Hospital news

Today I am broadcasting from the hospital: the last five days I have been interned due to a twisted fracture in my tibia and my fibula. The story is the following: during one capoeira play, my opponent and I became very close from each other. We were playing capoeira d'angola, which is a variant of Capoeira where opponents try to play close to the ground, and perform movements to "bribe" each other and make him perform something we want. Well played, Capoeira d'angola is not a violent variant: you perform movements on a question-answer basis (you kick, I defend, and vice-versa). Not all the times you play it well. It might be that the tension of the moment makes you cross the line of a simulation and make it real, and you kick your opponent, or it might be that you are new at it and still don't know your body: you might kick in the wrong direction, open too little the legs, or block the wrong side of your head. In this case I didn't calculate the measures properly. I performed a "tesoura do pe", a movement that blocks and tackles the opponent, making him fall:

I had my opponent on top of me and I felt I could go out of his block by making him fall down, and when kicking him I did not calculate that the space where he was supposed to fall was occupied by my leg. The result: His whole body weight was placed over my lower leg, generating a twisted fracture on the tibia and the fibula. I've been receiving rye-bread diet during the last five days.

--

Some days past and now I am comfortably seated home, where I can finish this post. I'd like to describe the attention in the whole medical process, which I found pretty interesting in some ways, comparing to other places I've been before:

1. The first thing to do in case of an accident, is to call the emergency center. They will not send any ambulance unless you have fainted (in my case, with a broken and swollen leg, they recommended me to drive to the closest hospital), nor provide any useful information. However, doing this step seems to be necessary to be admitted in your ER room, as they have told me afterwards.

2. Once arrived to the hospital, there is a "do-it-yourself" mentality in the ER rooms more proper from IKEA than from an emergency room. There are no porters, no nurses nor anyone that can provide you some information associated to the hospital. The emergency room is located in the middle of nowhere (pretty convenient when driving for the first time with driving a patient with cardiac arrest, I imagine). In my case, I got a wheelchair because the friend driving me found one an empty one after roaming around asking for information unfruitfully. If I was alone, I think they would have expected me to hop to the counter.

3. Despite being so different, the healthcare systems in Colombia and Denmark seem to recruit people for their ER with a requirement of having no humanity in their treatment. After arriving to the hospital, I was taken care 3 hours after, and in the meantime I only got some ice and paracetamol to relieve the pain.

4. The big difference comes later, when passing from the ER rooms to a real treatment. The nurses and doctors seem to be, not only highly qualified, but they do care a lot about your stay and your comfort while hospitalized. I have never been received a menu with different options for a dinner in a (public) hospital. When it comes to information, they were through in explaining all possible consequences, and give me the liberty of influencing the decision on which treatment suit me the best. I have received this kind of treatment only in private hospitals in my country, and only because in most of the cases, I know the doctors attending me.

4.B. A funny aspect that I got to know while in the hospital, was the effects of cycling in unprotected gear all year round. I was hospitalized in the orthopedic surgery wing, and when talking to the doctors, they mentioned that most of their patients arrive in the winter season, and they are mostly girls cycling in high heels. I just remembered all those wonderful images from Copenhagen cycle chic:

The fact is, that despite how good your legs look on heels and a bike, there are increasing risks on falling of a bike with heels. On the icy season, pavement gets slippery and when falling, a high heel does not provide enough support for your heel, which normally ends in a surgery and long months of recovery.

5. Technology goes fast, and that is ever more evident in the healthcare industry. In a country like Denmark, you feel that there are a good investment in new technologies. For instance, I got an X-lite cast, which is an ultra light cast made out of biodegradable plastic. It allows your skin to breathe (almost nullifying that horrible itchiness from chalk casts), is slim but still strong and feels comfortable (you are still with a cast, but still).

Now, I will have 8 weeks of doing everything from home. It's a new process and I hoping not to go crazy in this period.

Kære danske pige....

It has been a bit more than four years since I first stepped in danish ground, with times on and off inside this society and their amusing cultural behaviours. In most of the aspects, I can see myself as a well adapted immigrant that can find his way in the middle of social constructions and protocols that in many other lands make no sense. One thing that I have never fully understood, is the way danish girls approach the contact with members of the opposite sex, which makes me get into very uncomfortable situations from time to time. The word "dating" seems to have a big weight in the danish society, but a different conception than the one I have coming from a latin world. Today I want to shed some light to you, danish girl (or girl living in Denmark for XX years), on what me (and perhaps most latin guys) actually mean when they are talking to you:

Let's call this:

"Guide for understanding the latin behaviour in the light of scandinavian women":


1. The fact that I talk to you without having 4 liters of beer already processed in my liver, does not mean that I want to sneak in your underwear, nor that I want to marry nor have children with you. In the place where I come from, being outgoing, spontaneous and forward-spoken when it comes to conversations is the natural behaviour, and to do that we do not require to be drunk. In fact, although alcohol ingestion is a socially accepted routine, being drunk is generally seen as a very disrespectful behaviour towards yourself and the ones neighboring you.

2. A latin individual in scandinavia tend to have roots in the society based on his network of friends (unless being married/divorced). That means that most of the compromises that come from family activities are not binding for a person like us. Do not misunderstand that with a conception that we "do not care about family": on the contrary, having a very weak state in our respective countries of origin makes family the backbone of our society, and latin people are very proud of their family traditions.  We also regard meeting the family as a very intimate act, that only comes with a friendship or a long term relationship.

3. Yes, a latino can be talkative, joyful and playful with friends and no-friends. That does not mean he is an "easy-goer" or that he wants to sleep with all the girls he talks to. Discussions with other people are the milestone to a deeper understanding of our society, and we love to compare our own cultural facts with yours. A smile is not an indication of a flirt, nor an invitation to bed. In case of doubt...well, we are in Scandinavia, so you might well ask directly.

4. I Never, I repeat, Never go on dates, unless you are my girlfriend or somebody I know for a long time. That is because I consider "dating" as a very romantic moment that the person in front of me needs to earn. Yes, we are the romantic type that can give flowers or open the door to our beloved ones, but it can't be anyone. That is different from the scandinavian conception where dating can be considered a sport that you practice with regularity with one or more people at the same time.

5. Yes, latin people have in general a different conception of time than nord-europeans. That might lead of spontaneous invitations or encounters without too much planning. If you receive an invitation like that, that does not mean we are "desperate" to see you or have something with you, that only means we got some time off and we would like to spend it with you, because we care of you as a person. Don't think it too much.

6. Finally for now: when meeting and liking a person for the first time, a latin guy might like to get to know the person better: whether the interest will evolve into love, a friendship or a plain acquaintance will be unimportant for him.  We normally invite friends over, irrespective of gender and age. Several times I have received a question:  "Are we going out on a date?" I find this really rude, because you are judging in advance what your intentions are with a person you barely know. After talking with danish girl-friends I got a plausible explanation --it is effective, and you don't have to think too much where this encounter is leading--. I like to be effective at work, but in my social environment I am clueless on how a relationship will evolve, and considering going on a date with a person I have met once will contradict point number 4.


I hope I have cleared some of the normal questions when trying to interpret my behaviour towards you, It has indeed helped me to understand how we both races are so different in minimal things.

Spamming you: project updates

So, I will start using this blog to report the advances on my research. It will as general as possible so anybody interested would be able to follow. I am doing this because I need to push myself to write everyday, and do closures after every milestone created. Giving that I am doing this only 5 months before my hand-in date, it can be a bit too late to inform you, but we will see how does it go.

Today I am going to ramble a bit on one of the open threads in my research

Open Specifications of Concurrent Processes. The most common way of specifying concurrent systems is to take a set of communicating processes, and establish the interactions between them by input-output primitives. Think for a second on a model in which you have a patient Alice, a doctor Bob, and a Social Worker Charlie (switch the gender of roles if you think I am being chauvinist here). Now, you will like to express a case in which the patient feels and comes to the doctor in order to receive a prescription.

The following set of activities will be included in our specification S:

1. Alice comes to Bob for a medical appointment.
2. Bob checks out on Alice and formulates a medicine treatment.
3. Bob sends the medicine formulation to Charlie, so he can deliver it to Alice.
4. Alice gets the medicine from Charlie and starts taking her treatment regularly as specified by Bob.
5. After some days, Alice comes back to Bob for a control, and the symptoms have dissapeared.

Now, many details have been hindered from this example. First of all, the current example only details the interaction between three of the main actors involved. This is, however, not a complete model. For instance, considering a private health care institution that has to fulfill auditing processes, we will have that, between phases 2 and 3. other actors will come into play.

Our specification S will be extended accordingly. We call the new model S´:

1. Alice comes to Bob for a medical appointment.
2. Bob checks out on Alice and formulates a medicine treatment.
3. 1. David, the accountant, has to certify that the treatment is covered by the insurance hired by Alice.
   2. Emma, has to Audit that the process is fulfilling the standards given by the healthcare institution with respect to prompt medicine delivery, quality of service and so on.
4. 1. Bob sends the medicine formulation to Charlie, so he can deliver it to Alice.
5. 1. Alice gets the medicine from Charlie and starts taking her treatment regularly as specified by Bob.
6. 1. After some days, Alice comes back to Bob for a control, and the symptoms have dissapeared.

So, here the question is: Is it S a valid specification? and How is S related to S'? Is it clear that the notion that we are looking for has a lot to do with refinement. Basically, refinement will tell us that a specification S and an implementation Q are related if the set of behaviors in S is a subset of the set of behaviors exhibited by Q. Up to here, there's nothing new to the concept, and you can simply google "refinement concurrency" and will find a lot of examples, most of them based in similarities and testing theories.

Now, most of the times we will start specifying systems constructively, adding up more and more roles (and their respective behaviors) over the time. This, will lead us to start with a specification like S, knowing that each of the actions can be further refined with more and more behavior. To do so, transitions in S can be either the classical, fixed ones where a process exhibits an immediate a before evolving into P', or can be "open" transitions , where the process P can exhibit a series of actions in A before evolving into P'. This "open transitions" allow us to describe explicit stages in a process in which a process can be refined with any of the actions considered. Here, transitions become weaker, as they might need more than one step for moving from P to P', they also become broader, as the set A can involve more than one action a.

Obviously, these changes lead us to a different notion of refinement, in which you consider sets of transitions instead of a single, hardcoded interaction. Without bothering you with the details, we will say that an open refinement relation P R Q considers 1) That the transitions in P are covered by the transitions in Q, and 2) That if P allows for a open transition of the form , then there exists a sequence of transitions in from Q to Q' such that all actions in A are covered.

The new definition of open specifications lead us to very interesting paths on the verification of processes. First, open specifications are partial specifications by nature, and then one can explore the connection between these and logical reasoning. Returning to the example, one might be interested in saying things like "I know that I have to visit the doctor, and irrespective of all the other agents possibly involved, once I am in front of the social worker, he should deliver my medicine".

Currently, we already have the definitions of open specifications and refinement, plus a small logic to relate the transitions on a process and a set of formulae in the logic. Our next step is to map different specification models (for instance, the Pi calculus, or a Calculus for Choreographies) into this model, to prove its usability. My plan is to be able to talk a bit more on this subject from here until the beginning of October.

wrapping up

Now I'm in my fourth month in Portugal, which means that it is time to finish everything, summarize and think about the next step. Before coming here, the idea was pretty simple: take as much time as I can for myself. Learn new things, both at a work level and at the personal one, and generally, retake the order of my life lost in this 2010.

Now, thinking about what happened in Lisbon, things changed radically to the ones expected: I was able again to say "I love you" without having regrets to do so. I learn how not to plan every single step in my life, and enjoy the perfect moments of today without regrets for tomorrow or yesterday. My journey was more personal than I thought, and I found that being a giver in terms of emotions characterizes me. I understood that the best emotion for me is to being able to give with no expectations, with no contracts or everlasting promises that none will keep. Nobody warned me that those lessons will come bundled with nights of insomnia and some tears, but I am learning to appreciate even those moments...like spices, is what keeps all interesting, right?

On what is coming next, I certainly don't know...and I am not worried anymore. I will continue, I will crash and burn, and I will put myself together as one of the many times it has happened...only that this time I feel the nature of things, and I will give everything now to make those moments perfect, and feel the memories full of genuine moments.

Thanks to you, for having taught me that....

Insomnia

Ya se esta volviendo una costumbre esta: tengo mis horarios trocados, mis sentimientos encontrados y ahí dentro: un pozo que por más que intento llenar sólo se hace más grande. Ayer un italiano en su pobre traducción lo definió como una alcantarilla, y pensándolo mejor es un termino que no viene tan mal: Este es el momento en donde necesito sacarme todo el desperdicio de adentro, no un pozo que quiera llenar para acumular cosas, sino una cañería para deshacerme de sentimientos, de ausencias y desencuentros.

Hablemos un poco de los ¨amores bisagra¨. Estos se conocen cómo el tipo de relaciones usadas para conocerse más individualmente, para volver a creer en el amor y prepararse como pareja para una siguiente relación. En su concepción, el amor bisagra es el más puro acto de amor sin compromisos, y ambos participantes saben que dicha relación tiene un tiempo de vida determinado.

Ahora bien, un amor bisagra funciona bien si ambos integrantes de la relación asumen desde un inicio la naturaleza fútil de dicha empresa. En el caso contrario, se pasa de ser una relación de crecimiento mutuo a una relación de transferencia, en donde sólo uno de los participantes terminará con herramientas suficientes para embarcarse en nuevos proyectos. En el ejemplo de la bisagra, es cómo si uno de los dos lados se llevara todo el perno.

Los amores bisagras no son para mí, y aún considero relaciones un ¨todo o nada¨ en donde se apuesta cómo en todo, y se asumen las consecuencias. No puedes esperar que esto pase desapercibido por mi vida, que retorne a mi vida y que cambie de página así nada más. Puedo esconder un duelo con mil actividades que ocupen mi cabeza, pero la verdad es que ahí estás...tan presente cómo siempre.

Y pasa el tiempo

Y yo te busco en ese perfume que no es tuyo, que es de la noche y se irá mañana.

Te busco en esa sonrisa, que es tan mía cómo de aquel con el que cruzaste miradas en la metropolitana.

Te busco en esas cartas, las cuales has escrito pensando en aquel que un día rasgó tus vestidos,

ese aquel que no era yo

Envejezco, y me siento mejor

A mis 28, el mundo se pone a mis pies

Las sorpresas, en cambio, escasean

Y esa idea de cambiar el mundo, ya lejos queda

Me estoy cansando de esto, ya ves

He dejado de sentirte, tu presencia es sólo un recuerdo

El sentimiento se transforma, las cenizas queman

Y el corazón siente, ese insalvable vacio

No te amo, los dos lo sabemos

pero desde aquel momento, ese punto de ruptura

el amor dejó de existir para mí

y comienzo a pensar si no fue un sueño

Quiero revivir el sentimiento

Volver a creer que hay un futuro

Pensar en que uno más uno es más que dos

y que aquello que fué, no evitará un mañana.

Fragility

Today is a sad day, very sad indeed. I've recently received a couple of news from my former university that left me breathless for a while. The dean of postgraduate studies of what once was my university was shot by three individuals while parking his car in front of his mother's house. Still the information available is very unclear when referring to the identities of the perpetrators of such a crime, and I would not run into conclussions about the rationale or the provenance of these people.

I met John in 2003 when I was looking for an undergrad thesis. Along with Camilo Rueda and John E., we started looking into the problem of the computation of economic equilibria for multiple products using a constraint programming approach. Due to reasons that are outside the scope of this post I stepped outside of the project, but I got to know the work John had being doing during his MSc and his PhD. I remember him as a very dedicated person, with very practical questions to answer in his research and always available to explore new research ideas. I know that after I finished my career there he undertook duties as head of the Industrial engineering programme and later as the dean of postgraduate studies at Javeriana.

The second sad event, comes from the same university and the same department of engineering. My former professor Hernando Prado was shot by individuals after having withdrawn money from an ATM. Fortunately, he is now recovering from the shots, and I expect him to be sound and safe soon. Hernando was my professor of Economic engineering, and I think that if I would have met him earlier I would have probably chosen a different path in my career. I remember that despite the time where the lectures were held (19:00 till 22:00) he was still able to fill up the classroom with students eager to learn, not only about the topics he was teaching, but about all the life experiences he was including in every single lecture. Sometimes, I remember him as an inspiration when I have to teach, and I try to convey those values in the lectures, finding them hard to transmit when you are such a rookie in teaching matters comparing to people with 20+ years of experience.

My relation with none of them is close nowadays, but still I feel touched by the fragility of life, even in "safe" environments like the university. One of the reasons why I decided to pursue an academic life is because I feel I can make a change on the life of others, just by providing a little bit of motivation and base tools for their own research. It's hard to hear that still such a honorable (and humble, in both cases cited previously) profession can be affected by cruelty like assassination, and I still refuse to believe a student can possibly be included in this matter. It also left you thinking how else can you possibly contribute to a society like mine, when such minimal values are not taken into consideration. Between my ideals are still to contribute to my country by helping others in the lines of research and education, fostering R+D in Colombia and at some point strengthen my relationship with Colombia; however, I won't put in risk the safety of my family or mine in that effort.