Ambika K's Public Library

21 Nov 09

20 Nov 09

Audacity, Part 3: Funding Audacious Science - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers

"pursue a range of projects with different levels of risk and potential reward and different timetables" -KEEP SIDE PROJECTS.

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MedicalResearch audacious

You get hired for the big and bold ideas, but you don't get funded for those
You get hired for the big and bold ideas, but you don't get funded for those
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- What you publish is “the advertisement that you're providing to prospective students,” she says. If you aim to nudge your research into a bolder area but all you're publishing is the incremental, interim steps that are being funded, you will attract only students interested in incremental work, not bold ideas
- Once “you get hired at a place, the biggest expectation is not necessarily to make great discoveries but to get grant funding and to publish a lot of papers
- “If you start doing the boring stuff and you get all these little, minor reinforcements, like you get a grant, and you get tenure, and you get people patting you on the back and some paper gets accepted in this journal or that journal, you start losing sight of what's really driving the enterprise,” adds Vilayanur Ramachandran, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, San Diego. “I would never compromise on doing the exciting stuff, and the reason for that is it becomes habit. You get lulled into a false sense of security. You follow the crowd, and you become that.”
- If you want to get tenure, then you have to get grants–but is strong funding correlated with strong science? Not so much, say our sources, though it depends on the field. “It's a false impression that important discoveries necessarily need a lot of equipment and time and money. In fact, the opposite can be true,” Ramachandran argues. “If you've got a huge grant and 16 postdocs working under you, you become a lab manager. It stifles your creativity.”
- “What many of us do is, we get the funds for the boring stuff and then do the exciting stuff on the side,” Ramachandran says. “The great thing about NIH is, they don't mind [if you] spend about 10 or 20% of [grant money] on other exciting stuff as long as you tell them it's vaguely related. That's an easy, easy way to deal with that problem.”
- JHU neuroscientist Solomon Snyder doesn't write about new and exciting research directions in his grant applications. “I write about what we did that was exciting a couple of years ago and that was just published in the last year and say, 'Look, we discovered x, and we're going to do the boring follow-up of x.' ” When the money comes in, he works on what he wants to.
- “My advice is, if you're selling your wares, which is what you're doing when you're applying for a grant, you try to find out what the customer wants,” Snyder says. “You sell the customer what he wants. And then in real life, you do what you feel like doing.”
- Importantly, almost all of our sources put forward the concept of portfolio theory: Don't put all your eggs in a high-risk basket, they advise. Instead, pursue a range of projects with different levels of risk and potential reward and different timetables. Also pursue a range of funding sources; instead of relying on a single grant or source, spread the ideas and the applications around. Using strategies like these, you can establish a record of solid, if boring, productivity even as you pursue the big payoff.

19 Nov 09

Student BMJ: Cervical spondylotic myelopathy: arm stiffness and unsteady gait

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- Brisk reflexes

16 Nov 09

Overcoming Bias : Contrarian Excuses

www.overcomingbias.com/...contrarian-excuses.html - Preview

criticism

Honest contrarians who expect reasonable outsiders to give their contrarian view more than normal credence should point to strong outside indicators that correlate enough with contrarians tending more to be right.
higher aspirations
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- No fair assuming you are less biased just because you feel that way.
- shouldn’t matter who agrees or disagrees.
- There is usually some way to define “valid” critics so they are outnumbered by advocates
- If you want outsiders to believe you, then you don’t get to choose their rationality standard.

15 Nov 09

Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression
This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you're excluded, this has significant effects
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- Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control. "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively."

Predictably Irrational » Blog Archive » Sex, Shaving, and Bad Underwear

www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=677 - Preview

Procrastination

As I mention in Predictably Irrational, this predicament has to do with our inherent Jekyll-Hyde nature: We just aren’t the same person all the time. In our cold, dispassionate state, we stick to our long-term goals (I will lose ten pounds); but when we become emotionally aroused, our short-term wants take the helm (Oh but I am hungry, so I’ll have that slice of cake). And what’s worse, we consistently fail to realize just how differently we’ll act and feel once aroused.
In our cold, dispassionate state, we stick to our long-term goals (I will lose ten pounds); but when we become emotionally aroused, our short-term wants take the helm (Oh but I am hungry, so I’ll have that slice of cake). And what’s worse, we consistently fail to realize just how differently we’ll act and feel once aroused.
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- there’s a way around the problem: pre-commitments, or the preemptive actions we can take to keep ourselves in check.

the decadence - Writer's Block: Chemistry test

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marriage writing_seminar

limerence, which wikipedia defines as an "involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person".
recognizing that sometimes the most powerful attraction reveals itself over time, comes hand-in-hand with a deepening friendship. It might lack the sizzle and drama of limerence, but it also lacks the pain...and it just might go the distance.

14 Nov 09

Gary Hamel: Outrunning Change -- the CliffsNotes Version, Part II - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ

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entrepreneur starred

Disaggregate the organization
lack of intellectual diversity—since people within the same unit tend to think alike
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- counteracting the homogenizing effects of this groupthink is to break big units into little ones. Big units also tend to have more management layers—which makes it more difficult to get new ideas through the approval gauntlet. In addition, elephantine organizations tend to erode personal accountability
- Create real competition for resources
- A company can set aside a share of its capital budget for projects that are truly innovative. In this case, a legacy business that failed to come forward with enough breakthrough projects would have a big chunk of its resources reallocated to promising new initiatives. Top management should also relax the investment criteria for small, experimental projects. Like venture capitalists, they should analyze investment risk at the portfolio level, rather than project by project. Finally, executives must also create incentives for talent mobility. For example, a manager who takes on an internal entrepreneurial role, and helps to build a new business, should be more highly rewarded than one who opts for a relatively safe caretaker role in a long-established business.
- Multiply the sources of funding for new initiatives.
- The solution here isn’t an internal venture fund or incubator. That doubles the number of funding sources, but doesn’t go far enough. In a large company, there will be hundreds of people who have a discretionary budget of more than $100,000 per year. Imagine giving each of these individuals permission to invest 2 or 5% of their budget in any project that seems promising. Suddenly internal entrepreneurs would have dozens of “angel” investors they could tap for funding, and no longer could a single reactionary deep six a new idea
- Avoid irreversible commitments.
- Though the recession has battered luxury travel, the Toronto-based company has resisted the temptation to slash published room rates. Instead, it has offered travelers a fourth or fifth night for free. While cutting tariffs might help to fill hotel rooms in the short-run, it would undermine the company’s premium pricing over the long-term and, in consequence, its ability to provide the platinum service for which it’s famous.
- Invest in flexibility.
- In a world of fractured markets, fickle customers and whipsaw shifts in demand, any company that figures out a way to reduce its break-even point or accommodate greater variety in its product mix will gain a decisive advantage.
- Toyota’s ultimate goal: to be able to manufacture any of its products on any of its production lines, anywhere in the world—so it can instantly respond to shifts in customer demand and global economics. Now that’s flexibility.
- Think competencies and platforms
- To be adaptable, a company must decouple its fortunes from the fate of any particular market or product category. This requires a corporate self-definition that is elastic and extensible—one that is built around deep competencies and broad platforms rather than around specific products and services. Think about it: if Amazon had defined itself as an online bookseller, its growth would have stalled out long ago. Instead, Amazon defines itself as a platform for online retailing and as a platform for cloud computing. In a similar vein, if Apple had defined itself as a computer maker, rather than as a company that brings world class design skills and user engineering to digital devices, it would have never reinvented the music industry or transformed the mobile phone business. A final example: Gore & Associates has made money every year since its founding half-a-century ago—a testament to the company’s adaptability. Gore’s secret: it has no “core business.” It sees itself instead as a portfolio of chemistry-based competencies that can be exploited in dozens of markets.
- build adaptability into your company’s DNA.
- every day human beings all over the world rush out to embrace change—because they are seduced by an opportunity to do something big, exciting or noble. So if you want people to change ahead of the curve, you have to give them something worth changing for. You have to set in front of them some enticing challenge that draws them forward.
- But in most companies, there’s no glistening, Everest-like peak of purpose that draws people out of their comfy down sleeping bags, and up the slope of change and challenge—and that’s a problem; because in the absence of purpose, the only thing that will disrupt the status quo is pain.
- Standardization, specialization, hierarchy, goal alignment and control—these are great principles, but at the margin, they’re all toxic to adaptability. Changing this will require gene therapy: companies must complement their efficiency DNA with adaptability DNA. This means working hard to learn from the things in our world that have demonstrated their resilience over decades, centuries and eons, like biological systems, democracies, cities, and stock markets. Dig into these highly adaptable systems and you’ll discover the principles for building an adaptable company: Variety (you have to try a lot of new things), decentralization (you need to create mechanisms for bottom-up change), serendipity (you have to create more opportunities for unexpected encounters and unscripted conversations), and allocational flexibility (you have to make it easy for resources and ideas to find one other).
- Community, transparency, freedom, meritocracy, openness and collaboration—this is the fundamental ethos of the web. Within the beige precincts of corporate-dom, the values of control, discipline, accountability, reliability and predictability reign supreme. Twenty-first century organizations must amalgamate all of these values. Only then will they be able to deliver the goods day-after-day with penny-pinching efficiency while showing their heels to the winds of change.

Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code - Teach Yourself - Lifehacker

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programming

13 Nov 09

Butterflies and Wheels Article

identity-personal,collective.

www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php - Preview

identity

12 Nov 09

How India must face the Chinese threat : Rediff.com India News

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state India

For an enduring win against the heavy odds, the national goal should be to emerge as the single most dominant power in Asia by 2020.

This aim envisages an economically powerful India backed by extraordinary military capabilities and reach, and formation of potent international alliances that help defend multi-cultural democratic values under adverse conditions in Asia.
Instead of endlessly ceding strategic space as in the past 62 years, we must learn to fight at multiple levels, and secure and extend our influence in Asia through hard and soft power on land and sea.

Pursuit of this singular national goal will automatically force us to gear up the entire infrastructure, resources, policies and strategies towards the fulfillment of this endeavour.
40 percent area to the Maoists and ten percent on the borders to the insurgents.
It is vital that the State recaptures this space in the shortest possible time frame and establishes its authority up to the borders. Otherwise, India will be the next State after Pakistan to be consumed by civil war.
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- nfuse military talent by offering attractive terms and conditions to retired military personnel on fixed tenure and contract basis to take the battle effectively into the heartland of Maoists and the insurgents. They are fairly young, have military skills, are motivated, and understand combat in all its hues to take on the Maoists and the insurgents.
  
  Second, from the pool of retired military personnel, create military advisory cells in the home ministries of the states and at the Centre with adequate resources. Inter-link them with each other on a national grid to develop military appreciation of the situation on the ground and offer clear and decisive options.
- Fourth, the Indian Army can select and train a few officer cadets every year for the Indian Police Service at its Officer Training Academy in Chennai on the same tough pattern as the military officer cadets. This will rapidly induct precision of military thinking and sinews that the civil administration urgently requires to fulfill the task at hand.
- citizens are not allowed to settle and buy land in many areas of the Union. Such contradictions besides being illogical defy national integration, consolidation and fusion of the nation into one entity.
- demonstrated the gumption to use it when and where necessary in the past 62 years, if the foreign office had injected military spine into its policy making, and if the enemy knew that New Delhi would respond ruthlessly if threatened, with a clear message, 'Don't mess with us!' -- I am convinced that multiple wars would not have been imposed on India.

11 Nov 09

Disconnecting Distraction

internet addiction

www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html - Preview

Procrastination

So one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions.
But that's not as straightforward as it sounds, because there are
people working hard to distract you. Distraction is not a static
obstacle that you avoid like you might avoid a rock in the road.
Distraction seeks you out.
And technology is
continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things.
Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions,
new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.
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- When
  I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren't really a
  problem. It was when I'd finished one project and was deciding
  what to do next that they always bit me.
- The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need
  the Internet for some things. If you drink too much, you can solve
  that problem by stopping entirely. But you can't solve the problem
  of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the
  Internet entirely, as I'd done with previous time sinks.
- The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits
  is denial. So you have to make it so that you can't merely slip
  into doing the thing you're trying to avoid. It has to set off
  alarms.
- set up a separate computer for using the Internet.
- My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long
  as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. When
  I have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browse
  the web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, in
  my case at least, that it's hard to spend more than about an hour
  a day online.
- Your old bad habits now help you to work.
  You're used to sitting in front of that computer for hours at a
  time. But you can't browse the web or check email now. What are
  you going to do? You can't just sit there. So you start working.

Cities and Ambition

www.paulgraham.com/cities.html - Preview

living

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced
by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a
city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around
you cares about the same things you do.
Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city?
No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren't
the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is
a handful of talented colleagues.
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- You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit
  from it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones
  of your career. Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city.
  Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one.
- find peers and encouragement.
  You seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both.
- Unless you're sure what you want to do and where the leading center
  for it is, your best bet is probably to try living in several
  places when you're young.

Gizmoz / Home Page

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avatar

09 Nov 09

Tips for Buying Books and College Textbooks Online at the Cheapest Price

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books

Proteinuria: how to evaluate an important finding. — Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine

approach to a patient with proteinuria

www.ccjm.org/...535.full.pdf+html - Preview

med-algorithm

Is digoxin a drug of the past? — Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine

digoxin MOA diagram
digoxin blocks sodium-pot atpase pump & thus prevents removal of sodium ions from cell . this low ECF sodium inturn stops sodium-calcium exchanger to remove calcium from cell.

www.ccjm.org/...821.full.pdf+html - Preview

pharmacology

Ambika K's Public Library

ED Primer.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Audacity, Part 3: Funding Audacious Science - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers

Student BMJ: Cervical spondylotic myelopathy: arm stiffness and unsteady gait

Overcoming Bias : Contrarian Excuses

Neurologic Exam Videos and Descriptions: An Anatomical Approach

Newborn > Abnormal

Virtual Anaesthesia Textbook

Rejection massively reduces IQ - life - 15 March 2002 - New Scientist