Author Archives: Brock Tice

Ada Lovelace Day – Natalia Trayanova

Suw Charman-Anderson made a pledge to post about a woman in technology that he she admired, as long as 1000 other people signed up to do the same. (Details here.) It sounded like a great idea, so I signed right up. Then I puzzled for a long while about whom I should write.

I considered writing about Anousheh Ansari, a serial tech entrepreneur who has also gone into space (something I dreamed of as a child), but I don’t actually know that much about her, and she’s rather high profile.

Then I realized the answer has been staring me in the face — I should write about my doctoral advisor, Professor Natalia Trayanova.

Dr.Trayanova is a leader in the cardiac electrophysiology field, a field both historically and currently dominated by men. While I have met many talented women with promising careers in the field, very few of them have been full professors, leaders of labs, commonly invited speakers, or HRS fellows. All of these are true of Dr.Trayanova. Furthermore, along with a few other labs ( many of which are ‘related’ to hers ), she has been at the forefront of cardiac simulation technology since the year I was born (1983). She has helped to drive cardiac simulations from mathematical models of the electrical fields induced by excitable fibers in a volume conductor all the way to full-scale models of the human heart derived from medical images, running on massive supercomputers.

I think she is the perfect example of a woman in technology that can be a role model to aspiring women (per the stated goals of the Ada Lovelace Day project).

Happy first Ada Lovelace day, everyone!

Addicted to Spending

Sinclair Davidson has an excellent post up on Catallaxy (disclaimer: I am an occasional contributor there), wherein he extracts key quotes from an article in The Economist. A sample money quote is below:

Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of politicians and ordinary people alike because it provides a theoretical justification for irresponsible behaviour. Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow this prescription. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists do exactly this. They tell politicians, who are addicted to spending our money, that government expenditures are good. And they tell consumers, who are affected by severe spending problems, that consuming is good, while saving is bad. In medicine, such behaviour would get you expelled from the medical profession; in economics, it gives you a job in Washington.

Dissertation Update: 171 pages

Today’s status:

  • 21,241 words
  • 171 pages
  • 31 floats (images/tables

Today I incorporated another study, and at one point the page count nearly hit 200. However, I realized that my (long) figure captions were severely bloating the list of figures, so I cut them out and did some other editing. That eliminated between twenty and thirty (!) pages. There remains now only one more study to be incorporated, although I still have to do the writing for that study. I also have to write bits and pieces throughout the dissertation and do some massive editing, but it’s nice to feel like I’m picking up some positive momentum on this thing. It’s also much easier to cut and rearrange than it is to generate text, so that part should be easier.