Deliberate Practice

As I start to write this post, I am hoping I will be done in 30 minutes.

I am going to try a new experiment. Try and post small articles written within 30 minutes, or in some case 1 hour. Agreed, this doesn’t always work, so for lengthier articles I could span it over multiple days or ditch this scheme. May be you are wondering why should I force myself to write so fast?

I have come to believe that when practicing something that you want to master, speed is of importance. I had this idea vaguely understood before, but the book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ cleared it for me. In it, the author gives an example of learning to type. Before learning to type, your speed may have been abysmal. And once you learn to type, your speed improves a lot, but even though you may continue to use your new typing skill for many years, your speed may not improve that much. I myself learnt typing many years back and so since I have been typing for so long, my wpm must hit the roof, but that is not the case. There is no improvement since there is no deliberate practice.

The author of the book Joshua Foer cites psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner from the 1960s, and explains us that there are three phases to learning:

During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally when you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure you are as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot.

Most of the time, this autonomous stage is a good thing since you have one less thing to worry about, but it is not good for learning.

I believe that most of us, unfortunately, end up in the autonomous stage and never improve (or improve very slowly). Joshua calls this phase “OK Plateau” rightfully so. My typing skills is an example. My photography improved rapidly in the beginning and nowadays I don’t think I am improving these days.

Here is another from the book, which I found useful:

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice”.

(Ericsson here refers to Ander Ericsson, the psychologist behind the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice rule.)

This is why I am forcing myself to write fast. Hopefully if I keep doing this, I will keep getting better. Agreed, I need to carefully find out flaws in my writing and fix them. By the way, the time is up.

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2013/05/16/deliberate-practice/

What this blog is about

• 
  

  I realized that I like knowing more about how the human mind works and I want to understand how to get better at using it (e.g: becoming better at time management, personal development etc.).

  
  


• 
  

  I realized that writing is a great way to think.

  
  


• 
  

  I realized that I am bad at writing.

  
  

So I figured out that by writing ideas down on this blog, I will get better at writing (hopefully), and it will let me think more about what I write and thereby help me grow. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

---

Writing down seems to have certain magical property associated with it. For one, if the thought you had in mind had some holes, they become glaring once you write down. Second, the clarity of the thought seems to increase with writing. Third, what you write down will come back to you, often, to help. What I mean here is that, when you come across something that you wrote down before, you will be able to absorb more about it.

The main goal of this blog is to throw some ideas out in the wild. I have to tell you at the outset that some of them may be just plain wrong. Which is one great reason to write it down, so that I may be able to realize it myself or you can pin point it to me.

Few years down the road, I hope these posts appear amateurish to me. Since that would imply that I have become better.

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2013/04/24/what-this-blog-is-about/

Impostor Bungee Jumper

For most of us, bungee jumping is a terrifying experience. We aspire to do it, we plan for it, we reach there but before the grand act, we panic.

This reminds me of the Impostor syndrome. Most of you must have heard about it at some point or other, and some of you must have experienced it. I don’t feel shameful to admit it — there have been times when I have wondered why I am doing something in a place where I don’t seem to belong. I want to focus on the situations where you begin to do something new and feel incompetent about it.

If you are always at the place where you belong and where you feel comfortable, growth will be limited. You will have to be in situations where you are not trained to be, and probably where you are not supposed to be - but you use that situation in favor of yourself by learning to survive that situation and eventually thrive. Sometime ago I realized I am not very good at writing, and I decided to force myself to write this blog and a few others. If I don’t write, how will I get better at it?

Even after convincing ourselves that the jump is going to be safe, we panic. Most of the time it is because we haven’t done it before and don’t know what we have in store, and because it is way out of our comfort zone. But we eventually do it and emerge out of it stronger. Similarly, when embarking on a new adventure, if you start to think you don’t belong there, just suck it up and do it. You will emerge stronger.

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2013/02/18/impostor-bungee-jumper/

Some Changes

I am branching out my blog into two. The more technical and personal content have been shifted to my personal/professional blog, which is hosted on Github. Go take a look.

In this blog, I am going to try to focus on aspects related to the mind, creativity and various other related ideas. So stay tuned!

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2013/01/19/some-changes/

No more rush hours: An introduction to vehicular networks

Imagine doing a 70 on a highway on your convertible and imagine the loud music blaring through the wind. Imagine a sunny saturday when you are making your way to the beach, when suddenly your car tells you to slow down. There has been an accident ahead of you and the traffic is going to get to a crawl. As it turns out, some other car in front of you told your car that the traffic is going to slow down and that car came to know from another car ahead it and so on. Imagine cars talking to one another.

A vehicular network is an ad-hoc wireless networking technology that can be used to form a mobile network between cars and other vehicles, mobile or stationary; and between the vehicles and roadside access points. When I say ad-hoc wireless network, I mean the kind of network that is formed on the spur and the constituent nodes can route information between one another. One can call Vehicular Networks as VANET, and the vehicle-to-vehicle communication as V2V. Vehicle to infrastructure communication is called V2I. Add some brains to a vehicle, it can do a lot of stuff. Add networking and it opens up an amazing range of applications.

The brains here refers to having a computer or a processor that can run a few set of programs. Consider the following example. Attach an accelerometer and a GPS to a car. When the vehicle lands into a pothole, the accelerometer fires and this can be recorded along with the GPS coordinates. Its now not hard to see that multiple cars will have recorded a spike in the accelerometer readings at about the same GPS coordinates. So if I have access to all these data, I can infer sitting at my desk that there is a pothole at a particular GPS coordinate. This is precisely what MIT Pothole Patrol project accomplishes (associated paper).

You may ask why do we need vehicular networks?

Let me ask that to you - do we really want to invest time and money in getting cars to talk to one another? Do we really care if a car can figure out that there is another can coming very fast towards the intersection even though it is red? Do we want to have a technology that can potentially save thousands of lives per year? If you are like me, I assume your answer to these questions is an yes.

When do you think they may be available, you may ask. I don’t know. May be in five years, or in ten years. The automotive industry is slow to respond to innovation, partly because the lives of millions are at stake. And partly because the culture is different.

There are many safety applications possible. For example, detecting fast approaching vehicles at intersections, broadcasting traffic information to other vehicles behind and so on. Furthermore, there can be many other non-safety based application possible - such as detecting potholes and sending back the information to a central server.

Another rising star in the vehicular domain is the Autonomous vehicle - a self-driving car. Such cars do hold a lot of promise - not only in decreasing the accidents, but also in decreasing the congestion in the roads. For one, a family may not need multiple cars, since for example, the car can leave a person to his office and come back to help the spouse. This means less vehicles on the roads, and consequently less congestion. Cars can also communicate with each other to figure out when to accelerate and when to decelerate, and to keep close distance to minimize congestion (for example when the signal turns green the cars can start accelerating faster than if a human were driving so the congestion clears out faster).

Such applications not just require autonomous driving capabilities - but also the vehicular network. You can think of all sorts of crazy applications now - swarms of cars going together to minimize the wind resistance, thereby getting better fuel economy and so on.

Autonomous cars, if they become a reality will open up a slew of new applications, and if these cars can talk with one another, will change how humans move around. But for now, I must drink coffee so I don’t fall asleep behind the wheel.

via MIND. IS BLOWN http://mindisblown.com/blog/2012/11/29/no-more-rush-hours-an-introduction-to-vehicular-networks/

Finding Good Quotes

When you grow