I sit and wait
Does an angel contemplate my fate
And do they know
The places where we go when we're grey and old
Cause I've been told
That salvation lets their wings unfold
So when I'm lying in my bed
Thoughts running through my head
And I feel that love is dead
I'm loving angels instead

And through it all she offers me protection
A lot of love and affection
Whether I'm right or wrong
And down the waterfall wherever it may take me
I know that life won't break me
When I come to call she won't forsake me
I'm loving angels instead

--- Angels by Robbie Williams

I want to be someone's angel someday. And I want to see Robbie Williams in concert.

Back in the field

I'm back to fieldwork. I drove down to [teaching hospital] today in the afternoon. The drive was really nice with the warm sun, cool breeze, men speeding in red Audis, and 80s music blaring on the radio. They played a lot of George Michael and I'm unashamed to say that I sang along to "Father figure" and "Freedom 90". Oh how it reminded me of being in my early teens. Even though I was a teenager in the 90s, a lot of the 80s music hits came to India late and I grew up listening to them.

And then they played Thomas Dolby's "She blinded me with science" and it made my day. I see myself as the kind of girl he's talking about. Oh, the height of being dorky :P

Its poetry in motion
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony
But she blinded me with science....
And now she's making love to me
The spheres are in commotion
The elements in harmony
She blinded me with science
And hit me with technology

--Thomas Dolby

I can now hear the helicopters flying in patients to the ER. Though my body is tired, I do want to share in the excitement of the ER. Off I go.

Exercise

Throughout grad school I've made an attempt to do something new every semester. One semester I took up skating, the next running, then it was yoga, and dancing. But having started fieldwork last fall, I slowly gave up everything. I was either out of town at my field site or too tired from the travelling. Fieldwork is hard and what made it harder was not having a fixed schedule. I would just go to my field site, two hours away, whenever time and energy permitted. This made it hard to schedule yoga lessons or running during the week. I even tried to keep up with the running at my field site, but I slowly gave up as my fieldwork sucked away most of my energy.

For the past two months I've taken a lot of time off fieldwork to do some reading and writing and generally to focus my thoughts on my dissertation. This has left me with time to get back into some of the exercise. I've started running more regularly and have taken up racquetball of late. Racquetball is fun but it feels so good to be out there on the sidewalk running, hearing my breath, feeling the ringing in my ears and the pounding of my heart as it tries to keep up with my lungs, watching the world go by in a blur. So far I've refused to listen to music while running because its my one chance to be outdoors with nature, to listen to the sound of the wind in the trees and think. Yes, running is a great way to be alone with my thoughts and I don't want music to intrude. But I've been thinking of buying an ipod lately, and I might give running with music a try. Now if only I could keep up with yoga again.

Online presence

I haven't posted much in the last two months, partly because I was doing a lot of academic writing and didn't have the mental energy to write posts on top of that. I submitted my first journal paper yesterday, and inspite of the pain and tears involved in the writing process, I am feeling happy about achieving this.

Now to the topic of this post - individual online presence. I decided to join LinkedIn today and that got me thinking about what it means for individuals to have an online presence. Throughout college I used the Internet 'anonymously', in the sense that I did not join any social networking websites, did not have a web page, did not have a blog or leave comments on others' blogs, and was not part of forums or discussion boards. Starting grad school changed that as I realized that to be successful in grad school I needed an online identity. I needed to let others know who I was and what I did in order to connect with them. Most of my colleagues have web pages to showcase their work, blogs to talk about their ideas and life in general, profiles on various social networking sites to connect with friends, LinkedIn profiles to network with professionals, flickr accounts to share their photos and the list goes on.

But what does all this mean for those who are part of this Web 2.0 revolution of connectivity, personalization, social networking, multimedia etc.? More importantly, what does it mean for those who are NOT part of this? What about the millions of office workers in Calcutta who do not have an online presence? Or the people in war-ravaged parts of the world who are focused on obtaining a decent quality of life or an education and for whom this connectivity revolution doesn't figure in the larger scheme of life?

I know this goes back to the whole issue of the digital divide and what it means for some parts of the world like North America to be highly connected and some other parts of the world like Africa mostly disconnected from the Web. And even though I am priveleged enough to be residing currently in the connected part of the world, my roots prevent me from ignoring the rest of the world. I can't help but think about how trivial some of the issues that people in the US are obsessed with are (like should they buy the new iphone or not) as compared to those that some other parts of the world are grappling with (like how to fight AIDS in Africa or how to provide basic education in rural India).

Microsoft business ethics

I took a month off from blogging. Mom and dad visited me in the US for the first time. This was their first visit outside India and we all had a marvellous time. It felt great to arrange a vacation for them for the first time in my life and they loved every minute of it. I drove 2000 miles in the past month - partly because we visited a lot of places on the East coast and partly due to my tendency to get lost on US freeways. Now I'm back to work, with a vengeance. Lots of stuff to work on - its summer, the season of reasearch. (People in academia get most research done during the summer because there are no teaching/course obligations).

But, coming to the topic of my rant - Microsoft. I've never liked MS or their products particularly. In college, I used an IBM laptop and Windows because other technology was not widely available. When I started grad school I had the opportunity to start afresh, I could have chosen a MacBook or an iBook. But I rejected Macs for two reasons, the first one being a rather silly one and the second one slightly more legitimate. 1) I thought the learning curve for using a Mac would be steep and I didn't want to deal with it on top of all the other kinds of learning that starting grad school required of me. 2) I wasn't confident that all the software I would need to install for the next four years would be available for Macs. Most of my more experienced friends advised me to get a Mac, but I was not convinced.

So, in the fall of 2004, I spent $1700 (after a Univ discount) to buy an IBM laptop which originally costs $2100. And I've regretted that decision ever since. Within a year my laptop was attacked by many an Internet virus and I got the 'blue screen of death'. IE would throw up the nastiest of pop-up windows with half-naked women during school presentations. The fan stopped working a long time ago, so I get second-degree burns everytime I set my laptop on my bare thighs. The battery died in less than a year and so my laptop has to ALWAYS be plugged in. My Mac-loving friends couldn't help saying "I told you so".

Since I'm a poor grad student, I don't want to invest money into buying an iBook now. So i'm stuck with this laptop till I finish grad school atleast. However, I've come to accept that I made a wrong decision (as opposed to MS and/or IBM should design better products - classic case of Norman's users-blame-themselves-for-bad-design) and am trying to live with it.

Except when I read about Microsoft's bad business ethics. As if designing bad products and monopolyzing the market were not enough, Microsoft does not have a good business ethic. When I read articles like this one, it makes my blood boil. That is the time I am most ashamed to be a user of MS products.

Which makes me wonder about how MS employees feel about the lack of ethics? Do people think about the business ethics of potential employers? Does that influence their decision to join a firm or is it all about the money and benefits? I have friends who will never shop at Walmart because they are against how Walmart treats its employees. But do people take such stands when it directly affects their well-being? It is easy to not go to Walmart and go to Target or CVS instead for a bar of soap. But what about when one's livelihood is concerned? Would one decline a job offer from MS because their business ethics do not align with their values? I don't know what I would do. It would be too idealistic I guess to turn down a job offer from MS because I dislike their lack of ethics.

Women's empowerment

I haven't had the time to post much lately, mainly because this is the end of the semester and I'm trying to wrap up grading and other end-of-semester things. Also, I took a break from data collection this past week and caught up with life (aka bill-paying, cleaning, laundry etc.).

I came across this funny Onion article on how women are now empowered by everything a woman does.

Four hours of driving to and from the research site yesterday have left me extremely tired. Tomorrow is going to be all about meetings. I need to discuss a journal paper I'm writing with my adviser and I'm not in the frame of mind somehow to even think about it.

I found some of the following on a cool facebook group and the rest is my personal addition to the list:
"You know you're a grad student when..."
1. You sleep with your laptop next to you on the bed
2. You rate coffee shops based on the number of power outlets for your laptop
3. You check mail obsessively at 2:00am and feel disappointed that there are no new messages
4. You have spare clothes, a coffee maker, and food in the lab
5. You take a break from working on one project by working on another
6. You procrastinate by blogging or logging onto facebook
7. You consider power bar + coffee as a proper lunch/dinner
8. You need to drive your books over to the library at the end of the semester due to their sheer number
9. You use citations in everyday speech, as in "Snow White et al."
10. Free food is the high point of your day

How to sustain enthusiasm in grad school?

The answer is - work on multiple projects and collaborate with multiple and diverse people. Some of my current projects are:

1. Collaboration with 500-bed teaching hospital to collect disseration data on role of information and communication technologies in alleviating emergency department overcrowding.
2. Collaboration with the above hospital to understand patient flows and evaluate a new resource-based patient flow in their emergency department
3. Collaboration with faculty and graduate students in the Industrial Engineering department to simulate patient flows in the emergency department of above hospital.
4. Collaboration with the Intelligent Agent Laboratory to examine if agent-based architectures can be deployed on mobile platforms to help collaboration among pre-hospital and emergency department staff during mass casualty incidents.
5. Collaboration with faculty and grad students at the College of Education to understand how culture affects technology-career adoption among women in high school. (This project will involve collaboration with a high school in India).

I am one of those people who love to do multiple diverse things at the same time and I wish the above list were longer, but its been pretty hectic working on the these five projects. Project 5 is not related to my research interests but is the one that I am having the most fun with.