Terrible Thursdays: ZOMBIES!

It's been yet another crap day, doing business in Singapore flies against the face of rational decision making when everything exists around a concept of Guan Xi.

Guan Xi by its very nature, implies that even if it's NOT THE BEST deal/rates, the project/supply contract still goes to you- JUST BECAUSE you're a friend or long time partner.

This is great, all this trust and love is wonderful. But it flies in the face of innovative business ideas that depend on you making a RATIONAL rather than EMOTIONAL decision.

Singaporean business executives have a long way to go (which explains the economy is living in the crapper).

That said, I look forward to zombies rising forth and eating all the "set-in-stone" aged decision makers. And when it all goes to hell, I really hope my maid passes muster.

Cheers to the zombie apocalypse and my L4D marathon on friday!

The one thing Singapore does right

Political Correctness- It's a bane for the United States of America and the only advantage that Singapore has over the big bad "decadent" West.

Rob McKay for NZ Herald

Recently I was in Singapore. What really struck me were the low crime rates, genuine honesty and politeness of its citizens.

Singapore has zero tolerance for bad behaviour. They achieve this by being tough on those who break the rules. The phrase "political correctness" is nonexistent. You talk on your cellphone in the car: you lose the phone and $500. You eat on the train and there goes another $500. Drop a lolly paper on the ground and that will cost another $500 - all of this compliance and not a policeman in sight.

Singapore is full of novel ideas that make the city so safe and prosperous. The place is run like an efficient organisation. Why? Because Singapore has an over-riding policy of "zero tolerance for poor performance and bad behaviour".

We have become so PC in this country that people are too afraid to do anything for fear of repercussions. Managers are constantly accepting below average performance - why?

In many cases the manager has hired a person who does not "fit" the job, and they try to "fix" the problem by embarking on a treadmill of coaching and training, or a mixture of other "touchy feely" processes. Let me tell you straight up, if you have hired a person who does not have the innate personality, mental ability and attitude to do the job, no amount of training will make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. You might as well toss the training budget - and the six months of your time pandering to the situation - out the window.

Poor performance must be addressed immediately. The longer it's left, the worse it gets. Then one morning, you will wake up and decide enough is enough, go to the office and deal with it in an inappropriate manner that will probably cost you an expensive personal grievance claim.

Most organisations have three kinds of employees - have a look around your team now - you'll see people who were born to perform well (20%), some who have the capacity to perform well (60%) and those who will never perform (20%). Jack Welch, the famous American CEO, used to grade his team into As, Bs and Cs. The As were groomed for higher things. The Bs were trained to maintain, or fill the A slots and Cs were targeted to be managed out.

Often, managers take work off the Cs and lump it onto the As because they can be trusted to do quality work without a fuss. So the Cs are automatically rewarded for bad performance and usually get the same take-home pay. Here we see motivation working in the negative. There is motivation to perform badly because you get paid to do nothing.

It's time to get tough - "zero tolerance for poor performance" should be your new mantra. Don't allow the C team the luxury of passing off their responsibility to perform - set goals, introduce targets, measure output - ride hard, reward well.

Usually, when the pressure to perform comes on the C brigade, these slackers fold like a deck of cards and leave. But be very diligent when looking for a replacement: the next candidate could be the joker who was dealt off the deck of the last company because of poor performance.

As managers and leaders we have three opportunities to do something about our people performance. The first is at the front door - hire the right people first time - hire for attitude, train for aptitude.

The second opportunity is training and coaching your current people - ideal for your A and B people, but a huge waste of management time and money if you never got the first opportunity right. And finally, show the poor performers the back door - almost impossible to achieve in today's litigious employment environment.

Getting rid of poor performers is a long, morale-sapping, customer-killing, bank-balance-denting process. You have to face up to the fact, fast, that you screwed up and hired poorly. Many times this situation is not the employee's problem; they simply didn't "fit" the position and you never identified this.

"People" are the only lasting competitive advantage your business has, so here's another mantra - hire tough and manage easy.

Rob McKay MA(Hons) is a business psychologist and director of AssessSystems Aust/NZ Ltd

www.assess.co.nz

Movie Review: Oxford Murders

Reviews I used to write for ARENA magazine

At the height of World War I, amidst flying shrapnel and gunfire, a lone soldier is in relentless pursuit of an answer to an enigma that has plagued mankind since time immemorial: Can we know truth?

The great thinkers of history have often sought a singular, irrefutable answer, similar in certainty that 2 and 2 makes 4. What better way to look for truth than using a language free from the entendres of man? It is in mathematics that the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus is borne, leading Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein to a horrifying conclusion that beyond mathematics, there is no such thing as absolute truth.

This deduction is shared by Oxford Professor Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). However, visiting American protagonist Martin (Elijah Wood) believes otherwise. Whether out of naivete or pure intellect, he believes that if we discover the secrets of numbers, we’ll discover the hidden meaning of reality.

Even the smallest snowflake contains a numerical basis in its structure he quotes, but when his ailing landlady is murdered for no reason, the young student starts to find his faith severely tested.

Seldom is Holmes to Martin’s Watson and during the course of deciphering the killer’s cryptic clues in order to thwart the next murders, mathematical and physics theorems like Wittgenstein’s Finite Rule Paradox and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle fly thick and fast. The narrative is interspersed with metaphysical and philosophical debates between Martin and Seldom regarding reality and the chaotic happenstance of life itself.

Stripped of its nerdspeak, Oxford Murders is a convoluted murder mystery. It would have done well, save for the incidental incompleteness of plotlines. The director tried so hard at making a thinking film that the murder mystery portion was left behind. We felt little sense of emergency other than morbid curiosity on who was next, not that we cared if they died either. Even as we stepped into the shoes of our geeky protagonists, there was little reason to care about their motives or pursuits. In terms of acting, Hurt excels as world-weary mentor and kudos to Wood for successfully shaking off Frodo. However, once the on-screen debates end, there is little chemistry between the two leads and the eventual unveiling of the killer feels like a non-event.

Can we know truth? Truth is, though Murders often forgets its pulse as a murder mystery, the movie remains undeniably engaging and watchable save for the spaghetti complimenting sex scene.

Societal Mental Conditioning

More to come once I gather my thoughts- Happy Easter weekend.

Schizophrenia sufferers aren't fooled by an optical illusion known as the “hollow mask” that the rest of us fall for because connections between the sensory and conceptual areas of their brains might be on the fritz.

In the hollow mask illusion, viewers perceive a concave face (like the back side of a hollow mask) as a normal convex face. The illusion exploits our brain's strategy for making sense of the visual world: uniting what it actually sees — known as bottom-up processing — with what it expects to see based on prior experience — known as top-down processing.

"Our top-down processing holds memories, like stock models," explains Danai Dima of Hannover Medical University, in Germany, co-author of a study in NeuroImage. "All the models in our head have a face coming out, so whenever we see a face, of course if has to come out."

This powerful expectation overrides visual cues, like shadows and depth information, that indicate anything to the contrary.

But patients with schizophrenia are undeterred by implausibility: They see the hollow face for what it is. About seven out of 1000 Americans suffer from the disease, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and poor planning. Some psychologists believe this dissociation from reality may result from an imbalance between bottom-up and top-down processing — a hypothesis ripe for testing using the hollow mask illusion.

In healthy viewers, the illusion is so powerful that even when aware of the illusion (see video below), they are unable to see the concave face — the mind just flips it back. Though the illusion is strong for faces, it doesn't work well with other objects, or even with upside-down faces. This bias is likely due to the special relationship we humans have with faces. Many neuroscientists believe we have brain regions dedicated to processing faces, and some brain injuries can leave patients unable to recognize faces, even though their vision and other memories remain intact.

Dima and Jonathan Roiser of University College London wanted to understand why people with schizophrenia aren't fooled. They put 13 schizophrenia patients and 16 healthy control subjects in an fMRI scanner that measures brain activity, and showed them 3D images of concave or convex faces. As expected, all of the schizophrenic patients reported seeing the concave faces, while none of the control subjects did.

Dima and Roiser analyzed the fMRI data using a relatively new technique called dynamic causal modeling, which allowed them to measure how different brain regions were interacting during the task. When healthy subjects looked at the concave faces, connections strengthened between the frontoparietal network, which is involved in top-down processing, and the visual areas of the brain that receive information from the eyes. In patients with schizophrenia, no such strengthening occurred.

Dima thinks when healthy subjects see the illusion, which is somewhat ambiguous, their brains strengthen this connection such that what they expect — a normal face — becomes more influential, overpowering the actual, though unlikely, visual information. Schizophrenia patients, meanwhile, may be unable to modulate this pathway, accepting the concave face as reality.

Schizophrenics aren't the only ones who see the concave face — people who are drunk or high can also 'beat' the illusion. A similar disconnect between what the brain sees and what it expects to see may be occurring during these drug-induced states.

Citation: "Understanding why patients with schizophrenia do not perceive the hollow-mask illusion using dynamic causal modelling" by Danai Dima, Jonathan P. Roiser, Detlef E. Dietrich, Catharina Bonnemann, Heinrich Lanfermann, Hinderk M. Emrich, Wolfgang Dillo, NeuroImage, In Press, Available online 24 March 2009.

Dark Times- Part 1

Going through a bit (understatement) of work shit at the moment.

Let this day, April 9th 2009, stand testament to the power of God's grace.

I'll respond with my experience and how He touched my life in a quantifiable, discernable way. Let this be testimony of proof of His promise of Love & guidance for us if we let Him be a driving force in our lives.

Downward spirals of Obesity & Poverty

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been taking the effort to eat a little better. I work in the CBD, everything from simple salads (we're talkin tofu, corn kernels, diced hardboiled eggs and lettuce) costs within the range of $8 to $14 (added salmon- yum). It keeps me filled for a good 3-4 hours till either an early dinner or a late afternoon snack.

In comparison, a burger king meal complete with fries and coke costs $6 (a hell lot cheaper) or a "Economical rice" complete with overly greasy vegetables, a fattening but delicious sweet & sour pork and luncheon meat for $3.50. Cheap yes- filling? No.

Worst of all, it encourages you to snack and nowhere does it ever add up to the $14 I pay for a healthful lunch.

Conclusion:
Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups.

The scientists took an unusual approach, essentially comparing the price of a calorie in a junk food to one consumed in a healthier meal. Although fruits and vegetables are rich in nutrients, they also contain relatively few calories. Foods with high energy density, meaning they pack the most calories per gram, included candy, pastries, baked goods and snacks.

The survey found that higher-calorie, energy-dense foods are the better bargain for cash-strapped shoppers. Energy-dense munchies cost on average $1.76 per 1,000 calories, compared with $18.16 per 1,000 calories for low-energy but nutritious foods.

The survey also showed that low-calorie foods were more likely to increase in price, surging 19.5 percent over the two-year study period. High-calorie foods remained a relative bargain, dropping in price by 1.8 percent.Although people don’t knowingly shop for calories per se, the data show that it’s easier for low-income people to sustain themselves on junk food rather than fruits and vegetables, says the study’s lead author Adam Drewnowski, director of the center for public health nutrition at the University of Washington. Based on his findings, a 2,000-calorie diet would cost just $3.52 a day if it consisted of junk food, compared with $36.32 a day for a diet of low-energy dense foods. However, most people eat a mix of foods. The average American spends about $7 a day on food, although low-income people spend about $4, says Dr. Drewnowski.

And fact of the matter is, unless you're a white collar worker earning a decent income- you're going to be choosing junk food. Ancedotally, though poverty is not restricted to race, it struck me as I watched a family of 4 (they were malay incidentally) board the feeder bus. Jovially tapping their EZ-link cards, McDonald bags in hand as they ambled towards their seats- I sat amongst them in the 2by2 seat facing configuration and mused at the "turbulence" as their massive body frames pressed into the seat.

Poverty is not a good thing. Particularly when it limits your lifestyle choices to foods that will bring you ill health like high cholestoral and heart disease. And I'm curious as to what our current leadership (the PAP) is thinking when foreign labor policy forces wages down particularly for the lower income group.

It’s easier to overeat junk food, Dr. Drewnowski adds, both because it tastes good and because eaters often must consume a greater volume in order to feel satisfied. Still, even those who consume twice as much in junk food calories are still spending far less than healthy eaters.“If you have $3 to feed yourself, your choices gravitate toward foods which give you the most calories per dollar,’’ said Dr. Drewnowski. “Not only are the empty calories cheaper, but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.”

And if healthy foods are becoming luxury foods- what does all this "at all cost GDP" eventually create?

In my opinion, a systematic downward spiral that kills:

• National Defense capabilities- as the majority lower to low-middle income families suffer from obesity and other obesity related illness
• Higher burden on the medical system- even with means testing, prolonged medical aid necessary to combating fat-related illnesses creates an untenable and eventually unaffordable level of medical aid needed just to sustain life
  

Breaking News: CANCER detection

This just in- Getting screened for cancer is a leading cause of finding out that you have cancer. And now back to our regularly scheduled news this April 1st.

Business Week's findings on World's worst airport:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/pragues_franz_kafka_international