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By Kiran, April 20, 2009 8:52 pm

Over the last three years, both the mainstream and online news media have become increasingly biased, siding more strongly than ever on specific issues and marching to the drumbeat of their respective parties. These differences have grown so deep and caustic that the news from each network almost sounds like its from a different planet. There used to be a time when we used to just get the news and we had the freedom to form our own opinions and impressions; now, the real news is reduced to a small fleck among the endless opinion-spewing talking heads’ rants. There used to be a time when reporters would use plain and objective words to describe the day’s events; now every event is preceded and superseded with a long line of opinionated adjectives. Are we really so dumbed down that we need some network honchos to make up our minds? As I pondered this question, I came up with two reasons for this widening chasm:

1. We hear what we want to hear – The anchors on MSNBC are smart, witty and lucid; I feel entertained by them. The anchors on Fox are loud, adamant and pointed; I feel a little turned off by them. But that’s just me, there are millions of people out there that prefer the exact opposite. So yes, I am indeed biased towards tuning into Maddow and Olbermann every night, but I do take the time to listen to BillO and Hannity once every blue moon however irrational they might sound. Most of my friends would never watch those Fox “clowns” for the simple reason that they want to believe Obama is doing a great job; and most of Texas would not watch Maddow if she were the last reporter on earth. Ok, I am stereotypeing, but the point is that we like the networks which rehash what we believe.

2. News outlets need to make a profit too – Does Rupert Murdoch care more about the well being of Americans over his own balance sheet? News networks are not in the charity business; they are in the ratings business. MSNBC’s bush-bashing agenda has almost carried them to the top. And Fox has been investing serious resources into Obama-bashing to rally its own viewer-base. Of course, it could have been a lot worse if the government owned all the news channels, but what worries me is that the falling profits and recession could trigger even more bias in order to keep the revenue coming.

Most frightening of all is the increased radicalism at both Fox and MSNBC; while it is good to present both sides of the story, they have of late chosen to completely ignore that sacred line in the sand. The last one year has been nothing but a bloodied fist fight – the nightly name calling, sponsoring citizen protests, party-bashing, offhand jokes, blatant self-promotion. The tea-party ruckus from last week highlights this divide more than ever; yes, there needs to be dissent in a democracy, but that dissent must arise from the people themselves, not a news outlet. Media should not sponsor such uprisings, instead they should cover them for what they are so that the message is spread to other like-minded people. Get over it, there is never going to be a perfect government, and there is never going to be a perfect president, there is only going to be a majority of sorts. If everyone agrees with everything the administration does, there would be no checks and balances, and the government would gravitate towards authoritarianism.

Media has immense power in shaping people’s thoughts and opinions, and with such power comes moral and ethical responsibility. I truly believe that BillO can still be the bully and Olbermann can still be the smartass even if they chose to bash both sides. If the networks are trying to entertain us, somehow I don’t feel that entertained, I only feel disdain for such hatred and lie-mongering. The worst part is that the internet media is only two paces ahead of the broadcast media on the bias scale. I have yet to see Daily Kos and Drudge Report point one mistake in their respective parties; for the last few months, I have to desperately seek one, just one, unbiased political commentry – I’m still searching. I plea to you, big news, do not corrupt us, tell us things as they are without the added bullshit, if you have specific opinions please warn us about your affiliations beforehand so that you don’t mislead and miseducate us. And please dont make fair and balanced just another joke.

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By Kiran, April 18, 2009 1:01 am

Hence, I am taking a break from my random stray thoughts for a change and writing this memo/mini-manifesto to myself to remind myself of things I (and my team) need to keep in mind while doing what we do.

We spend countless hours designing application logic, we spend months debugging rules and flows, we put together over five hundred tables to store our data in the blink of an eye, yet we devoted mere minutes to the user interface. Yes, healthcare software is complex and cumbersome and never complete, but that does not mean we can’t do what Apple and Intuit do for their customers. I had the chance to read two UI-centric articles today – on healthcare software (specifically openvista), and on the usage of subtle elements in web design, and I realized that there are two simple reasons we are not presentation-focused – we assume the users will live with whatever we give them, and we are too obsessed with whats under the hood.

Maybe I am the only one, but to me, software design is an abstract art – there are things that are visible and evident if you know where to look, but there is seldom a lot more under that iceberg that most people will ignore. The artist chooses which parts he wants to highlight and which part he wants to obscure; unfortunately most artists will want to simply show every stroke of the still-life and be done with it. If our software affects thousands of users and patients, then why do we overly focus on the data and totally ignore presentation till the last minute. Why are social networks and Web 2.0 sites so far ahead of us in understanding usability issues.

Here a few ideas that I think would help me and the rest of my group:

Minimalism – Apple and Google epitomize this in every product they design. Of course their products are somewhat simplistic in purpose and their product silos are very well defined, but what we fail to appreciate is that they create a layer of abstraction that completely encapsulates their users’ needs without exposing the underlying alchemy. An illustration that I saw a few months ago highlights this best:

While it is near impossible to be minimalistic and yet present every piece of relevant information, there can be a trade-off which lets users to progressively see more data. The key to achieving this is prioritizing information, and building interfaces around the actions that the users would perform 80% of the time. Or maybe we can take a different route – minimalize every snippet of data and present these pieces as part of a bigger picture. For instance, we don’t necessarily need to show the patient’s financial/insurance information unless there is any abnormal event evident in the data.

Aggregation – Intuit is the wizard of aggregation. As an avid user of both Quicken and Quickbooks, I can attest to their depth of understanding of use cases and data aggregation. They use graphs, and then they use graphs; your net worth, your cash flow trends, your spending breakdown – every meaningful micro and macro metric is right there. There is no need to know which report to open, no need to read the manual to figure out what the next step is, and no need to wait guess how to navigate.

Data aggregation is an intensive process, but not difficult. What is difficult is putting that data through a set of filters and rules engines that can rate and parse out the most important pieces in real-time. We are already doing a good deal of aggregation within our cached objects, but unfortunately we are not persisting real-time aggregated information, which forces us to constrain ourselves to re-think every data element we want to include in our interfaces.

Personalization – The same login each time, the same set of information in the home screen, the same boring sequence of actions everyday. The most personalization that I have seen is the option to choose a custom set of tabs based on the roles defined for the user in some table. If an enterprise system is part of everyday business, it will become boring and monotonous after a while. Personalization to me is not just allowing the users to modify the organization and visibility of data, but instead to make the system feel a little more alive. So I have seldom asked myself, what could make a user smile every morning when they first login – a randomized salutation, a joke of the day, a funny logo, some random quote, highlighting a metric they are strong at, introducing a new competitive metric, or any other surprise. Clinicians are serious people, and they don’t always like automation; but from experience I have seen that when there is even just a morsel of “personalization”, their attitude towards IT completely changes.

Inclusivism – Like most healthcare software developers, we are the pros at making lists. A list for medications, a list for allergies, a list of past problems, a list of claims, a list for patient payments, and on and on. The lists are endless, but there is an innate problem with our lists – they give only partial information; is there is an unwritten rule out there which says every item in a list must lead to another interface which presents the details. I think we need to make more of our lists progressive, and not have the users to open additional interfaces. Additionally, our lists are mostly static and we hardly have action options within the lists, an “open”, “view” or “select” is more than seldom our easy way out. And the systems where lists actually include actions, tend to standardize the action directives. Take a list of medications a patient is on – the list would typically show the name of the med, the date prescribed and the dosage. What if the doctor had written a note about it, shouldn’t we want to include that data into the list itself; what if one of the meds was known to be a high-risk med with potential interactions, shouldn’t we indicate that in the list itself provide a link to details about such interactions; what if one of the meds is know to have a mild allergic reaction, shouldn’t it highlight this information and provide a quick way to indicate any new reactions. The examples can be countless, and the possibilities can be exponentially large, but it is important that we start thinking about semantic relationships when we are creating lists, rather than treat them as simply sets of discrete data.

Dashboarding – In the last 2-3 years, the whole world has gone gaga over business intelligence and executive dashboards. I reject the idea that a dashboard has to be limited to viewing data, it should instead be a combination – of data and paths to actions in one place. This usually seems very difficult to do because a comprehensive snapshot of data cannot necessarily be created in real-time due to the scale of data being generated by users. But there are ways are around it – possibly through a combination of aggressive caching and real-time warehousing. More importantly, the dashboard cannot be fixed and cannot be completely dynamic, it has to be a combination of both. If a dashboard is designed to be fixed, then there will be a lot of wasted real-estate, and if it is totally dynamic there is a good chance that less important data will beat the more important data to the front of the queue.

Extreme Linkage – Facebook knows how to link information about a user – from the profile, to comments, to links, to applications. Take a look at the very simple event description page from FB below:

Notice the number of hyperlinks hiding in this page disguised as regular information. Now imagine the same interface as designed by a medical software developer – there would be at least six separate buttons, four highlighted areas, a place to display error messages, the “Displaying the only photo” section would be a “Open Photos Page”, and the “Maybe Attending” section would be button redirecting to a grid of attendees with a colored status in the first column. Although the standards and medical thesauri are not yet at the stage where semantic descriptors can be associated with data elements easily, there are enough relationships between data that we internally describe anyway, the key is to harness those to link the pieces of the puzzle more accurately. So lets take a page from facebook, and link information more efficiently where users can find it without searching for that one button hidden beneath the clutter.

After all, the product is nothing without the marketing, and in that spirit, I will take it upon myself to pay that extra bit of attention to the user-interface design and take a respite from over-working the backend of applications that I design. Fini.

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By Kiran, April 13, 2009 11:14 pm

The guy behind the register was hardly skirting nineteen, nonetheless he looked proud and in control. There used to be simpler times when she could just ask for a small or large mocha at the corner bakery, but now she could carry out a whole conversation in grandes and ventis. He had chosen the starbucks; he was definitely a coffee drinker, the kind that would be in a coma each morning was it not for that strong cup of pike. She had reached there a good fifteen minutes before the deadline, she was never the tardy type whether it was work or pleasure. Somehow this was more important than all those projects that her boss demanded she show up for at the eighth stroke. Her mind was racing in a million directions, her thoughts, fears and hopes were suddenly in that large end-of-the-world collider she had read about last month. She had lost count of the “what if” questions at some point, and programmed herself to accept reality as it is. As one memory blurred into another, she thought back to the times when she had replayed this scene scores of times hoping to see a form to the silhouette.

It was a cruel game and fate tended to choose its victims with extreme prejudice. She had once wanted to be a rebel wading her way against the current, her charm and her smile were her weapons, and her steadfast dedication to her cause was her brown sugar. It was a beautiful day, and today she had even heard the birds chirp near her concrete adobe. She tried not to look happy, she wanted to be normal and her stoic self, and for the sixteenth time she had just told herself she was an impenetrable fortress. Melodrama was not her thing, she was the realist or that’s what she liked to think. But there had been a lingering void; she had looked far and hard and she tried to fill it with presumably fun things and memorable exploits. She had many reasons to smile that morning, but she was tired of repeating those reasons; her heart was right, but her joy was hard-found. Every night she forced herself to feel somewhat fulfilled but every morning she would wake up and talk herself into not dreading another day of loneliness. In a parallel universe, she might have worshiped the achiever, but she would imagine herself at Mr.Big’s side at that academic dinner and decided it was not her tea party. It felt like a lifetime ago and a heartbeat ago; here she was again – piqued by her curiosity, pestered by her family, teased by her friends, and buoyed by her optimism.

There were two people waiting for a free brew; she knew he was not the type that would be standing in line for a freebie. She had tried her best not to judge him, more than anything she did not want to preempt any potential shot at happiness. She felt confused, she was not sure how she could succumb to the pressure, but her mother had talked her into it. She had even heard good things about him, even sensed a certain depth in his character, and wanted to believe that he was more than the sum of his words. She was a smart girl, a detective of sorts, she would develop the full profile in the first three minutes; if he wore jeans, he wanted to feel more relaxed, but a shirt would trump a polo; if he wore a vest underneath it would mean he cares about his hygiene, if she could smell a strong cologne, he was trying too hard. She took another sip of that mocha and tried to tell herself not to jump to conclusions, but she couldn’t help wondering if he was he an answer or would he simply be another question, was he a solution or just another problem, was he genuine or just another wannabe. It was four minutes past the said time, and there was finally a new customer at starbucks. He stood in the doorway for a good five seconds before he spotted her and made his way to her table. She smiled for the first time on a Thursday. He wasn’t just another shadow.

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By Kiran, April 7, 2009 11:28 pm

There are two political parties in the United States – ok, there are two political parties that matter in the United States, but in reality, much like dialects within a language, there are numerous divisions within two main parties. Terms like social liberals, progressives, neoconservatives, etc are usually thrown around by the media as if they are all representative of the two parties. The notion of the past that the country is mostly center-right or pseudo-conservative has been somewhat tarnished by the meteoric rise of the Democrats in the aftermath of Republican failures. So I have seldom asked myself, can there ever be a true centrist that can postulate decisions based on the best that each side can offer. Consequently, if there are more centrists like me, why isn’t there a party that preaches such seemingly rational thought?

The answer to me is simple – political standing is often more of a matter of interpretation than actual execution. The true left and right exist only in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, the rest of the country is simply affiliated to the party that is closest to their ideals. We all know the broad-strokes differences in the Democratic and Republican thought processes, but we seldom postulate the same in terms of a larger set of principals that define our understanding of government. The two philosophies that predominantly dictate the measure of associativity an individual has with his political party are Individualism and Communitarianism. The Individualism school of thought holds high the right of individuals to exercise their desires without undue interference from societal rules. On the other hand, Communitarianism emphasizes the need for policies to be defined based on what is good for the society as a whole regardless of individual members’ needs and desires.

Despite the generalized underlying philosophies, the presence of numerous issues without a clear answer is what allows people to associate themselves with one party or another. For the benefit of a friend and myself, I am listing the main differences in the two parties on the issues as I understand them:

At the end of the day, the problem with a coin is that there are only two sides to it; you just can’t flip it and ask for a little bit of both sides. You pick a side based on the issue which is closest to your heart; like most philosophical questions, there is no one right answer. For many of us, taking the middle ground is for the most part the same as chickening out of taking a stance. There is a certain degree of disservice to the citizens when the two sides are so polarized and establishing a rational middle path is often at odds with ideals of half the citizens. Nonetheless, the two-party system is still a little easier to participate in than the two hundred party system in my home country. Wake  up politicians, there is a reason why majority of Americans consider themselves center-right or center-left, they simply don’t believe in one right answer. So I say, we don’t need more parties, we need more rationality; we don’t need policy based on abstract beliefs, we need policy based on empirical proofs; we don’t need arrogance and justification of mistakes, we need responsibility and repentance of mistakes.

I don’t want the welfare, I don’t want the bloodshed, I don’t want to pay taxes, I don’t want wastage, I don’t want to be supressed, I don’t want traditions re-written, I dont want smooth talkers, I don’t want enablers, I don’t want shadow warriors,  I don’t want loudspeakers. I am a centrist, I am a rationalist.

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By Kiran, April 6, 2009 1:10 pm

There were two streetlights every block and the faint blur of activity at the few stores that were still open that late. He opened his window and let the night breeze hit his face savoring a few moments of tranquil in the otherwise chaotic world. As he looked at the road ahead he tried not to think about where he was going; he turned into another vaguely familiar street, and wondered why all the roads looked the same. There was a tune playing on the car’s stereo, one that sunk in with ease into his thoughts…

I see trees of green…….. red roses too
I see em bloom….. for me and for you
And I think to myself…. what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue….. clouds of white
Bright blessed days….dark sacred nights
And I think to myself …..what a wonderful world.

He thought to himself if that wonderful world Louie Armstrong was crooning about was out there somewhere, if the same road he was travelling would take him there. As the song continued to play, his thoughts shifted briefly to reality, what he needs to do in the next hour, the next morning, the next evening. He lived in a place where time only existed one day at a time, and it was almost criminal to be wondering beyond his allotted scale. His attention span over the years had dwindled to a mere fifteen minutes, after which his mind would seek another chore, another challenge, or another interaction. He was not always like that, there were times when he could sit and read a book for eight hours without thinking about anything else. The world had got to him, his decisionmaking was becoming more machinistic, in the last two years he was depending more on quantifiable trade-offs and compromises than his gut.

He floored the pedal for a few seconds hoping to get another big whiff of that cool air. From the corner of his eye, he caught a late night taco stand, one of those deliciously unhygenic places where the blue collars would stop before heading home. He quickly made a list of pros and cons, evaluated three different decision trees, and moved on – all in the blink of an eye. He told himself that instant gratification is only but instant. As he drove on, he realized the unfamiliarty of the area, he tried to take in the prominent establishments hoping to create a mental map if he were to travel back on the same road. As the houses along the street got nicer, and the lawns looked greener and the parked cars appeared more expensive, he wondered how life would be in one of them. A nice house, a pretty wife, smart kids, modestly expensive cars, few debts; would he still be doing midnight excursions wondering where the road would lead, wondering if the asphalt is the same color after every turn. Maybe he would feel more content, a little more satisfied, a little more melancholic, maybe his thoughts would be more constrained, more attuned to the baser aspects of life. As he wound down his little role-play, he peered into the rear view mirror; he stared into it for a good ten seconds almost irreverent of the road ahead. As he turned his gaze back to the road ahead, his heart sank and he felt like he had died a little more on that day. The road ahead looked exactly the same as the road behind.