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
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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.

Via Read Write Web :

36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More!

A few months ago Chitika was hailed as a super service. But checked it to see how it is doing now..I am surprised their reputation has taken a beating .

Link :
Chitika publishers see drastically reduced earnings in audited reports

Thanks TP for the link. The post is terrific

evhead: Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

I was randomly looking for sites that have sprung up recently at home.

Study places : Venture from Naukri.com

FirstPhera Wedsite - a site which allows one to manage , share and preserve wedding activities. Reminds me of a classmate of mine who took all the pains to create a website for his marriage and sent the link to everyone. It was novel at that time, but is there paisa as a service ??

How did Jack Dorsey get the idea for Twitter ?

Link : twttr ( From the horse’s mouth  ) :

On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.

I have made it a rule to adopt the method of ignorance in my investigations into instincts. I read very little. … I know nothing. So much the better : my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the lights obtained.

-- Jean Henri Fabre

A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are sitting at a sidewalk cafe watching a house across the street. After a while two people enter the house. A little later, three people exit.

‘Reproduction,”says the biologist.
‘Measurement error,” says the physicist.
‘Hmm,” says the mathematician, ‘If a person enters the house it will be empty again.”

Failures / Errors when analyzed always makes oneself better. Such a simple statement has lead to the development of one of the most profound theorems in statistics. Here is a little note on how Central Limit theorem, a theorem which almost everyone intuitively uses, came to existence:

“The Central Limit theorem was originally stated and proved by French Mathematician Pierre Simon, who came to this theorem from his observations that errors of measurement tend to be normally distributed. The application of CLT to show that measurement errors are approximately normally distributed is regarded as an important contribution to science. Indeed, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the CLT was often called the “law of frequency or errors”

Suppose you have agreed to settle a dispute with cousin Joe by tossing a coin. The problem is that neither of you has any change. Joe suggests that you instead toss a bottle cap, which will count as heads if it lands with the top up, and tails otherwise. As you cannot assume that these are equally likely, is there any way in which fairness can be guaranteed?

-————– Solution :

Times of India Campaign :
India has Developed..When will Indians ?

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t

Something to think about..

What are your A,A,A’s and by any chance are you blinded by them ?

Link : Seth Godin

The world’s fastest human calculator Alexis Lemaire, 27:

Alexis Lemaire, a 27-year-old Frenchman, correctly calculated the 13th root of a random 200-digit number from a possible 393 trillion answers.The so-called ‘mathlete’ produced the answer of 2,407,899,893,032,210 in 70.2 seconds, beating his previous record of 72.4 seconds, at London’s Science Museum.

Like an athlete, he trains his brain daily for the far harder task of finding the 13th root of 200-digit numbers.

The link provided below is a great example of a mathematical technique being introduced in a very simple and effective manner

Link :An Introduction to Lagrange Multipliers

The point of the article is to make ANY person curious on some of the aspects of the Lagrangian  Multipliers

How many times have we come across teachers/instructors just dumping a set of formulae/definitions with out taking the time to explain the CONTEXT…Most of the times you read stuff with out a proper context and sadly when the context appears, you are clueless because you don’t even know that you have a specific math tool to solve the problem.

Via Bridging the gap between Interface and Implementation :

A nice article explaining the importance of Bridge Pattern

The Timeless Way of Building

The Timeless Way of Building is a 1979 book that ties life and architecture together, written by Christopher Alexander.

It is considered by many to be one of the major, seminal texts of the twentieth century.[citation needed] It has had a huge influence on creative thinking, especially in the areas of architecture and software design. It could be classified as one of what the Estonian researcher of the Orient Linnart Mäll calls the humanistic base texts.

Thanks TP

Via TP:

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

Via : 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People

Via : Groupware Bad

Narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

 bodhiTree:

bodhiTree: An expression of the alternate lifestyle Away from such words as pedagogy and value add, part of everyday parlance in a busines school..? Where suddenly words like feedback and monitor-mix take on meanings of extreme importance. Where the right bend, the right note slapped, the right drum roll and the soar in the vocals leads you into nirvana…

Via : 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton.

Technology Review: The Blow-Up

Beneath all this beats the great hope of the quants: namely, that the financial world can be understood through math. They have tried to discover the underlying structures of financial markets, much as academics have unlocked the mysteries of the physical world. The more quants learn, however, the farther away a unified theory of finance seems. Human behavior, as manifested in the financial markets, simply resists quantification, at least for now.

Via thinkArete

The classic Greek philosophers had a word for the process of self-actualizing and striving to reach your highest potential. They called it ‘Areté.’ .

In fact, Areté was one of the most important values in classic Greek culture. Guys like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle tell us that the meaning of life is to live with happiness and that the way to achieve happiness is to live with Areté (aka excellence, striving to reach your highest potential).

I know for a fact that there are zillions of unsecured lending sources in India. They go under the popular name"chit funds". It is  something similar to the Grameen model but the system is not at all robust. There are a lot of chit funds which have gone bust. But that has not stopped the mushrooming of new funds from time to time.So there are 2 kinds of systems in place. One system which is based on trust and works for atleast 5-6 years, the other system is run by fly by night operator and always carries great risk.

In one of the classes on Lebesgue Integration that I was attending , there was a student / executive who was rather pained by the academic side to probability analysis. Professor was trying to prove that a vector of n dimensional normal random variables is also a normal variable if every linear combination of the n components is a normal random variable.

At some point of proving the statement, the student felt frustrated and blurted out that he wanted more practical applications than theory. At that juncture, one could easily see that professor was rather disappointed with the perspective of certain students. She felt that any learning should make a person comfortable with the theoretical underpinning as well as the practical aspect of it. One superb point that she made was, all the models, all the applications in the world would change , but it is very unlikely that the theory on which the models are based is going to undergo rapid transformation. Innovation comes from understanding theory behind the models.

An Indian entrepreneur’s view on the location :

Link :  Is it easier to do a start up in India than in US

“A greatest leader is a servant, Don’t be a boss. Bea real leader, a servant leader. A servant  leader is a winner. Even when he loses everything, even when he loses his life, a servant leader wins it all”

       Pat Williams, S.V.P of the Orlondo Magin

Via : Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Let’s analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:

• Learn: In 3 days you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Jimmy Connors  : The best advice I have ever got was

• Do it
• Do it right
• Do it right now

:) 
     Via : The Evolution of a Programmer

The other day I was at a career fair and I overheard a funny comment from a student .“Why do all the people in the world want to price options ? " . He was irritated by the fact that there were so many people who were actually interested in pricing options for a living . As simple a statement it might sound, there is much more to what the statement means if one tries to generalize.

Via TP :

This is a superb model for Bottom of Pyramid Indians. I can relate to the problems mentioned in the article . I don’t see a reason why this service shouldn’t pick up.

Link : In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism

Daniel, a 20 year old who can rattle off 22000 decimal places of Pi, learn any language in a week, mixed numbers with visual imagery….He is probably one of the rarest folks to inhabit this planet…WOW

Link : Video

“One test is worth a thousand opinions.”

Even though the above quote applies to software development, it is equally relevant to testing out an idea in the market. Thousand people will talk about an idea in thousand ways but the only sane way to check is to actually test it out in the market.
Simple thought, but how many of us really DO , rather than indulge in only TALK ?

Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it as an unproductive result. Instead: analyze the process, its components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results. Do not ask the question “Why have I failed?”, but rather “What have I done?”

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.
     
 - Dave Berry

I am a big fan of Head First books. My first love amongst the series was “Design Patterns”. Most of the design pattern books that I have come across outside Head First typically were not that reader friendly. Books with tons and tons of UML diagrams , abstruse use cases etc. Hence I have never ventured out of Head First series. However recently I had a chance to go over " C++ Design Patterns and Derivatives Pricing“by Mark Joshi.

Being busy is seductive .Just because you are going flat out does not mean you are on the right track - 

         Via: The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun

“EMPIRICALLY , BOLDNESS WINS”

 - Paul Graham

I was teaching about e to a couple of undergrad students , used these facts to make the class more lively.

e :

In contemporary internet culture, individuals and organizations frequently pay homage to the number e.

For example, in the IPO filing for Google, in 2004, rather than a typical round-number amount of money, the company announced its intention to raise $2,718,281,828, which is e billion dollars to the nearest dollar.