I am a passionate leader seeking to motivate children to learn more through reading, study, play, and projects. I believe nothing is impossible for a child who is motivated to learn and win. My goal is to turn those years of childhood into enjoyable, educational, life-changing value while the mind is most pliable to learning.
Apple Developer maintains documentation and design guidelines for 3rd party developers.
Adobe Creative Cloud provides design tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
Super Smash Bros. for 3DS
Creatures develops spinoff Pokémon titles like Pokédex software and the Trading Card Game
Automated Tree Detection
Conducts research on computer vision, image processing, and video compression algorithms for real-life use
Conducts research on the geology and makeup of planets, stars, and moons
Click, run. An analysis of human behavioral blind spots and patterns often exploited in sales, marketing, and persuasion. Based on scientific study, divided into categories such as Reciprocation, Liking, Social Proof, Authority, Scarcity, and Unity. Basically, the book explains why our mind shortcuts to certain social cues, and advises us how to counter-balance those tendencies that might lead us astray.
An advanced cookbook of common (and less common) CSS issues, and code-level solutions to solving them, sometimes including HTML and JavaScript. Spanning geometry issues like diamond images, text & fonts, widgets (custom checkboxes), and animation strategies.
Case studies they include of real groups that started from scratch, such as the Little Free Library non-profit with the simple concept of take a book, leave a book; the Downtown Girls basketball club that would post halftime photos on Instagram; and the World Aeropress Championship as a way of encouraging coffee brewing.
Scripts for running user interviews and product tests, to gauge interest in your solution and determine how they use your product. Tips for maintaining trust, gathering truth, and diagnosing pain points.
Best guide for the best game. Full walkthrough showing where to meet each monster in each dungeon and on the overworld map. Maps, Lores, Rages, Espers, and Bestiary, though in alphabetical rather than in-game order.
Sound strategic advice for creating new value and expanding market horizons rather than benchmarking against competitors. High-level, with case studies of new market-defining companies and products.
Life hacks, self-help, amateur psychology, mental models, dictionary definitions, and regurgitations/quotations from other self-help books masquerading as a business education book.
Date by date, entry by entry journal documenting Jordan Mechner’s life during the rise of Prince of Persia with Broderbund Studios.
Fantastic, well-researched book with deep analysis of each aspect of building the park, telling the story of characters seldom mentioned in official Disney editions. Every aspect of the park, from training/breeding the horses that would walk Main Street, and C.V. Wood’s tactics for selling sponsorships when nobody would sign on, to lawsuits following the park’s opening, had dramatized scene-level detail with the participants talking out loud and explaining their viewpoints.
First-person account of the founding of Clif Bar. Focuses on the white road — off the beaten path, privately owned companies focused on long-term steady profits, fueled by organic demand and re-investment of profits into oneself, without outrageous borrowing from venture capital funds or acquisition.
Van Arsdale France recounts how he joined Walt Disney Studios, established Disney University, and trained staff for the opening of Disneyland.
Aimless meandering between topics like politics, military strategy, game theory, raising children, and venture capitalism, introducing idiomatic expressions and giving their origin as useless trivia.
Discussion of how consumer brands evolved during their penetration into the Japanese consumer market. A series of essays penned from various academic perspectives.
Case studies and retrospectives on successful products targeting each age group of chilren, from birth-2, 3-7, 8-12, 13-15, and 16-19. Daniel Acuff studies boy and girls separately, noting differences in both brain development and preferences in the two. He draws conclusions based on observations made in business under the name Youth Market Systems Consulting and Character Lab, which conducts focus studies, surveys, and case studies of various popular phenomena through the 1990s.
Debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers, and the contentious question of Pokémon’s educational value and place in school.
Comparison of preschool education and culture in China, Japan, and the United States, with commentary and interviews of educators across all three countries in 2004.
Comparison of preschool education and culture in China, Japan, and the United States, with commentary and interviews of educators across all three countries in 1984.
Interviews with famous people about their life hacks and turning points.
Informative, applicable guide to leadership style that Lee employed both at Walt Disney World and his various hotel roles at Marriott and Hilton. Focuses on soft skills such as empathy, empowerment, and ethics.
A superficial survey of companies like Wells Fargo and their leadership. Attempts to explain why certain companies saw an increase in their public stock price based on leadership, people, the hedgehog concept, discipline, and technology.
Musings on what makes a successful startup business, as viewed through the lens of finding and exploiting a valuable secret truth that few people agree with you on. What valuable company is nobody building? Seven conditions for a solid business plan, including distribution and team. How to avoid competition by starting from smaller, local niche markets.
Advice from a former senior executive at modern-day Disney.
In-the-trenches advice about how to market a children’s book in real life and on Amazon.
Keys to success as viewed from the lens of past leaders, such as Walt Disney, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and the author himself.
An introduction to using Discord, including servers, channels, bots, moderation, and settings.
Applies the Pareto Principle to life, business, and time management. How to determine which 20% of inputs lead to 80% of outputs.
What makes a good name? Multiple case studies in naming companies and products.
Ways to motivate kids to learn, from computer clubhouses to the Scratch programming language. Patterners learn from building, dramatists prefer a story.
The Network Effect describes how companies can scale from atomic networks to global businesses. Examples from both successful and struggling startups.
The tricks and techniques that Disney Parks use to improve customer service. Applying Disney’s customer service mentality to other company cultures.
A tour of Disneyland’s various lands & areas, with anecdotes, quotes, and history sprinkled in.
A collection of quotes from Walt Disney, sorted by topic.
Jim Cora’s autobiography, covering his childhood working hourly part-time for Disneyland, through his days leading Disneyland’s international expansion into Japan and France.
Tactics to design a website for optimizing conversion. Case studies include Mobal for Japanese travelers and GoHenry, a credit card for children.
A foundation of product design and validation processes, from user testing to problem space, primarily focused on software.
Advice on launching and promoting a product by being active on social media, creating a landing page, and posting to your blog. Marketing tactics.
Not about discovering new products, but rather exploring the problem space to find niches to penetrate. Case studies from large products like the iPhone.
A memoir from the son of famous Disney research economist Buzz Harrison, with stories about Buzz’s unique personality and charrette work on Disney theme parks. Lots of friend perspectives, not much substance.
Designing well-rounded multi-dimensional characters, as well as their flatter supporting counterparts. He deep dives common tropes like the Collector, the Player, the Obsessive, the Businessman, as well as ways to twist them into something unique, unexpected, and interesting.
Screenplay of the Fantastic Beasts movie detailing Grindelwald’s schemes, motivation, and backstory, culminating in his showdown with Dumbledore.
「You cannot teach a person anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.」 So many of the world’s problems stem from overly hands-on leadership, from people micromanagement. This book helps remind us of the paradox that you get more by managing less. You have to trust people and let them surprise you, rather than forcing success or results.
American sports analogies from NFL coaching to batting average as a model for measuring and motivating productivity in the workplace. Track stats to turn every workplace function into a game.
A memoir from Buzz Price, the business consultant Walt Disney commissioned to analyze the optimal size for Disneyland and Disney World. Anecdotes and numbers from the Disney projects as well as other clients, like Leo Harvey, Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich of Sea World, CV Wood, and Six Flags. A deep dive into the business of measuring risk and profit potential of theme parks and live attractions.
Self-published writer to self-published writer. Proven breakdown of the writing process and publishing pipeline down to word count.
Self-proclaimed heir Dick Nunis breaks down his time leading operations of the Disney theme parks. Each chapter ends with a short lesson learned that concisely sums up the vignette or anecdote’s takeaway message.
Strategies and archetypes for creating multidimensional characters and presenting them in story to stand out from the slush pile.
110 tips, each with its own short chapter on applying to motivate others to action. Title belies a deep, applicable manual for leading people calmly into action. Tools, not rules!
110 tips, each with its own short chapter on applying to motivate yourself to action.
How to organize knowledge so you can find it quickly later, consulting it like a second brain.
Inspiring biography of Steve Jobs’ entire life, from his early days attending computer clubs with Wozniak, to his later days launching NeXT, iPhone, iPad, and Pixar movies.
Studying human psychology through a framework of two systems. System 1 is impulsive, and provides heuristic and intuitive guesses and reactions to stimuli without prompting. System 2 requires devoted effort and concentration in rationalizing & making decisions. Explains several phenomena such as anchoring and intuition.
A solid book full of insightful observations about human behavior, from workplace dishonesty to self-estimation. Distilled into one main lesson, it is that we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. This book elucidates and clarifies those forces, many of them ingrained in our primal minds and psychological underpinnings, through example and reasoning.
Scientifically-backed studies summarizing the restorative and creative benefits of sleeping a full night. Practical, applicable, relevant. A call to action with a sense of urgency.
Cute manga comics featuring the viral character Chiikawa and friends. Shallow but entertaining stories about enjoying the small things in life.
Light-hearted entertaining manga series with page-long episodes ranging from dining out to studying for exams. A fitting introduction to the series and character.
Amiabura, Milkman, and several clever food scenes set this edition apart from the earlier versions, which were deceptively simple yet hard to understand.
The virally popular daily life short manga series continues with quirky episodes on nature, human intruders, and superstitions.
Longer manga strips with some horror stories mixed in. The monga featured on the cover makes an appearance.
Actionable techniques to focus on tasks. Apps like Forest and MyLand, web services like FocusMate, devices like the Striiv Pedometer, and time-boxed calendars.
Insider storytelling with brutal honesty on Jack Lindquist’s journey to Disneyland marketing director. Marketing tactics and campaigns, like Disney Dollars, the Magic Kingdom Club, Grad Night, and negotiations with the Epcot World Showcase countries.
Spotlight on Roy O Disney delving into the issues of running the business. More practical stuff like tax deductions, ABC contract negotiations, stock buybacks, and litigation. Not simply fluff of dreams.
A manual written by a former FBI hostage negotiator. Juicy stories that fail to consistently and convincingly bridge the divide between hostage negotiation and everyday business negotiation. Juiced with unconscious bias.
Well-researched, organized, insightful, motivating deep-dive into the business of Walt Disney, from early-day filmmaking to present day theme park logistics. Draws from both former workers to financial reports and news articles.
Short lessons in game design based on idle thoughts from games Sakurai has developed. Drawn verbatim from past Famitsu columns.
A convincing case that Black Swans drive much of creative or art markets. Analogies personify rare unpredictable events as animals (Black Swans), and then extend the metaphor through colors. Examples include Harry Potter, superstar athletes, and ancient history.
Insightful. Interesting. Illuminating. A glimpse into the process of a creative team/company, and managing that throughout a long cutting-edge creative project. How to QA or guarantee good storytelling quality through repeatable techniques like the Braintrust.
The story of how Nike grew, and more importantly, how Buck grew. These were the key moments of Blue Ribbon’s growth, and, more importantly, the key moments of a man’s life, woven with Nike’s backstory and the many races he ran. Buck’s Nike-is-personal motivations resonated with me, and his resiliency and struggles with the bank inspired me to dig deeper.
A moving testament to the power of direct experience. Michael Crichton tells a broad spectrum of stories, from his medical school impressions and his days directing films to his experiences studying psychics and auras. Every chapter offered something different.
Worldbuilding, witty dialogue, action, third-person limited story told from six points of view. Six memorable characters collaborate to rescue a master drug creator from impenetrable Ice Court prison. In a world where loyalty changes as quickly as money changes hands, it is remarkable that the six characters collaborating on the heist actually grow closer as the plot unfolds. So much betrayal and surprise! Best book I’ve read outside Harry Potter.
Riveting sequel to Six of Crows. Written with just as much suspense, worldbuilding, and character development, the story post-heist is as full of intrigue as the heist itself. Characters experience new challenges, betrayals, and enemies as they seek their freedom in a war of nations converging in Ketterdam.
Lessons in storytelling - such as story structure, inciting incident, beginning/middle/end, character development - aren’t unique to the book, but Matthew introduces techniques that he has used at Pixar that I haven’t read elsewhere： Character invocation, the story spine, memory prompts, the mental waiting room, character archetypes. Step-by-step approach to generating stories from thin air, buoyed by examples from his story development at Pixar.
A unique, visual tool. Each topic discussed comes mapped onto a line, with two extremes on the spectrum. Erin Meyer then places a number of countries and their cultures onto the spectrum.
A personal account of his time at Ghibli. He certainly hits at all the main events and doesn’t hold much back, experientially, but he does hold back on names. Unnecessarily dry humor and details about conversations with Miyazaki and how Ghibli does business worldwide in the early days.
The story of Epcot, from purchasing the land to building the pavilions in the World Showcase. Hiring people from all over the world to staff the World Showcase, negotiating with countries, selling sponsorships, and service. The greatest thing about these unofficial books is the ability to tell about the shade, the challenges, the lawsuits.
Fantastic story about a young orphan invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Reminds me of how fun school was, from meeting new friends to sussing out the motivations and expertise of teachers. If only every book we read in middle school had this kind of excitement and enjoyment, an inspiration to write and worldbuild.
Textbook-like tour of technologies used in the early Disney lab, like audio-animatronics, film readers, optics systems, and mechanical disks.
Each Disney film/world featured in the book receives a short story synopsis and illustrated character list, with short plot summaries introducing key characters and plot points.
An autobiography written by Walt Disney’s lead communications writer and Imagineer, Marty Sklar. Written in retirement, with a lot of name-dropping, gloss-over, digression, and quotes of others.
Useless facts and backstory surrounding Main Street USA, the Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, and other exhibits around Disney World Magic Kingdom.
Colorful, glossy, detailed summary of HTML and CSS, divided by topic. Covers most common keywords, terms, and browsers. Heavy and dry, but comprehensive and useful, with examples and clear, contextual explanations.
A series of short, two-page chapters covering lesser-known stories and people involved in Disney World, like sculpture artists, early ambassadors, Ice Gator, Humphrey the Bear, and even canceled attractions & pavilions. Strictly informational.
Tells the story of Jarl Brum and Fjerda’s invasion of Ravka, and King Nikolai’s schemes to save Ravka. Underneath that mien, however, we hear from a number of characters involved in the conflict, and their struggles to find meaning and hope. A textbook lesson in writing engaging multiple PoV fiction.
The story behind Nikolai’s rise, and the return of the Darkling. Nina and Zoya, Ravkans in the Second Army, feature heavily in separate plotlines. A merging of the Shadow and Bone Grishaverse and the Ketterdam stories from Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom.
The story behind Nikolai’s rise, and the return of the Darkling. Nina and Zoya, Ravkans in the Second Army, feature heavily in separate plotlines. A merging of the Shadow and Bone Grishaverse and the Ketterdam stories from Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom.
Enjoyable, applicable lessons from the Walt Disney Institute about the service compass, as applied to Hong Kong Disneyland’s Star Pack, food packaging companies, and hospitals.
The classic sci-fi story about dinosaurs revived by amber for a theme park gone wrong. Spellbinding storytelling from a multitude of 3rd-person limited perspectives, like the scientists and engineers working the park. The book is much better than the movie, and the dinosaur behavior and scientific explanations make you believe.
How much information does an image contain? The entropy of the image, often used to determine image compressibility, may quantify the randomness or variability of image intensity, but it seldom parallels human intuition gained from viewing an image, particularly when the underlying distribution is not mathematically but rather intuitively ordered. We would like mathematical quantitative information to match intuitive qualitative information, but the computer has no inherent framework to interpret images like we do. This thesis will explore and expound various techniques and heuristics that we might use to translate our mode of extracting information from images into computer algorithms. We will juxtapose not only the merits of many mathematical methods but also alternative forms of representation, such as the 2D Fourier transform, the discrete cosine transform (DCT), the 2D wavelet transform, eigenimages (principal components), the Hough transform, and Kolmogorov complexity.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” but finding the right thousand words to describe a picture has no simple adage. Camera phones and other mobile devices can easily capture a scene, but processing the image to inform its contents and describe the scene requires efficient object recognition and identification. In an effort to augment reality in a potential virtual museum guide, this document presents an efficient method to identify a painting centered in a camera phone digital image. This expedient and accurate algorithm taps the principal component transform to map the thirty-three paintings of interest into an alternative subspace spanned by an orthogonal basis of eigenimages. Within the eigenspace, Euclidean distance computation and subsequent feature recognition simplify into juxtaposition of the transformed image coordinates and the known eigencoefficients of our thirty-three known paintings.
In order to sensibly label objects or regions in an image, computers often require foreknowledge of the classes or categories into which the objects must be divided. However, we consider unsupervised learning algorithms, in which the human user supplies only the number of classes – not the identity or the statistics of the classes themselves. Given a set of training images and feature extractors, the classification system we describe generates a set of classes that are maximally distinct in the feature domain we prescribe. We formulate the acquisition of statistical knowledge from the training data as a Gaussian parameter estimation problem with vector quantization, and we implement classification of test images in a forward recursion algorithm. Our analysis juxtaposes the relative importance of various design parameters, such as the direction in which we scan the image, the block size, the type of extracted features, and the number of classes we instruct the algorithm to find.
Feature extraction assumes a number of forms in a number of applications. In this paper, we improve feature extraction by not only increasing the number of quality features that one can extract but also ensuring that the features we do extract are, indeed, representative high-quality features instead of false, minute, or noise features. We show that higher frequencies do not, for the purposes of feature extraction, necessarily represent human-salient features and that the combination of contrast enhancement, decimation, and lowpass filtering achieve more robust feature extraction than simple high-frequency boosting. Our ideal feature extractor therefore incorporates a decimator for reduction to an idealized size, contrast enhancement through stretched dynamic range, and frequency-domain filtering with a Gaussian lowpass filter.
Cassini’s Radar instrument has mapped over 10% of Titan’s surface through the T18 flyby in August 2006 and has detected remarkably few impact craters. Three impact craters have been conclusively identified and named, and a handful of unconfirmed candidate impact structures are documented. These results indicate that the overall crater density is a factor of 5x higher than Earth, and has a size- distribution slope very similar to Earth’s indicating rapid obliteration of smaller structures by erosion and burial. The paucity of small craters was expected from atmospheric shielding considerations, but the rarity of medium (20– 100 km diameter) craters – some 30 – 300 times less abundant than on nearby Saturnian satellites – implies rapid resurfacing. Erosion and burial appear to be the dominant means of crater obliteration, with viscous relaxation playing a lesser role. Models of the 20 – 100 km impact crater production rate suggest an overall crater retention age of 100 Myr – 1 Gyr, the same as the corresponding age for the Earth
In attempting to quantify ‘team ability’ a, we seek to juxtapose all teams in the league on the same simple but sophisticated scale. From a statistician’s perspective, this quantization allows us to rank the teams on a ladder, answering questions such as “Which teams seem to be the strongest in the league?” and “Which team has performed best in the league until now?” based on previously compiled results such as adaptively updated matches and last year’s records. From a gambler’s perspective, this quantization known as ‘team ability’ can aid us in prediction of future matches. For example, based on what we have seen from two given teams, we can compare their relative abilities and set a point spread (or at least declare a favorite and underdog) for the next match. The layman might simply extrapolate the two teams’ most recent matchup results, but we can do better by incorporating matchups with other teams in the league and accounting for noise. Finally, we can evaluate a team’s performance by using the past as a basis for our expectations of the upcoming season.
My experience studying abroad in Japan on the Critical Language Scholarship left me with many lasting memories and life lessons that I will attempt to document here, but no reflection can properly recapitulate or recapture their significance or my gratefulness for the opportunity.
Spending most of his writing career in Europe, Henry James often pondered the life he did not live; his friends wondered what kind of novelist he would have become in America, and these musings occupied James’ thoughts enough to materialize in his fiction. In short stories such as “The Middle Years,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Jolly Corner,” James’ characters explicitly retrospect their lives and consider the alternative paths they might have followed had their younger selves made different choices.
As a child’s knowledge and awareness burgeon, games adopt new names, the number of players fluctuates, and the rules and objectives lose precise definition, but the essence and essentiality of competition, strategy, and mastery remain. Through childhood and adolescence, we all play games; as time passes, we even master some. Juxtaposing the games we master with those we fumble, and the values we embrace with those we discard, we open a window into social and cerebral growth, the development of character.
Like a subatomic particle’s temperature, the dynamic personalities of Henry James’ characters also balk at the fixation imposed by scientific observation. Unique, variegated, and multidimensional, they defy classification and stereotyping; they represent the superposition of several linearly independent types, the incalculable convergence of many impressions and forms. Despite this diversity in personality and the hopelessness of categorizing it, other members of society inevitably judge and form their own impressions. Once measured, characters struggle mightily – sometimes fatally – to escape the accompanying preconceptions, but their efforts often come too little too late; by the time the nuances of a character’s true personality fully emerge, presumption has done its damage.
Immortality assumes many forms： enduring fame, endless existence, incessant influence. Human beings cannot live forever, but they can nevertheless achieve immortality in other ways; the poets and philosophers of ancient Greece proposed several alternatives.
The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a pass-fail exam held each year to certify advanced language speakers. N5 is the lowest level; N1 is the highest level. To pass the exam for each level, testtakers must master vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, syntax, reading, and listening comprehension. Since N5 through N2 are generally useless, I went straight for N1 and passed in 2022 with a score fo 105/180.
The U.S. Department of State awards the CLS Scholarship for studying the Japanese language and culture. I was part of the first cohort of 15 students in 2010, and we spent eight weeks studying Japanese language and culture at Doshisha University in Kyoto. I spent weekends studying trends in Japanese software use, particularly smartphone gaming and Pokémon offkai.
Stanford presents the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award to the top students of each year’s undergraduate senior engineering class. Terman scholars attend a celebratory luncheon and invite the most influential secondary school or other pre-college teacher who guided them during the formative stages of their academic career. I won the award for maintaining a GPA in the top 5% of the Class of 2008, and invited my high school English teacher, Lexi Eagles, to attend the ceremony.
I qualified for the Pokémon World Championships in 2008 based on my first place finish at the Los Angeles qualifiers held in June 2008. I brought the same team to Orlando, Florida, to battle the best of Japan in a 64-player single-elimination top cut tournament in August 2008. I continued my unbeaten streak to the semifinals, where I lost to Yasuhito Kajiwara of Japan.
Along with classmates June Zhang and Ivan Janatra, I developed a technique to recognize paintings on display in the Cantor Arts Center based on snapshots taken with a N95 Nokia camera phone. As part of an electronic museum guide, the user would point her smartphone at a painting of interest and would hear commentary based on the recognition result. Applications of this kind are usually referred to as “augmented reality” applications. Implemented on hand-held mobile devices, they are called “mobile augmented reality.” We finished first in a competition against 50 other graduate students in electrical engineering. Our algorithm, based on eigenimage training, recognized all paintings in the test set with 100% accuracy faster than any other algorithm.
The President’s Award honors students in the top 3% of first-years who have exceptionally distinguished academic records that exemplify a strong program of study in the freshman year. Students eligible for the award normally have completed Writing and Rhetoric and Introduction to the Humanities requirements during their first year at Stanford.
