Do you often find yourself giving the thumbs-up to those who finish the job with a big voice? We do. To be honest, we should quit doing so. Here's why.
We've been lately getting unhappy with the performance of my wife's beeper, which makes a less loud voice than before. Two days ago, we decided to buy a new beeper. We can't – and, in fact, we're not supposed to – have a lot of choices because the commercial market of beepers is shrinking with all the cellular telephones and iPhone models around. At the end of the day, the shopkeeper handed us a beeper, the same model of our original one; she told us that it was the one and only one beeper available in stock.
Good, fine, we thought. So it goes. We made the payment at the drop of a hat and got a new beeper. The voice of that new beeper was much louder, I swear. But, it soon came to our attention that the new beeper makes a loud bleep only when it receives the signal – and it rarely does so. Whew! What's the point of a loud beeper but with weak coverage? Well, that was foolish and we lived to regret it.
It goes without saying that we immediately returned the beeper and redeemed our adorable old beeper.
All right, that original beeper doesn't make a big noise, but it sounds much more adorable to both of us now.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sneakers
As we live, we begin to discover what was perfectly sound in the old days would no longer work out in the present day.
Not that I am claiming to be a stubborn old chap who keeps reminiscing about his youth. I'm not sure if you will remember the days when we were left at home taking care of the young siblings. Picture yourself alone with your younger sister, two toddlers not even old enough for kindergarten, playing with a washing-up basin of water. You would have to make sure your younger sister won't drink the water. Fast-forward to the present. This is absolutely illegal. Period.
Then you start to notice that we are simply being disqualified to repeat what we were able to do previously. Over ten years ago (okay, almost two decades) I was having fun hiking and mountaineering with a pair of white canvas sneakers. Okay. The light shoes with flat rubber bottom are primitive, but are affordable to students living on grants and loans. It's no surprise that those slippery sneakers are not waterproof. What may strike you, though, is that I was then doing perfectly well with them, off the beaten tracks like Tai Shing Stream and Double Deer Creek. Not now. Shortly after having a badminton game with my friends this weekend, alas, the primitive white sneakers gave my feet plenty of jolly sore blisters.
I'm not sure of the moral of this story, except that we're often reminded that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Not that I am claiming to be a stubborn old chap who keeps reminiscing about his youth. I'm not sure if you will remember the days when we were left at home taking care of the young siblings. Picture yourself alone with your younger sister, two toddlers not even old enough for kindergarten, playing with a washing-up basin of water. You would have to make sure your younger sister won't drink the water. Fast-forward to the present. This is absolutely illegal. Period.
Then you start to notice that we are simply being disqualified to repeat what we were able to do previously. Over ten years ago (okay, almost two decades) I was having fun hiking and mountaineering with a pair of white canvas sneakers. Okay. The light shoes with flat rubber bottom are primitive, but are affordable to students living on grants and loans. It's no surprise that those slippery sneakers are not waterproof. What may strike you, though, is that I was then doing perfectly well with them, off the beaten tracks like Tai Shing Stream and Double Deer Creek. Not now. Shortly after having a badminton game with my friends this weekend, alas, the primitive white sneakers gave my feet plenty of jolly sore blisters.
I'm not sure of the moral of this story, except that we're often reminded that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Communication
One of the great boons of working with administrators in a big organization is the chance to learn from them. The fact is, administrators always seem to be miraculous eye-openers. Just asking for something that requires money is usually crime enough under their draconian policy. They don't always turn you down – that depends on how you define it.
I have found numerous such eye-opening examples in the Yes Minister series, and – believe me – they are undeniably fascinating and entertaining. One of the stories goes that Health Service Administration replied to the hospital like this: "Because of the current supply situation it is not possible to issue you with the extra stethoscopes you have applied for. We are, however, in a position to supply you with longer tubes for your existing stethoscopes." The administrators then went so far as to suggest that it could save a lot of wear and tear on the doctors – with sufficiently long tubes for their stethoscopes, they suggested, they could stand in one place and listen to all the chests on the ward.
This is curious, but there is much more curious thing going on around us. I recall with pristine clarity my experience of applying for four cordless phones from our hospital administrators in order to help our medical interns. I talked about the busy extended night shift when our poor interns keep running to and fro, drenched with sweat, their weary lives impoverished by the beepers shouting in bursts. I then suggested that the cordless phones will make the situation less chaotic for our interns in the middle of the night, when the hospital telephone operators are half asleep.
Two days later we received a note from the administrators, who saw no objection to the utmost importance for interns to return beeper calls with telephones. They told us, nevertheless, that the proper way should be to provide the intern rooms with landline phones, instead of cordless phones. As for me, and my sort of brain, I can't figure out the logic. Good gracious! Our interns are schlepping throughout the hospital during the night shift, instead of drinking coffee and answering phone calls at their rooms. The only way their counterproposal can help is to let us live with the illusion that our interns are staying in their rooms for nap. (Often, they can't.)
Finding your request unreasonable in every way imaginable, they come up with astonishing decision, to which you would have difficulty in understanding, not to mention rebuttal. The administrators are, in my mentor's parlance, creatures who have emigrated to Pluto. In short, for reasons too difficult to explain, or impossible to explain, they do not understand a whit what we speak on this planet. And vice versa.
I have not the slightest notion what goes on in the mind of administrators, beyond the conviction that it represents a mind totally beyond my capacity. Just as the administrators are able to make suggestion that I cannot imagine, and smell important things of which I'm unaware, I have a hunch that I can never become an administrator.
I have found numerous such eye-opening examples in the Yes Minister series, and – believe me – they are undeniably fascinating and entertaining. One of the stories goes that Health Service Administration replied to the hospital like this: "Because of the current supply situation it is not possible to issue you with the extra stethoscopes you have applied for. We are, however, in a position to supply you with longer tubes for your existing stethoscopes." The administrators then went so far as to suggest that it could save a lot of wear and tear on the doctors – with sufficiently long tubes for their stethoscopes, they suggested, they could stand in one place and listen to all the chests on the ward.
This is curious, but there is much more curious thing going on around us. I recall with pristine clarity my experience of applying for four cordless phones from our hospital administrators in order to help our medical interns. I talked about the busy extended night shift when our poor interns keep running to and fro, drenched with sweat, their weary lives impoverished by the beepers shouting in bursts. I then suggested that the cordless phones will make the situation less chaotic for our interns in the middle of the night, when the hospital telephone operators are half asleep.
Two days later we received a note from the administrators, who saw no objection to the utmost importance for interns to return beeper calls with telephones. They told us, nevertheless, that the proper way should be to provide the intern rooms with landline phones, instead of cordless phones. As for me, and my sort of brain, I can't figure out the logic. Good gracious! Our interns are schlepping throughout the hospital during the night shift, instead of drinking coffee and answering phone calls at their rooms. The only way their counterproposal can help is to let us live with the illusion that our interns are staying in their rooms for nap. (Often, they can't.)
Finding your request unreasonable in every way imaginable, they come up with astonishing decision, to which you would have difficulty in understanding, not to mention rebuttal. The administrators are, in my mentor's parlance, creatures who have emigrated to Pluto. In short, for reasons too difficult to explain, or impossible to explain, they do not understand a whit what we speak on this planet. And vice versa.
I have not the slightest notion what goes on in the mind of administrators, beyond the conviction that it represents a mind totally beyond my capacity. Just as the administrators are able to make suggestion that I cannot imagine, and smell important things of which I'm unaware, I have a hunch that I can never become an administrator.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Italian lakeland
Sometimes it's the smallest one that gives us the most. Difficult to grasp as it might seem, my recent experience of Italy is a case in point.
When I attended the World Nephrology Congress in Milan, I stayed in a big hotel that comes with the name "Executive." As its name indicates, this hotel must be a grand one, being occupied by over thousands of executives, if not hundreds of thousands. Ah, that's the point, and I ended up paying 10 euros just for the sake of using the wireless net service for 60 minutes.
After the congress, I traveled with my wife and stayed at a two-star hotel above a family-run restaurant in Stresa (a location in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, in case you're interested). This small hotel is not a grand one. Obviously not, I know. Yet, the friendly family shared with me their password of the Wi-Fi, without charging me a buck. And, in a way, it didn't matter very much that this small hotel doesn't have rooms at the top end. When I next moved to Menaggio's youth hostel, the room was even smaller – and cheaper. Lest I begin to sound like mean old Scrooge, however, let me say that it is this youth hostel that offered me the most pleasant lakeside view throughout my trip.
Size rarely matters. Content does.
When I attended the World Nephrology Congress in Milan, I stayed in a big hotel that comes with the name "Executive." As its name indicates, this hotel must be a grand one, being occupied by over thousands of executives, if not hundreds of thousands. Ah, that's the point, and I ended up paying 10 euros just for the sake of using the wireless net service for 60 minutes.
After the congress, I traveled with my wife and stayed at a two-star hotel above a family-run restaurant in Stresa (a location in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, in case you're interested). This small hotel is not a grand one. Obviously not, I know. Yet, the friendly family shared with me their password of the Wi-Fi, without charging me a buck. And, in a way, it didn't matter very much that this small hotel doesn't have rooms at the top end. When I next moved to Menaggio's youth hostel, the room was even smaller – and cheaper. Lest I begin to sound like mean old Scrooge, however, let me say that it is this youth hostel that offered me the most pleasant lakeside view throughout my trip.
Size rarely matters. Content does.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Neat
Confession time again. When I don't have time (that is, most of the time), I tend to turn my desk into a haven of messy work space. One desk, no filing cabinet, and countless documents, letters, and manuscripts bumping together, frantic as atoms. On many days, I simply pull books out of a jumble of messy documents. Well, my reputation of being a messy guy grows in proportion to the height of the piles on and around my desk. Usually, three days is about all it takes for the piles to grow big enough to block my view of the computer screen, at which point another pile will sprout elsewhere.
Dealing with the mess on my desk is as much fun as visiting the dentist; no one will ever want to share this private bit with others. Conjure up an image of taking showers in the seventh- or eighth-grade gym. It's really about opening the insides in front of everyone, who could see your everything or your lack of everything.
As is often true with embarrassing story in our life, we will grow out of it eventually. For heaven's sake, I'm getting less and less guilt-ridden about the way I tolerate mess. Albert Einstein put it this way: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?"
Truth be told, I have been lately reading A Perfect Mess, a book that inspires me to learn that our bedroom is a pretty good place to maintain a mess. For those of you who think otherwise and struggle to keep a perfectly neat bedroom, I see no reason why you should miss this book. As the book captures the heart of it, making a bed when you get up in the morning is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off.
Dealing with the mess on my desk is as much fun as visiting the dentist; no one will ever want to share this private bit with others. Conjure up an image of taking showers in the seventh- or eighth-grade gym. It's really about opening the insides in front of everyone, who could see your everything or your lack of everything.
As is often true with embarrassing story in our life, we will grow out of it eventually. For heaven's sake, I'm getting less and less guilt-ridden about the way I tolerate mess. Albert Einstein put it this way: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?"
Truth be told, I have been lately reading A Perfect Mess, a book that inspires me to learn that our bedroom is a pretty good place to maintain a mess. For those of you who think otherwise and struggle to keep a perfectly neat bedroom, I see no reason why you should miss this book. As the book captures the heart of it, making a bed when you get up in the morning is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Scary
"I want to go to Hong Kong," my nephew Ethan says firmly. "There is so much fun."
Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)
No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.
"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."
Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.
We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.
Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.
When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.
Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)
No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.
"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."
Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.
We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.
Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.
When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Contagion
How often, when you visited the hospital over the past two weeks, were you asked to take temperature and wear mask? The answer, of course, is often, when everyone seems to be on high alert for human swine flu. If you still aren't convinced about the panic, go and read the posters put up in the hospital elevators: they are now teaching us the recipe - if there is one - which is called cough etiquette.
Regardless of the controversy over the need to quarantine people, most of us are afraid of anything that can spread like a bat out of hell. Swine flu, mad cow disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hansen's disease... Omigod! The list of contagious possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.
Well, our tendency always is to get overly serious and paranoid, I must say. You're probably thinking that everything that spreads is bad, but it isn't. In fact, I have come across quite a number of good examples recently.
Investigators at Harvard Medical School, for instance, had documented in a part of the Framingham Health Study just how the smoking cessation by a friend or coworker spreads through close and distant social ties. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study highlighted the network phenomena whereby groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert.
This study dovetails with another "offspring cohort" of the Framingham Health Study, this time published in the British Medical Journal, reporting that happiness is contagious. When the scientists analysed the data looking for happiness trends, they found that happy people passed on their cheer to connected people they didn't personally know - and this transferred happiness lasted for up to a year.
To look for clusters of happy people in the social network, the same group of researchers are now studying happiness contagion in Facebook. Believe it or not, they noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled.
If you don't believe me, think about the old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone."
Regardless of the controversy over the need to quarantine people, most of us are afraid of anything that can spread like a bat out of hell. Swine flu, mad cow disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hansen's disease... Omigod! The list of contagious possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.
Well, our tendency always is to get overly serious and paranoid, I must say. You're probably thinking that everything that spreads is bad, but it isn't. In fact, I have come across quite a number of good examples recently.
Investigators at Harvard Medical School, for instance, had documented in a part of the Framingham Health Study just how the smoking cessation by a friend or coworker spreads through close and distant social ties. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study highlighted the network phenomena whereby groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert.
This study dovetails with another "offspring cohort" of the Framingham Health Study, this time published in the British Medical Journal, reporting that happiness is contagious. When the scientists analysed the data looking for happiness trends, they found that happy people passed on their cheer to connected people they didn't personally know - and this transferred happiness lasted for up to a year.
To look for clusters of happy people in the social network, the same group of researchers are now studying happiness contagion in Facebook. Believe it or not, they noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled.
If you don't believe me, think about the old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone."
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