Tag Archives: Education
I’m learning Japanese
Posted on 23. Jul, 2004
Just booked a six week Japanese course! Should be interestng..
http://www.ihlondon.com/...
Creative Class War: Reverse Brain Drain in US?
Posted on 21. Jan, 2004
Kuro5hin:
Bachelor of Business & Electronic Commerce (Strategic Management)
Posted on 04. Dec, 2003
Uni results are in, looks like I made it through my final three subjects. Excellent! Last day in New York. I made several SMS posts over of the past few days, but I see that none of them ended up making it to my blog.. grrr. Ah well.
Two exams down, one to go..
Posted on 10. Nov, 2003
Exams almost finished, last exam tomorrow and then a tense wait till December for my final results. If all goes to plan I'll then apply to graduate and attend my ceremony sometime at the end of 2004, or later if I'm not in Australia. Ecomm Infrastructure went fine, however Information Law, a marathon 3.5 hour open book was a bit of work and I let the last question slip a little due to time constraints. Luckily I had every act and case I needed to answer the questions reasonably which is always a worry in open book exams. I've been surprised at the number of other Australian students sitting exams in London. On the first day there were three from Latrobe sitting at Strategic Management subject, a Monash media/arts student and another doing an accounting subject. On the second day there were two Monash students, one doing second year financial accounting, and another doing a second year managemnet subject. I was talking to the invigilator afterwards, he didn't have the exact number of students, but reckoned it was in the 50-75 range which is not bad.
The Monash Centre is a shop front type space on the corner of Strand and Surry Street in the block of buildings dedicated to Kings College. Kings College itself is an interesting campus. Imagine maybe 15-20 buildings of various size, style and age or joined together in a labyrinth of corridors, stairways, connecting passages and bridges. Some sections go three levels into the basement, and as high as 5-7 stories up. Although they place themselves as one of the leading universities, particularly for Law, the facilities from what I saw were pretty old and tired, but I guess you can't expect much from a London city campus. Still the campus was bustling, and would be great in Winter as you don't have to actually go outside to get between most of the buildings. There were stacks of students around rushing between classes.
Fingers crossed for Strategic Management tomorrow.
“Good Morning, Monash University”
Posted on 30. Oct, 2003
I had to ring the Monash University Centre in London yesterday to confirm the exams I'm sitting next week had arrived. It's a real spin out dialing a local London number and hearing an Australian voice answer the phone with "Good Morning, Monash University", and then going on to explain how to get to the campus via the Tube. They've received all my exam papers. The instructions for the open book law exam are all correct this time, unlike last semester's effort where I had to sit an open book exam closed book due to poor communication between the invigilators and the lecturer. The actual exam venue is at nearby King's College. I'm really lucky to be attending such an international university with such flexibility for students. There's not many Australian universities that can boast two campuses/centres in Europe! Go Monash!
Just playing around with TomTom Navigator on my iPAQ, quite a decent application. I've got 96MB of street level maps on my PDA for the entire UK. The navigator is particularly cool, and even warns you if your route takes you through a London congestion charging zone. The map above is the automatically planned route from Temple tube to the Monash centre, based on entering start and end street level addresses. It comes complete with distances, step by step directions and time estimates (based on walking or driving). It even has a 3D map view and voice instruction mode. Getting tempted to buy a GPS module again..
http://www.monash.ac.uk/...
Almost done..
Posted on 10. Oct, 2003
I've got a whole pile of things I want to post about, but my final uni assignments ended up taking a little longer than expected. The agricultural biotechnology industry report is done and submited, and now I'm trying to finish off an XML assignment which should have been a breeze, however the lecturer has thrown in a couple of tricky validation requirements in the DTD that I can't get my head around, I may need to head to Borders tomorrow to flick through a few advanced XML books. Anyway, more posts soon.
We're going to The Four Seasons by Candlelight at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night which should be relaxing. Still need to fit in some more Concorde spotting and a trip to the Doctor Exhibition before they both finish up.
Biotech expert
Posted on 03. Oct, 2003
Last week it was law relating to intellectual property, trademarks and copyright. This week I'm doing a fairly detailed analysis of the agricultural chemical and biotechnology industries. Maybe I've spent too long analysing all the big genetics companies as I'm now totally for genetic modification in agriculture. The benefits are enormous, and the regulatory hurdles organisations have to go through are significant to ensure a reasonable level of safety. What is so bad about genetically engineering a pest resistant plant if it leads to reducing use of nasty pesticides or herbicides? What is interesting though is when companies with a strong herbicide then go ahead and genetically engineer plants specifically resistant to their herbicide. So the farmer buys both the seed and the complimentary herbicide to go with it, creating a nice little product lock in.
WIPO Domain Name Decisions
Posted on 24. Sep, 2003
Part of the law essay I'm doing at the moment consists of a fairly close examination of international trade and service marks in relation to domain name disputes. The World Intellectual Property Organisation Arbiter and Mediation Centre has a fascinating list of cases and decisions against cybersquatters. Recent transfers include macquarie-bank.com, westpac-bank.com, telstrabigpond.com, frappuccino.com and starbuckscoffee.com to their rightful trademark owners. Interesting read, particularly when you drill into some of the cases and read why the defendants believe they should keep the domain.
On a related note, while I was listening to UK talkback radio last night an American caller mentioned that the nickname for Starbucks in the US is Fourbucks, as everything is so expensive. Excellent.
http://arbiter.wipo.int/...
Final assignments, final exams..
Posted on 22. Sep, 2003
I've got a final law essay due on Thursday, with quite a bit to do to get it up to scratch. I will be so glad when I finish this, my final semester. My three final exams are at the Monash University centre at 171 Strand near Temple tube station, so only eleven tube stops away from Paddington. They're all three hours long and start at 9:30am, six hours after people in Australia have finished sitting the same exam.
Failed RMIT software to be ‘reimplemented’
Posted on 12. Sep, 2003
RMIT plan to restructure the university to fit around the out-of-the-box PeopleSoft version, after giving up on their failed customised PeopleSoft implementation. Love it, the classic project management mistake of continuing to throw money at a failed project, rather than cutting their losses and giving up. [via The Fix]
http://www.crikey.com.au/...
Monash University Centre in London
Posted on 10. Sep, 2003
I was just having a quick browse of the Monash London site again. It's nice to know that even though I'm so far from home, my uni has a office/campus only 15 mins away on the tube. This office handles my exams while I'm over here too. Go Monash! (shame they don't have a library or study facilities though..)
http://www.monash.ac.uk/...
Almost done..
Posted on 10. Sep, 2003
Argh, I have a major essay due now every 10 days until the end of October, combined with hundreds of pages of law and management reading to catch up on, no wonder starting full-time work next week was a daunting prospect. I've got a Knowledge Management essay due Friday, which isn't too bad, however it does require a fair degree of reference to academic journals and research on KM rather than my own opinions and knowledge of the topic. The only positive I guess is that this is my last lot of essays before I finish my degree (fingers crossed). I need to find a nice big old Indiana Jones style library in London to use for studying for the remainder of the semester.. any tips? I notice the University of London library charges 5 quid a day to use their library. I had a look at the local Paddington Public Library, however it's pretty small and study desks were too crowded with weird eccentric locals reading old newspapers ;)
Intel Centrino revisited and the final three
Posted on 03. Aug, 2003
Quite amusing that given my comments on Intel Centrino a couple of months ago, one of the 50 essay topics to choose from for one my final subjects this semester was an analysis of Centrino and it's implications for business.
My final subjects this semester are Infrastructure for Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management and Information Technology Law -- and then I've finished my degree! Onto some business ventures or a post grad from there ;). Oh, I passed that last subject the mark was outstanding for, however I must have completely bombed in the exam as I scored really well in the assignments, but had a poor final mark.
Exams over..
Posted on 26. Jun, 2003
Woohoo, I've finished my exams for the semester, although I'll be at the same level of stress until I get my results on the 17th. My last exam today was deceptively hard and of course I took a punt on certain concepts, formulas and theories not being in the exam and didn't cover them very strongly, and lost out as three of them appeared in the exam. Project Management was supposed to be one of my easier subjects, however it turned out to be a comprehensive subject requiring both solid understanding of a variety of theories and the application of 15 or so different mathematical equations and statistical methods of measuring project metrics from a variety of angles, including schedule variances, probabilistic completion times, critical chain scheduling, cost performance index, payback analysis, schedule performance index, project-crashing, fast-tracking, resource loading and leveling, learning curve theory, CoCoMo, Capability Maturity Model.. blah blah.. the list goes on and on -- a hell of a lot to cram into a 2 hour exam. I covered most of the theory questions reasonably well, but sufferred a little on some of the numerical ones.. don't even get me started on that nightmare 20 node AOA network. Ah well, I'm rattling on bullshit.. fingers crossed. Sigh..
Exams..
Posted on 22. Jun, 2003
I had my third exam on Friday which was supposed to be open book, however due to a screw up by my lecturer at Monash the exam papers were printed without instructions on the front. The testing centre noticed this and made a query a few weeks earlier as to whether it was open or closed book, they were incorrectly advised closed book. So I sat down for the exam confidently with my text book in hand and to my dismay was asked to remove the book. I tried to convince them that it was open book but they insisted it was closed. I was so pissed off. So I did the whole exam closed book and then contacted the lecturer immediately after. Turns out it was indeed open book, and that they had only tried to confirm with the 15 exam venues the day before the exam that it was open book, obviously my exam venue was not informed in time. I was extremely angry, particularly with the lecturers attitude that he considered the book "wouldn't make much difference" and the attitude of the exam supervisor who would not ring the uni to confirm when I asked him to at the start of the exam. Bloody exam invigilators, that typical shutup we are right and you are wrong, the rules are the rules attitude is infuriating. I'm assured I will get special consideration, however I'm doubtful I'll get a HD in the subject (when I really should have), which would have been gauranteed if I had the text book in front of me during the exam. The School of Computing at Monash has screwed me around several times now over the years, where-as the School of Business and Economics are exceptionally well organised. I'm glad I'm doing mostly business subjects rather than computing.
More exams this week..
Posted on 14. Jun, 2003
Exam fun continues, this week I have an international business (management) exam on Thursday and a programming exam on Friday. Again I'm ill prepared for both of them, but should have it altogether by the time they start. bit cranky about them being Thursday afternoon and then Friday morning, some space in between would have been handy.
First exam tomorrow..
Posted on 10. Jun, 2003
I'd say I'm not well prepared. There's a lot of different theories (and some formulas) to memorise and apply which cannot be well crammed a few days prior to the exam I've discovered. Still I am reasonably confident, if the fact that I find myself applying service queue optimisation theories to the uni coffee cart while waiting in line for coffee is anything to go by, I'm probably in the right frame of mind for my service operations exams.
Exams
Posted on 03. Jun, 2003
So June is exam month, amongst other yet to be announced goings on. I've got Service Operations Management on the 11th followed by International Business (Management) on the 19th and Programming on the 20th. To finish the month off, I have Project Management on the 26th June. It'll be good to knock these subjects over. I've done mostly well in the assignments, although the last one for international business will be a bit touch and go as I was sick as dog the for the last two days leading up to the due date, risky as the assignment was worth 30%.
Lost educational opportunity dissonance?
Posted on 22. May, 2003
A new term is required to represent that feeling you get when you sit down in the last few weeks of semester to really learn the course material you were supposed to be studying in the previous 10 weeks, and discover it's actually really interesting stuff and you now wish you'd spent more time learning it earlier, rather than having to frantically cram for the looming exams.
Monash Europe
Posted on 13. May, 2003
Along with several Asian locations, my university has centres setup in London, UK and Prato, Italy. Impressive!
