A reflection upon hard drives

A few months ago I was having an issue: my laptop’s hard drive was running out of storage space. I was in the heat of a project that I couldn’t put on hold so every day I had to find a few unimportant files to delete. Just five years ago this computer was state-of-the-art and had seemingly endless storage: 100 gigabytes of data. But, like a large purse, I found ways to fill it. The documents and photos didn’t take up so much space, but my music collection took up a large chunk. At the time I didn’t sweat it as the 40 GB or so of free space was surely enough for an eternity. But my music collection bloomed. To compound this, about a year ago I started a video collection and it was only a few weeks before it was filled to the brim.

After my project was done I knew I needed to reflect on the state of my laptop.

How DO bacteria swim with no arms?

You had to skip breakfast today. To compound your misery, a delicious smell
permeates the office. Who ordered pizza? Your stomach growls. You wander around
the hallways and follow your nose to the source of the smell. A few boxes sit unat-
tended in the conference room. A sign in your boss’s handwriting threatens, “DO
NOT EAT.” You sneak a slice anyway, undetected. How do bacteria find food when
they are hungry?

How do you make a nanobot?

Here is an essay I wrote while reflecting on and researching a lecture I heard by Yale Goldman, Professor of Physiology at the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, and associate director of the NBIC at Penn.


How do you make a nanobot?

Imagine you are playing with a set of Legos. This set is one of the newer
ones. It has all kinds of blocks, gears, wheels, pulleys, batteries, etc. Put different
combinations of them together and you can build a house or maybe if you’re feeling
clever, a machine. Suppose you make a small battery-powered car. Imagine shrinking
this car. As it shrinks, the number of atoms in each Lego block must become fewer.
Eventually, you may reach the limit where each block is one atom. What if we could
make machines like this?

AWIS meeting report

Here is a report I did on the AWIS Philadelphia meeting. The topic was ethical considerations when pharmaceuticals and academic medicine mix. I am posting the full text here, or you can go to the AWIS-PHL website for a pdf version.

UPDATE: PUBLISHED IN AWIS MAGAZINE

October 2010 Meeting Report by Kerstin Nordstrom

Kathryn Ross (MBE, DMH (c)), the Research Coordinator for Quality Research at the American Board of Internal Medicine, gave a presentation entitled “Pharma’s Ties with Academic Medicine:“Ethical Concerns?” on October 19th at The College of New Jersey. This was a joint meeting between the Central New Jersey and Philadelphia AWIS chapters. She opened by formally defining a conflict of interest, a key issue for any ethical concern. A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that create a risk that actions regarding a primary influence (e.g. patient health, research validity) will be unduly influenced by a secondary influence (e.g. financial gain) [1].