Coelacanth - revisited

The Coelacanth

One of my favorite fish is the old Coelacanth.

The primitive-looking fish, called the coelacanth (SEEL-uh-kanth) was thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But in 1938, a South African museum related dude found this fish in a fishing trawler and soon everyone was on fire. Biologists came together to discuss about this fish (c'on it's jus a fuckin' fish~!~) and questioned how this bizarre lobe-finned fish fits into the evolution of land animals.

You know what? we all are descendants of this creature.. T-T sad but true, we're once roaming freely in the ocean, falling prey to sharks and whales, and thus our brave ancestors made it to the land.

It's Discovery

The coelacanths, which are related to lungfishes and tetrapods, were believed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. More closely related to tetrapods than even the ray-finned fish, coelacanths were considered to be transitional species between fish and tetrapods. The first Latimeria specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa, off the Chalumna River (now Tyolomnqa) in 1938. Museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered the fish among the catch of a local angler, Captain Hendrick Goosen, on December 23, 1938. A local chemistry professor, JLB Smith, confirmed the fish's importance with a famous cable: "MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED".

The discovery of a species still living, when they were believed to have gone extinct 65 million years previously, makes the coelacanth the best-known example of a Lazarus taxon, an evolutionary line that seems to have disappeared from the fossil record only to reappear much later. Since 1938, Latimeria chalumnae have been found in the Comoros, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and in iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa.

The second extant species, L. menadoensis, was described from Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1999 by Pouyaud et al. based on a specimen discovered by Erdmann in 1998^[12] and deposited at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). Only a photograph of the first specimen of this species was made at a local market by Arnaz and Mark Erdmann before it was bought by a shopper.

The coelacanth has no real commercial value, apart from being coveted by museums and private collectors. As a food fish the coelacanth is almost worthless, as its tissues exude oils that give the flesh a foul flavour. The continued survival of the coelacanth may be threatened by commercial deep-sea trawling.

Anyway..

Many scientists believe that the unique characteristics of the coelacanth represent an early step in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians.

The most striking feature of this "living fossil" is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs and move in an alternating pattern, like a trotting horse.

Coelacanths are elusive, deep-sea creatures, living in depths up to 2,300 feet (700 meters) below the surface. They can be huge, reaching 6.5 feet (2 meters) or more and weighing 198 pounds (90 kilograms). Scientists estimate they can live up to 60 years or more.

I first read about this animal when I was in middle school, and one thing that fascinates me the most is its name and its feature. Its name is super hard to pronounce for a young mind, and its feature that resembles a land animal really baffles me. What's more, the National Geographic narrator was saying "this elusive animal was once thought to have gone extinct"... and the subtitle "ikan ini pernah dijangka telah pupus oleh saintis" and I was like "WOWWW"... cuz it was discovered in the year 1938, and yet not much of us really know about this fish. Try ask any teacher in school or lecturers, bet they don't know this PREHISTORIC FISH. That's the point! PREHISTORIC!!! It is not included in our syllabus, and we were taught about dinosaurs, the dodo bird, the tasmanian tiger, mammoth, yet no one ever mention about Coelacanth~! It truly is a 'living fossil'.

This creature is considered endangered as there are only several hundreds left in the wild. We have to stop polluting the ocean if we are to stop another prehistoric creature from disappearing from the surface of the planet.

Because little is known about the coelacanth, the conservation status is difficult to characterize. According to Fricke et al. (1995), there should be some stress put on the importance of conserving this species. From 1988 to 1994, Fricke counted some 60 individuals on each dive. In 1995 that number dropped to 40. Even though this could be a result of natural population fluctuation, it also could be a result of overfishing. Coelacanths usually are caught when local fishermen are fishing for oilfish. Fishermen will sometimes snag a coelacanth instead of an oilfish because they traditionally fish at nighttime when the oilfish (and coelacanths) are feeding. Before scientists became interested in coelacanths, they were thrown back into the water if caught. Now that there is an interest in them, fishermen trade them in to scientists or other officials once they have been caught. Before the 1980s, this was a problem for coelacanth populations. In the 1980s, international aid gave fiberglass boats to the local fishermen, which resulted in fishing out of coelacanth territories into more fish-productive waters. Since then, most of the motors on the boats have broken down so the local fishermen are now back in the coelacanth territory, putting the species at risk again.

Different methods to minimize the number of coelacanths caught include moving fishers away from the shore, using different laxatives and malarial salves to reduce the quantity of oilfish needed, using coelacanth models to simulate live specimens, and increasing awareness of the need to protect the species. In 1987 the Coelacanth Conservation Council was established to help protect and encourage population growth of coelacanths.^[3]

In 2002, the South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme was launched to help further the studies and conservation of the coelacanth. The South African Coelacanth Conservation and Genome Resource Programme focuses on biodiversity conservation, evolutionary biology, capacity building, and public understanding. The South African government committed to spending R10 million on the program.

So take a moment and appreciate our ancestor.

Jasper - A Squirrel

Jasper

A Squirrel

As taken from

Remember, Sometimes the Dragon Wins.

© 1989 Jonathan Lowrie

1998 Xenea Publishing

Jasper

A Squirrel

      

       He looked half dead, may be he was dead, but that minute detail didn’t concern him right now.  He wanted to get out from the hole and gather his thoughts.  It was just moments earlier that he had fallen off the bridge into the gully. A damn fall, he might add. Nearly 30 feet, all tumbling through the air, over and over, and then- Wham! All this while watching a baby run from her mother.  He didn’t mean to fall off the bridge, it just kinda happened.  It was probably that last scotch on the rocks he thinks he consumed at lunch earlier. Or maybe it was a case of bad nuts. It all seemed so fuzzy these days, it was hard to remember if he was even coming or going.  After he got up, he looked around to make sure he had not made a spectacle of himself.  He had not.  Climbing up the steep dirt walls, he thought how lucky it was that he didn’t make a spectacle of himself.  Another alarming thought was drawing too much attention to himself. That just would not do.

         Jasper continued his quest, or what normal people would call a walk.  The difference between Jasper and normal people is that Jasper was not normal.  Ever since he was a kid, Jasper was considered weird.  With a name like Jasper, what would you expect? The universe can be a cruel place, naming kids things like Almelda, Eunice, and even Jasper. From the start, poor Jasper had 3 and 1/2 strikes against him. 

         His quest brought him to Main Street.  It was here at the corner of Main street and Second Avenue that Jasper seemed to realize that he didn’t belong here.  He saw men and women in business suits, pretzel vendors, and the ever so present corner drug dealer.  People were milling about, some chatting about the baseball game, other pondering the latest technology stocks on Wall Street. Of course, Jasper overhead this, and wanted to add that in the next 10 years, technology stocks would soar, but he quietly demurred. While Jasper was pondering the situation, a dealer came up to him trying to pedal some of his wares.  The dealer said he could get some for twenty.  Jasper thought it sounded like a good idea. Japser certainly wasn’t feeling terribly well today, and maybe today was a day to begin experimenting a little. Live life dangerously as his motto used to be. He vaguely remembers something about watching for cars and living dangerously.  He pulled out an old grungy bag of sunflower seeds and handed the man twenty of them.  The dealer knocked them out of his hand and continued down the street to his next sale, mumbling something about loonies loose on the streets. 

         Jasper then saw the little gray squirrel and continued his quest.  The pretzel vendor walked away telling people to stay away from that crazy dude on the corner.  As Jasper was walking, he fell again. 

         This time he woke up in his office.  He was slumped down on a big oak desk next to a cup of black coffee.  Chester, his real name, had fallen asleep on the job.  He had been working all night to catch up after his trip to Florida.  He sat back and stared out his window.  It was then he noticed the gray squirrel eating a turkey sandwich.  Now Chester had seen many a squirrel in his time (about forty six years?) and plenty of them had been gray.  But never in his life had he seen one eating a turkey sandwich!  Yet to his dismay, this squirrel just stared at him, with his red picnic polka dotted napkin, and munched his sandwich.  The squirrel was now close enough so Chester could see that it was a turkey sandwich with extra mayo and some lettuce.  Chester now began to question his sanity, not that it needed much question. He had a decent job, had two eyes, two hands and working fingers. He knew it was June, and what more did he need to be sane? Then the squirrel popped open a Diet Pepsi and took a few swigs.  He realized this was no dream when his cold coffee tasted like the fresh, his wife always made in the morning.  He didn’t know what to do.  He was working in the early pre dawn hours of the night and had a god damned squirrel eating a turkey sandwich of all things right in front of him. 

        

         His first order of business would be to get a bite to eat for himself.  Watching a squirrel eat can really make a guy hungry.  Chester soon realized that he had nothing in the office, and no change left for the vending machine. What the hell he thought, it was not as if the day had not already been pretty unusual. Chester figured it was worth a shot to invite his breakfast guest in for a while. 

         He slowly opened the window, and the squirrel slinked back.  Chester felt like such an idiot, but invited the squirrel in for a chat. To think that a business man in his 40’s leaning out of a second story office window and inviting a squirrel to lunch. His associates would have him committed on the spot. However, Chester had not been feeling to benevolent towards any co-workers, so a little eccentricity might be just what the old Doc ordered. Chester went ahead and asked the squirrel in to share a bite of lunch. Jasper said gladly and hoped right into the room, passing over the shocked man.  It took Chester a great deal of time to comprehend the notion he was talking to a furry little squirrel.  Now Jasper, the squirrel’s name was becoming impatient. 

         Jasper was not the type of squirrel one wanted to keep waiting.  He had no patience at all. In fact, most squirrels have little patience. They have a busy schedule. Collect nuts, forage for nuts, hide nuts. Remember where nuts were collected, foraged and hidden, and they do this all before winter. So, chitchatting with a human, and dillydallying for lunch was not in Jaspers appointment book. Once Chester had regained his wits, he wanted to know why the squirrel had picked a turkey sandwich.  Jasper’s reply was along the lines fat and cholesterol; Chester didn’t catch the rest.  Chester had no idea what to do with an intelligent squirrel, he actually thought this creature had more smarts than his dumb cousin from Atlanta, however he would never tell his mom.  Come to think of it, this here squirrel might just be smarter than most of his office. He often woke up with the feeling of being surrounded by idiots.

         Jasper and Chester stayed talking through the early morning hours.  Chester found that Jasper had been watching his business dealings for some time now, and told him he was doing it all wrong.  Of course, Chester was not about to take any talk from a squirrel, but in the end he did.  Jasper said he could do a much better job.  The bottom line is that a squirrel gets around. It sees and hears things, and as a stock broker, this was a valuable tool. Take for instance technology stocks. You have a few big boys in the market- Apple, IBM, Dell. They are gonna take off, and any tag along companies that jump in with them, Jasper would say. Jasper also hinted that he had some ability to see into the future as well, but Chester dismissed this as just a little too much. Then Chester heard some of his fellow workers arriving at work.  He politely told Jasper he would have to go.  This angered the squirrel, as  he wanted an executive position.  Jasper said he had a family to feed, and the acorn situation was not so hot now.  In fact, acorns in the city had been scarce, and of lousy quality this season. Chester refused, and was about to throw Jasper out when he slipped and hit his head. 

         Chester woke up.  He didn’t know where he was.  Then he realized he was in the large oak tree outside the office. It was one of the few old trees along the avenue. A big stout tree, with lots of branches and dense foliage. He also realized he was about forty feet up into said Oak tree.  His mind casually mentioned the fact that he was a squirrel.  It took Chester a whole ten seconds to realize what his brain meant. When you spend your entire life thinking as a 6 foot tall bipedal, the fast reaction times of your typical 12 inch squirrel can confound the processors in the brain.  Then he screamed, only thing is that what actually came out was more like a squeak.  Chester was now very upset and angry, he would kill Jasper if he could get his hands, uh, paws on him.  Then Chester saw that Jasper was in his body working comfortably in his office. 

         Chester was going to get him. This was ludicrous. He was a man, not a squirrel. He was a successful stockbroker, and he drove a BMW, and he was even set up for a date this Friday night. He had it all, and now he was getting excited about acorns and seeds.  He waited outside the car that he used to be able to drive and waited.  About eight hours later, Jasper came into the garage. Chester jumped out to confront Jasper, but it was too late.  The car was already started.  Again, the translation between two and four legs got in the way, and Chester found himself in a tangled mess of appendages before he could figure out how to work them all.

         Splat!!!!

         Jasper now thought he would have no problem getting that executive officer job downtown.     

Organization Climate versus Organizational Culture

Organization Climate versus Organizational Culture. Which do you need to watch out for.

Simply put, organizational culture is what the employee sees, and in turn what forms their beliefs, expectations and values about the organization. These underlying aspects of a firm may not even be consciously realized, but are apparent in the day to day functionality of the firm.  In a firm transitioning its culture if they follow certain plans they can be more successful.   It can be better demonstrated with the HOME model.  The organization must have a sense of history, create a sense of oneness/uniformity, promote a sense of membership and facilitate exchange of ideas among members. These tasks help make a more cohesive culture where a more positive outcome may arise.

Organizational climate is the physical nature of the organization.  For example it would be hard to have a high self image if the business was in dilapidated offices or if the CEO was dressed like a bum.  This is true of employees as well as customers.  A customer can feel the climate of a business just by walking in.  Some retail stores are stand offish or very friendly.  A great example is n Apple retail store.  It’s designed to be light, airy and open.  The people are generally friendly and helpful and promote a positive climate.  It makes the customer feel like they want to stay longer and learn and ultimately buy.

Some employers have tenets of behavior, sometimes called leader behaviors or leader attributes.  These are the underlying tenets of what the CEO envisions the corporate culture to be.  These seven behaviors are well stated and nearly every aspect of our training and performance reviews are tied to them.  But the organizational climate is one of recent performance gains and productivity.  This creates some bad behaviors.  On one hand we have these great ideals that we should strive for in the work place, yet the underlying climate is to follow those is to be weak and you will be left behind and marked as a non performer.  As a new employee its very confusing.  It also means few people follow the stated culture but tend to adopt the climate which is far from healthy. 

I think the change would have been more effective had the leadership provided the rationale and reasons for the change and had the tenacity to eliminate those that failed to get on board. 

In my case, the differences between climate and culture do make an impact.  I must state my goals around the culture yet work to achieve them within the climate which puts the two at odds and leads to frustration and low morale.

What Really Motivates Us?

What motivates you? 
Why do people give to charities? Volunteer? Write blogs -- for free?

Why do we do the things we do?
Money? Pride? Love? Sense of accomplishment?
How many of us really love what we do everyday at workplace, at school? How many of us afford to do what we love to do?

For employers, recruiting the right personnel to do their job(and loving it) could improve performance and level of competence. For employees, choose the wrong job and you're buried in quicksand for the rest of your life.

I watched a video by RSAnimate with Daniel Pink as the speaker, which tells the surprising truth about what motivates us. (if your browser is too slow to load the video, fear not, I've already summed it up for you - otherwise you can choose to skip reading an ocean of alphabets.)

Our motivations are unbelievably interesting--the science is really surprising, and a little bit freaky. We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.
We understand that when we reward something, we get more of the behavior we want, and when we punish we get less of it.

Image: t-chest.co.uk

A study that was done in MIT shows that the typical motivational scheme within organizations--rewarding the top performers while ignoring the bottom ones, pays off only when the task involved uses only mechanical skills, i.e. the higher the pay, the better their performance. But when it comes to tasks that require rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

Image: wolfescape.com

Which doesn't really make sense. But not to worry, you're not the only one to think this way.

The researchers thought that maybe the 50 or 60 dollar reward isn't sufficiently motivating for MIT students. So they went to the Madurai, a rural area in India to repeat the experiment. In rural India, 50 dollar USD is roughly equivalent to two-weeks salary for an average worker, which makes it a significant sum of money.

So what happened?

The people that were offered the medium reward did no better than those that were offered the small reward, but the people offered the top reward, they did worst of all.

Image: callcenterconsultant.net

Higher incentives leads to worse performance. For simple, straightforward tasks, the conventional motivational scheme would yield higher return. But when a task gets complicated, and requires some conceptual, creative thinking, the conventional motivational scheme doesn't work.

Image: funnymail.co.za

FACT: money is a motivator. If you don't pay enough, people won't be motivated. So you have to pay them enough so that they will be thinking about their work instead of the pay.

Image: onthefirm.co.uk

But what happens when they think about their work? What's the next step to improve their performance?
It turns out that there are three factors that lead to better performance and self satisfaction.

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

Image: prelovac.com

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed. Management is great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, which is what we want in the workforce today as people are doing more complicated, sophisticated tasks, self-directed is better.

At a company party on a Thursday afternoon, the employer of the Australian software company said of their developers
"For the next 24 hours you can work on whatever you want  with whoever you want, all we ask is that you show us the result at the end of 24 hours."

It turned out that in one day, a pure, undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software and a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise had never emerged. This is not the conventional innovation bonus. All they did was to request for something, and got out of the way, thus reducing the pressure set upon the developers.

Image: freeprintablecertificates.net

Now we'll talk about mastery. Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff. Why do we play guitar on the weekend? It's not gonna make us money, so why bother playing?
Because it's fun, and you get better at it, and it's satisfying.

Which leads us to purpose.
Example of people doing something not because of money? Well, Linux is one, Apache is another, and finally, the very-essential-lifeline for students, Wikipedia.

Image: wikipedia.com

The people behind these are highly skilled, and they have jobs! They use their limited discretion time to do equally if not more technically sophisticated tasks, not for their employer, but for someone hidden behind their computer screen for free. That's a strange economic behavior.

Companies that are thriving now are more purpose-driven than profit-driven, partly because it makes coming to work better, and partly because it's a way of getting talent. The science shows that we care about mastery very deeply, and we want to be self-directed, and that we are purpose maximizers. If we start treating people like people instead of horses, then we would not only build organizations that make us better off, but also make the world a little bit better.




info:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2010/oct/26/1

The longer the supply line, the greater the risk.

The longer the supply line, the greater the risk.

The integrity of the supply chain is vital to any company in operation, especially if they operate in a JIT fashion.  As companies expand globally, seek the lowest cost of production; supply chains will spread farther out into the world.  It is not feasible to have a complete supply chain located nearby, and the perils of distance, shipping time, and many other factors will play a role in the stability of the supply chain (Daniels, et al, 2009).

Global supply chains are more risky than domestic supply chains due to numerous links interconnecting a wide network of firms. These links are prone to disruptions, bankruptcies, breakdowns, macroeconomic and political changes, and disasters leading to higher risks and making risk management difficult (Manuj & Mentzer, 2008). Impairment to the supply chain can come in many forms: transit delays, weather, natural disaster, raw material shortages, government instability, terrorism, work stoppages, and quality defects among others.  The more stages in a supply chain, the more opportunities exist for something to go wrong (Daniels, et al, 2009).  The best a firm can do without vertically integrating all of its suppliers is to know and mitigate potential risk factors and be aware of them (Faisal et al, 2006).  Vertical integration reduces some risks, but even this will not prevent materials shortages, global strife, natural disaster and if geographically far, travel delays.  By sharing information with their supply chain partners, a firm can help understand the extent of the risks they may face in their supply chain (Faisal et al, 2006).

One possible solution to help reduce risk is going from a linear supply chain to an amorphous chain.  An amorphous supply chain relies upon various segments working together to sometimes bypass the MNE and ship directly to the consumer (Ritchie & Brindley, 2000). An example would be a Lenovo laptop.  A customer orders a laptop and that order is sent to a factory in China where it is made.  If it is a custom order it is shipped directly to the consumer via FedEx.  If it’s a stock order for a retailer like Staples, it is shipped to a Lenovo distributor then to the retail establishment.  With information technology and sharing a firm can also redirect inventory at a supplier to the end customer if that would prove faster (Ritchie & Brindley, 2000).

Even with an amorphous supply chain, the risk is still there.  Risk analysis will help determine how much peril your supply chain could be in (Barry, 2004).  Contrary to JIT inventory management and production, a buffer can help mitigate some of the uncontrollable risks (Manuj & Mentzer, 2008). Global supply chains are a source of competitive advantage. Global configurations of firms provide access to cheap labor and raw materials, better financing opportunities, larger product markets, arbitrage opportunities, and additional inducements offered by host governments to attract foreign capital (Manuj & Mentzer, 2008).  A MNE needs to be aware of the risks and the impact to its operation and have potential contingency plans to cope with supply chain interruption (Daniels, et al, 2009).  The benefits of a global supply chain far outweigh the risks that may never materialize.  An informed manager who knows both can better make strategic decisions for their MNE.

References

Barry, J. . (2004). Supply chain risk in an uncertain global supply chain environment. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, 34(9), 665-667.

Daniels, J. D., Radebaugh, L. H., & Sullivan, D. P. (2009). International Business (12 ed.). (S. Yagan, Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Faisel, M.N., Banwet, D.K., & Shankar, R. . (2006). Supply chain risk mitigation: modeling the enablers. Business Process Management Journal, 12(4), 535-552.

Manuj, I., & Mentzer, J. (2008). Global supply chain risk management strategies. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, 38(3), 192-223.

Ritchie, B.T., & Brindley, C. (2000). Disintermediation, disintegration and risk in the sme global supply chain. Management Decision, 38(8), 575-583.