Who won in the 2013 US Presidential Election?

Of course, we all know that President Obama was reelected to the 2013 White house with a 303-206 majority in electoral votes last week. But, the real win is for two important constituencies:

1. Education
2. Economy (Middle class)

Education. The advent of China and India as potential economic forces in the world economy needs to be taken note of. The 21st century belongs to a properly educated workforce. Not merely in overall education emphasizing liberal arts, etc., but one that provides proper grounding in technology too. President Obama's passion towards this cause is unmistakable. Did you see such passion in the GOP camp?

Economy (The middle class). The backbone of any economy is a vibrant middle class. Particularly when the entire world is getting adjusted to a different 'economic center of gravity' than just the 'West', with both the US and the Western Europe in economic struggle, it takes some proactive

Choice of Commencement Speakers.

WISHING ALL GRADUATES EVERYWHERE

The choice of a commencement speaker in American Universities is based quite frequently on worldly accomplishments, rather than being based solely on formal, university-centric, accomplishments. It is as it should be: Even the purpose of formal education is to assist the graduates in helping the world along anyway.

Years ago, we heard Steve Jobs giving a moving commencement speech for Stanford students in 2005. The latest example in 2012: Nipun Mehta, Founder Of Service Space, Delivers Inspiring Graduation Speech To Students At The University Of Pennsylvania. Neither of these have earned PhDs, but both have exhibited a lot of unconventional thinking.

A Review of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

In this book, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, hammers home how and why certain individuals have succeeded enormously, i.e., are outliers, by leading the reader from the obvious observations to the more non-obvious conclusions:

"It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Outliers are those who have been given opportunities -- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."

"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success — the unfortunate birth dates and happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all."

After chronicling the lives of many successful people, and making some interesting observations along the way, Gladwell concludes that success is not completely inherent to an individual's IQ and other genetic factors, but is influenced rather heavily by circumstantial factors as well.

The book is written in a story-like style, makes for captivating reading, and is full of very insightful comments, some of which are given below.

Excerpts from the book.

Characteristic	Page	Excerpt
Hard work	39	"... once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it ..."
Practice	40	"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything", writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin ... And, what is ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice."
Practice	42	"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
Accidental presence	64	"If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who would be in a best position to take advantage of it? ... Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955."
Intelligence	101	"... general intelligence and practical intelligence are 'orthogonal' ..."
Parenting	104	"[sociologist Annette] Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style 'concerted cultivation'. ... Poor parents tend to follow ... a strategy of 'accomplishment of natural growth'. ... But, in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. ... The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to constantly shifting set of experiences."
Parenting	107	"... Lareau describes a visit to the doctor by Alex Williams, a nine-year-old ... and his mother... Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is seen as special and as a person worthy of adult attention and interest. These are key characteristics of concerted cultivation. Alex is not showing off during his checkup. He is behaving much as he does with his parents — he reasons, negotiates, and jokes with equal ease."
Human memory	229	"... Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. ..."
Schooling	252	"The KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States."
Who are the Outliers?	267	"It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our behalf. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities -- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."
Book's lesson	268	"The lesson here is very simple. ... We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think that outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at Bill Gates and marvel ... But that's the wrong lesson. ... If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success — the unfortunate birth dates and happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all."

In summary, the insight in this book is something every parent would do well to keep in mind, as a child is being reared into adulthood.

Prospect for Biotechnology Graduates, 2011.

Recently, someone asked me what the prospects would be for biotechnology graduates after a bachelor's degree and after a graduate degree. Naturally, answering the request would require some researching, and this blog post is the result. To begin with, we need to distinguish between two terms¹ [Click on the hyperlinks to see definition on the dictionary's web page]:

1. Biotechnology. n. the manipulation (as through genetic engineering) of living organisms or their components to produce useful usually commercial products (as pest resistant crops, new bacterial strains, or novel pharmaceuticals); also : any of various applications of biological science used in such manipulation.
2. Bioengineering, Biomedical engineering. n. 1: biological or medical application of engineering principles or engineering equipment —called also biomedical engineering 2 : the application of biological techniques (as genetic recombination) to create modified versions of organisms (as crops); especially : genetic engineering

It is not important whether the foregoing definitions are universally accepted, but we will use these definitions in the rest of this blog post.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects the job market for [US] engineers in 2018 at 1,750,300 and, for biomedical engineers, at 27,600.² This number, to my mind, seems awfully small for a total engineering population of 1,750,300.

BLS' View of Bioengineering and Biotechnology

	Bioengineers	Biotechnologists
Alternate terminology	Biomedical engineers	Biological scientists
Employment in 2008	16,000	91,300
Employment in 2018	27,600	110,500

US News and World Report - Best Graduate Schools

When you search for the word 'biotechnology' on the US News and World Report's Best Graduate Schools web site, you are led to Best Biomedical and Bioengineering Programs! In other words, the definitions given earlier are not applied by US News & World Report. The top 10 best engineering schools in biomedical and bioengineering programs support a total of 20,974 graduate students in March 2011.

Google Search for Graduate Assistantships

If you click on the image below, you will be taken to a Google Search browser window with the search words — "(biotechnology OR bioengineering) graduate assistantships" — already filled in.

As an example, the Department of Biology at Northeastern University provides graduate assistantships worth $28,252.50/year, along with remission of tuition for full-time graduate students.

Sample Salaries from a Job Site

The job site Simply Hired compiles average salaries of different types of jobs that it promotes. While this may not be a good measure of absolute salaries, it can give a good sense of relative values of the salaries.

Type of Job	Salary/year3
Software engineer	$72,000
Bioinformatics engineer	$71,000
Biotechnologist	$65,000
Medical Doctor	$59,000

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¹from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

²The BLS is remarkably silent about software engineers, and projects 'other', presumably including the software types, at 195,400 in 2018.

³As of 1 July 2011.

What Makes a Good Teacher?

Today, President Obama announced his initiative to recruit 10,000 more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers in the next two years.

That'll set you thinking: What makes a good teacher? Of course, teachers are necessary to guide the students to a particular learning goal, be it learning an algebra, a calculus, a quantum mechanics, how to program a computer, etc. However, in reaching these various goals, a student will need to successfully negotiate suitable, intermediate, learning milestones. Thus, an effective teacher will be able to define, and guide students through, these intermediate milestones too.

Therefore, once a learning goal is established, a teacher will have to define suitable, intermediate, learning milestones in reaching that goal, so that students can be helped. At a macro level, this is seen clearly in university curricula where a certain course cannot be taken by a student without his/her getting a passing grade in a prerequisite course.

If you now consider that the purpose of life is self-realization — See, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs —, an immediate next step for self-realization teachers is to determine the intermediate learning milestones towards that goal. (Commentary on what those intermediate learning milestones can be is for another blog post).

A corollary: If we want self-realization as a goal to be applicable to all of humanity, it seems to me that a society or a community that incorporates such intermediate milestones into its everyday life is better poised to lead its members towards that goal.

The Cost of Improving Secondary School Education in America.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, we now know that we can expect a deficit of $1.7 trillion for the fiscal year 2010 of the United States.

We also know, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that there were about 1,133,000 secondary school teachers in America in 2006.

And, as of December 2008, the US Government has already committed to financial bailouts worth $8.5 trillion.

With the foregoing as background, let us review what it would mean to increase the salaries of secondary school teachers. (We all know that merely increasing the salary is not adequate).

Let us assume that the average yearly salary of secondary school teachers in America is $50,000. Let us further assume that, in order to attract and keep the right secondary school teaching talent, we will need to pay the teachers a salary of $100,000/year.

Thus, the additional yearly cost of paying the teachers a better salary is of the order of $50,000*1,000,000, or $50B/year.

Is $50B/year a high cost for educating America's children? In the light of dollar deficits in excess of $1 trillion/year? Or, even when we have surplus budgets, in a $15 trillion/year economy?

College Education in a Barack Obama Administration

In an increasingly competitive global and knowledge-intensive world, it is extremely important for a government to provide mechanisms to ease the burden of college education among today's college-bound students. While Barack Obama's proposed campaign promise is 100 hours of community service in exchange for a $4,000 tuition credit, it is the approach that is to be commended. 

100 hours translates to about 12 days (of 8 hours each), or about 3 months of elapsed time if a student uses only weekends to perform the community service.

Let us hope some effective educational program on these lines will indeed be implemented by the Barack Obama administration.

TiEcon 2008, Day 2, Saturday, May 17, 2008

This blog post is about some of my thoughts on the 2nd day of TiEcon 2008. This is not intended to be complete by any means: there are other blog sites that may provide a complete version.
Mike Malone, who handled a fire side chat with Elon Musk today, characterized him as really Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. The discussion on Wikipedia itself is an ample illustration of that. Elon's versatility is quite self-evident. An individual who built several successful information technology companies has now gone on to build several more in other fields: SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity.

The presentation by Chamath of Facebook was another excellent one. The slides were not at all busy, but still made the points very eloquently. For networking professionals focused on actual plumbing, it is very thought-provoking because he introduced a "social stack", after discussing the OSI stack and the LAMP stack. It looks like Facebook is really a good platform for consumer-oriented social networking applications. Its applicability in the business world, however, is not all that obvious [to me].

Probably the most moving of all presentations was one by John Wood. After leaving Microsoft, he founded Room to Read, a non-profit organization focused on promoting education of under-privileged children in the world. To date, it has produced awesome quantitative results. With a few more John Woods, the world will be a much better place to live. The presentation brought tears to my eyes.

What is in a school's motto?

Recently, I had occasion to discuss school motto with my son. He is an 8th grader, and it was difficult to find a motto for his school. After I discussed with him what a motto is and so on, I decided to publish this small note on the mottos of the schools that I went to (in reverse chronological order):

1. University of Southern California: Palmam qui meruit ferat. (Let whoever earns the palm bear it.)
2. Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
3. Bangalore University: ज्ञानं विज्ञान सहितं Jnanam Vignana Sahitam (My interpretation: Knowledge must be accompanied by its rational usage or, equivalently, Knowledge accompanied by rational usage is wisdom, but you can read a scholarly interpretation here).
4. National College: श्रद्दाही परमा गतिःShraddha Hi Parama Gatihi.
   

It seems to me that all institutions ought to have a motto: it makes it easier to channel the human energies of the institutions around the motto.

On Facilitative Education: An Essay

Education is an interesting activity. The process of getting an individual educated is an inherently complex one; if you do not love to educate another person, it can be very frustrating. (I suppose if you do not have inherent love for an activity, you won't be able to persist in it). I recently had an opportunity to write an essay On Facilitative Education.