Reading with writing

NYR Blog has a very nice essay about how to read and recommends always having a pen or some marking weapon while reading. I have also found this approach very useful but most of my marks were '?', 'why', and so on. Not like the image posted on the blog. I fully agree though that reading should always be done with writing. Here is the link: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/03/weapon-for-readers/  

(1/4) Intro/History: Introducing a 100-year-old mechanical computer

Happy New Year

I watched Happy New Year on the day of its release. It was all that I expected minus long overly emotional scenes. My expectations were based on previous Farah Khan movies such as Main Hoon Naa and Om Shanti Om. While these movies were high on entertainment value, they also had some scenes which seemed stretched. This was, thankfully, absent from Happy New Year. There was an attempt to provide emotional underpinning to overall heist plan and also loose patriotism at the end but it did not affect the pace of the movie. Actors were good. Or rather they fit their characters very nicely. There were more than its fair share of songs and dances. Story was normal but then one should not expect original story. There were some loose ends but then again one should judge a movie based on what is expected of it. Bullet points summarizing my experience:

• I don't regret watching it paying full price 
• I don't regret spending 3 hrs of my time watching it  

On assembly results of Aurangabad

2014 Assembly elections in Maharashtra has resulted in MIM opening its account in state. One of the seats it won is Aurangabad. Supriya Sharma has a nice write up on the candidate and relevant history. Article can be found here. Many interesting points: (1) Lack of reasonable alternatives for minorities when it comes to elections (2) Lack of reasonable alternatives for people who want to contest election (3) Compulsion of electoral politics in India. All in all a good and timely post. 

Google Scholar at 10

Google Scholar, that beautiful service from Google especially helpful for out-of-organized-research-community people like me completes 10 years in 2014. Medium has an article on it at here. 

Document management

I have been using Calibre for managing my ebooks. Recently I started using it to manage all my reading documents, particularly journal article. While it has good enough functionaliy, I find it liitle slow for my taste. May be about time I should write some document manager for my local machine. Fact that caliber was written and even today mostly maintained by an individual assures me that I can try to muild a rudimentary, local running, optimized for a single machine document manager. Till then, calibre is more than sufficient.

Sentences I would be happy to use - 1

'...it would be rude to blame individuals for the collective depravity of their genre...'

From this article in Atlantic. 

Unusual Job Description

Arrived in my mail box today, a recruiter's mail. Usual stuff, except when it was not. Company is in the field of assistive healthcare technology. Beside usual words like rockstar programmer, following line stood out:

"..Make products that win awards from the President of India and MIT and are subjects of TED talks..."

These are great things for publicity, but how do you predict which product has potential to win these kind of things or quantify it. Did someone run any analysis on list of Presidential award winners or TED talks?

Google unveils plan for voterless democracy

 

It may seem true, but is a work of fiction.

Mountain View Company, best known for making sure internet is working and for coming up with relevant Wikipedia pages for engineering course projects, has now started working on voter less democracy. Google has a history of venturing into innovative and potentially disruptive products. It has previously developed a userless social network (an internal memo accessed by this reported found that 'r' was a typo which stuck, nonetheless both name would have been true) and recently launched a driverless cars where no drivers are installed thereby eliminating need for automatic rebooting.

Google has been facing stiff competition from Facebook, another silicon valley based company which allows user to stalk other users. Internal study conducted by Google revealed increased user enthusiasm on Facebook during recently held Indian general election. With many states in India going to election in coming time, and many times after that, founders at Google have taken a long term view by working on voter less democracy. On condition of anonymity, a Google executive involved in this project confirmed and said they are getting full support from Indian political parties, particularly AAP whose leader who was shocked to find that 'Desh ki janta Modi ke sath mili hui hai'. INC has supported the idea on condition of Rahul Baba and his speeches on women, their empowerment, and state of mind being first search result whenever anyone searches something in form of a question. On being asked for a comment on this plan, congress spokesperson said that Party has always maintained that voting is nothing but just a state of mind. BJP, still unable to figure out where did they fucked up to land up with so many seats and now have no idea what excuses to make when they fail to fulfill their election manifesto given that they have no coalition pressure excuse to rely on, do not want to take a second chance. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO did not seem much perturbed though. 'Indian democracy has never been a voter driven democracy. It is family, caste, money, liquor, anything but voter driven. We have known this before and whole purpose of Facebook was to make people believe what they always wanted to believe that they have a say in Indian election by providing them a virtual wall where they can paint their political belief, just like Indian political parties paint real wall with hollow slogans', said Mark, sitting next to Teja.

While plan is out, there is still not much information how Google will pursue this. It can substitute real voters with its robots from Boston Dynamics or use algorithms developed at Deep Mind to figure out who should be in the new council of ministers. A notable development, after this announcement, was investment of an undisclosed amount by private equity firm into Radia's company which has previous experience in ministry formation without involvement of voters.

Constitutional expert were unanimous in their view, after searching in Google, that there are no hindrance in this approach which a small constitutional amendment can't take care of. 'It will still be for the people, just little off and bye to people' said one of the expert. Amazon, not to be left behind, has started working on adding a 'buy' to the democracy. Jeff Bezos said they have been working on a same day, drone delivered democracy. They have tested this in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Western Pakistan. Flipkart, with no idea how to respond to this, has raised another round of USD 376 Million.

 

Review of Four weddings and a funeral at Atlantic

I think it was Love Actually which first prompted me to go for all the Richard Curtis movies and I was not disappointed. Four weddings and a funeral was one of them. Since then, I think it is the second movie of Curtis which I have watched more than once, other being Love Actually. A nice review of movie at Atlantic appeared here.

Atlantic on EVM in India

Atlantic has an article on use of electronic voting machine in Indian election. It reports operational difficulties and past cases of reported technical problems. I was amused to read this:

During last year's regional assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, for instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) filed a formal complaint after an Indian National Congress party elder allegedly told tribal voters that the EVMs would electrocute them if they voted for non-Congress candidates. The BJP won the election, but the Election Commission's FAQ now reassures prospective voters that there is no chance of electrocution from "short-circuitry or [any] other reason."

Full article can be read here.

Trial

Test

Link

ASM has collected links to some videos which may be of interest to metallurgists at this link.

Link

Mathematical expression explanations using visualization here.

Test Post

Trying to post from android app for blogger.

Gmail..where to find material for autobiography

Apparently Gmail was launched 10 years back on 31st March, 2014. This article explains how Gmail was born. It is a very good read. 

My first mail id was at yahoo. I still maintain a yahoo account and it has improved a lot lately. I remember when I first made an email account, it was at a cyber cafe. I mentioned it to my uncle and he did not believe it because he thought it cost lots of money. 

I first heard of gmail in 2005 summers. That was also the time when I first discovered orkut.There were competitions where gmail invites was a prize. Aakash, then at kgp, sent me an invite and then I had 5 free invites I think. 

Then gmail introduced chat in the same window. It was time before any cloid storage and app like pocket. USBs were costly. We used to save our assignments and reports on gmail. I used chat feature of gmail to send web links to unsuspecting friends so that I can later search and find these at one place. Writing this, i feel old.

Elseiver announces allowing text mining of its journals

Elseiver is now allowing researchers to text mine journal articles. Nature report here. This page at Indiana University's website mentions researchers can text mine the journals by contacting journal publishers through them. It was published sometime in January 2013 (based on last update date on left bottom). So I guess researchers could text mine articles earlier also, now they don't need explicit permission. Of course, it is not for non - academician or for commercial purposes. Still, interesting opportunities lie in store.  

Quote

Found at Goodreads:

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” 
― C.S. Lewis

Links

I happen to have an opportunity to listen to Dr. Harish Hande when he was delivering second Girish Sant Memorial lecture at IIT Bombay on 18th September, 2013 (flyer here). I have read earlier watched his interview with editor of Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, in Walk the talk. Many of the things which he talked about in the lecture were similar to what he talked in the interview. Still, it was very interesting. Particularly his emphasis on looking at the problem holistically and providing solutions which solve the problem and not part of problem. Fundamatics, alumni magazine of IITB, has a feature/conversation (!!) on Harish Hande in present issue. Can be found here. 

New Yorker has a feature on Amazon and its effect on Publishing industry and books (here). One thing which stood out in the feature was this (Doeren was in the business of selling books over internet and this conversation took place when he saw Amazon's stall in BookExpo America in 1995) :

Doeren considered this, then asked, “What’s your business model?”

Bezos said that Amazon intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated

shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After

collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt

cheap on the Internet. (Amazon says that its original business plan “contemplated only books.”)

I think this is very much plausible. 

Apparently there is a Gates Annual Letter which I read for the first time this year. You can read full letter here. Lots of good points. I would recommend reading the part on corruption. It goes on to show how important it is to identify problem in hand and not get lost in other details. Aim of aid, or any other expenditure for any work X, is to get the work done. Sure, we would like to have a corruption free society so that things are more efficient but what if corruption is there. Bill writes:

Suppose small-scale corruption amounts to a 2 percent tax on the cost of saving a life. We should try to reduce that. But if we can’t, should we stop trying to save lives?