Can a number be illegal ?? Well, I came to know about it very recently , that in fact, a few numbers are illegal…!!!

Via  Illegal prime - Wikipedia:

An illegal prime is a prime number that represents information forbidden to possess or distribute, because when interpreted a particular way, it describes a computer program which bypasses copyright protection schemes. Distribution of that program in the United States is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Illegal primes are a subset of illegal numbers.

If you are planning to recruit a programmer for your firm, a quick way to filter out applicants is by asking a few basic questions, and this question falls in such a category of questions.

Q) If I declare a character array char n[12] and code the line, strcpy(n,“radhakrishna”); what’s wrong with it ?

A) character array is always NUL terminated. This means that strcpy writes a NUL at the 13th byte and you have no clue what you have over written on the 13th byte..

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

- Tom Lehrer, American mathematician

Anyone who regards games simply as games and takes work too seriously has grasped little of either.”
        German poet Heinrich Heine

The topic of pointers and dynamic memory management is not understood by many folks for a couple of reasons :

One, Lets face it..It requires some effort to understand whats going on. However it is a one time effort and subsequently one can learn as one experiments, codes etc. Then why don’t folks put in the one time effort.
Second reason, I can surmise is  : Most of the C++ introductory books have one chapter or at most two on pointers before diving in to OOPS concepts. OOPs principles are important and they should be covered but often times, the understanding of pointers is sometimes assumed or swept under the carpet when the aspects of dynamic memory management are introduced such as virtual  function, cloning, copy constructor, new etc.

I had the good fortune of meeting Barone-Adesi today, the man behind the closed form solution for american option. I managed to speak to him about 15 min and was amazed by his enthusiasm and the way he could connect ideas from fluid dynamics, physics, mathematics, fractal geometry. He cautioned me not to think about doing anything on the American option side as he had spent a pretty long time on the field and felt that there are more interesting things to look at in the non-american option side of things.

Wow,
goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

you can access all the google functions through a browser shell…real cool..

Today I gambled for the first time in my life with real money:) …ok …money at stake was not a big amount but the context was unforgettable..I was passing through Washington park and noticed a set of folks playing chess. I approached them and saw an empty board with a very old man sitting , who was just staring at the pieces which were nicely arranged . I approached him and said " Let’s play"..He asked - " For how much? “…I was little surprised..I never knew the games were played with money…The old man had one foot in the grave..He was extremely weak in appearance, had a ton of wrinkles on his face and could barely speak. He politely asked to go away if I did not play with money..I took a chance because I felt I could defeat this guy whose hands were trembling when he made a move…I agreed and the game began..

A few days back , I was strolling in the quiet Barnes and Noble on 14th St.  when I stumbled on to a book titled" The art of learning". At the outset, it looked similar to “Success Vs Joy”, one of my all time favorite books , written by Geet Sethi.

This book is an autobiography by Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy on whose life, “Searching for Bobby Fischer” movie was made. I browsed through a few pages, read a couple of intermittent points and put the book down. Reason being, I did not have time to actually sit through and read a book on learning. I was in a hurry to get on with my daily schedule. Just as I walked out of the book store, something in me, made me retrace my steps to the book section. The book had a magnetic effect on me and  I ended up buying it. I read the book on  my travel back to my apt, forgot about my dinner and just kept reading it until I reached the end of the book.After a very long time I managed to read a book in one sitting. In this brief post , I will try to recap some of the points mentioned in the book.  I feel this should be read by any one who wants to live up to one’s complete potential. Here are few points from the book
Making Smaller Circles:
It is extremely important to concentrate on depth than width. Josh gives a few examples to explain this crucial aspect of learning. We might learn all the fancy things in the world but fail to internalize some of the basic principles. Example from chess is , you can learn a gazillion openings and still crumble under a new attack for the simple reason that you have started your chess life with 32 pieces on the board. Why not start with just 2 pieces King and a Pawn, OR, King and a Bishop and then slowly look at King and Bishop Vs King and a Knight.  Incrementally build up the knowledge. The most important point is to understand each piece so well that you look at a opening , you just see that it is just one of the patterns when the individual pieces get together and move in a specific way. What do you gain by drawing these smaller circle ? Great perspective on things , on the depth of each move. I guess every one should ponder and ask a question to themselves, " When was the last time I was completely focused on a task and lost a sense of time, and in the end understood the beauty of the underlying principles.

Today I have attended a talk titled - “Interest Rate Models, past present and future”. This is the first ever presentation that I have seen till date that had only equations from Slide 1 till the end. What all I have known about stochastics seemed absolutely nothing , i mean nothing, as compared to  what was being done in the real world.The complexity of pricing and calibration is mind boggling.  The speaker ripped apart all the possible interest rate models till date and I was clueless to understand most of his arguments. BTW, the speaker was Jesper Andreasen ( Head of Fixed Income Research Group at Bank of America) . The speaker was awarded “quant of year” by Risk Magazine recently.

In Nassim Taleb’s words:

“Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks , the “duty” of attending opera performances( team outings) "

Wow!!! this is the sarcasm put forth in the most eloquent manner..I think he has seen quite a bit of management crap in his trading life.

An article about  “optimal stopping time” , in a completely different context.

Link : Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat

Monte Carlo simulation is one of the methods of pricing financial instruments. Why is it called Monte Carlo? Here is why ?

The etymology of the name is from the city of Monte Carlo of the principality of Monaco, located in southern France. Gambling has long been legal there , and the name is a tribute to Monaco’s celebration of the laws of chance through the operation of elegant gambling casinos

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

David T. Wolf

Thanks Sue for letting me know about this event in San Francisco. Interested folks, check it out:

Sun and Mashable.com have partnered to present “The Startup Review” on mashable.com which is a daily feature/review of a new startup to help spread the word on unique and emerging ideas throughout the community.

Sun is also hosting a free event called “Startup Camp” in San Francisco on May 4-5, 2008 to allow startups to participate in an un-conference networking event to hear from some web 2.0 authorities, meet other startups and apply to Sun’s Startup Essentials Program. The event also includes SpeedGeeking, where startup founders can compete in the Best Startup Contest by presenting a 5-minute pitch of their business to VC led groups of peers. Confirmed guests include: Pete Cashmore, Jonathan Schwartz, David Berlind, Om Malik, Matt Marshall etc. This event is a great way for startups to network and discuss ideas. http://startupcamp.org/

This had to happen . A purple cow like woot.com can be camouflaged in to many versions and here’s one in India

Online shopping portal Infibeam.com today announced the grand opening of its Mobile Store. The company will continue to feature its innovative business practice of discounting one mobile phone each day, which is displayed every midnight as Deal of the Day on its web site, http://www.infibeam.com/Mobiles The mobile phone displayed on Deal of the Day is often sold out within minutes and customers are served on first come first serve basis.

If one has ever taken a course in statistics, or, applied statistics to come to conclude in any research setting, paired t test is an animal which one encounters.

I am not going to write about the intricate details of the paired t test as there is already ton of stuff on it. My intention would be to link the basic concept to startup life…and what should one probably keep in mind before they start their own gigs…

We all know that the random number generator that comes along in excel is not actually random. If you sample 1000 x coordinates and 1000 y coordinates and draw a scatter plot, you can easily see large gaps where sample points are not picked.
Look at the picture below - The first one is from excel function rand()

If one is using random numbers a lot in one’s analysis, one has to ignore rand() and go for something else..One of the popular methods is LCG, a pseudo random number generator. If one looks at the second graph, it seems to be doing a better job than excel.

Why one should know about pseudo random numbers ? A superb quote below summarizes the need for it :

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin - John Von Neumann, 1951

A good life doesn’t come from  Looking good, Feeling good, Having goods

A good life comes from Being good, Doing good

- Rick Warren(Purpose Driven Life)

Derman  while speaking on Volatility Smiles :

Academics in finance departments often think that options theory is a solved problem. In fact, 15 years after the appearance of the smile, we are still in many ways, like the smile, laughing in the dark. There are too many models.

When you do research in options, you have to use advanced mathematics. If you are a practitioner you must never forget that you are moving through lawless roads where the local inhabitants don’t respect your customs. All financial models are wrong, or at best hold only for a little while until people change their behavior.

Just thought of doing some thing other than the usual stuff on a dull sunday afternoon :)..Made this cartoon

Until Last year I have always associated Rails (Ruby on Rails) with quick prototyping of web apps, pragmatic programming etc..

However, My time with stochastics in the last few months has made me give it a new meaning.
In my new world, RAILS stands for Relentless Application of Ito’s Lemma. Stochastic Calculus, once one understands the basic framework , is nothing but RAILS, atleast in the financial world I guess.

Came across this statement from a quant forum…It reflects the current state of the US market

It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.

Many people think that options and futures are recent inventions. However, options have a long history,going back to ancient Greece.As recorded by Aristotle in Politics, the fifth century BC philosopher Thales of Miletus took part in a sophisticated trading strategy. The main point of this trade was to confirm that philosophers could become rich if they so chose. This is perhaps the first rejoinder to the famous question “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” which has dogged academics throughout the ages.

Via Gigaom

Does the World Need Another Way to Search?

“To be what is called happy, one should have (1) something to live on, (2) something to live for, (3) something to die for. The lack of one of these results in drama. The lack of two results in tragedy.”

- 19th-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid

“Life is Good” is a brand of Apparel created by 2 brothers from Boston. It is a fascinating story of how 3 words and passion to create a successful brand can take an idea to an annual sales  of 100 Million USD.

Via : NY Times : Millions in Sales From 3 Simple Words

I am really pleased that Amazon has seen a great value in Audible.com
It is a great site and gives wonderful range of titles for the customers. Now what does it mean to amazon ? Obviously it is going to be a nice complement to its new product - kindle.
What can existing customers expect out of this deal ( me, included) ..Hmmm..least of it is more titles !

Link : Amazon.com buys Audible(for $300 million)

Riya founder Munjal Shah said in a recent interview that Face Recognition has reached its limits and cannot be improved. Just a day later that I watched the interview, here is something new… Link : Researchers Announce ‘100% Accuracy’ In Facial Recognition

I guess the challenge for the researchers now would be to deploy and test it on a large scale.

Very often we seem to think that results are not commensurate with the efforts that we put in….But read this..

James Dyson spent 15 years and 5,126 failures before he created the vacuum cleaner he wanted. His main lesson is one worth taking to heart:

It can take a very long time to develop interesting products and get them right. But our society has an instant- gratification thing. We admire instant brilliance, effortless brilliance. I think quite the reverse. You should admire the person who perseveres and slogs through and gets there in the end.I think most of the time, “instant brilliance” is really just lucky timing.

I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life’s path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right. The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice.
-- Herbert Simon ( Models of My Life)

Via a brilliant article by Bertrand Russell - In Praise of Idleness :

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently.

Via SIAMS News:Top 10 Algorithms of the 20th Century

• 1946: John von Neumann, Stan Ulam, and Nick Metropolis, all at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, cook up the Metropolis algorithm, also known as the Monte Carlo method.
• 1947: George Dantzig, at the RAND Corporation, creates the simplex method for linear programming.
• 1950: Magnus Hestenes, Eduard Stiefel, and Cornelius Lanczos, all from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods.
• 1951: Alston Householder of Oak Ridge National Laboratory formalizes the decompositional approach to matrix computations.
• 1957: John Backus leads a team at IBM in developing the Fortran optimizing compiler.
• 1959–61: J.G.F. Francis of Ferranti Ltd., London, finds a stable method for computing eigenvalues, known as the QR algorithm.
• 1962: Tony Hoare of Elliott Brothers, Ltd., London, presents Quicksort.
• 1965: James Cooley of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and John Tukey of Princeton University and AT&T Bell Laboratories unveil the fast Fourier transform.
• 1977: Helaman Ferguson and Rodney Forcade of Brigham Young University advance an integer relation detection algorithm.
• 1987: Leslie Greengard and Vladimir Rokhlin of Yale University invent the fast multipole algorithm.

Tidbit : Google uses a flavor of QR Algorithm in its algorithmic attack on the search problem

According to Steve Jobs, Kindle Reader from Amazon will not take off !!

Via: New York Times

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

- Mark Twain

Ooyala reminds me of riya.com where there was a great effort to tag images on the web…Similar to riya where experts in the field are going to develop video search software. Would be interested to see how it pans out

Via What Ooyala is Up To :

The company has hired six experts in computer vision, who’ve developed a way to catalog various objects within a video. When a viewer clicks on a football highlight featuring Patriots’ QB Tom Brady , for example, Ooyala’s technology will know it is him and will bring up relevant information (this could be anything from links to products Brady sponsors, his statistics, or maybe a message board where fans can discuss his latest exploits).
Lepe says the experience could be tailored in many ways. The video could pause, or requests for information on objects could be sent into a shopping cart, to be explored after the video ends.

Pagerank algo is being used by a hospital , objective - to cut down infections!!

Via : Google tool could search out hospital superbugs

Our new model is based very much on the way Google has achieved number one status among search engines," he explains. “When [Google’s] spiders crawl the web they build up a connectivity matrix of links between pages.”
Node search

Shepherd’s idea is to build a similar matrix describing all interactions between people and objects in a hospital ward, based on observing normal daily activity.

I was working on my univ’s website for the past 48 hours as it needed a revamp . Output is not that bad I guess. Here is the link to the site where it is hosted temporarily -  Site

An inspiring talk by IsabelAllende

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Concept arbitrage :
Nice word for applying Ctrl+C and Ctr+V to webapps

Link : The three business models that make Twitter a billion-dollar business in 12-24 months.

Another interesting mention in the post :
Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore–it’s about critical mass. It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.

Check out this site – reminds me of pubsub(a service which died recently), but with a twist.

Quintura

Click the words in the cloud to discover the hottest news or surf the web
Refine your cloud Save it! Share it!

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

       —- Horace Walpole
English author (1717 - 1797)

The article below has an observation ,which reminds me of a similar comment made by a friend of mine, Manish. He said that , any business in India , can be a huge success only if it leverages India’s best card -  man power. It does sound very obvious…
So that makes me think, Does all the gyan on bootstrapping a venture makes sense ? Should one have bootstrapping mindset at all to begin with OR have a completely different mindset where one should think of using a lot of people to solve a specific problem ( a.k.a tutorvista, iyogi,mechanical turk )..?

Analysis of Blog graph by CMU researchers : Interesting observations

Temporal patterns: For the two months of observation,we found that blog posts do not have a bursty behavior;they only have a weekly periodicity. Most surprisingly,the popularity of posts drops with a power law, instead of exponentially, that one may have expected. Surprisingly, the exponent of the power law is -1.5, agreeing very well with Barabasi’s theory of heavy tails in human behavior .

Vial Pragmatic Programmer :

A tourist visiting England’s Eton College asked the gardener how he got the lawns so perfect. “That’s easy,” he replied, “You just brush off the dew every morning, mow them every other day, and roll them once a week.”

“Is that all?” asked the tourist.

“Absolutely,” replied the gardener. “Do that for 500 years and you’ll have a nice lawn, too.”

Great lawns need small amounts of daily care, and so do great programmers. Management consultants like to drop the word kaizen in conversations. “Kaizen” is a Japanese term that captures the concept of continuously making many small improvements. It was considered to be one of the main reasons for the dramatic gains in productivity and quality in Japanese manufacturing and was widely copied throughout the world.