NU 12 by Kristine Rafer - What pissses you off at the school?

Kristine Rafer

Entrep-MM

Topic 11: What pisses you off at the school What must be done?

Ateneo Graduate School provides high and advantageous education, where students do not only learn but also earn a competitive edge over the others, speaking primarily in terms of competition to the game in the outside world.

Unfortunately, there are various processes that need to be improved. Enrollment process is one, it is good that online reservation and payment is enabled. However, those that are not taking online for some reasons that maybe they do not have the capability to proceed or there might be other reasons that hampers their ability to do so.

I noticed that enrollment process at Rockwell campus is not as efficient as it should be. Cashier is located at the ground floor, registrar is located at the second floor, credit card payment is on another room, and books for sale and materials available is at the second floor in another room. What's happening during enrollment is students will reserve subjects online, before the 24 hours end each has to go to the campus for payment if they can't do it online. Prior payment, confirmation of the reserve subject(s) happens in the registrar office at the second floor. Once confirmed, each student has to go down to the ground floor for payment. After payment is processed, students have to go up again to the second floor to get the syllabus and check if books are available for purchase. Upon checking the availability of the books, and decided to purchase, statement of account will be issued for payment. Hence, the student will go down again to the cashier to pay for the books and go up again to get the books upon presentation of payment receipt. Right after the enrollment, students are sweating like they come from the gym.

The set up is as if they are promoting fitness of the students during enrollment.

With the current set up, the school administration can put the series of enrollment steps together. Place them in one floor and in series to help students in the enrollment process, which could be easy and relax.

The enrollment process is the first step in how incoming students look at, if the institution can help them with their learning and growth, but if students will be stressed in this first step, possibility of transferring to other school is not out of the options.

Lucky that the school is already a reputable institution, what if it is just like another low profile universities' that are trying to get as much enrollees as possible.

Improving their enrollment process seems not to be critical for the institution to provide high quality education, but I believe that it is important and could be part of the future plans for continuous improvement. 3

KRafer - NU12 - Topic 10 Systems Integration

Kristine Rafer

Entrep-MM

Topic 10: What pisses you off in your office? What do you think must be done?

I'm currently working in an IT company, the use of technology is the core focus of the company's business. Our employees are group of highly skilled programmers and other technologically inclined professionals that can build complex systems and applications.

However, the internal systems for administrative management are not as efficient as it should be, at the moment. There are so many isolated systems that the company is using, where in fact they can be interconnected. We have a separate time monitoring system, but attendance filing is being done manually for over time, leaves, offsetting, etc. We also have separate system for payroll, and approval of the same. We also have a separate system for monitoring of employee's allocation for G&A budgeting and expenses audit. These systems are eating up resources to maintain and sustain but if they will be interconnected, efficiency and effectiveness can be recognized.

The company can spare at least one programmer to take on the lead to fix this in a matter of time.

How it is going to be done?

Get all the systems and design them to be interconnected with each other.

In one system, the following can be done;

1. Profiling – enables the gathering of employees profile such as; employment date, title, working hours, days off, administrative head, compensation package, etc.
2. Allocation – project percentage allocation start and end, enable the capability to update the tasks progress and enable the accounting and finance to pull out reports for budgeting and audit
3. Time clocking – provides ability to log in and log out, to adjust time and offset
4. Filing for payroll – provides ability to fix all the admin filing, leaves, holidays, overtimes, etc.
5. Approval – once all is set, enables to request for admin heads' approval for accounting processing

This is similar to the Human Resource Information System (HRIS) product available for sale in the market. Although the company can purchase, savings is expected if it will have its current systems interconnected to support the needs given the resources it has. This can be done with proper proposal for approval and planning for implementation. 3

KRafer - NU12 - Topic 8; Getting transportation for mall shoppers

Kristine Rafer

Entrep-MM

Topic 8: What pisses you off at the mall? What do you suggest?

Most of the time people go to the mall for the purposes of either or combination of;

• Shopping
• Dining
• Stroll

There are so many improvements that these malls in Metro Manila can take on that are associated to the customers' purpose.

Related to shopping, it is bad customer experience to keep them waiting while getting stocks from afar. Often times, waiting time just to get the right item takes about 15 minutes, on the average. Sometimes customer became tired of waiting which caused them to leave instead. This becomes lose of sales to the merchandisers. Another disappointing scenario is that the customer already waited just to know in the end that stock is no longer available.

Dining and strolling or window shopping makes it difficult when looking for a specific restaurant or shop but the facilities, like directories are not reliable and often times not functioning as expected. Right now, directories are present inside the mall to guide customers in the location of the shops but it seems outdated and often times not available.  

I believe that mall staffs are doing everything to keep their facilities working to sustain the needs of their customers. However, consistency to ensure the expected functionality should be enforced. There should be frequency of maintenance and daily checking of the facilities if they are still working as they should be.

As for the immediate availability of the stocks, the merchandisers should be keeping an updated inventory of the stocks at their stall. Keep enough items and sizes of all items on display to make sure that customers are not going to wait for the purchase to be completed.

Another thing that I noticed to be critical is the availability of taxi cabs for the customers. The mall management already provided bays for the taxi cabs to pick up passengers. However, the taxi cabs are not enough to take passengers to their destinations during rush hours and peak seasons like; Christmas and when there is a mall wide sale. Most often, customers tend to go home early not to be caught in the middle of traffic and worst case, past by their means of transportation going home. The mall management can work with the taxi cab operators to get as much as taxi into the mall during rush hours and peak seasons where people always go shopping because of huge discounts. This can be part of the after sales service that the organization can provide to their customers. The taxi drivers will surely get passengers from the mall without wasting time and gas in roaming around to find passengers off the road. This arrangement can surely be worked out by the management of the mall to ensure the safety of their customers. 3

KRafer - NU12 - Topic 5

Kristine Rafer

Entrep-MM

Topic 5: New Products / Products Improvement

Plastic Finger Food Picker

Have you ever experienced eating finger foods like; chips, peanuts, chicken wings, and other mouth watering snacks that you can't get away from using your hands to savor their tastes?

We often experience this during parties, at home and even eating outside. What do you do if in a party, while you are eating using your hands someone approaches to introduce a friend to you, and offer a handshake? As always and usual, we look for a table napkin to clean up the residue but totally smell can't be avoided until we properly wash our hands. For people who are cautious about the dirt that might be on their hands, sometimes people tend to choose what they are going to eat which spoils everything.

Another scenario is in the office, when having chips or French fries as snack. When someone approaches and ask for your signature, what do you do? Look for table napkin or go to the restroom to wash prior we attend to others needs.

Imagine if there is no need to worry about getting hands dirty while eating finger foods. This new product will take away all the worries that we have.

Plastic finger food picker is made of plastic material that can fit into 2 thumb and index fingers. This can be bought at the grocery stores and can be included in the packaging of chips and other packed snacks. In line with this, a contract can be worked out the big companies who are producing products related to the need for this small but useful material.  3

Mark Cuban's 12 rules for start ups (better to call them suggestions)

Rizal Philippines  |  December 19, 2013

From Entrepreneur. com by Mark Cuban

It is just 5 days before Christmas.  Merry Christmas to all start ups out there.

Rules for start ups?  May be guide. Start ups hate rules.  They are there in the first place because they dislike rules.  Maybe guide or suggestions are better title.

Here are some of them:

1.  Start a company you love and like doing;  ;

2.  If you have an exit strategy, you violate numbe 1;

3. Hire people who like your company

4.   Sales cure all (financing etc)  Start a company whose product are liked by people and therefore will sell

5.  Know your competencies and focus on being good at them

Read more

Big data = big profits. Agree?

Rizal  Philippines  |  December 19, 2013

It is 5 days before Christmas

Repost from Entrepreneur.com | December 16, 2013  by Brian Patrick Eha

A lot of spending is going on.  In US this is estimated to be $580 billion. And big data, the buzzword this year, is going to help a lot analyze the consumer spending data.

The infographics here say that marketers, and business chief can harness the staggering amount of data to improve revenues and bottom line.  72% say they do not know how to use big data  Some factoids:

42% of European consumers do web searches prior to making purchases;

61% of consumers do web searches in purchase journey

A 10 year study that using big data improved productivity by 5% and profitability by 6%

Next Big Future - 8 new articles

Latest updates:

1.  Bitcoin currency and its supercomputer network

2.  500 trillion tons of fresh water in aquifers under the sea.  Our water shortage problem is solved

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"Next Big Future" - 8 new articles

1. Bitcoin network is over 256 times more powerful than the top 500 supercomputers combined at over 64 Exaflops
2. A long way from Green lantern but double ring uses body heat to light an LED
3. 500 trillion tons of fresh water under the ocean's continental shelf in giant aquifers
4. Carnival of Space 331
5. They are coming for your retirement and college savings
6. Exoplanet at 650 AU does not fit any planet formation theories
7. China's lunar rover is expected to land December 14
8. Selling out over the Long term to achieve upward mobility
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Bitcoin network is over 256 times more powerful than the top 500 supercomputers combined at over 64 Exaflops In November, 2013, the Global bitcoin network passed 64 exaflops. This is 256 times the computer power of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Total bitcoin valuation is currently over $8 billion. The exaflops are not floating point and are mainly dedicated specially designed ASICS.   Bitcoin charts tracks news, statistics and other information about bitcoin. Bitcoin.sipa.be tracks bitcoin computing and other metrics. In May, 2013, Bitcoin became the world's largest distributed computing project, eight times more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined. That is a huge amount of computing power that could be used for other projects like research into genetics, or searching for extraterrestrial life, or modeling weather and the climate, or a huge number of other endeavors. Mining digital currency entails a huge opportunity cost, just as mining gold and silver for money did. Bitcoin mining works by setting a computer to chew on long and arduous "hash" problems that can't be streamlined and don't require floating point operations at all; the whole point is to tie up computer time and make the Bitcoin discovery process time-consuming and difficult. Dedicated mining hardware, which is becoming more popular in the Bitcoin mining community, is intentionally terrible at floating point calculations. making it more difficult to do this kind of direct comparison with general purpose computers. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • A long way from Green lantern but double ring uses body heat to light an LED The basic idea for this ring was to take a piece of a aluminum to make the ring out of, design it to fit the PCB and peltier, and create a heatsink that mounts on the other side of the peltier unit. Originally he had planed to make this a single finger ring but somewhere along the way my brain had fallen for a 2 finger design; It was much more practical, and surprisingly the PCB I made was the perfect size to fit across two fingers, leaving the heat sink on the side.   The finished ring has a glowing LED just from the heat of the makers hand. Thermoelectric materials are improving and LEDs are getting more efficient at converting energy to light. Ultimately taking about 1 watt for powering devices should be possible. There is more energy to be harvested from the footfalls of people when they are walking and from light solar film that could still be comfortably worn. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • 500 trillion tons of fresh water under the ocean's continental shelf in giant aquifers Nature - Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon   The flow of terrestrial groundwater to the sea is an important natural component of the hydrological cycle. This process, however, does not explain the large volumes of low-salinity groundwater that are found below continental shelves. There is mounting evidence for the global occurrence of offshore fresh and brackish groundwater reserves. The potential use of these non-renewable reserves as a freshwater resource provides a clear incentive for future research. But the scope for continental shelf hydrogeology is broader and we envisage that it can contribute to the advancement of other scientific disciplines, in particular sedimentology and marine geochemistry. Vast freshwater reserves have been discovered under the ocean floor which scientists believe could sustain future generations. Australian researchers claim to have found 500,000 cubic kilometres (500 trillion tons) of freshwater buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. The water could be accessed using the technology of deepwater oil drilling rigs. The infrastructure of pipelines could be setup to access millions of tons per day. The discovery comes as United Nations estimates suggest water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of the population of the world over the last century. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Carnival of Space 331 The Carnival of Space 331 is up at Photos to Space. NASA's Chandra Xray telescope has been looking at its first exoplanet and found that the planet appeared three times larger in Xray than when viewed in optical light NASA's Chandra Xray telescope, orbiting the Earth at a speed of 1.7 kilometers per second, has been pointed at an exoplanet for the first time, giving astronomers their first glimpse of another world at Xray wavelengths. They not only found that the Jupiter sized world has a thick atmosphere, but also discovered a previously undiscovered star orbiting in the same system. Arxiv - Transit observations of the Hot Jupiter HD 189733b at X-ray wavelengths Julian Sonner, a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led research showing that when two of these quarks are created, string theory creates a wormhole linking the quarks. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • They are coming for your retirement and college savings USA Today has an article calling the mass affluent the new rich. This relabeling seems to be spinning it so that this group is a suitable target for redistribution (ie higher taxes). The mass affluent generally do not consider themselves to be rich and have just executed the lifeplan that all financial people tell people to follow. They tell people - get a good education - get a good job - save your money for retirement and college for your kids UPDATE - I updated the title from "Mass Affluent are political and economic target" to "They are coming for your retirement and college savings". In Google+, someone accused me of being a troll for the Koch's, so in for a penny then in for a pound. I would disclose that I am in what is described as the mass affluent class. I knew when Bush 2, congress and Obama was running up the big deficits where the taxes and money would be coming to pay it. It was immediately obvious that those who are already paying taxes would pay more taxes. The only other alternative would be to have massive spending cuts at least back to Clinton level (and presidents prior for decadesChart below from the Congressional Budget office) spending. Fed government spending at 20% of GDP was what was done for decades prior to 2000. Reducing by 6% GDP is possible. I think massive defense spending cuts can be done without harming long term US interests. The active enemies of the US are weak and the US will not fight the bigger militaries (Russia and China). The US still has nuclear weapons. Retirement age can be increased 3-4 months per year and other developed nations spend half the US level as a percentage of GDP on healthcare. About 20% get to some degree of success. Although even if they save 1 million Fully 20% of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. Made up largely of older professionals, working married couples and more educated singles. The "new rich" are those with household income of $250,000 or more at some point during their working lives. That puts them, if sometimes temporarily, in the top 2% of earners. Even outside periods of unusual wealth, members of this group generally hover in the $100,000-plus income range, keeping them in the top 20% of earners. In a country where poverty is at a record high, today's new rich are notable for their sense of economic fragility. They're reached the top 2%, only to fall below it, in many cases. That makes them much more fiscally conservative than other Americans, polling suggests, and less likely to support public programs, such as food stamps or early public education, to help the disadvantaged. The AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) has a retirement calculator. Entering in 1.06 million in savings at retirement means that even with social security for a husband and wife they drop to just under $100,000 per year in retirement income. The $1 million savings level is what many are targeting. Obama signals more efforts to redistribute out of the mass affluent Last week, President Obama asserted that growing inequality is "the defining challenge of our time," signaling that it will be a major theme for Democrats in next year's elections. New research suggests that affluent Americans are more numerous than government data depict, encompassing 21% of working-age adults for at least a year by the time they turn 60. That proportion has more than doubled since 1979. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Exoplanet at 650 AU does not fit any planet formation theories There has been the discovery of a giant planet orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance has astronomers puzzled over how such a strange system came to be. The exoplanet Weighsin at 11 times Jupiter's mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance, planet HD 106906 b is unlike anything in our own Solar System and throws a wrench in planet formation theories. "This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said Vanessa Bailey, who led the research. This is an artist's conception of a young planet in a distant orbit around its host star. The star still harbors a debris disk, remnant material from star and planet formation, interior to the planet's orbit (similar to the HD106906 system). (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech) Arxiv - HD 106906 b: A planetary-mass companion outside a massive debris disk Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • China's lunar rover is expected to land December 14 Two years ago, in December 2011, China published a blueprint outlining its ambitions in outer space. The launch, on December 2nd, of Chang'e-3—a lunar mission named after a Moon goddess—shows that it remains on track. This will be China's first attempt at a lunar landing. If it succeeds it will make the China National Space Administration (CNSA) only the second, after Russia's, to put an unmanned rover on the Moon. It may also help pave the way for the agency to match NASA's greater technical success of landing people there. The lunar rover itself (named Yutu, meaning "Jade Rabbit") has six wheels and is intended to operate for three months. Reports of its weight have ranged from 100kg to 140kg. CNSA has not revealed the planned date of the landing attempt—though according to the European Space Agency, which is using its network of tracking stations to relay signals from and send commands to Chang'e-3 on behalf of CNSA, it is December 14th. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • Selling out over the Long term to achieve upward mobility Some black people consider that it is "selling out" to speak without using slang. Some think it is being fake when you change for other people. Learning proper grammar and more effective communication is just the beginning of properly selling out. Most who have successfully achieved upward mobility have multi-year and often multi-generational planning and efforts. UPDATE - Welcome Instapundit readers. There is a discussion of this article now at Instapundit Vietnamese boat refugees came to north america in the 1970s and 1980s. They often arrived with no money and few possessions and may not have had command of the language. What was their model of upward mobility ? They had multiple families in one house. They pooled income in order to buy their first house (with multiple families inside). Multiple families earning to afford the down payment and then to have more incomes to pay the mortgage. There was greater savings of income and capital appreciation in the house. The house would be sold a few years later and the profit split to afford multiple down payments. So it was not just dual earners. It was say three families pooling and squeezing one family into each room and camping indoors (for years) or being in bunks inside the one room until they earned enough to move. So it would be say 6 earners and more as children got past the age of twelve and were able to earn. Although the children may have been forgiven the need to earn if it meant better success in education. The Vietnamese boat people had to escape a war torn country (because they were on the losing side) and 10-70% of them died on the oceans to achieve their change of venue (to locations with more opportunity). All of the children make it through university and get professional jobs, own one at least one home per family. Read more »      • Email to a friend • Article Search • More Recent Articles Video animations of the Ringworld No Toys, No Victory Simple method for producing graphene quantum dots in bulk quantities from coal New theory may revolutionize superconductors and lead to the design for room temperature superconductors Global Health 2035

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