Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Capitalism redefines Time
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 22, 2010
Capitalism redefines Time; (Mar. 21, 2010)
The dividing line between present and future is invisible for the capitalist spirit: the past is passive and inefficacious to revert to and the future is mobile and evolving. I saw an old American movie a couple days ago: a customer is checking a Cadillac and asks the salesman: “Is it this year model?” and the dealer to reply: “This is next year model you are sitting in”
Capitalism captured the western cultural guiding rod in the last century: Time was no longer the enemy to mankind and time should be considered as the main dependent variable when studying nature, life, evolution, and development while space, temperature, climate, and the multitude of other independent factors were meant to explaining time. Time (and what correspond to time such as speed, rate, and turnover) is a directive God, the one notion that essentially defines all the other phenomena in the universe. Time and timeline are the measuring guideline to all human activities: work, distances, history, space, production, marketing, investment, liquidity, and budget. All other societies had to keep up with capitalism rhythm of what became the standard terminology and behavioral routines.
Power is no longer essentially related to borders, raw materials, dimensions of a nation, or even larger armies. Power is rate of return, turnover rate, and quickness in planning and starting production; power is quickness in distribution and consumption, quickness in gathering information and timely intelligence, quickness in analyzing and interpreting data, and quickness in relaying and disseminating information and intelligence. Power is how Time is tamed and used as the most potent ally and tool. Power is how to discover the best method to control and manage Time.
Oil, as a raw material, is no longer an intrinsic power; the value of oil is how quickly deposits are located, excavated, drilled, produced, refined, distributed, and consumed. Geopolitics, as a political power status, has changed its laws into chrono-politics for the flow of signals, dissemination of intelligence, and turnover of fundamental research into applied sciences.
Multinationals that represent the spirit of capitalism have tamed the most potent power tool: Time. Multinationals have set the rules of the game on how to compute, evaluate, account, and transform liquidity into ready investment; on how to change the concept of interest to periods of computing it; on how profit is defined as turnover rate of products and services. Multinationals have set the rules of how to do business, how to think business, and how to dominate with other people’s money and raw materials.
You cannot fight and win an enemy who adopted and tamed Time as its ultimate potent God while your arsenal is still limited to inert space and your notion of time is reversed toward the dead past, a past that is incorrectly read and synthesized.
It does not mean that capitalism cannot be defeated the way it is practiced as rules of the game but in the first phase you need to get trained to capitalism efficacious arsenal and then insert other dimensions to reform and transform the current ideology of capitalism. The new civilization capable to counter the enemy has to work toward a more viable quality of life such as earth sustainable ethics, eco-ethics, quality time to knowing yourself, quality time to listen intently to your communicator, quality time to focus on reading books relevant to man emotional development, and respect of the ancestors.
Most important to countering the enemy is learning to reserve peaceful time to reading the past without the need to superimpose your current obsessions and difficulties in order to interpret the past correctly and not tend to finding mythical solutions in the past that do not correspond to current realities: the fainting fits in reviewing the past is one of the magical behaviors because we mostly fail to read correctly our traditions and history. In order to endeavor reading the past we first must feel comfortable and well rooted in our present. It is important to read the past as a hobby in hours of distractions; otherwise, we end up projecting our current problems on ancient texts which distort proper focus on the initial content and context of the texts. I am reminded of a saying by Teddy Goldsmith (1928-2009): “We can destroy Earth without violating a single law: it is illegal to protect nature!”
Note: I extracted this notion from the French book of Fatema Mernissi “The political Harem”. Mernissi relied on the Moroccan author Mohammad Jaberi’s “We and our heritage” who criticized Moslem societies and imputed to the Western civilization the potent usage of time as its directive for modernization. I thought to redirect the topic to a more specific ideological/economics concept that is more adequate to describing the trend in the last century since Western nations were very much attached to nationalism and still are in many instances.
What! Savages and primitive tribes? Who is Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 10, 2010
What! Savages and primitive tribes? (Feb. 10, 2010)
The late famous ethnologist and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) said: “I gave up preserving primitive tribes; all that I am doing is recording their memory for later generations. Mankind is settling in mono-culture: Humanity is readying to producing mass civilization.”
Claude Levi-Strauss spent 5 years in the Amazon and Mato Grosso (1935-39) researching a few of their primitive tribes such as Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Munde, and Tupi-Kawahib.
Claude Levi-Strauss agrees with the prophetic remark of the physicist Neil Bohr who said in 1939:
“The traditional differences among cultures resemble the equivalent different manners of describing physical experiments”.
Claude gathered 3,000 photos and he needed 15 years of soul searching to gather enough courage and publish his first book “Sad Tropic, 1955” on his exploration missions.
Among the other masterpieces related to ethnology and anthropology we have “Structural Anthropology, 1958”; “The savage thinking, 1962”; “Mythology of the naked man, 1964”; “Seeing, listening, and reading, 1993”; and “Saudades of Sao Paulo, 1994”.
Primitive tribes are going extinct fast.
The trend is man-made expansion and exploitation that started by European colonial adventure in the 16th century, and particularly in the 19th century. A couple of decades ago, tribes in the Amazon Forest went extinct because Texaco polluted and ruined the ecological make-up for its oil-well extraction processes. Read note 2.
In “Sad tropic”, Levi-Strauss was pretty candid and wrote:
“I hate to travel and to explore. Should I recount the insipid details of a servitude to weeks and months of traveling, of hunger, fatigue, and illnesses? Should I tell of the toils for daily maintenance and upkeep as in routine military service? The amounts of efforts expanded on ethnological research do not confer a price to the negative aspects of the job. Truth can be divulged after all the gangue are stripped off.”
In 1940, the Vichy government whisked Levi-Strauss with three other French scholars to the USA because “with such a name you are doomed in France.” Levi-Strauss said that “I have never felt Jewish even though my parents were Jews. I did experience the difficulties and problems of being Jew in schools and universities. I do not comprehend the inventions of the Catholic Church councils relative to Trinity, trans-substantiation, or communion of the Saints. I have no inclinations of trying to comprehend these abstract notions. Christianity exercises aesthetic seduction on me.”
Levi-Strauss stresses that “the longer we get attached to ethnology, the more we keep our distances of current societies: the essential and dramatic characteristics of the present will not count heavily in the perspectives of several centuries later. Individuality is more prevalent in primitive tribes than in modern civilization. Ethnology respects history, though it does not extend to it any privileged value. History is a complementary research that deploys human societies over time, while ethnology extends the research over space.”
Anthropology extends the impression of going to the extreme limits of what was the goal of philosophy in witnessing the totality of human experiences. A scholar does not offer real answers: his role is to formulate pertinent clear questions.
Symbols have no intrinsic or invariable significance: they have meaning only within the context. This significance is foremost of position.
Myth is started by an individual and then is taken over by the original group and fine tuned progressively. Levi-Strauss claims that the main characteristic in myths is the beauty emanating from the imaginative stories. There is this intelligent emotion that story of myth, painting, sculpture, or music strikes us head on and makes us feel that we comprehend the global configuration.
Levi-Strauss is known for establishing “structuralism” in the domain of human sciences. If you read what is structuralism from non-scientific critics, you will not be more intelligent than before.
Structuralism in human sciences is a procedure of untangling the invariant characteristics of societies (for example, primitive societies) within the fundamental constraints of geography and environment on their specific structures. Studying primitive tribes is an excellent venue to extrapolate results to other societies enjoying the same restrictive localities.
(There are many statistical packages specifically designed to sort out the main characteristics or dimensions that group the cluster of categorical data. You have discriminant analysis, cluster analysis, and factors analysis experimental designs that do not differentiate among variables, simply because the purpose is fundamentally to investigate the main factors that come into play, for later well designed experiment of cause and effects. See note 3)
Note 1: Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Belgium and studied philosophy. He was offered a teaching position of sociology in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 1935. During the period (1935-39), Claude Levi-Strauss directed several missions in the Amazon and Mato Grosso to investigate primitive tribes. He taught at New School Social research in New York and then was appointed cultural attaché to the French Embassy in Washington DC in 1945. Levi-Strauss was nominated director of comparative religion of people with no written languages in Paris (1949). He was appointed professor of social anthropology at the “College de France” till 1982. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973.
Note 2: At the current rate of modernization and deforestation most of the aborigine tribes would disappear within a few decades. Many civilizations have vanished but a few have managed to survive precariously so far.
Currently we still have the ethnic Saamis (Norway and Finland), Inuits (Siberia, Alaska, and Canada), Ainous (Japan), Indians (USA and Canada), Zapotec (Mexico), Mosquitos (Nicaragua), Quiches (Guatemala), Cunas (Panama), Yanomamis and Guaranis (Brazil), Galibis and Akawaios (Guyana), Paez ans Guambianos (Colombia), Waoranis (Equator), Amueshas (Peru), Chimanes (Bolivia), Araucans (Chili), Touaregs and Bororos (Sahel in Northern Africa), Tigres (Ethiopia and Somalia), Dinkas (Sudan), Masais (Kenya and Tanzania), Pygmees (Zaire), Sans or Bushmen (Namibia and Botswana), Kalingas (Philippines), Kachins and Rohingas (Myanmar or Birmani), Hmongs (Laos), Santals and Gonds (India), Punans (Malaysia), Uzbeks and Tadjiks (Afghanistan), Aborigines (Australia), Maoris (New Zealand), Papous (New Guinea).
Note 3: Dimensions or factors are sorted out and data are forced to cluster along these dimensions and then the dimensions are given names (a kind of art). Once names are extended to dimensions then it becomes hard to change their connotations.
For example, quantitative psychology, marketing, and sociology use these structural analyses to find out complexity, customs, traditions, cooking specifications, and customer preferences, qualitative notions of beauty, parenting, or associations among the cluster of data.
How objective and scientific are research?
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 3, 2009
Article #29, December 1st, 2005
“How objective and scientific are research?”
Would you please give me a minute to set the foundations first? Friend, allow me just a side explanation on experimentation. Psychologists, sociologists and marketing graduates are trained to apply various experimentation methods and not just cause and effects designs. There are many statistical packages oriented to providing dimensions and models to the set of data dumped into the experiment so that a preliminary understanding of the system behavior is comprehended qualitatively.
Every applied science has gone through many qualitative models or schemas, using various qualitative methods, before attempting to quantify their models. However, many chairmen of engineering departments, especially those who have no understanding of the disciple of Human Factors or were never exposed to designing experiments, have a conception that this field is mostly qualitative in nature and would ask me to concentrate in my courses on the quantitative aspects such as the environmental factors of lighting, noise, heat and any topic that requires computation or has well defined physics equations.
We have three concepts in the title: objectivity, scientific and research that are related in people’s mind as connoting the same concept. However, the opposite meanings for these concepts are hard to come by without philosophical divergences or assumptions. If we define science as a set of historical paradigms, a set of concepts, truths, facts and methods that most of them keep changing as new technologies and new methodologies enlarge the boundaries of knowledge then you might be more inclined to discuss notions with a freer mind.
Could subjectivity be accepted as the opposite of objectivity without agreeing on a number of axioms and assumptions that are not tenable in many cases? Any agreement in the meanings of objectivity in scientific research procedures and results are basically consensual among the professionals in a discipline, for a period, until the advent of a new paradigm that changes the meaning or orientation of the previous consensus among the professionals.
Could opinions, personal experiences, recalled facts or events not be accepted in the domain of research even if they could be found in written documents but not thoroughly investigated by a researcher? So what if you refer to an accredited research article and then it turned out that the article was fraught with errors, misleading facts with borderline results and untenable interpretations? Would the research be thrown in the dust bin as unscientific or non objective and thus not worth further investigations?
Research in Physics, Chemistry and engineering deal with objects and are related to studying the behavior of the physical nature; these kind of research can arrive to well establish mathematical models because the factors are countable, could be well controlled in experimental settings and the variability in errors are connected to the technology of the measuring instruments once the procedure is well defined and established according to experimental standards. It is when research has to deal with the variability in the human nature such as in psychology, psychometric, sociology, marketing, business management and econometrics that the notions of objectivity, research and science become complex and confusing.
The main problem is to boldly discriminate among research and admit that not every research is necessarily scientific or objective and that a research has an intrinsic value if the investigator is candid about the purpose and nature of his research. We need to admit that every research is subjective in nature because it is the responsibility of the investigator to select his topic, his intentions, his structured theory, references, fund providers, the hypotheses, the design, the methodology, the sample size, the populations, the data collection techniques, the statistical package, emphasis on either error type I or error type II, the interpretation of results and so on.
By admitting prior subjective environment to a research endeavor then we can proffer the qualitative term of objectivity to the research only and only when the investigators provide full rationales to every subjective choices in the research process.
Every step in the research process is a variation on an accepted paradigm at one point in the history of science and the mixing of paradigms with no conscious realization of the mixing process should set a warning alarm on the validity of the research and the many pitfalls it is running through.
Acknowledging the role of subjectivity in the methodology, the data and its interpretation could open the way for more accurate and flexible judgments as to the extent of objectivity and scientific tendencies of the research.
“You want systems to fit people?”
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 8, 2009
“So, you want systems to fit people?” February 21, 2005
“So far, it sounds that Human Factors in engineering is a vast field of knowledge and it could have many applications.” You are absolutely right, the profession is multidisciplinary.
Let us consider the problems that an excellent human factors designer has to cope with when he has to incorporate the human dimensions into his design and the body of knowledge he has to learn and incorporate in his practice:
First, there are no design drawings for people as traditional engineers are familiar with because the structure of human organisms is approximately delineated and the mechanisms are imperfectly understood.
Second, people vastly differ in anthropometric dimensions, cognitive abilities, sensory capabilities, motor abilities, personalities, and attitudes; thus the challenge of variability is different from physics where phenomena behave in countable fashions and can be accounted for in design.
Third, people change with time; they change in dimensions, abilities and skills as well as from moment to moment attributable to boredom, fatigue, lapse of attention, interactions among people and with the environment.
Fourth, the world is constantly changing and systems are changing accordingly; thus interfaces for designing jobs, operations and environment have to be revisited frequently.
Fifth, contrary to the perception of people regarding the other traditional engineering fields, when we deal with human capabilities, limitations and behavior everyone feels is an expert on the basis of common sense acquired from living and specific experiences and we tend to generalize our feelings to all kinds of human behaviors. For examples, we think that we have convictions concerning the effects of sleep, dreams, age, and fatigue; we believe that we are rather good judges of people’s motives, we have explanations for people’s good memories and abilities, and we have strong positions on the relative influence of nature and nurture in shaping people’s behavior. Consequently, the expertise of human factors professionals are not viewed as based on science.
To be a competent ergonomics expert you need to take courses in many departments like Psychology, Physiology, Neurology, Marketing, Economy, Business, Management, and of course engineering.
You need to learn applied statistics, system’s modeling (mathematical and prototyping), the design of experiments, writing and validating questionnaires, collecting data on human performance, analyzing and interpreting data on the interactions of human with systems.
You need updating you knowledge continuously with all kinds of systems’ deficiencies that often hurt people in their daily lives, and learn the newer laws that govern the safety and health of the employees in their workplace.
All the above courses and disciplines that you are urged to take or to be conversant with have the well being of targeted end users in mind. To be an expert well qualified designer you need to assimilate the physical and cognitive abilities of end users and what they are capable of doing best; you need to discover their limitations as well so that you may reduce errors and foreseeable misuses of any product or interface that you have the responsibility to design.
You need to fit the product or interface to the users and avoid lengthy training or useless stretching of the human body in order to permit the users to efficiently manipulate your design. An excellent designer has to know the advantages and limitations of the five senses and how to facilitate the interaction with systems under minimal stress, errors committed, and health complications generated from prolonged usage and repetitive movements of parts of the body.
I am glad, my newly found friend, that you are attentively listening to my lucubration.
I would like it better if you ask me questions that prove to me that you are enthusiastic.
Could you enumerate a few incidents in your life that validate the importance of this field of study?
“Well, suppose that I enroll in that all encompassing specialty, are there any esoteric and malignant courses that are impressed upon me?”
Unfortunately, as any university major and engineering included, many of the courses are discovered to be utterly useless once you find a job.
However, you have to bear the cross for 4 years in order to be awarded a miserly diploma. This diploma, strong with a string of grade of “A’s” will open the horizon for a new life, a life of a different set of worries and unhappiness.
I can tell you for sure that it is not how interesting are the courses but the discipline that you acquired in the process.
You need to start enjoying reading, every day for at least 5 hours, taking good care for the details in collecting data or measuring anything, learning to write everyday, meticulously and stubbornly, not missing a single course or session, giving your full concentration during class, taking notes and then reading your notes afterwards, coordinating the activities of your study groups, being a leader and a catalyst for all your class associates.
You need to waking up full of zest and partying hard after a good week of work and study, staying away, like the plague, from those exorbitantly expensive restaurants and dancing bars because they are the haven of all those boring, mindless and useless people who are dependent completely on their parents.
Well, you will hear, frequently, that securing a University diploma is a testing ground for your endurance to accepting all kinds of nonsense. It is.
Most importantly, it is testing the endurance of your folks who are paying dearly for that nonsense.
Compensation: An Experimental mind
I recall my advisor telling me once in frustration “At your age I was professor and had raised a family”. He had two grown up sons and a daughter who just got married. I didn’t need this reminder to comprehend my desperate situation: I am just plainly stubborn with no imaginations on earning money. These long years in a PhD program in the specialty of Human Factors, at the age 35 to 41, should be considered a waste of time for any career-minded student but they were valuable for my mind. My exposure to the methods and vocabulary of five other different fields of study in psychology, business, marketing, economics, and education permit me to think that I acquired an experimental mind, a mind that not many could claim to explicitly have. I was exposed to various experimental designs, not necessarily cause and effects designs, and inevitably to different statistical results and interpretations. I witnessed graduates focusing on the technicality of terms and so many “point statistics” that basically means nothing, and a fortiori meant nothing in the minds of the graduates but their experimental minds were lacking in comprehension. The end result is millions of graduates publishing papers not valid scientifically and unable to interpret results.
When someone asks “how” (the mechanical process or procedure) it is tacitly understood that he comprehend the why and what of the subject matter or the system; that he knows all the factors and variables that may affect the outcome of a system, including the human element within the system. Maybe a practicing or a professional knows his particular system, (he should though implicitly most of the times, as engineers learn), but the fundamental question remains “has he acquired the generalized method and rationality to investigating systems outside his discipline?”
I know what I am talking about but the difficulty is to express and disseminate the problem. I have taught engineers who had no understanding for discriminating among variables such as dependent, independent, or controlling variables; you think that they implicitly know how to differentiate among the variables; wrong, they don’t. Even after three sessions coupled with examples they were still in the dark and still wondering what is all the fuss about. You think that they can interpret graphs, extract wealth of information and comprehend pages of written materials from one meaningful graph, they generally cannot. I can testify that 30% of my engineer classes could not read; another 30% could not understand what they read. It was a pleasure to educate a couple of good minds. I have written several articles on that subject in my category “Professional articles” for further detailed clarification.
Worst, undergraduates are almost never exposed to research papers. Most Master’s graduates barely comprehend or interpret correctly research papers. Graduates join the “work force” of the rational minds practically illiterate; they cannot resume any continuation learning programs for a simple reason: they are illiterate in reading and comprehending research papers.
My contention is this. If you acquired an experimental mind then you should be eligible to comprehend any field of study by reading the research papers in the field. The major contraption devised my professions to discriminate among one another is a flimsy mask targeted in changing the technical terms and vocabulary; a secret ritual inherited from ancient times to creating castes of literates. Other than that, the experimental methodology is fundamentally the same. When you acquire an experimental mind then all disciplines are one course away; you need to learn the slang, a new language that sound familiar, but with terms that have different meanings and connotations. The ultimate goal of teaching is for every university graduating mind to be trained to comprehend research papers of other disciplines.
May I refer the reader to my current article “Rationality Fraud: Can our leading minds pass Socrates’ dialogue test?”
Restructuring engineering curriculums to respond to end users demands
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 11, 2008
Article #21, April 19, 2005
“Restructuring engineering curriculums to respond to end users demands”
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.
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 teaching these courses?
Is it the need to allow the thousands of psychologists, marketing and business graduates to find outlet “debouches” in the market place 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?
Adonis Diaries 