Yelena M
Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies
Location Kazakhstan, Almaty
Activity
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Yelena M made a comment
Humans are turned into data that is processed in milliseconds. The contemporary motto can be something like this, "Personality is nothing, data is everything!" :-(
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Yelena M made a comment
Staff, stock, and service are Aisha's problems. They all are connected with customers' behavior analysis:
How many people are coming at what hours (peak times to have enough staff)?
What are the most popular things people order (to keep the stock)?
What is the pattern of on-line orders (when, where, what)? This can improve her delivery service.
Receipts,... -
Yelena M made a comment
My own device can only say that I check my emails regularly. And I always wonder why it decides that after a single visit to a fashion or a hotel site I'm crazily interested in those things... There might be some intelligent, but still artificial in everything
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Yelena M made a comment
I'm looking for a section on how combining data from different sources can lead to new insights and ethical application of data. The latter point has become more and more important nowadays.
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Yelena M made a comment
My phone is just an app that I use to communicate with others and don't personalize it. It doesn't know my location (switched off), doesn't take my physical measures (never been installed), can't dictate to me what I should do or eat (it's my personal business). The number of info others can have about me through my phone is restricted consciously. I prefer...
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The course was very interesting and useful, adding some new tips to my knowledge in the fields of uncertainty and decision making. However, it keeps a (good) narrow focus missing some contemporary theories on both topics. Yet, the course structure was perfect for me. Many thanx to all professors and those who put materials together and placed them on the...
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Yelena M made a comment
Excellent lecture! Now I understand that Complementarity is the major characteristic that many modern cities are missing.
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Yelena M made a comment
There is another level of city evolution that was not mentioned. Cities turned into places where it is not pleasant to live. The air there is polluted, traffic jams are everywhere, industrial waists harm our environment...
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Yelena M made a comment
The weirdest example of non-linearity in my city - Almaty, Kazakhstan - is the huge squeal at ATAKENT exhibition center that cost 23 mln KzT (approximately, 80ths USD). Take a look at it https://ru.sputniknews.kz/video/20180711/6383953/belka-mneniya-almatincev.html And we have lots of such examples around the city that used to be the most beautiful place in...
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Yelena M made a comment
An interesting presentation. I've never thought of cities from this perspective. Thank you!
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Yelena M made a comment
Love the idea that change is the only constant thing! But I didn't get the point why it is a "constant process of discontinuous change"? Discontinuous in what sense?
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Yelena M made a comment
Excellent stuff! Thank you!
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Yelena M made a comment
An excellent presentation! Very precise and up to point. Thank you, Dr. Dirk! As for the case study itself, it's an example of a black elephant of Postnormal Times: it is in the room but people don't want to notice it!
Consumption obsession is a disease, a plague of the Western world. A simple lesson: spend as much as you earn, not above your income. I think... -
Yelena M made a comment
I would say that it was an absolutely populistic statement by Gordon Brown. It's like saying "No more rains and tsunamis!" And the statement that "Booms and busts in the economy can never be prevented because of uncertainty" is absolutely correct cause with every new turn in the world economy history, there is a new uncertainty. For Postnormal Times...
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Yelena M made a comment
In my opinion, the problem with economists is relying only on trends and overlooking emerging issues. It depends on what one means by "predicting" future events. If you work on analyzing the current situation and include weak signals of the market into the bigger picture you try to construct, thus creating many different slots in it that represent different...
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Yelena M made a comment
A very helpful introduction to the week. But my question is, "How has it happened that the world economy - almost 98 percent of it - got into banks' slavery?" Why spenders rule over producers?
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Yelena M made a comment
Wow! We're going to perform a peer-reviewer work! Exciting!
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Yelena M made a comment
A comment on the last question of the test. Contextual and path dependant is the same
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Yelena M made a comment
I always marvel when Dr. Lex put the bottom line to every week :-)
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Yelena M made a comment
Definitely, cause it's human and their needs-oriented. Its focus is on society as a whole and its wellbeing. And I should say, it's very ethical.
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Yelena M made a comment
It's an easy question! In the world driven by complexity, chaos, and contradiction - the 3Cs of Postnormal Times - to plan something and try to control makes little sense. It simply doesn't work in 99.9 cases. If you learn to live with ignorance - that you can't know the outcome of your efforts, what comes next, etc. - you'll have fun by which I mean enjoying...
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Yelena M made a comment
Where is the risk of doing something in an uncertain and complex environment in this discussion? Prior to creating value, an entrepreneur has to calculate risks that might occur along the process. Some will burden their customers and partners with them (as it is a common practice for the liberal economy), others will share it and be responsible (as it is a...
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Yelena M made a comment
Often it looks like western liberal entrepreneurs do act as if they are "lonely cowboys." Schumpeter's definition is lacking a critical component, "entrepreneurship is making new combinations of products, processes, organization, and markets" - for whom? The value component is missing.
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An Islamic Bank cause it works not for gaining money out of money but for creating value and income our of developing production, real tangible things, not financial bubbles. It's an example of a human-oriented, not profit-oriented economy.
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@BauyrzhanTazhibayev I would argue a lot. On the surface, maybe, yes. We haven't had such turmoils and riots as Kyrgyzstan, our average income per capita is higher than in Uzbekistan. But why should I buy socks and cotton clothes produced in Kyrgystan? Where is the famous Almaty Cotton Factory that used to export its goods all around the former Soviet Union...
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Yelena M made a comment
I would like to summarize all three points this way. Be critical to yourself and the world around you.
And a special thanx to our intelligent lady professor for interesting materials!
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Yelena M made a comment
Great performance!! Super personality and the voice!!
She just shattered into pieces the stereotype that the stage is only for "pretty women" who have nothing except for $$$$ of their sponsors. It might be my stereotype but the current show-world is not for talented but for reach and satisfying their ambitions. That's why such shows as Britains Got Talent are... -
Yelena M made a comment
Stereotypes are the product of the environment, i.g., the society we live in. To overcome them, one needs to get out of this "comfort zone" and "be born again." Assume another self to look at the world with the eyes of God.
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Yelena M made a comment
Our time with COVID-19 is the perfect illustration of the article's theory on all the types of control illusion. Especially of the conclusion that when times are economically/pandemically uncertain, superstitions increase.
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Yelena M made a comment
Thank you! Very interesting!
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Yelena M made a comment
Well, the Professor did guess MY pattern of thinking about the world :-) It was neither consecutive nor ascending. It was multiplying.
And I wonder what social norms researchers now take as the pattern in the postmodern and postnormal world where everything is relative! -
Yelena M made a comment
I liked this history week a lot! Thank you!
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Yelena M made a comment
The only "stylish model" of the Western economy is its banking/financial system that works not for the sake of production but consumption. Making money out of money - a usury characteristic - inevitably brings a collapse. This particular critical lesson the Western policymakers, journalists, and economists haven't learned since 2008.
And leaving the gold... -
A very strong path dependence example is oil economies. Countries - Kazakhstan is one of them - have been getting their GDP from oil fields and do nothing to develop production and development sectors. The saddest fact is that even those who try to switch from this path are not welcome at all due to the tribal thinking and structure of the society. "One...
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That's why strategic foresight is important! It helps to overcome "used future" thinking.
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Yelena M made a comment
Well, the bottom line is that it's costly to be a pioneer!...
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Yelena M made a comment
What Niall says, makes sense. But my first reaction to the question about the country of the past was the USSR of the 1930s that jumped into the shoos of an industrialized country before the II WW. No competition, no property, no consumption, and no reasonable laws as the West understand these things. But there were (1) the Stakhanov's movement that triggered...
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New technologies are useful and can be helpful in sociology and in studying complex systems. However, the results should not be taken at face value, and whoever uses them should remember that the reality could be much more different.
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Yelena M made a comment
I'll become yellow cause such simple configurations are not my preference and what I see in the world is much more complicated, especially in complex systems that we study here. Maybe someone likes this-or-that model, and I can even assume that the number of such people could be up to 60-70% in real life. However, scientific models should include more...
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Yelena M made a comment
An "unintended result of social self-organization" of segregation should have a trigger anyway.
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I'd rather say that the most famous is in the Bible - the death of Christ. Socrates died for his philosophy. Try finding "Dying for Ideas" by Costica Bradatan. There is a section there that describes Socrates' trial (pp.132-36). It's much better than Wikipedia.
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Yelena M made a comment
It was very informative and interesting!
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Yelena M made a comment
I would argue that "central authorities play no influence." In all three cases, they can. If they give certain economic or social privileges to specific groups of people, thus making them cluster together. Or if they legally determine what part of the city is for immigrants. Or if they lead such economic policy of the country that cities are "naturally"...
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@AlnoorDewshi, free will is not always about "maximizing survival." Sometimes it is about minimizing your life and dying for others
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Yelena M made a comment
Natural selection doesn't produce any decisions. It's not able to do that cause doesn't have a brain.
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Yelena M made a comment
Sorry, but I don't get the point why we need this here in this course. :-( Talking about "evolution" as an intelligent being that controls and directs things sounds somehow strange. I can think only about one application, that if we humans stop acting as intelligent beings and mimic animal species, we become aggressive, suppressive, and spiritually ugly.
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Yelena M made a comment
The equilibrium rule works better in the natural world and among humans who are killing each other for non-essential things :-(
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Yelena M made a comment
I prefer to think of myself not as a result of evolution but thoughtful creation. Only in this case, the concept of free will makes sense. Under the evolution theory, free-will doesn't make sense, it's useless.
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Yelena M made a comment
Hmmm... Evolution is a simplistic and simplifying concept. I wonder how it can contribute to complex systems.
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Yelena M made a comment
Right to the point the comment of Prof. Klaus G. Troitzsch that it's not policymakers who make the world go round, but there are things inside the societies that direct the future.
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In Postnormal Times, with their complexity, chaos, and contradiction uncertainty is a daily state of life. I agree with Prof. lex, that nobody knows the future, but we can model its varieties - that's actually what his ABM is doing - and we can influence it today.
And I'm voting for the "different perspective" idea in ABM, as well as in Futures Studies.
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A very interesting point is about "a simulation tool is capable of creating narratives of future developments." Any suggestion for extra reading materials, Professor?
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Yelena M made a comment
Though Prof. Wander Jager has mentioned that he and his colleagues are trying to include some inherent characteristics of consumers into their ABM, it is a must to keep things as simple as possible. I'm very suspicious about the accuracy of such processing, but I admit that for marketing purposes, it is necessary. In my opinion, ABM can be used only as a...
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Yelena M made a comment
"Today could have been really different." Thumbs up for this comment! That's why we are doing futureS studies. And I absolutely love the idea of social-flight simulators :-)
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Yelena M made a comment
How much time does it take to change this lock-in consumer behavior? Or we need to come to a generation shift?
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Yelena M made a comment
What about usefulness of the product? The quality might be high but I don't need it
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Yelena M made a comment
What about the "number unhappy"? How does it go?
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Yelena M made a comment
Wow! An interesting piece about religion.
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Yelena M made a comment
I'm thinking of the Eurasian Customs Union. Actually, it was built on the ruins of the USSR with the longing for that connectedness, yet with the eagerness to stay independent at the same time. The attempt was good cause it tried to keep and restore some broken economic, social, and cultural edges for the former Soviet republic nodes. However, it's going...
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Yelena M made a comment
Is it an example of Orwell's obsession with "the Big Brother watching you"?
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Easily in the current world! Who has ever thought of "virtually" a few decades ago??
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Yelena M made a comment
I think that a lock-in concept has a parallel in Futures Studies in the form of the Used Future. A practice is not the best one, but people keep doing cause they are used to it. There are many examples of cultural traditions in this category. For instance, in Kazakhstan, there is a powerful practice to hire family members/relatives/close friends even if they...
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Yelena M made a comment
"You could say that not the strongest or the smartest survive. It's is usually the most adaptive that survives in these situations"
I love this and gree 100%!!! -
Yelena M made a comment
Not at any moment! It's not the sort of music I like, and I can even imaging myself coming to such a festival with these people.
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Yelena M made a comment
I'm sure that real and virtual belonging changes us, humans, our needs, feelings, and their demonstration. Are we still human?
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Hi David! Not necessarily. PNT is a theoretical concept for our epoch. As for COVID-19, it's just an example of postnormality.
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Yelena M made a comment
Hmmm... I wonder, if the experiment were conducted on a fixed stable platform, will the result be the same?
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Yelena M made a comment
Wow! That's really going to be interesting!
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I would summarise what you try to explain in this article by applying a Three Horizon theory. People divide the future into Extended Present, Familiar Future, and Unthought Future. That makes sense.
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Yelena M made a comment
The current problem with rules, ethics, and morality are that there is no more conventional and generally accepted pattern for morality, ethics, and regulations. How many people, so many ethics. Therefore, uncertainty grows in this moral chaos.
And in the world of uncertainty, money is the least important thing! Money is a support tool, and one can quickly...
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Yelena M made a comment
I feel ok with uncertainty. Yeas, it's a part of our daily life cause we cannot see, predict, and know the future. We can just imagine some options for the futures. My life after the ending of the quarantine is full of uncertainties due to the new level of complexity, chaos, and contradictions the world is facing. Uncertainty is an integral part of Postnormal...
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Yelena M made a comment
Ok! If profit is a reward for uncertainty, then what about risk? Isn't it profit as well? Or should it be something different?
BTW< it is very useful to keep. in mind that the future is futures - it is plural and can not only occur and happen but be formed and used. -
Yelena M made a comment
Absolutely agree that "the future cannot be predicted, but it can be imagined."
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Yelena M made a comment
Is there any scientist that deals objectively with things? There is no science without scientists who are humans and subjective. They have their biases and are picky about facts. Welcome to the box of Schrodinger's cat!
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Yelena M made a comment
For me, Sudden Transitions and Larg Events sound like contradictory points. Logically, if one watches out for small things (emerging issues), then nothing happens "suddenly."
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Yelena M made a comment
Nothing happens "all of a sudden." Probably, you've missed emerging issues and overlooked black swans. And the crisis of 2008 is an example of that. Everyone saw the signs of its approaching BUT did want to believe.
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Yelena M made a comment
Two questions based on the lecture:
1) If "you cannot know the exact timing of the turning point" or any exact figure or number - which I agree with completely - then what all that analytic is about? Especially in the financial field: exchange rates fluctuation, GDP rise or fall, etc.
2) Ref. "a limited number of links between any person or any elements."... -
In 2010, Ziauddin Sardar published his landmark paper "Welcome to Postnormal Times." He proposed a new theoretical approach for developing a better understanding of how change itself was changing in the present. Three main characteristics of PNT are 3Cs: complexity, chaos, contradiction. I find the theory very useful and making lots of sense in explaining our...
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Yelena M made a comment
And I really doubt that the "market system is also capable of responding to all detailed changes that take place continuously." Why then 1 percent become reacher and 99 percent poorer?
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Yelena M made a comment
Well, it's strange still turning to the economics of the 1930s to define the complexity of the 21 century. Sticking to the free market and liberalism didn't save the West that propagates them from the 2008 financial collapse. Or should I conclude that the very blind devotion to them brought the whole world to that crisis? Someone overlooked changes in complexity.
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Yelena M made a comment
I wonder if there was a moment in human history when social systems were not complex if you define them via interaction. There should be something else to differentiate our modern, really complicated society from the one even 50 years ago.
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Yelena M made a comment
Nice to meet you all, guys!
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Yelena M made a comment
Hi all! I am from Kazakhstan, working for the Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies. I've taken a few courses on this platform, and I'm pretty much happy with the level and the content they provide. I'm interested in the course because I want to know what is packed there. Uncertainty and Complexity are critical terms for Postnormal Times theory I'm...
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Yelena M made a comment
I wonder, what differs this course from Futures Studies. Some things sound similar.
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Yelena M made a comment
I prefer learning through doing. So for me, the ideal is less talking and more practicing. That's why peer coaching (coaching others and being coached) could be the best option.
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Yelena M made a comment
It was a useful experience. But I agree with @Stephen Morling that adding a name and following the comments is essential.
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Yelena M made a comment
Actually, I wouldn't mind attending a course (even an online) to get practical skills of working with the programs and softs that could be used in the classroom. At the moment, I feel like I've chosen the wrong course. But that's my fault.
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Yelena M made a comment
It's an excellent and very motivating statement! No objections at all! It shows that you always have a choice - to reach a certain level and stagnate or keep on growing, mentally, and spiritually. Love it!
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@RogerBartholomew , sorry but not. I've never watched it. I prefer reading.
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Yelena M made a comment
You know, I wonder about the other side of using this type of technology among students, teachers, and humans in general. Aren't we losing the skill of communicating face-to-face?..
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Yelena M made a comment
Wow! Google Certified Educator is just what I need! Thanx for these links to new practical skills!
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Yelena M made a comment
Absolutely agree with the approach! It should be a whole culture, a network of different connections, links, levels, people, psychologies, tools, results, even artifacts. "There needs to be a rationale, plan, managed training and support with ongoing dialogue and help provided" - as Cathy says. All three factors should be balanced.
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Yelena M made a comment
My working environment has been quite elementary in terms of digital and technological challenges until now. Even a projector was a rare thing in the lecture-room. Some glimpses of HiTek have started to occur only now. That's why I'm taking this course.
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Yelena M made a comment
Excellent initiative by the Sheffield tech teachers and educators! I wish we had the same people with us :-(
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Yelena M made a comment
A very clear, precise, and helpful explanation. Love practical examples! Thanx!
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Yelena M made a comment
Absolutely agree with the speaker! Unless a teacher knows, the students will never learn! Start with us first!!
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Yelena M made a comment
A special thanx for a guide on modern diplomatic protocol!
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Yelena M made a comment
A great piece on the importance of education of girls in empowering them to be full members of contemporary life and contribute to our common wellbeing!
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Dear Dr. Rofe, well, as an educator myself, I prefer to lay the foundation, to "look back" and then to go forward along the path which is somehow familiar. History helps to overcome ignorance and give some tools - in terms of pieces of knowledge - which students can apply to construct their new house. If you've got nothing at hand, how someone could expect you...
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Yelena M made a comment
I think a kind of similar example exists in academic research. Your "office work" needs to be mixed with "field research." And such a switch brings benefits in terms of collecting the first-hand dater. In the case of diplomatic work, I think, the advantage is in exercising one's adaptability and flexibility.
