Schedule For CityU Hong Kong

One of the first steps to getting organized for classes, is to create a schedule, and I like create a schedule with some style.  Here's my schedule at CityU:

Note: The hours and days of week is in Japanese Kanji or Korean Hanja, which are the same in this case.  This was made with Excel 2008 on Mac OS X 10.6, exported to PDF, converted to JPG with Preview, and later cropped in iPhoto.

San Jose is 50th out of 75 in Literacy

I came across this survey that ranked San Jose (California) 50th, lower than Oakland, out of 75 cities in USA for literacy: http://www.ccsu.edu/page.cfm?p=8142 

For those that don't know, San Jose is one of the major cities in Silicon Valley, home to many of the technological innovations in the 1980s and 1990s.  

There's some differing views on the quality of life there.  Some say great because of low crime and great schools.  Though others beg to differ.  San Jose is the largest city in the world without a major urban symphony.  Public transportation is expensive, $6 USD for a day pass, and small commutes that would take 15 minutes by car, take over 2 hours by public transit.  For me personally, beyond Santana Row, I don't find places that I enjoy hanging-out, chatting, or studying.

Incremental vs. Innovative Improvements

I am attending this Business Process Analysis course at CityU in Hong Kong [香港].  I came across a concept that I never encountered at my home university SFSU.  There are two ways to improve processes, an innovative way, or an incremental way.  

The incremental style is called TQM (Total Quality Management) and the professor clustered these methods into the following items:

• CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration),  
• Six Sigma DMIAC, 
• Six Sigma DMADV, and 
• PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) 

At SFSU, we touch on Six Sigma in various courses, and may have mentioned CMMI in IT Project Management course.

The innovative styles is called BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) and includes key authors like:

• Michael Hammer and James Champy,  
• Thomas H. DavenPort, and 
• Omar A. El Sawy.