Free Rice? Is there such a thing as a free lunch? Well not for us at least, but for millions of other poverty stricken people in the world, there are going to have free rice.

Ok, what am you talking about? How are they going to have free rice? Stop bullshitting.

I’M NOT! This is for real. This website - FreeRice.com gives out rice to poor people.

Well, I don’t believe a single shit that you say. Prove to me. This seems like one of those thousands of spam mail.

Basically the deal is like this. FreeRice.com is a website that allows users to improve their vocabulary by giving a word with 4 multiple choice answers for the user to choose. Like some sort of quiz-la.

The deal is, for every question that a user answers correctly, FreeRice.com will sponsor 10 grains of rice for the poor. Ain’t that cool?

But how can I be certain that the rice will really be sponsored and not just another scam?

Well, FreeRice.com is a sister site of Poverty.com, a world poverty site. It seems pretty legitimate and from the About pages of Poverty.com it states that it is run by a “private individual (John Breen) and has no political, religious, or corporate affiliation.”

OK, I found links to poverty.com from BBC and Washington Post website too. So I’m pretty sure what this guy is doing is for real. Else you can go burn in hell by eating up other people’s money.

Anyway, coming back to FreeRice.com it is actually an ingenious way of obtaining funding for the poor people. Users don’t need to pay a single cent. FreeRice.com generates its money from advertising by large corporations such as Fujitsu, American Express etc. The ads appear at the bottom of every vocab question.

This is a real clever and innovative trick to raise money. No solicitation of donations from the public. Kudos to FreeRice.com. Charities should really learn and make use of the free market to raise money too.

FreeRice.com really has a perfect attractive force to attract new visitors and frequent visitors to the site. You can really improve you vocab this way. Real good if you are preparing for you English, General Paper or SAT exams….

So whatcha waiting for? Hop on to FreeRice.com

This book is my current reading material - Good to Great by Jim Collins. I bought it from a second-hand bookstore at Bras Basah for S$18.

I’m less than halfway through the book but I find it exceptionally insightful reading it. Anyway, if you are wondering what kind of book this is, it’s a business-management-leadership book. Basically it speaks about the qualities that cause the companies to transform from being good to great.

“Good is the enemy of Great”

That’s the first sentence of the book; a statement with maximum impact.

So far by reading the book I learned a few things that make me question myself.

1 – Good is never enough. I look back at myself and I’d realised that for a very long time I’ve settled for just being good. What must I do to transform myself to be great? Have I settled for the mediocrity notion?
2 – Disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action. Am I a person with discipline in my thoughts and actions?
3 – Humility + Will = Level 5 Leadership – Humility. My parents always advised me to be humble, but up till this point I find it extremely hard to practise that. How?
4 – Good-to-great leaders don’t talk about themselves and are not I-centric - How? What is my real purpose in life? What am I really gunning for? I’m a big talker and one secret desire that I always have is to desire to brag. This correlates with number 3.
5 – “Good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes” – These Level 5 leaders don’t chase stardom. What am I up to? I always tell people do something for the right reasons. But am I practising what I preach?

I’d just realised, I’m very far away from being a Level 5 leader. What constitutes a Level 5 Leader? Level 5 leaders “build enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”

Not being self-centred and being humble. Perhaps I gotta learn more through AJ’s servant leadership programme. And put into practise for real. Coz it won’t hurt being humble.

Credit for Bad Behaviour. If buying offsets can excuse excessive [tag]carbon[/tag] use, why not other irresponsible acts?

This is a cool article that appeared in the latest edition of Time magazine (July 9, 2007, pg 17)

For most JC Economics students, you would most likely completed studying about [tag]Market Failure[/tag] and the solutions to counter Market Failure….And one of the solutions to counter environmental problem is to have a tradable carbon permit scheme to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

Based on this tradable permit idea, the writer, Michael Kinsley wrote about a myriad of other applications of this concept in our life. Some sort of new capitalism I would say.

“The genius of carbon credits is that it opens up a whole new inventory of things that people can buy and sell. And there is no reason that the principle should be limited to environmentalism”

What sort of other applications can this be applied in? Already it’s complicated enough for the concept to work in the environment area….

“For example, how about a “[tag]bad parenting surcharge[/tag]”. It would work like this.
Suppose you come home after a hard day of work, and there is your acne-ridden, foul-smelling brat of a son - if, indeed, he is you son, which is hard to believe - playing video games with his friends. Your living room is strewn with Dorito crumbs and other detritus that doesn’t bear close examining. Needless to say, the lawn has not been mowed as promised. How would you like to slug him? You know you shouldn’t. But what if by slugging him, you could actually reduce the total amount of child abuse in the world? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

What’s needed us a market in child abuse credits. Somewhere in the world there is a parent who is slugging his kid every night. For a price, he would refrain for a night, or even two. By paying that parent not to slug his kid twice, you gain the right to slug you kid once.

It’s a win-win-win. You get to slug your id. This other father gets the money. The other guy’s kid is happy - he gets a night off from being slugged.”

Sounds too optimistic to be true…And for me, it’s an idea that is incredibly theoretical in nature and has absolutely no chance of seeing light in reality…

A market in child abuse credit? Laughable….And how will the system work? How will you know that the parents will be honest? There is absolutely no measuring or accountability system in place….

A creative idea, but a real theoretical one indeed…..What do you think?

I was surfing around the webbie and I can’t remember how I’d stumbled upon this website, but this is one of the coolest website that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s called [tag]DontClick.It[/tag]

Cool name right? And as the name suggests, users can’t [tag]click[/tag] on the website. All you can do is just hover you mouse over the link and you will be transported there - minus the clicking….

This is what will happen if you click anywhere on the page…

Will this new technology be a breakthrough technology? And will we be able to surf around websites without the need to click around some day in the future? Or will we see mouse without buttons to click?

I personally feel awkward surfing around that site without clicking at all…Perhaps clicking has been too ingrained into my habit…..