Medical Technology

This morning my wife went through a knee surgery. This is a corrective procedure so that the knee joint replacement (as suggested by most doctors we consulted) was not necessary for some more time. But this post is not about that, though the knee joint prosthesis certainly rates as one of the wonders! There were couple of pictures about surgery in olden days hanging at the entrance to the OT complex.

One was of a woman who was totally conscious and yet a surgeon had started the removal procedure of one of her breasts. There was one assistant holding her hands and patients had to endure such a process. The other was that of a man hanging from some contraption, one person hanging on to one shoulder and the other was straining at the other shoulder trying to correct a dislocated shoulder! I was struck by how far we have come! I am sure many must have died simply from the shock/trauma of the surgery itself!

But today knee replacement is possible and works well for at least twenty years! I am not even looking at heart/liver/kidney transplant like really sophisticated procedures. The surgery itself is not that much of a trauma anymore. There are a whole host of things to manage the post surgical pain and recovery. After you have recovered, it feels so good! Most often at least! With this corrective procedure my wife should be able to start walking reasonably comfortably again and that should last 5 to 10 years! I remember with my own surgery, the ankle fracture was completely healed. Three years later when the hardware were removed, there was not one spot on the pieces of metal that remained inside my body for three years!

But all this happened step by step, one baby step at a time! These advances on so many areas have brought us this overall advancement! I kept wondering how many experiments, how many researchers toiling away at it and technological advances made all these advances possible!

You cannot help wondering how small improvements at the boundary areas of any discipline keeps moving the boundary in small increments! Yet over a time you have a larger area representing the body of knowledge!

Hard Core Child Pornography-You May Get Framed!!

There are reports around that malwares/viruses are downloading hardcore child pornography into the hard drive of unsuspecting users. For actual pedophiles this is a way of keeping the evidence away from his own machine, yet have the facility of remote viewing. Or, else if somebody wants to frame you. Whatever may be the motive, you better take guard. If you are caught with child pornography images on your machine, it is hard to defend that they are not yours.

So to guard against such disasters have your anti-virus absolutely up to date and keep it running whenever your machine is running. Another step that is necessary is to keep your browser up to date too in terms of the latest patches released by the manufacturers.

Recruitment Season Revisited

My last post was about campus recruitment and I am at it again. Couple of incidents in the interim makes me keep thinking about the dilemma that faces the students. Should they take anything that comes along or wait for something meaningful to happen!

First of these incidents is about a delegation of boys who came to meet me and wanted to get the second class test postponed. They begin around the 22 Nov of this month and couple of them had a clash for tests to be conducted for some jobs they have applied for. On pushing hard they came out with the fact that these were a little higher level clerk jobs with the state owned State bank of India. usually these banks take a few engineering graduate at the level of probationary officers who help with loan application assessments for engineering projects. I had to tell them to make their own choices between these glorified pen-pushers and the vital second test that is towards fulfillment of their degree requirements.

The second incident is about one of the brighter boys in CSE (Computer Science & Engineering) boys being picked up by the Air Force recruiters. But, what a waste! This boy will go to the technical wing of the Air Force and will get chances to work with computers. On the flip side though he will have an agreement to serve the force for twenty years. The most difficult part, according to me personally, would be to sir the seniors. This includes the guy who graduated as an officer six months prior to him. Discipline demands that he'll have to do yes sir to just about everything event to such people and I would have gone crazy to keep doing that for twenty years at a stretch. I had a good mind to catch hold of that guy and advise him against the job. But, on second thoughts did not quite do that. I am just hoping some better alternative comes along for him before he commits to the Air Force!

Recruitment Season and Student Concerns

This is the recruitment season for fresh engineering graduates coming out of colleges by next year Mar/April/May. Due to recession not many companies are visiting the campuses and students are in panic. You can see that from their questions regarding what is good for them. They'll mention every possible recruiter and ask if it is worth taking up a job with them.

At one level, this is a hard question. During this recession time it is not easy to give anything a go by. One tends to grab at any opportunity that can come along. It is hard on us too. As we know some of the jobs are dead ends. Because of our planned economy legacy, there are a lot of jobs with Government run agencies. Usually you get a life time job but then get into something where nothing much happens. It'll be criminal not to point out the hazards to guys who have half a mind and have learnt to exercise that.

ZOHO, An Amazing On-line Resource!

Bright hub editors have started using Zoho and that piqued my interest back on. I had fiddled with the original zohowriter when that on-line offering of MS Office like tools had a very strong curiosity value. I logged in again. It showed I was logging in after 1074 days or some such numbers. That's 3 years!

I was in for a very pleasant surprise! It has a whole array of tools, interface is newly designed. I just used the Zoho show and share and was duly impressed. I have vowed to myself to use it regularly. There's just about every facility you could ask for as a office productivity tool. As I keep changing place between my workplace and home, such on-line stuff is going to be very useful indeed!

University Syllabus WBUT

I have been teaching Advance OS and Distributed computing for sometime. They have similar content. They talk about distributed computing. Advanced features such as a higher level OS that can co-ordinate the OS of individual yet disparate systems are the topics of discussion. What I cannot help wondering is how many such systems are being built? The computers on networks are able to communicate as peer to any other peer and get the work done without trying to synchronize events in geographically dispersed locations. How many of the computer science engineers we are producing are going to use the techniques being taught!

On the other hand we have virtualization that really manages multiple and different operating systems withing one physical box. Cloud computing is a super hot topic that handles thousands of boxes in a data center. Should not we talk about these topics! Granted the synchronization and communication techniques are going to be useful. But giving the students a touch of reality is important too!

A Strange Dilemma

There has been a lot of discussions at my current workplace aboutt how to make students attend classes more. The requirement of the university is 75% during a semester. On the one hand this does not happen in case of many a students. Yet, it is really hard to stop a student from appearing in the final semester exams because of this. There has even been court cases and the courts seem to say that you cannot really stop the students from appearing from the examinations. The cirteria is that they should pass the final test. If they can do it without attending classes the what's the problem!

I personally also think that we should really not bother about attendance. These are professional courses. If students can clear their examps without attending classes so be it! This should, entirely, be voluntary! If most students pass without attending classes, where we are supposedly teaching the subject to them, then the problem lis elsewhere. The examination standards then become suspect.