Archive for May 24th, 2009
Kars (Turkey): one of the Cursed Cities
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 24, 2009
Cursed Cities: Karss (April 14, 2009)
There are geographical locations and regions that are cursed historically.
This essay is not about cities that experienced frequent disasters by natural calamities. For example, we have cities that had vanished because built near active volcanoes such as Pompeii in Italy, others because of being located on seismic faults such as Beirut and lately the Abruzzi region in Italy, and others succumbing to tidal waves and hurricanes such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, the USA Gulf regions, and Rangoon where people perish by the hundred of thousands every year and keep rebuilding in the same devastated areas.
This article is about cities located on major trade routes and suffered recurring genocides because of human greed for domination and power.
I will focus on the city of Karss in Turkey on the eastern side of the Anatolia Plateau (Anadol). Karss is built by the river Karss and is a must cross location on the route from Georgia, Tabriz (Iran), the Caucasus and Tiflis. I urge my readers to recollect other cursed cities through history.
Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus form one homogeneous geographic area in economy, culture, and social communication and trades.
The Armenians on both sides preferred to pay allegiance to Christian Russia and wished that Russia would grant them administrative autonomy in the Caucasus.
The Moslems on both sides paid allegiance to the Moslem Ottoman Empire. The triangle of the current States of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were the scenes of major battle fields and invasions through history and is still a hot area till now.
The Nobel Literature Prize winner Orhan Pamuk published “Snow” that described the calamities suffered by the inhabitants of the Karss region. The Armenian people lived in that region for a thousand years and then many waves of immigrants and refugees from persecutions flocked to it.
The Karss region hosted people from the Empires of Persia, Byzantium and then Moguls, Georgians, Kurds, and Cherkessk. In the 17th century, the Karss region was predominantly of Moslems and then Armenians were second in numbers.
The absolute monarchic Russian Empire vied for this region since the 18th century.
In 1827, Russia entered Karss and chased out over 27,000 Moslems and transferred 45,000 Armenians to this city from Iran and the Anatolian Plateau. The city of Yerevan (Capital of the current State of Armenia) that was mostly of Iranians was transformed demographically in 1827.
In every Russian invasion to the Karss region, the Russian troops could rely on the Armenian population for auxiliary regiments, logistics, and intelligence services. As the Russian troops vacated the region in 1829, over 90,000 Armenians fled with the Russians fearing well deserved persecution.
During the Crimea War, that confronted Russia against the combined alliance of Britain, France, and the Ottoman, the Russians put siege on Karss in 1855 for many months and all the Ottoman army within the city was massacred. The Paris treaty of 1855 forced the Russians to vacate the Karss region. The Ottoman troops retaliated heavily on the Armenians.
In 1859, the Cherkessk, lead by their leader Shamel, revolted against the Russians and Shamel was defeated; many Christian Russian Orthodox were transferred to Karss to replace the Moslem Cherkessk. The same eviction process befell three quarter of the Moslems of Abkhazia in 1867.
Thus, in less than 30 years, the Russian Empire changed the demographics of the Caucasus from mostly Moslems to mostly Christians. Over 1, 200,000 Moslems were forced to transfer to other regions; 800,000 of the Moslems settled in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1877, the Russians amassed troops on the border with Karss; Sultan Abdel Hamid preempted the invasion by massacring the Armenians on ground that they will inevitably aid the Russians.
After 93 days of war, the Russians entered Karss and a pogrom on the Moslems proceeded for many days. The treaty of San Estephanos relinquished the region to the Russian Empire. The Russians built a new city south of the city of Karess where the Emperor Alexander III met with his concubines and hunted.
In the next 43 years, the Armenians harassed the Moslems of this region and thousand had to flee. In retaliation, Sultan Abdel Hamid formed in 1891 a special regiment of Kurdish cavalry with the purpose of harassing the Armenians of the Karss region and the pogrom around Lake Van raised an outcry in Europe.
During the First World War, the Armenians again aided the Russians and formed semi-regular armies to fight the Ottoman Empire.
Consequently, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire launched the genocide plan against the Armenians and thousands died of famine during the long march out of Turkey. The Armenians settled in Constantinople (Istanbul), and the people in the Adana region shared in the mass persecution; only the Armenians in the Caucasus, within Russia, were spared.
The British occupied the Karss region in 1919 and gave some authority to the Armenians who gathered arms from the Moslems and gave them to the Armenians and another round of harassment and massacres took place.
The Turkish General Mustafa Kemal re-occupied the Karss region in 1920 after defeating the Armenian army: the Bolsheviks were then allied to the new Turkish Republic. The Russians transferred the Armenians from the region of Patum to Yerevan.
In 1927, all the properties of the Armenians in Karss were confiscated. The Armenians were robbed of a homeland because Turkey ceased Cyprus to Britain in exchange of guaranteeing the Karss region to Turkey. Mustafa Kemal (Attaturk) also negotiated a political deal with France to relinquish the Syrian region of Alexandrite to Turkey, setting the premises for future regional feuds.
Nowadays, there are no Armenians in Karss; the imposing buildings of Tsarist Russia are government Administrative offices; a vast villa of 40 rooms is transformed into hospital, and a Jewish museum.
An entire century of struggles, massacres, harassment, genocides, and useless hate to their neighbors in order to gain self-autonomy rewarded the Armenians nothing. They had to wait for the break down of the Soviet Union to enjoy the Armenian State that is totally dependent in its economy on the neighboring States. Kosovo, Kashmir, Jerusalem, Gaza, and Palestine are current examples of lost opportunities for stability and peace.
“What kind of methods will I have to manipulate in Human Factors?”
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 24, 2009
Article #11, April 9, 2005
“What kind of methods will I have to manipulate in HF?”
Once again you are asking a most interesting and to the point question.
Usually, my class is composed of all engineering disciplines and is basically a required course for industrial engineers in their third year.
Every time I ask the students: “Tell me, what 3 main methods you use in your discipline?”
I enjoy contemplating the glazed looks on their eyes.
For them, one method to using in a discipline is logically a reasonable supposition because somehow they must have been applying some sort of a method anyhow.
Hearing that there may be more than one methods that they have been applying explicitly without realizing it propelled my university students into a state of shock and disbelief.
If I asked them how they solved their problems their immediate reaction is: “Well, we locate the appropriate equation, we input the necessary data then we whip the calculator and get the response.”
Do they know before hand the magnitude and range of the reasonable answers?
Do they ever double check whether the answer is within the acceptable range for the specific domain of the problem?
Do they make it a habit to at least attach a unit to their answer?
Do they double check whether the algebraic manipulation of the dimensions of the independent variables in the equation matches the dimension of the dependent variable? Do they solve algebraically the equation before inputting data only in the last phase of the transformation?
The average graduate student has no recollection that his training induced him to apply methodically this process for applying algebra, considering the dimensionality of an equation or the range and domain of the problems at hand.
The average university student has barely been prompted to think about the taxonomy (classification scheme) of methods used in engineering and asked to locate the appropriate domain of methods that his course might require.
Every science is based on a set of taxonomies or classification schemes.
For example we are taught that mathematic is based on inductive and deductive reasoning, that it has several distinct branches like analytic, algebraic, numeric, geometric and not least probabilistic.
Every applied science has gone through the methodologies of experimenting, setting the protocol, collecting data, analyzing statistically the data and hopefully reaching a few practical results that the professionals in the disciplines could apply.
Fourth year engineering university graduates go through their final project with a set of inefficient experiments, each experiment being based on a unique independent variable or factor and probably a modicum of control variables, and they live happily ever after without knowing that there are courses that train you to design experiments in very efficient ways. They graduate without being required to taking at least one course in designing cause and effect experiments where more than one factor and more than one dependent variable could be studied simultaneously for the more useful information on the interactions among the variables. It does not matter how often I explain to them the various kind of variables through specific examples, the fact is their brain is not trained to look at problems from an experimental perspective.
“How Human Factors get involved in the safety and health of end users?”
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 24, 2009
Article #10, April 7, 2005
“How Human Factors get involved in the safety and health of end users?”
There is an issue that many in the Third World consumers are not aware of: mainly the legal liability of manufacturer and system designers of any faulty designed product.
This product liability concept has evolved greatly since the first quarter of last century through court rulings of various complaints from plaintiffs due to either physical or mental injuries that users suffered in different aspects of product usage.
Nowadays, in modern and developed States the burden of proof for defective products is on the manufacturers, distributors and deep pocket companies with financial strength and who are directly or indirectly related to any defective product reaching the consumers.
Another legal victory to consumers is that designers have the responsibility to foresee most operations not intended specifically for the product but that a few consumers might operate the product for different usage and end up being injured.
Although the product was well designed for its intended use most probably it was less than performing in safety and health for other possible usages.
A range-oven is intended for cooking but when the range door is left open and thus facilitating the curiosity of a toddler to step on the door, then the overturn of the range can lead to catastrophic consequences.
Designers are thus asked to foresee this usage of the range door and design in a counter balance or also designing in a preventing obstacle to a toddler inserting his hands inside the range to satisfy his unlimited curiosity.
When I was preparing my doctoral dissertation in the late 90’s there was a defensive attitude to affixing warning signs and warning pictorials on products and on instruction manuals.
The rational for this wave for displaying warning signs was because if companies failed in posting messages on functions that may cause injuries, then their successes in legal defenses were next to nil and compromises with plaintiffs outside the court system were considered less costly.
Posting warnings gave the companies a chance to defend their cases if their manufacturing processes are well documented and safety procedures are well managed.
There are well established consumer products like TV, dishwashers, washing machines, video recorders, cellular phones and so on.
If you consider the statistics of the actual injuries data in hospitals versus the expected frequencies of the injuries by common people you will be surprised of the high discrepancy and under valuation of the risks involved.
People think that the design of these well established products can be guessed by common sense that people acquire through experience.
A few simple experiments can prove that common sense should be the last resort method to designing.
The opinions and answers for specific design arrangements and best alternatives are as varied as users are, even among the expert designers of these products.
Adonis Diaries 