Told you so does not quite say it ..Does It ?

CAIRO - Egypt is preparing for a day of protests against the national government on Tuesday, with organizers confident that the insurgency in Tunisia inspire the masses to mobilize for political and economic reforms.

celebrity football fans, and opposition movements have committed to participate in demonstrations, and said tens of thousands of Facebook pages to advertise events that you attend.

Protests kick off 14:00 (1200 GMT) at various locations throughout the capital and the day the country nicknamed "the day of the revolt against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment."

The call was launched democracy youth groups, 6 April Movement, at the same time, a national holiday in honor of the day the police.

Other applications include the dismissal of Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, including police and security forces have been accused of slowness, the elimination of the emergency law that dates back several decades and a higher minimum wage.

The controversial law, which gives the police wide-ranging arrests, suspended constitutional rights and curbs governmental political activity, which was renewed in 2010 for another two years.

Ministry of Interior warned that we should "close" with those who behave illegally.

In an interview with public broadcaster Al-Ahram daily published Tuesday, accused Adly organizers of being "ignorant" and said they had "no impact".

"Security is able to face any threat to the security of its people, and do not take lightly the damage to property or violations of law," he said.

The protests were inspired by a wave of rioting in the streets of Tunis, which ended the government of a great veteran Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country on 14 January.

Opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei has expressed support for the protest, said opponents of the regime in Egypt along the course should be able to follow the example of Tunisia.

Opinion of his National Association for Change said some members had called the security company, Tuesday's demonstrations launch pad.

The Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement, the largest and most organized, and the liberal Wafd Party - Party of the former opposition in Egypt - have not formally accepted the protest, but said many of its members will participate.

Amnesty International urged the authorities not to repress the demonstrations.

"Egypt is to allow peaceful protests, and to stop the arrest and intimidate opposition activists and peaceful," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"Country? No security forces are troubling record when it comes to protesters, and ask them to refrain from future excessive and disproportionate force," the statement said on Monday.

In December, the self-immolation of 26 years, street vendor Mohammed Tunisian Bouazizi triggered a wave of unrest in the country in northern Africa, which resulted in the dramatic overthrow of Ben Ali to power after 23 years.

Bouazizi attempt to draw attention to the economic hardship and repression has triggered a series of imitations public burnings of books in Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Tunisia abuses were echoed throughout the Arab world, autocratic leaders especially nervous events in Tunisia.

The authorities have rejected the idea that the Tunisian scenario could spread to Egypt.

But in a sign of public dissatisfaction with anxiety, have recently tried to convince the public that the grants of commodities remain unchanged.

About 40 per cent in Egypt 80 million people live with about two dollars a day, and a Massive proportion of the population is dependent on cheap shoddy goods.

system Theory

History and Orientation

Hegel developed in the 19^th century a theory to explain historical development as a dynamic process. Marx and Darwin used this theory in their work. System theory (as we know it) was used by L. von Bertalanffy, a biologist, as the basis for the field of study known as ‘general system theory’, a multidisciplinary field (1968). Some influences from the contingency approach can be found in system theory.

Core Assumptions and Statements

System theory is the transdisciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence. It investigates both the principles common to all complex entities, and the (usually mathematical) models which can be used to describe them. A system can be said to consist of four things. The first is objects – the parts, elements, or variables within the system. These may be physical or abstract or both, depending on the nature of the system. Second, a system consists of attributes – the qualities or properties of the system and its objects. Third, a system had internal relationships among its objects. Fourth, systems exist in an environment. A system, then, is a set of things that affect one another within an environment and form a larger pattern that is different from any of the parts. The fundamental systems-interactive paradigm of organizational analysis features the continual stages of input, throughput (processing), and output, which demonstrate the concept of openness/closedness. A closed system does not interact with its environment. It does not take in information and therefore is likely to atrophy, that is to vanish. An open system receives information, which it uses to interact dynamically with its environment. Openness increases its likelihood to survive and prosper. Several system characteristics are: wholeness and interdependence (the whole is more than the sum of all parts), correlations, perceiving causes, chain of influence, hierarchy, suprasystems and subsystems, self-regulation and control, goal-oriented, interchange with the environment, inputs/outputs, the need for balance/homeostasis, change and adaptability (morphogenesis) and equifinality: there are various ways to achieve goals. Different types of networks are: line, commune, hierarchy and dictator networks. Communication in this perspective can be seen as an integrated process – not as an isolated event.

Conceptual Model

 

Simple System Model.

Source: Littlejohn (1999)

 

Elaborated system perspective model.

Source: Infante (1997)

Favourite Methods

Network analysis, ECCO analysis. ECCO, Episodic Communication Channels in Organization, analysis is a form of a data collection log-sheet. This method is specially designed to analyze and map communication networks and measure rates of flow, distortion of messages, and redundancy. The ECCO is used to monitor the progress of a specific piece of information through the organization.

Scope and Application

Related fields of system theory are information theory and cybernetics. This group of theories can help us understand a wide variety of physical, biological, social and behavioral processes, including communication (Infante, 1997).

How to make $3.6 Billion In 3 months

Wall Street's secret advantage: High-speed trading

They're unknown and invisible to most of us, but electronic trading programs now rule the stock markets

posted on June 28, 2010, at 6:12 AM

High-speed trading accounts for up to 70 percent of trading in shares listed on the NY Stock Exchange. Photo: Corbis SEE ALL 9 PHOTOS

What is high-speed trading?
It’s Wall Street’s winning edge. By harnessing massive computer power to buy and sell stocks in the blink of an eye, high-speed traders leverage tiny changes in value to make huge profits. The technique was pioneered in the early years of this decade by a hedge fund that hired astrophysicists, mathematicians, and statisticians to devise electronic trading programs. Other firms, including Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, quickly followed suit. Few outside the securities industry knew much about the practice until computer glitches helped cause the Dow to plummet 600 points in 15 minutes in May. But high-speed trading—also called high-frequency trading—now accounts for up to 70 percent of all trading in shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

What advantage does it provide?
Two-tenths of a second, which is enough to make traders rich. Using a high-speed system, traders can buy into a stock rally or sell into a decline slightly ahead of the pack, gaining a more favorable price than ordinary investors making the same trade a fraction of a second later. The advantage rarely amounts to more than a couple of cents, but compounded over the course of millions of daily transactions, it can add up to tens of millions of dollars. High-speed trading “is where all the money is getting made,” says William Donaldson, former head of the NYSE. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

How does it work?
Automatically. High-speed trading firms, from Wall Street powerhouses like Goldman Sachs to little-known shops with a handful of employees, program their computers to scan markets and exploit ephemeral price differences on the same stock trading on different exchanges. Their computer algorithms automatically generate thousands of transactions per second to profit from a price difference. For a fee, many stock exchanges even allow high-speed traders to get a few milliseconds’ preview of orders of 10,000 or more shares, giving them added incentive to handle unwieldy orders. “It is a rigged game,” says Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, a brokerage firm. Some high-speed traders go one step further, paying a stock exchange for the right to install computer servers right next to the exchange’s own servers, a practice known as “co-location.”

Does co-location increase speed?
Yes. The physical proximity to the exchange server reduces the time from when a firm’s buy or sell order is entered and when it’s executed. “By co-locating,” says Adam Afshar of Hyde Park Global, a high-speed trading firm, “we are able to take 21 milliseconds off our trades. In the past, 21 milliseconds was a trivial matter. Now it’s a pivotal matter.” Several academic studies have found that shaving even one millisecond off every trade can be worth $100 million a year to a large, high-speed trading firm.

Does this trading distort markets?
Its fans claim it makes them more efficient. In this view, high-speed traders actually perform a valuable service by adding liquidity to the market, meaning they generate so much activity that other market participants can quickly find buyers and sellers for their trades. Critics counter that high-speed traders exploit a costly technological advantage—high-speed computer systems can cost $250 million—to suck unearned profit out of the market. “They’re like locusts,” says professional trader Joe Saluzzi. “They come in, swarm the market, squeeze as much as they can, and when they’re done they’ll just move on to the next market.”

Do small investors get hurt?
Yes, but without knowing it. High-speed traders take some of the profits that would have gone to ordinary, slower investors. Institutional investors, such as pension funds and insurance companies, also suffer. Large institutions conduct multimillion-dollar stock trades, which high-speed traders sniff out using pattern-recognition algorithms. The traders then use their speed advantage to jump ahead of the institutions, buying if the institution is buying, which sends the price up, and selling if it’s selling, sending the price down. This “front-running” reduces returns to big funds’ beneficiaries and pensioners.

Did speed traders cause May’s ‘flash crash’?
Probably. Securities regulators suspect the flash crash started when a clerk entered an erroneous price for a stock-options transaction. High-speed trading algorithms spotted the anomaly and reacted with a cascade of orders to sell the stocks related to the options, sending markets plunging before humans could intervene. High-speed trading, say researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, “has the potential to generate errors and losses at a speed and magnitude far greater” than anything we’ve known in the past. That’s why the major stock exchanges recently installed “circuit breakers” to temporarily halt trading in a stock if its price rises or falls more than 10 percent within five minutes. Even if the breakers succeed in reducing risk, however, they can do nothing to level the high-speed playing field. “The dilemma,” says financial consultant Sang Lee, “is, do we slow down the faster guys or require that the rest of the market speed up?”
The servers that run the world
On May 6, stock traders were in full panic mode. “Guys, this is probably the craziest I’ve seen it down here ever!” shouted a trader on the floor of the Chicago Futures Exchange, amid a frenzied sell-off of stocks. Meanwhile, in a quiet, air-conditioned room in Jersey City, the only sound was a monotonous hum emitted by hundreds of Dell and Hewlett-Packard computer servers. The servers were serenely in charge, spitting out sell orders by the hundreds of thousands. Like a science-fiction film in which robots turn on their creators, the May 6 flash crash appears to have been a triumph of machines over humans. “Why do we pretend that people are in control?” asks Wall Street Journal blogger Evan Newmark. Trillions of dollars in wealth is at the mercy, he says, of “a bunch of computers making ugly, messy love with each other.”

Before Investing Your Money,Take A MRI scan

People with certain kinds of brain damage may make
better investment decisions. That is the conclusion of a new study offering some
compelling evidence that mixing emotion with investing can lead to bad outcomes.
By linking brain science to investment behavior, researchers concluded that people
with an impaired ability to experience emotions could actually make better financial
decisions than other people under certain circumstances. The research is part of a
fast-growing interdisciplinary field called "neuroeconomics" that explores the role
biology plays in economic decision making, by combining insights from cognitive
neuroscience, psychology and economics. The study was published last month in
the journal Psychological Science, and was conducted by a team of researchers from
Carnegie Mellon University, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the
University of Iowa.
The 15 brain-damaged participants that were the
focus of the study had normal IQs, and the areas
of their brains responsible for logic and cognitive
reasoning were intact. But they had lesions in the
region of the brain that controls emotions, which
inhibited their ability to experience basic feelings
such as fear or anxiety. The lesions were due to a
range of causes, including stroke and disease, but
they impaired the participants' emotional
functioning in a similar manner.
The study suggests the participants' lack of emotional responsiveness actually gave
them an advantage when they played a simple investment game. The emotionally

THE PRICE OF FEAR
A new study shows people with
brain damage that impaired their
ability to experience emotions such
as fear outperformed other people
in an investment game.
• The brain-damaged participants were more
willing to take risks that yielded high payoffs.
 
• They were less likely to react emotionally to
losses.
 
• They finished the game with 13% more
money than other players.
 
impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because
they lacked fear. Players with undamaged brain wiring, however, were more
cautious and reactive during the game, and wound up with less money at the end.
Some neuroscientists believe good investors may be exceptionally skilled at
suppressing emotional reactions. "It's possible that people who are high-risk takers
or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy," says Antoine
Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, and a co-
author of the study. "They don't react emotionally to things. Good investors can
learn to control their emotions in certain ways to become like those people."
The study demonstrates how neuroeconomics can offer insight into a question that
has become a growing focus of economic inquiry: Why don't people always act in
their own self-interest when they make economic decisions?
Though the field is still in its infancy, researchers hope neuroeconomics could
someday have dozens of real world applications -- like explaining how brain
chemistry influences market phenomena such as bubble manias and investor panics.
Wall Street executives already are paying attention to the findings, since it offers
insight into what motivates investors.
"This branch of inquiry and economic investigation is really fortifying and
buttressing our understanding of investor behavior," says David Darst, chief
investment strategist in the Individual Investor Group at Morgan Stanley. "It's
beginning to inform our tactical decisions."
Using sophisticated brain-imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging,
or MRI, tests and other tools, neuroeconomists peek inside people's brains to see
which regions are activated when we engage in behaviors such as evaluating risks
and rewards, making choices and cooperating with other people. Neuroeconomic
researchers also tap into brain activity by measuring brain chemicals and exploring
how damage to specific brain regions impacts economic decision making.
Neuroeconomics grew out of a related field called behavioral economics.
Behavioral economists use insights from psychology and other social sciences to
explore why humans don't always behave as predictably as standard economic
models suggest they should.
In the late 1990s, when the links between psychology and neurobiology were firmly
established, behavioral economists began turning to neuroscientists, in addition to
psychologists, for help explaining human behavior. The idea was that if brain
chemistry could explain phenomena such as depression or attention deficit disorder,
it might also help explain more mundane psychological functions, such as how
people reach financial decisions. Behavioral economists, like Princeton's Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel
Prize for Economics in 2002, began teaming up with neuroscientists, like Peter
Shizgal at Concordia University in Montreal. In one study, the pair used gambling
games and neuroimaging techniques to look what part of the brain is triggered when
people anticipate winning money. They found that monetary rewards trigger the
same brain activity as good tastes, pleasant music or addictive drugs.
The 41 participants in the new study included people with and without brain
damage, including a control group of participants with brain damage that didn't
affect their emotional processing. Players were given $20 and asked to play a simple
gambling game that involved 20 rounds of coin tosses. If they won a coin toss, they
earned $2.50. If they lost the toss, they had to give up a dollar. They could choose
not to play in any given round, in which case they kept their dollar.
Logic indicates that the best strategy was to take the gamble in every round of the
game, since the return on a win was much higher than the potential loss, and the risk
in each round was 50-50. The players with emotion-related brain damage took a
more logical strategy, investing in 84% of rounds, while the nonbrain-damaged
players invested in just 58% of the rounds. Emotionally impaired participants
outperformed the nonbrain-damaged participants, winding up with an average of
$25.70 versus $22.80 at the end of the game.
The researchers believe fear had a lot to do with the poor performance of nonbrain-
damaged participants. "If you just observe these people, they know the right thing to
do is invest in every single round," says Baba Shiv, an associate professor of
marketing at the Stanford business school and a co-author of the study. "But when
they actually get into the game, they start reacting to the outcomes of the previous
rounds."
Yet emotions may play a useful role in financial decision making. While the brain-
damaged players did well in the specific game in the study, they didn't generally
perform well when it came to making financial decisions in the real world. Three of
four of the brain-damaged players had experienced personal bankruptcy. Their
inability to experience fear led to risk-seeking behavior, and their lack of emotional
judgment sometimes led them to get tangled up with people who took advantage of
them. Their life experience suggests emotions can play an important role in
protecting our interests, even if they sometimes interfere with rational decision
making.
Humans developed this fear response as a survival mechanism to protect against
predators. But in a world where predators aren't lurking around every corner, this
fear system can be over-sensitive, reacting to dangers that don't actually exist and
pushing us toward illogical choices.
7/21/2005
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB112190164023291519,00.html
"There was no such thing as stock in the Pleistocene era," says George Loewenstein,
a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, and a co-author of the
study. "But human beings are pathologically risk averse. A lot of the mechanisms
that drive our emotions aren't really that well adapted to modern life."
 

MONEY,MONEY,MONEY.

deadly riots over the government's plan to avoid defaulting on its loans... ...is that the unemployment keeps rising and it has to keep rising just because you have an excess supply of goods... ...this is all borrowed money that our kids will have to repay... ...and that debt is owned by banks in other countries... ...M-O-N-E-Y, in the form of a convenient personal loan... ...build a cigarette that delivers the taste and I... ...are you hot?... ...US planning to bomb Iran... ...sanctioning terror attacks in Iraq... ...there's "strong", then there's "army strong"... Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word "maladjusted". Maladjusted. I would like to say to you today that there are some things in our society and some things in our world of which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realised. You know, economists are, in fact, not economists at all, they are propagandists of money value. This system is more wasteful than all of the other existing systems in the history of the planet. So, you're really dealing with not an economic system but, I would go so far as to say, an anti-economic system. The problem we have is essentially the financial money sequence system. It's a system disorder and the system disorder seems to be fatal. There is no profit, under the current paradigm, in saving lives, putting balance on this planet, having justice and peace or anything else. Disease supports medicine, it supports doctors and hospitals. But if you really were able to eliminate most diseases, you would eliminate professions as well. You have to create problems to create profit. Crime does create business. We have now roughly 2 million people incarcerated in this country. Many of them are in prisons run by private corporations who trade their stock on Wall Street based upon how many people are in jail. But that's a reflection of the culture in which we live, in which we've all, to one degree or another, endorsed. I think the biggest barrier would be the values that people are taught to uphold that system. At the social level of life organization, it isn't the genetic program, or a genetic defect, it's a value system disorder. What you have to understand is that the intellectual culture of a society actually reflects the power interests in that society; the dominant perspective. In the past, throughout almost all of human history, the main threat to human survival was nature. Today it is culture. Not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together, structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence. Some colleagues at Harvard studying this suggested that 'inequality' acted as a social pollutant because it affects almost everyone in society. The immune system can not recognize the invasive cancer and it takes over the whole body until the body collapses. And we're in that spasming, collapsing form now. So the system has to be corrected, not print more money and give it to banks. That doesn't deal with the problem. Every level of life organization and life system is in a state of crisis and challenge and decay or collapse. The problems that we have today will continue to go on, this will never go away within a monetary system. It's clear that we're on the verge of a great transition in human life. That what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we've known over the last century. There has to be a link between the economy and the resources of this planet, the resources being, of course, all animal and plant life, the health of the oceans and everything else. This is a monetary paradigm that will not let go until it has killed the last human being. The "in group" will do all it can to stay in power and that’s what you gotta keep in mind. They'll use the army and navy and lies or whatever they have to use to keep in power. They are not about to give it up 'cause they don’t know of any other system that will perpetuate their kind. January 2011 Simultaneous release in 60 countries | 20 languages. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward The Transition Begins

Bank Of England's Mervyn King has said that the squeeze on UK take-home pay is necessary.

Speaking in Newcastle, the Bank of England governor said the current high inflation rate was necessary as the UK economy adjusts to higher commodity prices and becomes more competitive.
He said inflation was likely to rise further to 4-5% in the coming months, before falling back sharply from 2012.
And he implied that the Bank would thwart attempts by wage-setters to keep up with the above-target price rises.
"Further rises in world commodity and energy prices cannot be ruled out," he said in his speech.
"Attempts to resist their implications for real take-home pay by pushing up wages would require a response [from the Bank's monetary policy committee]."
Despite this warning, his speech - which came in the wake of a surprise 0.5% contraction in the UK economy in the last three months of 2010 - appeared to downplay the chances of the Bank raising interest rates any time soon.
Commodity prices His speech will make bleak reading for UK households.
Mr King noted that they have been hit not only by rising prices and lagging wages, but also by high existing debt levels, high interest rates from banks, and often an inability to borrow at all.

Even abstracting from the effects of snow, growth at home slowed in the second half of last year”

End Quote Mervyn King Bank of England governor

He blamed the high inflation rate - which rose to 3.7% in December, well above the Bank's 2% target - on three factors:

• higher import prices thanks to the weak pound, which is needed to make the UK economy more competitive
• rising energy prices and other commodity prices, such as cotton, food and metals, driven by growing demand from the developing world
• rises in VAT, as the government begins to stabilise its finances

He considered all of these factors necessary as part of the UK economy's rebalancing away from domestic spending towards more exports - a process he claimed was already well underway.
Hard times In total, Mr King estimated that these factors were contributing the equivalent of three percentage points to the inflation rate each year for four years.
Ignoring these external and temporary factors, UK domestically-driven inflation was virtually zero during the same period.
Indeed, the Bank governor noted that stagnant UK wages coupled with high inflation had led to the longest decline in the real value of take-home pay in the UK since the 1920s.
Nonetheless, Mr King claimed that hard times for UK wage-earners were, one way or another, inevitable.
If the Bank had tried to counteract the rising prices by raising interest rates, he said it would simply have led to falling wages - and therefore the same loss in purchasing power - but at the expense of an even deeper recession.
"Monetary policy can affect the inflation rate at which these adjustments take place," he said.
"But it cannot alter the fact that, one way or another, the squeeze in living standards is the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies."
Chill winds Referring to the recent disappointing UK growth data, the Bank governor appeared to disagree with the government's analysis.
He said the data bore out his earlier prediction that the recovery would be "choppy".
"Even abstracting from the effects of snow, growth at home slowed in the second half of last year," he said.
The comments contrast with the line taken by the government that the weak output figures were due to the poor weather in November and December.
"These are obviously disappointing numbers, but the ONS has made it very clear that the fall in GDP was driven by the terrible weather in December," said the Chancellor, George Osborne.
Mr King added that spending in the UK will continue to face "headwinds", as the pay squeeze is set to continue, households and banks are still struggling with their debts, and government austerity is on the way.
As such, the economy would be dependent on a rebound in exports to drive the recovery.

Genetic Causes of Depression

It has long been known that depression can be inherited, but until recently not fully known whether people inherit a predisposition to these diseases or if something else, such as the environment was the real culprit. These depression research have been able to determine that, to some extent in depressive disorders can be inherited. What appears to be inherited a vulnerability to depression. This means that if you have relatives who suffer from clinical depression, which may inherit a tendency to develop the disease. This does not mean that we are destined to suffer from depression.

The genes we inherit from our parents determine a lot about us as our sex and color of our eyes and hair. Our genes determine disease also may be vulnerable at some point in our lives. Every cell in the human body contains somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 genes. All are made of a material called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. The genes are located on chromosomes in the nucleus of every cell. All body cells except the sex cells contain 46 chromosomes, genes and are generally found in a specific location on a particular chromosome. With the exception of identical twins, no two people in the world have exactly the same genetic heritage.

The genetics of depression for family research shows that some individuals are more likely to develop the disease than others. If you have a parent or sibling who has had severe depression, it can be 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop the condition of those who do not have a close relative is in good condition. It would also be the possibility of developing bipolar disorder. Since close relatives who suffer from clinical depression is a vulnerability to develop the condition itself strongly suggests that it may be an inherited disease.

Bipolar disorder has a strong genetic influence. Among those with bipolar disorder, approximately 50% of them have a parent with a history of clinical depression. When a mother or father has bipolar disorder, their children will receive a 25% chance of developing some form of clinical depression. If both parents have bipolar disorder, the chances of your child is also developing a bipolar disorder is between 50% and 75%. Brothers and sisters of people with bipolar disorder may be 8 to 18 times more likely to develop bipolar disorder, and 2 to 10 times more likely to develop major depressive disorder than others, such brothers.