Dakota Native Americans have a saying:
"When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount"
Many times governmental agencies and even corporations believe they can outsmart the Native Americans. Here are some of their "strategies"*:
1. Buy a stronger whip and use it more often.
2. Change riders. 
3. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
 4. Arrange to visit other countries, to learn how other cultures ride horses. 
5. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included. 
6. Hire outside contractors to try to ride the dead horse. 
7. Hire consultants specializing in riding dead horses.
8. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed. 
9. Provide extra funding and training to increase the dead horse performance. 
10. Perform a productivity study: would lighter riders improve the dead horse's performance. 
11. Declare that as the dead horse does not need to be fed, it is less costly, it carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy that live horses. 
12. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses. 
And last but not least: 
13. Promote the dead horse to a supervisor position. 

Since starting to work more and more with people who are in high-tech, web development and bio-tech industry, I have been pleasantly surprised to meet or find out about amazing people, many of them fellow Romanians. 

I am therefore happy to read about the Romanian computer scientist Matei Ciocirlie and his project, Robots for Humanity. Mr. Ciocirlie has built robots which help people with severe disabilities. And I like the name of the offices where he works Willow Garage and I love the way he summarizes the difficulty of programming robots: 

"The problem with computers is that they do what we tell them to, not what we want them to."


Please read the full article bellow. 

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22100290/chat-scientists-who-make-robots-help-disabled-people?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com