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
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 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
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 : 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: 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…
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 :
“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
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 -
“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.
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.
Set up a hassle now!
Via : The Influence of Atlas Shrugged
As executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, I see the impact of Atlas Shrugged on a daily basis. I’m continually amazed by how many people, from every walk of life and every part of the planet, from high school students to political activists in countries from Hong Kong to Belarus to Ghana, eagerly tell me: “Atlas Shrugged changed my life.”
Scores of business leaders, from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, say they have derived great spiritual fuel from Atlas Shrugged. Many tell me that the novel has motivated them to make the most of their lives, inspiring them to be more ambitious, more productive, and more successful in their work.
“You can determine how confident people are by listening to what they don’t say about themselves.”
A nice method for the math instructors - Link : WHAT IS THE MOORE METHOD?
Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.
--Jim Rohn
The other day I was listening to a speech by a very successful businessperson and it was so powerful that I started wondering why do most of the other speeches that we come across in our lives suck.
Look at the voice graph of the speech.
One thing to notice is a distinct pattern of pauses. The speech would have fallen flat with out the pauses. The other aspect is the sharp increase in pitch at regular intervals and for a short duration of time. This points out to a need to a very precise wording that makes a point. Who said making an effective speech is easy . Towards the end of the lecture, the pattern of short but powerful statements increase , thus culminating in to a situation where the objective of the entire speech is conveyed to the audience. I think this pattern holds good for any talk, be it a motivational speech or a sales pitch /elevator pitch / anything for that matter i guess…..Don’t know whether this works for proposing to a girl though :)
We have example of GrandCentral , a startup which offered a telephone number for life , Once you have a Grand Central Number you need not to change it when you change service provider , move to a new city or whatever . They promised “One Number for One Life ” very romantic .Many people [including me , just for the heck of it ] signed up for it . sometime down the line .Grand Central got acquired by Google . with in few weeks of selling out . Google changed the policy and issued new numbers to existing GC users . There was a small outcry but Google silenced them by offering money for reprinting Biz cards .
Give us the fortitude to endure the things which cannot be changed, and the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other.
-Oliver J. Hart
A mind blowing promotion campaign…It is spot on .
http://us.slingmedia.com/page/home
Paul graham in his essay How Not to Die says “Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!”
The following thoughts from Paul Graham makes me feel that NP needs to be brought back in some shape or the other..
So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look more closely. Are there zero users who really love you, or is there at least some little group that does? It’s quite possible there will be zero. In that case, tweak your product and try again. Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. If you just keep trying, you’ll find it.
Came across this fact today, Howard Schultz ,Starbucks fame, approached some 275 odd investors to raise money for his first venture which was similar to starbucks. Of 275 potential investors, 260 investors said NO. Imagine a situation like that where you are been told NO , 260 times. I guess that is one key trait of any person who wants to build a successful enterprise..Getting used to taking NO as an answer and still not getting affected by it largely.
