SAST Wingees

Got tagged – 8 facts about me

Ok – Me too got tagged. I should’ve expected this earlier in blogosphere. So, here we go..

1. I used to be a passionate soccer player in school/college. Even to a degree during my early career days till I got my ligaments torn and the Dr advised to stop playing. I don’t seem to enjoy Cricket that much these days (Sorry Ganesh). I am beginning to enjoy Golfing – wish I could expense it.
2. I learned to bycycle only in late high school. Of course, within an year I migrated to an Enfield Bullet that still remains my favorite bike. I was the only owner of a Bullet in my workplace for almost an year – the security/admin guys knew me very well because of the same.
3. When I got married, had to buy a whole new set of chest/shelf’s since my room was overflowing with books. It still is, but my spouse does a better job of organizing all of them and give away quite a few.
4. One screensaver program I wrote in my college was still running in the computer lab about 8 years later. (I couldnt check if the TSR was still there)
5. Though Eco is one of my favorite writer, I havent managed to read his ‘Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language’ completely despite several attempts.
6. Used to be with a local trekking club in Chennai and have done the Anamudi and Mukurthi. Have also done the Longs Peak along with a handful of other 14ers in CO.
7. I have practiced(for a very short time) the traditional marshal arts of Kerala – Kalariapayattu – I still use some meditation techniques I learnt there which is very similar to Yoga.
8. I learnt Homeopathy on the side for a while and can still do some basic prescriptions. There you have it ! -Sibu

Sudoku and management

Of late, I have taken a liking to Sudoku. I spend at least 45 minutes a day playing the game on my cell phone. While playing the game and strategizing, I could not help but make an association between Sudoku and management. Just as in Sudoku, what you do in within your team has repercussions both horizontally and vertically in your organization.

Consider the center block to be the team that you manage in an enterprise. And let us assume that you are in middle management. Upper center block represents the management team that you report to and the lower center one represents the team that report to you. Just like the numbers in Sudoku need to align vertically and horizontally, you and your team need to ensure that enterprise strategy aligns up and down the management chain, and that members of your team work toward executing the strategy. Your team also needs to coordinate with peer teams and this would be the 2 other horizontal blocks in the center. Again, you need to make sure what you do aligns with what other teams do.

Each number in Sudoku belongs to a slot in the block, and similarly each member (number) in the team needs to know what their responsibility (slot) is. There are also others associations – such as the need to rethink strategy and move resources (numbers) around etc.

Of course, I had to google and see how many folks have made this connection and taken it beyond what I was thinking. This article in hindu discusses more about this correlation between sudoku and management. I also found this site that provides Sudoku style puzzles that uses PM knowledge areas instead of numbers.

Book review meme – Train your mind change your brain

Updated again July 7, 2007: Lakshmi has responded. please see below.

Updated: July 5, 2007 : Ramya has responded. please see below.

I have been meaning to review this book for a while now. Archana Raghuram’s tag gave me the impetus to write this up. The book in question is “Train your mind change your brain” by Sharon Begley, one of my favorite science columnists. Overall it is a great book and one that i really enjoyed – lots of insights. The main theme of the book is Neuroplasticity – ability of the brain to change. Check the negatives section, before you buy though. Positives & key insights: 1. Excellent writing, to be expected from Begley, I guess. Very well presented as well. 2. Begley uncovers evidence after evidence that overturns a long standing myth in the neuroscientific world that the  neurogenesis (birth of new neurons doesn’t occur).  Neurogenesis does happen aplenty in the hippocampus – considered to be the seat of learning and formation of new memories. 3. Another long standing myth in the neuroscientific world is that the brain has a fixed structure and does not change. Again, Begley presents reams of evidence to show how the brain reorganizes itself – for example, in blind people that read braille, the otherwise unused visual cortex takes over the  function of touch and enhances it to enable the reading of braille that requires sensitive finger tips. 4. How brain changes occur only when attention is paid to it using the example of research on monkeys that show how monkeys learn new skills when they paid attention and not otherwise. 5. Begley weighs in on the nature vs. nurture debate with 2 astonishing examples. First, a water flea that grows a helmet like structure when it detects the presence of predators and not otherwise (a case of phenotype switching which by itself is a fascinating topic, i will cover later). Second, rats showing a gene for stress handling turned on when they were raised by an attentive mother as opposed to an inattentive/neglectful mother. You can read this excellent article on nature vs. nurture which also covers the water flea helmet. 6. Begley also covers how in Buddhist monks who have extensive meditation experience, structural changes have occurred that allow them to be more compassionate and more focused, creative etc. Negatives/Points to Ponder: 1. There is a lot of references to Buddhism. In fact the foreword has been written by the Dalai Lama. Sometimes these references seem to cloud the objectivity of this book. Buddhism is a great religion no doubt but these constant references about how great a religion it is, could have been avoided. 2. There is an research experiment that is described in which volunteers blindfold themselves and within a few days of the experiment, changes in the visual cortex were observed showing how quickly the brain starts changing. There is also a related write up on how in people that went blind after the age of 14 the visual cortex reorganization did not take place because it seems the brain is still waiting for signals from the visual cortex and refuses to reorganize it. The question is, have we tried blindfolding these people who are already blind to see if now the brain would start reorganizing the visual cortex? Seems to be that if in fully visioned people, reorganizing happens so quickly, would it not happen in blind people as well? 3. Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus is conclusively proven per this book. Begley also says these new neurons seem to be getting incorporated into the functional circuits of the brain. It is not clear how this is happening, considering that neurons don’t move around? Forwarding the meme – i tag the following people and they are requested to write a review of one of their favorite books and forward the meme to 5 other people: 1. Lakshmi Nagarajan – the mother of Lil General. [Lakshmi has responded with a review of a timeless faiy tale Cinderella. Thanks Lakshmi]

2. Kesava – the man at Berkeley. 3. Madan Menon – who doesn’t want pens and pencils anymore. 4. Pandurang Nayak – maybe he will review a book from the Microsoft Press! 5. Ramya Sethuraman – the mosakutti. [Ramya responded to the tag. Thanks Ramya] References:
1. Check this site out for some key extracts from the book.

JP Morgan’s Summer Reading List 2007

JPMC has published its summer reading list for 2007. As a Neurophile, Daniel J. Levitin’s “This is your brain on music” sounds interesting. Need to read that one. We had covered their 2005 reading list a while ago.

Mirror, Mirror – What is the whitest of all?

By the way, we have completed three years on this blog.

Did you know that for Mother Nature, white is the hardest of all colors to produce? That’s because white is created only when all visible wavelengths are scattered in a certain way. There are some whites that are familiar like milk, teeth, snow etc.  But it is the Cyphochilus beetle that has. Produced the whitest substance – its own ultrathin shell. By ISO standards,  Cyphochilus measures 60 in whiteness and 65 in brightness. By contrast, human baby teeth scores 40 in whiteness  and a 53 in brightness. Pete Vukusic at the University of Exeter, in southwest England, has been researching this beetle and says that what is even more remarkable is how Cyphochilus achieves this feat in whiteness in a 5 micrometer thick shell. This is less than 1percent of the thickness,  typically needed to achieve the scattering required for generating comparable whiteness in synthetic materials. In what could be a coup for Biomemetics, One day Vukusic says we’ll be able to produce white LEDs that mimic Cyphochilus’s techniques. 

I was thinking about this thickness issue and I realized there are a quite a few things in nature that are quite thin and are white – grayed human hair 50-100 micrometers, a petal from a white bouganvillea plant – possibly less than a millimeter thick. Don’t know if these are technically in the white category.

Anyway, next time you see something white in color, remember how difficult it is for mother nature to produce it.  

<Via IEEE Spectrum June 2007 Issue>

Flashback:

We had covered a building in Zimbabwe that mimics the fascinating termite mounds.