These past several weeks have been very busy and exciting. One of our sons got married and the other graduated. Everything went off well and we are extremely proud of our children and their accomplishments.
I am planning to keep the next few posts short 🙂
I was talking to a few of my colleagues about why is it that some of the projects take so long. I care a lot about efficiencies. Unfortunately efficiency works against culture, and it is extremely important to find the right balance between the two. Obviously, finding such a balance is non-trivial and takes a lot of practice and time. However, if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of this, more often than not, we will sacrifice efficiencies for the sake of cultural reasons. Which way to tilt the balance depends entirely on what we are trying to do.
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I spent most of the weekend catching up on the MOOC that I am registered for – The Secret of Life. We are learning about cloning and it is fascinating. The acceleration in discoveries and innovations has gotten up to a point where the “tools” of cloning are now available in a catalog – you can order the “cloning vectors” Â (“Plasmids“). We are also learning how the scientists have been unraveling the “secret of life”. It is mind boggling to hear how there is always an enzyme that assists a specific chemical reaction, which led the professor to quip that “there is always an app for that”! It is pretty amazing how all of these have to come together in particular sequence (no pun intended) and at particular times for everything to work just right. No wonder it took several million years to perfect this….
Whereas this course is teaching us the intricacies of formation of life, I was so sad to see many lives lost in the Philippines due to super typhoon Haiyan. I sure hope that they get the help they need and recover quickly. We were relieved to hear how technology, combined with the government machinery, helped evacuate 800,000 people from somewhat a smaller Typhoon that hit Eastern India a few weeks ago. I still vividly remember the 1964 cyclone (cyclone, hurricane, typhoon – they are all similar) Â that destroyed a bridge in South India (called the Pamban Palam) connecting an island called Dhanushkodi. My cousin was coming back to Sri Lanka after a trip to India around that time and it took us several days to know that he luckily skipped the train that submerged in the waters. Communication was pretty bad in those days!
I was talking to a colleague last week about a proposal to collaborate and we were both fretting how hard it has become to collaborate. We also were wondering aloud as to “what is collaboration?” One can look for its definition in dictionaries, but I think this definition in Wikipedia captures the essence well “Collaboration is working with each other to do a task and to achieve shared goals. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals”. The key is “working together”, “shared goals” and  “recursive process”. Too often, in our interest to collaborate, we lose sight of these key things.
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In case you have not heard yet, we released “Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator” on Wednesday morning. This is the brainchild of Professor Phillip Levine in Econ department. With just six fairly simple and straightforward questions, you get a good first approximation for the best estimate of what a student’s family is expected to pay to go to Wellesley. Though we don’t have a daughter, I could not resist the urge to check it out and as a parent of two sons (one is still a senior in College), I was pleasantly surprised to see the expected family contributions for various combination of the numbers. Of course, this is due to Wellesley’s generous Financial Aid policy. I strongly urge you to check this out.
This is a collaboration project that we can all be proud of. Yes, it had the usual pain points of meetings, revisions after revisions, and last minute integration of design and programming. But all these don’t matter, because, you forget all of that when you look at the final product, how much it is being used, all the press we have gotten so far and the feedback. Here are some viewpoints from the press:
There are many more, but these give you enough viewpoints.
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