A business model

I am looking around for patterns of successful businesses, and the one thing that is striking is the following: Most successful projects are about getting a bunch of smart people on the same room then ideas start proliferating.
So I guess we can start there. Partner with the smartest folks, create a company together, then decide what to focus on. Financial funding would come from some risk taking sponsors.
Too naive?

The Emerging Lands

The topic of giving back to their original country is a common topic among international people I meet. This is particularly true for people coming from developing countries. While this observation deserves a dedicated social analysis to understand the reasons behind this feeling, I would like to share with these people an idea that may help enable this idea.

I am proposing a global association of individuals like you and me who can share their aspirations and learn from each other. The association will act locally and think globally. At the local level, this association is a social forum from like-minded people to mingle, invite prominent guests and create local projects with global impact on emerging countries.

The death penalty

This may sound a ridiculous question, but I still did not find a satisfying answer:
A basic human right is the right for life, however, religions and constitutions sometimes allow death penalty. Does that mean that the person to be executed is not human, less human or just does not deserve the human rights? And if so, are these rights really universal?
I should probably consult with lawyers.

Ridda (apostasy) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (approved by all the countries):
"Everyone has the right of freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance"
Few Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan and Mauritania and Pakistan) punish apostasy with the death penalty. How do these country view the universal declaration of human rights?

Are we all criminals?

I am taking a class about International Law and Human Rights. This is a factinating questions that mix ethics, science, philosophy, law, etc. I will share with you some open questions that I am searching for good answers.
One fundamental HR (human right) is the right of life. I read an example of a person starving in an island, a sailor stopped in the island and leaves the hungry to die even if there was enough food for both of them. The sailor is responsible for the death of the man by his inaction; this death is in fact no different than stangling him, maybe it is more cruel.
We all know about the situation of Darfur. Are we criminals?

3-4 May

My ICRC interview is scheduled the 3-4 of May.
The first day will be a prescreening interview. I am assuming that I will be asked about my resume, my ambitions, etc, the classical stuff.
If I get approved, the 4th of May will be about language skills and role playing. I am preparing a special plan for this interview that I will execute durin April, I call it: "Le plan d'avril". I will share with you the details of the plan on the next post.

First Contact with ICRC

As I was fighting my sleep to prepare for my final exam in Financial Accounting, I checked my email to find an email from the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross). They are contacting to organize a first interview. So the good news is that I will be going to Geneva pretty soon. The challenge is that I will have the interview in French, so I should start brushing up my French.
I will call them on monday to get more crisp about the details.

Genetic determinism

I attended a community discussion titled: "Using drugs to create super humans", so the question was what if there were pills that could improve your memory, or critical thinking.
I still don't fully understand the depth of the ethical debate. So here is my question:
If we assume that we can identify personality and bahvioural traits based on a genetic analysis, should we use this information for employment selection/marriage/etc?
For example, if I am an employer and I need a very calm secretary, can I reject applicants because they have the "hyperactive gene"? Is a genetic based selection any different from a psychological test or interview?

ICRC job!

I would like to share my excitement as I am preparing to apply for this job offer: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/res.nsf/db900SID/OCHA-6M9KBJ?OpenDocument

Valerie, my ex-manager in the Seattle Red Cross, pointed me to this link with a message: "Sounds like you". I discussed this position with few friends and they all agree that I am a perfect fit for this.

For now, I am preparing my resume and my one page hand-written document to explain why I want this job so badly.

I will not discuss yet why I am considering it, but I will keep you posted with the progress on this.

MSN Eliza

Back on 1951, Alan Turing proposed a test to measure if a machine is intelligent, it is called: The Turing Test or the Imitation test. Basically, if you chat with a machine, and you can not clearly recognize that the chatter is not a real person, then we can describe the machine as intelligent.
In 1966, there was the first famous trial: Eliza (The Therapist emulator).

So how are we doing with this test?

Eventhough we are so far beyond creating intelligent machines, we do have a ubiquitous chat infrastucture. So we are ready for a contest!

We should create a program that every user can customize to run his own version of Eliza on MSN or yahoo!... I wonder why AI researchers did not do it yet.

Any takers?

Tanwih (Honors)

Since most Moroccans dont read, and it seems that this is the reason of its underdevelopment. I am thinking to help make things better.
The idea is very simple, most of the internet users in Morocco are high school students. They spend time surfing and blogging. A more constructive site will be www.tanwih.com (it does not exist yet) where students collaborate to prepare for their exams.
In this site, you may find:
- Old exams and answers
- Forums where students ask questions, other students/teachers/... can answer
- Ads for teachers (Swaya3)
- This site, if successful, can grow further in different dimensions...

The interesting thing about this site, is that it would be community based. So the maintainance cost will be minimal.

Let me know what you think about this idea, and particularly if you are interested to join this effort!

women beauty

I appreciate beauty and wonder what are its characteristics nowadays. I noticed that "beautiful" women, or at least the ones that are considered beautiful (models), are the slimmest ones, with filiform bodies.

In Germany, polemic debates were raised when, in a TV competition of top models, one of the candidates got excluded because she was not anorexic enough (52 kg - 1,76 mètre). But this country has 100 000 cases of endocrinian insufficiency (people not eating enough) every year, and this program on the first channel of the country doesn't help much.

Disconnected from the modern civilized culture, my anachronical mind has been influenced by the middle age. I know that, by those times, body corpulence, which might also be called "fat", was considered as one of the basics of beauty. No wonder if many artists made portraits of not so squelletic faces and bodies (please take a look to the splendid "Mona Lisa").
Why is it that today's women try to be skinnier and skinnier? As far as I am concerned, I just blame it on medias, that influences both sexes: altering man's taste and woman's behaviour.

L Hrig (The burn)

The title is related to the event of burning your Identification documents (IDs) in order to dissipate any proof of identification. In Morocco, we use this term to describe the act of throwing away the Moroccan IDs once we cross straight of Gibraltar to Europe.

I started reading the book: "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits" by a Moroccan author Laila Lalami. She has a very interesting blog: http://moorishgirl.com.

I will tell you more once I am done, but for now, this book sounds more realistic than a work of fiction.

Blog fork

I am tempted to pursue more international politics discussing on this blog, however, I wanted this space to be more about my trip plans (if any). So I m considering few options:
1- Have one common blog with all my posts. The discussion may become dry for some readers and would just lose interest.
2- Create a new dedicated blog, potentially inviting new editors: you to blog. This blog will stay focused on the trip plans.
3- Just dont blog on politics. Who cares anyway.

Please help me take a decision on this.

Seahawks!

Thanks Seahawks! I am proud of you..

Newspapers in Morocco

Based on the Maghreb Arabe press, Newspapers sales in Morocco do not exceed 300,000 copies:
http://www.map.ma/eng/sections/general/newspapers_sales_in3433/view

That is about 1% of the Moroccan population.
How about the rest 99% of the people? How do they shape their thoughts? What do they think about Israel, globalization, terrorism, internet and the free speech question in Denmark?

Support for suicide bombers?

An Europen reader pointed me to this web site: http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=248
You can read the related comment under "Antisemitism" post on this blog.

I am having hard time interpreting these numbers. I will share with you thie graph now and I will spend some time thinking about it.

Racism Survey

It seems that the racism issue is bigger than what I thought on the beginning. So I decided to learn more about it. I am thinking to create a site to collect, let's say, 1000 testimonies of racism and send it to the media and embassies. This will raise awareness about this topic.
What does everybody think?

First "Blink" on tall people

I recently read a book titled "Blink". It describes how we already have some opinion about people after few seconds of meeting them, sometimes before they even talk. One of the interesting observation is that CEOs of Fortune 500 companies tend to be six feet or taller.
I m 5'9", basically I just don't meet the bar for a CEO. This will help me set my expectation right.

Antisemitism

Semites are the people belonging to the Semitic race, mainly Jews and Arabs.During the 20th century, an antisemitic movement was spread and applied against the Jews. This event left a deep scar on modern human history that the world is still recovering from.
Surprisingly, the popular memory is short. A new antisemitic sentiment is quickly spreading across Europe. Muslim and Arab immigrants are discriminated based on their race and religion. Just like Adolf Hitler, the queen of Denmark publicly stated: "Islam poses a threat and is a cause of concern".
In France and Spain, my Moroccan friends and I have stories of our own experiences of racist acts.
The big scholar Mehdi Mandjra predicted this on his book: "The 1st Civilization War", and later the same idea was reiterated by Samuel Huntington in his famous "The Clash of Civilizations".
Arabs should probably seek advice from their cousins, the Jews, and learn from their experiences to avoid the worst.

The power of XML

Today I was busy writing software code, so I will share some geeky thoughts.
Software manufacturing can hardly be described as engineering. The process of writing software is still very ad-hoc and error prone. Some will describe it as art or craftmanship.
If we compare Software with cars, when you buy a car today, you are more focused on the performance, the esthetic and longetivity. When you buy a software, you are still hoping to get correctness and some security. Imagine you had this discussion with your friend:
- I was driving home, and turned the wheel right, but the car turned left.
- Oh yes, that s a known issue. Did you buy the latest car update?
- Yes, but I installed it and did not work.
- Did you close all the windows? And make sure to turn off the car.
- Oh well, Bunch of my friends are making a new open car and they will give me a ride for free.
- Well, make sure to not overload the car. Did I tell you the story of my friend that...

The Big Brother

If you did not read "1984" by George Orwell, you are missing one of the best foresight of our era. So in addition to the American ubiquitous supervision , a new big brother may soon become dominant: Google.
I woke up in the morning and checked my gmail account, on the right side of the browser, google displayed the advertisement that best fit me based on the content of the email, the history of the sender and my history.
Then, I decided to read the news, so I went to news.google and information were formatted to my taste, the content was decided by google on what it things are most relevant.
After being fed from google ads and google news, I thought about sharing some of my "new" thoughts in my google blog (blogspot), so I reiterated the same contents I read in the morning. My readers read my blog and clicked on the ads that are carefully selected by google (based on the content of the blog); of course, the readers assimilate google's news and ads and the cycle goes on and on.
One day, this guy decided to stop reading google related stuff, so he felt out of society and...

The Evolution and the discovery of time.

I was listening to NPR and there was a discussion that Women discovered Time and hence made us more humans.
OK this is hard to articulate to bear with me...
Assumptions:
- Animals do not have the notion of time.
- Animals react based on their instints.

Once upon a time, humans hitherto did not discover time yet. They were driven by their instincts. And women somehow started having menstruation at about every 29.5 days. This somehow matches how long it takes the moon to turn around the earth. Men, then, somehow, started to understand what is the worst time to approach women for sex based on the moon state. And Men learned to anticipate the future. Since then, men learned to hunt better, survive better, understand fatherhood... and now play with the genomes.

Happy new Hijri Year 1427!

The Hjri calendar is a lunar calendar based on estimates of the visibility of the lunar crescent. The actual month may start a day earlier or later than predicted. So we just can not print a Hijri calendar in advance.
Things get more messy today when one country has a different calendar than the other. This is sad since the world does not always celebrate the same Eid (Islamic holy day) on the same day.
What would it take to decide on a calendar in advance?

Le retour au Blad (The return Home)

I noticed that most of the readers of this blog are living away from their natal home. So I m raising the classical question of: "Should we go back home?"
The concept of home varies and is very fuzzy.
Some would consider home, the current residance. So if I m living in America, America is home. Others are more attached to the past and may consider home the place where they grew up.
In my opinion, home does not necessarily correspond to a physical location. Home is where I feel "at home". In my case, this is the place where my family and friends are, my culture is accepted and valued.

The Adclicker application.

As promised, I wrote a small software application that launches this site, clicks on the ad and closes the site. It loops though this logic infinitly. I let it run for few hours and it clicked on the ads about 400. The result was not good. This generated less than 50 cents.
As expected, The adsense seems smart enough to recognize that this adclicker is faked.

Happy new Year 4703!

This year is a doggy year! I was born on the horse year.
It is interesting how the years cycle has 12 animals:
Rat Ox Tiger Hare Dragon Snake Horse Sheep Monkey Rooster Dog Pig

I would like to know why there are exactly 12 animals, the same question would apply to the 12 months systems. Why dont we have 10 months of 36 days instead?

Who is reading my blog?

As I am celebrating the first week anniversary of my blog, I am sitting back and understanding who my audience is and what I should do to serve it better and expand it.
13 faithful readers.
7 guys 6 girls
Age braket:
15-20: 2
20-30: 11
Geographical location:
Africa: 4
America: 7
Europe: 2

Thanks for all the clicks!

I reached the 10$ milestone.
Thank you!

Yugang's friends at school

My friend Yugang asked once: "why 95%+ good looking girls always suck in studying stuff?" The expression sounds shocking but excuse his French...
I thought about it and I remembered that my computer sciences grad school barely had any women at all. Then, I thought about my math classes in high school and there were some beautiful girls, but the number of female students was about 6 out of 26.
It is hard for me to interpret that situation in American schools, but I thought about the Moroccan case, and I always believed that it was related to some unspoken social rules and expectations. Back on my time, girls in high school were thinking more about the future, the family, the society, etc. Guys were talking about their career plans, fleeding the country, making money, etc.
To go back to Yugang's comment, the best students I have seen had been hot chicks, both in primary school and high school as well as in university. So I am having hard time finding any patterns.

Elections

I don't do politics, but I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio) while driving back from school, the topic was the elections result in Palestine. I slowly understood that Fath (it s called Fattah here) was described as the peaceful party while Hamas was the symbol of threat and terror.
It gets ironic when these two words are translated from Arabic:
- Hamass: Passion, excitement.
- Fath: Conquest, victory.

Well, as a non expert reader, I would have assumed from its name that Hamass is friendlier.

Chain of friends

As a side idea, I found out that I can get in contact with anybody in the world through networking. Let's assume that every person in the world has 10 friends:
So I have 10 friends.
I have 10*10 friends' of friends which are be considered my friend
I have 1000 friends friends friends which are be considered my friend
...
I have 10,000,000,000 friends at the 10th level.

Notice that this is bigger that the human population of the earth. So if somebody is not friendly with you, try to find your chain of friendship and the problem will be solved.

Hmm, maybe I should create a site where we can find the chain of friendship.. I wish I can reuse msn database or something.

Blogging for money

Today is the 4th day of the adsense in my blog..
I woke up this morning and I found that google offered me 4$ thanks to my blog. Well, thanks to the readers that clicked on the Ad on the top of this page.
So I thought there are about 10 faithful friends reading my blog today. If I have 1000 friends, I will get 100$ each day. So if I want to pursue money, here are my options:
- Come up with a quality level blog that attracts more than 1000 readers.
- Investigate how to work around the system. Adclickers or other type of automation.

For now, I will be thinking about the two options. But I would like to get your feedback on the first option. How can I get real people to this site + they click on the Ad.
My friend Samantha suggested this:
Put the blog title on your nick name on msn, and ask ten of your friends to do the same. The idea has a lot of merit because in theory the numbers grow exponentially: 1 10 100 1000 10000...
But I m not sure how practical and scalable it would be.

From Istanbul

This morning, I read the blog "Ignorance is a bliss" of my brother Gurdel from Istanbul at http://spaces.msn.com/members/gatsuren/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=blogmgmt&_c=blogpart

I was the "host family" of Gurdel for a week when he came to Seattle for an exchange program in University of Washington. After that, he literally was part of the family. He tought me about the Greeko-Turkish history, the Casanova style community envolvement and much more.

Gurdel keeps reminding me that a person can be a successful dreamer. Thank you!

The moine (The monk)

My last blog about the mirror and the dress raised few interesting reactions, so I thought I will discuss it even further.

Mom always said in French: "The dress does not make the monk". Though, I keep feeling shocked whenever my look is unorthodox.

I sent once this picture to my friends and family, they all felt pity for me. After all, I am realizing that I should give up my mother's advice.

Outsourcing

I am ready to do an experiment and che sera sera (lilihaliha).
I would like to hire a web programmer that would be paid an above than average salary in his/her third world country. I am hoping to make a lot of money out of this.
Please send me your candidates recommendations.

Networking Event

Today, I attended a meeting where people stand up, eat, drink and talk to each other. It is almost like a party, but the difference is that everybody is dressed, clean cut, and most importantly talk about how good is his job.
Well, I was an outlier. I am not sure I can fit and raise to the occasion. Sometimes, I think that you are either in or out. And the decision is made earlier.
- My clothes were extremly casual. My company does not appreciate very formal clothes, networking folks do. Moreover, I am not used to spend so much time in front of the mirror to pick the right dress for the right occasion. This will be an exremely challenging task.
- I did not approach people. They did approach me. This is a personal tread that I need to understand further. I guess it is related to my education in a Moroccan school. I definitly need a mentor on this.
- I had difficulties coming up with a common topic. Most of the discussions were about the difficulties of the graduate school education. The discussion gets awkward and sometimes stops when I mention that I already have a masters.

Buttom line.. There is so much to learn in the MBA world.

Adsense, my first online paycheck

Today, I setup an adsense for my blog. Basically, I enabled adding advertisement on this page, and I get paid few cents for each click on the ad. I asked few friends to click on the link, and I realized that I earned 0.27$. It is a ratio of 7-10 dollars for 1000 clicks.
If you are still reading this post, I would appreciate ($) if you cick on the ad on the top of the page.

Well, I will let you know if/when I cash this money. For now, I am thinking of innovative ways to get the money flowing to my account.

The first test will be to automate an AdClicker that keeps clicking on the ad. I am not expecting much success, but it will be a good piece of script that I can use for my further experiments.

Catch me if you can

I m reading this book (Catch if you can). There has been a movie about it too. This book is about a young guy who faked being a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. His life changed as soon as he puts the suit on, people looked at him differently.
This reminds me that I should join this theater and start picking my dress, my words and my facial expressions more selectively.

La Honte

For the French readers:
http://www.webzinemaker.net/prana/index.php3?action=page&id_art=66976
For the English readers:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3424965.stm

I wonder if he publishes his book on internet, he will get more than 500 hits...
Or maybe I should create a site to sell these books on internet. I am sure a lot of the rich western readers will be so excited to get a copy of these type of books...

Color blind

Gibran khalil Gibran wrote in his book "The madman":

One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog.

And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped.

Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat and looked upon them and said, "Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice."

And when the dog heard this he laughed in his heart and turned from them saying, "O blind and foolish cats, has it not been written and have I not known and my fathers before me, that that which raineth for prayer and faith and supplication is not mice but bones."

Chopsticks

It was a long day. I gave a presentation about how to compile a compiler of the same language. If you have a program written in language X and language X is written in language X. How do you get to compile X given that X is not stable enough, most of the audience spoke Chinese-like language... Then, I had lunch using chopsticks, then I had dinner using chopsticks.
It is indeed a peaceful march.

3 skillsets

The Old Man once told me, there are three skills you need to acquire to become the VP of Ford:
- Technical skills: Learn how the Ford engine works, but do not spend too much time on the details. Gain respect of your peers and do not let them bullshit you.
- People skills: Your peers and your reports need to listen to you, follow you. You are the leader.
- Business skills: Know your competitor and set your priorities. After all, it s all about the money...

Metamorphosis

My friend Mehdi, from Casablanca, told me that I was terse on my comment about the fear of change. An excellent good reading about this topic would be "The Metamorphosis" of Francis Kafka.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Steve Jobs said once: "Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

Steve is one of the most inspiring figures on our era. You can read his speech at Stanford University at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html. Be careful! This material is stimulant!

The Fear of Change

Since I was hit with the idea of changing the jobs, I had this deep feeling of fear: what if ...? I have a stable job, good salary, warm appartment, people s respect, extra time to do stuff, social life, etc...So I googled it, and found that I m not alone. It seems that the fear of change is a popular topic. I particularly identified myself with "fear of the unknown" and "leaving your comfort zone". To better understand what I feel, watch the 1935 movie: "The Bride of frankenstein", he kept saying: "Change ...baaad"

Le Temoin

Sarra, my dear cousin, is getting married. I always considered her like a sister. We have been through so much together and we have so much in common. When we were kids, our mothers would decide to beat us for no reason, well the reason was that we need to behave... Till today, Sarra and I are called "3goune".. In some sort of a Moroccan dialect, it means "Extremely lazy".This morning, I was msning with Sarra and she gave me the best news ever. She asked me to be her wedding testimony in Berne, Swizerland. Her husband is named Arslan, and he is from Turkey.. Small world!

Changing jobs

After staring at these graphs for a long time, I thought I was doomed to learn less than I did yesterday. Then I thought that changing responsabilities provides me with this continuous learning:

Productivity dilemma

Based on the two posts above (knowledge is power and learning curve), I noticed that they both have the "Knowledge" access, so I looked hard and came up with this graph.When I started interpreting this graph, I was scared, I understood that my "power" will be limited if I keep working on the same place, doing the same task.

Knowledge is power

My savvy roommate Khaled always quoted the French philosopher Michel Foucault that "Knowledge is power". The same statement resonated on few hiphop and rap songs..For my simplistic world view, I understood Khaled by drawing this little graph in my mind:

The Learning Curve

The concept of the learning curve was introduced to the aircraft industry in 1936 when T. P. Wright published an article in the February 1936 Journal of the Aeronautical Science. Wright described a basic theory for obtaining cost estimates based on repetitive production of airplane assemblies. Since then, learning curves (also known as progress functions) have been applied to all types of work from simple tasks to complex jobs like manufacturing a Space Shuttle.In this blog, I am focusing on quantifying learning (Delta of knowledge) as time goes working on a given task.

skyblog vs blogger

I started a skyblog few days ago and I quickly realized that skyblog did not meet my expectations, here are few reasons:
- Ads: skyblog displays some very explicit advertisements.
- Language: skyblog uses French. Most of my users had trouble to find the comment button for example (ajouter un commentaire).
- It takes seconds to upload new updates to blogger.com, it takes few hours in skyblog.
- blogger offers an API :)

If this does not workout either, I will create my own blog website.

For now, I will migrate the content of the other blog soon...