Who is this prophet that people are attacking?

Few Danish caricature opened the door for a worldwide debate about freedom of speech and religious respect. Yes, freedom of speech has a higher priority in the west and they have the right to defend this freedom. However, is it open for anyone to bash and attack everybody whenever s/he desires?

It is an open question and the answer is not straightforward. I do respect the western right of Freedom of expression and there is no need to discuss the limits and conditions as long as a free journalist appreciate and respect the dignity of others.

I would like to look at the other side of the story. Why journalists are attacking Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah exalt his mention.

Who is this man?

Is he a holy creature that cannot be challenged?

What is his message?

Why Muslims love him so much?

Do non-Muslims hate him that much?

Did he live up to his claims?

In few words, What is the truth about this man?

I invite you to be the judge

What do Business graduates need?

I finished my first degree in business and heading into the second degree but still I could not answer this question.

Some students came to the MBA for the prestige of it. They thought, MBA will push them high into the corporate pyramid. Others came to acquire new skills that enable them to compete into the tight Northern American market. A lot of international students left their countries and sacrificed their savings in order to get an International degree and a reputation for their skillset. A lot of them are struggling now to find a new job. They are struggling sometimes more than what they used to be. At one hand, they used to compete into their own field that they knew well and acquired enough skills to work in. Now, they are competing with new others and in another land they do not know much about it.

Very few came to acquire a new mindset and understand the trick of the business. An MBA or another degree in commerce would not enable an engineer or a science student to find his dream career because he/she has a new degree. An MBA was designed to enhance the understanding of business for de-facto managers and evolved to become the corporate standard of excellence. However, having too many excellent MBA lately devaluated the MBA value :(

Politicaly active students and grades

I can not understand the behavior of politcally active students who put all their times pursuing their goals of serving others while they forgot about their grades.

They should learn how to manage their time in order to serve the others as well as serving themselves while going on for their degrees. It is sad to see an aundergrade loving the Cs and crying later on when he face the facts of life and the employment filterings.

I was advicing some of my freinds today to put more efforts into managing their time and respecting the limitations of time. One of them astonished me when he said: "I love Cs" :)

Another one said I started with A+ then with A- and now I am surviving with some B :(

Concordia's examinations

Being an invigilator during examination is not an easy task but rewarding. I have joined the team of invigilators for the first time during my studies at Concordia and I got surprised to realize the amount of efforts behind exams.

I have done exams under different educational system and I have never had the chance to think how these exams are setup and managed. I always felt that supervisors and invigilators are just mean people who are designed to bother students during exams and nag on them from time to time. To say the truth, some monitors are nothing but bothersome. Now, I am looking at things from a different perspective and I am getting the skills to guess whether a student is about to cheat or not. It is hard to assume and blame someone of cheating but I am realizing how easy is to see a tired student looking around waiting for an inspiration.

During my studies at The American University of Beirut I admired the examination schedueler system that was designed by my Software Engineering professor (Dr. Akra). A light and simple software that will acquire the rooms capacity, students numbers, and exams in order to define the scheduele for the whole examination session. That was back in 1993 when the computer industry was still crawling. At the same time, I attended the Lebanese University for a History degree and I hated the concept of exams there where everything is done manually and few students might be assigned the same seat number sometimes and wrong rooms.

Coming to Concordia, I just took graduate courses where everything is arranged by professors most of the time and things will go on a "Let Go" basis. You go into a classroom and find a place and just do your exam and leave. As simple as that.

However, things are extremely different for undergraduate students whose exams are assigned differently and their seats in the rooms are different as well. I know the system had several bugs but I have to respect the amount of efforts being spent behind all this arrangments.

I attended a training session last Tuesday for new inviglators and it reminded me of my military services when I was trained (as an army officer) on how to train the new (fantassin). I felt that I am going into a class room to inspect every student and check what they are doing and count their blinks. At the end of the session things started to shape and I noticed that the exagerated perception I got was just a higher push in order to keep a tighter control in mind.

In examinations rooms, things went very well and students did not feel the pressure of having several steps to get to their places or communicate with the invigilators or with their own professors.

It shocked me that students do not even try to cheat !!! I was telling another colleague that they have to go to Lebanon to see what is cheating during examinations :)

In total, it is a nice experience thgouh it needs continous improvement maily in the seat assignments and in the supervision system. Seats should be automatically assigned using a software and students should be able to get their numbers from a posted list on the billboards in front of the examination rooms. Second, some supervisors need continous training on how to control their nerves when they face a novice invigilator. I heard today that one supervisor insulted an invigilator in front of everybody in the class because he had his coat on. I could not beleive this but this might had happened. It became very hard for him to control the students for the rest of the night because they saw him being insulted in front of their eyes.

I wonder what this supervisor will do if she saw my invigilation-mate this morning when he was reading the code of condut for students in class. He was playing the role of a Chi-Choy-Fu master shouting and making all kind of hand gests. Yaaaa Shaaa Noooo Taaaa :)

Overall, I feel that every graduate students should see this experience in order to build his perception on how exams should be conducted and what he might face in the future when teaching.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the hard work that everybody is putting and the long nights spent by the examination officers to facilitate the life of everyody during these 15 days. I can not compare the continous effort put in here but to my 60 days intensive military training.

Life sharing

It is not easy for anyone to appreciate the value of life sharing. One needs someone else in life to support and share hardship with. People try to hide the need for someone else to build the future with. However, every man will have quite a few chances to understand the importance of his wife in his life and vice verca. Ladies will have equal chances to value the presence of a man close by.

I am facing huge problems and surviving. I would like to ackowledge the support of a great angel next to me who is giving all her best for me to enjoy whatever we have left in this life.

For the one I appreciate, I want to say: Thank you
Her Blog is at: Petit Poussin

Referendum symptoms

It was a hot week (Nov. 8,9,10) because all the undergraduate and graduate students voted for a "Yes" or a "No" without knowing what are the main reasons behind any of them.

Active campaigns was telling people to go and Vote for a "Yes" while others were shouting "No, no.. These Yes' people are not of our line". It is astonishing to see such radical split within the educated community who are supposed to come and learn how to organize the society of the future.

At the end, 6 "Yes" teams wins and celebrated while the others "JUST" disappeared. There was no follow up nor clarification. It seems that all the heat came from some personal allergy against each other without any objective reasoning.

At the graduate side, Concordians agreed to join CFS-Q and pay $7.20 yearly. It was not a matter of joining or not because any national students' federation would help sustain the rights of students in Canada. However, the problem of governance is a major issue. Who can ensure that this money would be spent in the right direction.

At the undergraduate level, the money would go for different vague directions. The radio program deserves some funding but does it have any strategic planning? I do not know for sure but selecting an AM band for a university student radio is the worst idea I have ever heard of in the 21st century.

I believe strongly in supporting People's Potato but I hope that they would decrease their vegan spirits and feed some regular vegetarians from time to time.

Disruptive Technologies: Email

Internet seems to be the most disruptive technology ever-seen in the world. However, email and other online transactions (email clone) disrupted our lives much more. In the simplest picture, the internet linked our computers. However, email was the first pal-medium to create a momentum for humanity.

Armestrong's step was really giant, however, it could not change anything in our habbits so far. Emails changed the lives of billions on this earth and became a mandatory routine every morning and evening for serious professionals. Worse, it became an hourly or minutly routine for novice computer users who eat and breath in the cyber space.

Gmail came lately to change even the whole scenario. It is changing the email game. With its invitation tactics at the begining, it provided google with a huge free database of personal links from gurus who strive to protect privacy online. Google wizards can draw a huge tree of friends all over the world.

They know who are my friends and with the adsense technology, they know what we have in common. By fetching some words from our emails, they know where we like to go and how do we spent our leisure time and whether we are exchanging men's secrets in the workplace or not.
Indeed, they got to know a lot and security agencies might envy them for their ability to urge people to disclose personal information and allow Google-services to absorb every single details of our da-to-day life. Furthermore, they succeeded to make us compete to run and join the Blog, Gmail, Adsense, Smart Search... areana.

On the 34th anniversary of email, I would like to congratulate the Googlers for their successful product and congratulate the information generation that we have more services than what we dream of.

A brighter vision for the .Mind World