The Changing Face of Public Management

There will be absolutely changed conditions under which public managers will operate in the future, some of the areas of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they will be required to possess, and some of the pathways public managers might explore in order to move toward the future.

There will be an extraordinary explosion of new knowledge and technological innovations, especially in the areas of information sciences, genetics, materials, instrumentation, automation, and space. Our public managers will wade into an age of extraordinary technological change and have to accommodate themselves and the institutions to dramatically different bodies of knowledge and technological innovations.

They will not only have to cope with and employ their expanded knowledge and technological capacity, they will have to learn to use this knowledge and technological capacity for the benefit of society. In the technological world of the future, there will be even greater temptations for them to be captured by technology, to fall prey to “technological imperative,” and to allow rational technical interests to supercede human concerns and those of values. Finding ways of employing advanced technologies so as to enhance rather than restrict their capacity for leadership, creativity, and personal responsibility will be a serious challenge.

In the future, knowledge and information will prevail. And if information is power, then those who have information will indeed have power. But who will have information? Information will be increasingly centralized and controlled and marketed through traditional economic and political processes. It will be widely distributed throughout society, so that increasing rather than decreasing numbers of people will have information and in turn have power. Such a possibility will lead to “the twilight of hierarchy,” to be inevitable.

Combining these issues, we can safely predict that the knowledge or information that our public managers will be able to access will be tremendous, to the point that the quantity of information will no longer be the most important issue. Rather the key question will be how to organize this information for human purposes. This means that public administration will have to learn to organize information in a fashion that will facilitate the pursuit of important public purposes. The great challenge will be to organize information so that we can enhance the process of democratic decision-making, of consensus building, and of dialogue and deliberation.

There’s no question that we will have the capacity to organize information for dramatic new public purposes, to restructure our structures of governance in dramatic ways. But what will our choices be? Imagine a computer in Islamabad that could reach out into every home, so that on any occasion that a major policy decision was required, an appropriate message could go out to all the citizens and their answers could guide public policy - a process that would approximate pure democracy.

The globalization of society is obvious today, though in twenty-five years or so, we may experience trans-globalization or beyond, as the frontiers of the oceans and space are extended even further. Already we are thinking more in global terms. However, our managers are still thinking in terms of traditional institutions operating in a new global context. They are not yet asking how they reconfigure businesses and governments so as to carry out a global vision. How do they encourage businesses and governments to assume global responsibilities rather than those defined in terms of one’s own self interest? For example, how can Pakistan move toward sustainable development and environmental justice on a global basis?

One obvious casualty of the global age may be the nation-state, replaced not necessarily by a new global or interplanetary federation but possibly by new forms of governance far beyond those we can imagine today.

In future our public administration should know the importance of “responsibilities” rather than “functions” of government. While a large part of the current worldwide debate over privatization or outsourcing speaks to the question of which “functions” belong where, the new debate will necessarily focus on public responsibilities and speak in a language of ethics, citizenship and the public interest.

In reinvented government or the new public management, customers shall replace citizens - or, to put it differently, the integrative role of citizenship has been reduced to the narrow self-interest of customership - in government as in business.

Indeed, we think the job of all public managers will increasingly be more than directing or managing our public organizations. It will be not merely “steering” or “rowing” but “building the boat.” The new public manager will construct networks of varied interests that can work effectively to solve public problems. In doing so, it will be the job of the public administrator to promote pluralism, to create opportunities for constructive dissent, to preserve that which is distinctive about individuals and groups, and to provide an opportunity for diverse groups to share in establishing future directions for the community. The administrator will play a substantial role in diminishing polarization, teaching diversity and respect, building coalitions, resolving disputes, negotiating and mediating. The work of the top public managers will thus be - to build community.

There are two broad areas that public managers will need to explore in order to fashion a response to the trends. These emerging trends will turn public management both “inside-out” and “upside-down.” Public management will be turned “inside-out” as the largely internal focus of management in the past is replaced by an external focus, specifically a focus on citizens and citizenship. Public management will be turned “upside-down” as the traditional top-down orientation of the field is replaced - not necessarily by a bottom-up approach, but by a system of shared leadership.

In the past public administration has been largely focused on what happens within the public bureaucracy. The future will require that it dramatically refocus its attention on the world outside, particularly the world of citizens and citizenship. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Human Factor Engineering

Human engineering or human factors engineering, also called ergonomics, is the science of designing machines, products, and systems to maximize the safety, comfort, and efficiency of the people who use them. This area is a vital component of future.

The comparison between speed and liveliness of current technological advance with the tardiness and unevenness has always marked educational developments. This comparison is between invention and the processes by which people appreciate, accept and use invention.

The human factor engineers draw on the principles of industrial engineering, psychology, anthropometry (the science of human measurement), and biomechanics (the study of muscular activity) to adapt the design of products and workplaces to people’s sizes and shapes and their physical strengths and limitations. They also consider the speed with which humans react and how they process information, and their capacities for dealing with psychological factors, such as stress or isolation. Armed with this complete picture of how humans interact with their environment, human factor engineers develop the best possible design for products and systems, ranging from the handle of a toothbrush to the flight deck of the space shuttle.

The future holds promise for ergonomically designed system to provide optimum performance and takes advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of both its human and machine components.

The ergonomics will prevent workplace illness and accidents resulting from continuous repetition of the same motions. The injuries that may be caused will be exacerbated by awkward postures, such as bending or reaching.

Ergonomists will work to eliminate such health problems by designing workplaces, such as offices or assembly lines, with injury prevention in mind. They will position tools and machinery accessible without twisting, reaching, or bending; design adjustable workbenches, desks, and chairs to comfortably accommodate workers of many different sizes, preventing the need to continuously lean or overextend the arms. They will also determine and design safe workplace environmental conditions, such as correct temperature, lighting, noise, and ventilation to ensure that workers perform under optimal conditions.

Ergonomists will seek to increase worker efficiency and productivity when designing workspaces. They will place those pieces of equipment used most frequently in closest proximity to the worker and arrange systems in ways that are convenient and easy to use. Well-designed workspaces will thus ensure workers perform their jobs in optimal comfort, without experiencing unnecessary physical and mental fatigue that can slow work performance, reduce accuracy, or cause accidents.

They will design individual tools and equipment for use of workers, such as, curved computer keyboards to encourage typists to hold their wrists in a position that is less likely to cause carpal tunnel syndrome; to protect the eyes from incessant glare, ergonomically designed computer monitors will be equipped with glare reduction screens. Ergonomically designed chairs will distribute a person’s body weight evenly to avoid back and neck strain. These chairs adjusted to a user’s height will ensure that the feet rest flat on the ground. In factories and assembly lines, ergonomically designed knobs and levers positioned appropriately so as not to require reaching, and these knobs and levers also require minimal force to trip.

Some ergonomists will practice in the area of job design, thus helping employers assess both the individual tasks necessary to perform a particular job and the skills needed to accomplish each task. By grouping like tasks and skills, jobs will be redesigned to maximize efficiency. An office telephone receptionist, for example, will perform a number of other tasks as varied as filing, sorting mail, and bookkeeping. Grouping these responsibilities, will all be performed in the vicinity of the office telephone system, making use of the receptionist’s time when there are no telephone calls. Ergonomists will help employers evaluate different ways of organizing workdays to increase worker productivity, ensuring that workers have adequate breaks and rest periods, as well as a well-defined set of tasks.

The work of cognitive ergonomists will be particularly evident in public transportation buildings, such as airports or train stations. These buildings are often large, complex, and difficult to navigate. Cognitive ergonomists will develop clear, easy-to-understand navigation aids, such as signs and maps, to help people find their way to their gate as simply and efficiently as possible. Color-coded subway maps, for example, will help subway riders navigate with relative ease through a complicated maze of interconnected underground tunnels.

Ergonomic design will make consumer products safer, easier to use, and more reliable. In many manufacturing industries, ergonomists will work with designers to develop products that fit the bodies and meet the expectations of the people who use them. An ergonomically designed toothbrush, for example, will have a broad handle for easy grip, bent neck for easier access to back teeth, and a bristle head shaped for better tooth surface contact. The shaving razor has already undergone a similar design revolution.

Ergonomics will become increasingly concerned with future marketing. This is the discipline of modeling future social and lifestyle trends in order to inform design and marketing strategy to deliver an offer and a brand image that will appeal to users over the medium to long term.

It is often suggested that the great increase of automatic controls for practical purposes will lead to widespread unemployment. This is unlikely, except perhaps as a temporary phenomenon. The future will still have a vast demand for people to improve, monitor and especially to maintain the necessary instruments. Also there will be an increasing tendency towards shorter working hours and a great increase of leisure time activities, which will absorb a larger and larger amount of employment.

We have got to go all out to learn how to balance reduction of conditions irrelevant to efficiency against increase of efficiency range. Most operatives will be combining two or more jobs, which have generally been regarded as different, and as requiring different performers. This future is in the neighborhood. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Talking about Genomics

Molecular biology has long held out the promise of transforming medicine from a matter of serendipity to a rational pursuit grounded in a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of life. Molecular biology has begun to infiltrate the practice of medicine; genomics will hasten the advance. Within 50 years, we expect comprehensive genomics-based health care to be the norm. We will understand the molecular foundation of diseases, be able to prevent them in many cases and design accurate, individualized therapies for illnesses.

In the next decade, genetic tests will routinely predict individual susceptibility to disease. When the genome is completely open to us, such studies will reveal the roles of genes that individually contribute weakly to diseases but interact with other genes and with environmental influences, like diet, infection and prenatal exposures to affect health.

By 2010 to 2020, gene therapy should also become a common treatment, at least for a small set of conditions. Within 20 years, novel drugs will be available that derive from a detailed molecular understanding of common illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure. The drugs will be designer therapies that target molecules logically and are therefore potent without significant side effects. Drugs like those for cancer will routinely be matched to a patient’s likely response, as predicted by molecular fingerprinting. Diagnoses of many conditions will be much more thorough and specific than now. For example, a patient who learns that he has high cholesterol will also know which genes are responsible, what effect the high cholesterol is likely to have, and what diet and pharmacologic measures will work best for him.

By 2050, many potential diseases will be cured at the molecular level before they arise, though large inequities worldwide in access to these advances will continue to stir tensions. When people become sick, gene therapies and drug therapies will home in on individual genes, as they exist in individual people, making for precise and customized medical treatment. The average life span will reach 90 to 95 years, and a detailed understanding of human aging genes will spur efforts to expand the maximum span of human life.

In Future, the complete DNA sequencing of more and more organisms, including humans, will revolutionize biology and medicine. It is predicted that genomics will answer many important questions, such as how organisms evolved, whether synthetic life will ever be possible, and how to treat a wide range of medical disorders.

If, within a few years, scientists can expect to amass a tidy directory of the gene products—RNA as well as proteins—essential for life, they may well be able to make a new organism from scratch by stringing DNA bases together into an invented genome coding for invented products. If this invented genome crafts a cell around itself and the cell reproduces reliably, the exercise would be the ultimate proof that we understand the basic mechanisms of life.

In the last 50 years, a single gene or a single protein often dominated a biologist’s research. In the next 50 years, researchers will shift to studying integrated functions among many genes, the web of interactions among gene pathways, and how outside influences affect the whole system.

Within 50 years, with all genes identified and all possible cellular interactions and reactions charted, pharmacologists are developing a drug or toxicologists trying to predict whether a substance is poisonous may well turn to computer models of cells to answer their questions.

Being able to model a single cell will be impressive, but to fully understand the life forms we are most familiar with, we’ll plainly have to consider additional levels of complexity. We will have to consider how genes and their products behave in place and time—that is, in different parts of the body and in a body that changes over a lifespan.

So far, developmental biologists have striven to find signals that are universally important in establishing an animal's body plan, the arrangement of its limbs and organs. In time, they will also describe the variations—in gene sequence, perhaps in gene regulation—that generate the striking diversity of forms among different species. By comparing species, we’ll learn how genetic circuits have been modified to carry out distinct programs, so that almost equivalent networks of genes fashion, for example, small furry legs in mice and arms with opposable digits in humans.

In 50 years, we will fill in many details about the history of life, though we may still not understand how the first self-replicating organism came about; we will learn when and how – by inventing, adopting, or adapting genes – various lineages acquired, for example, new sets of biochemical reactions and different body plans. The gene-based perspective of life will have taken hold so deeply among scientists that the basic unit they consider will likely no longer be an organism or a species, but a gene. They will chart which genes have traveled together for how long in which genomes.

Scientists will also address the question that has dogged people since Darwin’s day: What makes us human? What distinguishes us as a species? Undoubtedly, many other questions will arise over the next 50 years. As in any fertile scientific field, the data will fuel new hypotheses. Paradoxically, as it grows in importance, genomics may not even be a common concept in 50 years, as it radiates into many other fields and ultimately becomes absorbed as part of the infrastructure of all biomedicine.

Genetic information and technology will afford great opportunities to improve health and alleviate suffering. But any powerful technology comes with risks, and the more powerful the technology, the greater the risks. In the case of genetics, people of ill will today use genetic arguments to try to justify bigoted views about different racial and ethnic groups. How we will come to terms with the explosion of genetic information remains an open question. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Film Production in coming days

In a world of flickering screens, large and small, filmmakers will work inside and outside of the studios and television networks, bring in diverse voices to televisions, cinemas, and computers alike, tell stories ruled not by profit but by art, by conviction, and by people’s need to connect to one another and the world around them. In the same world ignoramus filmmakers of Pakistan—clueless about the modern technologies, the art and science of filmmaking together with the oddments of globalization—will drag on poking holes in technological jumps and thus demonstrating that they were powerless to draw breath in the 21st Century.

Future’s digital technology will transform the way the media is made and consumed. The moment is not far off when critical decisions will be made, in the halls of government and in the marketplace, about how digital technology will be used to create, copy, distribute, and present media in the years to come.

As digital opportunities and challenges change our landscape, one question will stand out: how will the public—and the diversity that filmmakers bring to it—benefit? Filmmakers will depend on a healthy public media ecosystem, and our shared future tied to policy that nurture or weaken that system. They will take creative risks, speak their minds, and champion the many voices that matter most but seldom heard.

For future’s media makers, the essence of digital is this: everything we do to create content can be turned into a series of ones and zeros that our naked eyes can’t decode into pictures and sounds, but that a variety of devices can.

This new digital code will change media making forever. This code will transform the four most important processes for media makers—production, replication, distribution, and presentation.

To produce media, future’s artist will be able to point a digital video camera at a tall mustachioed man scratching his ear and capture this moving image, represented inside the camera as a unique piece of digital code. The artist will manipulate that code to remove the man’s mustache and add a large and hungry dinosaur bearing down behind him (using CGI technology). The artist will then combine this new code with other pieces of code to shape a complex story of images, sound and music (using editing systems such as Avid or Final Cut Pro).

The result will be an enormous sequence of finished code: a movie, say, that will be copied an unlimited number of times, with each copy an exact replica of the original. Any of these copies will then be transmitted through the air, across wires or via a physical container (such as a CD), depending on how large the code is and how much capacity the transmitter has read at the receiving end in many different ways by a wide variety of devices—a computer, a projector, a television, a phone—that translate the code into images and sound.

The possibilities with digital technology will be nearly infinite. The realities will be much more confined. The question with digital will not be what might happen, but what filmmakers actually do with it.

The dizzying pace of digital change will, in fact, catch us all somewhat by surprise. Businesses and lawmakers will scramble to catch up with the changes wrought by this technological explosion. New business models and new policies will be built to deal with it.

Major economic stakeholders in tomorrow’s burgeoning media economy will all work hard to shape the outcome in their own interests. And much will be at stake for them all, because digital technology will challenge the traditional business models that media companies have relied on to profit financially from their work.

But they will not be the only stakeholders. There will also be public—all of us as citizens and parents and children, artists and consumers. When the dust will settle on the new digital economy and society, how will the public have benefited? Will the media policies actually promote freedom of speech and diversity of expression? Will they foster the many facets of the cultures that make up a nation?

The good news is that digital technology will make production cheaper, faster, and more manageable. It will also open up avenues for distribution, such as the Internet and, to a lesser extent, cable and satellite, while drastically reducing the costs of replicating copies of an filmmaker’s work.

And that’s also the bad news. Filmmakers will face challenges in three big areas: ownership, distribution, and funding. Specifically: (1) Ownership: How will filmmakers protect their work from unauthorized use and copying, while still having access to others’ work for legitimate use in their own creations? (2) Distribution: Will new distribution networks give filmmakers more or less access to audiences—and how will that distribution affect production? (3) Public support: How will the public resources now provided—such as spectrum allotments and public funding—change in the digital era?

In the days and age of democracy, stakeholders will assert their interests in the coming changes. Broadcasters, movie studios, technology companies, and other players will try to figure out how to make sure that the answers to these questions benefit them. They will take their issues to legislators, to the courts, and to consumers. The result will be policy.

Filmmakers will also be stakeholders—as well as artists and business people with a job to do. Digitization won’t change everything. The old standbys of good storytelling, the battles over concentrated ownership, the resistance to change by those with power, and conflicts over public support will repeat themselves in the digital age.

Digital will change the ecosystem that the filmmakers live in. The vision that filmmakers bring will be important, as stakeholders thrash out the terms under which they use digital code. Cut and dried, this future has already made an entrance in Hollywood. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Up and coming Fashion

Fashion is really just starting to interact with the world of information technology (IT). Today there are already ‘cool’ gadgets and wearables, but in future, we will see whole new domains where fashion can play a key role. The biggest of these is the duality of appearance - where we may appear one way in the physical world, and have a whole range of digital appearances in the augmented reality and virtual environment worlds. This will lead to many people designing for themselves.

Along the way, electronics will continue to shrink in size to a point where it no longer significantly need affect the form of the object that carries it. Form and function will be separated at least as far IT is concerned.

Fashion is often at the forefront of technology usage. Many new materials and technologies are used in textiles and accessories when they are still too expensive or primitive for other uses. Technology development is accelerating quickly and shows no sign of slowing down in the foreseeable future, so fashion designers will have a lot of fun over the coming years. The next decades will see the gradual convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive technologies. Typical results will be materials with different tensile, thermal and optical properties, integration of IT into fabrics, and linkage of our bodies to the network for medical and communication purposes, via clothing or skin-wearables.

Thin, flexible displays are becoming available already, and we will undoubtedly see them built into clothing with increasing frequency. This will be both for body adornment and functional uses.

A wide range of electronic devices can already be built into clothes and this will increase. New fabrics are already being developed to provide power generation - using solar power, electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical means.

Storage technology is improving extremely quickly and we may expect massive amounts of storage to be available in very small volumes, so that people can take all their files, music and videos with them - integrated invisibly into small devices or clothes.

Haptics technology (the technology of enabling the remote sensation of touch) will also become available as part of clothes. A variety of electro-responsive materials exists already, albeit sometimes in primitive forms (for example, muscles wires, polymer muscles, shape memory alloys, etc), and these will progress quickly into routine fabric technologies.

Clothes will be part of the ambient intelligent environment we will inhabit in a few years’ time. There will be myriads of chips all around us - in building infrastructure, furniture, gadgets, clothes, foods, packaging, even on our skin and inside some peoples’ bodies (for medical and security purposes).

Chips in the environment or on our person will offer processing, storage, sensing identity and communications. The resulting smart environment will know who we are, what we are doing, where we are, to the nearest few millimeters, and all about us, subject only to our own preferences and privacy or security laws.

Chips will be physically very small, so have it in their power to be hidden anywhere, and any functionality that won’t physically fit into a device can be accessed via the smart environment. This means that fashion designers can add a wide range of functions to something without needing to change its design.

Various sensors on and about our person will monitor our behaviors and physical characteristics, and respond accordingly. One of the areas that computers may want to go in with other people’s digital bubbles is that of personality characteristics. An ego badge would alert us to other people that are likely to be of interest to us so that our social and sex lives would improve. A related device is the active contact lens, which uses tiny lasers and micro-mirrors built into a contact lens with circuitry and power supply, to raster scan a high resolution image onto our retinas. This is called direct retinal projection.

Any computer generated images could be superimposed on what we see in the real world. We would be able to modify how we see other people so when you meet people you could change how they look. Come hell or high water, beauty will quite literally inhere in the eye of the beholder.

We will not be limited by the properties of physical materials, or have to have the same appearance for everyone looking at us, nor even have the same appearance all day. Our appearance can be different to each viewer and different each time they look at us. So fashion designers will need to design virtual fashions, and these will need to be dynamic and context sensitive. Through and through, dual appearance dictates dual fashion.

One of the accessories that we might need in such a world is the digital ‘aura generator’. This will act as a sort of wireless web server that radiates our digital appearance into the nearby space. It is almost like the hologram generators that science fiction fans will recognize from Red Dwarf. The main difference is that it will make us look different to different people.

With increasing assistance expected from AI in all walks of life, we should expect that people would often want to design their own clothes - making most of the artistic decisions and letting the computer sort out the technical stuff.

As local production becomes more widespread, self-design may become very popular indeed. How much this affects the market for professional fashion designers will thus depend on how much relative skill and creativity they really have, as well as on how much effort people can be bothered to invest in designing themselves.

These developments bring us to the heart of how fashion will change. Such future is near at hand when we will have to worry about both our digital appearance as well as our physical looks. And on that account indeed our digital appearances can be infinitely diverse. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

English in 21st Century

The future of today’s global language, English, is more complex and less certain. It will retain its excellence in the 21st century and is unlikely to be displaced as the world’s most important language. Its usage is an intricate system in which many factors act together in ways that are not easily foreseeable. Just the same, recent progress in shaping the behavior of complex systems, like weather, could help us understand the patterns that may emerge in the globalization of English.

From north and south and east and west, there are more than 1,400 million people living in countries where English has official status. One out of five of the world’s population speaks English at some level of competence. Demand from the other four fifths is bumping up. English is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science technology, diplomacy, sport, international competitions, advertising and pop music.

Almost all those who are professionally associated with the English language worldwide acknowledge that there is no imminent danger to the English language, or to its global attractiveness.

Yet with the emergence of new world order and global transition, the next 20 years or so will be a critical time for the English language and for those who hang upon it. The structures of usage and public attitudes to English will have long-term consequences for its future.

The future of English will be more complex, more demanding of understanding and more challenging for the position of native-speaking countries than has up till now been thought.

The global popularity of English is in no immediate danger, but that it would be unwise to see in the mind’s eye that its predominant position as a world language will not be threatened in some world regions for use as the economic, demographic and political shape of the world as it transforms.

The future of English will however be a complex and plural one. The language will grow in usage and variety; yet simultaneously diminish in relative global importance. To put it in economic terms, the size of the global market for the English language may increase in absolute terms, but its market share will probably decline.

Additional reasons that have resulted the reduced fervor threaten trends of increased usage of English. The growing adoption of English as a second language, where it takes on local forms, is leading to disintegration and multiplicity. No longer will be the case, if it ever was, that English unifies all who speak it.

The future is going to be a bilingual one, in which a growing ratio of the world’s population will be eloquent speakers of more than one language. There is little to help us understand what will happen to English when the majority of the people and institutions who use it do so as a second language.

Native speakers may feel that the language belongs to them, but it will actually be those who speak English as a second language or foreign language who will determine its world future—the fact that 19th century futurologists failed to foresee that the growth in second and foreign language speakers would be a much more important phenomenon.

As the number of people using English grows, second language speakers will be drawn towards the inner circle of first language speakers and foreign language speakers to the outer circle of second language speakers. All through this status migration, attitudes and needs in respect of the language will change; the English language will diversify and other countries will emerge to compete with the older, native-speaking countries in both the English language-teaching industry and in the global market for cultural resources and intellectual property in English.

The future and globalization symbolizes a significant discontinuity with previous periods. The Internet and related information technologies, for example, may upset the traditional patterns of communication upon which institutional and national cultures have been put together.

In four key sectors, the present dominance of English can be expected to give way to a wider mix of languages: first, the global audio-visual market and especially satellite TV; second, the Internet and computer-based communications including language related and document handling software; third, technology transfer and associated processes in economic globalization; fourth, foreign language learning especially in developing countries where growing regional trade may make other languages of growing economic magnitude.

Computer technology has changed the way people act together both locally and globally. At the present we are at the core of personal and group communications. The Internet will remain the flotilla leader of Global English and it will be a quite different language from what it is today. Nevertheless, there seems to be developing a new, global English-speaking market in the knowledge-intensive industries.

At this point in time there is a significant increase in the numbers of people learning and using English, but a closer examination of driving forces suggests that the long term growth of the learning of English is less secure than it appears to be.

Overtly and covertly, the use of English language is most ubiquitous amongst professional groups and middle class families are most likely to embrace English as the language of the home.

By and by, no single language will occupy the monopolistic position in the 21st century, which English has—almost—achieved by the end of the 20th century. As communications infrastructure ameliorates and relative costs plunge, more telephone conversations around the world will be held in languages other than English.

English must keep up a range of corporate roles and identities and must be usable for both team working and service interactions. Not surprisingly, demands on an employee’s competence in English will rise.

The ELT industry needs to respond to changing international social values—to ensure that the reputation of English language is enhanced rather than diminished. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

On Cancer

Permit me to embark on this 7-minute journey with Shakespeare’s muse:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.

Mr. President, crusaders, doctors and wonderful audience:
Another British poet and painter William Blake mentioned:

In seedtime learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

I must appreciate Dr. Phillip rather than poking holes in his selection of wintertime for a forum on a serious public health issue. Perhaps he enjoys wintertime in launching a crusade against the enemy of humankind.

Implicitly and explicitly, under his leadership the team of philanthropists, oncologists, and physicians deserve a thunderous applause on organizing this event with epic cause successfully. Thus and so, we must proffer bouquets on their endeavor for congregating a moot of professionals, researchers and clinical oncologists. Good show, Dr Phillip!

I am privileged for speaking to this wonderful audience not as a guest of honor but being the part of the majestic cause that is behind this Congress.

Ladies and gentlemen, cancer is a killer disease with more than 100 versions. These versions are characterized by excessive, uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells, which invade and destroy other tissues. It develops in almost any organ or tissue of the body, but certain types of cancer are more lethal than others. Cancer is growing cause of death everywhere. For reasons not well understood, cancer rates vary by gender, race, and geographic region. For instance, more males have cancer than females. Cancer rates also vary globally—residents of the United States, for example, are nearly three times as likely to develop cancer than are residents of Pakistan.

Cancer usually develops gradually over many years, the result of a complex mix of environmental, nutritional, behavioral, and hereditary factors. Scientists do not completely understand the causes of cancer, but they know that certain lifestyle choices can dramatically reduce the risk of developing most types of cancer. Not smoking, eating a healthy diet, and exercising moderately for at least 30 minutes each day reduce cancer risk by more than 60 percent.

The Greek physician Hippocrates first made the connection between disease and natural environmental factors in the 4th century BC. His treatise Airs, Waters, and Places described how diseases can result from way of life, climate, impure water, and other environmental factors. For the next 2000 years, it was the most widely used text on public health and epidemiology.

Epidemiologists and other public health officials attempt to break the chain of disease transmission by notifying people who may be at risk for contracting an infectious disease. While the participants may read technical papers, I must emphasize on the need for awareness campaigns for prevention. Behavioral Change Communication must be used in mass awareness.

People need to know that saturated fats from red meats and other animal products are linked with several cancers; high salt intake increases the risk of stomach cancer; adult obesity increases the risk for cancer of the uterus in women and also appears to increase the risk for cancers in the breast, colon, kidney, and gallbladder.

Cancer of the prostate gland is the most cancer among males. People should be made conscious about the need to consult a doctor when they notice unusual health symptoms, such as, changes in bowel or bladder habits, a sore that does not heal, unusual bleeding or discharge, thickening or a lump in the breast or any other part of the body, indigestion or difficulty swallowing, change in appearance of a wart or mole, or a nagging cough or hoarseness.

Scientists estimate that more than 60 percent of cancer deaths are preventable through lifestyle changes.

The society must be educated that lifestyle changes and consumption of such foods that have the potential to protect against cancer. I mean foods comprising broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, tomatoes, soy products, and foods high in vitamins A, C, and E. In addition, green and possibly black teas contain compounds that protect the body from carcinogens. These foods contain substances called antioxidants that block the action of free radicals. Other chemicals in fruits and vegetables are thought to block the cell growth promoting effects of steroid hormones, protecting against cancers of the breast and prostate.

Mr. President, I would specifically be interested to receive the set of papers, which are likely to be read by experts and scholars in subsequent technical sessions. Apart from filling myself with knowledge, I will use necessary data in dissemination.

I epilogue my statement with a Japanese proverb:
One kind word can warm three winter months.

Permit me to modify this proverb as:
One kind deed can gladden the whole winter and the year round and round.
While wishing success to the crusading spirit of this Congress, I thank you for listening.
May God bless you!
Asif J. Mir,
Organizational Transformation