Archive for May 28th, 2024
Responding to end users/clients demands, safety and health? Restructuring engineering curriculums
Posted on: May 28, 2024
Note: With this frenzy of Artificial Intelligence new emerging upstart companies and powerful chips and cloud extension, there is a feeling that formal education is becoming irrelevant, and those decades of formal schooling is of a past generation. A paradigm shift in restructuring the education institutions and what material to teach and how to teach is setting in, especially the retraining of teachers.
Still, how to focus on the design of systems and products to satisfy the health and safety of users is taking additional importance.
In 1987, Alphonse Chapanis, a renowned Human Factors professional, urged that published Human Factors research papers target the practical design need of the various engineering disciplines so that the research data be readily used by engineers.
Dr. Chapanis was trying to send a clear message that Human Factors main discipline was to design interfaces between systems and end users and thus, research papers have to include sections directing the engineers as to the applicability of the results of the paper to design purposes.
In return, it is appropriate to send the message that all engineering disciplines should include sections in their research papers orienting the engineering practitioners to the applicability of the results of the papers to the end users and how Human Factors professionals can judiciously use the data in their interface designs. (Mining data is an important field in sciences)
As it was difficult for the Human Factors professional to send the right message to the engineering practitioners, and still has enormous difficulty disseminating the proper purpose and goals, it would be a steep road for the engineers to send the right message that what they design is actually targeting the needs and new trends of the end users.
As long as the engineering curriculums fail to include the Human Factors field as an integral part in their structures it would not be realistic to contemplate any shift in their designs toward the end users.
Systems would become even more complex and testing and evaluation more expensive in order to make end users accept any system and patronize it.
So why not design anything right from the first time by being initiated and exposed to human capabilities and limitations, their safety and health?
Instead of recognizing from the early phases in the design process that reducing human errors and risks to the safety and health of end users are the best marketing criteria for encouraging end users to adopt and apply a system, we see systems are still being designed by different engineers who cannot relate to the end users because their training is not explicitly directed toward them.
What is so incongruous with the engineering curriculums to include courses that target end users?
Why would not these curriculums include courses in occupational safety and health, consumer product liability, engineers as expert witnesses, the capabilities and limitations of human, marketing, psychophysics and experimental design?
Are the needs and desires of end users beneath the objectives of designing systems?
If that was true, why systems are constantly being redesigned, evaluated and tested in order to match the market demands?
Why do companies have to incur heavy expenses in order to rediscover the wheel that the basis of any successful design ultimately relies on the usefulness, acceptability and agreement with the end users desires and dreams?
Why not start from the foundation that any engineering design is meant for human and that designed objects or systems are meant to fit the human behavior and not vice versa?
What seem to be the main problems for implementing changes in the philosophy of engineering curriculums?
Is it the lack to find enough Human Factors, ergonomics and industrial psychologist professionals to teach these courses?
Is it the need to allow the thousands of psychologists, marketing and business graduates to find outlet “debouches” in the marketplace for estimating users’ needs, desires, demands and retesting and re-evaluating systems after the damages were done?
May be because the Human factors professionals failed so far to make any significant impact to pressure government to be part and parcel of the engineering practices?
Note 1: I am Not sure if this discipline Human Factors/Ergonomics is still a separate field in Engineering or has been integrated in all engineering disciplines.
From my experience in teaching a few courses at universities, I propose that courses in Experimental Design be an integral course in all engineering disciplines: students graduate without having a serious idea how to run “sophisticated” experiments or know how to discriminate among the independent variables, the dependent variables, the control variable…and how to interpret complex graphs.
Note 2: This is another reedit of a 2008 version.
A demographic upheaval in the pseudo-State of Lebanon? The Syrian refugees story
Posted on: May 28, 2024
As the USA, western colonial powers, Saudi Kingdom and Gulf pseudo-States funded and trained the extremist Islamists of Nusra and Daesh to destabilize Syria in 2011, displaced Syrians flocked to Turkey and Lebanon.
Lebanon, bankrupted State at all levels, wide opened its borders to the refugees without checking, counting or registering: “Welcome to your second land”. And Lebanon political structure spread the wishful desire that “Damascus” is falling within 2 weeks.
(Ironically the two parties that encouraged this large flow of refugees are the ones hysterically demanding their transfer a decade later, mainly the Samir Gea3ja and the Future parties)
More than a decade later, Syrian refugees in Lebanon are 2.5 million, for a Lebanese population tacitly rumored to be barely 3 million. Not the “declared” 5.5 million in the last decade.
In the last decades, Lebanese and mostly educated graduates (engineers, medical, nurses…) had vacated by the thousands for no return. Every year, the rate of these Lebanese immigrants almost doubled.
Anyone visiting villages, he will realize that there are mostly older generations that could Not afford to leave, or their children abroad refrained from them to join them by sending them an air ticket…
Educated children that the parents spent whatever they saved and sold their properties to give them an education and are barely surviving with the little that come in.
Most of the refugees are economical in nature because they lost properties, homes and businesses during the 8 years’ war against Syria.
The political refugees transferred to the northern regions of Syria in Edlib province, the Turkish dominated zones and the Kurdish zones.
The USA and colonial powers have installed many military bases in the north-eastern parts of Syria and pillaging Syria riches in oil/gas, mineral, rich sands, and first-class wheat and cereals...
Mind you that Lebanon never conducted a census. Why? The Lebanese political structure decided before “independence” in 1943 to share the power among the mostly Maronite and Sunny Muslims, on the basis the administrative positions be split 50% for the Christians and 50% for the Muslims.
Fact is this “understanding” explicitly discarded from the budgets the people in the south, Bekaa Valley (mostly Muslim Chiaa sect) and Akkar provinces.
Currently, the Chiaa are at least 45% of the total population and are Not officially getting their fair share in the political structure.
The only census was done in 1930 by the colonial mandated France. The number of 5.5 million has been displayed in the last 10 years from implicit statistical observation during election periods, municipals and parliament.
The rate of birth of Syrian families are 2,5 times the rate of the remaining residing Lebanese.
The EU parliament has been warning the pseudo-state in the last decade: “Stop fretting: The Syrians are there to stay. We are funding their existence with monthly stipend (more than twice what a retired Lebanese paycheck), education and health care…in order to remain in Lebanon”
Recently, the EU decided to allow the Lebanese institutions to disburse these funds instead of their NGOs so that the rotten politicians can get their hefty share of the funds. The EU reserved one billion Euro, spread on 4 years, for the refugees’ expenses shouldered by Lebanon and by the $billion.
The idea is for Lebanon to tightly restrict immigration by the sea to Cyprus and Europe.
No problem: Lebanon has No maritime economy in ships, cruises, luxury yachts or any viable sea transport.
(Turkey that has a large maritime economy can extort $billions from the EU every year in exchange of Not encouraging immigration to the hundreds of close by Greek islands)
The EU could easily directly fund the returned Syrians to resettle but they simply do Not want. Why? they want to sustain the sanctions on the Syrian regime and refuse to allow any kinds of direct negotiation.
The sectarian political parties (they are all sectarians, except the two oldest before the independence) created their “current enemy” to be the Syrian refugees in order Not to care about the genocide in Gaza and support the valiant confrontation of Lebanon Hezbollah in the southern border (and beyond) against the Zionist onslaught.
Many municipalities are giving short-term warnings for refugees to vacate their tents, rented rooms, flats, shops…
The ministry of the interior is obliging this frenzied apartheid trend by setting up flying barrages on roads to check on the refugee drivers and the licenses for cars and motorcycles… (all these measures are generally temporarily as how this State functions)
The Syrian refugees are refraining from venturing far from their neighborhood in order Not to be detained under various reasons and excuses.
Note: The Syrian refugees are the hardworking people and entrepreneurial and fill the many gaps in our survival state condition. You will hardly find Lebanese with the required talent and know-how for daily repairs: The Lebanese play the foremen to teams of Syrians and barely touch any tasks.
Adonis Diaries 