FW: Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation

http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/

Interesting take on engineers and their role in this world.

Posted by Eric Savitz
Written By Norm Augustine
Norm Augustine: We're falling behind.



I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering.
In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.
Why does this matter? Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions. Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.
Part of the problem is the lack of priority U.S. parents place on core education. But there are also problems inherent in our public education system. We simply don’t have enough qualified math and science teachers. Many of those teaching math and science have never taken a university-level course in those subjects.
I’ve always wanted to be a teacher; in fact, I took early retirement from my job in the aerospace industry to pursue a career in education. But I was deemed unqualified to teach 8th-grade math in any school in my state. Ironically, I was welcomed to the faculty at Princeton University, where the student newspaper ranked my course as one of 10 that every undergraduate should take.
In a global, knowledge-driven economy there is a direct correlation between engineering education and innovation. Our success or failure as a nation will be measured by how well we do with the innovation agenda, and by how well we can advance medical research, create game-changing devices and improve the world.
I continue to be active in organizations like the IEEE to help raise the profile of the engineering community and ensure that our voice is heard in key public policy decisions. That’s also why I am passionate about the way engineering should be taught as a profession – not as a collection of technical knowledge, but as a diverse educational experience that produces broad thinkers who appreciate the critical links between technology and society.
Here we are in a flattening world, where innovation is the key to success, and we are failing to give our young people the tools they need to compete. Many countries are doing a much better job. Ireland, despite a devastated economy, just announced it will increase spending on basic research. Russia is building an “innovation city” outside of Moscow. Saudi Arabia has a new university for science and engineering with a staggering $10 billion endowment. (It took MIT 142 years to reach that level.) China is creating new technology universities literally by the dozens.
These nations and many others have rightly concluded that the way to win in the world economy is by doing a better job of educating and innovating. And America? We’re losing our edge. Innovation is something we’ve always been good at. Until now, we’ve been the undisputed leaders when it comes to finding new ideas through basic research, translating those ideas into products through world-class engineering, and getting to market first through aggressive entrepreneurship.
That’s how we rose to prominence. And that’s where we’re falling behind now. The statistics tell the story.
•U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.
•In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
•China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter. •Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S.  Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.
•The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.
Innovation is the key to survival in an increasingly global economy. Today we’re living off the investments we made over the past 25 years. We’ve been eating our seed corn. And we’re seeing an accelerating erosion of our ability to compete. Charles Darwin observed that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.
Right now the U.S. is not responding to change as we need to. But there is a way forward. Five years ago, I was part of a commission that studied U.S. competitiveness. We issued a report called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which made some important recommendations and specific actions to implement them.  The recommendations were:
•Improve K-12 science and math education.
•Invest in long-term basic research.
•Attract and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the U.S. and around the world.
•Create and sustain incentives for innovation and research investment.
Our report was received positively and enjoyed tremendous political support. I felt confident that we were finally getting back on the right track.
In 2007, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act, which authorized official support for many of the steps urged in the Gathering Storm report. When the stimulus package was passed early in 2009, most of the COMPETES Act’s measures received funding. There was an increase in total federal funding for K-12 education, the creation of scholarships for future math and science teachers, and financial support to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a new agency dedicated to high-risk, high-reward energy research.
Since the completion of our study five years ago, however, 6 million more kids have dropped out of high school in this country. What kind of future will they have? Likely not a promising one. It is quite possible that our nation’s adults will, for the first time in U.S. history, leave their children and grandchildren a lower standard of living than they themselves enjoyed.
Global leadership is not a birthright. Despite what many Americans believe, our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness.  Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation. Right now that is not happening. But we still have time. If we place the emphasis we should on education, research and innovation we can lead the world in the decades to come. But the only way to ensure we remain great tomorrow is to increase our investment in science and engineering today.



Norm Augustine is an IEEE Life Fellow and retired chairman and CEO of  Lockheed Martin.

Malaysian Politics and Economy

An admission – I’m just a layman not used to talk about policy-level issues on a local scale, let alone national scale. But I need to get this off my chest.

1.       KPIs are so last century, but hurray GoM is now implementing this as part of their alphabet soup of governance, as advised by the alphabet soup consultants!

2.       Sibu shows the Chinese electorate are a pretty sophisticated bunch who move as one big mass of body politic

3.       Hulu Selangor shows that the Malay-electorate can still be swayed by short-term financial perks – RM50k anyone? Same for Indian-electorate.

4.       Innovation & Technology, the pivot around where the NEM is supposed to sway on to bring us to the high-income territory, is just so bloody far away that I just cant see it happening

5.       The PM has shown that he’s no statesman – u don’t go around explicitly bribing your electorate

6.       Brain Drain shows no signs of abating, and I fear that it may pick up steam after the next GE “when” BN still wins majority seats because of no. 3 above

7.       The Opposition, while showing some promise to reverse some of these deep-seated fundamental problems, have major issues of credibility and leadership. Let’s take a look at national leaders – there’s DSAI – who has funnyman Saiful being a pain in the ass, quite literally – but beyond him….? LKS or LGE – oh please! Let’s not trade a bigot with another. Dzulkifly Ahmad, Nizar, Khalid Samad are too far away from the national consciousness.

8.       Malays are at an important crossroad – they must choose their future – let go of the easy money and be competitive OR milk the nation till everyone starves. You think they’ll be able to make the right choice?

9.       Malaysian sportsmen are our hope for a common, united Malaysia, but are let down by weak mentality. So hockey, badminton, football – not much success there to unite everybody. Squash – too much on the fringes.

10.   The most articulate young politicians are not given the platform to shape or to move policy, institutions or society. Those given opportunities are betrayed by inexperience, lack of ability, easily outmanouvered politically and most importantly in my opinion, let down by an inordinate exaggerated belief in one’s own ability. Personal conviction of youth is our main hope, and when we don’t have enough competition amongst apathetic, rotten, amoral, unethical, ambivalent youth raised in an ineffective education system to produce young leaders– we have a major problem.

11.   oh – item 10 – our education sucks. We need more of the Musleh schools – perhaps in an English medium, which makes them Adni schools. And that needs to be opened to all public, without restriction.

12.   Then there is the teachers – overworked, underappreciated, overwhelmed, stressed and scope creep continues unabated. But they get a nice big Selamat Hari Guru card from the PM… isn’t that sweet?

13.   Financial management of the country sucks. We have a Madoff-like institution giving out high returns regardless of its portfolio performance, we have a provident fund which is so risk-averse that at your retirement age, the average Malaysian will still not have enough, Zakat institutions that are.. I reserve judgment.

14.   We have in inordinate sense of self importance – why do we still protect Proton at the expense of all Malaysians? Btw TM stands for Terribly Mediocre – unbefitting of its status as a national fixed line operator that will soon rollout triple-play and quad-play products. Practise meritocracy and see what Digi does with this. And VW to partner Proton. Btw what happened with Proton’s acquisition of Lotus – Lotus is now dragged down to Proton’s level! CK says we can source out other hydro plants from Sarawak, but which will still need the submarine cable, which was too costly. Oh yeah, he won the Best CEO award, so we should be comforted. Come to think of it, who are the major shareholders of these companies?

People and their set ways - resetting is not easy

Bismillah

1.       Society is so badly fragmented these days, and any thoughts of leaving a permanent impact on positive change leaves such an immense sense of the gargantuan effort required. Take for example, brutal killing and murder of babies, for that is what they are. Try changing that, and immediately you get the sense of the hopelessness of change. Where is the hope? When people raise the moral code as a preventive measure, there is a general outcry deriding imposition of Islamic values on liberals and non-muslims. Yet, the initiatives of handing out condoms are seen as the panacea for rampant zina amongst teenagers. The general paralysis analysis is too great that any effort as those done by raudhatusakinah needs to be given fullest support. Cynicism must be dampened fo hope to flourish. The littlest contributions must be promoted to give hope that these efforts are not done in vain.

2.       Then you have Islamic finance – trying to build upon the ruins of a capitalist system that breeds unfettered greed. CDS, CDO, derivatives, arbitrage, etc – positive purpose of risk management offset by lack of regulations allowing speculators to build upon loopholes, seen as backed by the rigour of an intellectual analysis but in truth no more than gambling against uncontrolled circumstances. Islamic finance allows for the risk of participating in these transactions with an asset-backed capital as a solution, when you lose you lose your own pants, not as part of a leveraged debt now termed as OPM, the loss is somebody else’s. Obama chasing after the miscreants in Goldis is a fantastic piece of news of clear thinking. Let the investors shit in their pants. They have had it easy for far too long.

3.       NEM promoting innovation et al. Already cynics are moving out of the woodwork when this initiative should be supported and expanded where able. Such is the crisis that we have in Malaysia that a major crossroads such as this is being seen as mere sloganeering, but failure to execute could have dire implications. A slowing economy will leave powerful forces tugging at the fraying strands of social cohesion. IN a way, I agree with Dr Halili if the opinion he expresses are true. In this case, weaken the empty “sloganeering” opposition, and strengthen the forces to keep Malaysian society intact for as long as we can.

4.       Tech development isn’t easy. Tech transfer leakages are occurring where people see opportunities to benefit. The system needs to change. MOSTI are regulators, not beneficiaries.

5.       New neighbours seem to be a bit nosy too.

The dark side of the internet

The dark side of the internet

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

Andy Beckett
Thursday November 26 2009
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about ? freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky ? they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" ? "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn ? [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness ? its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" ? the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet ? The value of deep web content is immeasurable ? internet searches are searching only 0.03% ? of the [total web] pages available."

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything ? that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."

But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial ? "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet ? all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture ? the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog ? and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand [http://www.sealandgov.org/" title="Sealand official website]. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay ? the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise ? announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet ? we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable ? suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web ? the content, links, and transactions between people ? A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

Assortments - reinforcement and tank filling greatly required

Wednesday, November 26, 2008; 16:19:27

Another assortments piece here – namely for key action steps:
personal and family strategies – for here and hereafter
tech and RE work strategies – developing institutional capacity
CIRED, energy and TNB – sustainable progress
Liverpool – keeping the momentum
making sure I am sustainable

First salvo, personal and family strategies.
the kids take precedence – and by that I mean their development as muslims & mu’min, their education, their akhlak and their disposition should be a primary concern.
Hence, selection of school is crucial. Ensuring the right school meets these objectives must be done right, and also the practical aspects, including finances and potential risks assessed in making this decision. Once, decision made, however, there should be no stones unturned to make sure the objective is achieved.
Central to this is also the issue of wifey getting the time, a critical resource to carry out this role effectively. If that means compromising on financials in the short-term, then adequate contingencies have to be thought through, as well as bracing ourselves mentally and physically to meet the expected troughs.
This additional resource – time- should be used judiciously. One is to realign our interests to what are the key priorities in one’s life – and hence, participation and commitment in jamaah should be reinforced, participation in educational improvements at pre-school, school levels towards policy governance and administration could be enhanced; or even formation of new commercial interests taking into consideration of previous interests – in short, pursuing the hedgehog.
Mak? Well, she seems to accept her destiny of not being able to draw upon her children’s devotion. I blame my sisters for not being able to get-together to do things for mak’s best interests. I’m not too sure how to go about doing this, but definitely this is far from ideal.
Again, I do need to relook at this particular area and find ways for betterment.

Tech, RE and investment work strategies
Not as appealing as the point before, but I owe it to myself to make sure this works given the strategy from above. To that end, initiating indispensability is a key strategy, and that requires both intellectual and attitudinal shifts. Intellectually, justification for every position that I take is a necessity, and attitudinally, a strong and firm disposition is required.
The former, insyaAllah, whilst hard is not as difficult as the latter proposition. Being firm is not something I’ve been used to in a work context, being dripfed on the neo-feudalistic TNB culture. Even LTK, who I should have vociferously engaged antagonistically on numerous occasions, is addressed deferentially and nodded with in agreement. Although, I should think in private conversations, he tends to steer towards my opinions more times than usual, and then uses that opinion to influence his bosses. The result? He gets promoted a few times in 2 years, and me? Well, I can’t complain cos I’ve made my bed outside.
So, I’m reminded of the story of Musa a.s, being given his stick by Allah, and his articulation of its uses as evidence of characteristics of a daie. Also, the voluminous writings of numerous muslim scholars who had created a gigantic knowledge repository covering all possible permutations of life as being a key reason for the spread of the beauty of Islam and knowledge illuminating the Dark Ages of Europe. Never mind that it was later, erroneously, proclaimed that ijtihad is closed, thereafter relegating Islam to a slow, glacial-like deterioration to the sad happenings to muslims today. Yoga-issue doesn’t help – but more than that demonstrates the deficiency of wisdom in addressing today’s issues.
Key issue to follow through at work in portfolio content in addressing technology risk – as well as other possibilities that needs further analysis and considerations.

CIRED, energy and TNB issues
CIRED, utility and energy are the unholy trinity in the country now. Of course, CIRED is just a small association, but I’m using it as a proxy for other disengaged organizations and agencies who should be doing something but probably is not able to do much now for whatever reason.
Something needs to be done, and pushing it forward requires more mental preparation to move it forward at pace.

Liverpool
playing OM tonight. I think Rafa should play Lucas and stick a finger to the dumb fans who booed him after the Fulham game.
Of course, I was disappointed with the game – the performance stank until Alonso’s introduction (see comment abt Sunderland’s game before), result was awful and other big 4 results were no consolation given we would have outright league leadership had we won. But to boo Lucas, and therefore betraying an ego as if as fans they knew better than Rafa, and as if that was the only reason for the poor performance, boy that pissed me off more than the performance and the result.
Primarily, because I face the same set of ego here at work, and elsewhere, (cue: “I’m doing research, I know everything comment” from this colleague), of people who just because they have access to wiki and google knows everything. What they have is just information and data. Without that being tried and tested in real-time, having the big-time experience of putting it into the pounding mill, where wisdom can be churned out, then these type of people needs to re-learn humility. It’s a disappearing commodity.

My last comment is – well, apart form waking up at night to watch Liverpool, I face a serious challenge of developing myself to meet numbers 1-3. It requires getting my head screwed on right, my motivations spot-on, an action-packed orientation, the courage to standup and suffer and not just to follow the easy path all the time, and to develop relationships and networks to help meet aspirations. These are all great deficiencies, arising from the vast gaps of iman and the postponement and procrastination of addressing and filling up this empty tanks so hungry for reinforcements. The longer the wait goes on, the worse it will become, and should death invite me under this condition, then I shall fear very much for my condition in the hereafter. In this condition, hyprocrisy and munafik reigns. I pray I shall find the light.

Making this world a better place is easier to say than to practice.

Permatang Pauh and its ramifications

I’m thinking in parallel directions at the moment – and today’s probably the best time to collect my thoughts and formalise the deliverables before being asked to execute stuff I am ill-prepared for.

First, on the technology front. I like the theoretical framework for managing disruptive innovations, as opposed to sustaining innovations, which has a nice alignment to the innovation-led economic growth model and the schumpeterian principles associated with it as espoused by DNR. I would need to provide a primer and the linkages to the white technology space for GIH as a view towards identification of potential investments and the way towards managing the ecology and circumstances towards technology deployment. I would also need to work further on the precepts and concepts and see the relevance and the applications towards the pre-defined tech space. It looks very exciting – and it really is up to me to spread the enthusiasm and bring people on-board.

Secondly, other responsibilities within GIH requires that I spend time to discuss with relevant people, create workable networks, ask good questions, be prepared with questions on all issues, maintain a wide scope of curiosity, and have my own opinions on the workability of resolutions. Not many seems to be able or want to participate on other’s turfs, and it should for then the collaboration, the critical questions come to the fore and brings the best out of people.

Thirdly, other responsibilities – do not relegate or negate the responsibilities you hold to others.

Now comes the hard part as I seek to redefine myself. I’ve always been surviving on other people’s thoughts and opinions- seeing as it is I have difficulty expressing my own views as well as dealing with criticisms and disagreement with my views. The redefinition requires that I make explicit my thoughts, and the best way to do it is to ‘lapik’ the thoughts appropriately and seek sincere advice. Perhaps, previously I had thought of myself too highly and refrained from seeking advice and it needs to be changed now that I’m leading a team, and a high-performing one at that, where every nuance is open to feedback, criticism and debate. It can only be something good and taking evasive action, and being an unwilling participant within this context can not only mean being ostracised, which I know from experience the unhappiness associated with it, or even worse having the ideas, thoughts and wants being rejected for not meeting necessary standards.

So, first things first.

Let’s talk about the political scenario.

The personality-driven culture, on both sides of the divide, is driving Malaysia to the brink of disintegration. It’s a legacy of the Malay feudalist structure, one still prevalent in the kampungs, and to a certain extent, also within the Indian community. Society can only progress when its democratic institutions are intact and beyond reproach – which is currently not happening with all the mudslinging implicating too many of its most important pillars, the judiciary, the AG’s office, the police and the IGP, politicians who even in the best of times will not enjoy the reputation of being the cleanest people around, and let alone the many NGOs who are vulnerable to criticisms, clampdowns, intimidation from the political power of the day.

Within this context, the power struggle DSAI is bringing into the mainstream of Malaysian society requires us to look into the possible outcomes – sort of scenario planning if you will. Clayton Christensen relates the anecdotes of a professor saying how he hates gravity when he dropped some stuff to the floor, but quickly appended his statement to include how we would need to work and move with that reality in place.

In the end, we should be looking at empowering democratic and social institutions – and that should be the focus of the voting public. The conundrum to that is that taken to extremes will present a liberal posture, inviting an increased fragmentation of society. The liberal young in the Malaysian society currently will not be able to exude the controls to ensure Malaysia’s continued existence, particularly in the domain of Malay-muslim’s political dominance which represents a sort of final frontier towards proliferation of Islamic ideals, although various events pertaining to erosion of morality and civility, proliferation of violent crimes, breakdown of family values are occurring in many a muslim family. The inability of the liberals to relate to the feelings and thoughts of the elderly and the typical Malay generation I can point to my experiences in the GIH, or even among the many in the private sector – overseas Malaysians too seem to contribute towards this phenomenon.

Left unrestricted, in the end, all we get is a jumbled mish-mash of ideas that’s no good to anyone – and perhaps a return to the paternalistic society with TDM as its icon. What we need is a strong leader with the ability to relate to the vast majority of its population, with the ability to manage the expectations of the liberal elite. In the end, DSAAB is not that person. PAS may have a very strong set of elite Muslim professionals, yet its image problem is being manipulated and opposed too easily by its so-called “partner” in DAP – led by the Lion of Jelutong who’s ideals are imported wholesale from socialism and Singapore. The only solution, realistically is DSAI, despite his many problems. Should he be the PM? Yes. But in what manner? Should be in the manner which does not create further disintegration in society.

But as they say, it is always darkest before dawn…