This week, we cooked food from Kazakhstan. Their national dish was Beshbarmak, which is boiled meat on top of dough. We did not find it too appetizing and we had cooked a lot of boiled meat in the past so we decided to choose two other dishes:
Lamb pilaf – a rice dish common in many countries. Looking at youtube videos, we were surprised of how much oil you had to add. But, it tasted great in the end as the rice absorbed the oil. 9/10. We followed the Uzbek recipe as I could not find a Kazakh equivalent.
Baursak – fried dough. We had eaten already similar things in the past, but this recipe we followed was more “bread-y”. 5/10.
Evaluating impact from research: A methodological framework – proposes a typology of research impact evaluation methods. They identify the following designs: experimental and statistical methods, systems analysis, textual, oral and arts-based methods, indicator-based approaches, evidence synthesis approaches.
incentivizing diagnostic firms with financial rewards
funding R&D
coordinating stakeholders to make it easier to bring new tests to market
the government provisioning resources to lead R&D and testing themselves
incentivizing healthcare providers to use tests more appropriately
establishing IP regimes to support the development of tests based on demand
Deep Learning applications for COVID-19 – explores how deep learning is used in COVID. They categorize the application to four main areas: computer vision (ie. to analyze medical images and robotics), life sciences (ie. for drug repurposing and protein structure prediction), epidemiology (ie. for forecasting and contact tracing) and natural language processing (ie. literature mining).
Psychological factors influencing technology adoption: A case study from the oil and gas industry – introduces the Psychological Technology Adoption Framework (P-TAF) which categorizes various factors that facilitate or hinder adoption: personality (innovativeness, risk aversion), motivation (personal incentives, fear of technology failure), attitude (technology attitudes, trust), cognitive (risk perception, technical knowledge, certainty perception, previous experiences), social (social influence, subjective norms) and organizational (leadership, collaboration culture, technology adoption culture).
Last weekend, we cooked food from Serbia. We followed these two recipes:
Sarma – meat wrapped in cabbage. I found the fermented cabbage to be too sour / overpowering. 6/10. Recipe here.
Palacinke – pancakes / crepes with cheese filling. The pancakes are baked after filling them with cheese and topping them with sour cream. Personally, I recommend not baking anymore to have a less dry final product. 8/10. Recipe here.
Happy new year everyone! Here are my interesting reads from the holidays up to today.
Developing a unified definition of digital transformation – studies that aim to define a certain concept are always fascinating. In this study, they review the digital transformation literature and complement it with a survey of practitioners and academics to get a unified definition of DT:
A fundamental change process, enabled by the innovative use of digital technologies accompanied by the strategic leverage of key resources and capabilities, aiming to radically improve an entity* and redefine its value proposition for its stakeholders.
Organizing for innovation: a contingency view on innovative team configuration – study on how a team’s expertise should be tailored according to the domain they are trying to innovate in. The researchers explore 4 domains varying by modularity and breadth of application – MRI, RFID, stem cells and nanotubes. Modular domains like MRI and RFID do not need a lot of overlap in knowledge across their inventors. Domains with broad applications benefit from teams with wide knowledge breadth as well.
Uncertainty – refers to the lack of sufficient information needed to get to the desired outcome. Put simply, not knowing the answers.
Complexity – related to the number of parts in a system and the difficulties in predicting the interactions among them. In other words, not knowing how to find the answers to the question.
Ambiguity – the inability to interpret. In other words, not knowing what questions to ask in the first place.
Equivocality – potential for multiple interpretations, even when information is available. Put simply, having multiple answers.
Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions? Part 1: Ways to make an impact, and why we are not there yet – despite moving away from pharma research, I still enjoy reading news about the industry. The summary of this article is the classic line garbage in, garbage out. The conclusion perfectly illustrates this: “with our current ways of generating and utilizing data, we are unlikely to achieve the significantly better decisions that are required to make drug discovery more successful… we need to understand what to measure, and how to measure it… Only once these data are available for AI approaches can the field be expected to make real progress.”
As an extremely introverted person, I really find it difficult to network. Connecting with strangers really drains me. I do not like its transactional nature. And the truth is I am too much of a mess during small talk. I always feel awkward, afraid of running out of things to say. Networking cocktails still do not feel natural to me. I’m still trying to understand how to enter and exit conversations.
However, once I’ve connected with somebody, that’s the easy part. I can easily handle one-on-one coffees and just random chats. I like listening to people and trying to help them however I can.
This year, to force myself to “go out” more and create new relationships, I pushed myself to conduct an experiment. This experiment started from October, so about 3 months now. It was simple:
Every weekday, I would connect with one interesting stranger on Linkedin.
That’s it. Either I come across their profiles when they liked a post of a current contact or I come across one of their work that I found interesting. I tried to do it everyday but there were just some days when I just could not think of whom to connect with. I then connect with them with a personal note on why I would like to be their contact.
Since the experiment started, I’ve sent out invites to 56 people. Out of these, 47 have connected with me. Out of these 47, 8 sent a personalized response, typically thanking for connecting. Out of these 8, I’ve chatted with 3 people.
I think it’s been a successful experiment so far. For someone who barely used Linkedin to now connecting with one person every day, I think it’s a good achievement already. However, I had not been too deliberate about scheduling conversations with these people to get to know them better. For next year, my goal then is to increase my rate of personally connecting with newly formed connections.
This week was Lebanon. Miriam’s family were excited since they love Arabic food. We cooked the following:
Hashweh – Rice with beef with various aromatics like cinammon, raisins and almonds. I liked it a lot. 9/10. Recipe here.
Baba Ganoush (or Mutabbal?) – both are eggplant-based dips. From searching online, it seems like mutabbal uses tahini while baba ganoush does not. Nonetheless, I used this recipe which used tahini. 8/10.
Who Contributes Knowledge? Core-Periphery Tension in Online Innovation Communities – explores what makes a contribution highly valued in the forum Stack Exchange. They talk about social embeddedness which refers to how connected socially an individual is to their community and epistemic marginality which refers to how different an individual’s knowledge base is compared to their community. Those who are both socially embedded and epistemically marginal are able to contribute highly valued insights as these insights are generally novel compared to the community and at the same time, they are able to communicate well their ideas to their community.
Experience base, strategy-by-doing and new product performance – When we think of strategy, we usually think of getting a whiteboard and brainstorming on the best plan forward. In contrary, there is strategy-by-doing which is defined as “actions of iterative search for what works in the market.”
Last Saturday, we cooked food from Togo. Did not really know what to expect but we were pleasantly surprised. These were the recipes we tried:
Grilled chicken – we don’t have a grill so we roasted it. What tasted a little different from the typical roasted chicken was the red palm oil. 8/10. Recipe here.
Ablo – typical meal accompaniment made from cornmeal. Kind of similar to bao. 7/10. Recipe here
Lime cake – not really sure if this is from Togo but when you google dessert recipes from Togo, this West African lime cake is the top recommended. 7/10. Recipe here.
In Silico documentary – Nature featured this documentary on the fall of the Human Brain Project. I still haven’t watched it but this seems to be an interesting view on the politics behind science.
Exploring the dynamics of novelty production through exaptation: a historical analysis of coal tar-based innovations – previous theories of serendipity explain that it rises from a need or from theory. This paper offers a new route to serendipity – affordances. I did not know this word before but as the paper explains it is “the perceived or actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used”
Failing to Learn from Failure: How Optimism Impedes Entrepreneurial Innovation – a fascinating study that links laboratory experiments with firm data. They measured entrepreneurs’ dispositional optimism – the tendency to think that they will have a favorable outcome. They then linked it to patents or product development success. I like their finding that those who are optimistic by disposition tend to not update their beliefs of future success despite negative outcomes. Everytime I meet with my entrepreneur friends, I really see the difference on how they think and perceive things.
