Posts Tagged ‘man-made system’
Notes and tidbits on FB and Twitter. Part 59
Toutes les espéces vivantes sur terre se transformeront pour accommoder la qualité de l’air qu’on a engendrer. Bientot, on pourrait survivre sur d’autres planétes qu’on croyait invivable.
Les mots “de chose” qui sous-entend l’eau comme characteristique essentiel constituent la majeur partie de n’importe quel dictionnaire.
I was having a dream of activities and conversation and the movie froze, picture and sound. Kind my dream-mind wanted to freeze. Exactly as movies freeze on TV. I woke up and realized I was having my siesta/nap and the quota of sleep was over.
It is an experience that can be remembered. In this dream I was having a ride by a young man in the evening and we were driving on a road under repair and he was asking me a question and the dream froze. The car was like parked on a road side and the question in suspension. In vain, my lucid dream was trying to restart the conversation, but the movie was definitely frozen
There’s a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. Care to guess who they are? The first 8 make up eight million in total population. They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people Onward, fellow humans.
Can We Let Capitalism Die and Move On? How many more calamities, financial, occupations, pre-emptive wars, famine, climate change, indignities… can our existence sustain?
Le jour de l’armnistice, tous ceux prêt á etre fusillés, sont-ils épargnés? Pour ce jour de célébration? On célebre le jour de l’armistice, pas la fin de la guerre: les gens ne sont pas si idiots, quand même.
Les armistice successives en Syrie ont sont la preuve. Une journée sans violence d’armes est une victoire.
Le récitant du conte raconte ce que le hero eut aimé qu’on racontât.
Dans la société capitaliste, les gens de capital n’ont que des destins, et qui nuisent a tout le monde. Des destins d’illusion d’un progres qui doit être instantané, ou rien ne vaille.
Les actes, les emotions, les idées s’installent chez moi, y font briévement leurs nids, et puis me quittent successivement avec des délais. Je constate, mais ne peut affirmer que je les subit: Ils sont malins et ne s’imposent pas tous á la fois. Il serait illusoire de ma part d’assigner de lois á leurs apparitions ou disparitions
Tant qu’il reste une rue, un café, une maison, un cimetiére…que tu n’a pas exploré dans cette ville, tu ne doit pas dire que “tu ne l’a pas trouvé”
Le progres a des niveaux de myths idolatres. Les financial multinationals ont élevés l’illusion du “Progrés Idole” au plus haut degree. Ils savent tout instantanément, decident instantanément, et transférent des milliars instantanément.
Les hommes font l’histoire? Plutot, des histoires á n’en plus finir
Occupe toi de ta santé: le Bonheur tombe par hazard. Pas de grâce de la joie sans santé. C’est une autre histoire.
“Toutes les famille heureuses se ressemblent, Les familles malheureuses (sont différents), malheureuses á leur facon”
“Les enfants que je n’ai pas eus ne savent pas ce qu’ils me doivent” Cioran
If this is Death, I don’t think much of it. Neither life, for some balance to my rational pessimism.
Le plaisir, s’il sent agreable et sans soucis, est meilleur qu’un devoir sans grâce et sans concentration.
De ce que j’ai senti en ma vie, sentiments pauvres et sec, je crois que la vie est supportable. Poutant, my experimental mind exige une vie alternative: Une jeunesse fougeuse et bréve.
“If you say, I think the occupation of Palestine is fucked up on forty different levels, people are like, you’re the devil, we’re going to get your tenure taken away, we’re going to destroy you. You can say almost anything else. You could be like, ‘I eat humans,’ and they’ll be like bien, bien.” Junot Diaz
Any man-made system must necessarily be fraught with errors, faults and limitations on its intended usage.
Any man-made system (product, service, administrative, management, political, control…) is doomed to fail when designed to cater for complex tasks and objectives. It will end up tying up many teams targeted for training, maintenance, redesigning…
A few excerpts of Steve Jobs biography
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 8, 2016
A few excerpts of Steve Jobs biography and comments
From the biography of Walter Isaacson. He claimed that Jobs refused to read any notes or a draft version. And this book is pretty thorough.
On June 29, 1975, Steve Wozniak typed a few characters on his invented machine (a keyboard, a screen, a monitor and a microprocessor) and letters were displayed.
Wozniak had spent 2 months hard working on the program.
This inspiration of creating a personal computer was the result of attending the Homebrew Computer Club that displayed the technical file of the Altair Kit microprocessor.
On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer launched the Macintosh. The motto was “You will understand why 1984 will Not be as 1984” (A reference to George Orwell book)
Ridley Scott (director of Blade Runner) shot the story-board of Lee Clow in London. The grey industrial complex was packed with skinheads listening to the speech of Big Brother. A blonde athlete woman (disk thrower) runs and smash the big screen the moment Big Brother (IBM) is declaring “We are going to win”.
IBM PC had snatched the personal computer market. By then, Steve Jobs had lost his fire as a renegade, a pirate: The Macintosh had a steep price ($2,500) with no external extensions. Computer geeks could Not add their own cards, functions, or even open the box.
After he was diagnosed with cancer, Jobs said at the graduation ceremony in Stanford, June 2005:
“Remembering that I will die soon was the catalyst for taking the greatest of decisions of my life.
The waiting, pride, fear of failure and feeling embarrassed…all that vanished in the face of death
Remain what count
The best way Not to fall in the trap of believing that we have anything to lose
We are already naked.…
Why Not start listening to your heart?”
If you hire a commercial PDG instead of a product designer, don’t be surprised for your enterprise to fail in the medium term.
If you sell your start ups, blame yourself for failing to build a perennial institution
(A closed, vertical integrated product of materials, programs and applications performs better for common users. Looks like many start-ups needed certain constraints to deliver on their products. For professionals and institutions, open systems suit better and enhance technology and start ups.)
the 21st century is the intersection of technology and Art designs.
After he was diagnosed with cancer and his son Rees got interested in DNA processes, Steve said:
The current century is the Intersection of technology and Biology
As he was getting ready to pass away, Jobs said:
“It is difficult to admit that all the experiences and wisdom we acquired can vanish at death.
At least, I like to believe that conscious survives
Most probably, life is like an off/on interrupter.
I never installed this kind of on/off alternatives on Apple products”
After the implant of a new liver, the nurse tried to install an oxygen mask for Jobs. He snatched it away while barely coming out of anesthesia, on the ground that it was Not aesthetically designed. He ordered to have 5 version submitted to him to select the best designed.
Lisa Brennan (Steve’s daughter from Chrisann) said of what Steve’s believed in:
1. Everything leads to its contrary
2. The best harvest are produced in arid soils
3. Pleasure is generated from privation
Tina Redse, the first love of Steve’s that lasted 5 passionate years and till the end of his life, described the character of Steve as emanating from the psychological syndrome ör pathology of “Troubled narcissistic personality” that matched perfectly the behaviour of Steve’s, mainly a deficit in empathy
Steve connected with his biological mother after his adoptive mother passed away in 1986. He refused to meet with his biological father (originally from Syria)
The author Mona Simpson was his sister and they met and linked up and became great friends. She looked like him and was a red-headed person.
Daniel Kottke was one of the closest friends of Steve Job. He attended with him the Reed University for 2 years, joined him on his trip to India for a year, shared an apartment with him where Job’s girlfriend was pregnant, and worked with him in the garage developing Apple II.
Jobs refused to give him a single share when Apple went public on the ground that Kottke was just a technician.
Many wanted to give Kettke a few shares but Job was adamant: Zero shares.
Wozniac distributed 2,000 shares on 40 people in his team who were able to purchase their dream homes.
If Wozniak behaviors are considered naïve and ill-matured, then these labels must be common to most well-adjusted, caring and compassionate people.
A few quotes by Jobs:
1. If you want to develop a program, try to figure out the machines that will use it
2. The best way to predict the future is by inventing it
3. The good artist copies, the genius steal (from Picasso)
From Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Catalogue (1968):
“Free access to tools that permit private and individual power to tailor-make education, to find inspiration, model our environment and share our adventure with all who need them…
The genius of Jobs (rip, mix, burn) was to transform the personal computer into a digital hub for all portable electronic gizmos, such as camcorders, iTunes, iPod, iPad…The computer served as a center for producing and generating videos, movies, clips…iMovie, iDVD, iTune…
Jobs also got totally engaged in the Cloud technology and succeeded in closing the loop.
Note 1: Bill Gates is Not an outlier: He is pretty much mainstream of the proper timing for new technology. Steve Jobs is an outlier: He could Not program but made all the nerds in electronics and programmers rally to his distorted reality
Note 2: There are plenty of geniuses in human history and in all kinds of disciplines.
Rare are those geniuses who could invent (intuition) and do the demonstration also.
One common traits among those rare geniuses is that they had to write down that they discovered and in two versions (Not the case of Jobs):
1. A version for their own benefit translating their mental processes for ease recollection when re-read, and
2. A version for publication to satisfy the rational processes for the period
I am thinking of Blaise Pascal, Galileo, Kepler, Lavoisier, Kamel Hassan Sabbah and scores of ancient Arab scientists who experimented before publishing their thesis
Note 3: And how would you “want to change the world” Sir?
Are more lunatics those who make apologies of the fools who claim their mission is to change the world
Like all those cult-like minds who want the world to behave according to their world views
What do you want to change Sir?
1. The standard of living all over the world?…
2. Behavors of individuals?
3. The standard norms of communities?
4. Reforming system institutions to cater better to the common people requests?
5. Re-structuring the administrative institutions that are meant to control and rule the masses?
6. How about focusing first on your own community, and provide draft projects for its approval?
7. How about accepting the many idiosyncrasies surrounding you and your community?
Note 4: We have a structural problem to approach climate change.
You can simultaneously understand the medium to long-term risks of climate change and also come to the conclusion that it is in your short-term economic interest to invest in oil and gas.
Which is why anybody who tells you that the market is going to fix this on its own is lying to you.
But the government institutions are wary of changing this mid-fix of market stupid fixing of anything that drastic and existential
Note 5: Any man-made system must necessarily be fraught with errors, faults and limitations on its intended usage.
Any man-made system (product, service, administrative, management, political, control…) is doomed to fail when designed to cater for complex tasks and objectives: It will end up tying up many teams targeted for training, maintenance, redesigning, repairing…
Man-made designs barely consider the idiosyncrasies of users and the environment of the community and the designers lack the necessary knowledge, technically and the socio-psychological intricacies and interrelationship of the users and community.
The diversity of users and environments will easily pinpoint the deficiencies in any system.
The proper functioning of any system in the medium term relies solely on the acceptance of the idiosyncrasy of the community, regardless of the level of performance the system is delivering, particularly in health and safety usage and applications
If you are the type to sweating profusely at exam time, your heart beating at top speed, your hands sweaty, and feeling pretty light-headed and forgot everything you studied and learned then, you are an original of mankind specie.
Do you know that all these symptoms is basically to draw all the blood to your lower limbs so that you maybe able to run and flee at top speed without thinking back? Wet hands are far more efficient for climbing trees: You don’t want to slip and be eaten by a carnivorous animal.
We know, deep down, at exam time and during critical meeting (private or public) that something is not normal and does not match our psychological constitution, but we have no idea what is the real danger. We have been conditioned to sit for exams and be interrogated and investigated during interviews that we forgot why we are so afraid and feel the real need to flee as quickly as possible.
Fact is, we our primitive intuition is intact to a normal degree and we didn’t lose it; we just are conditioned to think twice before running from dangers. Fact is, all these exams and interviews are not meant to educate us but to humiliate us consistently so that we accept the role of obedient and mindless technocrats devoid of ethical and moral considerations toward the pain and suffering of common people.
The 10% in the population hoarding 50% of the wealth in the nation want a system that conditioned educated people to bow heads and feel terrified when hired to doing a job. All these exams and periodic evaluation reviews are fundamentally meant to be ready to satisfying schedules of plans, study, and work-in-progress as “management” had decided without your feedback for feasibility. You are trained not to think about the health, safety, and long-term benefit of any project: You are to learn to becoming a human robot.
We all feel since childhood, as we are forced to go to school, that something is not right and a devilish system is moulding us to becoming something unnatural and inhuman. We certainly prefer to have extended vacations, to working in jobs we like to do, to have quality time for our family and kids, to meet with our community and discuss our difficulties. We have desires for so many interesting things but we feel in a big prison and having no choices but to following instructions, law, order, and peer pressures to be part of the group behavior.
Our primitive instinct is pretty intact and we feel in our guts that human carnivores are raising us as cattle for the slaughter as we grow older and under performing according to youth standards. Mankind is scared from his own kind and is loathing any kind of man-made system designed to increase law and order schemes.
There is no shame to getting angry and voicing your opinion high and strong when you feel afraid and in dire danger. All indicate from political structures that 20% of the population are designed to stay in the lowest classes to serve as cheap hand laborers; and 70% are designed to becoming mindless technocrats for the benefit and comfort of the upper 10% of the population. Has mankind lost his dignity investing time in serious reflection to his conditions, finding alternatives to regaining his freedom for whatever he desires of his life, and get moving accordingly?
Note: Multinational corporations have increased their “own specialized university facilities” to 4,000 in one decade. The traditional universities are meant for endoctrination of the new potential technocrats but company universities are meant to teaching particular skills that traditional universities have “forgotten” to focus on. Company universities are far more sophisticated and equipped than any traditional university and millions are poured in to educated specialized employees.
NASA jet propulsion laboratory Director: Professor Charles Elachy
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 26, 2008
“How Human Factors are considered at the NASA jet propulsion laboratory”?
Article #47 ( written in June 7, 2006)
Professor Charles Elachy, the director of NASA jet propulsion center at Pasadena in California, gave a lecture at LAU, Byblos, during his visit to Lebanon, and was inducted a member of the Board of Director of the university.
I instructed my class to prepare written questions to submit to Professor Elachy after the lecture, but we failed in our endeavor because questions were stricly managed. I composed a series of questions, and after discussing them with my class, I e-mailed them to Elachy on May 30, 2006. The mail stated:
“I teach a single course “Human Factors in engineering“, which is required for industrial engineers. This course used to be elective for the computer and other traditional engineering fields before this year, until it was eliminated as a viable choice in the curricula.
The main value of this course is to offer a behavioral change at looking at the design of projects from a different perspective. A few students in my class of Human Factors in engineering prepared a series of written questions for your lecture at LAU at Byblos, and we would appreciate your reply on the following:
1) As a leading member of one of the most sophisticated man-made system from conception, to designing, testing, evaluation, production, operation, and execution, then would you consider that any failure in your system is ultimately a human error?
2) Could you offer us samples of what NASA would consider as near accidents? In such cases, would your internal investigation of any near accident try to assign the error to a person, a team, or the organization as a whole in order to redress potential hazards?
3) I read that the engineering work force at your department in NASA is around 5000. What is the percentage of human factors and “industrial psychology” professionals in that work force who are involved in designing interfaces, facilitator’ tools, training programs, conducting controlled experimentation, testing, and evaluating human behavioral performance in operations in order to foreseeing potential errors and eliminating safety hazards?
4) To what extent are tailor-made task analysis, foreseeable errors analysis, and decision flow diagrams in every stage of the development process computerized as expert systems, and how embedded is the role of experts in reviewing computer outputs?
5) Could you give us a few samples of the kind of expert opinions that NASA still seek in system development? What are the impacts of expert opinions in the development cycle and how critical are they? On what system do you rely in decisions concerning the allocation of tasks to either operators or automation?
6) Do you think that NASA has already accumulated an exhaustive list of cognitive and physical capabilities/limitations of human operators compared to machine potentials? How efficient is a human operator currently evaluated within this growing trend in technology and automation? What kind of guidelines does NASA engineers rely on for designing interfaces or anything that requires operators’ interactions with the system?
7) What types of inspectors do you mostly hire, such as technical versus people oriented? Would your guidelines for hiring technical or people performance inspectors differ (for example in-house hiring or outside contracting)? Is assigning an employee to inspection jobs is generally viewed by engineers as a negative coded message for position downgrading?”
On June 4, I received the following reply from Eachy:
“Dear Adonis, my response to your questions will not be in the direct order because our work here is not a production activity.
Each spacecraft is different and they are always first of a kind. However, we do have a system of checks and balances.
We have one organization which does the design and development (about 3,500 technical people) and a separate organization which does Quality Control (about 350 technical people).
The role of QC is not only to check on the quality of the work, but also to help the development organization do it right to start with. So, we assign a few QC experts to each project, but they report through a different chain than the project manager.
When we have a problem we try to understand the root cause and develop procedure/training to avoid it in the future.
We do not try to blame a person but we put a number of reviews and independent checks to make sure problems don’t slip through the cracks.”
I read Professor Elachy’s response to class. It was clear that Human Factors professionals are still viewed as more relevant in the production activity phase, although there are many cases where they were involved in analyzing missions from their inception, knowing that NASA pioneered the process of hiring Human Factors in the agency.
Update 1:Professor Elachy was awarded this year 2011, the French highest order in scientific achievement. He had done his highest studies in France before Charles Elachy was hired in the USA.
Update 2: Charles Elachy is the head of the team that landed the rover on Mars to find out if there is life on this hot planet
Adonis Diaries 
Titbits #100
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 25, 2021
Notes and titbits on FB and Twitter.
Posted on September 5, 2017
Toutes les espéces vivantes sur terre se transformeront pour accommoder la qualité de l’air qu’on a engendrer. Bientot, on pourrait survivre sur d’autres planétes qu’on croyait invivable.
Les mots “de chose” qui sous-entend l’eau, comme caractéristique essentiel , constituent la majeur partie de n’importe quel dictionnaire.
I was having a dream of activities and conversation and the movie froze, picture and sound. Kind my dream-mind wanted to freeze. Exactly as movies freeze on TV. I woke up and realized I was having my siesta/nap and the quota of sleep was over.
It is an experience that can be remembered. In this dream I was having a ride by a young man in the evening and we were driving on a road under repair and he was asking me a question and the dream froze. The car was like parked on a road side and the question in suspension. In vain, my lucid dream was trying to restart the conversation, but the movie was definitely frozen
There’s a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. Care to guess who they are? The first 8 make up eight million in total population. They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people Onward, fellow humans.
Can We Let Capitalism Die and Move On? How many more calamities, financial crisis, occupations, pre-emptive wars, famine, climate change, indignities… can our existence sustain?
Le jour de l’armnistice, tous ceux prêt á etre fusillés, sont-ils épargnés? Pour ce jour de célébration? On célebre le jour de l’armistice, pas la fin de la guerre: les gens ne sont pas si idiots, quand même.
Les armistice successives en Syrie ont sont la preuve. Une journée sans violence d’armes est une victoire.
Le récitant du conte raconte ce que le hero eut aimé qu’on racontât.
Dans la société capitaliste, les gens de capital n’ont que des destins, et qui nuisent a tout le monde. Des destins d’illusion d’un progres qui doit être instantané, ou rien ne vaille.
Les actes, les emotions, les idées s’installent chez moi, y font briévement leurs nids, et puis me quittent successivement avec des délais. Je constate, mais ne peut affirmer que je les subit: Ils sont malins et ne s’imposent pas tous á la fois. Il serait illusoire de ma part d’assigner de lois á leurs apparitions ou disparitions
Tant qu’il reste une rue, un café, une maison, un cimetiére…que tu n’a pas exploré dans cette ville, tu ne doit pas dire que “tu ne l’a pas trouvé”
Le progres a des niveaux de myths idolatres. Les financial multinationals ont élevés l’illusion du “Progrés Idole” au plus haut degree. Ils savent tout instantanément, decident instantanément, et transférent des milliars instantanément.
Les hommes font l’histoire? Plutot, des histoires á n’en plus finir
Occupe toi de ta santé: le Bonheur tombe par hazard. Pas de grâce de la joie sans santé. C’est une autre histoire.
“Toutes les famille heureuses se ressemblent, Les familles malheureuses (sont différents), malheureuses á leur facon”
“Les enfants que je n’ai pas eus ne savent pas ce qu’ils me doivent” Cioran
If this is Death, I don’t think much of it. Neither life, for some balance to my rational pessimism.
Le plaisir, s’il sent agreable et sans soucis, est meilleur qu’un devoir sans grâce et sans concentration.
De ce que j’ai senti en ma vie, sentiments pauvres et sec, je crois que la vie est supportable. Poutant, my experimental mind exige une vie alternative: Une jeunesse fougeuse et bréve.
“If you say, I think the occupation of Palestine is fucked up on forty different levels, people are like, you’re the devil, we’re going to get your tenure taken away, we’re going to destroy you. You can say almost anything else. You could be like, ‘I eat humans,’ and they’ll be like bien, bien.” Junot Diaz
Any man-made system must necessarily be fraught with errors, faults and limitations on its intended usage.
Any man-made system (product, service, administrative, management, political, control…) is doomed to fail when designed to cater for complex tasks and objectives. It will end up tying up many teams targeted for training, maintenance, redesigning…
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