On the roller-coaster of life you often don’t know whether you are going up or coming down. That is how I felt some 26 years ago. Then I met and fell in love with a beautiful girl. Before I married her I wrote her this poem: I watched the bud begin to swell firm, like…
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Notice how very important money is becoming? It always was, of course, but in the last few months it has shot to the top of almost everyone’s agenda. Fine after fine for the bankers, scandal after scandal for the politicians, outrage after outrage as top people get paid sums many of their workers don’t even…
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“Understanding and addressing the social challenges brought on by rapid technological progress remain tasks no machine can do for us.” A quote from Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s article* in the New York Times. They were writing about Google DeepMind developments that are allowing computers to defeat humans at Go. The reason they have said…
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If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If someone tells you there is nothing new, everything has already been invented, tell them rubbish. What they are saying is not true – as the thousands of new apps invented daily testify. Indeed, if we had not already been told that this is the age of something else I’d call it The Age of…
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A headline in the Straits Times of 21Mar16 caught my eye. It said “Virtual world is no substitute for the real one”. It took my breath away. Is this something new and if so why? We are able to see all the wonders of the world on our screens. Most of us have about 100…
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Have you ever watched a surgeon operating on a patient’s heart or some other delicate part of their torso? What do you notice about the operating theatre disciplines and about how the surgeon handles the body? What strikes you most about the atmosphere in the theatre? How would you describe the operation? Surgeons and theatre…
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It’s not his real name; that would be too cruel. He is an 8 year old Pakistani who was playing in the Lahore Park when it was attacked by a bomb the other day. He lost a leg and his left hand and had serious damage to his left side. His mind, at least physically,…
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If you suffer from one or more of the following, take heart, practical help is at hand. You can now consider each of these problems as an opportunity in waiting. Difficulty getting started – Initiation Deficit Can’t keep going when things get tough – Perseverance Deficit Desire to make a project perfect prevents you from…
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While the authorities’ prepare themselves for more unpredictable terrorist attacks maybe the rest of us should pause and think about what is our contribution to reducing and eliminating terrorist activity. What has led to a world of such violence, such disregard for life and such sad hatred that we have lost sight of the amazing…
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