy Consumption by Countries:
China is ranked the top in both subjects. For food waste, one may say it is not surprising because China has a huge population. Yes, that is correct. Brazil, for example, is only ranked fourth as a nation, but way higher on per capital waste. What is astonishing is how much each person can waste in these countries (and how diverse), while there is not even enough food for the children in some other poor countries. And yes, there is not much we can do. But if each of us tries to avoid wasting food, we should collectively be able to help with the world’s sustainability.
Regarding energy consumption, China again ranks the top in primary energy consumption, significantly outnumbering the second one, the United States. The good news is that it not only is reducing the use of coal for generating electricity, but is also actually the top in the world to use renewable energy. I have shared several emails about energy and sustainability in the past. Because this is a crucial subject for our future, your future, I might share more in the future.
Enough for now! Hope you enjoy the read, and enjoy your weekend!
I talked about energy consumption last week. If you have already been with HC for some time, you know that I talk about the environment and climate change a lot. True! These are not only trendy topics, but actually have big impacts to our lives, the impacts of which we will see only in the long years to come, but which can be unimaginably destructive. This time, I shall connect you to three important and trendy terms: gender equality, green jobs, and STEM, with reference to a recent blog from IMF (International Monetary Funds) with the exact title as this email. In case you do not know what STEM means, it is the approach to learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics together, although the newer version has become STEAM, with “A” standing for arts. “Green jobs” means the jobs/occupations related to green energy. Here is the link to the blog: https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/10/07/why-women-risk-losing-out-in-shift-to-green-jobs
The blog starts with people predicting that when more green jobs replace brown (energy generation that will pollute the earth) jobs, more men will lose their jobs. It turns out that women also lose jobs, because gender inequality has caused fewer female students to study STEM, which is crucial knowledge for developing green jobs. To change this phenomenon, the blog further referred to a study by IMF people entitled “Green Jobs and the Future of Work for Women and Men”, that countries with less gender inequality in STEM degrees, such as Ireland, has faster greenhouse gas emission reduction.
I shall leave the following sentences from the blog to you for more thoughts:
“STEM education drives green innovation and gives workers the skills they need for green jobs.”
“… policymakers should support women’s participation in the economy by reducing labor market barriers, improving access to finance, reforming legal frameworks, and increasing board representation. This will make the green transition more inclusive and improve the effectiveness of climate policies.”
Enjoy your weekend.
I recently came across a simple but inspirational message which I would like to share with you. Unfortunately, I cannot find the source of this message, as there are many versions if you Google it. The title is “Your title doesn’t make you a leader”. Very true! What is the use of a job title “Senior Executive” (“Executive” sounds executive! “Senior” is even better!) with no one for you to lead? Even worse is if you have subordinates who do not like working for you, or who do not listen to you. So, what will make you a leader? Think of the following six traits:
- Your Vision
- Your Integrity
- Your Actions
- Your Empathy
- Your Communication
- Your Accountability
I have seen many who thought they were leaders because they could pass their thoughts to others clearly (point 5 above). But to motivate people to listen to you, your thoughts should be visionary. More importantly, your team members have to be confident that you have your integrity (be ethical and stick to your promises), you act (rather than enjoying your life while they work over time), and you are accountable for what you do as well as for your team. And if they made mistakes, they have your empathy, rather than blaming them instead of solving the problem.
These traits should be what decent persons have, not only for leaders. I hope you as HCers possess them too.
Dear HCers
Guess this is around the end of your series of midterm examinations! Hope you manage to have some rest!
I try to keep this short and light this week. Time magazine has an article about “8 Toxic Communication Habits” last week. Let me try to summarize them here.
- Making it all about you – Most people do not like self-centered people. Do not let others’ conversation always land on you, such as starting with “Oh, I also have similar experience…” and steal away others’ focus
- Shutting down when you are upset – because your friend won’t know when to come back to care about you
- Frequent interrupting when others talk
- Rambling on, and on, and on – please make your point clear and short
- Distracted “Listening” – I think many of you do, like playing with your phone and pretending you are listening
- One-upping the other person – Do not compare and try to beat others; that is, saying “oh yes, I got a newer model than this.”
- Opinion-jacking – Do not repeat the opinion from someone who just spoke up before you and treat it as your idea
- Offering unsolicited advice when it is not needed
If you want to read in details, here’s the link:
Enjoy your weekend!
Today’s title is also the title of a book by Vaclav Smil who is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. By the way, do you know what is “professor emeritus”? There are a few at the University of Macau, too.
Back to the book. Prof. Smil has written several interesting and easy to read books, including this one, and the one entitled How the World Really Works. To give you a flavor about what he covers, let me share two chapters with you. One is “Why electric cars aren’t as great as we thing (yet)”. It was once predicted that electric vehicles (EVs) will constitute 11% of the global car market in 2020. Really? It is less than 4%!! One point to note. The aim of having EVs is to reduce carbon emission. But do not forget where the electricity used to charge them comes from. In 2020, over 60% of global electricity is still generated from fossil fuels. That means the global mean (or average) of electricity for EVs is still over 60% from brown energy.
What do you have in mind now? That those countries with EVs are usually developed countries, such as Canada, Norway, or France, where electricity comes from renewable energy? Partly true! But what you might have ignored is the greenhouse gas generated during the production process, during which higher toxicity to human and freshwater ecosystems are simultaneously generated. You will definitely learn more than what is merely mentioned here if you have a chance to read the book.
So, let’s hope technology can be significantly improved in the EV industry to really enhance the benefits of EV to the planet earth.
I shall leave the other chapter for next week.
Here’s the other chapter chosen from Numbers Don’t Lie, entitled “What’s worse for the environment – your car or your phone?”. What do you think? If it is obvious, I guess Prof. Smil will not have written this chapter.
According to the chapter, an average sedan (4-seater) weighs 1.4 tons while a smartphone weighs 140grams. Now, take another angle. About 1.75 billion mobile phones were sold in 2020. About 250 million of other portable computing devices such as laptops, notebooks tablets were sold in the same year. The total weight would be about 550,000 tons. In summary, without telling you the units of energy consumption, new cars weigh more than 180 times as much as all portable computing devices combined, but require 7 times as much energy to make. Considering the need for more frequent replacement of the computer devices versus cars, the energy used for producing cars is just double of that of computer devices.
Considering all of the above, mobile phones still consume less energy than cars. What is missing? Network that supports our phones, and servers that have to save our data! Think of how much of your data is in the “cloud”. I remember watching a documentary in which a group of the younger generation in a northern European country were asked about protecting the environment. They all agreed that they participated, until they were asked to cut the daily usage of their mobile phones. Oh well!
Here’s the open question. What will you do to help save our planet earth?
Have a good weekend!
Tomorrow will be the last class day of this semester. That means this Friday email serves as the last one for this semester.
To continue the topic of the previous two weeks, have you heard of Waymo? It is an American company for autonomous driving technology, and a subsidiary of Alphabet. What is so special about Waymo? It supplies robotaxis. As at the end of August, there were already 100,000 paid rides per week, which was a double in just three months. Its services are now available in Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Impressive? It reflects how much people trust technology. But in a recent study by Forbes, Waymo rides turned out to be more expensive and took twice as long to reach the destination in over 50 rides when compared to a taxi service with a driver by Uber. Some of you may be giving me a flown face now because China has already had Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan, and will be extended to Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing, probably, soon.
My point is that we need to keep inventing and fine-tuning our technologies to make them work, sometimes taking quite long. A lot of patience and money are both necessary! And yet, we also have to think which technologies are necessary in improving human living, and which are not. And their pros and cons. For example, by having more robotaxi services, will sustainability and bio-diversity be enhanced, for example, as in COP29, which was held in Azerbaijan over the last two weeks? Not to mention the number of job loss by taxi drivers! And safety for the time being?
You, potential future leaders, should consider both pros and cons, benefits and impacts, every time you make a decision, as you should be responsible not only for the decisions, but the world you live in, and the people you work for.
Good luck to your examinations! Let’s talk again next semester.
By the way, if you are not very familiar with any of the terms I used above, please Google search them. I am sure you will be opened to a world of knowledge which you have no idea of learning before.
Merry Christmas in advance!
Welcome back to the new semester! Hope you have had some fun time and enough rest during the Christmas and New Year holidays!
In this beginning of 2025, some of you have gone to new places – our partner universities – for your “study abroad” experiences. For those of you in your second year, you will have to start preparing for this “study abroad” applications. If you are in your Year 1, perhaps you will have to be ready for taking TOEFL or IELTs in order to submit your scores to meet the English Proficiency requirement. What do you have to do if you are in Year 4? Prepare for your Honours projects?
You might ask why I want to remind you of your work at HC. Well, I actually meant to remind you that, yes, your studies are important, but so is the awareness of what is happening around the world. I was in Japan for vacation in December. The weather was beautiful, warmer than usual. But two days after I came back, it snowed heavier than it usually would. I just came back from a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Macao time. Then, on Tuesday, US west coast time, wildfires hit several places in Los Angeles, burning down many houses, including those of the celebrities. Ten years ago, we had to wear thick coats and down jackets in December in Macao. The highest temperature yesterday, Jan. 9, 2025, was 20 degrees Celsius! Look what has global warming done to us!
Yes, you have to live responsibly by being environmentally friendly. But can you do more than that? Please have a look at the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals. The aim is to “ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity”. Only a little more than 5 years left before 2030. Where are we now? Far from achieving the goals? Almost there? Something for you to learn, think, and see if you can even take action of some sorts to help push us closer to the goals!