Engineering quotes that I agree with...

“The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”
-- Elon Musk, CEO and chief product architect, Tesla Motors

“The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you’re an engineer that has given life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name on it.”
-- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc.

“So here we have pi squared, which an engineer would call 10.”
-- Frank King, cartoonist, creator of Gasoline Alley

“You go to a technology conference or an engineering conference, there are very few women there. At the same time, it’s a blessing in the fact that you do get noticed. People tend to remember you as the only woman in the room ‘who said that’ or the only woman in the room who was an engineer.”
-- Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems, former CTO of Motorola Inc.

“Let’s face it: Engineering companies in general have more men than women. Google has tried really hard to recruit women. On the other hand, we have a standard. Google tries to recruit the best engineers.”
-- Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president in charge of product management and engineering at Google

Source: got these from many others in the following link.

Few more:
"I do not know one millionth part of one percent about anything"
-- Thomas Edison

I do not know one millionth part of one percent about anything - Thomas Edison - See more at: http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/team-isaac-/82832#sthash.dgvEZBq8.dpuf

I do not know one millionth part of one percent about anything - Thomas Edison - See more at: http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/team-isaac-/82832#sthash.dgvEZBq8.dpuf

I do not know one millionth part of one percent about anything - Thomas Edison - See more at: http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/team-isaac-/82832#sthash.dgvEZBq8.dpuf

Jo soc Calalañ :D

Today is an historic day of elections in Catalonia. It is not the famous independence referendum, but I feel it is the time to speak up. For each side. Independentist (secessionist) have taken advantage of the crisis to get a lot of supporters. To me, it is a classical example of opportunism while proposing the wrong solution to the problem, while real solutions are urgently needed.

My problem is not with the feelings of anybody. Everybody can feel from wherever and even change those feelings during life. I start having a problem when people thinks that it is better for Catalonia, from the economic point of view. That I don't buy (surely not short/medium term), and specially when the new government would be made of the same people that drove Catalonia to this situation in the first place. Yes, the rest of Spain wasted their money, but did you guys checked what we did with ours in Catalonia???

Still, this could simply be an economical discussion, which is fine. My real problem is that the secessionist voice involves, besides bending reality, a speech of superiority and look down on other people. This smells to stuff that I simply don't like.

Below couple of post I placed in La Vanguardia, a nationalist newspaper, probably the biggest newspaper in Catalonia:

Basically, I think the different governments in Spain and its regions have proven to suck at it, so, it may be an exaggeration, but Germans may do a better job at it... Or at least strong auditing from outside.

Well, maybe not imaginary, but you understand me ;)

Peace!

PS.: By the way, if you want to know what is all this about, probably one of the most accurate articles on the topic would be this one from The economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21567085-stabilising-spains-finances-without-tearing-its-social-fabric-apart-being-made-harder

On abortion

Note: I wrote this before the election. I finally never went to vote...

====


So, I am ready to vote. I feel I would vote Obama because some of the things that Romney said I can't just agree to (like military spending can't be reduced, his healthcare policies,...). There are likely more things that Romney said that I disagree to, than that Obama said. Yeah, maybe I should be looking at what I agree, not to what I disagree :). But in one particular topic that I can't just ignore, abortion, both actually agree that morally is wrong. So, the difference is in what they do about it (one would put laws against while the other wouldn't).
http://2012.candidate-comparison.org/?compare=Romney&vs=Obama&on=Abortion

Somehow then, I started researching the topic, read posts, arguments, etc.. pro and against abortion. Not a single topic on pro-choice made the cut (we could review them here but that's probably for a different post), and end-up on the page of Ron Paul (who I wouldn't necessary agree on other topics) but who I think expressed my arguments with the exact words I would use:
"In the 1960s when abortion was still illegal, I witnessed, as an OB/GYN resident, the abortion of a fetus that weighed approximately 2 pounds. It was placed in a bucket, crying and struggling to breathe, and the medical personnel pretended not to notice. Soon the crying stopped. This harrowing event forced me to think more seriously about this important issue. That same day in the OB suite, an early delivery occurred and the infant boy was only slightly larger than the one that was just aborted. But in this room everybody did everything conceivable to save this child's life. My conclusion that day was that we were overstepping the bounds of morality by picking and choosing who should live and who should die. There was no consistent moral basis to the value of life under these circumstances. Some people believe that being pro-choice is being on the side of freedom. I've never understood how killing a human being, albeit a small one in a special place, is portrayed as a precious right."

See http://www.issues2000.org/tx/Ron_Paul_Abortion.htm

I believe that one day we will see the 40M abortions performed in US since Roe V. Wade in 1970 (and of course, all others in the rest of the world), like we see today slavery or many other horrible things humans defended, allowed, promote, or simply choose to ignore. This is not a post against those women that performed an abortion, but against a society that didn't do everything they can (including helping and respecting those moms) to protect that baby. I can't vote somebody who wouldn't put a stop to it, so, I can only vote blank :(. And just to be less negative, my deepest respect and kudos to those single moms out there.

PS.: Just so we are clear, I would agree with the argument that prohibition is not the "magic" solution to it, and that many other policies that governments also implement to reduce the number of abortions are more effective, but we can't just say "it's ok".

Crowdfunding

I was just thinking of ways to have the money that goes into treatments go to the pockets of those who really created those treatments. The day to day researchers everywhere. It goes to the pharma sales folks. To the doctor. To the advertiser. Etc. Till it trickles down to few $$ on the pocket of the researchers. It is also well known that many of the funding non-profit collecting organizations take a good chunk of the money they collect to pay for their overhead. I am not going back now and checking this data, but if I remember right, the CEO of the ACS (American Cancer Society) gets paid about $1M. So, one way I thought was if scientists directly asked for money to the public to pay for their research. That would also give a chance to people outside the status quo (young researchers, etc...). But what could they give in exchange, though, of that money? A thought was information on the topic. The researcher is an expert on that topic, so, how about he contributed part time to a blog/a web/etc... on that topic? Or even more targeted. How about he answered emails from the donors? Anyhow, the following post talks about this topic. Not on the return to the funders, but on the way to select/attract funding:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/startup-science/

Which mentions:
http://www.petridish.org/
http://www.sciflies.org/
http://myprojects.cancerresearchuk.org/  This is specially interesting and focus on cancer.
http://scifund.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.rockethub.com/

Still a lot to be done but it is a beginning.

PS.: For more entrepreneurial kind of projects, check www.kickstarter.com

Google Health RIP

Google Health, a portal from Google to keep track of your health records, sport activities and anything that could be related one way or another to your health, is going to be disconnected at the end of this year, after 3 years of service.

This is very symptomatic. Truth is that I never even looked at it. I wonder how others like Microsoft Health Vault (4 years old) are doing but my guess is that not very good and this link seems to think the same:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20080403-75/microsoft-offers-transfer-tool-to-google-health-users/

They try to point to issues with privacy or hospitals not adopting it... Others say that Google simply couldn't make money out of a service with so much privacy constraints. But to me, this is just one more proof of our behavior  as humans about health. It is something that we don't care about till we lose it. Maybe we are even program to forget about it because we don't want to be obsessed either about the idea that we are not immortal. We want to enjoy life without worry about those things. Of course, I am talking in general, but taking care of our health is something that is seen as "we need to do", not as "we love to do". A warning to many of those "solutions" where people is pouring resources to develop...

What is next in humanity evolution

When describing the evolution of a system, probably we should start by describing what we mean for evolution, but that would probably open a whole post by itself. So, let's assume that we all understand for evolution the same and can agree to a quantitative measure of it (yeah sure...). This post is about looking at the slope of the evolution and the factors propelling it.

Initially, in a simple system the mechanisms can be only simple, and in many cases are purely random. As such evolution takes quite a while. As the system evolves, new evolution mechanisms are created and with it, the evolution speed is increased. It is fair to wonder if those more efficient evolution mechanisms limit also the potential outcomes, versus a completely random mechanism, but that is probably a topic for just yet another post. In here, we are going to simply look at evolution of humanity from its origins and then wonder how we will evolve moving forward, trying to predict trends.

So, we all know what has happened till now. Till few thousand years ago, things were mostly random and as such, it took really a long time to get somewhere from an "intelligence" perspective (we are back to that other post on what is evolution...).

Then some form of minimum intelligence started showing up. Probably the main highlight of it would be the realization of thinking in our future. I.e., most primitive creatures can do very basic planning for the future (for instance, storing food). But humans took it a step further, developing a better feeling for that future. Survival (great engine) drove this. Humans started cultivating food instead of just picking it up (this one would think showed some thinking), etc... Again, we want to focus on what is next, although it is nice to sweep through the past :). Notice that the thinking of future, cultivating, etc... created better conditions to do more meaningful stuff, instead of going hunting every day. This accelerated effectively the rate of evolution.

Note: somewhere in here, the conscience of "death" kicked in. Again, survival instincts driving evolution.


Considering the conscience of the future, another thing that probably created an extra step was the use of currency. I.e., collect money to use in the future. And with it, specialization and roles become more and more apparent. Humans shifted from general individuals (almost like bacterias, but yes, biofilm guys, don't jump on me... :) ) to cells on a body with a distinctive role. One can't avoid to wonder if, like in cells, humans are also dispensable for the good of a bigger entity (humanity). Just one more topic for a  post... :)

So, we have humans getting specialized, and as such, they are able to improve the things that they build. Build them better and better, get more money for them. Probably association was intrinsic already, so, we won't count companies, etc... as an evolutive step. At this moment, the speed of evolution is accelerated through specialization. Still, the roles that each individual develops are mostly shaped by environmental factors, mostly related to rewards. I.e., individuals will choose to work on something that feels can pay their bills in their future. Still today is like that. (Feels that this is a post for socialism, but wasn't my intention).

So, at that moment evolution comes from the cooperation, communication between few co-located individuals. Information takes years to move from one place to the other and trigger new needs, new inventions, etc... 1+1 happens slowly. The drivers still the same (survival, greed...). Notice that the drivers don't really change all this time, and we wonder if they should to fuel faster evolution (another topic).

Note on the 1+1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&feature=related

Then the unfold of communications happened and a new slope to evolution happened. First radio, then TV, cell phones and now Internet. All of them setting a new slope on that curve. And we finally arrive to the topic of this post: what is next in evolution.

Notice that evolution all this time has been based on a human putting 1 and 1 together to create a new thing. A Eureka moment in one person, fostered usually by the collaboration of many. I can see a bifurcation in front of us. Or one would say, a parallel path:

1. From one side, a faster way of communication between humans. Faster than the Internet. Or the Internet re-inforced.
2. A new level of evolution where humans are not the ones that need to do the 1 + 1.

The 2 have things in common. On the first, we could be thinking about cables connecting our brains, where we don't need to write or read to get information in and out to others, creating effectively another layer on top of our brains. But it will probably mean earlier a way to organize the knowledge of humanity, initially for ourselves to be able to find the information faster, but eventually for machines to be able to dig it and eventually relate it to each other and eventually understand it.

Zooming in the Internet itself evolution, we got:

1. A place where everybody was just dumping data.
2. A method to dig into that date (crowlers, we search...)
3. Socialization arrived, but still, digging for some piece of info is usually an individuals work. Lots of duplication going on. For instance, what is the best camera to buy with $100?
4. The current step is where individuals get together to sort the information out there. Some of this has started to happen already, with what people calls curation. The issue with this is that the driver is not that strong. Nevertheless, #2 driver was not that big either. A lot of info came from companies, but a lot for anonymous individuals. 

So, we can start outlining what mechanisms drive evolution: once survival is taken care, the next obvious one is enjoy the life we are surviving. That would explain why entertainment is so big and drive so much money. In fact is one of the biggest drivers of innovation today (cell phones, TVs, movies, social networks, video games...). There are always other "primitive" drivers (envy, fame...). Funny we call them "primitive" because animals actually don't have any of those... And then there are others that not sure where they would fall. In the primitive category probably we would put "curiosity". There is also the feeling of doing something good. One of the reasons I think humans are intrinsically good and they do want to contribute to a bigger good, teach, mentor, explain... Finally, there is an "uneasy" feeling, a "is that it?" that drives also change and with it, takes us from comfortable environments and pushes us to seek something different.

Anyhow, back to our Internet evolution, I wonder if these factors will be strong enough to drive the "curation" process. In the end, curation is, as implemented now (in systems like PearlTrees), just a compilation and partial sorting of information. Like a new way to create a web page on a topic. A collection of bookmarks.

I feel that the result of this will be a slow evolution of it because the drivers behind are weak. People will create those driven mostly by curiosity or the compilation of information on something they like. Maybe close to entertainment, but maybe too much work to call it entertainment (not so quick reward). It is more closer to "do something good for humanity", which may not drive all the energy into it.

I think that curation would be much more effective when driven by other factors, specially the two main ones, survival and entertainment. By the way, notice that in today's days, people is more driven by entertainment than survival. People don't mind spending $40 on cable every month, but will barely donate $20 a year in cancer research (although there are other factors in this that would probably change the conclusion... post post). So, where and how these two are going to kick in curation? I think the key drive is the opposite of entertainment. We hate to waste our time in boring tasks. Sorting information is not an appealing one although there is people that does it. We got to make this fun or at the very list, transparent to the user. We don't hate, nevertheless, so much, to look for information for a specific need. Which takes us to answering questions to our doubts being the key thing. Curation should probably be organized as answering questions. Forums, Wikis, blogs are all examples of this. We need a new level, where we get right to the answer we want, and if we don't know it, we can dig it and add it there. How much is that different from a forum. Probably the difference is that forums tend to answer straight questions, while here we are looking for more complex ones: I got this symptom, what is the cause? Is Obama doing a good job as president?

Once we got through this phase of evolution, which would expedite evolution because of "organizing the information out there, reducing waste of time and freeing resources to more meaningful tasks", we would then be positioned for the next level, where the information is compiled on a way that machines can interpret and eventually combine to create their own conclusions. The first is the target of new initiatives, like:


http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/IkeWiki

"Currently, IkeWiki can make use of some of the knowledge represented in RDFS and OWL schemas to display enhanced navigation tools. Furthermore, we implemented a sample "biology ontology" that automatically displays a taxonomy box for biological objects."

The publication http://sepublica.mywikipaper.org/drupal/node/7

http://sepublica.mywikipaper.org

Got to clean up this post but doesn't hurt to post it... I am specially interested on understanding drivers of evolution, as these will motivate humans to get together, collaborate and create a new level of intelligence, one where maybe, the entity that puts 1+1 is not anymore a single human, but something above. Now you probably know what I mean for cell0907. I am just a cell on that bigger system :)

About Khan Academy

Watching the presentation from Khan in TED, I couldn't avoid to have some kind of healthy "envy".

It was obvious that he wasn't the first on thinking or putting lectures on the Internet. He didn't invent that. But still, he became famous. I wish it was me. First because he got famous for something that I would have also enjoyed doing. Second, because he knows all that stuff that he talked about. He is or seems truly a renaissance man  and knows all that stuff that I don't know. And 3rd because maybe even now, if I thought of a similar idea, I wouldn't have the balls to go try. For instance, I think now that I would like to do the Spanish videos but I will not do anything about it. Or one in medical imaging...

The other thing to learn is how implementing and showing something can turn the things around much more than simply trying to convince somebody about it. If he would have tried to explain that this was a much better way da da da a lot of people would have criticize him as fool, "don't know what you are talking about", "careful with your kids going this path and wasting their time, could affect them forever"... but instead, he just did it and prove it right, and he wasn't even planning for it.

Finally, it is amazing to see how humanity keeps doing something over and over and think it's correct. How many education experts, teachers, educative reforms have gone through, few of them in the last 10 years when Internet was created, and nothing even close to this had been created. It is like if only a few are really "thinking" and the others are just doing/copying...

I have a lot of thoughts of how Internet will change things. I'll write a post on that soon and it is actually the base for the name of this blog (cell0907), but on the mean time, I'll just post this to show my healthy envy and congratulate Mr Khan for his work and dedication.

When do you know you are getting old?

Long time ago, I heard somebody say that "you know you are old when your idols are younger than you". Or maybe he was saying that you know you are not young :). Anyhow, I past that already some time ago and as such, I don't really like the definition... :)

Yesterday I heard Mario Conde (a famous guy in Spain) say that "you are old when your memories outnumber your illusions". Nice one.

PS.: (update 1/30/2011) I just found something very similar from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
"It is not truth that the people stop pursuing their dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams".