Everything Is Distributed - Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2014/05/25/everything-is-distributed/

Everything Is Distributed

By Courtney Nash

In September 2007, Jean Bookout, 76, was driving her Toyota Camry down an unfamiliar road in Oklahoma, with her friend Barbara Schwarz seated next to her on the passenger side. Suddenly, the Camry began to accelerate on its own. Bookout tried hitting the brakes, applying the emergency brake, but the car continued to accelerate. The car eventually collided with an embankment, injuring Bookout and killing Schwarz. In a subsequent legal case, lawyers for Toyota pointed to the most common of culprits in these types of accidents: human error. "Sometimes people make mistakes while driving their cars," one of the lawyers claimed. Bookout was older, the road was unfamiliar, these tragic things happen.

However, a recently concluded product liability case against Toyota has turned up a very different cause: a stack overflow error in Toyota's software for the Camry. This is noteworthy for two reasons: first, the oft-cited culprit in accidents—human error—proved not to be the cause (a problematic premise in its own right), and second, it demonstrates how we have definitively crossed a threshold from software failures causing minor annoyances or (potentially large) corporate revenue losses into the realm of human safety.

"What is surprising is not that there are so many accidents. It is that there are so few. The thing that amazes you is not that your system goes down sometimes, it's that it is up at all."–Richard Cook

It might be easy to dismiss this case as something minor: a fairly vanilla software bug that (so far) appears to be contained to a specific car model. But the extrapolation is far more interesting. Consider the self-driving car, development for which is well underway already. We take out the purported culprit for so many accidents, human error, and the premise is that a self-driving car is, in many respects, safer than a traditional car. But what happens if a failure that's completely out of the car's control occurs? What if the data feed that's helping the car to recognize stop lights fails? What if Google Maps tells it to do something stupid that turns out to be dangerous?

We have reached a point in software development where we can no longer understand, see, or control all the component parts, both technical and social/organizational—they are increasingly complex and distributed. The business of software itself has become a distributed, complex system. How do we develop and manage systems that are too large to understand, too complex to control, and that fail in unpredictable ways?

Embracing failure

Distributed systems once were the territory of computer science Ph.D.s and software architects tucked off in a corner somewhere. That's no longer the case. Just because you write code on a laptop and don't have to care about message passing and lockouts doesn't mean you don't have to worry about distributed systems. How many API calls to external services are you making? Is your code going to end up on desktop sites and mobile devices—do you even know all the possible devices? What do you know now about the network constraints that may be present when your app is actually run? Do you know what your bottlenecks will be at a certain level of scale?

One thing we know from classic distributed computing theory is that distributed systems fail more often, and the failures often tend to be partial in nature. Such failures are not just harder to diagnose and predict; they're likely to be not reproducible—a given third-party data feed goes down or you get screwed by a router in a town you've never even heard of before. You're always fighting the intermittent failure, so is this a losing battle?

The solution to grappling with complex distributed systems is not simply more testing, or Agile processes. It's not DevOps, or continuous delivery. No one single thing or approach could prevent something like the Toyota incident from happening again. In fact, it's almost a given that something like that will happen again. The answer is to embrace that failures of an unthinkable variety are possible—a vast sea of unknown unknowns—and to change how we think about the systems we are building, not to mention the systems within which we already operate.

Think globally, develop locally

Okay, so anyone who writes or deploys software needs to think more like a distributed systems engineer. But what does that even mean? In reality, it boils down to moving past a single-computer mode of thinking. Until very recently, we've been able to rely on a computer being a relatively deterministic thing. You write code that runs on one machine, you can make assumptions about what, say, the memory lookup is. But nothing really runs on one computer any more—the cloud is the computer now. It's akin to a living system, something that is constantly changing, especially as companies move toward continuous delivery as the new normal.

So, you have to start by assuming the system in which your software runs will fail. Then you need hypotheses about why and how, and ways to collect data on those hypotheses. This isn't just saying "we need more testing," however. The traditional nature of testing presumes you can delineate all the cases that require testing, which is fundamentally impossible in distributed systems. (That's not to say that testing isn't important, but it isn't a panacea, either.) When you're in a distributed environment and most of the failure modes are things you can't predict in advance and can't test for, monitoring is the only way to understand your application's behavior.

Data are the lingua franca of distributed systems

If we take the living-organism-as-complex-system metaphor a bit further, it's one thing to diagnose what caused a stroke after the fact versus to catch it early in the process of happening. Sure, you can look at the data retrospectively and see the signs were there, but what you want is an early warning system, a way to see the failure as it's starting, and intervene as quickly as possible. Digging through averaged historical time series data only tells you what went wrong, that one time. And in dealing with distributed systems, you've got plenty more to worry about than just pinging a server to see if it's up. There's been an explosion in tools and technologies around measurement and monitoring, and I'll avoid getting into the weeds on that here, but what matters is that, along with becoming intimately familiar with how histograms are generally preferable to averages when it comes to looking at your application and system data, developers can no longer think of monitoring as purely the domain of the embattled system administrator.

Humans in the machine

There are no complex software systems without people. Any discussion of distributed systems and managing complexity ultimately must acknowledge the roles people play in the systems we design and run. Humans are an integral part of the complex systems we create, and we are largely responsible for both their variability and their resilience (or lack thereof). As designers, builders, and operators of complex systems, we are influenced by a risk-averse culture, whether we know it or not. In trying to avoid failures (in processes, products, or large systems), we have primarily leaned toward exhaustive requirements and creating tight couplings in order to have "control," but this often leads to brittle systems that are in fact more prone to break or fail.

And when they do fail, we seek blame. We ruthlessly hunt down the so-called "cause" of the failure—a process that is often, in reality, more about assuaging psychological guilt and unease than uncovering why things really happened the way they did and avoiding the same outcome in the future. Such activities typically result in more controls, engendering increased brittleness in the system. The reality is that most large failures are the result of a string of micro-failures leading up to the final event. There is no root cause. We'd do better to stop looking for one, but trying to do so is fighting a steep uphill battle against cultural expectations and strong, deeply ingrained psychological instincts.

The processes and methodologies that worked adequately in the '80s, but were already crumbling in the '90s, have completely collapsed. We're now exploring new territory, new models for building, deploying, and maintaining software—and, indeed, organizations themselves. We will continue to develop these topics in future Radar posts, and, of course, at our Velocity conferences in Santa Clara, Beijing, New York, and Barcelona.

Photo by Mark Skipper, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

Natural gas and renewables will power country's economic growth | ASIA TODAY News & Events

Natural gas and renewable energy are poised for boom times in China over the coming decades, and they'll be key factors in the development of the nation's economy, a global energy agency said on Wednesday.

China's natural gas consumption will quadruple by 2035, becoming a driver of global demand for the fuel, according to a report released by the International Energy Agency in Beijing.

China consumed 147.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2012, up 13 percent year-on-year.

"The rapid development of unconventional natural gas will continue to benefit North America, which is looking for opportunities to export these resources in the form of liquefied natural gas," said Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the Paris-based IEA.

China is the largest potential buyer of that LNG.

Along with eastern Africa, Australia and North America, China will be an active participant in global natural gas trading, which will propel diversification of that market.

In most parts of the world, it's cheaper to generate electricity with coal than with natural gas.

But efforts to cut air pollution, address climate change and improve energy efficiency will determine the future of these two fuels.

There's no doubt that China's coal consumption will ease as the central government strives to raise the percentage of natural gas in its primary energy mix, the report said.

According to the IEA, China's coal use will peak in 2025. India will become the world's largest coal importer in the 2020s, replacing China.

China's natural gas development is playing a big role in the country's drive to improve its air quality.

"China's natural gas output has maintained double-digit growth in recent years, with an average annual growth rate of about 13 percent in the past 10 years," said Zhou Jiping, chairman of China National Petroleum Corp, the country's largest natural gas producer.

He said that the company will continue to increase natural gas imports, with more investments in pipelines and LNG projects.

The company, which operates about 70 percent of China's natural gas pipelines, invested about 300 billion yuan ($49 billion) from 2010 to 2013 in pipeline construction.

The nation's natural gas pipeline network totals about 55,000 kilometers. But Zhou said it still lags those of developed countries.

Renewable energy will account for half of the increase in global electricity generation by 2035, with wind and solar power to account for 45 percent of the increase among renewables, said the report.

China will be the biggest country in terms of renewable generation by 2035, producing more electricity through those methods than the European Union, the United States and Japan combined.

"China is working hard to raise its renewable energy use among the total mix, aiming to improve the country's air quality and cut emissions," said Gu Jun, deputy director of the international division of the National Energy Administration.

China isn't a member of the IEA, but Gu said that China will work more closely with the agency on energy issues.

The IEA and six emerging economies - China, India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia - have signed a joint declaration involving closer cooperation with regard to global energy challenges.

"As the global energy map is redrawn, the IEA's 28 member countries face many of the same energy challenges as key emerging economies, and we all share a common interest in building a secure, sustainable energy future," said Van der Hoeven.

"This is why the IEA has always attached such high importance to working with such dynamic countries outside our membership as China."

By Du Juan

SOURCE China Daily Green China

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

10 Leadership Lessons From U.S. Commanding General John E. Michel | Vala Afshar

10 Leadership Lessons From U.S. Commanding General John E. Michel

Brigadier General John E. Michel is the Commanding General, NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan; NATO Training Mission/Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan; and Commander, 438th Air Expeditionary Wing, Kabul, Afghanistan. In addition to serving our nation as an active duty General Officer in the United States Air Force for 26 years and counting, General Michel enjoys helping people learn to walk differently in the world so they can become the best version of themselves possible, something he addresses in his book, Mediocre Me. General Michel is a widely recognized expert in culture, strategy and individual and organizational change.

Commanding General John E. Michel

An accomplished unconventional leader and proven status quo buster who has successfully led several multi-billion dollar transformation efforts, General Michel has dealt with business transformation at a scale that most of us will never see in our lives. Here he shares with us his words of wisdom and expertise. These leadership lessons from the military can be translated for business and commercial organizations anywhere.

10 Leadership Lessons from the U.S. Military and Commanding General Michel:

1. Be a strong leader -- General Michel sums up the top three must-have attributes of a strong leader:

• Leaders realize it's about people, not things: When you work a lot with technology it can be easy to confuse priorities and become infatuated with the technology. Strong leaders put the people first and leverage technology to make them more efficient.


• Leaders take smart risks: This infers that things may go well or they may not go so well but either way, you have to be willing to try. Strong leaders have the courage to do the right thing.


• Leaders are willing to fail forward and try again: Strong leaders realize things will not always work out the way they would like and when things don't go their way they regroup and realize that every opportunity is an opportunity to begin again, only smarter.

2. Co-create and collaborate with individuals -- Fear is a very significant issue that individuals and organizations have when they are moving into something that is uncomfortable. To combat fear when trying to drive transformation in an organization, leaders need to make it a top priority to involve every individual in the organization in the process of co-creation. General Michel's rule in guiding people through change is to put his vision in pencil, not marker. This communicates that you know that the whole organization has ideas on how to get you where you are going. "Creating a completely collaborative approach going forward is the only way to remove the fear of failure," says Michel, "When people are involved in that process they are willing to go to uncharted territory."

3. Include stakeholders throughout the process -- Speaking from experience from his time at the U.S. Transportation Command, which leverages a significant information backbone and has a massive group of stakeholders, General Michel advises involving key stakeholders as broadly as you can on a consistent basis. Sending a memo at the beginning and then filling them in on how it worked out at the end of the effort is not going to cut it. After establishing an initial vision, leaders should engage in an aggressive campaign to include stakeholders throughout the process. This consistent communication makes stakeholders feel they have a role and a shared understanding, reducing resistance and making them more apt to contribute. "No matter what business line you are in you will never go wrong if you involve people in the process," says Michel.

4. The customer is the common ground -- General Michel emphasizes the customer point of view by saying that any of us in business are in business to serve someone else. Getting everyone calibrated to the customer, making the customer the center, makes it easier for everyone to find a common ground to connect to. "If we all have a shared and beneficial outcome in serving our customer, we have a unified place where all our interests converge. Success is not defined by our own personal and business line goals; success is in the eyes of the customer," says Michel.

5. Demonstrate clear intent -- According to General Michel, the best organizations and individuals operate on disciplined thought, leading to disciplined action. He says one of most important things a leader can do is to supervise clear intent, which is something the military does well. The best organizations provide clear intent -- clear expectations to people about what you are doing and where you are going and clear expectations of what you need from people and what you expect them to do. Maintaining this high-level of transparency creates a state of trust where individuals are willing to share challenges and creates a culture where leaders will provide the resources they need. These conditions that a leader sets establishes how well organizations and individuals can pivot and be agile in doing what needs to be done, allowing the organization to shift and move with the changing demands of the marketplace.

6. Use technology tied to metrics to enable transformation -- General Michel calls IT a "force multiplier" and says that technology has been an enabler and accelerator for the military in Afghanistan enabling them to achieve the success much more quickly and cheaply in the face of shrinking timelines, budgets and personnel. To avoid technology that comes in late and over budget due to changes in expectations which quickly make the technology irrelevant, Michel says you have to closely monitor and utilize performance-based methods informed by clearly stated goals and objectives along way. "There is a propensity for people to add on, change and modify and overtime we end up off course. If we don't clearly tie technology to metrics, the initial intent can be sidetracked and lend itself for being irrelevant for what you originally intended to use it for," he warns.

7. Break projects down into smaller components -- In order to be more agile, stay within the budget and keep projects relevant it makes good sense to modularize capabilities. Wise leaders will look at a massive problem and start to immediately break it down into a series of components, align to see who is best able to handle those components and then orchestrate them into a collaborative whole. According to General Michel, the military has mastered this. He says that it's important to look at achieving effect by bringing the least amount of force upon the right place in a system to achieve what you want.

8. Push the boundaries of your potential -- In his book, Mediocre Me, General Michel focuses on achieving personal performance and helping people to figure out what is holding people them back from realizing their full potential as an individual or as a change leader in a world that needs talent more than ever. He says that if we don't push the boundaries of our potential we will start to atrophy and live much smaller lives than we are capable of living. People in this state of "prolonged equilibrium" enter a state of denial that they are capable of doing things and being more.

9. Be morally courageous -- For a leader to be morally courageous they must be willing to do something that is unpopular. They must be willing to make choices that are consistent with their values, even if that means going against the flow to do what they know is right. This can be an uncomfortable place and leaders need to have the courage to lean in when it would be easier to fall back. Leaders are especially under scrutiny by people who are looking on to see if they are going to walk the talk. In this way, we all going through serious levels of disruption, even in our personal lives. While courageous leaders say that pushing the boundaries is a smart, calculated risk, there are times when they also need to take a leap of faith -- it is in these leaps of faith where growth occurs and we inspire others.

10. Invest in lifelong learning -- General Michel is fortunate that the U.S. Air Force provides many opportunities for academic training and being on the move ensures he is constantly being exposed to different people, ideas and opportunities to stretch and actualize his potential. His parting advice to leaders of all industries: "Make lifelong learning something you believe in and invest in. The combination of personal commitment to making a constant investment in yourself and leveraging what your organization will afford you is where you become well-rounded and maximize the skills, attitudes and capabilities you bring to bear."

You can watch the full interview with Brigadier General John Michel here. Please join me and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as we host CXOTalk - connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

The middle class’s missing $1.6 trillion | The Great Debate

The middle class's missing $1.6 trillion

The United States was the world's first middle-class nation, which was a big factor in its rapid growth.  Mid-19th-century British travelers marveled at American workers' "ductility of mind and the readiness…for a new thing" and admired how hard and willingly they labored. Abraham Lincoln attributed it the knowledge that "humblest man [had] an equal chance to get rich with everyone else."

Most Americans still think of themselves as middle class.  But the marketing experts at the big consumer goods companies are giving their bosses the unsentimental advice that the middle class is an endangered species. Restaurants, appliance makers, grocery chains, hotels are learning that they either have to go completely up-scale, or focus on bargains for the struggling and budget-conscious.

Current income surveys, for statistical reasons, usually segment families by broad categories, which obscure the recent radical shift of income to a thin stratum of the super-rich. Well-to-do people may buy $100 coffee pots, but the lion's share of the income growth has been going to folks with five houses and staff to make the coffee.

For the last 15 years, an international consortium of economists has been building data bases on the income shares of the richest people in the developed countries, based on pre-tax market income including capital gains and tax-exempt income, and excluding government transfers. The American data reveals the greatest inequality by far, followed by Great Britain.

The stunning income distribution has a remarkable symmetry.  In 2012, the top 10 percent captured half of all reported income. But the top 1 percent got almost half of that — 22.5 percent — while the top 10th of 1 percent (0.1 percent) captured half of that. All three are within a few decimal places of the previous highs — which occurred in 1928, just before the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

The percentages don't quite capture the violence of the skew.  The stock market implosion of the 1930s followed by World War II's strict price controls and high marginal taxes brought the top 1 percent's income share down to about 9 percent by the end of the war.  Executive and financial sector pay was quite restrained, even through the good times of the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1 percent's income share did not start to rise until the late 1970s. It took off for the stratosphere then — amid the oceans of cash sloshing around Wall Street during the 1980s leveraged buyout boom.

The sums involved are enormous. The difference between the 1 percent's income share in 1975 (8.9 percent) and today's 22.5 percent is 13.6 percent.  That additional share of personal income is worth $1.6 trillion.  Each year.

What can you buy with $1.6 trillion?  Well, it's more than the annual outlays for Social Security payments, and about twice as large as Defense Department appropriations.  It's enough to pay off the federal debt held by the public in about seven years.

To amass that incremental $1.6 trillion, the 1 percent took 68 percent of all personal income growth between 1993 and 2012. To be fair, those same folks lost a great deal of income during the 2008 financial collapse, because much of their income comes from financial assets. But during the recovery of 2009-2012, they took a whopping 95 percent of the income growth — so their relative income and wealth positions are nearly all the way back to their pre-2008 high.

The canonical retort to such musings is that all segments of society benefit from a well-fed and contented super-rich. They are the ones, the argument goes, who supply the high-octane financial fuel to maintain America's advantage in high technology, keep its job-creation machinery humming, and lay the foundation for solid long-term growth.

Unfortunately, that is not proved true in recent experience. Since financial markets were liberalized in the 1980s, the finance sector's income and debt has soared, income inequality has skyrocketed, and the world economy has flopped from crisis to crisis – the Savings and Loan fiasco, the petrodollar debacle, and the leveraged buyout  circuses of the 1980s; the "hot-money" driven currency crises and hedge-fund collapses of the 1990s, and the hallucinatory mortgage games of the 2000s.

The dangers of runaway finance have been getting some academic attention of late, as scholars have begun connecting the dots between the super-rich and financial instability.

The very rich do invest productively, of course, and are also interested in capital preservation — so large segments of their portfolios are invested in safe, AAA-rated assets. As their income soared, however, their appetite for safe assets greatly outstripped the available supply. so the financial industry dutifully set about creating allegedly top-quality assets out of whatever lower-quality paper was at hand.

Adair Turner, the former head of the British financial regulatory authority, has outlined the "complexification" of finance that gave rise to the insane derivative structures and synthetic portfolios that unraveled so dramatically in 2008.

Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, two senior economists at the Bank for International Settlements, have documented the "inverse U-shaped curve" of finance's contribution to the economy. The history of all developed countries shows that as finance employment rises, economic growth and productivity increases. But only up to a point. After that, continued growth of the finance sector often triggers falling growth and declining productivity.

The two authors also worked out a model of why this happens. As the financial sector grows more sophisticated, it competes with technology and manufacturing industries for the smartest and most ingenious engineers and mathematicians. At the same time, however, broad-gaged finance needs highly "pledgeable" assets that can be readily leveraged, like residential and commercial mortgages. (High-technology investing has a very high risk of failure, and so is the preserve of specialist venture-capital firms.)

The best and the brightest, they found, instead of creating new technology breakthroughs, become the servants of the super-rich — because they pay the most.  The  engineers devote themselves to increasing low-productivity, easily understandable assets in order to transmute them into new, highly complex, instruments that look super-safe, but often aren't. How to wreck an economy in three easy steps.

Reversing these realities, unfortunately, will take at least as much time as it did to create them. But we have to start somewhere and keep at it for a couple of decades.

The first step should be to continue to rein in the financial sector. Turner of the British financial authority, points out that a key founder of the "University of Chicago School" of free-market economists, Henry Simon, opposed almost all government regulation, except for the financial sector. Simon understood that very smart people applying high leverage to other people's money is an invitation to disaster, and so required tight regulation. The most important step today might be breaking up the mega-banks that emerged from the crash. Then they would be easier to police — and easier to indict.

Second should be to start rolling back the income shares of the very richest people by targeted taxation and other strategies, including radical tax simplification to reduce the legal cubbyholes for sheltering income. The economist Brad DeLong wonders why the middle classes haven't risen up and demanded fairer income distribution.

Reducing the top 1 percent's income share to, say, 14 or 15 percent, still much higher than the pre-1980 norm, would free up about $1 trillion for middle-class tax relief; higher minimum wages; pension, healthcare, and educational subsidies, or job-creating infrastructure construction.

That wouldn't solve all of our problems. But it would help put America back on course to realizing its original promise.

ILLUSTRATION (TOP): Matt Mahurin

PHOTO (INSERT 1): At least 20 private jet aircraft sit parked at the Friedman Memorial Airport during the Allen & Co Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho July 13, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

PHOTO (INSERT 2): A model presents a creation from the Oscar De La Renta Autumn/Winter 2013 collection during New York Fashion Week, February 12, 2013.

PHOTO (INSERT 3): A couple walk with Hermes shopping bags as they leave an Hermes store in Paris March 21, 2013. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

Dubai Captivates the World With Dazzling Firework Display at Burj Khalifa to Mark the New Year | ASIA TODAY News & Events

DUBAI, UAE, Jan. 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The iconic New Year's Eve fireworks display by Emaar Properties, the global property developer, at Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building and Downtown Dubai, captivated the world and put the international spotlight on Dubai, alongside the largest fireworks display and celebrations held in the city at The Palm Jumeirah, The World Islands, and Burj Al Arab.

With millions of visitors - both residents and tourists - building the excitement in Downtown Dubai, the Burj Khalifa fireworks display was a true spectacle of artistic creativity. Ten stunningly different firework sequences on Burj Khalifa marked the run-up to a musical countdown for the New Year.

Each display also told the world a story - of the UAE's inspiring success, Dubai's positivity and ambition, and the design narrative of Burj Khalifa, which is choreographed to the captivating melody of symphonic orchestra music of Downtown Dubai, 'The Centre of Now.'

Abdulla Lahej, Group Chief Executive Officer, Emaar Properties, said: "The celebrations in Dubai now serve as a true benchmark for New Year's Eve galas across the world. Colourful, spectacularly planned, and creatively executed, the events also underline the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, to ensure a positive, inspirational, and high-growth environment in the city, for people from around the world."

Starting off with a dramatic countdown through a display of effects racing up to the pinnacle of Burj Khalifa, 828 metres high, the fireworks began with spectacular sequences including a colourful salute to the nation with the colours of the UAE National Flag. Silver pearls lend an unmatched ambience in a sparkling celebration of Dubai's success, especially with its win to host the World Expo 2020. Another stunning display was the tribute to Burj Khalifa, with the fireworks evolving into petals, wrapping the tower much like the Hymenocallis desert flower, which inspired the design of the building.

In the grand finale, fireworks lit up every direction dramatically and a golden lattice formed across the sky. Rainbow effects filled all over Downtown Dubai as Dubai ushered in 2014.

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

Mizuho Bank, Aeon Vietnam tie up for one-stop payment services- Nikkei Asian Review

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Mizuho-Bank-Aeon-Vietnam-tie-up-for-onestop-payment-services

Mizuho Bank, Aeon Vietnam tie up for one-stop payment services

HANOI -- Mizuho Bank will establish a partnership with Aeon Vietnam, a subsidiary of Japanese supermarket operator Aeon, to provide comprehensive cash management and payment transaction services for the retailer.

     The partnership will be the first attempt to offer such services in Vietnam, where management of sales data has lagged, and it is expected to help modernize the country's retail sector.

     Mizuho Bank and its existing Vietnamese business partner, Vietcombank, will form a comprehensive alliance with Aeon Vietnam on Monday. The two banks will handle all cash management and payment transaction operations for supermarkets directly operated by Aeon Vietnam and for the 120 or so stores in Aeon Vietnam's first Aeon Mall, which will open in January 2014, in Ho Chi Minh City.

     Sales data will be managed comprehensively through point-of-sale systems to be installed in each store and which are capable of supporting credit card transactions. The banks will also offer other financial services, including direct deposit of employee salaries.

     The partnership will also issue an Aeon-Vietcombank debit card. To promote sales and enhance customer loyalty, the card will offer such perks as points based on purchase amounts and coupons.

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853

http://mobilebeta.reuters.com/nelson-mandela-from-apartheid-fighter-to-president

South Africa Mourns Mandela

By Tosin Sulaiman and Peroshni Govender JOHANNESBURG - South Africans united in mourning for Nelson Mandela on Friday, but while some celebrated his remarkable life with dance and song, others fretted that the anti-apartheid hero's death would leave the nation vulnerable again to racial and social tensions. President Jacob Zuma said Mandela would be buried on Dec. 15 at his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape. South Africans heard from Zuma late on Thursday that their first black president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had died peacefully at his Johannesburg home in the company of his family after a long illness. On Friday, the country's 52 million people absorbed the news that the statesman, a global symbol of reconciliation and peaceful co-existence, had departed forever. Zuma also announced Mandela would be honoured at a Dec. 10 memorial service at Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium, the site of the 2010 World Cup final. "We will spend the week mourning his passing. We will also spend it celebrating a life well lived," Zuma said. Mandela would be laid to rest at his ancestral village of Qunu, 700 km (450 miles) south of Johannesburg, in a plot where three of his children and other close family members are buried. Despite reassurances from public figures that Mandela's death at 95, while sorrowful, would not halt South Africa's advance from its apartheid past, there were those who expressed unease about the absence of a man famed as a peacemaker. "It's not going to be good, hey! I think it's going to become a more racist country. People will turn on each other and chase foreigners away," said Sharon Qubeka, 28, a secretary from Tembisa township. "Mandela was the only one who kept things together." Flags flew at half mast across the country, and trade was halted for five minutes on the Johannesburg stock exchange. But the mood was not all sombre. Hundreds filled the streets around Mandela's home in the upmarket Johannesburg suburb of Houghton, many singing songs of tribute and dancing. The crowd included toddlers carrying flowers, domestic workers still in uniform and businessmen in suits. Another veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, said that like all South Africans he was "devastated" by Mandela's death. "Let us give him the gift of a South Africa united, one," Tutu said, holding a mass in Cape Town's St George's Cathedral. Tributes continued to pour in for Mandela, who had been suffering for nearly a year from a recurring lung illness dating back to the 27 years he spent in apartheid jails, including the Robben Island penal colony. U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron were among those who praised him. The White House said Obama would travel to South Africa next week to participate in memorial events. The flags of the 193 United Nations member states along First Avenue in Manhattan, New York were lowered at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) in honour of Mandela. The U.N. General Assembly observed a minute of silence. The loss was also keenly felt across the African continent. "We are in trouble now, Africa. No one will fit Mandela's shoes," said Kenyan teacher Catherine Ochieng, 32. Former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, an old ally of Mandela's in the struggle against apartheid, hailed him as "a great freedom fighter". POLITICIANS NOW "NOTHING LIKE MANDELA" For South Africa, the death of its most loved leader comes at a time when the nation, which basked in global goodwill after apartheid ended, has been experiencing labour unrest, growing protests against poor services, poverty, crime and unemployment and corruption scandals tainting Zuma's rule. Many saw today's South Africa - the continent's biggest economy but also one of the world's most unequal - as still distant from the "Rainbow Nation" ideal of social peace and shared prosperity that Mandela had proclaimed on his triumphant release from prison in 1990. "I feel like I lost my father, someone who would look out for me," said Joseph Nkosi, 36, a security guard. Referring to Mandela by his clan name, he added: "Now without Madiba I feel like I don't have a chance. The rich will get richer and simply forget about us. The poor don't matter to them. Look at our politicians, they are nothing like Madiba." The crowd around Mandela's home in Houghton preferred to celebrate his achievement in bringing South Africans together. For 16-year-old Michael Lowry, who has no memory of the apartheid system that ended in 1994, Mandela's legacy means he can have non-white friends. "I hear stories that my parents tell me and I'm just shocked that such a country could exist. I couldn't imagine just going to school with just white friends," Lowry said. Tutu tried to calm fears that the absence of the man who steered South Africa to democracy might revive some of the ghosts of apartheid. "To suggest that South Africa might go up in flames – as some have predicted – is to discredit South Africans and Madiba's legacy," Tutu said on Thursday. "The sun will rise tomorrow, and the next day and the next ... It may not appear as bright as yesterday, but life will carry on." MAY HURT ANC IN LONG TERM Zuma and his ruling African National Congress face presidential and legislative elections next year which are expected to reveal discontent among voters about poverty and unemployment 20 years after the end of apartheid. But the former liberation movement is expected to maintain its dominance in South African politics. Mark Rosenberg, Senior Africa Analyst at the Eurasia Group, said that while Mandela's death might give the ANC a sympathy-driven boost for the next elections, it would hurt the party in the long term. He saw Mandela's absence "sapping the party's historical legitimacy and encouraging rejection by voters who believe the ANC has failed to deliver on its economic promises and become mired in corruption". Mandela rose from rural obscurity to challenge white minority rule - a struggle that gave the 20th century one of its most respected and loved figures. He was among the first to advocate armed resistance to apartheid in 1960, but was quick to preach reconciliation and forgiveness when the white minority began easing its grip on power 30 years later. He was elected president in all-race elections in 1994 after helping to steer the divided country towards reconciliation and away from civil war. Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, an honour he shared with F.W. de Klerk, the white Afrikaner president who released him in 1990. In 1999, Mandela handed over power to younger leaders better equipped to manage a modern economy, a rare voluntary departure from power cited as an example to African leaders. This made him an exception on a continent with a bloody history of long-serving autocrats and violent coups. (Additional reporting by Ed Cropley, Dave Dolan, Tiisetso Motsoeneng, Xola Potelwa and Stella Mapenzauswa in Johannesburg, Wendell Roelf in Cape Town, Lou Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols in New York, Brian Moonga in Lusaka.; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Matthew Tostevin, David Stamp and Giles Elgood) 

Sent from Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

3rd, 3-45, Complex Bukit Jambul, Penang, Malaysia.

Contact : 016-404 3004

                016-521 9853