The Shoe-Slamming & Bush's Comeback

I think the shoe should have hit the target. I mean first the reporter misses the target, then he receives a good amount of beating for it from his own peers and later Bush handles the situation with such great composure that everyone is now talking about Bush's ability to duck and hide and his graceful composure. Imagine this: the first shoe hits Bush's head, knocks him out. Bush screams from the podium and slips out the F word. The Secret Service people come out and they, not the Iraqis, beat the hell out of the reporter. At the end, the press conference is called off and Bush immediately flies back, cutting his trip short. If this had been the case, we all would have loved the fact that the shoe hit the right target.

Watch the video clip below and enjoy the interesting event!

2008 - The Year of Obama

A creative play with Obama's name to reflect on the year that will be remembered as the Year of Obama!

Cars 2.0 - The New Business Model for the Automobile Industry

Original article:
Op-Ed Columnist - While Detroit Slept - NYTimes.com

Thomas Friedman timely points at the new innovation in the automobile industry that has the potential to become a game-changing model for transportation business all over the world. What years of 'it's coming', 'it's here' cries of the environmentalists about global warming couldn't do was eventually done by the oil price hike in the last 2, 3 years - wake the world up from it's gasoline-consuming slumber. As car makers around the world look for smaller, smart and alternative-fuel run cars, Better Place, a Palo Alto-based company, is one step ahead of them. It is building the network that will fuel these electric cars of tomorrow. It is like laying the cable network before the first fax machine is shipped out - an electric 'fueling' station, if you will, for the green electric cars.

For the environmentalists, however, that solves only half of the problem. The supply of power to these electric fueling stations is also the area that must be powered by cleaner, renewable energy i.e. wind, geo-thermal, nuclear or solar. While much work still needs to be done in that area, at least we have started to see heavy advertisement by alternative energy technology providers like Vestas on CNN, which increases awareness, if nothing else, about the potentiality of these ventures.

As Zorlu Group from Turkey and Sanfarina, a local firm, work to charge our national power grid with some renewable energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels, we can only hope that other investors also see this as an 'investment of tomorrow' and increase the size of the alternative energy pie in Paksitan.

Truth about the Iraq Qar - For Whom the Bell Tolls

TRUTH IRAQ WAR DOCUMENTARY
Uploaded by NEW_FRONTIER

It is quite a shame that with the overwhelming evidence presented in this video and in other sources prior to this production and even after countless confessions by almost every member of George Bush's cabinet members, George Bush and his entourage, especially Dick Cheney will simply walk away from the White House with not a single legal action initiated against them. Thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqi lives have been lost or damaged since the beginning of the Iraq invasion and the perpetrators have not even slithered a shade of their grace.

And the Streets Shall be Painted Red

This is time for the Islamic festival of animal sacrifice. Muslims all over the world with varying passion and rituals are celebrating the Eid-ul-adha - the festival of sacrifice in the name of the Supreme Being. The event is celebrated in the memory of Prophet Abraham who offered to sacrifice the life of his son following the wish of his Creator. As the tale goes, God replaced Prophet Abraham's son with a sheep at the last moment and rescued Prophet Ismail's life. The willingness to offer the life of his son by Abraham and the equally admirable attitude of his son, Ismail, to oblige is cherished both in Christianity and Islam. The underlying concept behind the tale is that of sacrifice of things most dear to us in the name of our Creator, which is a noble notion.
Having said that, the current practice of the festival in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular, however, seems to have lost its original spirit. Now this religious ritual has simply become an exercise of over-consuming overpriced meat during the Eid-ul-adha time. Every family has their self-serving motive behind the exercise – some do it out of their misplaced religious belief while others feel compelled as part of their effort to seek society's approval (whether they like to admit this or not is a separate debate). The idea of sacrifice has come down to a monetary sacrifice only as families hardly get to spend enough time with these animals to develop a strong sense of connection with them before they are slaughtered in the name of Allah. You obviously can't expect them to be feeling any sense of loss associated with the sacrificed animal – the 'sacrifice' of the money that went to pay for them, however, is genuine. On one extreme, some households never even get to see the animal they have sacrificed as the entire exercise for them is to make the trip to the community centers to collect their portion of the meat. The only real sense of 'loss' or sacrifice is felt by the children as they truly fall in love with their goats and cows during the few days leading up to the Eid. I know that because I remember it from my childhood.
I don't mean to disrespect this holy practice or disregard the faith of those who believe this exercise will make God happy but we must make some room for rational thought in our religious rituals. On one hand we claim that Islam is a progressive religion and is timeless in its application and on the other, we cling to practices and rituals that have little to do with the original spirit of their tradition. If the act of slaughtering millions of animals were to bring peace or help millions out of poverty then I would blindly support the cause but until then I continue to question its utility.

Tapping the Breeze

On 3rd December, I learned first hand from the CEO of Zorlu Group that the first mega wind energy project (49.4M Watts) in Pakistan was being implemented by their Turkey-based company and that the day before i.e. 2nd Dec, they erected the first wind turbine tower and connected it with the grid to produce clean, green and renewable energy in the Hyderabad wind corridor. The news was a pleasant surprise for all of us who were in the audience at the MAP Convention where Mr. Bursa, CEO, Zorlu Group, was delivering his presentation. Matter of fact, this wasn't the only pleasantly surprising news he shared, he also made a claim that raised quite a few eyebrows - that his company has found Pakistan's bureaucracy a very easy and convenient establishment to work with. To assert his claim, he revealed that he had worked in the Turkish government for 25 years and knew what he was talking about. At the end of his presentation, he left with another good news that his company is already seeking investment to increase the capacity of the wind farm to over 300 M Watts. Wallah!!


Having heard that news, I began to search for other ongoing wind power projects in Pakistan and found Sanfarina Pvt. Ltd. This is a company that focuses on small to medium size wind and solar energy projects – ranging from 300 to 1500 K Watts. The company is based in Pakistan and is working with partners from Denmark, Germany, India and China to bring clean energy technology in Pakistan. One of the groundbreaking ideas that they are working on is to install micro wind turbines at homes and factories enabling households and industrialists to produce their own energy. Their vision is to bring light to far reached areas and enhance the irrigation capacity of barren lands by providing the growers power through wind energy for their tube wells. I wonder if these two companies can find these ventures profitable, why can’t other investors?

While cheering up the crowd with his series of good news, Mr. Bursa of Zorlu Group also highlighted the reasons why growth in wind and solar energy projects has been so lackluster. He said that the technology patents in wind and solar energy technology are strictly held by only a few companies and they don’t encourage transfer of technology to maintain their monopolizing position in the industry. The top leaders of the oil industry are the ones that have control over most of these patents. Is it any wonder why we are witnessing a collectively non-intuitive response to the looming climate crisis by the world at large? The ones to be disadvantaged by the promotion of the renewable energy solutions are the ones holding the key to this treasure.

TED talks - first experience

TED talks are simply awesome !! I watched a few last night and found myself glued to my computer screen - a little preview of the ones i watched

Interactive Whiteboard

Johnny Lee is a PhD student who focuses on cheaper ways to bring technology to mainstream users. His presentation focused on the new uses of the Nintendo wII remote. The wII remote is primarily advertised for its motion sensing capabilities but it also has a infrared camera. Using the infrared camera, Lee shows the audience how with a projector and a laptop, one can make an interactive whiteboard. Lee directs the wII remote camera towards the white screen where a multimedia projector is projecting the computer image. Lee then uses a marker than has an infrared LED attached to it to write (throw infrared beam on the screen that is then sensed by the wII remote). The software Lee has written translate the movement of the infrared beam on the white screen to written lines and images on the white screen. This apparatus makes an interactive whiteboard screen.

The Big Internet

Another talk was about the next 5,000 days of the internet. The speaker projects that in the next 5,000 days of the web, every machine on the planet will be connected to what he calls the central machine, "the one." This one machine, or the web, will become very good at knowing you and anticipating your wants and preferences. The futurist believes that in the next 10-15 years, the web will own every bit. No data will be on a separate machine but will be part of the web. With that one thing people will have to give up is their privacy so he believes that things will become much more transparent. Sharing would be the trend because it would increase the overall wealth of information.

The Advent of Computers

One interesting talk was about the invent of the computers. It was quite fascinating for me that the first computer was built to run the calculations for the first atomic and nuclear bomb tests. Von Newmann, who is revered for his contribution in many fields especially the field of computers, along with few of the geniuses of the time built the first computer. The architecture that was used then is still popular today and every computer that there is has the same Von Newmann architecture.

Living Forever

A skinny, long-bearded, hippy British talked about anti-aging and how it is going to be a reality in the future. He talks about why we age and how we can put a stop to it. He considers aging to be a disease and believes it can be cured through multiple therapies.

Avoiding the Next Pandemic

The founder of InSTEDD, Dr. Larry Brilliant, talked about the global pandemics and how they can be stopped from happening. The slogan that he often uses to describe the strategy to fight global pandemics is "early detection, early response." Dr. Brilliant tells the story of the team working in Canada that helped to catch SARS before it spread too far out and saved the world from a major pandemic. Now he believes, Avain Flu or the Bird Flu virus will be the next virus that can cause a pandemic. He has setup InSTEDD with the help of some health care organization as an early warning detection system to identify the spread and trace the roots of a potential pandemic.

Down Sizing is Never Easy

Last week, I conducted a custom-designed training session for a major financial institution in Karachi. The program was titled, "Motivation and Positive Thinking" and the audience was, well, not quite willing to get or even feel motivated. This financial institution is in the middle of a down-sizing (or 'right-sizing' as the management likes to call it) exercise on a mass scale, with hundreds of positions being scaled down or eliminated. My audience members were the victims of this corporate practice that has always received sharp criticism, regardless of where, when, and why it is implemented.

Now, imagine a group of people with an average tenure of 20-plus years at an organization with skill-set not the least bit compatible with the new trends in the industry being 'forced' to jump off the boat and dive into the ocean of uncertainty - and then imagine you being asked to conduct a training workshop for this group on behalf of the HR department to help raise their motivation level !!! Yea, talk about swimming with the sharks !!

After the workshop, I was left to wonder if there is ever going to be a perfect way for organizations to right size. Can it even be properly answered? As commonly understood, right sizing is exercised to reduce costs and help the organization stay afloat in troubled waters. So in a way, it manifests the utilitarian concept of making a decision in the interest of greater number of the people - cutting the fat out of the body to make it more lean and healthy. The fat, however, in this case amounts to dozens and at times hundreds of bread-earners of their families.  It becomes far more troubling when this exercise is being implemented in a country, like ours, where the safety net for those most vulnerable is non-existing and the concept of social welfare has never transcended above the mere rhetoric of the politicians, leaving no hope for a secure transition into a new career once forced out as a result of the down-sizing exercise.