The best gift that we can give ourselves and our families is to live in good health until we leave this planet. As someone with several senior citizen relatives including some near and dear ones, i want to highlight some observations that i have collected about Elder Care.

To my utter shock and dismay, i find 2 broad patterns of behavior from doctors when it comes to treating senior citizens. And I am talking about doctors from reputed hospitals. One pattern is - doctors don’t seem to order basic diagnostic tests that are necessary, possibly under the pretext of saving money or because they have not kept themselves updated about the latest diagnostic tools and techniques. The other pattern is - doctors order surgical procedures aggressively when other treatment options are available.  Let me explain with some pertinent examples.

One of my senior citizen relatives recently started having blurred vision in one of the eyes. The doctor diagnosed it correctly as a damage to the retina due to high blood pressure  and left it at prescribing some medication for hypertension. Another doctor was consulted for a second opinion and that doctor immediately ordered an angiogram and it showed that there were some blocks in the arteries in the heart.  Armed with this information, consulted another opthalmologist, who decided to order an Eye Angiogram. It showed the areas that are damaged in the retina precisely.  I didn’t know such a test was available and i was impressed by the doctor who ordered it. With the results from both the Eye Angiogram and the Heart Angiogram, sufficient information was available to create a proper treatment plan. Why didn’t the first doctor order these tests?

In another instance, we took a senior citizen relative, who was complaining of a painful inflammation in the anal tract, to a reputed hospital. Several specialists got involved and they recommended an emergency surgery to fix the problem. We then took a second opinion from another doctor who simply gave some medication and the inflammation dissappeared in a few days.  I shudder to think what complications could have arisen if the surgery had been done.

There are many such examples i have noted which led me to the conclusion that there are serious issues with elder care in this country. My advice to elders, please try to understand what health condition you have and ask your doctor to explain the diagnosis and the course of treatment. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you don’t get convincing answers, go to another doctor.  Do some research on the Internet about the illness and be armed with information so that you can have a meaningful dialogue with your doctor.  Your health is too important to be left to the experts.

Although, it is easy to blame the doctors for these problems, i find that many elders have abysmal awareness about health issues. Many even hold outdated views such as:

- “In my family, there is no history of XYZ illness, so i will never get it”.
- “Oh! I am 70 years old, i am expected to have these problems, right?”

Everyone will agree that early detection of illnesses is critically important in effective cures and in the case of elders, this is even more important.  Here are some basic tips I strongly recommend that all elders follow:

1. Be very aware of your body - how much time you sleep, how many times you pass stools, urine - the consistency, color etc of the stools, urine. Frequently monitor these to make sure there are no dramatic changes in either the frequency or the color/consistency etc.

2. Check your weight atleast once a week and note it down to identify any sudden deviations.

3. Check your blood pressure frequently

4. Once a year do a master health check that includes your eyesight. If that is expensive, talk to your doctor about ordering some basic tests that are inexpensive but help you monitor the critical indicators.

Next month, we will cover how to research health issues on the Internet. Stay tuned.

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I am game to holding people to a higher standard, especially those snarly ruthless politicians since they are coaxing and cajoling me to reach the highest office. Even I was shocked to find myself outside of the political realm and moving into another realm altogether. I could hear Rod Serling voiceover in the background - you unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You just entered the twilight zone of - Professional sports!

That’s right ladies and gentlemen - Professional sports! Today, it’s not as easy as throwing marbles or playing sticks, is it? It’s highly complicated and life consuming. We are talking about putting people on a pedestal, holding them accountable, and expecting them to dole out miracles everyday. Even Jesus Christ didn’t have this kind of pressure on him to perform miracles every day. And sports fans, oh we are ever so picky and downright hypocrites.

Hypocrite! Me, you say. Yeah! You and me both darling! Let’s look at some of the recent events that rocked the sports world. Sure, I exaggerate a little bit, but, you know me - what’s life without a little drama. Manny Ramirez, for those of you who don’t know him, is arguably the best right hand hitter in baseball, goes from Boston to LA and Boston fans hate him like he’s their evil Mother-in-law and cry foul. Should Sourav Ganguly be playing or sitting it out? Is he being selfish for wanting to play? Australian cricket team decides to travel to India, but not to Pakistan and Jones cries foul - they are doing it only for the money and not for security reasons. Finally, the outcry over IPL - players are selling their souls and doing it for the money. How can we lose our culture and do such a thing? What’s this country coming to?

Let’s look at the logic here. What’s wrong with playing for the money? We all do it, but only when we do it, we claim a noble goal (career growth, right opportunity - fill in the blank with your favorite cause here). The noble and not-for-profit messiah Jones himself did play for the money and continues to do so even today. Why else did he leave a trail of vomit at Chepauk like a scavenger hunt gone bad and continued to play?

It’s easy to critic Manny, Sourav, Australian team and players in the IPL, but, it’s downright hypocritical for you and me to question it and pretend that we don’t / won’t do the same. Let’s not kid ourselves. We’d jump ship too if someone offers 100% or 200% more money to do the same job, or pay 50% more than the next person for the same house. Not one of us will say, Oh no! I’ll only take half that money because I like charity. Of course, you are exempted if you are doing real charity work.

Let’s stop holding sports stars to a higher standard that we won’t hold ourselves to. They are, after all, human. And please, let’s stop pretending that it degrades our culture. Unless you are a Martian and you just landed here, you are no different than the next Joe Sport and it’s not detrimental to our culture any more than you switching houses.

What do you think? Are you a hypocrite or did you just land here?

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Just in case you didn’t get to see / hear the news in the past few months, it’s election year in the US. Hema and I are going to be voting for the first time and we are very excited. One of the best aspects of the US political process is the debates - where the average voter gets to see where the candidates stand and how they articulate their thoughts and ideas. We love the debates. In fact, we debate for hours together after watching the debates.

It’s no wonder then that after watching the VP debate, our conversation turned to Ms. Barracuda (Governor Palin for the rest of you elites). As recent poll numbers are showing, Gov. Palin’s support amongst women is dwindling and most women are starting to say that they wouldn’t vote for her. On the other hand, when we were sitting in the hall for oath taking, there was an African American to the right and left of me. Both of them have been in the country for over 30 years and this was the first time they wanted to become citizens, so they get the chance to put one of their own in the White House. In fact, analysts are predicting that there will be extraordinary turnouts of African Americans at the polls come November 2nd.

For the first time in the US history, an African American has the chance to become the president or a woman has the chance to become the Vice President. I wanted to understand why African Americans are feeling the maternal instinct of protecting one of their own, but, women are not feeling that same instinct in protecting Gov. Palin. No two segments of people have been more tortured, oppressed, denied their rights and treated as slaves than an African American or women. Yet, women who have been oppressed and sidelined since the hunter-gatherer days still won’t support one of their own, if only to elevate their collective condition, but an African American would and does. I find that very intriguing. Of course, I am over simplifying things by leaving out lot of nuances, but, you get the general idea.

I ask every one of the women that tells me they wouldn’t vote for Governor Palin, including my wife, why they wouldn’t. Most tell me that they are unable to identify themselves with the Governor and they can’t understand what she’s saying most of the times. Of course, their opinion of her collectively changed after the now infamous interviews that Governor Palin gave. The answer gets complicated when I ask them if they’d support her if she was eloquent and thoughtful and empathetic. Most of them are unable to point out why they wouldn’t support her even at that point.

Forget for a moment that a President and VP have nearly 3000 people to support them through key every day decisions and wouldn’t have to be great orators themselves - think of George W. Bush. Of all the virtues he had, public speaking wasn’t one of them. It can’t be that we value communication and inter-personal skills so high that it trumps our instincts to protect our own? If so, how did the independent women vote for W. Is gender instinct not as strong and clear-cut as racial instinct?

No matter which way we lean, at least at the outset, it looks as though women are able to overcome their gender-bias and no matter what gender you are, racial bias is much more difficult to overcome. What do you think?

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The last concept hack i did called the iPod SD became a popular post. Too bad, Apple never built the product

Yesterday, i came across this interview of Steve Wozniak (via Techmeme) where he mentions an iWatch.  I decided to daydream about the iWatch.

At a minimum the new concept should cure a disease of mine that has me embarrassed down to the bones - one that possibly afflicts most people that have reached a ripe old age like me I am walking around, someone comes around and says “Hi Sukumar, how are you doing” with such affection and familiarity, that it has me cringing - oh god! - i don’t remember the person’s name.

Wouldn’t it be cool, if i could have a camera, built-in to my spectacles, that would recognize the person and whisper the name of the person in my ears.

I knew that oakley had built mp3 sunglasses which gave me the hope to pursue this idea. I proceeded to look for sunglasses that had a camera built-in.

W00t! There is a whole range of spy cameras that are available that have cameras builtin to sunglasses and other sundry items. The only issue is that they all looked like the ones robocop would wear - not meant for humans

After some searching, i found one made by Brando that i thought i could wear with some alterations. I had to add a earbud headphone similar to the oakley so that i could hear what the sunglasses would eventually tell me. Then I wanted to strip out all the memory and other electronics needed from the sunglasses and leave only the bare essentials needed for the camera to work. That way i figured i could convert the Brando into a sleeker one that normal humans would consider wearing

That meant that i have to store all the electronics somewhere else and use bluetooth to communicate with the sunglasses. Additionally i realized i needed some kind of platform to run my face recognition program that would analyze the picture and whisper into my ears. Similar to my decision on using my spectacles to host the camera, i wanted to use something else that i always have with me to host the back-end electronics for the camera - the wristwatch.

After some Googling, i found this Hyundai wristwatch cell phone - it is a full fledged GSM cellphone+mp3 player+camera+bluetooth stuffed into a watch form factor. Conceptually i could take the camera lens and the mp3 speaker out and have it talk to the modified Brando sunglasses i described above.

The problem with these watchphones is that there are too many buttons making the user interface too clunky and complicated. I wanted something like the iPhone - a multi-touch based watch phone which had a superior user interface.

Dame luck smiled on me again. Yankodesign has published a concept phone called Cobalt that fit the bill perfectly - oozing OLED goodness. Yanko Design had it made like an old time pocket watch. I had to crop the picture to get the design that i wanted.

Drumroll please, here is our concept hack - the iWatch.

The spectacle piece is on the left and the watch piece is on the right. The watch is showing the time, temperature, a recent text/sms, the date/time, voicemail and email notifications.

If you are wondering where the camera is, i decided to give you another view of the iWatch.

The spectacle piece has the camera highlighted and the watch piece is showing the mp3 player.

With this on, i hope to recognize you when you come say hello Not just that, the iWatch can replace the mobile phone, digicam and mp3 player that i need to carry around.

Hope you liked the concept hack. How would you enhance this concept hack further?

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As Microsoft quickly found out to its chagrin, associating with Seinfeld in this day and age, may not be that fashionable. But hey, i am no Microsoft and I love Seinfeld. The inspiration for the post’s title comes from a super Seinfeld episode called the Soup Nazi.  In an earlier post, we covered how to build passion.  While passion goes a long way, we need some mechanism to build expertise in a certain area.

The Yoghurt Nazi

As I thought about this, I was struck by Priya Raju’s deeply formed opinion about Yoghurt (Curd). She looks at the texture, color, the level of sourness etc and only if it met her standards, she would consume it. I jocularly refer to her as the Yoghurt Nazi after the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld who has a zillion rules.  As for me, i have no taste in Yoghurt and would be okay with anything as long as it is yoghurt. However, i am very opinionated about which vegetable should be added to what kind of dish. I am the Food Nazi. My grandfather was a gourmet and i would like to think i have inherited some of his genes. Whereas Priya Raju didn’t have such opinions about food except that it taste good. Interestingly, she would try a lot of different cuisines effortlessly and spot trends, i found myself, slightly more reluctant to try newer cuisines.

Sound of Music

Then i started to look at tastes in music and i found another interesting thing. While i had a strong opinion about what is good music, i generally tended to experiment and discover newer genres of music, I found Priya Raju had a greater ability to say which is great music and she didn’t experiment as much as I do with music.  I also observed similar patterns in taste for movies.

The Taste Spectrum

Then I had several discussions with Priya Raju and we realized that to have a good taste in something you need to have a certain degree of expertise and a certain degree of enthusiasm for it.  We then proceeded to categorize people and plotted the diagram above that i call the Taste Spectrum.  On the X axis expertise going from -5 to +5 and Y axis is enthusiasm going from -5 to +5.

1. Nazis - these are people who have high expertise and slightly less enthusiasm than the trendspotters (see below). Expert critics, connoisseurs, gourmets would belong here.
2. Trendspotters - these have slightly less expertise compared to Nazis but have a higher degree of enthusiasm compared to them so they try more new stuff and may be the first ones to spot new trends.
3. Normal - these have medium level of expertise and medium level of enthusiasm.  If you take music as an example, many people would be in this category - everyone likes music for the most part.
4. Indifferent - these have zero expertise and zero enthusiasm. They simply don’t care about the stuff.
5. Rigid - these have some medium level of expertise but their enthusiasm is medium negative.  They will hold onto what they have tried and liked and won’t try new things that easily.
6. Bad Taste - these have a great level of enthusiasm but medium negative expertise. They may enthusiastically choose the wrong things.
7. Finicky - these have both medium negative expertise and medium negative enthusiasm. They don’t have expertise to discern and won’t try new things as well.
8. Haters - they have poor expertise and poor enthusiasm. they simply hate the stuff.

The Taste Zones

Once we plotted the spectrum, we could see 3 broad zones emerging

1. the love zone - Normal, Trendspotters and Nazi. They really like the stuff and this group as a collective has the greatest level of enthusiasm and expertise - these are the talented boys/gals.
2. the hate zone - finicky, haters. They have crossed over to the other side. the talent-free club.
3. The middle zone - indifferent, rigid, bad taste. They have potential to move to either side depending on how they develop their open-mindedness or their abilities.

Taste Translates

Overall, what we find is that, if we can develop our taste in one area, we can quite easily translate that into areas where our professional success may depend upon.  All of us belong in the love zone in atleast one thing - music, movies, yoghurt , food, travel. If we can develop that area and become a Nazi in that, we can then transfer that ability to other areas that matter in our professional lives.

Epilog

What do you all think? What are you a Nazi in?

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