Dreams vs. Targets

April 28, 2016April 28, 2016 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Many people have great dreams, and they stay as dreams in their minds. These dreams may also die with their dreamers. So what is the true benefit of a great dream in the end? Dreams need to be “actuated”. Otherwise, dreams will be like free balloons parked in mid-air – just beautiful to look at.

Dreams may become reality when they become “targets” in the minds of the dreamers. A target is the visual of a finish line, of something to work towards, an end to meet, or an objective to achieve.

Martin Luther King did not lose his life over just a dream parked in mid-air, he lost it because he had civil rights thought and a plan; a target he dedicated his life to achieve. He did not just have a passive dream.

ON IMPARTIALITY.

September 19, 2015September 19, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

ON IMPARTIALITY.
Difference is what creates a rate of change. No difference means no dynamics, and no life. This is why our eyes as they process images, they recognize change, identify patterns, and categorize the processed images. No difference means no pattern recognition. The same applies to hearing and the other senses. During pattern recognition, humans develop stereotypes based on categories such as race, color, ethnicity, nationalism, amongst other attributes that define “difference”. It is this difference that helps the person develop an identity, relative to others. This difference “drives” behavior, and may cause prejudice. This difference also produces competition.

The job of religion is to minimize this difference, it is to teach “impartiality” where recognized patterns of difference are downplayed by defining higher points of commonality (shared values.) This reduces the perceived rate of change, and results in peace – in theory.

In practice, religion, as a new pattern, in and by itself causes a new difference, this leads to additional labeling (Label Theory.) Muslim vs Christian, good vs evil labels, etc. In processing religious images and messages, humans always look for patterns of difference, to define “distinct” or different identity. Humans are not designed to look for points of commonality, otherwise less difference (less competition) is the result. Commonality is less exciting.

While all religions espouse impartiality and equality, in practice they produce partiality, bias, and injustice. More wars were fought in the name of religion than in any other attribute of difference.

Impartiality, coupled with force / power, leads to war and injustice, as powerful Impartiality imposes its position on others (through media, war, etc.) The USA is case in point today.

The lesson here, impartiality is there by design, and balance of power between competing players is the only way to keep the peace. Defining global human values can help keep the difference in check. Otherwise, strongly actuated difference have to be dealt with either by direct confrontation (war/conflict), or implicit competition (cold war.) There will always be winners and losers. Welcome to difference, welcome to life on earth!

ON GROWTH. YOUR BANK ACCOUNT VS. YOUR BODY?

September 7, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Growth is always seen as a positive attribute until it reaches your own body. If I tell you, for example, I will grow your wallet or your bank account by a few thousand dollars, this is seen as a good proposal. But if I tell you, grow your body bigger by 20%, this is seen as a negative proposal. Wallet fatter ok, waist line fatter, not OK. So what gives?

The difference, in short, is in the infrastructure. You cannot build a Dodge Ram size vehicle on a Mini Cooper vehicle chassis. But if you do, you will overload and maybe break that Mini chassis. The same concept applies in the case of your body, since the infrastructure (your chassis / skeleton / backbone) is “fixed”, any additional growth (beyond normal BMI) is seen as negative since such growth will strain your body and its organs (engine/heart overload, also auxiliary/organs overload). The only way adding pounds to your body will be seen as positive is when you can scale up your skeleton; add 1 foot of skeletal structure along your height, hypothetically, and add a few pounds, no problem whatsoever.

In the process of growing a business, operators forget to scale up their business quickly. Your business grows by 50%, then you don’t keep the same business skeleton, you will need to hire more people, invest in new facilities, or else you will strain your resources, and your best workers will leave you (or fail on you, similar to body kidney failure with overload.)

When you get a bigger family, you will need to scale up; bigger home, hire maid service, etc. Absent that, the system will not be sustainable, unhappiness ensues.

The lesson learnt; good growth is accompanied with commensurate infrastructural growth. This may seem like common sense, but it is most frequently ignored because of the immediate added cost to scale up the infrastructure. The long-term cost of not adding it quickly is much higher.

ON SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS.

September 6, 2015September 6, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

So which comes first? As young kids, we use Lego bricks to build structures and ideas- some designs of sorts. This is synthesis. Once you have the first completed structure, you can do some analysis, then decide to reiterate on the design to improve it. Synthesis takes place again – as new ideas are synthesized / compounded. Your first Lego car design had no wheels, the 2nd one did as you discovered the first car didn’t roll. Synthesis first. Engineering is all about this continuous process of synthesis-analysis-synthesis. God does not need to do any of this, he creates things perfect, at first go – no iterative synthesis. We, on the other hand, err every step of the way. So synthesis is our way of saying we cannot see the optimal design right away, we have to work hard to understand things. All those corporate departments of research and development, analysis groups, etc are an acknowlegment of how little we know a priori.

Why Do You Need Money?

August 9, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

The short answer is to buy commodities. Imagine that you lived on a farm and you had on site everything you needed to subsist; meat, wool, wood, water, fruits, and vegetables. Then you do not need money, and you’re fully independent. The first $100 that was printed was to get someone “in debt” by this amount so that person would buy a commodity (gas, flour, etc) The amount is paid against labor performed, labor is the worker’s capital, his/her input. Commodities are traded in USD. Today, if we all drove solar-powered cars, then we could afford to work a few hours less per week (cost of gasoline saved). You could enjoy life better with your family. But banks and the commodity oligarchs are not interested in such efficient systems. They want you to get more in debt, promoting more commodity derivatives that you may not even need. Before you purchase anything, ask yourself if you need it, and find ways to be self-sufficient (your small farm/garden, bicycle riding when possible, etc) in attempt to emancipate yourself from commodity slavery. If you inspect a $1.00 bill, it reads an instrument of “debt”, not an instrument of credit. In theory, you need less money, not more, to be free.

On Sales Leverage

August 2, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Many companies and shops are open for business everyday and do not have a leverage product in their product mix. For example, a shop may have 10 products yielding 10% each. Say you’re selling scarves at $5 each, yielding a net profit of $2; in a day, you will need to sell 50 pieces to make $100 in profit (maybe you even have to deal with 50 customers!) Instead, you could identify 1 product yielding $50 in profit per transaction (like a suit or leather jacket), so in a day, you need to sell 2 products to lock in $100 in profit. Compare this to dealing with 30 to 50 customers selling low leverage products. Many companies struggle because they do not have leverage products, or if they do have them, they fail to promote them well. Look around at your business or shop, identify those high value leverage products (high profit density items) and market them well. Happy Selling!

Surgeons vs. Plumbers

July 27, 2015July 27, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

There are many parallels between human body surgeons and household plumbers, similar to the parallels between dentists and mechanics. In fact, in the State of Michigan, dentists are officially classified as mechanics. And rightly so, for example, orthodontists study quite a bit of mechanics, dynamics, and materials science.

Surgeons do quite a bit of plumbing; they unclog arteries off of plaque build-up using chemicals and organic substance, similar to plumbers unclogging pipes with detergents and enzymes. Surgeons can stitch torn arteries today instead of amputating body parts, and plumbers do the same using soldering of pipes to keep existing parts. Surgeons can remove tumors resulting from rotting body parts, and so do plumbers with rusting and rotting plumbing components. Once sucks infected blood out, the other rusted stagnant water out. And so on.

The truth is that plumbing is deterministic and near science today, whereas surgery remains as an “art” or pseudo-science, and is less deterministic (relies on skill, trial-and-error, rules, best practices, etc.) It is very unlikely to find a plumber causing sudden death to the system he or she is trying to fix, whereas in surgery, given the uncertainty, complexity of structures, and “non-linearity” of materials response (visco-elasticity), it is seen as more likely. But people continue to pay surgeons higher fees for a job seen much less than perfect. What gives?

The morale of the story is that being more advanced and more deterministic does not pay off (e.g. engineers are paid peanuts today relative to their contribution.) It is better to be in a field where you can use external attribution to explain failure of materials and processes. This is why doctors and lawyers make the big bucks, they operate in a field full of uncertainty and inefficiency. This requires some major skills and training to deal with the unexpected. Things get worse when a surgeon does not anticipate the impact of the action he or she is taking on the body as a whole; i.e. ignoring system-level interactions. A procedure may be successful locally but it may cause problems elsewhere in the body (unexpected endocrine system response, kidney failure, high BP, etc.) Sometimes it is too late to rescue the system.

Doctors may have put themselves in a sandbox and they do not want to get out of it. A multi-disciplinary approach is needed where the experience of engineers, plumbers, system analysts, material scientists, electronic specialists, nano-technologists, etc. is pulled together to make medicine a more deterministic and integrated science. I wish I would live to see the day when every human is wearing an on-board diagnostics (OBD) device showing that all systems are running normal, or not? Automotive Engineers did it, look at your car. Doctors just need to raise the bar, and make it happen. Then, and only then will we pay them less 😉

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