Posts Tagged ‘safety’
Introspection: What Design? (#55)
Posted on: March 1, 2009
Designing what? The Human Factors Concept
The bottom line in industrial engineering is to design a system that would optimize production, inventory, distribution, material handling by maximizing profit or minimizing cost or finding a trade-off that would satisfy the marketing department, the shareholders, the after sale, the union, the consumer product, and the health and safety agencies and so forth.
Now we can recognize that optimizing a system involves inter-relationship among various interested groups of people. The inter-relationship with consumers, operators, employees, workers, management, and shareholders requires a good understanding of the research done in psychology, sociology, marketing, econometrics and other social studies. This fact is anathema to mathematical solutions that do not consider constraints on human needs, demands, safety and health regulations and specifications, and variability in capabilities and limitations and ethnic idiosyncrasies.
Can industrial engineering discipline be of any aid to small and family based businesses and industries with limited financial resources and marketing scope? It should be of aid if the boss is an industrial engineer but my opinion is that this discipline is geared toward large industrial complex that hires many employees and workers even if many sections are automated. Designing an optimum system of production without serious awareness of the research done in the consequences of shift work, pay rate, sleep deprivation, and the political infighting among departments, management, syndicates and employees is tantamount to failure. We can understand that there are many strong and interesting interactions among industrial, social, psychological and business administration fields.
Whether we like it or not human factors engineering that studies the capabilities and variability of the human element, his health and safety and risk taking tendencies or avoidance should be an intrinsic part of designing work production. The reality is that companies are wary of hiring generalists such as industrial or human factors engineers for the benefit of specific specialties that are much more in demand because they are better known, even if a global view and comprehension of a system can, in the medium and long terms, deliver much better performance in production, minimizing lost work days, turnover, human aches and pains, emotionally and physically.
Private companies conjecture that they cannot afford human factors engineers whose jobs are designing interfaces for end users to interact efficiently with complex systems; this is partly true because experimenting with human subjects is time consuming and very costly when dealing with the innumerable variables involved in studying the behavior of workers, employees, engineers and consumers.
I like the current tendency to label industrial engineering as engineering management because the scope matches the management requirement and responsibilities and avoid the connotation with mechanical design and fabrication.
Sex is Stupid: Ask Viagra
Posted on: February 13, 2009
Sex is Stupid: Ask Viagra (February 11, 2009)
Do you know that the sex medicine molecule for impotence, named VIAGRA, happened to be an acronym for its discoverer Ronald Virag in 1980? Doctor Virag tested a procedure of micro-injections of papaverine in the cavernous body of the penis. A few years later, prostaglandin (secreted by the two glands seminal vesicles) had proven to have fewer side effects.
With Viagra, the supposedly impotent old fart of a penis was shocked to be standing still “saluting the Chief”, for hours. Could you imagine a situation more ridiculous than an elder man carrying a stupid face for an incongruous condition? Many had to be admitted to hospitals for painful relief procedures, admittedly less painful than the erect position case.
Do you know that over 40% of men in the developed countries become impotent by the age of 40? Male menopause or middle age difficulties are setting in early on, and psychologists are making fortunes with the high turnover rate of impotant male. To increase their hourly rate, psychologist bring up the Death symbolism.
For example, psychologists ask their hapless clients “Do you have the feeling that the world is crumbling underneath your feet?” Guess what, the client invariably and candidly answers “That is exactly my feeling! I kind of have the impression that I have been dispossessed”
Naturally, the impotent male feels dispossessed of a woman to love or a 14-years old pretty boy… This is the time when a male obsessively observes himself and starts to have presentiment of his own mortality, an unimaginable occurrence as long as his prick reassured him of its vivacity.
Now the impotent is ready to bow his head for “le coup de grace”. Most probably, the new impotent failed to observe the reactions of his mate for so long, a mate “who was content for once in a while, a night every month…” because she was tiring quickly of physical exercises.
It is time for introspection. It is time to ask fundamental questions “What is love”, “What happened to my youth?”, “Where did I go wrong?”, and “How could I have managed my health better?”
There is this deep misconception that the act of sex is a re-establishment of power or a confirmation of power. Reality is proving that sex is actually the signing of the political agreement after negotiating a balance on the terms of liberty, choices, and responsibilities. Holding sex is an act of power to express outrageous disagreement of the relationship, a sort of revolt. Thus, when it is time to sign the truce, then Viagra is appropriate, occasionally.
Sex is stupid; that is why youth is exciting and attractive. As we rot with age, we long for our stupid youth. Usually, those who rot fast and suddenly, are those who denigrated the pleasures of reading, writing, and reflecting in their healthier period. As impotence sets in, they have got nothing to revert to or compensate for, but their stupid esthetic recollections of failed prowess and inconsistent masks, which never fooled any one.
If sex is conveyed as a stupid act, which any mindless individual can perform, and if youth are instructed that intercourse requires high emotional and cognitive capabilities, then probably the age of impotence would recede into a very old age. Thus, feeling cool about intercourse and investing more time on knowing the partner would achieve better performance for all concerned parties.
Maybe then sexual intercourses would be more pleasurable and meaningful and would offer most of the answers for later years existentialist questions.
Cloning therapy: not a science fiction (January 29, 2009)
This is no longer the realm of science fictions: you can repair any sick organ with cloning parts and if you are rich you can extend your life to 150 years. We don’t need male sperms to clone a complete entity, human or animal. We don’t need a female nucleus in eggs to clone a complete entity, human or animal. Soon, we won’t need female eggs; labs would be able to manufacture the “pouch” or envelop of the female egg. It is going to take some time before human invest on research to circumvent female uterus for incubating fetuses during nine months. There are human clones on earth.
Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori announced publicly in 2003 that he has cloned three babies; he was forced to recant and moved his business to Ukraine. There are many professional institutions cloning human, for a price, after they have been cloning favorite pets of the rich and famous. No State or institution is about to go public on human cloning; they don’t have to, they just do it.
Let us examine the protocol for clone fertilization which is very close to cloning spare parts. First phase, a female egg is removed; its nucleus, which contains the genetic instructions, is extracted. A male non-sexual cell (generally taken from the skin) is treated to extract its nucleus (containing the DNA) and implanted in the de-nucleated egg. Let me remind you that the cell can belong to the same female person of the ovary and it would work equally well! The new egg contains all the DNA information of the donor.
Phase two: A special cocktail of electric shocks and chemicals aid the cell to regress to a primordial cell that replicates. Phase three is the process called “blastocyst” that can generate either an embryo for fertilization or the production of specialized spare parts of the various organs such as kidney, liver, heart muscle, or even hair.
Phase four cultivates the different organs by immersing the cell “souche” in a “soup” of proteins and enzymes to normally develop and then be transplanted to the sick donor in order to repair the failing organ.
Three main obstacles for assuring complete success have already been conquered. The first hurdle was taming the chaotic replication of cells; the second problem was the immunological aspect where virulent tumors developed in reproduced cells; and the third problem was the longevity of the organ due to the atrophy of the telomeres.
China, Britain, and the USA are publicly leading the research on cloning therapeutic spare part organs but they are the tip of the iceberg; many specialized institutions in Asia, Turkey, Israel, and India are working full time.
Article #35 (Started March 4, 2006)
“Efficiency of the human body structure”
This article is an on going project to summarize a few capabilities and limitations of man. While the most sophisticated intelligent machines invented by man may contain up to ten thousand elements, the human machine is constituted of up to a million trillion of cells, up to a thousand trillions of neurons in the central nervous system, about a couple hundred bones, and as many organs, muscles, tendons and ligaments.
In the previous article #33 we discussed a graph in a story style and discovered that a human barefoot in texture, shape, and toes has a higher coefficient of friction than many man-made shoes that allow easier traction to move forward for less energy expenditure. We also expanded our story to observe that the structure of the bones and major muscles attached to limbs for movements as lever systems provide higher speed and range of movements at the expense of exorbitant muscular efforts.
A most important knowledge for designing interfaces is a thorough recognition of the capabilities and limitations of the five senses. One of the assignment involves comparing the various senses within two dozens categories such as: anatomy, physiology, receptor organs, stimulus, sources of energy, wave forms, reaction time, detectable wavelengths and frequencies, practical detection thresholds of signals, muscles, physical pressure, infections and inflammations, disorders and dysfunctions, assessment, diagnostic procedures, corrective measures, effects of age, and safety and risk.
Human dynamic efforts for doing mechanical work is at best 30% efficient because most of the efforts are converted to maintaining static positions in order to preserve stability and equilibrium for all the other concomitant stabilizing joints, bones and muscles. For example, the stooping position consumes 60% of the efforts for having a work done, in addition to the extremely high moment effected on the edges of the lower back intervertebrae discs. Static postures constrict the blood vessels and fresh blood is no longer carrying the necessary nutrients to sustain any effort for long duration and heart rate increases dramatically; lactic acid accumulates in the cells and fatigue ensues until the body rests in order to break down that acid.
Human energy efficiency is even worse because most of the energy expended is converted into heat. Not only physical exercises generate heat but, except for glucose or sugar, most of the nutrients have to undergo chemical transformations to break down the compounds into useful and ready sources of energy, thus generating more heat. Consequently, heat is produced even when sleeping when the body cells are regenerated. Internal heat could be a blessing in cold environments but a worst case scenario in a hot atmosphere because the cooling mechanism in human is solely confined to sweating off the heat accumulated in the blood stream. Heat is a source of blessing when we are sick with microbes and bacteria because the latter is killed when the internal body temperature rises above normal.
Adonis Diaries 