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Comment by 用心涼Coooool 17 minutes ago

We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?”

So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position.

I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool yesterday

（Con't）In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist's project is self-undermining. I'll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,”is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 16, 2026 at 5:20am

（Con't）He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one's own feelings that count.

Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist's impulse to honour the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can't truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon.

Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel's dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 13, 2026 at 10:09pm

（Con't）If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

（The Case Against Travel：It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we're at our best by Agnes Callard，June 24, 2023，The New Yorker)

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 3, 2026 at 4:00pm

[iCONADA Research Team] Proletarianization

Proletarianization is the socioeconomic process by which individuals shift from self-employment or ownership into wage labor. In Marxist theory, it describes how people lose control over the means of production—such as land, tools, or specialized knowledge. Consequently, they must sell their labor power to survive, expanding the working class. Historically linked to industrial factories, this phenomenon actively shapes the modern global economy.

The historical foundation of proletarianization lies in the separation of producers from their resources. During Britain’s Enclosure Acts, common lands were privatized, forcing agrarian peasants into rapidly growing cities to seek factory jobs. Similarly, the rise of industrial manufacturing outcompeted independent artisans. They could no longer match the scale of mechanized factories, leaving them no choice but to enter the corporate workforce. This dynamic concentrated wealth in the hands of capital owners while standardizing the experience of the working mass.

In the twenty-first century, proletarianization manifests in white-collar and digital industries. The expansion of the gig economy exemplifies this shift. Rideshare drivers and freelance digital workers function as independent contractors on paper, but algorithmic control strips away their true autonomy. They rely entirely on centralized platforms for income, mirroring traditional wage dependency without the associated legal protections or job security.

Furthermore, advanced technology accelerates the de-skilling of professional fields. Artificial intelligence and complex software now codify specialized tasks in law, medicine, and education. As corporate entities absorb independent practices, professionals like doctors and lawyers find themselves operating under rigid corporate metrics rather than autonomous judgement. Their specialized knowledge becomes institutional intellectual property, effectively proletarianizing highly educated tiers of the workforce.

Ultimately, proletarianization highlights the persistent imbalance between capital and labor. From nineteenth-century textile mills to modern digital platforms, the mechanism remains identical: the loss of autonomy and the commodification of human work. Understanding this continuous evolution is essential for navigating the future of labor rights, economic inequality, and worker agency in an increasingly automated world.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on June 25, 2026 at 6:57pm

[Golongan Penyelidikan iCONADA] Transformasi atau Pelanggaran Sempadan? Apabila “Otak Kiri McKinsey” Bertemu “Otak Kanan LUNAR”: Peralihan Paradigma Pendidikan Kreatif di Institusi Pengajian Tinggi

Pada tahun 2015, gergasi perundingan global McKinsey & Company mengambil alih firma reka bentuk industri terkemuka LUNAR. Penggabungan antara dunia strategi perniagaan dan kreativiti ini bukan sekadar pengembangan korporat, tetapi menjadi simbol perubahan besar dalam industri kreatif: kreativiti tidak lagi dianggap sebagai hiasan akhir, sebaliknya menjadi elemen strategik dalam mencipta nilai perniagaan.

Sebelum ini, reka bentuk sering dilihat sebagai proses “kemasan” selepas pembangunan produk dan strategi perniagaan selesai. Namun, gabungan McKinsey dan LUNAR membuktikan bahawa pemikiran reka bentuk (Design Thinking), pengalaman pengguna dan inovasi kreatif kini menjadi sebahagian daripada proses membuat keputusan di peringkat tertinggi organisasi. Kreativiti telah berkembang daripada menghasilkan objek menarik kepada menyelesaikan masalah kompleks masyarakat dan perniagaan.

Perubahan ini memberi cabaran besar kepada pendidikan kreatif di universiti. Model pendidikan tradisional yang memisahkan bidang perniagaan dan reka bentuk perlu diperbaharui. Dunia kini memerlukan bakat dwifungsi yang memahami estetika, budaya, teknologi serta logik pasaran. Oleh itu, institusi pengajian tinggi perlu menggalakkan pembelajaran rentas disiplin seperti “reka bentuk + perniagaan”.

Selain itu, pendidikan kreatif harus beralih daripada sekadar penguasaan kemahiran teknikal kepada penyelesaian masalah sebenar. Pelajar bukan hanya perlu tahu “cara menghasilkan reka bentuk”, tetapi juga “cara menggunakan kreativiti untuk mencipta impak”. Pemahaman terhadap data, penyelidikan pengguna dan nilai komersial juga penting agar idea kreatif dapat diterjemahkan kepada strategi yang bernilai.

Namun, transformasi ini turut membawa risiko. Jika pendidikan kreatif terlalu tunduk kepada KPI, keuntungan dan kecekapan pasaran, kreativiti mungkin kehilangan sifat kritikal, kemanusiaan dan keberaniannya untuk mencabar norma. Universiti bukan sekadar kilang menghasilkan tenaga kerja industri, tetapi ruang untuk memelihara pemikiran bebas dan inovasi yang melangkaui keuntungan jangka pendek.

Kesimpulannya, masa depan pendidikan kreatif memerlukan keseimbangan antara rasionaliti perniagaan dan sensitiviti seni. Kreativiti perlu mempunyai nilai ekonomi, tetapi pada masa sama mesti kekal mempunyai jiwa, kritikan sosial dan kemanusiaan.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on June 2, 2026 at 3:09pm

[Fable] The Southern Favorite

The chair sat empty. The Elder’s “Southern Favorite,” though once at the center of a donation scandal that stirred public uproar, had always been protected by the Elder’s formidable authority. After all, a cherished confidante is bound to be indulged and spoiled a little, isn’t she?

This time, the mother hen led her chicks: four distinguished figures from the same family all emerged to seek seats of their own. The public spun it into a charming tale: it is not only femme fatales who command attention in the marketplace; mature beauties are just as sought after. And it is not only the back door that offers a pathway upward—there are routes through the harem as well.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on May 27, 2026 at 3:16pm

ICONADA Research Team: "Three-in-One" Integration of Education, Training, and Employment and AI

Lecture Halls, Workshops, and Assembly Lines: A Cultural Critique of the "Three-in-One" Integration of Education, Training, and Employment in Anglophone Nations

In the global economy, fusing education, training, and employmentis more than a labor market mechanism. It is a unique cultural landscape rooted in Anglophone pragmatism. Over decades, nations like Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US have built an ecosystem that blends the theoretical instruction of the lecture hall, the skill refinement of the workshop, and the professional practice of the assembly line.

1.The Philosophical Roots: From Bacon to Competency

To understand why English-speaking countries seamlessly bind these functions, one must return to British empiricism and American pragmatism. Through this lens, knowledge is valued not for its abstract sublimity, but for its capacity to be translated into action.

Australia’s VET system and the UK’s National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) are bureaucratic manifestations of this philosophy. By placing learning and working side-by-side, they dismantle the elitism of the intellectual class. Within a National Qualifications Framework (NQF), a welding torch and a lecture handout carry equal institutional dignity. This enables the "Earn and Learn" cultural phenomenon, blurring the absolute boundary between blue-collar and white-collar work. Young people establish their social coordinates through practical experience while avoiding crippling student debt.

2.The Instrumental Trap and the AI Crisis

However, this aggressive market orientation has a dark side. When education is swallowed by vocational training, universities risk downgrading into pre-production assembly lines for corporations.
When curricula are tethered strictly to current industry metrics, the humanities are marginalized. Cultural critics worry this system mass-produces "the perfect tools"—individuals with high immediate workplace utility, but fragile capacities for critical thinking.

This hyper-specialization now faces an existential crisis with the rise of Advanced AI. The "Three-in-One" model relies heavily on teaching specific, predictable workplace skills. Yet, AI excels at automating precisely these highly defined technical tasks. If a student's education is merely a reflection of a current corporate job description, their skills risk obsolescence by graduation. The system's greatest strength—its tight alignment with the current market—becomes its greatest vulnerability in an automated world.

The Scale of Efficiency

The integration of education, training, and employment in the Anglophone world maximizes economic efficiency and mitigates youth unemployment. Yet, it also mirrors a cultural obsession with immediate utility. In the era of automation, finding a fresh balance between equipping youth with survival skills and preserving the adaptable, critical human soul will be the next true test of Western educational wisdom.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on May 15, 2024 at 7:53am

Vincent （Starry starry night）by Don Mclean （唐·馬克林）

Starry starry night

星光星光閃耀的夜晚

Paint your palette blue and grey

讓調色板描繪出你深深地憂郁和晦暗

Look out on a summer’s day

讓那雙洞察我靈魂深處的眼睛

With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

面朝著夏日的白晝

Shadows on the hills

在這如雪般的畫布上

Sketch the trees and daffodils

勾勒出丘陵的投影

Catch the breeze and the winter chills

描繪那樹叢和水仙花

In colors on the snowy linen land

捕捉微風和冬季的寒意

Now I understand what you try to say to me

而此刻我才懂得你想對我訴說的那些故事

And how you suffered for your sanity

你因深深的思索而承受著苦悶

And how you tried to set them free

你因賦予思想自由而所做的一切

They would not listen

可是，那些人不會聽到

They did not know how

因為他們無法體會

Perhaps they’ll listen you now

又或許他們現在才知道

Starry starry night

星光星光閃耀的夜晚

Flaming flowers that brightly blaze

那些如烈焰般綻放的花兒

Swirling clouds in Violet haze

那些在紫羅蘭的薄霧中旋轉的雲朵

Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue

都在文森特瓷器一樣湛藍的眸子裏

Colors changing hue

變幻著色彩

Morning fields of amber grain

清晨琥珀色的原野

Weathered faces lined in pain

風化了的臉孔鐫刻著的痛楚

Are Soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand

畫家用深情手去撫慰那些憂傷

Now I understand what you try to say to me

而此刻我才懂得你想對我訴說的那些故事

And how you suffered for your sanity

你因深深的思索而承受著苦悶

And how you tried to set them free

你因賦予思想自由而所做的一切

They would not listen

可是，那些人不會聽到

They did not know how

因為他們無法體會

Perhaps they’ll listen you now

又或許他們現在才知道

For they could not love you

盡管他們並不愛你

But still your love was true

可你的愛卻是如此真實

And when no hope was left inside

可你的愛卻是如此真實

On that starry starry night

在那個只有絕望的星夜

You took your life as lovers often do

你帶走了自己的生命就像殉情的愛人一樣

But I could have told you Vincent

然而我必須告訴你真相文森特

This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

這世界上不會再有什麽如你一般的美好

Starry starry night

星光，星光閃耀的夜

Portraits hung in empty halls

那些肖像懸掛在空寂的大廳裏

Frameless heads on nameless walls

在一面面不知名的墻壁一幅幅沒有畫框的頭像

With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget

上用他們那令人難忘的眼睛註視著這個世界

Like the stranger that you’ve met

就像你曾遭遇到的陌生人

The ragged man in ragged cloth

邋遢男人們穿著襤褸的衣衫

The silver thorn in a bloody rose

就像是躺在聖潔的雪地裏的

Lying crushed and broken on the virgin snow

血紅的玫瑰中銀白的荊刺

Now I think I know what you try to say to me

而此刻我才懂得你想對我訴說的那些故事

That how you suffered for your sanity

你因深深的思索而承受著苦悶

And how you try to set them free

你因賦予思想自由而所做的一切

They would not listen they’re not listening still

可是，那些人不會聽到，依舊不會聽到

Perhaps they never will

又或許，他們永遠不會知道

Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Night, oil on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, 1889; in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Critics said Gogh's work was influenced by Katsushika Hokusai (日本畫家葛飾北齋 1760－1849）

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on March 4, 2022 at 11:14pm

The Meaning of PhD

Yesterday I booked a private taxi for airport.

When I arrived at my destination the driver gave me his business card for future bookings.

「Dr. Raymond Tan PhD」

Wow !!! i was surprised and quizzed him,

"Why are you driving a taxi with such high qualification ?"

He replied "Dr. is the short form of Driver"

"Then what about your PhD ?"

"I am a Privately-Hired Driver"

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