Dingo Game in Second Life

Southern Cross University in Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) recently developed a dingo game which is similar to soccer game but has four balls instead of one. The game requires two teams to play together, blue and red. Each team will have four people. Avatars will have to wear team uniforms before the game starts. I come up with some winning strategies and would like to share and get suggestions here.

I divide assign the four people to different roles, forward, defender and goal keeper. Instead of keeping two forwards, using two defenders can allow team members get more interaction with each other and learn how to coordinate to finish a job together.

Positions

A Forward 1 Push the balls to get the soccer ball past the goalie.
B Defender 2 Stealing the ball back from the other team
C Goal Keeper 1 Prevent the ball from entering the soccer goal

Exhibit 1

This is the starting layout of the dingo ball game. Four defenders are in the middle of the field. And two goal keepers stay at the gates.

Exhibit 2

When two As get one ball each, they start to push the ball toward the gates. But when they get to the middle field, the Bs should circle around A, trying to steal the balls from them.

Exhibit 3

If B fails to take the ball from A, then C should defense A in the gates. But if B successfully steals the ball from A, then one B can push the ball to the gate while the other B will go to get another free ball which was originally still in the center. At this time, A who lost the ball will go to get another free ball. Then there should be no balls available in the center any more.

Exhibit 4

After A who lost the ball before get a new ball, A will go directly to shoot in the gate and fight against C. The other two Bs who stole the ball from A will take both balls to push to the gates. Then red Bs will use all their power to go against blue Bs. The game at this time will become one-to-one offense and defense.

Logic for Team Building Development

This strategy involves both defense and offense roles through the whole game. In this way, team members can always feel the interaction with each other, either between its own team members or across different teams. The team members can build trust by helping each other such as the triangle situation in the Exhibit 2. When team members do this exercise, they should rotate positions after one game so that everybody in the team can have a understanding of different roles in the game.

The Winner in the Financial Crisis

I was introduced to MarketHealth Case study by Professor Micheal Kraten to develop a case study for this particular start-up financial company. MarketHealth Inc. provides 401K investment advice by using a different approach from the current popular diversity strategy. Mr. John Bailey, CEO of MarketHealth, does his research on the stock market on a principle that keeps loss minimum in market downtrend and increases profit maximum in uptrend. The principle has been approved into a big success in the 2007-2009 economic crisis.
In the early of 2008, when most financial advisors still think investors should put more money into the 401k investment, Mr. John Bailey suggested that investors should reduce the contribution to the 401k, 100% pull-out. Although the MarketHealth 401k newsletter subscribers read the suggestions, most of them were held by the traditional diversity investment idea and didn’t follow Mr. John Bailey’s advice. As the Collapse of Bear Stearns, Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America, in September 2008, Dow Falls 777.68 Points, which is largest One-Day Point Drop in History. At this time, the investors that took Mr. John Bailey’s advice, successfully avoid the loss while the investors that didn’t take his advice, lost their 401k investment dramatically.
Now in the focus group conference call, people that didn’t take his advice were regretted for their decision. Some of them are aggressively investors who tend to take more risk than other investors. That’s why that they made a failure in their investment when the economy got down. They want to make more profit anytime, but to most 401k investors, the security of not losing money is a key to guarantee a good retirement check. MarketHealth knows this point very well so that they use minimizing loss as the fundamental investment strategy. They helped many investors save their loss in the worst time and they are looking forward to help more people to make a safe 401k investment.

MarketHealth:http://markethealth401k.com/aboutus.aspx

When we face money…

Madoff scandal in the end of 2008 is another bad news for this economy. It seems that all the ugliness come out when the curtain is open. The people that lost their money in this Ponzi Scheme are financial advisors and bank experts. How come those people can get into deep trap of this ponzi scheme?

“A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned.” from wiki. It looks simple in this summerized one sentence, but it could be really tricky when you get into it. I think these investors of Madoff are not dumb; they should be smart people, otherwise they won’t be so good at their work. For something easy like this Ponzi scheme, they should be able to realize the truth at the back. The problem is that they get blind, when they first see the hugh return and lost themselves. This is one of the weakness of human beings. The desire for more makes people get into bad situation and led them away from the best position. When the executive of the Madoff made the investor believe that they can earn more money, they just put more into this black hole and never seen it come back. The other kinds of scheme are doing the same thing. They draw money from people by taking advantage of their desire for money.

Several my friends joined a financial company that sells financial products to their customers. This company is using multilevel pyramid scheme, which is similar to Ponzi scheme, but this one requires keep developing new members to join in. Under this scheme, the lower level people basically just give their money away to the head. The most disgusting thing is that they only take international people. I think because some international people are not very familiar with this scheme and they also need more money. But they should target at students. That is just wrong. Another thing about this scheme is that they have some power that close to religion. They make their staff really believe what they are doing and let them try to get more people, so they go out and talk to families. That is why I don’t like this scheme. It not only takes away money, but also your mind is controlled.

Take a deep breath and have a clear mind; We need to know when we should stop chasing for money. Now I think what we learn in class about “Keeping a skeptical mind” is very practical. This is very important to most people, not only the Madoff guy.

Angelo Mozilo is charged with fraud

The economy recession now partly comes from the mortgage crisis, which is led by the Countrywide fraud. It is happy to see that Angelo Mozilo, the former boss of Countrywide get charged on June 4th. There are still many people like him who lead to this financial crisis today. If SEC can keep doing research, the market will become better and better.

One of my classmate worked for a mortgage company two or three years ago. At that time, he just graduated from the college but he made more than a hundred thousand a year because of his mortgage job. He admitted that he didn’t do anything very serious but to close mortgage or to help the company pack the mortgage and then sell it to other big companies such as Citibank. They know some mortgages were very bad and toxic but still what they need to do is to make it look good and fill out legal documents so that they can be accepted by big mortgage companies. I think what he experienced is a miniature of that time, the time when Angelo Mozilo was pride of his toxic subprime mortgage. It is shown that the mortgage market was not regulated and almost controlled by some big companies like Countrywide. When they were earning so much money from the bad mortgages and the innocent people, they didn’t think about anything else but money. They didn’t think about the market will get into a recession and so many companies will go bankruptcy today. Their sight was so short that they didn’t even think about they will be punished by all the unethical things they did. The punishment for Angelo Mozilo is a good warning for many other similar people but those haven’t get punished yet. They should have a clear mind when they are earning money too easy without considering what staff they are selling.

Although this is a bad time that people fail, this is also a good time that people think, thinking about what they should do in the future and what they did in the past. It is a time for people to calm down and consider whether they are doing the right things.