So I’m waiting for Google to fix it’s maps service so that I can finish my CS project. My partner and his friends are playing games to kill the time and I thought I’d write something to kill the time. Since we all just got back to school after Thanksgiving, I figured that as I’m multi-tasking (as in waiting for my project to start working), I’d write about multi-tasking.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I read a interesting article about multitasking. It was in The Atlantic, which by the way is one of the greatest magazines I’ve ever read, and it provided a lot of insight to the whole concept of multitasking. It was great because the writer (Istvan Banyai) used a lot of different voices and brought in substantial data from psychology and biology, while also contributing his own personal anecdotes and observations. I also really enjoyed it because you could tell that the writer was fairly young (I expect in late twenties) and, as a result, I related a lot more to his anecdotes making for a better experience.

Biologically, he claims that multitasking actually makes humans less intelligent as it hinders our memory. Multitasking essentially limits how our brains develop (a process which proceeds until twenty-plus years of age) and makes us less capable of remembering things. Personally, I can see this happening to me as I’ll be working on one thing, shift my focus to something else, and then when I go return to the first activity, I’ll have to back track a little bit because I’ve forgotten what exactly I did. Maybe that’s not the same, but he cited some biological data to validate his facts. Banyai argues that we’re actually less efficient when we multitask because we, “chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.”

Banyai used an interesting analogy about human brains. We use our brains as we use the most technologically advanced devices. Before the computer age, our brains were seen as beakers of chemicals (i.e. they worked relatively magically), then during the major physics discoveries our brains were very mechanical. Now we compare our brains to CPU’s and think that they should be able to work like CPU’s. Obviously our mental facilities are very different from computers and we shouldn’t think that we can think the same way that computers work.

And obviously multi-tasking can be dangerous. We all know that talking on the phone while driving significantly increases the chance of an accident and there are several other scenarios where this is true.

So am I going to stop? Probably not. I’ve grown up with multi-tasking; I listen to music while doing homework, I work on other assignments while waiting for my code to compile, I talk to my friends in between physics problems, and I’ve done all these things since middle school. It’s in most of our natures to multi-task but I think we should all be aware of it and try to take tasks one at a time.

If you have Atlantic online membership you can read the article here.

Fuel cell technology is still a long ways off. Honda’s fuel cell prototype will set you back over a million dollars - and it certainly doesn’t run like a similarly priced Ferrari.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks regarding fuel cell technology is the production and storage of hydrogen. Most people simply assume that you get hydrogen from water - put some electrodes in water, pass some current and you’ll see the hydrogen bubbling out. But that’s not where we get our hydrogen. Perhaps ironically (from a warming perspective), the hydrogen that is produced usually comes from the combustion of methane (CH4 + O2 –> CO2+2H2). And that’s assuming it’s complete combustion, incomplete combustion releases CO into the environment. Furthermore, consider that a sizable portion of our energy comes from coal plants (see CARMA) and if you have to get a lot of new electricity to produce the heat needed to make millions of tons of hydrogen to run all of our cars - the carbon pollution savings are not as great as you’d hope, if they even exist. (This by the way, is the same downfall as that for corn based ethanol. While the corn itself reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, producing and burning ethanol puts carbon back into the atmosphere.)

But researches at Penn State were able to create hydrogen using bacteria. Essentially they utilized a bacterial fuel cell that performs electrolysis on a sample of organic matter (in the case of the research they used acetic acid). One of the biggest benefits is that with the help of the bacteria you don’t need to supply as much outside energy as you would otherwise, cutting down the amount of work we need to put in to produce hydrogen. And while other lingering technical hurdles are sure to keep fuel cells off of the mass market for quite some time this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Story from Wired

For anyone interested in examining the CO2 output of various power plants across the globe here’s a great site to check out: http://carma.org

Up until recently I think emissions from power plants were really overlooked. Everyone focuses on the effects of oil and the need to switch over to hybrids, plug-ins, and eventually fuel cells but if all the electricity we produce is powered by dirty plants then simply changing our automobile fuel won’t do much.

I for one hope we don’t add any new red dots onto the American map (note the concentration around the Eastern US and China).

After seeing what happened to ankit on Tuesday i decided i should get to the airport a bit early for my Thursday 8am flight and since everybody kept telling me that the airport was going to be packed at that time i decided to leave around 6ish. I somehow slept through all of my alarms and didn’t get up till 650, woke pav up and rushed to the airport. Luckily there was no traffic and security went by pretty fast so i actually ended up being on time. The moral of this is if you’re going to leave for the airport one hour before your flight, make sure its really early in the morning.

In other news i ended up watching Oprah on Thanksgiving because my parents were watching it and found some really interesting stories i wanted to share. The first is of an 11 year old girl who upon hearing about the aids crisis with children in Africa immediately took all of her own money and adopted a child with aids for a year. This girl was born with a rare liver disease and had to go through two liver transplants in the span of one year. Instead of accepting gifts like flowers from well wishers she asked them to donate to a foundation she created for the aids children. Imagine that, you’re on a hospital bed getting one liver after another and yet you’re thinking about helping others in any way that you can. Former President Clinton heard about this and personally went to her high school and brought her to the Oprah show. Some anonymous person who was traveling with Clinton donated half a million to this girls foundation. What really stood out to me was how unselfish this was on the part of the girl, she had no other motive but to help people in need.  I have always tried to think for the better of other people and not always about myself which is why i admire people like this little girl.

Another nice story i found from the show was of a website called www.kiva.org . Entrepreneurs in this country have all kinds of financial aid available to them to make their small company successful, but what about the entrepreneurs of third world countries? Thats where this website comes in, it provides a place where anybody can loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. The most amazing aspect of the site is the fact that 97% of the loans have been paid back, that is quite amazing considering people aren’t really sure of where they are loaning this money. Its people like the creators of this non profit company that show me how the web 2.0 generation can be used to help out people in need.

There was also a piece on the school Andre Agassi has created in Vegas which ill write about later. Check it out here if you want http://www.agassifoundation.org/ .

Hope everyone is having a good break.

-Saumil

I’m sitting at home watching the lakers game against the Bucks. Soon, I will recover my files from my network hard drive at home. My laptop still isn’t working, and I don’t think it will. I can’t get the hard drive slot to open now because one of the screws I put back in is broken and can’t open with a screwdriver. Sad story, but a good lesson -never ever play flip cup with vodka. Again sorry for keeping you awake so late spray I didn’t realize. Apologies to the house and chandani as well.

I’m using my mom’s laptop that she left at home before she went to India. I cleaned it up and it works pretty well, it’s the same fujitsu laptop I had but a different model, so I’ll probably just have this till December Break before i get a new laptop. Thinking about a mac. Also thinking about how etnanine is just turning into an open-ended chatroom for us in the house. I’m gonna peel to the couch with mah blanket to watch the rest of the game…

-Prashant

I got home for thanksgiving break a couple hours ago and I’m really excited for this break. It was really nice to see my brother again (I hadn’t seen him since May, 2007), and he actually came with my dad to pick me up and met some of my housemates which was pretty cool too. My mom baked some cake which is looking really good right now as I’m quite famished. But I’m just really excited to get a lot of sleep and recover from this stupid sickness that I have right now. Plus I’ll get to see all of my family and high school friends which is always good.

Unfortunately, there is a crap-load of work that I need to do during this break so I don’t really know if it will be all that relaxing. I have to catch up in all of my classes and I have a comp. sci. project due the Thursday after break. It’s going to be tough finding time for all my work when my mom has already scheduled like 3 things a day for the rest of the vacation. So I guess we’ll see how much I end up getting done.

Hope everyone has a great thanksgiving break, where ever you may be.

akshay

p.s. i just read a really interesting article about multi-tasking. I’ll try to write about it sometime soon (if i get around to it)

we have a beer pong table.

Hey guys. I’m in EE122 lecture right now. I’m just kind of bored because he’s discussing how to prioritize bandwidth based on user applications, which sounds tight, but indeed is not as cool as you may think. (Ir)regardless, I’ll be home in a few hours, and I was wondering what our plans are tonight, if any. Okay, back to Prof. Paxson.

–

Pavan

P.S. Leopard is pretty tight; Shay, it makes your computer run at a noticeably higher rate than Tiger did, which seems different from what one would think from a newer operating system (a la Vista), but it’s true. That was for you Tap. Blow me. Later.

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