Putting time into perspective

At a website called waitbutwhy.com, there is a fascinating infographic that discusses time from a very interesting perspective. It's far too large to replicate in its entirety, but I thought I would show you the part that goes back to Christopher Columbus landing in America. It's something of an arbitrary point, but it does give you some idea of how we perceive historical events. It's interesting to compare that to our perception of the current moment to try to get some mental idea of how long ago some of these events really were.

I was quite amazed to think about how different history might be for someone who is 30 than it is for me. I don't think of someone at that age as that much younger than me, but I think the reality is quite different!

There were a couple of fun facts sprinkled in there:

• A current 90 year-old was born closer to Lincoln's assassination than to our current day!
• The oldest living human today is 116. She was born closer to Washington becoming the first president than to today!

Here is the link to the full infographic:  http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html

Need to update that algorithm

Amazon just sent me a link recommending titles that I might like. Now that my sons are 9 and 7, I don't think "P is for Potty" is really appropriate!

Who are you going to believe?

Original post:  Mar 9, 2015

Video can be quite unforgiving.

Over the weekend, I was transferring some home movies to DVD for the grandparents. My mother-in-law is quite skeptical of internet sites like YouTube. While it takes a lot more time, it is also nice to have some physical reminder as opposed to a virtual reference every now and again.

There was some video of the boys last year delivering their speeches for the Toastmasters group. I had also videotaped my older son giving a speech he delivered on Robert Goddard. I thought that it was a nice way to show how much he had progressed over the last year.

Little league tryouts are next Sunday. Since we have barely picked up a ball since fall, I thought it would be a good idea to get outside and toss a few. I also decided to videotape him pitching. It was actually quite interesting to watch on the playback. You start to notice small differences in the delivery that can be corrected. There is a reason why professionals often videotape their efforts and review them. The camera stares and records all of your best efforts. It also reveals correctable flaws.

The only unfortunate piece is that it can't correct them for you.

Happy feet, no bruises

Original post:  Mar 4, 2015

Icy sidewalks and driveways can be treacherous. Given the extremely cold temperatures lately, it can be really difficult to avoid slipping and falling. Frozen ground is a terribly unforgiving surface. To minimize your risk this winter, perhaps we ought to take a page out of the penguin playbook.

This Vox infographic helps explain why penguins waddle the way that they do. Shifting their center of gravity over their main point of contact helps reduce the odds of falling!

Here is the link to the full article:  This is the best tip to avoid wiping out on the ice - Vox

Innovations can be free

Original post:  Mar 3, 2015

We often associate innovations with costly and complicated new gizmos. We may even expect to spend a great deal of money on the new solution. In my opinion, that is a failure of imagination. Some of the best innovations might actually be free!

This article in the New York Times gives an example in healthcare. Patient surveys are becoming an increasingly important factor in the overall grades that hospitals get as a measurement of patient outcomes. This has led to a new goal: reducing patient suffering. This elusive factor in overall quality is very difficult to measure (much less address).

Here is the story of how one innovator developed his solution:

That is how Dr. Michael Bennick, the medical director for patient experience at Yale-New Haven Hospital, solved a problem. He noticed a question on a Medicare survey asking, Is it quiet in your room at night?

Maybe, Dr. Bennick thought, what is really being asked is: Can you get a good night’s sleep without interruption? Is it really necessary to wake patients again and again to take blood pressure and pulse rates, to draw blood, to give medications?

He issued instructions for his unit. No more routinely awakening patients for vital signs. And plan the timing of medications; outside intensive care units, three-quarters of drugs can be given before patients go to sleep and again in the morning.

Then there were the blood tests. “Doctors love blood tests,” Dr. Bennick said, and want results first thing in the morning when they make rounds. That meant waking patients in the wee hours.

“I told the resident doctors in training: ‘If you are waking patients at 4 in the morning for a blood test, there obviously is a clinical need. So I want to be woken, too, so I can find out what it is.’ ” No one, he said, ever called him. Those middle-of-the-night blood draws vanished.

Without anything else being done about noise in the halls, the medical unit’s score on that question rose from the 16th percentile to the 47th nationally in the Medicare survey. Now the entire hospital follows that plan.

“And it did not cost a penny,” Dr. Bennick said. “The only cost was thinking not from our perspective but from a patient’s perspective.”

While some of these recommendations may seem "common sense", in reality they are not widely practiced. In my own experience, I often wondered why it was so critical to have someone burst into your darkened room as you were in a deep sleep and flip on all the lights to take your vital signs. It would seem that rest is very important to the recovery process.

There are more anecdotes in the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/health/doctors-strive-to-do-less-harm-by-inattentive-care.html?_r=0

A lesson in snow

Original post:  Mar 2, 2015

Despite predictions of 5" - 9", Mother Nature took pity on us. We ended up with about 2" of powder.

This morning, I shoveled the snow off the driveway. You can see in the first shot that it comes up really easily.

The real problem is finding a place to put it. To add some perspective, my mailbox is at about chest height. You can see the red flag on the left side of the picture.

Here is one way to measure the snow in Boston using the local language:

Thought for today

Original post:  Mar 2, 2015

Leonard Nimoy, the actor most famous for playing the character of Spock on "Star Trek", died last Friday.

When I was a boy, I grew up fascinated by space. Star Trek helped ignite a lifelong love of learning and exploration of the unknown. It's amazing how much you can be influenced by people you will never meet with ideas you may have never before encountered.

The actor's final tweet contains a little treasure that I thought worthy of sharing:

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory."

Study smarter

Original post:  Feb 26, 2015

No matter how accomplished we may be, there are always things we need to learn. For many of us, this process can be quite painful. Fortunately, science is helping us understand the difference between effective methods and those that simply appear to be effective.

To me, the most surprising finding was that re-reading your notes is a highly inefficient way to study! While it was the most common method cited by most students, here is what the researchers actually found:

"On your first reading of something, you extract a lot of understanding. But when you do the second reading, you read with a sense of 'I know this, I know this.' So basically, you're not processing it deeply, or picking more out of it. Often, the re-reading is cursory — and it's insidious, because this gives you the illusion that you know the material very well, when in fact there are gaps."

The research found that it was much more effective to ask yourself questions or to link the information to other knowledge that you might have. Even flashcards were found to be more effective than re-reading notes.

Here is a link to the full article detailing ways to improve your studies:  Re-reading is inefficient. Here are 8 tips for studying smarter. - Vox

Trying to get you see my view

Original post:  Feb 25, 2015

We are in the midst of creating new potential use cases to help prove out new ways to get data identifying the product from packaging and barcodes into electronic health records and beyond. There are many different ideas. When you gather in larger groups that are aiming to solve difficult problems, there are any number of people each representing their own distinct views. It is often extremely difficult to extend our perspective to accommodate some other way of analyzing the issues. Sometimes, we are so deeply ingrained in a certain way of looking at the world that it is hard to imagine any other way of understanding the complexity.

I'm hoping I can open my mind to the possibility that someone else has a better way. I'm further hoping that the others in my group might also be willing to yield if my way shows promise.

Powering our way to the future

Original post:  Feb 11, 2015

In preparation for one of the storms (we've had so many recently I've lost count), I went to buy a few batteries as backups for my flashlights. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. There were no "C" or "D" cells to be found anywhere. Fortunately, we never lost power and I never had to find out whether or not I had enough energy.

Batteries light up our world in so many ways. Without the invention of the lithium-ion battery, it is doubtful that the smartphone revolution would ever have occurred. It's difficult to imagine how

it could have happened if you had to cart around monstrosities more like the phones on the left side of this picture. Many of them relied on lesser technologies like zinc-carbon or nickel-cadmium.

You may not know who invented this amazing lithium battery technology. Truthfully, I didn't know it either until I read this article.

The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery at the age of 57 has an idea for a new one at 92 – Quartz

Our lives would be very different without the work of one man.

Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize. But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla.

In 1980, Goodenough, a whip-smart physicist then aged 57, invented lithium-ion’s nervous system. His brainchild was the cobalt-oxide cathode, the single most important component of every lithium-ion battery. From Mogadishu to Pago Pago, from Antarctica to Greenland, and all lands in between, Goodenough’s cathode is contained in almost every portable electronic device ever sold. Others have tried to improve on the cobalt-oxide cathode, but all have failed.

Goodenough does not feel that his work is complete. He is now 92, but still works everyday in his lab in Austin, TX. If he succeeds, he could revolutionize our world yet again.

But Goodenough seems most passionate about ending his career with a last, big invention. He is trying, of course, to make a super-battery, one that will make electric cars truly competitive with combustion, and also economically store wind and solar power.

But the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s.

It's a difficult problem, but I am glad that someone is working on it. For all our sake, I hope someone succeeds.

Stumble you might fall

Original post:  Feb 10, 2015

We can all agree that there is a tremendous need for innovation. One of the most common sayings of the recent past was that we wanted to "fail faster". Of course, no one really wants to fail. The whole point of trying to change what you are doing is to end up with a better result! That said, it is difficult to do new and different things without running into some challenges along the way.

This actually relates to a lot of the work that I do in data standards. We are attempting to do something within healthcare that really hasn't been done before. We marvel at what retail has done. It's as if they are Olympic-level athletes. Meanwhile, most of us haven't even started the sport! It isn't realistic to expect us to be competitive any time soon without an awful lot of training and practice.

Perhaps the place we can start is with our overall objective. Instead of trying to "fail faster", maybe we need to "stumble but not fall". No one wants to fall flat on their face. We may not have the luxury of being able to fall down. But even if we trip along the way, we keep moving in the same general direction of progress.

Keep yourself connected...writing's on the wall....

Describing change management

Original post:  Feb 9, 2015

The UDI Program does hold powerful promise for the future. Unfortunately, many of our most important customers underestimate the incredible amount of change management that will be required in order to implement the program correctly. They also seem to have no idea how difficult it will be to transform the data generated by UDI into meaningful improvements in patient safety.

One way to help people understand is to relate these struggles to terms that they might have experienced in their own lives. In a discussion earlier today preparing for an upcoming panel presentation on UDI, I stumbled onto something that might be helpful.

There have been many changes to surgical procedures over the years. Each one of them started out as a new, unproven procedure. Someone had to invent the procedure. They had to try it out on a patient. When it worked, they had to document the procedure. They then had to show it to others. Once other surgeons agreed that it was an improvement over the status quo, they had to learn how to do the procedure in the same way and practice on their own. Over time, the repitition would eventually become the new practice.

We are in the earliest stages of UDI adoption. We still don't know all of the ways it can eventually improve healthcare. We've got to slowly build up our portfolio and then train others with a similar approach.

What do you think?

Innovation has to extend beyond the product itself

Original post:  Feb 3, 2015

It's extremely hard to create new markets out of thin air. While we correctly heap all kinds of praise on the chosen few that succeed in bringing amazing new inventions into our lives, we also ignore the thousands of new products that never quite find their footing. Many of those lesser lights were excellent ideas on their own. For whatever reason, they may not have captured the imagination of enough customers to sustain themselves in the marketplace.

We often think of the giant technology companies as if they are invincible. They toss around their mighty power and we simply react. But even the largest and most successful companies sometimes have a difficult time sustaining innovation.

One example of that is Google. While they dominate search and have other really great products like Google Analytics, Maps, and Documents, they do not enjoy complete success at all of their inititives. They were unable to make Google Health work properly. Google Wave had promise but never caught fire. Even Google Glass, once so highly prized that there was a lottery for the right to pay $1500 to acquire one, has now been downgraded to a much lower profile. This article explains some of the reasons why:

On Thursday, Google announced that it would stop selling its much ridiculed Google Glass smart glasses, and that the product would no longer be developed in Google X, the company’s research division.

In a blog post on the Google Plus social network, Google said Glass was graduating from X. It will still be available to “certified partners” and for commercial trials in places like hospitals and factories. But the Explorer program, in which software developers and gadget nerds could buy a test version of the product, is over.

The article continues by pointing out that only two years ago, Glass was the star at Google's developers conference. It showcased some of the incredible future possibilities of the platform. Yet all of that promise also held some of the same reasons why it hasn't been successful:

Today, Glass is more like a case study in the perils of developing hardware whose purpose isn’t clear. Unlike, say, the iPhone — which cleverly combined products people already understood and used — consumers weren’t quite sure what to make of Glass. That creeped some people out.

The device was pre-emptively banned by bars and large parts of Las Vegas. Legislators in West Virginia tried to make it illegal to use the gadget while driving.

“There’s no vision for why people actually need this device,” Mr. Gownder said. “That’s a problem. When you don’t have that, people fill that in with their own assumptions, and right now the assumption is that this is a device for recording people.”

That last issue probably doomed the product. The article closes:

“From the privacy perspective, we are of course pleased to see Google drop this product,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in an email. “And it is a very big deal when Google backs down, particularly after its big push.”

He continued: “But it is also speaks to a larger issue in tech design about privacy. Eyeglass-mounted web display and phone for those who wanted it? Not really a problem. Surveillance and recording of those around the user? Yeah, that’s a problem.”

Here is the link to the full article:  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/a-retreat-for-google-glass-and-a-case-study-in-the-perils-of-making-hardware/?_…

Super Super Bowl

Original post:  Feb 2, 2015

What a whipsaw of emotions. I could not believe how many swings of fate there were in the game. To make matters more interesting, my seven year old had declared earlier in the week that he was rooting for the Seahawks. He even brought home an art project with a "football guy" in blue and green. All through the game, he kept up a steady stream of needling comments. When Seattle jumped ahead in the second half by ten points, it just added salt to the rapidly developing wounds. As the Patriots slowly fought back, he still remained confident. He was very sure that they would repeat their heroics at the end of the first half and score the winning touchdown. As they flew down the field and added a miraculous circus catch, he was certain of victory. To be honest, I completely expected it. Then the impossible happened and the Pats got an amazing interception by a rookie to pull out the win.

While the rest of the family started to celebrate the unbelievable finish, my wife noticed the sobbing heap in the corner. My little guy was inconsolable. It took a good 20 minutes before he was composed enough to get to bed.

As silly and inconsequential as sports seem, they still have an ability to tap into some of our deepest emotions. They can draw us in and find ways of making us care in so many ways--often even more than we would care to admit. For a little while, they can even help us feel more alive. Of course, tying your fate to the unpredictable nature of professional sports can also expose us to crushing defeats. Having survived both sides of the equation, I can speak from personal experience. Still, I'm glad my boys are becoming sports fans. Life itself has its share of ups and downs. As devastating as the losses can be, our ability to persist in the face of adversity can help guide us toward ultimate victory.

Once we had safely tucked the boys in bed and lights were out, my wife decided to call it a night. She went upstairs and then came down again fairly quickly. In the darkness, she had heard my older son (the Pats fan) climb into his brother's bed and console him. I could not have been prouder of him.