Archive for July 17th, 2009
Not such a bad Concept
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 17, 2009
Ideology: Not such a bad Concept before Ruling (April 2, 2009)
I believe that personal reflection is the best alternative for discovering a set of values (most compatible with our passions) to guide our behavior. However, there are many obstacles for any individual to access his own “ideology” of life. First, the school system, family upbringing, community customs and traditions are as many diverse implicit ideologies that an individual has to comprehend and sort out. Second, it presupposes that an individual has reached enough maturity to believe that his reflections can affect the course of events. Third, it presupposes that the governing institutional systems care about individual opinions and demands and are ready to examine them seriously. Fourth, it presupposes that the individual has enough will, energy, education, and perseverance to discover his own set of values and ideological system.
An ideology basically transmits perceived habits and models for interpreting social and political conditions. To a lesser extent, an ideology communicates explanations and teaches to making choices for situations and events. It is my contention that every ideology or political party implicitly exhibits a philosophical line. Since a philosophical construct is fundamentally a process of prioritizing our individual set of passions, that cannot be changed but re-ordered and then focused as a collectivity of like minded association, then it is beneficial for any ideology to debate the philosophy that is most compatible to its priority of passions.
It is up to graduate philosophers to analyze the party line and extract the corresponding philosophy out of hundreds that the human mind has constructed. An ideology that misses opportunities to seriously debate its underlying philosophy is bound to fail as a gathering of focused passions. I am aware of a case where a fresh graduate in philosophy and a fresh member in a political party attempted to stick his personal philosophy to the ideology instead of objectively analyzing the underlying philosophy and allowing free discussion on the topic; it was an opportunity that was missed to debating a rough philosophy that had potentials to be fine tuned and accepted by the collectivity of members.
Most political ideologies loudly claim that the members are the subject matter, that the members are the driving force and the main concern of the ideology. That line of thinking should be the purpose of syndicates because that is the reason for instituting syndicates and professional associations. Political parties should avoid the technical hypocrisy of proclaiming that their goals are the members’ benefit.
Members in political ideologies are simple cogs of focused passions. Fresh members in political parties are willing to slave for free and accept all the nonsense, constraints, and abject humiliation on opinion restraints because “they need apprenticeship period” to comprehend and thoroughly learn the mystery behind an ideology, as if it was a cult. Those individual cogs who regurgitate the political lines and memorize them by rot and spew them integrally are the one who accede to the higher echelons and then reap the benefits and advantages; there are no rooms for divergence of opinions on ideological lines, otherwise, a new ideology is in the making. It is worth noting that those who accede to the higher echelons are invariably astute power grabbers but very limited spiritually because they fail to invest energy and time on personal reflections. Those limited minded “leaders” are imposed on society for needed reforms that invariably fail and leave tracks of long miseries and sufferings.
Any ideology is inherently a cult with many super imposed constructs of myths and verbal testimonies of elders that are added as the rank swells; these abstract constructs are meant to increase the obscure notions and make the ideology more fascinating and enduring to the youth, simply because the ideology failed to adhere to an explicit philosophy of rational cohesion. Fundamentally, schisms are implicitly divergences on priorities of passions to focus on which are interpreted as political differences.
Religions follow the same process as ideologies and end up splitting and forming schisms and cults. The core of religions and political ideologies are of abstract constructs with the same consequences on societies. The main difference between religions and ideologies is that religions invariably end up adhering to a philosophy as guiding rod and are thus enduring in all levels of life for many centuries.
Ideologies as religions are necessary passages for individuals’ spiritual development; they are the building blocs for getting aware and hopefully caring for human miseries and problems. Ideologies are extensions to our spirit because we need the association of people to develop our soul.
Find me an individual who never joined a political ideology or at least cared in his youth to learn the ideologies of his time and I can forecast that this individual will specialize in his professional discipline and be a complete illiterate outside his field of specialty; he will end up a very narrow minded person with no heart or soul to count on for change and social reforms. I would be uncomfortable dealing with an individual who joined an ideology in youth and never felt the need to re-examine his ideology: I simple cannot believe that a young person can be bright enough and wise enough to knowing his strongest passions before dealing with the real world and people.
In many moments in life we asked “what is the meaning and purpose in life?” How about we start from the obvious? We are a bunch of jumbled passions that drive our life and we ache to re-order our passions and discover the strongest passions that mean most to us. We want to be discriminated as an individual, not on physical traits but as thinking reflecting persons that have distinct set of passions that we managed to prioritize; we finally think that we know who we are and what drove our life. We want to be at peace with our soul and spirit.
Man-Go
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 17, 2009
Man-Go
Girls have huge Egos.
An immense Ego that cannot conceive
Of another option
But to raise a bunch of brats
Of one day old to beyond their late fifties.
Compared to man’s Ego
The magnitude is Galactic.
I like to call the Ego of man
Mango.
The Illusionist performer: “What performance criteria again?”
“Performance” is the magic answer offered by university students to questions like “What is the purpose of this course, of this method, of this technique, or of this design?”
Performance is what summarizes all the conscious learning in the knowledge bag for lack of meaningful full sentences available in the language to express clear purposes.
It takes a couple of months to wean the students from the catch word “performance” and encourage them to try harder for specificity.
There is a hierarchy for this abstract notion of “performance”:
The first level of abstraction is to answer “What do you mean by performance?”
The second level of abstraction is to answer: “What kind of performance?”
The third level should answer: “How these various performances criteria correlate? Can we sort them out between basic performances and redundant performance criteria?” and
The fourth level is: “How much for each basic performance criterion? Can we measure them accurately and objectively?“
It seems that every discipline has created for itself a set of performance criteria that an insertion of another element into that set is like a paradigm shift in its field of science.
For example, if you prompt a business or engineering university student to expand on the meaning of “performance”, when supported by a specific example, it might dawn on him to spell out another piece of jewels such as: “max profit”, “minimize cost”, “improve quality”, “increase production”, “save time”, or “increase market share”.
In order to reach a finer level of specificity we need to define functionally, for example, what “max profit” means?
A string of monosyllables rains from every where such as: “increase price”, “cut expenditure”, “sell more”, and again “improve quality”, “save time”, or “increase market share”.
If we agree that profit is a function of market share, price, expenditure, added values of products, and marketing services ,then we can understand what could be the basic criteria and which criteria dependent on the basic ones.
How can a business improve performance? How can it make profit or cut costs?
Should the firm layoff redundant employees, force early retirement, dip in insurance funds, contract out product parts and administrative processes, eliminate training programs, scrap off the library or continuing learning facilities, streamline the design process, reduce advertising money, abridge break times in duration or frequency, cut overhead expenses such as control lighting and comfort of the working environment, stop investing in new facilities, firing expensive skilled workers, settling consumer plaintiffs out of court, searching for tax loopholes, or engineering financial statements?
How can a business increase its market share? How can it survive competitors and continually flourish?
How can a firm improve products for the quality minded engineers?
Should it invest on the latest technological advancements in equipments, machines, and application software, or should it select the best mind among the graduates, or should it establish a continuing education program with adequate learning facilities, or should it encourage its engineers to experiment and submit research papers, or should it invest on market research to know the characteristics of its customers, or should it built in safety in the design process, or perform an extensive analysis of the foreseeable misuses of its products or services, the type of errors generated in the functioning and operation of its products and their corresponding risks on health of the users, or manage properly employees’ turnover, or care about the safety and health of its skilled and dedicated workers, or ordering management to closely monitor the safety and health standards applied in the company?
At the first session of my course “Human factors in engineering” I ask my class: What is the purpose of an engineer? The unanimous answer is: “performance”.
What are the criteria for an engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
At the first session of my class I repeat several times that the purpose of the engineering discipline is to design practical products or systems that man needs and wants, that human factors engineers are trained to consider first the end users, the customers, the operators, and the workers when designing interfaces for products or systems.
At the first session I tell my class that the body of knowledge of human factors is about finding practical design guidelines based on the capabilities and limitations of end users, body and mind, with the following performance criteria: to eliminate errors, to foresee unsafe misuses, to foresee near-accidents, to design in safety operations, to consider the health problems in the product and its operation, to study the safety and health conditions in the workplace and the organizational procedures, to improve working conditions physically, socially, and psychologically, and to be aware of the latest consumer liability legal doctrines.
A month later, I am confronted with the same cycle of questions and answers, mainly: What is the purpose of an engineer? The unanimous answer is: “performance”.
What are the criteria for a human factors engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
A few students remember part of the long list of human factors performance criteria, but the end users are still hard to recognize.
A few students retained the concept of designing practical interfaces or what an interface could be, but the pictures of end users are still blurred.
I have to emphasize frequently that the end users could be their engineering colleagues, their family members, and themselves.
I have to remind them that any product, service, or system design is ultimately designed for people to use, operate, and enjoy the benefit of its utility.
Human factors performance criteria are all the above and the design of products or services should alleviating the repetitive musculoskeletal disorders by reducing efforts, vibration, and proper handling of tools and equipments, designing for proper postures, minimizing static positions, and especially to keep in mind that any testing and evaluation study should factor in the condition that a worker or an employee is operating 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and for many years.
I tell them that any profit or cost cutting is ultimately at the expense of workers/employees, their financial stability, safety standards, comfort, and health conditions physically, socially, and psychologically whereas any increase in performance should be undertaken as a value added to the safety, comfort, and health of the end users.
Sugar for my brain
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 17, 2009
Sugar for my brain (July 16, 2009)
It is proven that the more consistent and varied are your reading, at least two books a week, the fresher are your laughs and the warmer are your cries. It is a truism: you learn to laugh normally because you are in company of a friend not capable of criticizing your behavior; thus, you are not obliged to copy cat the behavior of acquaintances in flesh and bones. It is a truism: you learn to cry genuinely because your cries are no longer bitter reflecting the miserable routine life of your neighbors and yours.
It is proven that the more consistent and regular are your reading patterns the happier the setting in the after life. You will discover that there is one accountant in the after life; he does not keep records of the money you accumulated, or the mileage you recorded to drive to your routine and boring jobs. This busy accountant is keeping data on the quantity of brain sugar you consumed on productive and focused knowledge; consequently, on the quality of reflective thinking you invested on improving your mind and understanding your environment, including man.
This after life accountant is busier that ever because He is smart and highly critical. His set of criteria is to discount the sugar consumption in your brain related to anxieties and the irrelevant forecasting of the multitude of problems in the future and how to insure total safety and independence from fellow man.
The compassionate accountant (there are no oxymoron terms in the afterlife) will restitute your complete memory, including your multiple lives from reading. The naive and jovial accountant will judge your average rate of productive sugar consumption in your brain per week and then allocate you a space suitable for your mind versatility so that you never get bored. You certainly get what you were willing to invest in life in improving your chances for happiness and comprehension of your neighbors.
Why brain needs only sugar to function is an interesting question. Brain does not need protein, fat, or vitamin to function properly; it turns out that most of the food you consume has sugar content; the more you use your brain the more sugar is transferred to your brain instead of accumulating in other parts of your body. When you read you are in fact detoxifying your body and shaping it better than jogging or cycling for long stupid hours.
Adonis Diaries 