Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Scientists from Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel,have achieved a major milestone in the research on pregnancy and how it works. For the first time, they were able to take fertilized eggs from the oviducts of female mice just after fertilization (Day 0 of development) and had grown them in the artificial uterus for 11 days. The gestation period of mice is 20 days so in human terms it would be about 5 months of pregnancy.

The mouse embryos looked perfectly normal. All their organs were developing as expected, along with their limbs and circulatory and nervous systems. Their tiny hearts were beating at a normal 170 beats per minute.

The major problem the scientists are now facing is how to get enough nutrients to the embryo so that they can survive post the 11 day mark. As by then the embryo has a placenta and a yolk sack, but the nutrient solution that fed them through diffusion is no longer sufficient without a blood supply.

This is a really cool break through, and once the problem of getting nutrients post 11 days is solved we can expect similar experiments with mammal and then human embryo’s. The medical advantages of this technique are vast, it will allow doctors to monitor the fetus for abnormalities and correct them if required. Another advantage would be to allow couples to have a child without having to bear the child naturally which would enable folks with busy lives or those who work in dangerous environments (think armed forces) to have kids without going through a surrogate mother. Transgender couples or same-sex couples will also benefit from this technology as they would be able to have a child which wasn’t physically possible for them before.

Finally, coming to the Sci-Fi angle.. we have long talked about spaceships and it is a common trope that frozen embryo’s are sent into space to populate a distant planet with a limited no of adults to pilot the ship. Having a human gestate all the embryo’s would not be feasible but a mechanical womb would solve this problem and give us a way to travel to the stars. A few days ago I was reading about this push to have a vault established on the moon with frozen sperm and eggs to be used in case of a global catastrophe to repopulate the planet. Till now it would not work without human wombs but if we can get the mechanical womb to work with a reasonable success rate then having a seed vault on the moon suddenly becomes feasible.

Obviously, there is a lot more work required before we are at a stage where humans are born from a mechanical womb but this is an important step in that journey.

Check out the paper published in Nature for more technical details on the achievement.

Thanks to Slashdot.org: Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos In a Mechanical Womb for the initial story.

– Suramya

I saw this article over on Lifehacker.com, that talked about how You should Text Before Calling someone. According to the article:

That’s why—barring some exceptions—you should try sending a text prior to calling someone on the phone. Even if it seems like an indirect route for getting someone to pay attention, it’ll likely help your relationship with them over the long run.

Nothing screams “I demand you dedicate time to me” like an impromptu phone call. Even in this time of isolation, people are still busy, with a constant stream of digital notifications and Zoom meeting reminders vying for their attention. A phone call insinuates an immediate demand for another person’s time; a text message nudges the ball along just a little bit, using a polite suggestion to talk more when you get the chance.

I thought about this for a while, and for the most part I disagree with this. There are certain scenario’s where I would text someone before calling but those are usually when I know the person is super busy and I need to make sure I am not interrupting anything. (Think calling my manager for a question or someone senior who is very busy). Another scenario when I almost always text before calling is when the other person has a young child. Believe me, you don’t want to be the one who woke up a toddler who finally went to sleep after ages of effort.

Other than that, I just call people when I need to get in touch with them. If they are busy or unable to take a call then they can (and do) reject the call or don’t answer and then I just wait for them to call back. I follow the same pattern for when people call me. One rule that I do follow is that I rarely call people after 8pm unless it is urgent or we agreed to have a call post 8pm. This is because I was taught that it is not nice to disturb people after that time unless it is an emergency. Jani makes fun of me sometimes about this but I still find it hard to call folks after 8. I rarely call them before 10am either, but that is mostly because I am sleeping and don’t wake up before that time ;).

For me Text messages are good when I need an answer that can wait, however if I need to talk to someone I will call them without first prefacing with a text message. That is just wasted effort. I know there are a lot of people who don’t feel the same and maybe it is a generational thing as I see my parents generation and most folks in my age-group calling without texting first. Some of the younger folks I work with have the tendency of only texting, or texting and then calling.

There is no right or wrong way of looking at this, but I personally am comfortable with how I approach it and so far no one has complained about it so I am good :).

What do you think?

– Suramya

In the past I have often posted about bad service or problems I have had with various companies so I thought I should also post about companies when I am happy with their services. This is because not everyone does it and then only the negative news is posted. Today I will talk about ACT Fibernet who I have been using as my primary internet provider for almost 3 years now. I have been very happy with their services and for the most part their network has been stable and I get the speeds that I am supposed to get. (I frequently check this because that wasn’t the case with Airtel).

What really wow’d me and prompted this post is that they frequently upgrade your plan to a faster speed without charging extra and without you asking for it. I got an email recently telling me that my plan had been auto upgraded to a 400Mbps plan with an Unlimited monthly FUP from the existing 300Mbps plan. All I had to do was log out from the portal and log back in (or just restart the router). I did that and immediately I had the faster speed available. This is the second time in the past year that I have been upgraded (last one was from 250Mbps to 300).

Another thing I really like about them is their support (once you get through to them) are perfectly willing to have their technical team call you if you have questions they can’t answer. I recently wanted details about their static IP option and the guy on support didn’t have the answer, within 4 hours I got a call from their technical team who answered all the questions I had and then helped me register a static IP. There have been multiple such cases when I have reached out with technical questions. The same is not the case with my other connection (and I will post about it in another blog post) where I have had people insist to me that the information I am asking for does not exist and they refuse to connect me to their technical team.

One slight quibble I have is that they don’t have a 24×7 support line but other than that things are great and I highly recommend them to others.

– Suramya

As some of you know, I don’t usually check Facebook very often. I recently logged in to FB after a while and while I was browsing, I got a little pop up on the bottom left corner of the screen telling me that someone had shared a photo in a group that I follow 6 mins ago. So I clicked on the pop-up and it took me to the group. There I immediately noticed that the post that Facebook had told me about had actually been made 5 hours ago. I had noticed this in the past in my notifications but never had a pop-up about it before.

This basically shows how much Facebook’s algorithms and UX trick you into engaging more on the site and stay there, by showing a message about a new post 6 mins ago they made me click over to check it out. However, this was posted over 5 hours ago and I might have already seen it. This is not a one time event, looking at my notifications, I see this happening very frequently…

Screen shot of the notification and the actual post. Note the time in each.

Are others seeing this as well? At least with Twitter, I don’t see a message that someone has just tweeted something and then find out that that was sent hours ago. This along with all the other nonsense that Facebook is doing is why I don’t use it very often. I am on it mostly because others are there and they share pics etc from our trips & travels on it. I am planning to do a full download of my entire Facebook account activity so that I have a record of it. I don’t think I will delete my account as of yet, but this is bordering on pushing me into deactivating the account.

– Suramya

This is a question that is getting a lot of attention right now. A lot of people say that Technologists shouldn’t be political or worry about how their tech being used but I believe that it is wrong. This school of thought comes from when historically people working on computers were not impacting any real-world events/consequences. E.g. if a computer crashed or was hacked it might not have a life & death impact. Now with everything connected to each other including devices that effect the physical world that is not the case. So if there is a major flaw in a control system of a car that allows it to be hacked then it can be used to crash a car or stop it in the middle of the road causing a pileup. If there is a vulnerability found in a pace maker then it can be used to kill people.

Due to this all our work needs to take in account all three scenarios. We can’t just create a system that causes extensive harm and claim that it was done because “This is what I was told to do” is not a valid justification for doing something that is used to harm people/communities. Some claim that our job is to help our companies & clients make money and leave the ethics at home but it is not the correct way to look at things.

To take an example, what if I develop hacks that allowed governments to spy on terrorists undetected by monitoring their phones & computers? That seems like a win-win for all correct?I am helping stop terrorists and keeping the world safe. What else do we need? Now what if those same hacks were repurposed by repressive regimes to spy on their dissidents? It shows that everything we do and work on, has consequences some of which are intended & some are not.

In another example, if I figure out a way to remotely identify anyone even when they are masked, then before I release the software I also need to think of how else the software might be used. Will it be used to target protestors or political dissidents? We need to figure out what other uses it might have and then take a call.

Unfortunately there is no clear answer or a checklist that we can follow to make the correct decision. End of the day we need to make a decision and then live with the consequences.

– Suramya

Dealing with death is something that everyone struggles with and with the digital aspects of life becoming more and more prevalent there are many ways folks try to keep the memory of their loved ones accessible. There are options in major social media sites to memorialize an account after the owner passes away, others use personal websites to memorialize their loved ones. With advances in technology there is now a new way to remember your loved ones, using AI and machine learning there are companies that allow you to ‘chat’ with your loved ones even after they have died. Basically these sites train a machine learning model using existing communication, emails, chats, postings etc to give you the impression that you are chatting with a dead person.

In theory this is very interesting and I like the use of technology to ease the sense of loss from a death. However, my concern is that this can quickly become a crutch and for people who are having a hard time letting go, this can make things even more complicated. In the end this is a chat-bot pretending to be a person, although to be fair the bot is explicit in telling people that it is a bot. For example when asked where they were the bot responded: “As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco. And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me.”

Overall I am not sure how I feel about the tech. It is both good and creepy at the same time. Extrapolating into the future we can see that soon it would be possible to create a virtual reality (VR) representation of a person that can interact with people after the original person dies. All you would need is data and enough processing power to create a model of how a person behaves. There was a TV show that I saw a while ago where dead people lived on as online avatars and would still interact with their loved ones but I can’t remember the name but it was an interesting concept.

What do you think?

Source: Popsci.com: Old text messages are letting people chat with the dead

– Suramya

A while ago I had posted about the most bizarre reaction I had seen from someone whose friend request I had not responded to quickly (I don’t check FB very often). I am happy to say that it was nothing like the reaction this person from North Dakota, US got. Apparently 29 year old Caleb Burczyk decided that being friends with his ex-coworker was so important that Caleb threatened to kill them if his request wasn’t accepted. To top things off, this moron actually went over to their house and kicked in the front door while getting caught on camera doing so just because he couldn’t take the fact that his friend request was rejected ensuring that he has a felony assault entry in his record.

Caleb Burczyk, 29, pleaded not guilty to felony charges of burglary and terrorizing filed in Williams County District Court Tuesday, Dec. 29. Burczyk’s attorney Jeff Nehring declined to comment on the case.

Police say Burczyk started sending aggressive Facebook messages to his ex-coworker on Dec. 24, according to an affidavit of probable cause. He threatened his ex-coworker’s life and warned him that he was going to “come at” him if he did not accept his Facebook friend request, the affidavit stated.

“Accept my friend request or I’m going to murder you,” Burczyk wrote in a message to his ex-coworker, according to the affidavit.

I can understand being slightly upset when someone doesn’t want to be friends with you but this is extreme and the guy should be in jail as he is not stable and could have caused a lot of harm. These are the kind of entitled morons who need to be taught that the world doesn’t revolve around them and they need to accept that people don’t want to associate with them. I don’t blame the co-worker for not wanting to be friends if this is how he behaved. I am sure he was doing the same thing in real life as well.

Source: PSA: If Someone Doesn’t Accept Your Friend Request, Do Not Threaten To Kill Them And Kick In Their Front Door

– Suramya