chale chalo ki wo manzil abhii nahiin aaii by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem Subh-e-aazaadii written in August 1947. Very moving poetry, haunting words.  Its relevance is not limited to partition.  It still resonates...

Also, stumbled upon this article in The Economist on Pakistan.  Its sad ... wo manzil abhi nahi aayi ...

Human Mind is a Palimpsest

Human Mind is a palimpsest of memories, ideas, thoughts, dreams, observations and experiences... and our intelligence is a result of the superposition of all these.

Inspired from this passage from Nehru's book "The Discovery of India"

"...She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these had existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them. And they have gone to build up the complex mysterious personality of India..." From "The Discovery of India" by J. Nehru

The Idea Incubators.. Good Idea !!!

Reading NY Times article on The Idea Incubators or Proof-of-concept centers. It looks like a good idea as it is already effective in encouraging more and more researchers to get their product to the market. What I am not sure of is the long term consequences of the federal funding getting diverted towards commercialization oriented research. I hope that the funding for proof-of-concept centers is not coming at a cost of funding for fundamental scientific research.

Commercial product oriented research is already done in industry R & D. Besides many of the Universities have tech transfer dept to help researcher get their ideas to market. I am not sure if pumping more federal money in it will make a big difference. There is a chance that it might prove detrimental in the long run if it ends up discouraging researchers from working on challenging and more fundamental research problems.

May be I am looking at it from skewed view point (I blame it on my academic research background). It makes more sense when I think of federal funding for proof-of-concept centers as an effort from the government to help tech industry and thus economy at large and not University research.

The Velluvial Matix by Gawande...Complexity

I was reading Atul Gawande's article "The Velluvial Matrix" in The New Yorker... Complexity showed up...again...

As always he made some excellent observations and suggests that complexity is at the heart of the problem.

"... This is a deeper, more fundamental problem than we acknowledge. The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals......We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity....."

He suggests that the complexity is a result of knowledge explosion especially in science and technology but that's not the only source of complexity. Complexity also stems from the uncertainty. Let me explain this by using Gawande's example. He mentioned that there are more than 13600 diagnoses and its too much for the human mind. If there were 13600 well understood diagnoses with clear and independent symptoms then the problem would have been tractable. Granted that it would still be beyond one mind's capacity. But with the advanced technology one does not need to know/remember everything. Tools like WebMD can be used to supplement the human intelligence in better and faster decision making.

I think its not only the numbers but also the associated uncertainty in the process of diagnosis. Diagnosis is like a tricky puzzle with missing pieces. Many a times doctors do not have enough information to make proper diagnosis. This makes the decision making a difficult process and dent the confidence of a doctor. This uncertainty is a big part of the problem as it compels the doctors to recommend lot more tests to be on safer side and there by costing both time and money and making entire system more costly.