Vinod Mishra's Blog

Project Management

2011-03-01T00:08:00.000+11:00

A new vacuum cleaner salesman knocked on the door on the first house of the street.

A tall, mid-aged lady answered the door.

Before she could speak, the enthusiastic salesman barged into the Living Room and opened a big black plastic bag and poured all the cow dung (droppings) onto the carpet.

"Madam, if I could not clean the mess up with this new, excellent and powerful Vacuum cleaner in the next 5 minutes, I will EAT all this shit!" exclaimed the eager salesman.

"Do you need chili sauce or ketchup with that" asked the lady.

The bewildered salesman asked, "Why, madam?"

"There's no electricity in the house..." said the lady..

MORAL: Gather all resources before working on any project and committing to the client..!!!

मुह की बात सुने हर कोई

2011-02-18T11:28:00.002+11:00

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मुह की बात सुने हर कोई, दिल के दर्द को जाने  कौन
आवाजों के बाज़ारों में खामोशी पहचाने  कौन

सदियों सदियों वही तमाशा, रास्ता रास्ता लम्बी खोज
लेकिन जब हम मिल जाते हैं, खो जाता है जाने  कौन

वो मेरा आइना है या में उस की परछाई हूँ
मेरे ही घर में रहता है, मुझ जैसा ही जाने  कौन

किरण किरण अलसाता सूरज, पलक पलक खुलती  नींदें
धीमे धीमे पिघल रहा है , ज़र्रा -ज़र्रा जाने  कौन
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PhD Students: Disposable labour

2010-12-28T16:15:00.001+11:00

The Economist article describing the state of PhD degree. Apparently PhD students and Post-Docs are cheap disposable labor for conducting research and teaching for most of the US universities. Read the full story at the following URL:

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

Kaalachakra Bar

2010-05-14T18:14:00.000+10:00

What if scientiests actually suceed in inventing a time-machine? Well here's what going to happen then ...

Read the story..it is a great si-fi fiction with a twist ..
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Kaalachakra Bar!

1975 Jan 1

It was about five in the morning. Father (I am not bothering with names) woke up with a start. Many years had passed since he had founded the orphanage. He had named it ' X-Orphanage ' , a rather funny name. But looking back, everything about his life seemed funny now. Hearing some noise outside, Father decided to have a look.

A child lay there in front of the orphanage. It was a girl. Seeing her abandoned like this in the cold morning, Father felt a sense of anger for the merciless being who had thrown her away like this. He took her in his arms. He would raise her like his own child.

17 Years Later

The girl had now grown up. She was now staying at a hostel. She met a man and fell in love with him. Soon she got pregnant. But the man disappeared. She was thrown out of the Hostel. Father came and took her back to the orphanage. She gave birth to a girl, but the baby was mysteriously stolen.

Unable to bear all this, the Father committed suicide.

5 years later

Due to some serious health problems, the girl went to see a Doctor. The doctor having examined her, said with a sad _expression on his face, " Adrenalo Sytosis, a serious case of hormone imbalance " . An operation was performed in which the doctor had to change the sex of the patient. The girl was now transformed into a man.

The man was very depressed because he had lost his child, his father had committed suicide, his lover had betrayed him, he had to change sex and so on. He eventually took to drinking. One day he saw that a new bar called ' Kaalachakra Bar ' had opened in his locality. He went in. He saw a bearded man to whom he related his sad tale. The bearded man took pity on him and told him that he had a Time Machine and that he could use it to change his past. He accepted the gift from the bearded man. He decided to go to the past (to the year 1992) and started the Time Machine.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1992

The man arrived with the Time Machine in the year 1992. There he met a girl and fell in love with her. The girl got pregnant. The man, unwilling to marry her, left the town. He went to another city, earned some money and five years later came back to the city where the girl lived. Wanting to conceal his identity, he grew a beard. He started a bar named 'Kaalachakra Bar'. One day a man came to the bar and narrated a sorrow tale. Out of compassion, he gave the Time Machine to the man. The man started the Time Machine and went back to the past.

Suddenly a man wearing a mask came into the bar. He pointed a gun at the bearded man. He said that he had a Time Machine and forced the bearded man into it along with himself. Taking the bearded man with him, the masked man started the Time Machine.

When they reached the past, the masked man suddenly gave the Time Machine to the bearded man and ran away. The bearded man found himself in front of X-Orphanage. He went inside and found a woman lying there with her new born baby. It was a girl. Since the mother lay unconscious and there wasn ' t anyone else nearby to take care of the girl, he took the girl and started the Time Machine to go to the past.

1975 Jan 1

The bearded man arrived with the girl. Thinking that it was the best place for the child, he left her in front of X-Orphanage. He joined a college, studied hard and became a doctor. One day a woman was brought to the hospital. He examined her and found that it was a serious case of 'Adrenalo Sytosis'. He performed an operation in which he had to change her sex. One day, fed up with the complexities of modern life, he started the Time Machine and went back in time.

1968 May 12

He arrived at a time of great famine and suffering. Seeing all this, he decided to become a priest and serve the people. He started an orphanage and named it 'X-Orphanage'. Years later, he found a girl lying in front of the orphanage. He took her and brought her up like his own child.
Many years later he heard that the girl was pregnant and was thrown out of the hostel. He brought her back to X-Orphanage. She gave birth to a girl and fell unconscious. The father desperately searched for help, but since there was no-one nearby to help him, he decided to bring a person back from the future. He wore a mask, took a gun for protection and started the Time Machine. He materialized in front of 'Kaalachakra Bar'. He went inside, found a bearded man and forced him to travel with him to the past.
Reaching the past, he felt very guilty about forcing the bearded man to come with him. He gave the Time machine to the bearded man and ran away to see his daughter. When he reached there, he heard the sad news from his daughter that the baby was stolen. Unable to bear the sorrow, he committed
suicide.

THE END

Now that you ve read this story, I m sure you re feeling like taking the positronic coherent-ray atomizer gun, going back into the past and zapping me before I sent you this mail! I knew you would feel like that. So I
already went back in time and killed the guy who invented the positronic coherent-ray atomizer gun. So there is no such thing like that in the world now and hence I m safe! Enjoy

Spammers Turn Positive on the Economy

2010-04-27T14:03:00.000+10:00

Add another to voice to the chorus declaring that the recession that began in December 2007 is over: your spam folder.

Symantec Corp. (SYMC), the security software company behind such programs as Norton, every month cleans out its industrial-sized spam filters and issues a monthly State of Spam & Phishing report based on the result. In its April 2010 report, the company found the tea leaves suggest economic prospects are picking up, at least according to spam email using economic terms.

“While the United States consumer sentiment remained unchanged in March 2010, top ten subject lines containing economic keywords show that spammers have an optimistic view of the economy with job offer spam among their top spam subject lines,” Symantec said in its report.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Researchers “Addicted” to Bogus Internet Studies

2010-04-27T13:36:00.002+10:00

The University of Maryland released a study of college students and the Internet yesterday that garnered some headlines, including one from Reuters that talked about how these poor students were “suffering from Internet addiction.” According to the research quoted by the newswire, they showed “symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions” when they were forced to give up access to the web and mobile communications such as text messaging. And what were those symptoms?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

10 Things the Internet Has Killed or Ruined (And Five Things It Hasn’t)

2010-04-17T15:22:00.002+10:00

For some people, the Internet is the killer app–literally. From newspapers and the yellow pages to personal privacy and personal contact, the Net has been accused of murdering, eviscerating, ruining, and obliterating more things than the Amazing Hulk. Some claims are more true than others, but the Net certainly has claimed its share of scalps.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Do the economics of real-time search ads work out? | VentureBeat

2010-04-15T20:52:00.000+10:00

Do the economics of real-time search ads work out? VentureBeat

Quote / Unquote --- Politics

2010-04-15T13:04:00.000+10:00

1. In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more, is Congress.

-- John Adams

2. If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
-- Mark Twain

3. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain

4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle .
-- Winston Churchill

5. A government, which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always depend on the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw

6. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-- G. Gordon Liddy

7. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

8. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries, to rich people in poor countries.
-- Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University

9.. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

10. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
-- Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

11. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Ronald Reagan (1986)

12. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers

13. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!
-- P.J. O'Rourke

14. In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
-- Voltaire (1764)

15. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)

16. No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
-- Mark Twain (1866)

17. Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it.
-- Anonymous

18. The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end, and no responsibility at the other.
-- Ronald Reagan

19. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
-- Winston Churchill

20. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
-- Mark Twain

21. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

22. There is no distinctly native American criminal class...save Congress.
-- Mark Twain

23. What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-- Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)

24. A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Apple iPad tablet : Some questions answered by Walter S. Mossberg

2010-04-09T12:54:00.001+10:00

Here are some of the questions about iPad that Wal Mossberg answers . Sometimes I really wonder, whether this device is worth buying ....!!
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Since my review of the new Apple iPad tablet last week, I have been bombarded with questions. This is natural. The iPad is a real computer that overlaps many functions of a laptop, but works very differently from one.

So here are answers to some of the most common questions I’ve received, in hopes they may help clear up any confusion. One caveat: Apple is offering a “sneak preview” on Thursday of a forthcoming revision to the iPhone operating system, which powers the iPad, so some changes might be revealed.

Can you print from an iPad? Apple (AAPL) didn’t build in a printing function, so you can’t just tap a menu button to print an email, photo or Web page. But a few third-party apps allow printing of some items from an iPad to a networked printer. One is Print Online. It costs $5 and I tested it successfully. But these apps are complicated and limited workarounds—inadequate substitutes for built-in printing.

The iPad lacks a USB port, so how do you get files into it? Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad has the familiar Apple connector port and comes with a cable that links this port to a USB port on a PC or Mac. Then, using iTunes on the PC or Mac, you can sync over to the device your songs, photos, videos, contacts, apps and more.

New to the latest version of iTunes is a function that will also transfer to the iPad files like Microsoft Office documents. But this feature only works if you’ve installed on your iPad certain programs that can edit these documents, such as Apple’s optional $10 word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs. Documents can be moved in the other direction, too.

You also can get some types of documents into the iPad wirelessly, if you receive them as email attachments or as downloads from the Web. For example, if you receive a Word-document attachment, and you have Apple’s Pages word processor installed, you can send it to Pages, where it can be stored and edited. Pages can then send back the edited version.

Is there a way to type on the iPad without laying it flat and using the virtual keyboard? There are several. Apple sells a $39 case that bends to angle the device in a more convenient typing position (and allows for hands-free video watching). The company also sells a $69 accessory physical keyboard that features a dock at the rear to hold the iPad upright. In addition, you can type on the iPad using Apple’s $69 wireless keyboard for the Mac, which can be held on your lap.

Can I run Windows or Mac programs on the iPad? Not unless their makers produce iPad versions of these programs. The iPad doesn’t run the Macintosh or Windows operating systems, so it can’t run programs designed for them. It runs the iPhone operating system, which is only compatible with iPhone and iPad apps, of which there are more than 150,000. There are some iPad and iPhone apps that let you remotely control Windows and Mac computers, so you could indirectly run Windows and Mac programs via the screen of an iPad, but that isn’t like running the programs locally.

I hear the iPad lacks multitasking. What are the downsides of this? First, let me clarify that the iPad (and iPhone) can technically perform multitasking, or running more than one program at once. But Apple has chosen to limit this ability to some of its own built-in apps, and deny it to third-party apps. For instance, the built-in email program will continue to receive messages while you are watching a movie on the built-in video player.

The downsides of denying multitasking to all apps are considerable. For example, you can’t listen to streaming music from the Pandora music app while checking email. And you can’t view fresh Twitter posts while on other apps. You have to close the app you’re in, then re-launch a Twitter app and wait for it to fetch the new posts. And, you can’t, say, check email or surf the Web while waiting for a complex game to load in the background, because the game stops once you change to another app.

Since the iPad’s battery is sealed in, how do I replace it? The battery isn’t designed to be replaceable by the user. Apple will replace your iPad with one containing a fresh battery for $107, including shipping. The process takes up to a week. Most important, you will lose all your personal data unless you back it up regularly to your computer and restore it on the replacement iPad. Details are at: apple.com/support/ipad/service/battery/.

Read the full post and watch a video at the original post

Google at Art Gallery

2010-04-09T12:45:00.000+10:00

Most people see Google’s image search as a quick way to find a picture. Ken Solomon sees art.

Literally.

Solomon is a Brooklyn-based artist that has spent the past couple of years working on stuff with a digital bent. One recent strain: Recreating the contents of a Web browser, such as Google results pages and Facebook profiles, using watercolor on paper.

This sounds odd but looks cool, at least to my eye. And I definitely enjoy the practical joke at work here: Solomon creates an image by appropriating Google’s (GOOG) appropriation of other people’s images.

Is that art? Well, Solomon has a show opening at a Chelsea gallery tonight, so some people think so. You can see some examples of his work at the bottom of this page, but it may make a bit more sense when you hear him explain what he’s up to in this video.

See some of his pictures and a video on the original post

Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment Than Print?

2010-04-04T17:44:00.000+10:00

Public opinion polls show that concern about the environment rises and falls based on the state of the economy and other factors, but concern about the negative impacts associated with using paper and printing continues to rise. Nothing captures the essence of these feelings more vividly than the signature line appearing at the foot of more and more emails: “Please consider the environment before printing this email.”

This seemingly well-intentioned call to action, as well as others like “Sign up for paperless billing, help the environment and save trees” confront consumers with a false dilemma and present a forced choice that may have unintended consequences.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in Australia

2010-03-29T16:55:00.000+11:00

An ex-student of mine send me an email today and he wanted to know my views about the government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme". More specifically he wanted to know ,

"the governments Carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) policy and whether it will a) reduce CO2 emissions considering expanding economy, etc and b) will it be financially viable and sustainable.."

I am definitely, not am expert on climate change economics, however I tried to tell him something ... basically whatever conclusions I could draw based on my knowledge of basis facts in economics... here is what I told him...
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CPRS: As described on Governments climate change website (http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/cprs.aspx)

Under the CPRS, the government will set an annual limit (or cap) on the total amount of carbon pollution that can be emitted under the scheme, within Australia. The cap will be gradually lowered, reducing the level of carbon pollution we produce each year. Voluntary action can contribute to lowering Australia’s emissions cap in a variety of ways.

Companies or other groups within Australia that need to emit carbon to do business will need to purchase permits (or may be issued with permits) that represent the right to emit a specific amount of carbon pollution. The total amount of permits issued overall cannot exceed the government-set cap. Businesses can trade permits among themselves if they find they have more than they need - or if they don't have enough – ensuring that abatement (reducing emissions) occurs at least cost.

A Simple approach to study the ramifications of this scheme.

Carbon emission, just like any other form of pollution is a negative externality.

An externality refers to the uncompensated impact of one person’s actions on the wellbeing of a bystander. If the impact on the bystander is adverse, the externality is called a negative externality. In this case, the emitter is any Australian business and the bystander is society.

Negative externalities lead markets to produce a larger quantity than is socially desirable. The simple logic behind this phenomenon is that emitters (firms) do not have to pay for the full social cost of their actions (pollution).

As the diagram above shows , the private cost is less than social cost and hence the pollution amount of goods produced by market/firms (Q market in diagram) is higher than the socially optimal level.

Now, what will CPRS do to solve this problem? CPRS is going to impose an extra cost on businesses thereby shifting the private cost line to match with the social cost line (the red line), which will lead the firms to produce socially optimum (Qoptimum) amount .

This all sounds perfect in theory, however implementing this in reality has the following issues:

Generally, the private cost and social cost curves are not observable with 100% accuracy in the real world. So if you do not observe these curves, how to decide how much cost to impose on businesses. If you got this cost wrong than it can be bad for economy. For Example if government ends up overestimating this cost than the market will produce less than socially optimum (imagine a line left of red line), which will increase cost and make people worse off.
The cost of reducing pollution is not same for all businesses. Less carbon intensive industries will reduce pollutions and sell their permits to more intensive ones. Now, imagine if there are more carbon intensive businesses than there will be a shortage of permits and hence the permit prices will shoot up. This will lead to complete collapse of some businesses. So, in the short run there will be issues of business failures and unemployment in some sectors of economy.
The third and most important thing is, what others (Australia’s main trading partners) are going to do? If Australia only puts a price on the carbon and its export partners don’t put a price than Australian export will be expensive compared to its competitors exports in the international market. In this case Australian businesses loose and society on general doesn’t get any better, as the carbon emission leading to climate change is a global phenomena (which will continue as other countries will keep on emitting).

Depending upon the above mentioned factors CPRS may or may not work.

Academia equivalent of Oscar awards.

2010-03-09T23:34:00.000+11:00

Just saw a comic strip on PhD Comics, which presents the Academia equivalent of Oscar awards. This is really funny. I think I have tretty much qualified for all the 4 awards at some or the other point of time in my research carrer. Have a look:

Data, data everywhere

2010-03-02T23:56:00.002+11:00

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

Feb 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.
Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America's Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. "How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry," he says.
"We are at a different period because of so much information," says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it "the industrial revolution of data". The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: "big data".

Epistemologically speaking, information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses "data" and "information" interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart. Given enough raw data, today's algorithms and powerful computers can reveal new insights that would previously have remained hidden.
The business of information management—helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data—is growing by leaps and bounds. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the "sexiest" around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

More of everything

There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world's 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.

Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. "Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement," says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains. Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.

The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore's law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months. The software programs are getting better too. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore's law for decades.
A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.

People have long groused that they were swamped by information. Back in 1917 the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm complained about the effects of the telephone: "Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent." Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth. The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference.

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. "What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level," says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. "Every day I wake up and ask, 'how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?" says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Sophisticated quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past. For example, Farecast, a part of Microsoft's search engine Bing, can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records. The same idea is being extended to hotel rooms, cars and similar items. Personal-finance websites and banks are aggregating their customer data to show up macroeconomic trends, which may develop into ancillary businesses in their own right. Number-crunchers have even uncovered match-fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling.

Dross into gold

"Data exhaust"—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google's search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query. If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up.

As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating and analysing data is likely to bring huge benefits in other fields as well. For example, Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. "Early on in this process Eric and I both said: 'Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health-care economy around the data that relate to people'," Mr Mundie explains. "You would not just think of data as the 'exhaust' of providing health services, but rather they become a central asset in trying to figure out how you would improve every aspect of health care. It's a bit of an inversion."

To be sure, digital records should make life easier for doctors, bring down costs for providers and patients and improve the quality of care. But in aggregate the data can also be mined to spot unwanted drug interactions, identify the most effective treatments and predict the onset of disease before symptoms emerge. Computers already attempt to do these things, but need to be explicitly programmed for them. In a world of big data the correlations surface almost by themselves.

Sometimes those data reveal more than was intended. For example, the city of Oakland, California, releases information on where and when arrests were made, which is put out on a private website, Oakland Crimespotting. At one point a few clicks revealed that police swept the whole of a busy street for prostitution every evening except on Wednesdays, a tactic they probably meant to keep to themselves.
But big data can have far more serious consequences than that. During the recent financial crisis it became clear that banks and rating agencies had been relying on models which, although they required a vast amount of information to be fed in, failed to reflect financial risk in the real world. This was the first crisis to be sparked by big data—and there will be more.

The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world. Economic production used to be based in the factory, where managers pored over every machine and process to make it more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.
"The data-centred economy is just nascent," admits Mr Mundie of Microsoft. "You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now." This special report will point to where it is beginning to surface.

Why the internet will fail

2010-03-02T23:00:00.001+11:00

Came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail.

----------------------------------

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana

By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn't–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of "Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway" to be published by Doubleday in April.

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Adam Smith and Outsourcing

2010-03-02T00:37:00.001+11:00

What would Adam Smith think about outsourcing?...

See what Lionel Frost has to say about this. Read the full article on

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/what-would-adam-smith-think-about-outsourcing-20100226-p8av.html

Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?

2010-03-01T23:16:00.002+11:00

Read an Interesting article on Wall Street Journal (online). It's interesting; the author raises question on the very existance of economics as a science ...which has been my source of livelihood so far.. Have a look ..

_______________________________________________________________________________

Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?

Some macroeconomists say if we just study the numbers long enough we'll be able to design better policy. That's like the sign in the bar: Free Beer Tomorrow.

By RUSS ROBERTS

For an economist, these are the best of times and the worst of times. We live in the best of times because everyone wants to understand what happened to the economy and what's going to happen next.

Is the mess we're in a market failure or a government failure? Is the stimulus plan working? Would tax cuts for small business spur employment? When will the job market improve? Is inflation coming? Do deficits matter?

So many questions and so little in the way of answers. And so it is the worst of times for economists. There is no consensus on the cause of the crisis or the best way forward.

There were Nobel Laureates who thought the original stimulus package should have been twice as big. And there are those who blame it for keeping unemployment high. Some economists warn of hyperinflation while others tell us not to worry.

It makes you wonder why people call it the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. After all, most sciences make progress. Nobody in medicine wants to bring back lead goblets. Sir Isaac Newton understood a lot about gravity. But Albert Einstein taught us more.
But in economics, theories that were once discredited surge back into favor. John Maynard Keynes and the view that government spending can create prosperity seem immortal. I thought stagflation had put a stake in the heart of this idea back in the 1970s. Suddenly, he's a genius once again. F.A. Hayek, Keynes's more laissez-faire sparring partner, is drawing interest. There are various monetarists to choose from, too. Which paradigm is the "right" way to think about the boom and the bust? Or are they all wrong?
I once thought econometrics—the application of statistics to economic questions—would settle these disputes and the truth would out. Econometrics is often used to measure the independent impact of one variable holding the rest of the relevant factors constant. But I've come to believe there are too many factors we don't have data on, too many connections between the variables we don't understand and can't model or identify.

I've started asking economists if they can name a study that applied sophisticated econometrics to a controversial policy issue where the study was so well done that one side's proponents had to admit they were wrong. I don't know of any. One economist told me that in general my point was well taken, but that his own work (of course!) had been decisive in settling a particular dispute.

Perhaps what we're really doing is confirming our biases. Ed Leamer, a professor of economics at UCLA, calls it "faith-based" econometrics. When the debate is over $2 trillion in additional government spending vs. zero, we've stopped being scientists and become philosophers. Do we want to be more like France with a bigger role for government, or less like France?

Facts and evidence still matter. And economists have learned some things that have stood the test of time and that we almost all agree on—the general connection between the money supply and inflation, for example. But the arsenal of the modern econometrician is vastly overrated as a diviner of truth. Nearly all economists accept the fundamental principles of microeconomics—that incentives matter, that trade creates prosperity—even if we disagree on the implications for public policy. But the business cycle and the ability to steer the economy out of recession may be beyond us.

The defenders of modern macroeconomics argue that if we just study the economy long enough, we'll soon be able to model it accurately and design better policy. Soon. That reminds me of the permanent sign in the bar: Free Beer Tomorrow.
We should face the evidence that we are no better today at predicting tomorrow than we were yesterday. Eighty years after the Great Depression we still argue about what caused it and why it ended.

If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system. That's hard enough. But they can't tell you what will happen with any precision to the population of a particular species of frog if rainfall goes up this year in a particular rain forest. They might not even be able to count the number of frogs right now with any exactness.

We have the same problems in economics. The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions.

The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one's thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don't know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability.

Mr. Roberts is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, professor of economics at George Mason University and a distinguished scholar in the Mercatus Center.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Management

2010-02-24T19:43:00.000+11:00

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Senior Management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

WHO IS YOUR COMPETITOR TOMORROW ?

2010-02-24T19:29:00.000+11:00

Here is a note from an Indian Academic talking about the competitive market ...
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Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon.

Answer is none of the above.

The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cellphones

Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley ). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi
(professor @ Indian Institute of Management Bangalore).

3 Idiots - Famous Speech by Chatur

2010-02-24T01:09:00.000+11:00

This is the famous speech from movie 3 Idiots. Real Funny ...

iRack

2010-01-31T20:12:00.000+11:00

Just saw a very clever video clip made by MadTV about Americal invasion of Iraq. Very subtle and interesting clip, comparing Apple's CEO Steve Jobs with Goerge Bush !!

Opinion Polls

2010-01-23T12:18:00.000+11:00

Just saw a comic strip on PhD Comics, which very well expresses my frustration with opinions polls conducted and boradcasted by popular media. Have a look:

Who said that?

2010-01-22T01:21:00.001+11:00

It was the first day of school and a new student named Chandrashekhar Subramanyam entered the fourth grade in a school in the U.S.A.
The teacher said, "Let's begin by reviewing some American History.

Who said "Give me Liberty, or give me Death"?

She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrashekhar, who had his hands up:

"Patrick Henry, 1775" he said.

"Very good!" Who said "Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?"

Again, no response except from Chandrashekhar.

"Abraham Lincoln, 1863" said Chandrashekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, "Class, you should be ashamed. Chandrashekhar, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do."

She heard a loud whisper: "F**k the Indians,"

"Who said that?" she demanded.

Chandrashekhar put his hand up. "General Custer, 1862."

At that point, a student in the back said, "I'm gonna puke."

The teacher glares around and asks "All right! Now, who said that?"

Again, Chandrashekhar says, "George Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991."

Now furious, another student yells, "Oh yeah? S*ck this!"

Chandrashekhar jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher, "Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!"

Now with almost a mob hysteria someone said "You little shit. If you say anything else, I'll kill you."

Chandrashekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, "Gary Condit to Chandra Levy, 2001."

The teacher fainted. .

And as the class gathered around the teacher onthe floor, someone said, "Oh shit, we're f**ked!"

And Chandrashekhar said quietly, "George Bush, Iraq, 2005

!!!!!

Sad state of Australian Advertising

2009-09-22T17:50:00.004+10:00

Image from: http://www.crunchgear.com/200...

View image on Bing

I don't know if this person is a man or a lady or something in between. Most obvious guess would be that 'he' is a cross-dresser. A man dressed up a a women, with loud makeup and a voice mimicking a female voice ....

Now that we have discussed the familiarity of this person, when was the last you saw this creature on TV ? I am sure 90% of you remember him/her from the advertisement of "The Women's Weekly". This guy is coming in the advertisement of Women's weekly for quite some time. They change the contents, but not his starting line, "Hello Possums.. " and than he goes on describing what's inside the latest issue of Women's weekly.

Sometimes I wonder, how come a successful and creative magazine like Women's weekly can't come up with something creative, when it comes to their own advertising. Hiring a cross-dresser, speaking in a disgusting and repetitive manner is the last bit of creative advertising one expects from arguably one of the best selling woman's magazine.

What I am hinting here is a broader issue i.e. the sad state of Australian TV advertising. I am someone , who watches the advertisements shown on TV (mostly unwillingly). I think making a good TV advertisement require ultimate level of creativity. Otherwise the TV advertisement can be a turn-off factor for the consumers. I mean just think of a person who is watching his favourite TV show and it interrupted by a commercial break, he is already annoyed by this interruption and then comes an advertisement, which is aimed to bore him to death. A stupid cross-dresser in her cheap and loud makeup speaking some repetitive phrases... ... gosh. don't you think whenever he looks at this magazine on the news stand he will remember the torture he has gone through last night, while watching his favourite TV show.

Well my idea of advertisement is that it should be something that compensates for the annoyances caused by the interruption of my favourite TV show, not increases it .

Alternative Histories

2009-07-08T16:18:00.003+10:00

Quoted from an interesting book i read today:

One can illustrate the strange concept of alternative histories as follows. Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e. to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death. The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires).

Consider the possibility that the Russian roulette winner would be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors. ...

While the remaining five histories are not observable, the wise and ,thoughtful person could easily make a guess as to their attributes. It requires some thoughtfulness and personal courage. In addition, in time, if the roulette-betting fool keeps playing the game, the bad histories will tend to catch up with him. Thus, if a 25-year-old played Russian titoulette, say, once a year, there would be a very slim possibility of his surviving his 50th birthday - but, if there are enough players, say thousands of 25-year-old players, we can expect to see a handful of (extremely rich) survivors (and a very large cemetery).

By:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

in his book Fooled by Randomness

Sarfasoshi ki Tammana - A new prespective

2009-05-28T18:49:00.000+10:00

Letterman's tribute to Bill Gates and Microsoft

2009-05-22T16:28:00.001+10:00

Understanding The Rising Cost of Food - A youtube Video

2009-05-22T16:24:00.000+10:00

Karl Marks on Current Financial Crises

2009-05-22T16:15:00.001+10:00

भारत का विकास: कितना सच , कितनी कहानी?

2008-11-21T17:03:00.005+11:00

आज कल भारत की ही बात हो रही है पूरे पश्चिमी विश्व मे। भारत एक विकाशशील देश है, भारत दुनिया की आर्थिक महाशक्ति बनने ही वाला है, भारत और चीन दुनिया की सबसे बड़ी ताकत बनने वाले हैं ... वगैरह वगैरह।

एक भारतीय होने के नाते मुझे यह सब पढ़ और सुन कर प्रसंता जरूर होती है, परन्तु एक मिनट को यह भी लगता है की क्या सही मे ऐसा होने वाला है। कहीं ऐसा तो नहीं की ये एक धोखा है, एक मीडिया स्टंट है, जो समय के साथ ग़लत साबित हो जायेगा। भारत को आजाद हुए एक लम्बा आरसा हो गया है और भारत की विकास दर, बाकि दुनिया के मुकाबले काफी धीमी रही (जिसे लोग मजाक से , "हिंदू विकास दर" कहते हैं) । पिचले कुछ सालों से भारत की विकास दर बाकि दुनिया से ज्यादा रही (चीन की तुलना मे फिर भी कम ही रही) , और लोग कयास लगाने लगे की अगर भारतीय अर्थ-व्यवस्था अगर इसी दर से बढ़ति रही तो भारत एक आर्थिक महाशक्ति बन जायेगा ।

मुझे जहाँ तक लगता है , बहस कम मुद्दा यह नही है की भारत एक आर्थिक महाशक्ति बनेगा या नहीं। भारत का आर्थिक महाशक्ति बनना इस बात पर टिका है की "अगर भारतीय अर्थ-व्यवस्था अगर इसी दर से बढ़ति रही"। तो यहाँ सवाल ये है की इस "अगर" पर किता भरोसा किया जा सकता है। हम किस हद तक इस बात पर भरोसा कर सकते हैं, की भारतीय अर्थ-व्यवस्था इसी दर से अगले ५० सालों तक बढ़ति रहेगी। ऐसा क्या है भारत में जो इस आर्थिक विकास के इंजन को आने वाले सालों में चालू रख पायेगा। आखिरकार विकास का इंजन चलाने के लिये कोई इंधन तो चाहिये ... कौन है बनेगा यह इंधन ? भारत के अम्बानी और टाटा? या भारत के हजारो यूनिवर्सिटी/कॉलेज से हर साल निकलने वाले ग्रेजुएट ? कॉल सेंटर में काम करने वाले लड़के -लड़कियां ? बंगलोर के सॉफ्टवेर इंजिनियर ? या फिर दिन पर दिन आमिर होता मध्य -वर्गीय उपभोगता ?

इस विषय में किसी की भी कोई एक राय नहीं है। अलग अलग लोगो का अलग अलग आवलोकन है। मैने सोचा अपनी इस ब्लॉग की माध्यम से मैं भी अपनी विचार दुनिया के सामने रखता हूँ। आने वाले कुछ लेखों में मैं इन्ही विषयों पर चर्चा करूँगा। मैं यह लेख् की सीरीज़ हिन्दी में क्यों लिख रहा हूँ ? इसकी एक वजह तो यह है की मैने बहुत दिनों से हिन्दी मैं कुछ लिखा ही नहीं है, और मुझे डर है की मैं हिन्दी में लिखना भूलता जा रहा हूँ। दूसरी वजह यह है की मैं चाहता हूँ की जयादा से ज्यादा हिन्दी पढ़ने वाले लोग इस लेख् को पढे और मुझे बताये की उन्हे यह लेख् कैसा लगा। मुझे बहुत ही खुशी होगी, अगर यह लेख् को पढ़ने वाले मुझे मेरी गलतियाँ दिखा कर, उन्हे सुधारने का आवसर दें ।

The Revenge of Electric Car

2008-11-19T22:57:00.013+11:00

I was reading this very interesting story on Time Magazine's website, whether US government should save the General Motors. Although there is a lot of media speculation about the Detroit's big three falling apart, but, in absence of a bail out package, the General motors will fallout first and will have the biggest impact on the US auto market.

Why General motors'? because Ford is not in that bad condition and Chrysler is not that big. So the only one remaining is General Motors (GM). Ford and Chrysler may also go bankrupt, but, they definitely aren't the first one to go.

The article on Time Magazine's website went on discussing the financial problems of GM and it finally concluded that a falling GM will have a devastating impact on US economy. Whether the government wants or not it will have to cough up some money to GM. The only choice government has is, whether it want to pay for GM's survival or it want to pay for GM's funeral.

Well, amidst all these discussions I rolled over to the typical behaviour exhibited by Economists and started thinking what GM could have done in past that would have perhaps prevented the current situation. After all, its not credit crunch that has affected GM, there are Toyotas and Hondas who are still surviving. While i was thinking on these lines, I came a across the following web page on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car

The following excerpt taken from Wikipedia, describes what this page is all about,

"Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology."

I really wasn't aware of the existance of this documentary and I definitely never had a chance to watch it. However, this page made me a little bit more curious about this electric car, whose murder we are talking aobut.

So after doing some more search, I found another page on Time Magazine's website , which describes the General Motors EV1, using the following Words, and somehow decides to put this Car in the category of "The 50 Worst Cars of All Time".

"The EV1 was a marvel of engineering, absolutely the best electric vehicle anyone had ever seen. Built by GM to comply with California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate, the EV1 was quick, fun, and reliable. It held out the promise that soon electric cars — charged from the grid with all sorts of groovy power sources, like wind and solar — could replace the smelly old internal-combustion vehicle."

Anyways, Time Magazine, had its owen reasons to classify this car into the category of the worst cars and I am no car technology expert to argue against this opinion. Whether, it was a lack of consumer confidence or a conspiracy, that killed the electric car, but surley GM missed the biggest oppotunity of its corporate life. GM decided not to produce any more EV1s and stopped developing the technology.

Had GM not killed the electric car back than, i guess the situation would have been much different for GM now. Where exaclty are we in Electric car technology ? Well ..almost nowhere !! Even hybrid thechnology is nowhere near in that stage of development where a mainstream consumer can buy a hybrid car. Had GM not dumped this technology 10 years back,worked on developing this technology inspite of some initial market setbacks, the Electric car made by GM would have been 10 years more advanced than the current technology and instead of begging for bailout and loosing its market share to Toyota, the situation would have been much different for GM!!

However, that never happend and hence taxpayers will have to pay for either GM's life support (I wonder for how long one can keep GM alive like that) or for its funeral. On a more general note, what GM failed to realise is the importance of innovation in corporate sucess. Making cars just more flashy, sexy and stylish can't get you anywhere in the long run. Current corporate sucess are full of examples where market appriacated innovation. Look at Apple, Google or the technology that lets me write these free blog posts.

It happens only in India

2008-11-13T18:26:00.001+11:00

It Happens Only in INDIA

Collection of Funny Pictures which shows the Incidents which can Happen Only in INDIA

--
http://users.monash.edu.au/~mishra/

PHD Graduation Ceremony

2008-11-01T22:18:00.000+11:00

Transperancy International's Coruption Perception Index

2008-09-28T19:57:00.001+10:00

Last week Transperancy International released its Coruption Perception Index for the year 2008.

India scored 3.4 out of 10. Not too bad for a developing country. India did better than its neighbours like Pakistan(2.5), Bangladesh(2.1) and Sri-Lanka(3.2).

I was amazed to see the low scores of Indonesia(2.6), Philippines (2.3) and Russia(2.1). At least in my perception these countires were not that corrupt. The complete list and most details about this year's list can be found on the follwing website:

http://www.transparency.org/news_room/latest_news/press_releases/2008/2008_09_23_cpi_2008_en

Cup or Coffee

2008-09-24T12:46:00.001+10:00

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.

Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: 'If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones.. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other ' s cups.

Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn ' t change. Some times, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.'

Don ' t let the cups drive you.. Enjoy the coffee instead

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

2008-08-24T20:10:00.000+10:00

Is is possible to connets dots in future to form a line ? No ...because you don't see future !! however it is really easly to connet dots in past when you have seen it all..

Should one settle down with what he has achieved ? or should you keep on looking for answers.. ?

Have a look at this video. I found it quite motivating and interesting !!

Tax Cuts Explained

2008-08-14T18:21:00.001+10:00

Because it is tax season. . . Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Because you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"

"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"

"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

भारत तभी तक सेकुलर है जब तक यह हिन्दू बहुल है

2008-08-06T15:15:00.001+10:00

भारतीय संविधान के अनुसार भारत एक पंथ-निरपेक्ष, समाजवादी और प्रजातांत्रिक गणतंत्र है। अनेक चुनौतियों के बाद भी लोकतंत्र यहां सफलतापूर्वक चल रहा है और पंथ-निरपेक्षता तो प्राचीन काल से भारत की विशेषता रही है। लेकिन भारत तभी तक सेकुलर और प्रजातंत्रवादी रहेगा, जब तक कि यहां हिन्दुओं का बहुमत है। जिस दिन हिन्दू-समाज की संख्या घट जायेगी उसी दिन इस देश से लोकतंत्र और सेकुलरवाद भी विदा हो जायेंगे। पाकिस्तान और बांग्लादेश भारत के ही हिस्से थे। जैसे ही वहां हिन्दू घटे दोनों के दोनों मजहबी राज्य हो गये और प्रजातंत्र भी वहां मरणासन्न हो गया। अमरनाथ बोर्ड को जमीन देने और वापस लेने का घटनाक्रम इसका ताजा उदाहरण है।

हज हाऊस और उर्स
भारत के हर प्रदेश से हर साल हजारों मुसलमान हज के लिए जाते हैं। केन्द्र सरकार हज करने वालों को आर्थिक सहायता देती है। प्रत्येक राज्य में हज-यात्रियों की सुविधा के लिये बड़े-बड़े हज हाऊस बने हुए हैं। अजमेर में हर साल ख्वाजा मोइनुद्दीन चिश्ती का उर्स होता है। उर्स में आने वालों को राज्य सरकार और प्रशासन सभी सुविधाएं उपलब्ध कराते हैं। अजमेर में पुष्कर रोड पर विशाल मैदान में जायरीनों के लिये स्थायी विश्राम स्थल बना हुआ है। हिन्दू समाज ने कभी इस पर आपत्ति या आन्दोलन नहीं किया कि जायरीनों या हाजियों को एकड़ों जमीन क्यों नहीं दी गई है, लेकिन अमरनाथ यात्रा करने वालों को अस्थायी रूप से कुछ भूमि दिये जाने पर कश्मीर घाटी में विरोध खड़ा हो गया। हिन्दू यात्रियों को कुछ सुविधा दिये जाने पर घाटी के मुसलमान भड़क उठे, कई दिनों तक उग्र प्रदर्शन किये गये और अमरनाथ जाने वालों पर हमले किये गये। यह तभी रुका जब राज्य सरकार ने जमीन देने का आदेश निरस्त कर दिया।

यह क्यों हुआ? इसका सीधा सा उत्तर यही है कि कश्मीर में मुसलमानों का बहुमत है, वे कट्टरपंथियों के प्रभाव में हैं और जहां मुस्लिम अधिसंख्य हों, वहां इस्लाम के अतिरिक्त अन्य किसी मजहब का बने रहना असम्भव है। इतिहास में इसके उदाहरण भरे पड़े हैं। आज भी स्थिति यही है। बीस साल पहले घाटी से हिन्दुओं को रातों-रात घर-बार छोड़कर भागना पड़ा था। इसके बाद पचासों मंदिर वहां ध्वस्त कर दिये गये। पूरी घाटी में नाम मात्र के हिन्दू बचे हैं, वे भी मजदूरी के लिये गये लोग हैं, जो चौबीसों घण्टे आतंक में जीते हैं। अब अमरनाथ का तीर्थस्थल कट्टरपंथियों को चुभ रहा है। अमरनाथ की गुफा में बर्फ से बने पवित्र शिवलिंग का दर्शन करने पूरे भारत से हर साल लाखों लोग पहुंचते हैं। सेना की कड़ी सुरक्षा में यह यात्रा होती है। फिर भी आतंकवादी हर वर्ष कोई न कोई वारदात करते ही हैं। तीर्थयात्रियों पर बम फैंके ही जाते हैं।

पृष्ठभूमि
वर्ष 1996 में अमरनाथ यात्रा के समय जबर्दस्त बर्फीला तूफान आया, जिसमें दो सौ श्रध्दालु मारे गये थे। उस समय राज्य सरकार ने इसकी जांच के लिये 'सेनगुप्ता समिति' बनाई। समिति का सुझाव था कि पहलगाम और बालटोल के बीच यात्रियों की सुरक्षा के लिये स्थायी शिविर बनाये जाने चाहिये। 2001 तथा 2002 में यात्रियों पर आतंकी हमलों के बाद एक और सुझाव 'अमरनाथ तीर्थस्थल प्राधिकरण' (अमरनाथ श्राइन बोर्ड) गठित करने का आया। इस सुझाव के अनुसार उक्त प्राधिकरण का गठन किया गया। प्रावधान यह रखा गया कि राज्यपाल इस बोर्ड के अध्यक्ष तथा राज्यपाल के मुख्य सचिव इसके मुख्य कार्यकारी अधिकारी होंगे।

लगभग 6 माह पहले तत्कालीन राज्यपाल जे। ज. सिन्हा ने 'बोर्ड' के अध्यक्ष के नाते सेनगुप्ता समिति की सिफारिश के अनुसार राज्य सरकार से 40 एकड़ भूमि की मांग की। इस भूमि पर यात्रियों की सुरक्षा के लिये आवास व्यवस्था की जानी थी। यह जमीन केवल यात्रा अवधि में काम में ली जानी थी तथा इसका किराया भी प्राधिकरण की ओर से दिया था। जम्मू-कश्मीर के मंत्रिमण्डल ने बालटोल के पास 40 एकड़ भूमि देने के आदेश भी दिये। राज्य की नौकरशाही ने भरपूर प्रयत्न किया कि अमरनाथ बोर्ड की जमीन नहीं दी जाये, किन्तु जमीन दिये जाने का आदेश फिर भी निकल गया।

वन विभाग ने यह कर बाधा पहुंचाई कि पास ही में थजवास अभयारण्य है और यात्रियों के वहां ठहरने से अभयारण्य के वन्य पशुओं को तकलीफ होगी। यह भी कहा गया कि वन विभाग की भूमि अन्य किसी उद्देश्य से दी ही नहीं जा सकती, जब कि राजौरी में एक इस्लामी विश्वविद्यालय के लिये इससे भी बड़ी और गुलमर्ग में होटल बनाने के लिये 30 एकड़ वन विभाग की जमीन दी गई है। एक आपत्ति पर्यावरण प्रदूषण की भी थी। इन सब आपत्तियों के बाद भी मई में राज्य मंत्रिमण्डल ने 40 एकड़ भूमि अमरनाथ प्राधिकरण को देने की स्वीकृति दे दी।

बालटोल के पास दी गई इस भूमि पर-

-तीर्थयात्रा अवधि( अधिकतम दो माह) के लिये अस्थायी आवास बनाने की योजना थी।
इस जमीन का किराया 2 करोड़ 31 लाख 30 हजार चार सौ रुपए अमरनाथ बोर्ड ने वन विभाग को दिया है।
-भूमि पर पेड़ लगाने के लिये कुछ अतिरिक्त धन भी बोर्ड की ओर से विभाग को दिया गया है।
दो माह भूमि वन-विभाग को लौटा दी जाएगी।
-अमरनाथ बोर्ड को उक्त भूमि किराये या लीज पर किसी अन्य को देने का अधिकार भी नहीं है।
फिर भी इस भूमि-आवंटन पर तूफान खड़ा किया गया।

अलगाववादियों ने भड़काया
वास्तव में सरकार की स्वीकृति के बाद विरोधियों ने घाटी के लोगों को भड़काना प्रारम्भ कर दिया। भड़काने वालों में पीडीपी के लोग सबसे आगे थे, जबकि पीडीपी के मंत्री भी उस बैठक में
थे, जिसमें भूमि आवंटन की अनुशंसा की गई थी। इसी का परिणाम था कि विगत 22 जून से कश्मीर घाटी में हिंसक प्रदर्शन प्रारम्भ हो गये। अमरनाथ यात्रियों पर पथराव किया गया और कुछ स्थानों पर तीर्थयात्रियों पर हथगोले भी फैंके गए। श्राइन बोर्ड के मुख्य कार्यकारी अधिकारी श्री अरुण कुमार को भी निशाना बनाया गया।

लगभग दो महिने पहले ले। जनरल एस. के. सिन्हा के सेवानिवृत्त होने के बाद पूर्व गृह सचिव श्री एन. वोहरा प्रदेश के राज्यपाल बने। इसलिए अमरनाथ बोर्ड के अध्यक्ष भी वे ही हो गए। 30 जून को उन्होंने प्राधिकरण के अध्यक्ष के नाते सरकार को लिख दिया कि उन्हें बालटोल के पास भूमि की आवश्यकता नहीं है। राज्यपाल के इस हिन्दू-विरोधी कदम से हिन्दू समाज में भी जागृति आई। जम्मू में तो भूमि-आवंटन के समर्थन में प्रदर्शन पहले ही से हो रहे थे, विश्व हिन्दू परिषद् ने 3 जुलाई को भारत-बंद रखने का आह्वान किया। पूरे देश में यह 'बंद' आशातीत रूप से सफल रहा। प्रश्न उठता है कि देश की जनता का पचास हजार करोड़ रुपया अब तक सौंपा जा चुका है, फिर भी यदि अमरनाथ यात्रियों को वहां सुविधा नहीं मिल सकती तो कैसे घाटी को भारत का अभिन्न अंग माना जाये? (साभार-पाथेय कण)

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics

2008-07-17T12:31:00.000+10:00

A very Interesting article about love, from the prespective of an economist:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13every.html?ex=1216872000&en=dbdeb76198c3577c&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Why I created a Blog

2008-06-10T14:14:00.000+10:00

Hi, I am Vinod Mishra and this is my first post on my Internet Blog.

"Blog", sounds like an interesting word. It didn't meant anything to me a few months back. I had heard this term here and there in the news etc. but I didn't knew what exactly this Blog, thing is? and why is everybody talking about blog.

Once , I was with my friends and we were talking about something, when someone mentioned the terms blog. Because I was with my close friends , I dared to ask ? , "What is a Blog? , I know nothing about it?". Everyone, (of course except me) burst in laughter, almost instantaneously. One of my friends said, "It's a shame that you don't know what a blog is" , and what's more shameful is that, "you admitted in front of all your friends that you have no idea about what a blog is"?

In fact, at that moment I felt like an illiterate person , standing in front of PhDs in literature. Ok, I admitted that I don't know what a blog is ? But what's the big deal. And I asked my friends, that there are 1 million other things that I don't know, but you don't laugh at my for my ignorance. For instance i don't know how to fly an aeroplane or I have no idea, "How is George bush surviving without a brain in his head?".

Although said jokingly, but that's one of the things about latest technology that kind of annoys me most. In past also there are different technology's emerged but a person who was using an older version was not classed out like illiterate (or uncivilised). for example take the case of automobile technology. Cars too have made an enormous technological break through. If some one is driving an automatic car with V8 engine and I am driving a manual with straight 4 engine, I don't feel like I am left behind in tech-savyness. People may draw conclusions that perhaps I can't afford or perhaps i am miser or maybe i am a bit old fashioned. Nobody think i am ignorant. However, on the other hand no a days everyone has a mobile phone which has an inbuilt camera, a music player, a movie player and some stupid thing known as Blue tooth. Now if have a mobile phone, which doesn't have all these capabilities (In fact the only feature that i has is capability to make phone calls and text messages), I am almost immediately labelled as a gorilla who is dropped in a civilised society. I am not ignorant, I know what a music player is and what a video player is. It's just that I don't think, I am soo busy that I got to listen to music from a music player which is integrated into my mobile phone. Moreover the music players inbuilt in mobile phones are pathetic and nobody listens music using his mobile phone.

Doesn't matter you use it or not but it's a must have gadget

I don't remember that where exactly, for the first time i heard the term perceived obsolence, but it really, very well explains explains this kind of situation. Most of the things aren't obsolete but we are made to believe that it has become obsolete . why? , because someone else is using a better , flashier and newer version of the same product. For example my Nokia 6288 is still more than just a cellphone (it's a camera, music player, movie player etc etc.) but as soon as iPhone is launched in Australia, I will see everywhere people flashing around their iPhone and I will start feeling that my Nokia is obsolete. And Guess what !! I too am in the queue to buy an iPhone (with practically no reason other than perceived obsolence of my phone).

Anyways, I will get back to the original discussion of my quest to find out, "what is a blog?". Wikipedia, mentions that a blog is a kind of online diary,usually maintained by a person.