Saket Vora

Thanksgiving break started at 5pm on Friday for me. I’m staying here at Stanford seeing as none of my family is at home in Raleigh. It’s ok though. I took Friday night and most of Saturday off. Took Nader to the airport, finished some errands, and have been working primarily on my EE 214 term project. It’s going to take a lot of work.

I re-read one of my favorite works of literature yesterday — Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn.  Some of you know that this one of the works assigned in Honors 201 class, freshman year. Some of the more humanities-focused classmates didn’t appreciate it, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant. In my sophomore year, UNC Playmakers put on a production of Copenhagen at Chapel Hill, and I was fortunate to see it live. While I was studying abroad, I visited the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and took a stroll around Faelled Park, where Bohr and Heisenberg would often walk and talk.

 So yeah. I’m a major fan. In high school I read through Brian Greene’s very accessible The Elegant Universe and was enjoying physics as my favorite class. I read about physicists like Richard Feynman and learned about all the science being done during the first third of our century. So when I came upon Copenhagen, I already had a familiarity with the (laymans) physics and the characters.

Copenhagen is a play that I love to pick up and truly read; if just to mouth the words and roll the dialog around my head. Copenhagen is about famous meeting between Niels Bohr (a half-Jewish Danish physicist) and his former apprentice Werner Heisenberg, a German. The year is 1941, and Denmark is occupied. These two worked together in the early 1920s and through their collaboration emerged two pillars of quantum mechanics — the complimentarity principle and the uncertainty principle. After this fateful meeting this one night in 1941, their relationship forever ended. What was said? What transpired? Frayn draws upon historical sources and indeed, the afterword of the play is nearly as many pages as the play itself and is where Frayn outlines the various historians and interpretations of the events.

I love this play because of the questions it evokes and makes me wonder. About the interminableness of our memories. About ethics. About decision making. About what it means to be a scientist. As the play unfolds, the mind races with the possibilities that are presented — what if Bohr hadn’t stormed off when Heisenberg asked him that critical question? Would Heisenberg then realized his earlier miscalculation? The tantalizing coincidences and happenstances that occurred regarding the competing atom bomb projects…the Allies estimating the required amount of U-235 to be hundred times less than what Hiroshima needed, thus making them more eager, while the Germans estimating it to be hundreds of times more than needed, thus making them reluctant. The ethics — how scientists who helped build the bomb at Los Alamos refused to shake Heisenberg’s hand when he visited after the war. The unending questions — was Heisenberg trying to subtly intentionally sabotage the Nazi atom bomb project? Or was his physics wrong?

As you might guess, I could go on like this for many more pages. I would love to transcribe some wonderful passages from the play. Absolutely delightful. Note to interested readers: you don’t have to know anything about physics to appreciate it. This play won the Tony Award in 2002.

I went into the City today to see a film, called Heima, about Sigur Ros‘ Icelandic concert tour. Despite getting there half an hour early, the line was so long they had run out of capacity. Note: don’t go to a film screening when the venue is a club that is being converted into a screening room.

My buddy Lei forwarded me a note from a friend of his in the GSB about Carlos Ghosn coming to speak at a weekly GSB lunch-time speaker event. I had never heard of Ghosn before, but I’m glad I went. Ghosn was named Business Man of the Year  in 2003 by Fortune magazine, and is widely lauded for turning around Nissan. Ghosn has the distinction of being the CEO of both the French automobile giant Renault and Japan’s Nissan at the same time. When Renault and Nissan formed an alliance back in 1999, Nissan had $20 billion in debt and compared to all of its peers, was in astoundingly bad shape. Now, Nissan is in the green. He is so highly regarded in Japan that his nickname is Samurai and manga (comic book) has been written with him as a character.

Ghosn appears to be the perfect man to lead  two global companies. Born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, he studied in France and is fluent in 5 different languages, with a sixth coming along. Ghosn spoke about the state of the automotive industry and the challenges of bring a very French company and a very Japanese company together towards success. He is an excellent speaker.

He spoke about the cultural problems in Nissan that made it plunge so low (not profit driven, not customer driven, and no cross functional teams). He said that leadership is about getting a group of people to work towards a goal they are uncertain of. When it came to the idea of failure, Nissan and Renault posed two different problems. In Japan, people feel shame when they fail. But failure is part of innovation — Ghosn says that shame comes with repetitive failure. In France, is it the opposite. If a person is doing a 95% great job, the French is likely to point at the 5% and complain.

He spoke at length about the new developing markets in China, India, Brazil, Russia, and sub-Saharan Africa.  In order to open up the possibility of owning a car to more people, they have to drive the price lower. In America, the cheapest car is $9,000. But people can’t afford that. He described a partnership that Renault-Nissan has with Bhajaj Motors in Mumbai where Bhajaj is designing the car while using the resources and technology of Renault-Nissan. Ghosn noted that India is designing cars with the Indian consumer very much in mind. He also gave an interesting statistic for China — the domestic car manufacturers only have 12% market share in China. This is the lowest for any other country. In Japan, that stat is 80%. In America, 40%. In European countries, closer to 50%. So Ghosn thinks there is still some time before Chinese cars flood the international markets — they have a lot to catch up with at home.

Someone asked about hybrid vehicles and Ghosn made a point saying that technological innovation is very different from commercial marketization — a point that I agree too many engineers fail to understand. There are 65 million cars sold every year. How many of those are hybrid/electric vehicles? 0.1%. Yes, it is growing but there is still time before it becomes a big commercial market.

Ghosn showed a quick mind, offered more detailed answers (with figures, percentages, time estimates) than what I would have expected from a CEO, and felt comfortable with the crowd. Someone described the Renault-Nissan alliance as a marriage, and Ghosn said that you don’t judge a marriage by the first sixth months…you have to look where it is after 5 or 10 years. A while ago GM was rumored to perhaps join the alliance, and Ghosn described it as “what happens if you like the father-in-law but think the bride is ugly.” He also noted that when it comes to management, people only care when things are going bad. When things are good, great companies can run themselves. When you’re flying on a plane, you don’t care who is flying until you notice the engines are flaming out and you want to make sure the pilot isn’t some rookie.

As I was watching Ghosn, it really impressed upon me of the notable difference between leadership and management. I know I’ve been taught these topics before, but still. A leader’s fundamental role is to provide a vision for people to believe in and want to work towards. As Ghosn says, you cannot simply command or order people to be motivated. You have to inspire it. A manager is concerned about implementation and execution, and making sure you have total awareness of what is going on within your organization. I reflect back to the projects I’ve been a part of, and I wonder: have I been more of a leader, or a manager? As a major advisor to this year’s Krispy Kreme Challenge organizers, I realize that I failed to spend the time to truly communicate the vision of what Krispy Kreme Challenge was about and to inspire our group last year. My thoughts would first jump to ‘total awareness’ mode and start analyzing all the things that had to be done and how to execute. I think I did a better job with ARI, the senior design project, because in my role I was able to stay above the gritty implementation part and really make myself available to our undergraduates.

I need to be mindful of this differentiation between leadership and management, and wear their respective hats accordingly.

I’ve been using Vista Ultimate or over 3 weeks as my primary OS, as it preloaded with this new laptop. And after giving it that much time, I plan on switching back to good old Windows XP. My questions for Vista:

•  Why did you have to change my directory browsing behavior? The ‘up directory’ arrow, which I could use in XP to easily traverse my entire harddrive from wherever I was, is gone. If I open the ‘My Documents’ folder, I’ve got to carefully click the tiny ‘>’ breadcrumb divider, then move the cursor down to select ‘Computer’. Not intuitive.
• Why does Adobe Acrobat crash 5+ times a day? Note this holds true whether I’m viewing Acrobat files in Firefox, in IE, or just by themselves.
• Why have I had to a hard power-down three times today because Windows Explorer chose to completely freeze (no task manager and Ctrl+Alt+Delete unresponsive)? If I had 30+ windows open and trying to defragment my harddrive at the same time while encoding a DVD and burning a CD I might understand…but when I’m just trying to open iTunes? When I’m just trying to open my mail client? Unacceptable.
• I like the option of your Sidebar, but is it so restrictive?

Yeah, the visual facelift is a nice touch. The searchable start menu is good, the volume adjustments are more specific, and there is a nice media center mode too. But instability and frequent program/OS crashes is something I cannot tolerate. I’ve had more of these problems in these past 3 weeks than I had with my Windows XP in a year.

Unacceptable. Nice try though.

Yeah, I did very, very little work this weekend. On Friday, Nader and I met up briefly to talk about our circuits project, but really watched some TV and played Super Smash Brothers. Gene’s happy hour was in full swing and I joined in. There was a nice mix of people, some humanities and engineers. Veronica is a grad student in structural engineering and we talked a lot about how that applies to NGO work. She spent three months in India advising rural villages in northeast India about seismically sound structures. She’s graduating in March and will work with a locally based NGO on an eight month project in Guatemala. Simon, Luke, and I were finally able to convince Darcy (a french literature grad student) to try some Vegemite. She’s actually from the Triangle area too, so she picked up on NC State pretty fast.

On Saturday I woke up very early and went over to the SAP campus at 8:30am for the Cyber|West conference. This is the west-coast event for Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium event. Some of the discussions there were on the future of the mobile web platform, an interview with Rich Redelfs, a video from Ray Kurzweil’s keynote that was given at Harvard just a few hours before, and a panel on clean tech with cities. Some pretty neat guests and speakers were there: VP of PayPal Mobile, venture partner from Menlo Ventures, Product Manager for Google Mobile (maps and gmail), VP of AdMob, solar power consultant, VP of SAP, head of corporate environmental at Intel, and even the Mayor of San Jose. It was really interesting to hear how SAP is starting to look at ways of integrating green/clean tracking and monitoring into their venerable ERP platform, for including externalities into executive dashboard as well as compliance monitoring. These are the kinds of things that my friend Lei and I have been discussing a lot too. Tobias Dosche, of SAP, said that in the 1980s the focus was all about cutting costs, and in the 1990s it was about competitive advantage. Going ‘green’ is no longer in the realm of feel-good treehuggers. Going green for many corporate clients is now about both improving the bottom line and gaining a competitive advantage. The Mayor of San Jose explained the ‘green vision’ for his city. Very ambitious. Consider though that there are 8 known solar power companies in the Bay area — we’re talking technology firms creating new solar technology. And more are in stealth mode. Tesla Motors is here, and there is also Better Place, the electric car promoting venture by Shai Agassi, of SAP fame. His vision is to make Silicon Valley the ‘Detroit’ of the next generation of [electric] automobiles. When it comes to IT, Silicon Valley is still king. For biotech and medical devices, Boston/Cambridge is the leader. But in this emerging green/clean tech, Silicon Valley appears to be rapidly securing its leader position. The discussion on mobile web was nice, with all of the panelists criticizing the cell phone carriers for not being progressive. Their inability to work together and their over-protective mentality has resulted in an absolute nightmare of regulatory and technical redtape which is slowly the spread of a great mobile web. Verizon was deemed the worst of the major carriers. In the future, we’re going to be paying for things using cell phones. It’s commonly said that downloadable ringtones/wallpapers for your cellphone is a $2 billion business, but if you start opening transactions to things over $5, $10, or $20, you start talking about market sizes in the couple of trillion of dollars. The future is the mobile web.

I got a Harvard Business School branded laptop sleeve as my swag. This conference was free to Stanford students (instead of $50) and its a shame I didn’t see more students there.  At around 6pm Lei came over and we just sat back and watched college football for a few hours. USC-Cal game was really sloppy, and Stanford lost. Lei’s Buckeyes (he’s an OSU grad) lost too. But talk about the Wolfpack’s win over Carolina! Later we talked at length about what classes to take and looked at Rise of Nations a bit.

Woke up late Sunday, looked at EE 278 homework (oh the horror it is so long), watched a bit of Chargers vs Colts, cooked some pulao, in the evening went over to Packard with Nader, Morris (almost-finished PhD in the VLF group), and a few of Morris’s friends and we watched two episodes of Planet Earth on a projector. Deserts and the Ocean Deep. One day I gotta watch that entire series on Hi-Definition.

So yeah. Didn’t really do a whole lot this weekend. This week I gotta finish that awful 278 homework. Nader and I will get a first working draft of our circuit by Friday. I’ll be staying here over Thanksgiving break and working on the 214 project full time. I am extremely motivated in making my project very good for that class. I’ve got something to prove after my less-than-stellar ECE 511 project.  It’s getting more chilly here too.

This place might seem like a country club, but it can have a sense of humor. You know those inspirational college promotion ads we see during college sporting events? This is what Stanford came up with for this year:

Hail, Stanford, Hail.

the homeworks aren’t something you can jump into on a whim. Even Nader remarked, shaking his head, how many windows he needed open to work on the homeworks that require simulation. For those readers who haven’t experienced the joys (cough, cough) of circuit simulation, we have tools available in which we can specify a particular circuit configuration (from 1 transistor to eleventy million), and we feed it into a simulator and it will save the results into a file that we can then analyze. This tool is called Hspice, based on the SPICE simulation engine that was developed by Berkeley. The annoying part is that this is a server-side tool, which requires that we login and run these apps remotely. I’m fortunate to have an external widescreen monitor to help me keep track of it all. If you’re interested, here is a screenshot of my work environment for this homework I’m currently doing:

My other laptop is off to side, showing the actual homework assignment. Sigh.

Anyway, are any of you interested in seeing the kinds of problems I’m doing for the courses? I could do a post a week sampling what I’m currently learning/working on. Let me know what you think.

Friday’s circuits midterm was alright. It was a good exam, but I did make two stupid mistakes. It’s frustrating to lose points on easy stuff. I went to review session for the probability midterm and spent Friday night working on the take home midterm exam. I didn’t get to bed until late, and ended up waking up at around 1:30pm Saturday. There was another review session from 2 to 4 where the TA went over the solutions for the practice midterm, which was helpful. Why am I so concerned about this midterm? I don’t think I have had such a poor grasp of the subject matter before. In circuits, there are physical behaviors — I can ask myself “what would an electron do?”. With probability, I often have no idea how to setup the problem. I spent the rest of the day going over old homeworks. After the 2nd cup of coffee at 7pm, decided to gun it and kept working through the night. Did laundry at 3am. Made it until about 8am, when I took a 2 hour nap that turned into a 4 hour nap. Did some grocery shopping with Luke. Spent a while cooking chili and dal makhni for the upcoming week. Luke was filming a video for his research project. Later that night we watched the finale to the the South Park story arc ‘Imaginationland’, thoroughly enjoying it.

It sucks that Indy lost to the Patriots. NC State beat Miami in OT, crossing my fingers for this week’s game against Carolina. Stanford lost to Washington. Did a lot of thinking about the Krispy Kreme Challenge too, with frequent discussion with Thomas Finch, Greg, and Kelly. Thomas has been really good about learning from the experience Greg and I have had doing this race for 3 years and our knowledge of the web. It’s worrisome to me that the other four members of the organizing committee aren’t doing the same. The room for error when an event starts to involve more than 2000 people decreases very rapidly. Hopefully this conference call on Tuesday will be give me more confidence.

My parents finally arrived in Mumbai after being delayed 4 hours in Raleigh and another 4 hours in NYC. Fortunately it was a direct flight from New York to Mumbai, but two of their bags are missing. They’ll be arriving in Akola, the small town in central India where my Dad was born. This is a photo I took in 2004 of the building where he spent most of his young childhood.

Donny seems to be settling very well to the east in Bangladesh, making me feel embarrassed cause he’s schooling me in a South Asian language despite me having a huge advantage. Looks like Greg was Extra Number 7 in a commercial that Siemens shot at Cambridge (maybe Donny too gets to be in a commercial?) I wanna see those on YouTube.

What’s coming up next? After midterms are over, we’ve got one more hw in circuits (due this friday) and then our Project will be assigned. I’m staying here over Thanksgiving and will be working on it full time. Looking forward to it…that class is great.

Got my 278 homework done…sort of. Circuits midterm rapidly approaching (Friday morning). Still need to study for that. My parents are leaving for India on Friday too. The big dinner I made for Mary and Matt on Sunday? I just finished the leftovers today….

I had lunch with Ed Chiang today, who went to high school with Donny. We had been meaning to meet up before classes started, but never got around to it until now. Had a two hour lunch with him at Bytes. Really good guy, fun to talk to. He’s doing a Master’s in EE, in more of the computer architecture/software side.

Earlier this week I worked on the UV LED project, the Lunar X project, some KKC stuff, and talking a lot with Mike. It’s fun though. I totally agree with what my friend Lei observed: coursework keeps me from doing what’s really important. I think he and I will take a break from studying for our 278 midterm (upcoming Tuesday…i don’t think i’ve ever been less prepared for a midterm ever) and watch some football. Poor guy hasn’t seen a full game since the season started…and he’s an Ohio State alum.