Emergency Rooms--as perceived from the patients point of view--are always understaffed and poorly managed. They tend to display chaotic behavior and makes one ponder as to whether anybody within the top ranks of health-care industry is doing their job. Speaking with first hand experience, which unfortunately I have gained in past few years visiting multiple ERs, most of the ERs seem to depict dilapidated affairs. Partially the reason being that any new patient is not taken in based on the time the patient came in, but rather the severity of the condition of the patient.

Walking into ER itself brings shivers to my spine as it has a huge "uncertainty factor" attached to it. There is no guarantee when the doctor is going to see you after you are triaged. The wait could be anywhere from couple hours to a whole day. Ideal situation would be that there are no other patients in the waiting area who have worse condition than yours and that the hospital has a bed for you. 99.99% of the times you won't be lucky to get both of them in your favor. Furthermore, as the wait time increases, so does the influx of patients as they keep coming in. So pray that either nobody else come in after you are triaged with worse condition or you have the worse condition.

Apart from the inherent nature of the ER, there are things that definitely can be managed effectively and can help expedite the process. McKinsey has a very good article on how to fix the overcrowding problem in ER. They have enumerated lot of reasons causing the delay in ER room, but the one that stands out, which I have experienced almost everytime I have been to the ER, is the time taken to discharge the patient from ER. A bed in the ER is the key resource and majority of the time the backlog is caused by unavailability of the beds. On an average, it takes almost 20-30 minutes to discharge a patient irrespective of the hospital/chain. In other words, the patient is ready to leave and there is no other reason for him to stay except to sign some papers. Imagine a patient under sever chronic pain waiting in the sitting area for a bed to get freed and is not able to sit on a chair. Yours truley happens to be one of those patients. Just by reducing the time of discharge, ER can increase the number of patients it can serve in given amount of time, not mentioning how happy the patients would be by the reduced waiting times.

Besides the process management, customer service is the other aspect that needs proper addressing. As in case of any kind of business, the customer is the king. In case of ER, the patients who show up happen to be in the worst possible state they can possibly be in. "Handle with Love and Care" must be the modus-operandi. Altruistic nature should not be only reason the patient gets loving care at the hospital, but it should be what the nurses and staff members along with the doctors should always adhere to as a principle. I can easily recall from my past visits that the times when the staff was gentle and kind, I ended up remembering that visit as a pleasant one, even though the pain might have been worst. Altruism is not a natural trait in human being, but atleast it should be one of the core values that the culture within the hospitals should be build upon.

Our perception of almost everything we do, tangible or abstract, follows this golden rule. We may judge people, quantify usefulness of a product or evaluate a blog. No matter what we do, we have to have a standard or something similar to compare our ideas with. For example, there is no such thing as absolute happiness; we are always in pursuit of being more happy than in the past.

As humans, we are constantly evaluating what direction we are headed in. A beautiful quote by Charles Simoni sums up the idea very well:

Susan: Why is it taking so much time for progress to occur with computers:

Charles: Because a lot of dumb ideas have to die first. That’s why progress takes time. First, new ideas have to evolve, then the bad ideas that stop the progress have to die. Even with relativity and quantum mechanics, the good ideas had to crystallize. And then people with vested interest in the old physics had to die out.

How do we evaluate our progress and what stops the progress today ? Evaluation of the progress itself needs a benchmark to verify if there is any change and if there is a change, whether it is positive or negative. What are the factors stopping us from the change. The factors mentioned, again are benchmarked against each other to qualify them as bad ideas and good ideas.

Relativity is what defines progress. Relativity is what defines what is good and what is bad. In absence of all good ideas, one of the bad idea would automatically become good in relative terms. Hence, the phrase "Relativity is Absolute".

Downloading 16478 emails, almost 2.4 Gb is not for the faint heart. I aways wanted to have a local backup of my Gmail account, but the idea of transferring mother-load of data always made me think otherwise. Besides, there was another road blocker, or rather I should say the Google "best search app" syndrome, that says that no desktop client comes close to the capability of Gmail websearch that can dig your emails and present a compelling alternative. Let's see if we have a contender...

Playing around with Thunderbird 3-beta4(T3B4), it surely doesn't feel like I am living in 2004 anymore. Funny, we haven't seen any evolution in email client interfaces in past 5 years. And for tech industry, surely 5 years is fairly long time. To say the least, I am quite impressed by the T3B4 with its new cool interface, addon plugins just like firefox, thread view combined in one message pane (View all the threads as one single email) and much more.

The feature that single handedly trumps everything else including the aging google interface, is the new search interface. T3B4 client indexes all the local folders and provides a very fast search capability, even better than Canonical Evolution. The Results page shows a timeline graph generated from all the messages returned from the search query. It also identifies top senders in the results and allows you to modify the results by adding/deleting selected senders/recipients. Hovering your mouse on the sender, you can see graph overlay showing what percentage of all the messages are sent by that particular user. Sweet !. Even the folders where the mails are picked up are shown as tags (for selection/de-selection). T3B4 ran perfectly fine with fresh 2.4 Gb of data and results were as fast as blink of an eye.

To make things even more interesting, Mozilla just released Raindrop, which boasts even more radical ideas on data representation. Too excited about new Messaging tools :-).

The way sound affects us in our day to day lives, consciously or unconsciously, is quite fascinating. Just concentrate for a second on the environment around you and notice everything that you hear at this moment. Surprisingly you would come up with more variety of sounds than you would have imagined. That may be colleagues talking two cubes over, a cell-phone going off in the distance, shoes stumping on the floor, door closing with a shudder, neighbor typing frantically on the laptop keyboard as if he were in a race to prove his dexterity or it could be some white noise continuously humming in the background--say from AC source or a heater or a fan.

Notice that I have not even used the word music in the above examples and it is silly that whenever we use word sound, the first thing that comes to our mind is Music. Julian Treasure gave a talk at TED, where he talks about how sound affects us in our daily lives. Open Space offices reduces our productivity by 66%, says Mr. Treasure. Well, that explains quite a bit of bay area culture and its love for open cube spaces.

Most often than not, the sounds that we hear are unpleasant and disturbing. On the other hand, do you know why ocean waves are so soothing to us ? Sounds produced by ocean waves are 12 cycles per minute apart, exactly same frequency as breathing when we are sleeping.

Finally got around making the blog and the tweeter work together. Hurray !

Change is Refreshing. It brings excitement and motivation and that's the theme for this blog post. I have been quite busy lately and hence long time gap between the posts. Hopefully in coming days that would change. In order to motivate myself, I updated the look of the blog, which I believe is much more sleek, much more clean than the one it replaces.

I love Orange/Black combination. Orange brings excitement, enthusiasm and also encourages socialization. Black brings boldness and authority. You can find more on the effect of colors on human psychology here.

There are few modules that I have added to the back-end software; One of them was to link my twitter account with the blog. That would synchronize my blog posts with the twitter account and vice versa, bringing more dynamism to this blog, as you can imagine twitter updates are quite frequent.

Following article from Economist paints a picture of how economies of BRIC (Brasil/Russia/India/China) are flaring against the developed countries of the West. For the most part, the indications are that they have decoupled themselves from the global cycles, thanks to their sheer size, controlled financial systems and low GDP dependency on exports.

It is the Sound, that reigns over the silence :-)

BMW 130i tii from Daniel Michaelis on Vimeo.

In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."

Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak's comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana." But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.