Over the past couple of days I have discussed the same topic with multiple people in multiple situations. Scenario 1: I walk in to a conference room in the Packard Building (Packard houses the Department of Electrical Engineering). The person I am to meet is there already with the door wide open and as I walk in the first thing we land up discussing is how “the room needs to be aired out since there were a couple of EE students in there before us”. Scenario 2: We decided to use the Library in the Gates building to host an event. As I walked into the room to start setting up, my first instinct was to open the doors wide open and then proceed to open all the windows to the room. The problem: there were a bunch of CS students working in the library room before hand.

Notice a pattern yet? These are just two of several instances and a problem which seems to repeat itself everyday. In fact, I’ve had conversations with multiple people about this topic already. One particular case I posed as a question about what is the right thing to do in this situation: Lets say a colleague/classmate has a chronic case of bad B.O. (Body Odor). I don’t know if it is from a lack of showering, or lack of using deodorant or maybe even something that is genuinely beyond the individual’s control. What do you do? Do you tell them? How do you tell them? Are you doing them a favor by letting them know that their interpersonal relations and how people react to them is being adversely affected by this problem? Or are you being rude and inconsiderate? What is the correct approach to deal with the issue? Or is the correct approach to not deal with it at all? Or is it a case of you write in in a blog and hope that the people read it!

Computer Science and Electrical Engineerng are disciplines where this problem has become so endemic that it is now a stereotype. I’ve had people tell me that when they walk into the Computer Science building — it smells different. And you know what, I believe it, because every so often I can smell the difference too. Now granted that all of the really smart people working in these really hard disciplines have a lot of thinking and a lot of work to do, but is it too much to ask that people take a shower and learn how to use deodorant/cologne?

(I should put a caveat in here that I have nothing against CS/EE people. I am one of them myself. And that’s why I feel comfortable and picking on them 🙂 Fortunately, the majority of the people I have encountered do not have this problem. But this maority also recognized a minority of the population that does have this problem — but I am afraid no one may be bold enough to address it and that’s why I felt compelled to write about it.)

When we talk about education, I believe that as educators it is our responsibility to not only educate people about the field, but also to educate them about how to operate in the real world — in the real world where there are other people. Even if you are going to be locked in a room for hours at end, at some point, whether you like it or not you are going to have to come within the 3-5 foot personal bubble of another person (though in some cases you can smell CS/EE people from more than 10 feet away!). So as educators shouldn’t we teach students the importance of personal hygiene? Especially if a problem is common enough that it has turned into a negative stereotype for the field, I would hope that we have enough self-awareness to be able to recognize when there is a problem that has an easy solution.

Maybe when we admit someone into the CS or EE programs we should include a stick of deodorant in their welcome kits and tell them that we not only want you to excel in your field, but also excel as a human being. And this is a very small step in that direction 🙂

Motivation is a big word. Merriam-Webster defines motive as something (as a need or desire) that causes a person to act. Motivation is the condition of being motivated or having motive.

Now, there is a reason I’m going around checking the dictionary for what this word means. And that reason is that it is one of the words that I struggle with very often. This is a recent problem for me — something that has become a growing issue only in the past two years or so. Probably because I think I have grown up more in the past two years than I have ever before. Probably because my thinking has changed more in the past two years than ever before and probably because more than ever before, I have stopped and taken the time to think about things more than I have in the past.

But thinking can be a dangerous thing. In fact looking back in the old quotes section of Eavesdropped! I found an old quote I had put in in 1994. Here is what it said:

Why I don’t think..

When you think you ponder…

When you ponder you contemplate…

When you contemplate you deduce…

When you deduce you conclude…

When you conclude you feel bad….

…So don’t THINK!

…Sneaker, 09/30/94

Thinking back, I can distinctly remember that time during undergrad when I pre-emptively pulled myself out of having a motivational crisis by making a conscious decision to not think about the meta-issues — because trying to graduate in three years from undergrad and thinking about motivation can be a dangerous thing when done together. But what happened then is that I got so sucked in to achieving the next mile-stone and raising the bar each time, that I lost sight of what I was thinking about till recently. Sometimes it takes a shock to the system to get you back on track — or to derail you again, I’m not sure which it is.

Somewhere along the way of running iMeet, I lost the interest in doing that. The challenge was gone — the excitement had died out and the adrenaline ruch just wasn’t happening for me. I can say this now, because I think that most of the people who were my partners-in-crime at iMeet either realized this at some point before I left and if they didn’t now, I’m sure they realized it after I left — heck worst case they may read this and realize it now 🙂 But it’s okay for them to know this now. It wasn’t okay earlier since it would be detrimental to the company to know that the CEO had lost interest. And knowing that, I did everything I could in order to make sure that I executed my role as best as possible. Some of the old-timers who were around from SneakerLabs’ days may have noticed the change in my passion, but I hope they never felt that I wasn’t commited to iMeet as I always was. Even after I realized that my interest in running the company was waning, I sincerely continued with everything I had started because then is was a question of commitment and finishing what I had started — something I make a point of doing. And in hindsight, I think merging iMeet with Netspoke was an awesome opportunity for iMeet and Netspoke both. A truly synergistic and symbiotic move given the relative strenghts, weaknesses and opportunities in front of both companies.

The reason my interest in running a company was waning was because I felt that the challenge had gone out of it. The technology had been proven. It worked. And though there is always room for marginal improvements and feature additions, there wasn’t anything that I felt needed to be discovered or invented. A lot of the needs of customers were being met and though there would be 1x or 2x or even 3x changes, there wasn’t a 10x change looming around the corner. And as Andy Grove suggested in his book, only the paranoid survive — a 10x change is what changes the world around you. On the business side, it wasn’t a question of proving a market, but a question of gaining market share in a way in which the company actually made money. And we started to do that already and so it was now a question of execution using tried and trusted business techniques — not innovating new ones.

I guess what the experience taought me about myself — and this is something I am grateful that other members of my executive team realized about me — is that I operate in the first phase of the lifecycle of the company. I am a true startup person. I like taking the company from concept to product. And maybe a little bit into the commericalization phase, but thereafter, when you get to the latter stage of the commercialization and then the growth phase of the company — at least this time, I didn’t feel like that was for me. That may change in future and I do hope that the next company I found will provide me the opportunity to prove to myself and others that I have the interest and the capability to function in those parts of the lifecycle of a company as well — but I think even more important than that is realizing when you are not having fun any more and changing things around when that is the case and that is what I did.

Coming to Stanford was my answer to attempt to help resolve the issue of having a challenge. And similar to the approach I took back in 1994, to immerse myself in an envrionment where I am surrounded by lots and lots of smart people and an environment that provides a little (just a little, not too much, since I am believe I am too free-willed to survive in an over structured environment) structure with visible miestones to chase after. In this case — getting a Ph.D. and the sub-mile-stones that come under it. Passing requirements, doing research, publishing papers etc.

But from time to time even while I am immersed in these day to day tasks, I often wonder, am I just being a coward and hiding behind the facade of academia really to seek refuge from the questions I am afraid to face?? And these are not questions about career — but qustions about meaning and purpose. I know that I can succeed in business. I’ve proven that to myself once and wouldn’t be afraid to go out and do it over again. I know I can succeed in academia. I’ve done that before and I can do it again. But I fear that the question I may be afraid to confront is that of trying to find the answer to the question: “And then what!?”

From what I have read about psychology so far (and granted, my knowledge in the subject leaves a lot to be desired yet) some people would call this a fatalistic attitude. The attitude where you because you know you are going to die one day you stop living. But that is not where I am at at all. More than that I am every so often searching for meaning which in all likelihood does not exist. Victor Frankl talked about this in his book. Feynman talked about it as the meaning of it all it realizing that there is no meaning at all. Every religion seems to build an illusion of meaning for it’s followers — but that I am convinced is an illusion for the weak — for those who aren’t bold enough to ponder the question themselves and willing to live by someone else providing them with a placebo.

And if Feynman, Frankl, and all theother great thinkers that have existed before — thousands of them — all way smarter than I am couldn’t find what they were seeking, or couldn’t articulate what they found, then why should I harbor the illusion that I could do any better. And if there is no real point to it all, then why shouldn’t we just adopt a completely hedonistic approach and just make the pleasure the sole purpose of our life. Where the only thing that matters is to enjoy the time you live because eventually you will be dead anyway?

Combine that with the talk I recently heard from Phil Zimbardo on Time Perspective and you’ll realize that what I am referring to in the above paragraph is a Present-Orientation in the context of time perspective; i.e. only the present matters, because — in the long run we’re all dead right!? But alas that leads to a dilemma… because all the other characteristics of my personality prove that I would be classified as a person with Future-Orientation. Delaying gratification for larger future outcomes. And this dilemma is probably the best way to articulate my issue with motivation.

On one hand, I am competitive, aggressive, driven and foregoing present-oriented activities for future gain. And on the other hand I wonder what the hell for. The resutant is an oscillating viewpoint. This could either be a state of balance which is ideal or it could just mean that I’m pulled in two directions and thereby the lack of focus results in optimizing neither. The only good thing is that atleast I can feel good about being able to step put and look in. Now the question is find the answer and find the motivation…

Last quarter, I took a class called “Seminar on Emotion” at the Psychology department at Stanford. Though the class had a lot of reading and some were rather dry, there were a few gems scattered around here and there which in the end, made it all worth it (of course it was also one of the few classes I had which in which the ratio favored the fairer-sex and so it was always a pleasure to attend!). Now I know I am probably going to get a lot of flack on this a particular blog entry and so before I do so I should probably mention that though I am writing this now, I actually thought of this stuff during my class last quarter. And so this is not precipitated by current events in my life and nor it is it targeted to anyone in particular. I am simply interested in hearing your opinions to help me ponder and solidify my own, so here goes…

One of the readings for my Emotion clas was by Nico Frijda, in which he tried to formulate Laws of Emotion. These were not intended as “laws” per se, but more as guidelines about emotion and to put forth some food for thought. In his paper was the following passage:

“Data from questionnaire studies (Rombouts, 1987) suggest that [falling in love] is triggered by a specific sequence of events, in which the qualities of the love-object are of minor importance. A person is ready to fall in love because of one of a number of reasons – loneliness, sexual need, dissatisfaction, or need or variety. A object then incites interest, again for one of a number of reasons, such as novelty, attractiveness, or mere proximity. Then give the person a moment of promise, a brief response from the object that suggests interest. It may be a confidence; it may be a single glance, such as a young girl may think she received from a pop star. The give the person a brief lapse of time – anywhere between half an hour or half a day, the self-report suggests – during which fantasies can develop. After that sequence, no more than a single confirmation, real or imagined is needed to precipitate falling in love.”

— Nico H. Frijda, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in his paper on The Laws of Emotion.

Now, I haven’t had the time (yet) to go dig up the Rombouts paper and look at the data myself (would be very interesting to do this though — I looked on PsycInfo already but my preliminary search didn’t find this paper/data. If anyone finds a pointer, please do let me know), but I did feel that this is a rather bold and insightful statement which flies in the face of what all of us would like to believe. We are taught from childhoold, either throught friends, family, books and in a lot of ways by movies and the entertainment industry that there is something magical about falling in love. But after having read the above passage, I sincerely wonder, is it just the magic of having our own needs met? Feeling wanted. Having company. Fulfilling our need and desire for sex. Or is it really something about the person we fall in love with? How does one choose who he or she falls in love with??

The latter really is a curious question and so it begs for a little more explanation. I will pose it as a qustion to the reader — Think about your relationships. How did you initially meet the person you entered into a relationship with? What was the series of events that got you there? From the time that you saw or noticed or heard from the person the first time what was in your head. For a woman — what makes you go out wiht one guy over another? And what was your mental state at the time? What were your needs? What did you want out of the relationship? In summary, what was it the person you are in a relationship with that got you hooked?

Thinking about and even writing about the questions above scares me. It scares me to think about them because if there is any shred of truth to Frijda’s statement then I fear that it may shatter a widely held illusion. It scares me because I too may subscribe to the same illusion. It is easier to live under the protective shield of an illusion. However, my guess is that there is some level of veracity to Frijda’s statement. That human beings are indeed just as shallow as animals in more ways than they would like to hear of. To think that you are in a relationship with someone not because of any other reason that you are fulfilling some need for yourself would seem to suggest that the qualities of the the person who is the object of your affection do not matter. Put another way, someone loves you not for what you are, but for what you mean to them.

Falling in love, may not be a quest for waiting for the right person, but more for the right time and right environment. A time where you have a need — loneliness, sexual need, dissatisfaction or variety (as Frijda puts it) — and there is someone in the environment who happens to respond to your need and fulfill it. But then again don’t we always have one or more of these needs? I know I do. And isn’t it scary to think that this need-based dissection of falling in love could potentially explain all kinds of human behavior like love at first sight, infatuation, one-night-stands and even affairs and adultry!?(I’m assuming that is what he is referring to by the need for variety).

It is ironic that as much as people say that love is blind and there is a “soulmate” out there for everyone etc etc, at the end of it all, love itself may actually be more pragmatic than most people realize! Or is Frijda just on crack? Tell me what you think!

Here is my million dollar question of the moment (and I do have one for each moment, really, I do) — Do academics get off on making things sound more complicated than they really need to be?. I started wondering about this question about two years ago when I started attending talks at Carnegie Mellon. At the time, I wasn’t in an academic program and was busy running my second company, but every so often I felt the need to drive over to campus (CMU) and sit in on a talk here and there just to help pull me out of the day to day struggle and think creatively for a little bit. Get out of the rut and out of the box of and enter a bubble which facilitates creativity.

My experience with going to a lot of these talks was mixed. I wanted to go to talks in fields I knew nothing about. Psychology was one. HCI was another (okay, I had some practical experience with product design and development here…). I found that in some of the initial talks, I was completely lost. I really had no clue as to what the heck they were talking about. Bayesian Networks and all that stuff which at the time I knew nothing about (I’ve since become educated a little more believe it or not). And so I wondered, have I really lost the ability to deal with academia?

I decided to conduct my own little personal experiment. Instead of being intimidated by my lack of understanding of the subject at hand, I decided to continue to go to the talks and see if I could make sense of them by simply trying to break them down one word at a time. Take each little word and break it down to something simpler. And then take the sentence and break it down into something simpler and eventually get to the point of taking the concept and distilling it down to something simpler. And lo and behold, much to my surprise I was amazed to find how many topics which I had no clue about began to make sense… slowly and steadily. The problem with this approach is that it definitely takes longer to comprehend the tpic since there is a significant overheard of translating jargon into something simple and in coming up with analogies to help comprehend the concepts at hand.

I continued this experiement for about six months at CMU. Unfortunately being in Pittsburgh and running a company just wasn’t conducive to my need not only for a change in intellectual stimulation nor in just needing a change in atmosphere for personal reasons. (Not to diss Pittsburgh at all, but I just had too many experiences, both good and bad in the place and I just needed a change.) And so I applied to Stanford and joined the Ph.D. program here. Similar to my experience when I first joined CMU as an undergraduate, when I came to Stanford, I found that there are lots of brilliant people here. And everyday, my respect for them increases as I watch different people excel in different fields. But I also found that I had the same problem here at Stanford with academic-talk that I did at CMU. And so I’ve recently begun to wonder if there is a pattern here.

So my hypothesis, based on personal experience of course is this: Once academics (myself included in that category now), have an innate tendency to take topics they understand and try to complicate them. Somehow, once they understand a topic, it goes through a transformation when they try to explain it to someone else that often makes it un-intelligible. Maybe it becomes too formal. Maybe they are just trying to appear more knowledgeable than the next person. But the fundamental thing that happens is that they may understand it one way, but when it comes to explaianing it, they screw it up.

I believe that this ma be the key between being a good teacher and not-so-good-teacher. A good teacher will remember how he learnt something and what was it that made it click in his head when he saw this concept for the first time and then be able to simplify that even more so that students can understand that same concept just as easily. I understand by analogies. Whenever I am presented a concept I need to come up with a real world example that I can visualize to get a better sense of what the concept is. And it is only when I can construct such an analogy in my head can I really get a grasp of the subject at hand. So when I teach, I tend to use the same approach in teaching. I need to come up with an analogy and hopefully the analogy will be strong enough to convey the concept, but real enough to not introduce any side-effects.

And since I am writing about explaining things, I should eat my own dog food and explain with an example right :). One of the topics I had to explain recently was threading and mutual exclusion. Now this is generally a hard topic for most students and there are tons of cases and different places where Murphy comes in and screws things up. But, what I realized when I was forced to explain it was that, this isn’t such a hard concept — because we encounter it every single day in our lives. A person who has absolutely no background in computer science can understand threading and mutual exclusion. How, you may ask? Well, think about it… Lets say you have a party at your house. And since you don’t want to mess up your house, you leave only one bathroom open for guests to use. This bathroom is now the equivalent of a critical section. And using that, you can now explain critical section, you can explain a lock and mutual exclusion. You can explain that bad things happen when there isn’t a lock. Extend that metaphor even further and lets say you are now in a theatre. And during the intermission everyone runs tot he bathroom. But the bathroom has only a limited number of stalls. Whoops! We just explained counting semaphores. So the idea without getting into too much detail is to take rather obscure concepts and map them to real-world analogies. (I explained streams in Java by using water pipes and filters as the example).

Analogies not only make it a lot more fun — because you can make them amusing, but also provide a framework for thinking. A framework, which then becomes etched in the students mid often because it was so silly that it just made sense! That is wha I consider good teaching.

So with that I’ll end my most recent rant about my own problems in often understanding academics and what I think would be a better approach to teaching. Comments as always are welcome, from academics and non-academics alike!

Several people forwarded me and article from the New York Times – Hindu Nationalists are Enrolling, and Enlisting India’s Poor. I think by now most of the frequent readers of this site are well aware of my stance against any and all religious movements primarily for the reasons such as those outlined in this article… religion is the pinnacle of mass mind-control – and that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan with the Taliban and that is what any such religious education will create in the future as well.

I guess the bottomline remains that people are screwed in the head and it is never really going to be possible to eradicate such behavior from human society. The scum of society will contantly rise to the surface and every so often we will need to go in and clean the pond.