My corner

Green Business II

2011-10-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy in Bogotá, I remember hearing a woman hollering “botellas, papel” (bottles, paper) on the street periodically. I can’t tell if it was once a month, once a week or more frequently. She was a recycler who bought glass bottles and old newspaper for a very low price to resell them to the recycling plants. That was her way to make a living, her business and the business of many other very poor people. Even then, Bogotá was a large and growing city requiring many, many of them to do the job. And these people didn’t have a motor vehicle. They walked through the streets dragging a wooden cart. Even the cart was environmentally friendly, as we say nowadays, for the wood was biodegradable, and the wheels were old ball bearings: they were reusing them. I never knew for certain how they carried the paper and the bottles all the way to the recycling plants, but I imagine several of them bringing the collected material to a street where a “zorrero” was waiting for them. I have to clarify that “zorrero” is the term we used in Bogotá to refer to a man who drives a “zorra”, literally a one-horsepower vehicle. A “zorra” was, in the Bogotano dialect, a large wooden cart drawn by a horse. Again, an environmentally friendly vehicle since the shafts, wheels and tires were all reused, and the wood was biodegradable. The horsepower was, of course, 100% organic and, when the moment came for the equine, 100% biodegradable as well.

The “zorras” shared the streets with the faster motor vehicles that had much, much more horsepower. As I said, I was a small boy and I don’t have a clear recollection of how heavy traffic was in the Bogotá of the beginnings of the 1960’s. But as the capital of the country, the city of opportunities for many Colombians, it grew very fast, becoming a large and diverse metropolis. Along came an amazing growth in the number of motor vehicles, which caught the planners, if they existed there and then, off guard. The infrastructure of the city became quite insufficient and, in an underdeveloped country, resources, especially money, are scarce. Streets and avenues maintenance and construction couldn’t cope with all that traffic. “Zorras” were on the streets along with cars, trucks, and buses, slowing down the flow of motor vehicles generating huge traffic jams and driving Bogotanos nuts. “Zorras” and cars were not sharing but competing unfairly for the scarce and inadequate street space. The recycling model was starting to be seen as an inconvenience.

Simultaneously, the television programming in the two channels - no satellite or cable TV then - was being inundated by what we called “enlatados” or in English “canned programs” coming from the United States. Everybody with a TV set at home was impressed by the prosperity and sophistication of the characters in those programs. Soon we would like to imitate that lifestyle. Visiting the United States was a dream for many of us. Since many couldn’t afford the trip we would have to feel satisfied with the stories and the souvenirs brought by those lucky ones that could take the jump. They spoke of many very tall skyscrapers, modern highways with tangled bridges where traffic flowed very fast and smoothly. They spoke of ice cream parlors, and restaurants where food wasn’t served to the table but the client brought it by him or herself to the table, or could take it directly to the car using the drive through window. Food was ready in a matter of minutes and everything was very hygienic, since food was placed on neat disposable boxes, dishes and cups. There were amazing machines where people would put coins in slots and get, without human intervention, cans of ice cold soft drink and many other goodies. And of course, the fortunate tourists brought, together with sophisticated battery-operated toys, some cans to drink Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola in front of us, just to show off.

We felt like we were living in the Stone Age, still using and reusing soda glass bottles, and going to restaurants where nothing was disposable, and on top of that, getting served took ages. Most of our cars were also very old; we were maintaining them too long and the new models they saw in the United States were fancier, more powerful and faster.

Even grocery shopping was a completely different experience. Americans would go to supermarkets where everything was neatly packed in plastic and polystyrene foam containers, and the store would provide as many plastic bags as needed to accommodate all the purchase.

How antiquated were we still using those rustic handmade baskets and going to the farmer’s market. Instead of plastic bags we were still using paper for packaging.

We needed to do something to get out of the underdevelopment and urgently. And so we did and have done ever since. We stopped reusing glass bottles and now we recycle all of them. The reason? Bottles eventually become brittle. My question is, nowadays, do glass bottles become brittle after the first use? Has anybody done any serious study about how many times on average can a bottle be reused before becoming brittle? Taking into account the environmental impact of reusing vs. recycling, wouldn’t it be more cost-effective and environmentally friendlier to test the bottles for brittleness and separate those that can be reused from those that need recycling? This sounds like a good environmental business compromise.

And Colombia along many other underdeveloped countries came into the era of sophisticated supermarkets where we could buy food neatly packaged and displayed in plastic and polystyrene foam packages, as well as canned goods: canned soft drinks, canned beer, canned food, etc. Farmer markets were gradually displaced by supermarkets. Of course, these supermarkets would provide plenty of plastic bags so that customers wouldn’t need to bring those ugly old baskets. They were a thing of our underdeveloped past; we needed to ride the train of development. We started to use plastic bags and disposing of them.

And the big chains of fast food restaurants started to pour in our cities. As our economy became more active our lifestyle had to follow that rhythm as well. We didn’t have any more the time to have lunch at home or to sit in a restaurant waiting to be helped and our food brought to our table. The solution was fast food restaurants for our ever more hectic life. Plus it was more hygienic: those colorful boxes and cups were disposable. Even on weekends it was fun to go to those restaurants because they had boxes for kids, which in addition to the food, included a collectable toy. A great catch for us kids, and we would beg to go back urgently to collect another toy.

I think that was the time we stopped calling ourselves underdeveloped country and jumped to the category of developing countries.

Green businesses

2011-08-30T15:22:00.001-07:00

Staying in a Westin Hotel recently I found the sign to hang from the door knob whose picture you see on the left. I'll let you observe it for a moment before continuing to read this post...

This is one sign where the hotel management supposedly promotes ways to conserve natural resources. Nothing apparently wrong with that. If you tried to read it, however, the resolution of the image is not enough to comfortably read it, because Blogger didn't allow me to upload a higher resolution image, so I'll transcribe the first paragraph:

"You have the option to decline housekeeping service for the day. For helping us conserve natural resources, we are happy to offer you a $5 gift card for use at participating food and beverage outlets within our hotel or 500 SPG® Startpoints^SM redeemable at checkout"

Do you know why this sign caught my attention?

Because I don’t see why, declining housekeeping service for a day makes a green option. What is the natural resource they are conserving? The way I see it, they are saving money, period! Aren’t the people who do the housekeeping natural resources? And I don’t mean to be disrespectful with them or anybody else; in fact, I consider myself to be one more natural resource. Now back to my argument. By declining housekeeping, some of these people will not conserve their jobs and their families depend on their small income (and tips). It saves money to Westin but certainly collaborates with unemployment of the poor; and I have good reasons to believe that conserving the environment is for the benefit of all: rich and poor.

And if they are talking about saving money (conserving the company’s green US Dollar bills), what other kinds of savings is the management of the Westin doing? Fewer or smaller bonuses for the CxOs? (Replace the x in the acronym by E, F, I, etc., and you get whom I’m referring to)? And what about reducing the number of high executives? Money-wise one of them makes for many, many, many housekeepers, and since they probably wouldn’t apply or need to apply for unemployment, the government, or the taxpayers, save money. But in addition, housekeepers probably use public transportation to go to work instead of their individual automobiles, and so the impact they produce on the environment is lower than the executives’. What about power consumption per capita? I bet housekeepers consume less kilowatts per person than the high executives, way less! And I can continue rambling on and on and on with this kind of comparisons…

If the Westin management really wants to make an environmental choice, they should look for other alternatives that are environmentally and socially better. And yes, they can keep my $5 gift card because I didn’t hang the card on the door. By the way, I don’t mean to scorn the Westin Hotel … only. This goes to any other hotel with a similar policy.

What I do choose every time I stay in a hotel for one or two nights is to hang my towels and not to place this card on the bed so that they do not change the towels or the bed linens unnecessarily. That saves water and detergent waste. Another way to help reduce waste is to take the remaining shampoo, conditioner, body lotion, etc. and finish them at home. Remnants are discarded otherwise. It may seem minuscule if I'm the only one doing this, but adding up all the guests it really means fewer little plastic bottles per day discarded. Hopefully, they recycle the bottles.

Now that I think of it, what do businesses really mean by green? People normally associate green with the environment and if that is so, businesses need to be more careful and stop invoking the environmental conscience of people for purposes that are not related to the environment.

Let’s call things by their name. By green, are they really implying the environment? Why not blue? Don’t we call our planet the "blue planet?" There is much more extension of blue in the environment of the planet than there is green. What about yellow? The yellowish desert is a rich ecosystem which we also need to care for. And what about all the other colors of nature? Our environment is beautifully multicolor, so let’s use the right words and the right names for the right things. Green is just one of the multitude of colors of nature and, as I have shown here, people’s association of green with the environment may be used to manipulate their conscience for other hidden purposes.

Heaven

2011-04-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

If heaven exists I have been there many times with My Love. After one of our journeys in October of 91 our twin daughters were conceived.

After Math

2010-08-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

The student strike finished several weeks ago and I believe it’s time for reflection. This is the fourth and probably the final post related to the student stoppage at the University of Puerto Rico, a topic that caught the attention of the local and international media and has given me an opportunity to reflect on conflict resolution, a long time topic of interest. This complex and long conflict has also served as a great source for specific examples of things that actually occur in conflict: a great learning experience for me, and hopefully for my occasional readers.

I’ll try to apply the four principles of Principled Negotiation to some specifics of the UPR conflict; I barely scratched the surface on my previous post. Anyway, a post or two in a blog do not give enough space for such purpose and besides, I have only some information and rumors that circulated before, during and after the student stoppage. I was not directly involved in the actual negotiations, so I wish someone from each party did this same reflection exercise, but with detailed and direct knowledge of the process. I'll try to stick to the information and filter out the rumors, but I'm only human.

There is a lot we all can learn. Let me start by showing the application of the four principles. The examples, of course, are not exhaustive of all the issues at stake but illustrate my view of the problem from a Principled Negotiation point of view.

1) Separate people from problems: As pointed out in my previous post, people from both parties and their affiliations are completely irrelevant for the negotiation process. What is important is to identify the problems. In my view there is one major problem to be solved and is related to money: the University has a fiscal deficit and has to look for ways to find new revenues or savings. One source of revenue is the tuition and other fees the students pay, and so an increase in tuition and additional fees would be a potential source of additional revenue. But money is tight for the students too, so this kind of measures affects their pockets: a source for conflict. The University administration identified a potential source of savings by imposing restrictions on students getting scholarships and tuition waivers. Again, these restrictions affect some of the students’ economy and thus become a source of conflict.

2) Focus on interests, not positions: The position of the University Administration was to increase tuition beyond the agreements reached a couple of years ago, add extraordinary fees for the following three years and impose restrictions on students receiving both federal government scholarships and tuition waivers. The position of the students was to not accept any tuition fee increase beyond what had been negotiated, extraordinary fees or restrictions on scholarships and tuition waivers. If we focus on their positions, apparently there is no reconciliation. Nonetheless, if we identify the interests of both parties there is good reason for hope. The University Administration interest is to have no fiscal deficit. The students’ interest is to have affordable higher education of at least the same quality as they are used to. Neither the University Administration, nor the students are interested in the University losing money or, even less, going bankrupt. Along the same lines the University is not interested in losing some percentage of the student population who may not afford large fees. We have started to identify common grounds.

3) Invent options for mutual gain: Parties have to look at the problem from different perspectives and at different times: in the short, medium and long term; therefore all the parties with stakes, not only the students and University Administration, have to design action plans that urgently generate new or alternate sources of revenue and savings for the University. For instance, from the time perspective, could it be possible to look at the University’s economy in a period of three years or more so that some fiscal deficit in the first year be managed with excess in the following years when projects and business can start to produce revenues or savings? To mitigate part of the deficit and looking from a fee perspective, could the students manage some tuition fee increase above the current value? Could the students handle a temporary extraordinary fee? How much could they handle? (This is a first step towards setting levels of desire). From a savings perspective, could the University look for savings in energy costs by investing in energy-efficient and power management systems? I, for example, believe that the University wastes energy in cooling empty rooms or keeping the same A/C settings for rooms with few people as when they are full. Could the University achieve some savings in other utilities, water, telecommunications, etc? From a business point of view, could the University identify some sources of income by selling or renting some assets? Could the University leverage the knowledge and expertise of its employees, for example the faculty, to provide services that generate new business, e.g. strengthening consulting, or offering new strategic courses and programs in continued education and training? Could the University generate energy by investing in new technologies, such as renewable energy generation? If Windmar Renewable Energy in Puerto Rico invested in the largest solar park in Latin America (thanks to Dr. Alberto Ramirez for sharing this link with the professors in my Department), couldn’t UPR get bondholders for projects like this one? I believe there is knowledge and expertise for projects like this. I guess it’s a matter of making a business plan. I see not only the University but students benefiting from such enterprises: they provide real-life practices where they can work, learn and be paid, just like the internships and the Coop programs. I don’t claim these are my original ideas and I recently received information that the President of the University had proposed many along the same lines when seeking to be appointed. I’m sure the list can grow much more by engaging the University Community in solving the problem. I’m sure there is plenty of talent in many of these and other business opportunities. UPR would not be the first one. It’s a matter of creating spaces and opportunities in an adequate environment. It’s a matter of putting to practice what we teach in business, communication, administration, planning, project management and other related fields.

4) Insist on objective criteria: Let’s estimate with technical and financial analyses what expectations are reasonable for all parties; after all, the problem is University finances. Let’s talk about feasibility, about timelines, about investments and ROI, about cash flow, about existing expertise and knowledge, about HR, about current infrastructure and assets… Let’s stop using manipulative negotiation tactics and let’s start organizing in task forces the diverse talents available in the University and setting timelines. I have seen in the University very successful inter- and multidisciplinary teams work in research projects; why not for generating businesses for the University. It’s a matter of engaging the University community in a goal that is a win for all. If the problems affect us all, the solutions benefit us all. Let’s talk business: the University being a non-for-profit organization does not imply it being a for-loss organization!

The part I have serious difficulties is finding acceptable Alternatives To Negotiated Agreement. In buying-selling goods or services there may be other providers-customers. In marriage conflicts there is divorce. Someone may suggest there are other universities and other students but I have serious trouble with these alternatives... I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader and myself.

I listed in my previous post some apparent consequences of the prolonged strike and those consequences seem to indicate that not reaching an agreement has catastrophic consequences for both parties. This is to me a symptom of notorious weaknesses on both sides. My interpretation is that a settlement is a “must”. The choice between agreement and no agreement in this case feels almost the same as choosing between walking both parties a step, however small, away from a cliff, or jumping into the abyss, pushing along all the stakeholders. I will let the reader do the analysis.

Setting the levels of desire regarding student fees require analysis of the finances of the University's and the students. That's beyond the scope of this post. Students could've conducted or continue to carry out a study of their part, while the University looks for other sources of income and savings. That way, all the parties can set realistic bottom-line, aspiration and wish levels.

The strike finished several weeks ago, but I perceive the stoppage time was left to run too long. In long conflicts reproaches tend to plague the process, and resentments arise. In conflict resolution there is a time and there is timing. It’s not a matter of rushing; it’s a matter of keeping as much control as possible so that negotiations really progress; it’s a matter of avoiding the use of manipulative tactics and neutralizing them when they occur. I perceive that not all has been said or done in this particular conflict, but I hope the community at the University of Puerto Rico takes time to reflect on what happened and learn from the mistakes so that, next time around, we take advantage of a crisis to grow and be creative.

After Nash’s paper on non-cooperative games there have been significant advances in game theory, which I claim is applicable to conflict, and models include more features that occur in real life, like limited rationality, incomplete information, and coalitions between players. Models are including dynamic features by incorporating physics and information theories. Still, answers as to what the mixed strategies are for all the players to obtain their best payoff cannot be feasibly computed; but that’s no reason to give in. Math tells us there are one or more equilibria, which speaks of at least one optimum and several suboptima. Principled negotiation provides one possible approach and a set of tools to search for those equilibria.

Finally, I remember reading somewhere that in Principled Negotiation one sees the other parties not as adversaries but as problem solvers. This brings us back to the stable equilibrium I wrote about in Conflict and Hope, but in this case it happens not out of fear but respect. After Math, we are left with our Humanity: our irrationality and our immense reasoning capabilities; let’s use our human nature wisely.

Principles of Principled Negotiation

2010-07-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

This is the third of a series of posts that I decided to write due to the 64-day student stoppage at the University of Puerto Rico. The first two are found in the following links:

http://jfvrcorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/conflict-and-hope.html

http://jfvrcorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/math-belief-and-hope.html

My first source for definitions is always the dictionary and in this case resorted to the Merriam-Webster on-line. I was looking for the word “negotiation”. Why was I looking for the word? Because a few weeks ago, in the middle of the student stoppage at the University of Puerto Rico, two persons avoided the word “negotiation” or any other derived from that in front of the press. Instead, they referred to the process as “dialogs” conducing to “understandings”. Since those two persons - oh what the heck, the president of the board of trustees and the president of the University - must’ve known better than I do, I decided to be very careful treating the subject to avoid big flaws in technicalities I, as an aficionado on the topic, could’ve made. The first definition in the M-W dictionary didn’t help much, but I decided to follow the link to “negotiating” and there I found the following definitions:

“intransitive verb : to confer with another so as to arrive at the settlement of some matter
transitive verb 1 a : to deal with (some matter or affair that requires ability for its successful handling) : manage b : to arrange for or bring about through conference, discussion, and compromise ”

That definition reinforced my concept of negotiation and I felt happy for that, but I still found something missing. I went then to the most popular information source on the Web and here is what I found in Wikipedia:

Negotiation is a dialogue intended to resolve disputes, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. It is the primary method of alternative dispute resolution.

Negotiation occurs in business, non-profit organizations, government branches, legal proceedings, among nations and in personal situations such as marriage, divorce, parenting, and everyday life. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation]

The “dialogue” and the “understandings” mentioned by the presidents seemed to be in that definition and I guess a stoppage happens due to a dispute, doesn’t it? Add to that the fact that it occurs in “non-profit organizations, government branches, ...”, and the University of Puerto Rico is both. All the elements in the definition appear to match the situation. Satisfied?

Well... no, so I decided to dig deeper. My next source was my beloved antiquity; my leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica from 1988. If you read carefully I didn’t refer to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia because I didn’t want to get into the conflict about what a real encyclopedia is. Some of my closest peers in academia do not consider Wikipedia an authoritative source, so for their benefit I searched high and low for negotiation in Britannica. Guess what?

I couldn’t find negotiation or conflict resolution, so I opted for Britannica on-line [http://www.britannica.com/], which gave me no direct definition but “assorted references” (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/408114/negotiation) to a bunch of topics, but no luck with the kind of concept I was looking for. I thought the closest one was related to Diplomacy and I quote what I found:

“the established method of influencing the decisions and behaviour of foreign governments and peoples through dialogue, negotiation, and other measures short of war or violence. Modern diplomatic practices are a product of the post-Renaissance European state system. Historically, diplomacy meant the conduct of official (usually bilateral) relations between sovereign states.”

And in Diplomacy: Diplomatic Tasks…

“Beyond these functions, the ambassador negotiates as instructed. Negotiation is a complex process leading to agreement based on compromise, if it reaches agreement at all. (The object of international negotiation is not necessarily to reach agreement; it is to advance the interests in an ambassador’s charge.)”

Wow! I could not believe my eyes… “The object of international negotiation is not necessarily to reach agreement; it is to advance the interests in an ambassador’s charge.” Would that mean that as long as everybody smiled and shook hands for the picture, someone could be twisting arms behind the scene? I had been born in the crude realm of diplomacy and with no anesthesia!

I decided to walk on friendlier camps, so I followed the link to social interaction but nothing directly related to negotiation. I insisted on on-line resources different from my own personal definition. I wanted to legitimate my views – yes, I’m using another negotiation tactic -, and I found the following two definitions:

General: Bargaining (give and take) process between two or more parties (each with its own aims, needs, and viewpoints) seeking to discover a common ground and reach an agreement to settle a matter of mutual concern or resolve a conflict. [http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/negotiation.html]

This one seemed to be in my favor, or perhaps with my flavor, but still my ignorance on possible technicalities didn’t let me sleep. My next step was to look for something legal, and I found the following:

1) It is a process by which the involved parties or group resolve matters of dispute by holding discussions and coming to an agreement which can be mutually agreed by them. It also refers to coming to closing a business deal or bargaining on some product. 2) It also means exchange of negotiable instruments such as bills of exchange, cheques etc in exchange of goods, service or money. [http://www.legal-explanations.com/definitions/negotiation.htm]

At this point I was starting to think that, after all, I was not so ignorant and stopped my search for more support on those technicalities because the online resources seemed to agree with me. If one charitable reader can confirm or deny my view as compared to that of the persons I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post, I would sincerely appreciate getting me out of this merciless doubt, particularly referring to Puerto Rican law.

I don’t pretend to give a treatise or complete lesson on negotiation but, at least, put some of my ideas and knowledge in order so that anyone interested may learn a thing or two about it. Conflict management is a complex, intricate and overwhelming subject. Just to see a list of the diversity of topics visit http://www.mediationworks.com/mti/certconf/bibs.htm.

I want to refer to “Principled Negotiation” to avoid any further uncertainty. Again, I looked for definitions online and found the following, which I’ll quote in a convenient order below:

“Principled Negotiation is an interest-based approach to negotiation that focusses [Sic] primarily on conflict management and conflict resolution. Principled negotiation uses an integrative approach to finding a mutually shared outcome. First published in the book "Getting to Yes", Principled Negotiation is used mostly in North America and is more popular amongst Academics and Mediators than in Business. Principled Negotiation has become synonymous with the more popular phrase "Win Win " - originally taken from Game Theory. Although Fisher and Ury drew from various disciplines in their 1981 book "Getting to Yes" (including NLP), many Mediation Practitioners and Academics have subsequently contributed in answering the challenging question: How can we best achieve Principled Negotiation in many different contexts?” [http://www.negotiations.com/definition/principled-negotiation/]

“Principled negotiation is the name given to the interest-based approach to negotiation set out in the best-known conflict resolution book, Getting to Yes, first published in 1981 by Roger Fisher and William Ury. The book advocates four fundamental principles of negotiation: 1) separate the people from the problem; 2) focus on interests, not positions; 3) invent options for mutual gain; and 4) insist on objective criteria.” [http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/peace/treatment/pricneg.htm]

The first quote places principled negotiation in the context of Academics and Mediators, which seems to reinforce my personal opinion that this kind of negotiation would’ve been adequate in the resolution of the conflict that led to a 64-day student stoppage at 10 out of 11 campuses of the University of Puerto Rico. Another point to highlight from that definition is that principled negotiation has become synonymous with the phrase Win Win, which I mentioned in my post http://jfvrcorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/conflict-and-hope.html, that originated in Game Theory, also referred to in my same post.

The second definition states the four fundamental principles of this kind of negotiation. I’ll explain them briefly and try to give some examples, including some from the conflict over the fiscal deficit of the University of Puerto Rico between students and the administration.

1) Separate the people from the problem: It means that it doesn’t matter who we or the other parties’ people are or what affiliations they have. In principled negotiation what is relevant is the problem to be solved. In the particular problem at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), who the president of the Board of Trustees, the University or the General Student Council are, or what their political or any other affiliations are was irrelevant; after all they have a term in their positions and eventually someone else will be appointed or elected. Negotiation should’ve centered on how each party could contribute to solve the fiscal deficit foreseen for this and the following three years or so.

2) Focus on interest not positions: There is an interesting example from the book “Getting to Yes” [Fisher, R. Ury, W. and B. Patton. Getting to Yes. 2nd Edition. Penguin Books. 1991], in which two men quarrel in a library over whether a window should be open or closed. The librarian enters and she asks to one why he wants the window open [his position]: “to get some fresh air” [his interest]. She asks the other man why he wants the window closed [his position]: “to avoid a draft” [his interest]. After thinking one moment she opens a window in the next room, bringing fresh air without a draft [the solution]. In this example there is one additional ingredient, the librarian, who acts as a mediator. In the case of UPR, the position of the Administration in one of the issues was to set extra fees and increase tuition. The student’s position was to not accept any extra fee and keep the current tuition fee conditions negotiated a couple of years ago. In this particular problem the interest of the University is to solve the fiscal deficit and keep the University sustainable. The student’s interest was to continue having an affordable higher education. Of course there were some other issues at stake but my idea is to illustrate this principle.

3) Invent options for mutual gain: In the library problem the option invented was to open the window in other room which solved the problem by identifying the interests of both parties. I won’t enter into details of the UPR problem to not extend this post. Again, my idea is to illustrate the principle. The reader that is aware of the UPR conflict can invent her or his own options.

4) Insist on objective criteria: Just like in Nash’s theory parties or agents are searching equilibrium since in such state everyone maximizes its payoff. Objective criteria are sought through reasoning so as to approach the rationality needed in Nash’s theory.

In principled negotiation parties also analyze alternatives to a negotiated agreement, i.e., actions that might be taken if no agreement is reached. A normal practice in analyzing these alternatives is for each party to make a list of actions that can be taken in case of no agreement. I leave as an exercise to any UPR reader to make such list in the case of the student stoppage.

What actions could the UPR Administration have taken in case of no agreement?

What actions could the students have taken in case of no agreement?

After the stoppage finished, there are some important lessons to be learned from what actually happened. The actions I list below are related to the Alternatives To Negotiated Agreement for both parties:

- The communications from CES (Puerto Rican Council for Higher Education) to UPR regarding the potential loss of the license to operate;

- The Probation Status on UPR accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) which is the institutional accrediting agency;

- Potential loss of eligibility for federal government funding according to the communication from the Department of Education of the United States;

- Delay in academic term completion and student graduation;

- Risk of losing admission to graduate schools or job offers to graduating students;

- Delay or cancelation of summer session, including the Coop program, Summer Practicum required for some programs, and summer internships, among others;

- Deterioration of University facilities due to lack of maintenance.

This list can be enlarged by the reader and actions assigned to one party, the other, both or to third parties. Once a list of actions is completed, the next step is for each party to improve those that can be improved and select the best one. This is known in Principled Negotiation as Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA. On the other end, select the Worst Alternative of the list or WATNA for short. Preparation for negotiation includes estimating one’s own and the other parties’ BATNA and WATNA.

These alternatives are important because the BATNA establishes the power that each party has in the negotiation process, while the WATNA provides information about weaknesses. Both set the stage for a realistic negotiation and help establish the limits of what is being negotiated [http://www.mediate.com/articles/notini1.cfm].

The last step in the preparation is to establish the “Degrees of Desire”:

Wish: The best result out of the negotiation that you can imagine;

Aspiration: a reasonable level you can achieve in the negotiation; and

Bottom line: The very least you can live with; the point where you are willing to walk away.

Based on the BATNAs and WATNAs, each party should clearly establish its degrees of desire and estimate the other party’s for each issue at stake. The Wish and Bottom line establish a region for each party’s negotiation. The overlap of these regions is known as the settlement/bargaining/contract zone [http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=drcn]. Somewhere in this region a settlement point for the dispute is located, and, I would argue, that in this region the Nash’s equilibrium is also located (see the figure below for a depiction of the contract zone).

Whether each party in the UPR conflict ,or the mediator that intervened at the end used this approach is not known to me, although I believe, based on what I could observe, it wasn’t used. Anyway, this post, the longest or one of the longest in my blog, is quite insufficient to cover conflict management or negotiation. As said before, this is a complex and overwhelming topic, but my idea was to show very basic information about negotiation with two purposes in mind: 1) To motivate people toward this fascinating subject; and 2) to serve me as a pressure release valve during the student stoppage.

Math, Belief and Hope

2010-06-22T16:29:00.000-07:00

I left some loose ends in my previous post, so before I start discussing negotiation let me start clarifying some issues regarding my previous post. Negotiation will be the next topic. I promise.

My post on conflict and hope may lead many to believe that my hope is based on some simplistic argument: some equilibrium points in Game Theory and based on an old paper, written even before I was born. I invite those thinking that way to read Nash’s paper and tell me if the argument is simplistic. Others may criticize me as a crude reductionist, trying to explain complex human behavior using a mathematical model. As I said in my post, there are concepts that need to be defined further for the model. The payoff is one and, as I also said, we would have to find ways to include non-quantifiable variables in conflict. Someone could ask how to put moral principles as part of the payoff. To that I say principles are not negotiable. Another issue is related to rationality, but rationality in this case does not refer to reason or to the quality of reasoning, but, as I also said, rationality is based on utility theory, i.e. maximizing a payoff. How good could then be the model? To answer to this question I will summarize two experiments.

I found them in a book I’m currently reading: A Beautiful Math (Siegfried, Tom. A Beautiful Math. Joseph Henry Press. Washington, D. C. 2006.). In the first experiment, the biologist David Harper at the University of Cambridge fed a flock of 33 ducks in two separate patches of a pond at the university’s botanical garden. The strategy was to toss precisely weighted pieces of white bread. In one of the patches the feeder would toss one piece of bread every five seconds. In the other patch the feeder would toss one piece every 10 seconds. According to the author, ducks took about a minute to organize in two groups, approximately two thirds of them where bread was being tossed every five seconds and the rest, where bread was being tossed every 10 seconds. What this shows is not that the ducks know math but that they naturally organize themselves to maximize their food intake, their payoff.

The second is based on the work of another heavy-weight scientist: John Maynard Smith. He invented a simple animal-fighting game between hawks and doves. In this theoretical experiment Maynard Smith showed that one single strategy for the two types of birds would not produce a stable population, hawks aggressively and doves passively. The two types of birds in this theoretical experiment need to combine their strategies, doves sometimes behaving like hawks and vice versa, to become an “evolutionary stable strategy”. If hawks always fight for food, they’ll kill each other to extinction while food is wasted away. On the other hand, if doves never compete they will starve to extinction running away from any bird, including other doves. Of course, this is a theoretical experiment but shows clearly why a mixed strategy is necessary. A similar example I give my students when speaking of distributed intelligent agents. In my example, two or more collaborative agents will never go through a door because their courtesy yields to giving way to each other. On the opposite end, two competing agents will never go through the door fighting to get through first. This example also shows that mixed strategies work better than single strategies. Thus, Maynard Smith postulates that in evolution theory fitness should be replaced by utility and selection by rationality in the sense of game theory.

These examples show that the concept of rationality in game theory does not relate to reasoning but to maximizing payoff. The examples also suggest that the competing parties do not necessarily carry out mathematical computations, but that rationality is imprinted in evolution. To alleviate partially the dilemma nature versus nurture that may arise from this last statement, let me just say that the plasticity of the nervous system is a result of evolution but how this plasticity develops, is related to nurture: environment, education, culture, etc. A similar statement could be said of other systems in living organisms.

The next issue that may arise is how one construes hope from such an abstract mathematical expression. I would reply that some people found their hope in abstract expressions like the pursuit of happiness, achieving enlightenment or perfection or loving each other, including one’s enemies. I mean not to compare the moral or practical valor of these statements but only how abstract they all are. My point here is that I can ground hope, at least partially, in that conflict may turn positive and there are solutions where everybody can win. The problem paradoxically lies on finding rationality, when human reasoning is involved. My response is through principled negotiation but, as I said, this will be the topic of my next post.

Conflict and Hope

2010-06-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

One of my reading assignments was “Fights, Games and Debates” by Anatol Rapoport. Professor Harry Schwarzlander was teaching a course on General Systems Theory at Syracuse University. It was 1985 or 1986 and I was starting my doctoral studies. Not only the reading but the discussions that Professor Schwarzlander promoted in class led me to develop a keen interest on conflicts and peace, first from a mathematical point of view and later on from a negotiation and conflict resolution perspective. At first I was disconcerted by the prospects of the mathematical concepts of stable and unstable equilibrium in the international conflicts of that time, particularly the cold war. I, a pacifist, had to face that mathematics seem to indicate that unarmed nations in conflict, were in a state of unstable equilibrium. Basically, a tiny pebble could become the force that would drive competing nations into war. On another end, comparably armed nations in conflict could be in a state of stable equilibrium. My only explanation to that was fear. Sides would avoid provoking an armed conflict, and peace could be maintained out of fear. The USA-USSR state of affairs at that time seemed to confirm this theory. Yet, I was not satisfied and so I decided to start studying conflict on my own.

Let’s step back a little on my reading assignment and its provoking title. I have to resort to my long term memory, very fragile, and to a few summaries I found on the book, to rebuild Rapoport’s theory, since I left this and many other books in Bogotá when I moved to Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. In Rapoport’s view, there are three kinds of conflicts:

Fights, in which the purpose of any party is to inflict harm to the opponent;
Games, where the purpose of any party is to outwit the opponent; and
Debates, in which the purpose of any party is to convince the opponent or any bystander.

Evidently, this taxonomy provides interesting insight about conflict. Fights in the pure sense assume no calculations or strategies. Games are based on rationality and strategic decisions based on the analysis of alternatives. Debates involve argumentation to make the opponent see things the way we see them. In an ideal situation, logic would be the right tool in a debate, but humans are not purely logic and it is not uncommon to see people using techniques of fights, e.g. threats, or of games, e.g. stratagems. Not only debates used mixed techniques, but games and fights combine them too. If one classifies war as a fight, which seems reasonable, in addition to attacks, threats, and other pure fight techniques, war involves a great deal of strategy. Many sports, and sports could be classified as games, allow some degree of fight: ice hockey in the USA is a good example. Artificial as it may seem, Rapoport’s conflict taxonomy results very useful when analyzing conflict as a process.

Conflict is natural and some authors claim it is necessary to prevent stagnation, but this, though, should be qualified. Ideally, conflict should not lead to fight, but that is idealism. Also, parties should be willing to resolve the conflict, otherwise conflict stagnates itself. One example is a couple that, to protect their children or their public image, do not voice their quarrels. Both the cause for complain and the conflict are stalled and I would hypothesize that conflict will escalate till it explodes. In this example, what could have been kept as a constructive debate could become a destructive fight.

Someone could argue that most human conflicts are debates and this makes sense since, at least, conflicts could start as one party tries to convince the other about one or more issues. As suggested before, people in debate use a variety of techniques, i.e. some strategy planned ahead of time, and some responses that arise in the heat of the situation. Strategies are typical of games while those unplanned or apparently irrational responses could seem more typical of fights. But realistic and interesting games not only involve pure strategy. Players, even in Chess, respond with surprises, threats, traps, etc.

The argument for conflict as debate is strong, but when we look at a good debate we see parties have prepared their strategy for argumentation so that their expressions, including body language are all in tune. After the opening statement, nonetheless, a good debater should be prepared to apply all the skills to respond adequately to the surprises the opponent brings to the table. Strategy should consider contingencies, having contemplated as many “what ifs” as possible and have the best replies to those unexpected situations. A good debater should analyze the opponents as carefully as possible during preparation, just like a game player analyzes opponents. But that is not enough. Traps will be set, emotions will enter the scene and all that planning may seem useless. Isn’t that exactly like a game? But in game as in conflict preparation isn’t useless if done carefully.

It is here that borders in Rapoport’s taxonomy become quite artificial or my rusty memories of the book do not allow me to see clear borders between the three grand types of conflict. Additionally, I do not know of any other general conflict taxonomy and, in the literature, I have only found some conflict-specific taxonomies, e.g. political conflict.

Anyway, this is convenient for my argument because I now bring another perspective to human conflicts: conflicts as games. This highly controversial perspective for some humanistic schools of thought brings hope to conflict resolution and I will explain this further down.

For my own internal debate and any external debate with any reader, I have some heavy-weight supporters of this perspective: John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, John Nash, Harold W. Kuhn, Anatol Rapoport, and many others. For the reader familiar with negotiation tactics I am using one known as “association”. Some of my “associates” (pardon my modesty) may be immediately recognized but, if not, I invite the reader to look for any or all of them in Wikipedia.

Now, you may wonder why treating human conflict like games brings hope. I invoke now the non-cooperative games that gave Nash an excellent topic for his doctoral dissertation and became a seminal work in Economics for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1994. The name of this kind of games is quite eloquent: each player for him/herself. This is not the aspect that gives me hope. What gives me hope is that in this type of game there is an equilibrium point where, and I quote Nash, “each player’s mixed strategy maximizes his payoff if the strategies of the other players are held fixed. Thus each player’s strategy is optimal against those of the others.” [http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~ia/nash51.pdf].

One historic note. When I got interested in this topic I had to struggle to get a physical copy of Nash's paper; the World Wide Web and Google were not even a figment of the imagination. That gives you an idea of how old I am. Now, I googled it out and I could reread it with almost as much difficulty as the first time: that guy is a genius :-)… and I’m not :-(.

Back from my digression, my hope resides on the fact that, based on Nash’s theory, each party in a conflict can maximize its payoff; sort of a win-win situation, if all the parties play their best mixed strategy. This is an ideal situation, because how does a party know what its best strategy is. The equilibrium points assume total rationality of the players, but who defines rationality or how? The debate about rationality has been going on for millennia and I’m not sure anyone has agreed on a definition, except, maybe, in mathematics regarding utility theory where rationality refers to maximizing a payoff function. Then, the next question comes to mind: How do we define that payoff, when many variables in conflict are not quantifiable? That is certainly not trivial, but I have never argued this was going to be easy. The equilibrium points give us a target at which we should aim so that, when in conflict, we all get the best we can; we all can win. If I were to continue with my mathematical arguments, we could approximate equilibrium through an iterative process. The final question is how? My answer is through negotiation.

P.S. I have been writing this post for several days, motivated by the longest student strike I have seen at the University of Puerto Rico. I had never been caught in the middle of this kind of conflict before. writing it has been my personal therapy and I hope will serve someone else too. I will now start to write my next post on negotiation as a sequel to this.

Recipe for happiness on ocassion of Thanksgiving Day 2009

2009-11-26T12:29:00.000-08:00

When you wake up, get your gratitude out of the marinating sauce of your sleep. It may have been sweetened by your dreams, but if you find it a bit sour by a nightmare, don't worry. It's just a matter of breathing till you calm yourself down. Add a bit of a smile to sweeten it to taste and feel happy for you have one more day ahead to live.

Cook it slowly and gently at every hour, minute and second of your day. Sprinkle it with the salt and peper, and the spice of your triumphs and setbacks, of your joys and sorrows, of your laughter and tears, of your rises and falls for they make you feel alive.

When you finally go to sleep brush your gratitude with the fatigue of a day of plenitude and be thankful for you've lived one more day.

This recipe should be served daily in the warmth of those you love and shared with everyone around you.

"La vida no es lo que uno vivió, sino lo que uno recuerda, y cómo lo recuerda para contarlo". Gabriel García Márquez

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIrGQD84F1g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXynev4F1Sg

Juanes' political statement

2009-09-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

I'll start by stating that I don't like Juanes' songs, his voice or his music in general. Nevertheless I admire him on the grounds that he is making strong political statements at least among the Spanish speaking people, by leveraging his huge popularity as a singer.

First, it was a concert on the border between Venezuela and Colombia. Another simulaneous concert was organized by someone else, possibly following Juanes' lead on the border between Colombia and Ecuador, in times when relations between the three countries were in crisis. Neighbor countries can't just close the borders in a flash due to a disagreement between those who govern these or any other countries. Large businesses probably get affected but their international contacts may provide them alternatives in other destinations in trying to compensate for the suspension of commercial and diplomatic relations, as it has been now frequent beween this so called "brother nations". It is small businesses that have flowrished on the borders for almost two centuries of neighborhood that really get hit. It is families and friends that get separated by an imaginary line I haven't ever seen: the border. And all this from an executive order of one person and a few consultants or advisors.

The most recent of Juanes' statements was the concert at the Plaza de la Revolución in Habana, Cuba. This was a very strong political statement, and in this sense but only in this sense I agree with those protesters in the USA and probably in some sectors of Latin America. It was indeed a strong political statement. What I strongly disagree with those protestors is in the message Juanes and his friends were conveying.

The fact that it was at the Plaza de la Revolución doesn't make it pro communist, regardless of any monuments or murals there may be in that plaza. Juanes, a wealthy man who has made his money with marketing and sales in the capitalist world, would not have the moral authority to preach for communism. His message wouldn't just have gone through. Besides, I don't think Raúl or Fidel Castro or any of their high ranking aides were VIP guests.

This concert was not a money-making deal, in fact, for him and the other artists who participated, the concert may have a negative effect on their record sales. As far as I heard, Juanes, Miguel Bosé and Olga Tañón put a lot of money in the planning, organization, transportation and assembly of all the infrastructure, and a great deal of their leadership in the montage of the show. If they wanted to do business, with the same title "Peace without borders" they would have gather huge paying crowds, somewhere else, for example in Miami.

The issue was to bring this message, "Peace without borders", to a crowd where many could have not attended this kind of show because they could not afford it, in Miami, or any other place, not even in Havana if they had to pay what these artists charge for these events. I wonder how many of the protesters' relatives and old-time friends were in that crowd... Have you already forgotten about them?

Just because I don't agree with a regime does not entitle me to discriminate against those who forcefully or voluntarily live in a country like Cuba. Besides, how many popular artists would go and give concerts in Habana for a profit? - or for a just cause, for that matter; I heard many singers chicken out of Juanes' concert -

I congratulate all of the artists who were there in the concert. It was a humongous crowd: 1.25 million in Plaza de la Revolución, and many more millions through the tv. Even CNN - not just CNN en español; CNN in English... for the Americans! - spoke about the concert.

It has been a great achievement. I commend all of you for your convictions in this matter and, most of all I admire all of you for your courage.

Where is the cash?

2009-03-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

I started to wonder where all the money was since the banks had to be rescued by the government, the automobile industry too, companies are laying off employees, people were facing foreclosures of their homes, repossessions of their cars, credit trouble, and so on. Apparently everybody run out of cash. So, who has it? It couldn't possible have banished. Somehow, my intuition has hinted me of this kind of crisis now and some years ago in Colombia. It's not that I'm an expert in Economics; I'm not even an economist but my training as engineer had given me the sense that a system can't grow without bounds and I was seeing too much growth in the demand for housing, all or almost all based on credit. So, what is wrong with that? Banks have money to lend; that's their business. Anyway, money was flowing and developers and people selling their houses were putting money in their pockets or investing it back. Where is the loophole, then? To answer that question I have to warn me readers that either, I'm too naive or the answer had been ignored for a reason I ignore. And how could people receiving or investing money get in financial problems? My answer is extremely simple: elementary economics law, supply-demand. Let me explain further with an example.

Suppose I buy my house during the growing demand period, say for US $100.000 and for simplicity sake, let's assume the bank lends me 100% of the value. After a few years the market value of my house is, for instance, $130.000 and during that term I have amortized $10.000. At that point in time my debt to the bank is $90.000 and since the market value of my house is $130.000, my equity is $40.000. So far so good. If I sell my house, then I can put $40.000 in my pocket, but if instead I use my excellent credit record to get a loan for, say, for $30.000 to buy appliances, a car, and travel, nothing is wrong so far. I still have an equity of $10.000, don't I?

Now my engineering training comes in handy. Money is not a boundless resource and housing demands drop, either due to market saturation or property is so overvalued that very few people can afford to buy. Economics says property value drops subsequently. To continue with my example, let's say the market value of my house drops to $90.000. Now I have $40.000 in debt for which I have no solid backing. Appliances and cars loose their value extremely rapid and the money I used for traveling ... well, it's now only beautiful memories and pictures, or movies if I bought a video camera with the $30.000 loan.

When these conditions occur, Economics also says that businesses slow down and unemployment grows. Economics also says that salaries tend to level off, hopefully they don't decrease and I don't loose my job. Chances are I could get in trouble if I start to pay my financial obligations late or cannot afford to pay the debt services in full. I start to accumulate debts in the form of late fees, interests, and other penalties, not to mention if I default on my loans altogether.

Let's be a bit optimistic and say that I can sell my house. I still have $40.000 in debt, which is worst than when I started my story. I have a large debt and no support other than my income. This is the result of loose credit approval and over-consumption which is what has happened, from my point of view.

Now, let's look yet at another scenario which has come to my mind as a result of my bumping from cell phone company to cell phone company, without my being consulted at all. Allow me to start with the story of my wandering through the atlas of cell phone companies. After a frustrating experience with a prepaid plan with a company with very little coverage out of the metropolitan areas of Puerto Rico and having made a good credit history I could get a cell phone in a good plan. I decided to do it with AT&T. Why? People told me it had a good coverage and service. I had also good memories of this company when I lived in Syracuse, NY, back in the 1980s. At that time cell phones were in the making, but the telephone service in my apartment, or should I say flat, was with AT&T and besides being very reliable and with lots of cool features their agents and operators were extremely nice, so I took a shot at AT&T cell. Some time afterwards AT&T was bought in many states of the USA by Cingular but in Puerto Rico this acquisition could not happen for some legal technicality.

Anyway, in Puerto Rico was Suncom who bought AT&T and AT&T vanished, even from tv; not only in Puerto Rico but in the USA I didn't see any commercial ads. Everything was Cingular and Suncom here in Puerto Rico. Sometime afterwards AT&T reappeared stronger and bought back Cingular and "now Cingular is the new AT&T" or so went the tv ad. In Puerto Rico too AT&T reappear but since I didn't have Cingular I continued with Suncom until a few months ago when, guess what? Suncom was acquired by T-Mobile. And that's my status as of today. Who knows what awaits for me tomorrow.

What does it all have to do with the economic crisis? Well, those dissapearances and reapearances of cell phone companies made me think how real those companies were because the stores, the infrastructure, even the people (employees of course) remained. The signs changed and the store and booth decoration did too. So, where do these companies go when they vanish, for example, where is Cingular right now? It looks to me as if many companies are just a bunch of investors buying and selling shares. Again, what does this have to do with the crisis?

The connection is not so straightforward but let me make a conjecture. My conjecture has to do with a simple economic law: Supply and demand. What if these companies (would it be fair to call them "paper companies"?) started to buy shares from each other every so often. Wouldn't it create an apparent demand on the stock market? From my point of view it certainly would. The result? With the demand, share prices rise and stockholders feel happy and as share prices rise banks are happy to lend money to investors. Looks like a good business, so banks feed this merry-go-round with fresh cash. Shares continue on the rise till...

That's right, till cash runs out. Overvalued shares, just like overvalued real estate. Years of apparent prosperity crash into reality. There is just so much money; it's a limited, a bounded resource; so, wake up. Game is over. Now, we have to face the consequences: yes, everybody, whether we like it or not. I guess, now it comes in handy the words of the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as cited in the NY Times quotation of the day on Marh 27, 2009:

"Our system failed in fundamental ways. To address this will require comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game."

A matter of simple economics

2009-03-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

New York Times, March 26, 2009.
Quotation of the day:
"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians."
SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, on a visit to Mexico.

Why hadn't the most capitalist of the capitalists realized that as long as there was demand there would be supply, not the opposite? It's Economics 101! What did it take for the USA government to admit that the problem was not just combating the supply? Was it that the violence generated by drug trafficking was too close to home and it started to massively enter their territory?

As a person born in Colombia, the most stigmatized country with drug traffic in recent history, I was surprised to read this quotation and the full article on that subject this morning. I was always puzzled by the way the "war on drugs" was handled. Millions of dollars were sent to producer countries to arm antidrug forces to destroy the marijuana crops, then coca and more recently amapola. And what about the spreading of glyphosate on those crops and its environmental impact. And what about the very high number of deaths in countries producing these kinds of plants or involved in drug smuggling? And what about the financing of terrorist organizations with drug money?

It's only till today that an American Government Official makes this admission publicly. And one can only wonder why not before? The war on drugs always looked like a waste of money because data indicated that the illegally crop-cultivated land was not decreasing; it has continued to grow. As long as there is demand for drugs there will exist supply. If the demand grows, prices increase, making the business more attractive. What interest was there that did not allow USA officials to see this simple economic principle. Was it a matter of image? Or was it some hidden interest?

What does it imply that Mrs. Clinton had made this admission? Would the war on drugs strategy change? It is my stronger desire it changes. If Americans cut their demand for drugs there is hope for a chain reaction: decreasing prices; production reduction; drug smuggling business becoming less lucrative and thus less attractive; decreasing income sources for illegal movements, including terrorist groups; decreasing political and economic influence of illegal organization; decreasing number of drug-related deaths, including American victims of overdose.

Do I have a reason for hope?

Open market economy

2009-01-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

For many years I have been incredulous about the so called open market economy. If the economy is really open, why rich countries subsidize crops in their land?

If the economy is really open, why workers cannot travel freely anywhere they could get a job and work honestly? Let me bring the quotation of the day on the NY Times of May 24, 2008:

"I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families. Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law."MARK W. BENNETT,a federal judge, to illegal immigrants sentenced to prison terms in Iowa."

If the economy is really open, why my human blood or other type of samples could not be used for a research project on MS in the USA? I quote from the email from the Multiple Sclerosis Genetic Group at University of California, San Francisco, as response when I volunteered for this project:

"We wanted to thank you for emailing the Multiple Sclerosis Genetic Susceptibility Project. Unfortunately, we cannot enroll your family at this time due to restrictions on transporting specimens outside of the 50 states. "

By the way, I live in Puerto Rico, a US territory for other purposes!

Could it be that the open market economy is just a pompous name for a convenient commercial exchange of goods?

An African American wins the presidency of the United States of America

2008-11-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

I have to agree with the heading of this post, not because I wrote it or because of the color of the skin of Mr. Barack Obama, not even because it has been used in the media but because Mr. Obama is the son of an African from Kenia and an American from the United States.

Another loss on July 25, 2008

2008-08-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

Many people got to admire Randy Pausch for his "Last Lecture". He died on July 25, 2008.
http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/beyond/2008/summer/an-enduring-legacy.shtml
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/July/july25_pausch.shtml
I did admire him too. RIP.

Premonitions?

2008-08-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

For many years my most recurrent nightmare was about being followed by some bad guys and my legs didn’t move fast enough to get away from them. I screamed desperately because I wanted to get out of the dream. Many times I got to wake up by myself or got my wife to wake me up in a profuse sweat at the very moment the bad guys caught up with me.

Now my legs do not move fast enough to run or walk anymore, but fortunately I haven’t been followed by bad guys.

I haven’t had that nightmare anymore…

Entrepreneurship and Romanticism

2008-08-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or the concept of entrepreneurship has changed radically from what I saw of my father? I have been to a couple of entrepreneurship seminars lately and the general impression I’ve gotten from them is that entrepreneurship nowadays is about start-ups. You get an excellent idea of a product or service with a good market and either you hit rich, for example Google, or you sell your nascent business to a giant and move on with your life, or rather, move on to another idea and another start up.

Where is the concept of developing your client base, being loyal to them and gaining their loyalty? At least that’s what I saw in my father’s business: a hardware store. He started almost from scratch with his two business partners and slowly and with hard work built their business. Yes, many people must've just walked in and bought in their store only once but many returned because business was about getting clients, gaining their trust, remaining loyal to them and maintaining their loyalty based on good quality products and customer delight, not just satisfaction. It was a personal relationship between the customer and the salesman. It was a long-term person-to-person relation, the salesman knew the customer name and the customer knew the salesman name. And the employees were not just a sales force or a team; they were friends, almost family.

My father probably didn’t write a business plan and didn’t carry out a market study. He just worked hard with his partners and employees at delighting their customers. It wasn’t the most efficient or profitable business but it generated employment; and most of his employees stayed with him for many years. One of them, Don Ignacio Rodriguez, stayed with him until my father died.

Not long after my father’s death we had to close the stores, two at the time. Business didn’t go well anymore. Maybe customers were so loyal to my father that they went away after his death, or they were already moving on to the new hardware stores run by franchises. My father successors, i.e., my mother, my sister, my brothers and I didn’t contemplate paying royalties to a franchiser.

Now that I see modern hardware stores, I believe my father wouldn’t have liked to be part of one of those franchises. If I got to know him well, he would’ve felt like betraying his customers. We would’ve had to surrender not only our business identity but my father’s very own philosophy of business: close personal relationship with clients; clients you know by name and clients that know you by name too. It was not only about selling the highest quality tools or the cheapest, but chatting with the customers to really find out the right tool and price for each one.

It was not probably the most efficient business model or the most profitable, but that business provided for all of us and for the families of the employees. Probably business was not about becoming rich but about profiting just enough while enjoying good friendships; the sense of belonging; feeling part of a family.

Adios Tía Lucila

2008-08-06T05:57:00.001-07:00

July 25, 2008. RIP.

Seven years, a long long time

2008-08-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

After seven long years I went back to Bogotá and visited many relatives and some friends. I found the city intense, overwhelming, yet attractive. Large cities have the charm of diversity in every aspect, architecture, art, music, cuisine...

And of course, I loved being with my mother, most of my brothers, my sister, most of my nephews and nieces, and friends. My daughters, my wife and I all brought along beautiful pictures and memories.

Hostages rescued in Colombia

2008-07-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

I could have not kept silent after this news. The Colombian armed forces carried out an outstanding operation in which, with no shots, rescued 15 hostages that Farc had for more than 5 years. Some of them had been kidnapped about 10 years ago. I am very happy for all of them but I still feel sad for all the hostages in the hands of the guerrilla. If real humanitarian reasons moved the French government to intervene in this matter I hope they and the other European governments continue to help in obtaining the release of the rest of the hostages. I hope the intervention of the French was not only to get Ingrid Betacourt released. She was one of the many hostages, but all of them and their families suffering is as intense and painful as hers; maybe more because some soldiers and policemen supported their families and their families, in addition to the pain of the long separation and uncertainty, have been passing through very tough economic times.

Is this fair?

2008-06-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

I have temporarily changed the topic of my blog but this video I found in NY Times just made me mad.

Marijuana is legal in some states of the USA, like California. The war on drugs, sponsored by the USA, has caused so many negative effects in countries where marijuana used to be grown, deaths, herbicide spreading over crops ...

The link to the video is http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=b7e4529b7a3ac6b3ffbba2deeb447b5324e49b92

And apparently, some doctors write the prescription with the suggestion of their patients and "patients" go and buy the weed and smoke it...

What's next, legalization of cocaine when people in the USA learn how to grow coca indoors?

Unbelievable, this double moral...

Of patients and doctors; the social cost

2008-05-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

After stating in my previous blog the problem, as good engineers do and I'm one, let's make a gross analysis of the impact of this practice. To start with, except for the San Juan Metropolitan area, public transportation is practically non existent in Puerto Rico. That means that every patient has to take his or her own vehicle. The first obvious consequence is on city traffic and congestion. If you look at the times patients have to go to the doctor’s office to write their name down in the roster, it’s the rush hour in the morning or in the afternoon. That's right doctors, you are helping make traffic worse at rush hour. And in the country with the highest concentration of motor vehicles per capita in the world ...

But the problem becomes even more interesting when we include parking space in the picture. Of course, early birds will get the best spots. The rest will have to drive around for 10 to 15 minutes, at best, looking for someone leaving a parking place on the street or parking lot. Yes, as expected, parking lots are packed all the time, and the vehicular space rotation is very low. Cars will stay parked for several hours and so, your best option is to continue driving until someone leaves an empty space. The 10 to 15 minutes I gave above is my empirical estimate. Now, there are three clear outcomes up to now: unnecessary and increased gas consumption and air pollution, these two caused by driving around searching for a parking place, and parking congestion, not to mention the frustration, anger and stress.

Now, allow me to use my very rusty knowledge about classic telephone traffic (before VoIP and other digital systems) and extrapolate it to parking congestion analysis. I’ll avoid being mathematically formal. When I studied telephone traffic a long time ago, the traffic unit was the Erlang. One Erlang is one call using a telephone line for one minute. Let’s now define a parking congestion unit as one parking spot busy for one hour. For brevity, let's give this unit a name: a "Car-lang". I just came up with this name so that it sounds similar to the telephone traffic unit. Probably, vehicular traffic engineers have an appropriate name for it but I don't know it. With this definition we can say that each patient generates 3, 4 or 5 Carlangs since his or her car will occupy a parking space for 3 to 5 hours, the waiting time in the doctor’s office. Let’s be optimistic and suppose that it’s just 3 hours. Then, each patient generates 3 Carlangs. (Doctors, I’m making you look not too ugly). Suppose a doctor sees 40 patients per day (believe me I know some doctors see more than 40 patients per day). Each doctor is responsible for 120 Carlangs, and I'm being easy on the waiting time and not too bad on the number of patients per day.

Now let’s imagine the doctors gave appointments by date and time (imagination is our only hope for the time being) and let’s use a pessimistic estimate of the waiting time of 1 hour. In this case the parking congestion generated by each patient is 1 Carlang. Assuming again that a doctor sees 40 patients per day each doctor giving real appointments would generate 40 Carlangs. The math is simple. By giving an appointment by date and time the parking congestion is reduced to a third, at least! That means lower parking cost for the patients, significantly reduced congestion and higher vehicular rotation in the parking spots. Guess what else: higher probability of finding a spot, thus reducing driving time searching for a place to park. And since patients need to go at the time of the appointment instead of the rush hour, there is a better distribution of traffic over time of the day in the cities. And the parking issue does not stop here. Even the parking businesses would make more money. Why, you ask? The first hour in a parking lot is most of the time the most expensive. The customers that generate the highest gains are those that leave their car in the lot for less than one hour.

Now let´s analyze the monetary aspect due to time absent from work. If the waiting time is 3 hours the patient for sure has to ask for at least half a day of leave. And this is optimistic. In many cases patients miss a full day of work. Again, I'll go easy on doctors. Assume that each patient is absent half a day, 4 hours. Assuming the patients earn $7 per hour, the cost for the patient's employer or to the patient is $28. If instead of missing 4 hours the patient had to be absent 2 hours, the cost would halve! As I said, this is an optimistic estimate because many patients earn more than $7 per hour and many loose a full day of work. Doctors, in addition to your cost, which is around $30 for non-specialist, which you charge to the insurance company, you are generating a high cost to the system. Your real cost is at best $58 per patient. Of course for a specialist this cost is significantly higher.

The impact does not stop there. There is also a health impact. A reunion of sick people in a waiting room is propitious to share bacterias and virus, in other words, spread infections. Add the stress of a long waiting time and you have low body defenses. The perfect soup to get sicker. And what about diabetic or hypoglycemic patients? They better take some food along or ...

And there is a cost for the doctors too. First they have to pay additional hours to their secretaries since they arrive two to three hours before the doctor does. Second, the waiting room needs to be larger as the number of people in the room is larger. If instead of 15 or 20 people in the waiting room there were only four to six the size of the waiting room would be significantly reduced. Plus the air condition system could be smaller and reduce the electricity bill. And water? Yes, water too. The shortest a person is in a place, the waiting room in this case, the lowest the probability that person is going to use the bathroom.

Surely there must be additional costs due to this hideous practice but I guess I got my message across, so I'll stop here.

Of patients and doctors; in Puerto Rico you’ve got to be patient to go to the doctor

2008-05-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

This is probably the first of a small series of blogs about this issue, so bear with me and my concern...

When I had just arrived to Puerto Rico it caught my attention that many, if not most of the people passing near my table when I was eating would say “buen provecho” or as Shakespeare would’ve put it better “bon appétit” (oh, pardon my French). And, what does it have to do with doctors and patients? Not much, but it may explain the courtesy sentences used by Puerto Ricans in different occasions. One of them is “que salgan pronto”, which translated to English means “I hope you get out soon”. No, it’s not the sentence used when visiting a prisoner; it would certainly make sense there; but no, it’s the one sentence every person going out of a doctor’s office would say to all remaining there. Sadly, it makes sense if you are a patient because you have probably been waiting to see the doctor for several hours, so the best wish anyone can hope for you is to get out soon!

I’d be surprised if no one had written about this before, especially foreigners like me, because the doctors’ appointment system in Puerto Rico is different from at least the other two countries I’ve known: Colombia and USA. At least in these two countries doctors give appointments by date and time so patients get to the doctors office a few minutes before the time of the appointment. Well, since time is money, Americans would plan the day ahead and may get there calmly; but some Colombians may rush into the traffic to arrive there right on time or a couple of minutes late; but they will make it. In the waiting room the waiting time may range from a few minutes to an hour or so, tops. Occasionally the doctor will reschedule the appointment due to an emergency; but all this is only natural, and understandable; or should I say bearable.

Now, let’s move to the enchanted island. If you call a doctor’s office and the secretary gives you an appointment with date and time, play the lotto that day. You’ll hit rich. The odds of such thing are extremely low. So far I haven’t had such wonderful experience. The second best, but don’t play the lotto since this is more likely to occur, is to get an appointment for a given date and you get to choose morning or afternoon.

If your appointment is in the morning you are told to arrive from 7:00 till 10:30, or something like that, and write your name down on a roster. Now, you may think that if you get at 7:00 you’ll get turn 1 or 2 and the doctor will see you at 7:00 and you’ll leave by 7:30. Well… I’m sorry to disappoint you but the doctor will get to the office around 9:30 or 10:00, so if you got turn number 1 the doctor will see you by 10:00. Yes, you will have to wait at least three hours. If you got other turn, you’ll have to wait 3, 4, 5 hours, maybe more. But also, you will probably see an admonition on the door, counter or wall that reads something like “If you are called by the doctor and you are not in the waiting room you will loose your turn”. Therefore, if you want to sneak out of the office, do it strategically or else…

Now, if you want to get turn number 1, don’t get to the office at the time they open because, I assure you, there will be 5 to 10 people ahead of you, maybe more. Your effective waiting time may be longer than 4 hours: half an hour to an hour outside the doctor’s office and three hours in the waiting room till the doctor arrives.

Now, let’s say you are not an early bird and choose the afternoon. You are told to arrive from 1:00 to 2:30. Now, let’s say you want to play it smart and go in the morning to write your name down on the roster… Think again. The secretary will tell you that you have to wait until 1:00. You may make number 1 in the afternoon but you will have waited several hours anyway. Now, you may say that since the doctor is in the office since 10:00 you will be called at 1:00… Wrong again. The doctor will have a backlog from morning appointments and will start to see afternoon patients by 3:00. Again your waiting time is longer than three hours.

If you think what I have narrated so far is bad, hold your horses. Worse things exist. There are doctors that give appointments by date, period. You have to go in the morning, or at the time they open the office, write your name down and see what turn you made. Yet, there are doctors that don’t give appointments! You just show up in their office at the time they open and … you know the rest of the story.

If you think this sounds terrible, let me reaffirm you on that; it’s hideous. I wonder whether someone, an illustrious university professor or a consultant has studied the cost of this practice. I’d love to see such study, but show it to me before doctors know about it. Surely doctors would try to make it disappear.

Open market economy

2008-05-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

"I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families. Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law."
MARK W. BENNETT, a federal judge, to illegal immigrants sentenced to prison terms in Iowa.

This is open market economy, isn't it? "Good, hard-working people" sent to prison!

This sentence appeared as the quotation of the day in the New York Times of May 24, 2008.

Politically incorrect or un-politically correct

2008-05-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

How would a politically correct person call a black person from Senegal, Kenya, South Africa or any other country in the African continent, “African Senegalese”, African Kenyan”, “African South African” or, in general, “African African”?
This question has been in my mind for quite some time, probably since I was talking to a very good friend of mine, American of course, a couple of years ago. At some point in our conversation in a small café in Palo Alto, he referred to my ethnic group as “Latino” and I believe he felt embarrassed since he apologized to me. He then asked me if I preferred to be called "Hispanic". I answered that anyway he or anybody called me was fine. I really didn't care then, and I don't care now.

I started to realize then how Americans, in an attempt to look egalitarian have resorted to adapt names to the different ethnic groups so that in public they do not hurt anybody. I know my friend didn’t mean any harm and was not trying to be politically correct with me. I' sure he's not racist. But looking at the hard facts, racism still exists; and it exists regardless of the way blacks, yellows or any other ethnic group is called.

In my view, these names are just euphemisms to be politically correct. But frankly I prefer to be un-politically correct or politically incorrect, but treat everybody with respect. Blacks, yellows, reds, browns or any person born in the USA is as American as any white American. Blacks, whites, reds browns or any person born in China is as Chinese as a yellow Chinese. And the same goes to any group, religious, ethnic, etc. born in any other country. In the end, respect for other people it’s not in the way we called them but in the way we treat them.

A moment's thought

2007-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to classical music for soothing my soul in difficult moments.

Past, present and future

2007-06-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

Live your present to the fullest so that in the future you have a beautiful past worth remembering.
Or in Spanish:
Vive tu presente a plenitud para que en el futuro tengas un pasado hermoso digno de recordar.

Where is the exception to the sixth commandment?

2007-06-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

To the best of my knowledge the sixth commandment as given to Moses by God was “Thou shall not kill”, or in a version I found a few days ago the text of this commandment is “Thou shall not murder”. To the best of my knowledge these commandments are shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Can someone tell me where is the clause with the exceptions to this commandment that has allowed Jews, Muslims and Christians to fight the cruelest and bloodiest wars in history, all in the name of the same God, which, by the way, goes against the third commandment?

Human Unnature

2007-06-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

This post took a long time before I actually wrote it and I suspect that I may generate some old-standing and needed controversy. I hope to offend no one with my view in this issue. Without further ado, here it is…

I continue to be puzzled between nature vs. nurture, or more accurately between nature vs. culture, specially in regard to some aspects of life that are very natural to me. In my last trip while waiting for my flight in LAX (yes, I had to wait a long time for my connecting flight) a lady with a baby in his stroller sat in front of me. The baby started to cry and she took him out of the stroller and started her struggle to breastfeed him. The struggle was twofold. One was trying to hold the baby, keeping in place a cloth over her shoulder so that no one could see her taking her breast out. The second one was once she started to feed her offspring and this battle was between the baby and her. He was uncomfortable with the cloth over his face. I started to think that being breastfeeding the most human and natural of things, culture or prejudice had made it so awkward for mothers, babies and everyone around them.

I sympathize with the baby because for him or for any baby, food is necessary and natural. I started to wonder, what if we all have to put a cloth over our heads so that no one else could see what we are eating. That would be certainly uncomfortable. Why have we humans in many cultures made female breasts and breastfeeding something to hide? What is wrong with that or better yet, what is wrong with us? We cannot blame Freud because I believe this custom came much earlier than his time, but his theories certainly must’ve helped to exacerbate the situation.

This issue has taken larger proportions than the one I just narrated. Not long ago, a lady in a shopping mall in San Juan, Puerto Rico, asked the manager of a store permission to sit for a moment to breastfeed her baby. The manager, a woman, didn’t allow such thing in her store. Of course, this incident made the way into the media, which generated very justified protests against the store. But whether it is denying a woman permission to breastfeed in a store or a woman struggling to hide breastfeeding in a public place we humans have made one of the most natural things in human life the most humanly unnatural issue. Well, fortunately not in all cultures. Some so-called “primitive cultures” see nothing wrong in women’s breast or breastfeeding. A few years ago when I was living in Colombia I was in a small village called Juanchaco. I saw a group of native Colombians (I should say real Colombians) entering the village with t-shirts on top. Someone told me they covered their breasts only when they were in town, forced, I suppose, by the customs of us the “advanced western culture”. Why is it then that we men do not have to cover our chest? In this issue I think cultural prejudice has taken us too far. “Culture” (the quotation marks are intentional) has become human unnature or anti-nature.

Solitude is awareness paradise

2007-04-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

Long time ago I heard a sentence like that from a psychoanalyst; yes, I went to a therapist some 10 years ago or so. It better be true for, otherwise, how can I explain all the minute details I’ve observed and ideas I’ve come up with during these hours by myself in LAX (Los Angeles International airport; it’s not a brand name of a laxative :-)?

Save water; it’s easier than you think

2007-04-30T06:18:00.000-07:00

So it said on a small sticker on the mirror in front of the Sloan automatic faucet in one of the Los Angeles International Airport restrooms. Why then, didn’t the automatic faucet use motion detection only to let water run instead of using a timer? When I wash my hands I follow four steps: 1) wet my hands, very shortly; 2) put some soap and rub my hands; 3) rinse my hands with water, a bit longer than the first time; 4) dry my hands. During the first step the faucet let water run for a period of time much longer than necessary, thus wasting water. If they had used only motion detection the system would have stopped water flow sooner when I was soaping and rubbing my hands and water would’ve have been saved; it would’ve been easier than what the Sloan engineers thought.

On accepting one’s reality

2007-04-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t easy for me to seat for the first time in my life on a wheelchair but, I had to since my flight from Mayagüez to San Juan had been delayed. I would’ve not been able to check in my luggage and made it to the gate had I not asked for special assistance to American Airlines when I got to San Juan. They continued to provide me with wheelchairs in Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo. Thank you very much. I learned realism and humility.

Things didn’t stop there. At Cal Poly, the organizers of the meeting I was attending, both from Cal Poly and HP, were very kind and considered. Again, they taught me that pride wouldn’t take me far; my gratitude forever. And no, I’m not giving in to MS (no, I’m not referring to Microsoft but to Multiple Sclerosis). I’ll fight it with all my energies and continue to walk, slowly as it may be, until my legs (or my nervous system) allow me.

Prayer of the "workoholics"

2007-04-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

Lord, please tape my family’s life so that I can watch it in my next life. My spouse is taping the game/soap opera for me.

Digital Divide

2007-04-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles International Airport, Terminal 4, in the Burger King – Starbucks Coffee restaurant close to gates 46 through 49, Friday April 27, 2007, 4:15 pm.
An Oriental good-looking woman seats in a small roundtable. Across the table is a white American-looking tall guy. They must’ve been married for several years since they barely exchange a few words during the 30 minutes or so I sat in a table close to theirs. The guy was absorved by his computer screen.

Long time ...

2007-04-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

A very good friend of mine sent me an email, concerned because I had not written in my blog for a very long time. My fault. I let sometimes my work and other activities fill up my days and do not get around to reflecting and writing as we all should. My thoughts and ideas accompany me when I'm driving or in the shower or anywhere and when I'm by myself but the fact is that I didn't sit down to type in my personal blog. Anyway, I'm back and with news. Three months ago, after finally changing physician, or neurologist to be more precise, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, or MS as is commonly denoted.

The only difference from my previous post is that now I know what I have and am under treatment. Regrets? Nope, it's not worth it. I can't change my past, so I have to go on with my life and business as usual, or almost as usual. I have been making some adjustments because of my movement limitations and I also have to squeeze in time for physical therapy sessions. Anyway, this is no excuse for not stopping for some minutes to write and share with my few readers my reflections and thoughts.

Ideas to write about? Yes, I've had a lot, specially when I am by myself, but I will be trying to get back to the discipline of writing in my blog more frequently.

Reflection on my 50th birthday

2006-08-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Probably, I had not made such a big deal about my birthday ever since I was a kid. I, like any other kid, felt very excited about getting gifts from my parents, godparents, family, relatives and friends. Curiously, I have been making a big deal about my 50th birthday today, because I was excited about receiving the greatest gift of all: 50 years of life.

If you think that I'm a rich man, think again; I'm not. But if you think I'm a happy man, then you got it right. I have had a full life, and I intend to keep it that way. The most important ingredient of happiness? Love. I love and I am loved. Life has challenged me before, and maybe now is giving me the greatest challenge of all, at least in regard to my health. No, there is no diagnosis yet, even less a prognosis, but whatever they may be I can only be grateful for the wonderful gifts of life and love. The rest are just minutiae that I will solve day by day.

Happy birthday to myself, or as the song Louis Amstrong used to sing: "and I say to myself, what a wonderful world".

Cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor

2006-07-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Yes, the title of this blog is in Spanish, my native language and is taken from "Coplas por la muerte de su padre" by Spanish Poet Jorge Manrique (1440-1479). And, what is wrong with that sentence? For starters it is not the full sentence but to make things worse I believe that many people live by it, specially when becoming adults. They think that infancy or adolescence or youth in general was better. And if life just happens to take them to a different part of the world, the places they were before were better. Things do not stop here. There is yet another popular Spanish sentence "recordar es vivir", or my own translation: "to remember is to live".

But now, let me be the defense attorney of the Poet. His full sentence was: "como a nuestro parecer cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor", which is better interpreted by the English Translation "How fain is memory to measure each latter day inferior to those of old". By the way, the English sentence can't be chopped the way the Spanish version can. The corresponding part of the English translation wouldn't make sense.

There is no denying that the Spanish poet was indeed saddened by his father death. I was too when my father passed away. I have also been saddened when diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. But even in such situations, the poet and I found that life is worth living, because every moment is precious. There are so many people and reasons to keep going and enjoying, that these difficult moments are just that, moments; but life goes on and so does the life of the loved ones. Why wasting our time and our mental energy in remembrance of times that will never come back. As the idea I wrote in a previous blog, we must make our present so pleasant that we will remember it with joy, but not try to stick to a past that we only remember fragmentarily or ... conveniently.

And the suspense continues...

2006-07-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

No, the neurologist could not make a diagnostic yet. One more lab test. It seems that my movility limitation is more evasive than I thought, and the uncertainty, of course, is not pleasant. Treatment cannot start yet, whatever it might be. In the mean time, I'll just keep on doing my regular exercise routine every morning. I guess that if I donot know what it is I might as well try to keep as healthy and strong as I can. But enough about my health. And as usual, while life presents a challenge, I also get good news. I was promoted today, so all in all balance prevails.

I believe, in my last blog I left some arguments unfinished. Although I don't think I'll ever finish them, at least I will try to complement them as I blog away. Someone may have thought with reason that my optimism is not typical of an existentialist and I wouldn't argue against that because I wouldn't like to be typical of anything, except being typical of myself. What I argue is that existentialism is pragmatic. I live my present to the fullest. If I can't change my past, not even what I have just lived a few microseconds ago, why should that worry me? Someone could argue that I was typing my blog and that I could've deleted and writen something else. That's something I do often, but that doesn't change the past, only changes the text that I wrote but I can't go and "unwrite" or change the reasons why I wrote what I wrote in the first place or why I changed it later on. The only thing I can do is trying to learn from the past so that I don't make the same mistakes again. But that even may not be quite simple sometimes.

And what about the future? The future is not happening yet, so in a sense it doesn't exist. Present, which I would think is "unmeasurable", is unraveling as I go on with my life. No matter how much I plan, future does not exist. Only the present and what I do with it shapes my life. It doesn't mean that I don't plan. I do plan, but I can only act on the present and make things so that what I plan might become true. But not even that ensures I will achieve what I plan. Just two years ago, it didn't cross my mind that I would have my current limitation, so how could I have planned for this. An insurance agent would say, you could have bought a disability insurance policy. But not even that would've stopped me from getting mi movility limitation. I just have it in the present. Would I have it in the future? Probably, but not certainly. Maybe it's curable, maybe not. Whenever I know, if I ever know, I will just have information about what it is and how should I act. But my acts only exist in the present.

Well I feel I have to leave this unfinished, again, but my present is demanding me to take the action of going and picking up my daughters which, by the way, is a beautiful present.

Long time without blogging

2006-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

It's quite unfortunate that I gave in writing my thoughts and let the daily routine and the rush to cope with everything that came up absorve the few moments that I spent in my blog. My thoughts, if not shared just remain in my mind and won't have any effect on anybody else, or even evolve in my own mind unless they are somehow published. People that comment my blogs are offering me a great opportunity to learn, to see different, many times opposite points of view. What a better way to grow.

Anyhow, I'd like to write about something that's been in my mind for a few months now, ever since I started to have some movility limitations: life. I used to get into discussions about the meaning of life, and time. Quite a heavy topic, discussed at length by all philosophers, evidently with a lot more training in Philosophy than me. But some of them, possibly the existentialists, had an impact on my way of looking at life, at least in my philosophical discussions. Some times at least, existentialism gave me strong arguments in some heated debates. So, from an strategic point of view, it was convenient for discussions. Of course, I must've added some arguments of my own and somehow, all of that became a target for my real philosophy of life. The one of my moments of solitude, and when I started to think about my health condition many of those arguments came back to me, but now loaded with the fear of the uncertainty about what diseaseI could have. Tests after tests have possibly narrow down the spectrum of possibilities to one or two neurologic diseases and my own research have led me to believe that I may not recover full movility, but under treatment, I may continue with the current level of movility, or something like that. I am facing one of the most challenging moments in my life. Some people, many close to me, would think "life is tough", while I reafirm myself in my motto "life is not tough, life is just challenging". And the way I have been receiving the results, day after day, lab test after lab test, doctor visit after doctor visit, it seems I have been applying quite well many of my discussion-winning arguments and my motto.

It doesn't matter what the diagnosis is (probably, I will have it tomorrow), I am optimistic. I've had several months now to look at my past, I am almost 50 years old, and it has been wonderful. What about my present? It can't get any better than that. And my future? Well, if my past and my present are so wonderful, what do I have to fear in the future? Nothing. First of all, I'm not alone in this. I have my family and friends that have always supported me. I am not the first, the last or the only patient of neurological diseases. And what about the existentialism. Well, plain and simple. I have a wonderful present. I love what I do and I don't have to make radical changes. As life develops I will just adapt to newer circumstances, newer challenges from which to learn. Isn't adaptation what we keep on doing? Do you think learning to walk was simple? How about speaking? Nop, that wasn't simple. What about leaving the nest and going to school the first day? And math, social science, biology, physical education, literature? Nop, that wasn't simple, either. And for the boys (at least the ones of my generation), remember how hesitants we were about asking "that" girl to be our sweet heart and how our knees trembled while our heart was racing like an F-1? And when they said "no" life went on, only a little sad. And for the girls (at least for the ones close to my generation), was it simple waiting to be asked out by "that" boy? And for the ones married, divorced and widowers: is or was marriage a permanent honeymoon? Nop. Life is not simple but is not tough either. It's just challenging. In the end, can you imagine how boring life would be without challenges and difficulties?

I leave my blog here for now. A bit of suspense for anybody who reads it but I'll try to get back on track with my bloggin and tell you how my life goes on...

Cultural shock

2005-04-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

If a got impressed by Chancellor Keneth from Syracuse University sentence, which I quoted in one of my first blogs, I am deeply impressed with Shatha Al-Musawi sentence quoted yesterday, April 14 2005, on the New York Times: "To tell you the truth, I am not a feminist. I don't want to commit the same mistakes Western women have committed. I like that family should be the major principle for women here."

We, as Westerners judge other cultures based on what we think is right and make it absolute. Easterners do their counterpart. But these two quotations put together tell us we may be wrong. We hear often politicians and high ranking officials in government talking about diversity and tolerance, and how important they both are; but talking is not enough; and maybe just tolerance is not enough; appreciation and respect for other cultures sure would save us from unnecessary conflicts. We need discernment of good from evil but we need to be cautious in our judgement and look not only through our eyes. We need to defend justice and values, but not only our justice system or our value system. Cultures have evolved through different paths, even though we may have common ancestral roots, for example, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I am convinced that all cultures have evolved in search for good. Thus, we all, Westerners and Easterners alike, have to learn to recognize and appreciate good, not just what we think is good; but even more challenging, we need not to judge as evil anything that does not match our notion of good.

"Human rights include food and water"

2005-03-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

That was written on one sign held by one of the protesters over Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removal in Pinellas Park, Florida, USA. And believe me, I sympathize with the people at both sides of this conflict but I wish people protested so passionately about the thousands (millions?) of children, adults and elders that die daily of starvation in Africa, Asia and Latin America, people that die out of any hospice and without any health care: in the abandonment of a world that only responds to the events, made spectacular world news by the media of a handful of countries. Is it that only people from these few rich countries really have or deserve to have our support to respect for the basic human right of food and water?

Frankly, from my point of view, this is a complex ethical problem for the health care professionals and families involved, but how do we all feel about those people who have to feel with full intensity and awarenes that they are starving to death? This great display of news about one single human individual should make us all, but most of all the media, stop and reflect upon the reality of those less fortunate that do not have access to minimal health services, food and potable water, not to mention lawyers or media to present their miserable situation to the eyes of the world or to justice, to move our hearts and our protests for their human rights protection.