Back to the present

I try and I fail
Again and again
As I drag myself
Now from the grudges of the past
Then from the checklists of the future

When will I at last
Arrive at the present
To behold the beauty
That I've gotten used to

They say ignorance is bliss
I say knowing too well is a curse
Wrest yourself from its shackles
Lean into this very moment
With the curiosity of an empty cup

"One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?" ~Rachel Carson

What will you pass on?

As the river of time
Flows through your being
Pass on the largesse
To those downstream
And hold on to the gunk
For most will pass that too
Let the swirling currents
Break down the chunks of filth
Right from inside your hands
Until they’re rendered powerless
Your being will be clean again
Downstream will win, amen

Ratings are overrated: From Goodhart to good heart

The above word cloud was generated using this online tool:
https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

Goodhart's law states, "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric." The moment one single parameter gains undue importance, many other equally (if not more) important aspects are ignored or side-lined. Any reasonably complex system is bound to have a dashboard of quantitative specifications and qualitative features which together ascertain proper functioning. To a lazy or overwhelmed observer, metrics provide a poor shortcut to circumvent the tedious process of judging the efficacy of a system. 

Once the players know that the observer has this parochial approach, they can choose to game their proposition to optimize for the single metric under the microscope, at the cost of everything else that matters. In many cases, this single metric is not just maximized, but also bloated beyond its true value to make it look larger-than-life, to make it stand out in the crowd. Once a sufficient number of players get into this habit, everybody else is pulled in just to stay afloat. We thus end up in a mad and meaningless rat race, caught in a vicious circle of megalomaniacal portrayals of ourselves, our work, and our creations. This is what I refer to as CV-lie-zation: The act of bloating up our CV to make us look much better than we are.

The overarching phenomenon of metric fever corrupts a multitude of processes, from marketing and buying of products to screening and selection of candidates in job interviews. A lot of our current systems are about running after these metrics, typically one in each domain. Grades in school, rankings of universities, citations of researchers, impact factor of academic journals, GDP or growth rate of an economy, profits of a business, TRP ratings of a television channel, followers on social media, customer ratings on online business platforms. 

All of these metrics have their place in informing assessments, but are extremely limited when each of them becomes the prima donna in their own domain. Let's resist the urge to oversimplify and embrace putting in the time and effort required to make important decisions. Ask for and evaluate much more than the metric.

Every once in a while...
- Ask a student with "poor grades" what excites them at school,
- Explore the tenth page of your Google online search results,
- Study that old paper with one citation,
- Read that unknown book that's rated one star on Amazon,
- Go to a hidden restaurant that's rated one star,
- Watch a forgotten movie that's rated one star on IMDb,

Valuable discoveries are made at places that no one is looking at. There are pearls hidden in the 'one star'. 

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." ~Haruki Murakami

The Struggling Nobility

You've noble intentions
And yet you struggle
When you're on your own
With no one to impress
You're perhaps unsure
If your actions matter
If you matter
Is there a point?
Then it hits you
That this is precisely
The state of the human
In front of you
And all around you
We're all making things up
As we go along
Struggling nobility
Posturing as popes

The PhD Experience

Yesterday I gave a talk titled "The PhD Experience: Lessons learnt in five and half years." I narrated my personal experiences, thoughts and the lessons I learnt while pursuing a PhD at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science. 

The key question that I try to address is, "What are the processes and tasks that get the best out of a researcher?" Considering the researcher as a system, I discuss the inputs (information and experiences), outputs (hardware, software, knowledge) and processes of this system. The presentation is targeted primarily at present and prospective graduate students. However, anybody with an interest in learning and productivity might resonate with aspects of the talk.

Here's the video of the talk [video credits: Abhijit Kshirsagar]

The pdf file of my presentation is available here.

P.S. During the talk, I mentioned the importance of developing verb vocabulary.

The Thesis Whisperer has compiled a useful verb cheat sheet that is available here.

Energetic consequences of doing things slowly

From charging capacitors to filling up water tanks.

Electrical engineers are familiar with the idea that when you try to charge a capacitor from a step voltage source, only half of the energy coming from the source gets into the capacitor while the other half is dissipated in the circuit resistances and/or lost as radiated electromagnetic energy. In other words, the efficiency is only 50%. Does it always have to happen that way? How can we do better?

The answer lies in shaping the applied voltage. If the rate of rise of the applied voltage is of the order of the time-constant of the circuit, the efficiency is much better than 50%. If it is very slow compared to the time-constant of the circuit, the efficiency approaches 100%. This is proved analytically as well as validated by circuit simulation in this article.

Even if we did not shape the voltage, if the capacitor doesn't have a linear relation between charge and voltage (in other words, it is a non-linear capacitor), the efficiency can still be very different from 50%.

The case of a step current source feeding an inductor is also analogous to the above scenario and gives similar results.

Taking a step back and applying this concept to any other domain (other than electrical engineering) can give some interesting insights. Pumping water into an overhead tank through a pipe having finite resistance (due to friction) is an example of an effort source feeding a potential energy storage element much like a voltage source charging a capacitor. Hence, it will take lesser energy if we were to pump the water slowly (trickle pumping) over several hours rather than doing it fast (gushing water) in fifteen minutes flat!

On a philosophical note, a very nice example is that of a teacher teaching a student. If the teacher goes far too fast beyond the grasping speed of the student, much of the knowledge doesn’t get transferred to the student’s brain.

Importance of stupidity in research

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” –Albert Einstein

Every time I manage to take a small step forward in my research, a plethora of new doubts and questions crop up. There are so many of these questions that I don’t seem to have an answer for – at least in the present. My collected PhD notes seem to be littered with more questions than answers. They expose my ignorance and probably prove my stupidity. 

That turns out to be quite a normal and happy disposition for a researcher. Martin Schwartz discusses about the importance of stupidity in scientific research in a heartening article for researchers. “The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries”, he writes.

Questions are the very things that drive the researcher and his/her research. You can’t seek answers if you don’t have questions. Does that make questions more important than answers? Possibly yes. The amazing human brain can come up with endless questions. Answers for questions that have been answered before come from prior art and learned men/women. For the unanswered questions, answers could come from various sources – deep thought by the brain itself, nature, experiment and, in some cases, a computer. 

Quite interestingly, Pablo Picasso once said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." They are after-all garbage-in, garbage-out machines. If the questions are meaningless, so shall be the answers. So if you've been thoughtful enough to pose the right question, it's acceptable to feel stupid about not knowing the answer so long as you're still seeking. In other words, feeling stupid is okay, being stupid is not.