Business communication

Would not it be nice if people acknowledged receipt of emails, even if they do not yet have answers to them? Would not it be nicer if they actually read the text of work emails, without quickly hitting reply and answering an unrelated assumed question?  Sometimes I find myself repeating the same thing five different times and ways before the message is really received and understood by the other side.  Do you have the same experiences? Do you find yourself in unnecessary email chains that could have been avoided if the initial recipient had first carefully read the text of the email?  What are your solutions? I think sending short emails, with one question and a different subject line for each, make it harder for recipients to get confused.  At the very end, it seems to boil down to how responsible is the recipient, and how much s/he cares to take care of business.  I understand scientists and engineers not being the best communicators.  However, when someone's job is to provide customer service, especially for life changing matters,  I cannot grasp their non responsiveness.  Change your job for God's sake if you do not want to provide service to customers and answer their questions.

Being green

Today I learned an English term. Someone said in an email that someone is "too green". Considering the context of the message, it did not make sense to me. What did caring about environment and nature have to do with her message? So, I searched for the term. When you say someone is too green, it means they are inexperienced, new to their job, not able to navigate and handle issues as good as an experienced person would. It all makes sense now.

Ocean inside Saturn's Moon

"NASA's Cassini spacecraft and Deep Space Network have uncovered evidence Saturn's moon Enceladus harbors a large underground ocean of liquid water, furthering scientific interest in the moon as a potential home to extraterrestrial microbes."

"Gravity measurements by NASA's Cassini spacecraft and Deep Space Network suggest that Saturn's moon Enceladus, which has jets of water vapor and ice gushing from its south pole, also harbors a large interior ocean beneath an ice shell, as this illustration depicts." 
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Reference:

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/april/nasa-space-assets-detect-ocean-inside-saturn-moon/#.U0b1cV6xG3F

Empathy vs Sympathy

Here is a nice short clip demonstrating the difference between sympathy and empathy, and how sympathy can be destructive.  

The great take away lesson:

“The truth is, rarely can a response make something better — what makes something better is connection.”

It seems to me that the requirement for emphasizing is feeling the hurt person's feelings and placing ourselves in their shoes.  However, what if we cannot emotionally handle experiencing and feeling that pain, or rather not to?  Does it mean we will be incapable of emphasizing with and helping the person in need?

Roaches

As humans we are not fond of cohabiting with many insects, especially roaches.  They are not sanitary and are messengers of old or dirty structures or remnants of food around the house.  That is as far as I used to think badly about roaches, till yesterday!  I was watching a sad documentary on TV about some government housing conditions in poor areas of New York; how people lived in rental apartments that had mold and many roaches; how they cooked and bathed there, getting sick, and landlords ignored tenants requests for repairs; how rate of Asthma for those residents was much higher than other neighborhoods; how finally a concerned mother after years of persistence and taking the subject to the media and her community, was able to force the management company renovate her bathroom and fix a pipe's leak instead of just providing a band-aid solution by cleaning and painting over the mold, which made mold come back soon later.  Anyways, apart from the interesting story, I learned that not only mold but also roaches contribute to Asthma!  One more reason why pest control and vacuuming often is more important than what you can imagine!

To learn more about the relationship between roaches and asthma please visit here. 

The mentioned documentary broadcasted on January 5, 2014 on NBC's Dateline program can be watched here. 

Mark Twain

I learned that Mark Twain was a pen name Samuel Clemens had chosen for himself!

Google's aeronautical endevours 2: O3b satellites!

This summer, I was surprised to learn from manotv, a Persian TV based in England, that Google has launched its first series of four O3b satellites from French Guiana on June 25, 2013! [1]  I am puzzled why this has not got more publicity in the U.S. media or maybe it did and I missed it.   O3b Satellite Constellations is another project of Google aiming to connect people all over the world, similar to Google Loon Project, especially those in remote areas who currently do not have broadband internet access.  The first of these satellites was built in France and the remaining ones was assembled,integrated, and tested in Italy.  O3b satellites will fly in a circular orbit, about 8000 kilometers above the Earth, in medium Earth Orbit.  A quick search reveals that Google is an investor of O3b Networks, along with other companies, to enabling next generation high speed satellite networks.

This is the beginning of a new era making the space and computing technologies come full circle. It was the space industry that enabled high performance computing via commodity computing and invented some computers for aerospace missions, and now it is the computing industry benefiting from the space industry.

References:

[1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/25/google-backed-o3b-successfully-launches-its-first-four-satellites-into-the-heavens/
[2] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/24/googles-other-plan-to-connect-the-unconnected-satellites/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSSC-1
[4] http://spacejournal.ohio.edu/pdf/Dorband.pdf
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_%28satellite%29
[6] http://www.o3bnetworks.com/