Lu Xiao: 九月 2007

2007年9月30日星期日

Ratan Tata

Ratan Tata is presently the Chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group. Ratan Naval Tata is also the Chairman of the major Tata companies such as Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Tea, Tata Chemicals, Indian Hotels and Tata Teleservices. He has taken Tata Group to new heights and under his leadership Group's revenues have grown manifold.

Ratan Tata was born on December 28, 1937, in Bombay. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1962. Ratan Tata had a short stint with Jones and Emmons in Los Angeles, California, before returning to India in late 1962. He joined the Tata Group and was assigned to various companies before being appointed director-in-charge of The National Radio & Electronics Company (NELCO) in 1971. Ratan Tata was appointed Chairman of Tata Industries in 1981. He was assigned the task of transforming the company into a Group strategy think-tank, and a promoter of new ventures in high technology businesses.

In 1991, Ratan Tata took over the Chairmanship from JRD Tata. Under him Tata Consultancy Services went public and Tata Motors was listed in the New York Stock Exchange. In 1998, Tata Motors came up with Tata Indica, the first truly Indian car. The car was the brainchild of Ratan Tata.

Ratan Tata was honored with Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in 2000. He was also conferred an honorary doctorate in business administration by Ohio State University, an honorary doctorate in technology by the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, and an honorary doctorate in science by the University of Warwick.

From: Indian Heroes

Link: http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes/ratan-tata.html

Carlos Slim

Article: Man who could become richest on the planet

A modestly dressed Mexican with a taste for expensive cigars, baseball memorabilia and bonsai trees has overtaken the American investor Warren Buffett as the world's second richest man and is quietly closing in on Bill Gates as the richest man on the planet.

Carlos Slim, a magnate whose empire supplies Mexicans with everything from cheap flights to cigarettes, has seen his fortune soar by more than $4 billion (￡2.02 billion) in two months to $53.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

The 67-year-old's net worth outstrips Mr Buffett's holdings, which have fallen to $52.4 billion since Forbes released its table of wealth rankings last month.

Since last year, his fortune has increased by $19 billion because of a strong Mexican economy and soaring stock prices for his businesses.

Mr Gates still holds the top spot with $56 billion but with the Microsoft co-founder increasingly focusing on philanthropy, analysts say Mr Slim is on track to surpass him.

"It's virtually cradle to grave," Prof George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, told the Los Angeles Times. "You are engulfed by Slim in Mexico."

Mr Slim is the son of a Lebanese-born shopkeeper. As a child he recorded every peso he spent in ledgers that are still in his office.

He bought a cigarette company in the 1970s. Despite an economic collapse and widespread panic in Mexico in the early 1980s, he kept acquiring assets.

The workaholic's charitable foundations have benefited hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. He has funded hospitals, a national archive and an art museum named after his late wife Soumaya, which houses works by Degas, Monet and the largest Rodin from her private collection.

Mr Slim recently told Forbes that his vision of a businessman's role differed to that of Mr Buffett, who is to donate $ 1.5 billion every year to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Our concept is more to accomplish and solve things - not going around like Santa Claus," he added. "Poverty isn't solved with donations."

From: Telegraph

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/13/wslim13.xml

Zhang Yin

Article: Thanks to Mao, Zhang Yin's a billionaire

It was one of China's proverbs that Mao loved to quote; women, he would say, hold up half the sky. But until the communist revolution of 1949 the Chinese had not meant it. The Chinese imperial system, famously, had been one of the most anti-feminist societies on Earth. Women had no rights, existing only to have babies and please men, the richer forced to hobble and disfigure themselves by binding their feet from birth to affirm their essential purpose - decorative daintiness.

But last week it was reported that China's richest billionaire is now a woman - 49-year-old Zhang Yin is worth a cool $3.4bn (£1.8bn). The tycoon is the world's richest self-made woman, having built China's largest paper recycling business, Nine Dragons Paper, which was floated on the Hong Kong stock market just six months ago. She seems an eloquent symbol of the new China; a capitalist whose success and wealth was unthinkable before Deng Xiaoping freed China from the embrace of Maoism in 1978. It is capitalists such as her who are proof that paradoxically it is communist China that is home to the globe's most vigorous capitalism. And she is a woman.

In China, though, beware. Nothing is quite what it seems. Zhang Yin owes her success both to pro-market Deng Xiaoping and ardent communist Mao. As the eldest daughter of a family with eight children, her expectation before the communist revolution would have been to grow up illiterate before becoming her husband's chattel. Mao's radical egalitarianism may have given China the murderous mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. But he also transformed the role, expectations and education of women.

In 1949 female illiteracy in rural China was 99 per cent. In 1976 when Mao died it was 45 per cent and today it is 13 per cent. One of Mao's first acts was to give women the same rights in divorce as men, and for all his other barbarism he consistently championed the equality of women.

China is still a sexist society, but compared with the rest of Asia it is light years ahead. Female illiteracy in rural India, for example, is still 55 per cent. The change has gone deep into the marrow of Chinese society. One survey recently revealed that Chinese girls between 16 and 19 name becoming president, chief executive or senior manager of a company as their top career choices; Japanese girls between 16 and 19 say they want to become housewives, flight attendants or child-care workers. One of China's most formidable economic and social resources has become its women.

As the daughter of an officer in the People's Liberation Army, Zhang Yin also understands the corrupt and controlling pathology of Chinese communism well - and has understood the imperative to keep ownership and direction of her company as distant as possible from Beijing. In China the party controls, or has the capacity to control, everything; the number of companies forced into decline or even bankruptcy because they were compelled to support party aims - bailing out an endemically loss-making company to protect jobs or buying a state-owned company at an astronomic price to feather the nest of a senior official - is beyond counting. Indigenous Chinese capitalism is a form of hit-and-run guerrilla economic warfare in a constant battle with the world's greediest and most corrupt officialdom. Survival depends upon paying tribute. It is no accident that two thirds of China's six million private businesses are owned and run by ex-communist officials. Almost every private businessperson in China is either a party member or applying to join.

Zhang has avoided much of that - courtesy of Hong Kong, a Taiwanese husband and managing to get out of China in the months after Tiananmen Square when repression was at its height and the prospects for any kind of private enterprise seemed nil. Her cleverest moves were her first; incorporating her company in Hong Kong in 1985 and then marrying a Taiwanese with a non Chinese passport. In exile in Los Angeles in 1990 the pair founded America Chung Nam - a company specialising in scrap paper brokerage as she had been doing in Hong Kong.

Scrap paper is one of the few industries the party considers non-strategic and which it indulges - another smart choice for an ambitious woman. In December 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and in January 1992 the ageing Deng Xiaoping declared in a tour of Guangdong, China's most pro-capitalist province, that as international communism was dead the only way for Chinese communism to survive was to embrace pro-market reform. In particular it should welcome inward investment from foreign companies with know-how and technology. It was glorious, he said, to be rich.

There was an avalanche of inward investment, including America Chung Nam building a paper and board mill in the very same Guangdong- a foreign investor even if owned by a Chinese living abroad. After all, China's booming exports would need to be wrapped in paper and paperboard. Guangdong's exports have grown phenomenally; so have sales of paper and board.

And six months ago Zhang Yin and her husband cashed in - floating their shares not in one of China's stock markets on the mainland, but in Hong Kong. Here a private company can keep its distance from the party; if there is a dispute with the communists it gets settled in Hong Kong's still independent legal system - legacy of the British - and not in one of the mainland's rigged courts.

The extent of China's reform, and its subsequent growth, is stunning. It is also true that Ms Zhang could not have made her money if China had not opened to the world. But nobody should believe that somehow her fortune means that China has made the full transition to capitalism. Rather she has exploited the system's fault lines. This remains a one-party state, in which every institution - from the media to its companies - is constructed to sustain its monopoly of power.

Entrepreneurs such as Zhang Yin only succeed if they find ways around the system; they can only push the economy so far. One day the party will have to let go properly. The issues are only how and when.

· Will Hutton's book on China and the West, The Writing on The Wall, will be published in January

From: TheObserver
Link: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1922797,00.html

2007年9月16日星期日

Final UT2004 Map Link

Link:

Student Name: Lu Xiao
Student Number: 3201219

Final Image Captures

Stephen Hawking's Space

Stephen Hawking
"The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
The sequence of space is intented by leading viewer walking in a spiral order from outside to the core( the truth that we are exploring for), and from high level to deep. The golden line in the middle of path plays as role of clue, which in another way conveys the comman order of track under the process of exploration of universe from phenomenon(outer) to essence(internal).

Meeting Place

Electroliquid Aggregation:

The "gradual realization of certain underlying order of science" helps the human get rid of the evolution stage of "no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference".

Charles Darwin's Space

Charles Darwin
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
The features of insensitive, isolated, emotionless, and hopeless feeling in the beginning of the world are intented by letting a person standing in a negative space of hole, with few introdution of light. Thus, the maximized height of hole put the view in a place, in which ones only can experience the warm of light through the narrow slots and the space above.