Phillip Morelock's Blog

I've been enjoying Phillip Morelock's blog for a few weeks, every since I found it, so I wanted to point you there too. Phillip is the CTO of JibJab, an all around great guy and a blogger with a sense of humor. Here is a post with pictures that I really liked.

Kati on the Ipad

Kati is one of very special moderators on Living With Ataxia a community on the Ben's Friends Patient Support Network that I'm involved in. Aside from being all-around amazing, she's also an Apple Fan Girl. She wrote up a cool review of the new ipad and what she is hoping for from the next generation. Kati writes from the perspective of someone who has physical challenges, so I always love reading her reviews on products for a different perspective.

Yes, Apple's iphone's and ipad's are changing the lives of John Q Public, but lost in that is what a big impact they are making on smaller segments of people who face daily challenges. For Kati, the iphone, and soon the ipad are essential for keeping her connected. How else can her dog Inca get the virtual hamburgers and steaks that people leave for her on Living With Ataxia? :)

My favorite part of Kati's review wasn't even about how the ipad relates to her. It was a little anecdote at the bottom of her post.

"I came across another link on Facebook leading to video of two deaf people using the iPhone (Facetime Video App) as video phone to sign to each other."

Goosebumps

This Really Happened - Pop a Shot

Schweif's birthday was two weekends ago and we re-lived his formative post-college years in the Marina via a scavenger hunt full of challenges. One of those challenges was Pop A Shot at Mauna Loa. Now, those happened to be my formative post-college years too and one thing I got really, really good at was Pop A Shot at Mauna Loa.

Maybe too good. Definitely too good. Way too good at Pop A Shot.

Before I took my turn to shoot, I turned to Meghan, Matt & Vanessa (my teammates) and said, "I may be better at Pop A Shot than anything else in my life." They looked at me in a weird way.

Then I shot a 71, which is the world record as far as I know.

At that moment, everything in the world made sense.

"People Aren't Motivated by Insults"

"People aren’t motivated by insults. Criticizing someone feels good, but it isn’t likely to result in a behavior change. This is why companies selling weight loss products don’t go around pointing fingers, “Hey, you there. You really do look fat. Put the donut down now.” It is also why people in the fashion industry focus on the great new look, not making fun of people wearing the old style.

So I’m not sure why President Obama has decided the best way to deal with the oil spill is to attack BP. This week he said something like this: “You folks at BP are either totally incompetent or criminals. You deserve to be punished, and I am personally going to lock you away for a long time. And Tony, Mr. CEO, you are the worst of the bunch. You have a bad haircut, too.”

This approach might be right if the problem was fixed and the only issues were working through the cleanup and determining the liability. But that is not the situation at all; the leak continues with no end in sight.

It appears that the people who will fix this leak all work for BP, which means we need the BP team to do great work. Declaring them incompetent and lazy will not make them work harder or inspire them to come up with new ideas. At the moment we should look for ways to support the people fixing the leak, not criticize them."


-- Great advice by Professor Caulkins, one of my favorite Kellogg Professors.

Moore's Law in Healthcare

"Last week Illumina Inc, the market leader (by number of units shipped) in gene sequencing machines announced a 60% reduction in price of it’s personal full genome sequence. The price is now down to $19,500.



Health Care Information Technology: Moore’s Law is so last century!


The same test was:


$350k in 2009


$650k in 2008


$3B in 2003"

I loved this post by James Siminoff about how Moore's Law is affecting Healthcare Diagnostics, because it was the subject of my internship at Becton Dickinson. The layman definition for Moore's Law is that every 18 months, the number of circuits on a semiconductor doubles. It's not a law of physics, but the magical semiconductor R&D labs always seem to do it. Accompanying the doubling of circuits, is a similar price drop of something like 50% for a given level of computing power. The price drop isn't a law of economics and wasn't even addressed by Moore, but it just kind of happens, and you can bank on it.

One of the best things about going to Business School is your summer internship. You get to try out a whole new profession for three months. You meet great people along the way, learn about what you love, and do great work. BD is a Fortune 100 company and they asked me to research and propose a strategy in the molecular diagnostics market for them. BD was very strong in old school, culture based tests, but didn't have much of a presence in the new fangled Molecular (gene based) market. Molecular Diagnostics are fantastic at determining the genetic markers that tell us whether someone is genetically predisposed to things like Breast Cancer and other diseases. Your genes don't lie and there is a wealth of information in them.

Moore's Law is something that hadn't really occurred to the folks at BD because they had spent their careers in Healthcare, a place where costs only seem to go up, not down like clockwork in technology. However, I'd spent the early part of my career doing Investment Banking for tech companies and I saw the magic that was unfolding in this market. In fact, the capacity improvements and price reductions were blowing away Moore's law, increasing and decreasing respectively by about 4x a year.

The trick in Molecular is finding the genetic markers that correspond to a disease. As James shows above, the tools capable of this work were insanely expensive, kind of like how old mainframe computers were when the computer revolution started. But Moore's Law gradually made the personal computer and server market accessible and today we walk around with a phone that is more powerful than those old mainframes. My message to BD management was that diagnostic toolmakers were going to make finding genetic markers cheaper and easier than they had ever imagined, and we would have a healthcare revolution on our hands shortly. Management enthusiastically embraced my recommendation and has made moves into the market.

I share this story because for all of the developments going on in Information Technology, I think the most exciting leaps are taking place in Healthcare. Technology is a beautiful, unrelenting force, powered on by human ingenuity, and soon, very soon, we'll all be better off for its magic.

Ariel's Life is Funny

"Reynoldo then proceeds to go through my items one by one and put them in either a “Yes” or “No” pile. I see him take a pair of Gucci shoes, still in the box, which I bought on clearance and only wore once because they’re a size too small and pinch my feet so hard want to cry when I wear them, and put them in the “No” pile. “What’s wrong with the shoes?” I ignorantly ask. “Um, pointy toes are kind of out right now.” Thanks, asshole. This is a secondhand store in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco…didn’t realize the pointy toe was such a leper. Reynoldo’s judgement didn’t seem to stop with the shoes, though. After he goes through my clothes, he looks at me, dressed in workout clothes, and goes “Not working today?” in a tone suggesting I was either unemployed or some spoiled girl with out-of-style pointy toes Gucci shoes who doesn’t need employment. “No, Reynoldo, I’m a teacher. I teach children.” Don’t you judge me, Reynoldo, or my pointy-toed shoes."


My good friend Ariel is blogging now. She's hilarious in real life and a good writer. This is her second post and I was already laughing out loud. Enjoy.

Horses

Awesome video of Band of Horses playing live. I've listened to Monsters roughly 65 times in the last month.

Friday Chill Music (June 25, 2010)

I started thinking about the new Sunday Morning this week. It's a mix tape I put out every year that my friends have really gotten into. It's always a dual purpose mix, good for hangovers and/or makeouts. For this week's mix, I dug through my music and posted some old Sunday Morning songs.

Sadly, many of the mixes have disappeared from my computer over the years. If you have an old copy or any of the mixes, I'd love to burn it so I have a record of what I put together. Leave a comment or send me an email with what you have!

"I Am Here for You Too"

"I am here for you too, anytime, we chiarians need to stick together."


We started a new patient to patient support network under Ben's Friends. It's for Chiari Malformations and this quote was left on the network from one patient to another last night. 


Ben's Friends and all 14 (!) of our networks are a little Internet miracle. Take a second and check it out.