So I was hesitant to write this blog since it provides evidence of my geek-roots. But Kiwi’s have a tendency to alleviate the hesitation. When I took Distributed Systems at CMU one of the things that we learnt was transactional-integrity – i.e. maintaining the ACID properties for transactions. Where ACID is Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable. And one approach to do this for distributed transactions is to use two-phase commits (a little bilt too much to explain in this blog, for those of you who know what the heck I’m talking about, good for you. For others, it doesn’t really matter, because the geeky part is not the point).

I think I took transactional integrity a step too far. At the time I thought this is cool… I can apply this to everyday stuff. And so I became anal. Very anal. Everything had to be done the right way or else it wasn’t satisfactory. Every email I received, had to be answered, because it was a transaction and it had to be processed as per the laws of transactional-integrity. And because of it, even till today I not only answer every “directed” email addressed to me, but I also expect a response to every directed email I send out (directed as opposed to mass). And it’s not only email it’s everything. Every thing is a transaction. It must be “closed out” in order for it to be complete and to get taken off the stack.

But sometimes the stack gets overwhelming. There is too much going on. Too many open issues. Too many transactions. Too many things that I just want to get away from them for a little bit. But if I get away I’m afraid I’ll leave things undone — leave some transaction un-committed. And they will get lost in the ether of my desire to let them go. In a way this craxy thing of applying transactional logic to every day things is good since it makes sure that things get done. On the other hand it drives me nuts to not be able to let go of stuff every once in a while.

Lately, I’ve been consciously trying to not get myself involved so deeply so as to claim ownership. Because if I do get that deeply involved, the control-freak in me surfaces in order to try and make sure that everything gets done the way it is supposed to be done and no less.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure no one knows what the heck I’m talkinging about here so I may as well shut the hell up.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made it a point to attend several lectures at Carnegie Mellon by the various guest speakers and faculty candidates that come in to present their research. Today, I intended a talk which talked in which the researcher was talking about using MRI data in order to try and better understand the functioning of language comprehension. Now, before I go any further, please note that I am not in any way trying to knock the research this person was doing. I do not know much at all about it and half of the time had to revert to my newly found principle of “translate the jargon” in order to develop a better understanding of the matter being discussed, since I lacked the benefit of basic familiarity with both the medical and the psychological lingo.

If I understood correctly, basically the research was focused on looking at the amount of bloodflow in certain parts of the brain in order to try and hypothesize what parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions (I am fairly confident that that lay explanation would probably hold its own). Now, I am definitely no expert in neurology or cognitive science, nor do I have much background in psychology. So what I’m about to propose may be downright stupid and possibly offensive to people who do work in the field, in which case, I do not intend any such offence.

I have a fundamental problem with how cognitive scientists and psychologists for that matter are trying to understand the working of the human mind and understand human behavior. It seems to me that most psychology experiments targeted at understanding the functioning of the human mind are using an approach in which the chances of success are so incredibly slim that they would be bordering on being futile (I take part of this back later on in this passage). Let me explain, but giving an example. Lets say I give you a box. This box happens to be a computer (only because it’s the closest thing I can think of to a human brain). Now, lets assume for a moment that you have absolutely no idea about what bits and bytes are, you do not know what a transistor is, you do not know what a logic circuit is, what a chip is. Now, can you, by simply designing experiments in order to exercise this box, determine how it is built. Can you really understand how a computer works – RAM (short-term memory), storage or ROM (long term memory), Arithmetic Logic Unit, caches, buses, and all that stuff that we understand today, because we built is ground up…. is it really possible to design experiments such that we can understand these fundamental building blocks of a computer? So then why should we expect that we can understand the workings of the human mind by conducting experiments on how people react to certain stimuli?

I’m not comfortable with how well I’ve been able to communicate my point above. So let me try and state it again… I feel that the probability of being able to understand the functioning of the human mind based on the type of “experiments” conducting in cognitive psychology today is infinitesimal. And therefore I’m questioning whether it is worthwhile.

Of course, I will also be the first to admit that I do not have any better proposal for trying to solve such problems. If you are given a black box, and you can interact with the black box, or cut it open in order to reverse engineer it — well, then the scientists of today are doing all the different approaches I can think off of the top of my head. So I don’t see a better way. But I think what I’m slowly leaning towards convincing myself is that I may prefer the approach of cutting open the black box and trying to break it down to its fundamental components and work up from there to try and understanding how the mind works as opposed to trying to devise experiments which just work with the black box. But, I guess there is some value in both and so doing both makes sense.

Now generally, whenever I come up with crazy arguments like this one, I like to discuss it with other people who have the capacity both for rational thought and for entertaining wild ideas and critiqing them objectively. I don’t get that opportunity often enough, but this time I was fortunate that in the midst of my composing this blog, I got a call from a good friend who completed his Ph.D. from Caltech. (And yeah, I’ll make his head grow a little bigger by acknowledging that he is amongst one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with). And so he gave me a reasoning which I can accept. Basically that though he agrees that the approach being used today is probably not going to lead to any direct answers, all we are doing in research today is making minor advancements. With each lifetime of effort, we gain an epsilon of knowledge, where hopefully epsilon is greater than zero.

So I guess now that I’ve had the chance to dicuss this at length with my friend, I’m not as agitated about it as I was when I first started.

So we established today that I’m certifiably nuts, because at dinner earlier today with two of my apparently single friends when we were talking about asking people out I made the analogy that asking a girl out is like raising money from VCs (and yes, I have had a little bit of experience with both in order to qualify me to make this analogy, fortunately or unfortunately, my track record with VCs is a little better!).

Of course that comment caught the attention of my friends and so they asked why. At dinner I had only a few points. But now at 3:00 AM on the morning, I have a full Letterman-style Top 10 List. And no, I didn’t get this from anywhere, this is a sneaker original! Here goes….

Sneaker‘s Top 10 Reasons Why Girls Are Like VCs

      OR

Sneaker‘s Top 10 Reasons Why VCs Are Like Girls

10. There are always more of us and less of them.

09. Before you try approaching one, you must eat your pride and bury your ego six feet under.

08. You must have a reference for a proper introduction, cold-calls generally do not get a good response.

07. They don’t look at you if someone else isn’t already looking at you.

06. They expect you to do all the work while they just sit there and look pretty.

05. Even when you do approach them, they always play hard to get.

04. You buy the drinks.

03. You never get a straight answer, they always string you along, even when they know there is no chance in hell.

02. When one says yes, all of them say yes.

01. Asking a girl out or trying to raising money from a VC both suck.

P.S. If you decide to forward this around, please send this link with it, since I reserve the right to re-prioritize and update this list! 🙂

For years and years now we’ve heard how the Medical profession has always been slow in adopting new technologies. That was the fundamental premise behind the failed attempts of compnies like Healtheon/WebMD and a gazillion other startups that were out to revolutionize the medical profession by introducing better proceses and technologies. But they all seemed to have failed or fizzled out. Some brave souls may still be at it, but it doesn’t look like any oerson or company will be able to bring about the sea-change that was envisioned.

Why? My theory is simple. Any such change would involve a fundamental change in behavior of the practitioners of the profession. The doctors of today are used to writing prescriptions on little pieces of paper in handwritings that can only be deciphered by pharmacists (and sometimes not even them) and faxing medical records back and forth with absolutely no centralized repository. Heck, my own doctors probably can’t keep their records straight without requesting multiple copies from each other! All the companies that endeavored to alleviate these problems which plague the current medical system (mainly referring to the US here, the medical systems in other countries esp. India have more fundamental problems that would need to be addressed first!) failebecause they could not get buy-in from the current practitioners.

However, I’ve recently been observing several Pitt Med Students who frequent my neighborhood Starbucks haunt. And I realized last week that there is a change in the making. A change in how the new generation of students think and act. A change in how the new generation of med students are as toy-happy as the other geek on the street. Technology is innate to this generation. When these med students finish their residencies and begin to permeate the medical profession, the change that all the companies were trying to achieve will happen. It will happen not because any one or more companies became the agents for that change but more so at a grassroots level… where the doctor you will be seeing in 3-5 years of maybe 10 years from now will probably be more comfortable typing on a computer than writing on a pad of paper and more comfortable writing prescriptions in Graffiti (Palm) than in the cryptic undecipherable handwriting. It is then that all the new technologies that are out there will be ready for mass adoption. When the prescription/diagnosis goes over a wireless network directly to the pharmacy for fulfilment and directly into a centralized repository for building a comprehensive patient view. Heck we designed this stuff from a technology point of view five years ago when I was in grad school.

The technology is there, but it doesn’t hold the answer. The adoption will only happen when the people who need to adopt the new technologies are primed and ready… which will be soon. There is a revolution every ten years — because what we think is so cool and so new and amazing, comes to the next generation as a given. In my time, Instant Messaging is the cool thing. But for those in high school and college… it’s been around forever and it’s a normal means of communication.

And I know this is a very harsh way of putting it, but I’ll do so to drive the point home: Sometimes in order for something new to be accepted, those with the old ideas need to get out of the way first. The dinosaurs died for a reason.

I’ve been more and more inclined to return to the academia recently and as part of this endeavor while I await the edict of the powers that be to make that happen or not, I’ve been encouraging myself to participate in more academic discussions on various topics. So every once in a while I’ll pick up a book which would otherwise be considered esoteric or go attend a lecture at CMU (especially when they have guest speakers).

Recently as I was reading a book by Feynman, he touched on the topic of why academics (80/20 rule applies) always try to make everything sound a lot more complex than it really needs to be. Here is the example he used:



There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail or it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until I finally said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.

So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The invidivual member of the social community often received his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People Read.”

Now, I remember realizing this at some point when I was at CMU, but I also seem to have lost sight of it along the way. In fact my own blogs were at one point getting convoluted. But having read that again it reminded me of what really matters is the ability to get your point across – in a simple way. Sometimes it’s good to treat it kind of like a game. The academic lingo and jargon and big fancy words are all part of a code and if you can succeed in deciphering that code, you have conquered the secret to actually understanding what you need to know!

One of the talks I attended recently was like this. It was on a subject that I had little to no prior knowledge about. But if I would take the words that were being used and apply first principles to them, it made a little sense. Now, of course, the fact that I had to translate along the way made me a little slower on the uptake, but I probably learnt more from that exercise than a lot of people who didn’t go through that process.

Curious if this works for different subjects, so I’m just going to have to sneak my way into more lectures in different topics at CMU! 😉