Category: General

John Hagel writes: “Gaussian distributions tend to prevail when events are completely independent of each other. As soon as you introduce the assumption of interdependence across events, Paretian distributions tend to surface because positive feedback loops tend to amplify small initial events. For example, the fact that a website has a lot of links increases the likelihood that others will also link to this website…In a world of power law or Pareto distributions, extreme events become much more prominent. ”

Sramana Mitra has a post by Savita Kini:

Most of the work done today in [Banaglore’s] offshore offices, as well as the IT service companies is still the kind or cost reduction work that cannot happen in silicon valley. While definitely there has been some improvement in the kind of work that is happening here, its not comparable to the kind of cutting edge research and innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. The new startups are also mostly taking the beaten path as far as technology is concerned. Adding to the already skewed environment, the VCs have been flocking to the city hoping to capture the best deals. To manage their own risk, they continue to invest in late stage deals or in the services model. Some of the deals which happened in the last 1 year have majority been in the dot.com internet companies which my new friend Sramana Mitra calls Concept Arbitrage. I am not passing any judgment here. In a way its good because at least the entrepreneurial culture will get reinforced and more risk takers will emerge.

However, to be really compared to Silicon Valley, we need something much broader than the current mixture of IT services & products model.

The Times of India, in a story on Infertility Support Groups, wrote about Abhishek’s birth and what Bhavana and I went through. For more, read The Making of Abhishek.

The New York Times has an article by Tom Friedman: “The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about green upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.”

Paul Graham writes:

The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there’s usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you’ve been misjudged, you can protest that you’ve been treated unfairly.

Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are.

But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.

Andrew Gelman reviews the new book by Nassim Taleb. “The book is about unexpected events (“black swans”) and the problems with statistical models such as the normal distribution that don’t allow for these rarities. From a statistical point of view, let me say that multilevel models (often built from Gaussian components) can model various black swan behavior. In particular, self-similar models can be constructed by combining scaled pieces (such as wavelets or image components) and then assigning a probability distribution over the scalings, sort of like what is done in classical spectrum analysis of 1/f noise in time series.”

The Happiness Project offers seven suggestions. Among them: “Rid yourself of a nagging task: answer a difficult email, purchase something you need, or call to make that dentists appointment. Crossing an irksome chore off your to-do list will give you a big rush of energy and cheer, and youll be surprised that you procrastinated for so long.”

Dina Mehta writes:

For my generation, the internet has been life-changing. We know what we missed when we didnt have it. We are completely smitten by new avenues to communicate and collaborate in new ways today. We get excited about YouTube and Flickr and Twitter and rush to try them out. We are buoyant and optimistic about the immense possibilities they bring us. We are so grateful that we can now communicate across geographies and time and are a mere fraction of a megabyte away from anywhere else in the world. For many of us, it’s still a tool that’s shown us a different way of life. Assimilating this medium into our lives has given us new options.

For youngsters today, especially teenagers, it isn’t an option really – it is their way of life. I keep looking for aha moments from them during my research studies and I dont seem to hear them. They don’t take it as seriously as we do. They are not as grateful to it as we are. They do not talk about how cool YouTube is – they just use the services to check out the latest Gwen Stefani video – the video is their point of conversation rather than how cool the service is. When I ask them to imagine life without them, they simply cannot – they know nothing less. They’re not delighted by ‘free’ as we are – growing up with this medium has made them expect it. There are few divisions between the techno haves and have-nots among them, as in our case.

Atanu Dey writes: “Education is all about loading the bootstrap program in the brain of a child. And after you have done that, the child himself is capable of loading the other bits of software required to do everything else, or what we call learning. The important point is that the bootstrap program has to be loaded first and it has to be very small and very efficient. I think that there is sufficient evidence around that the bootstrap program is very small. One only needs to know how to read and write (at least in one language), do a bit of arithmetic, and understand a bit of rudimentary logic. That is all that is needed as part of the bootstrap program. The rest does not have to be taught. The rest has to be learnt. To learn a subject is then just a matter of time and effort on the part of the student, given that relevant subject material is accessible.”

The New York Times has an article by Alina Tugend:

In our busy, busy world, however, I sometimes feel as if I am the odd one out. Although those who are overworked and overwhelmed complain ceaselessly, it is often with an undertone of boastfulness; the hidden message is that Im so busy because Im so important.

Now I realize that busyness is not an absolute: everyone has a different threshold. I have one friend for whom more than one social engagement a weekend is just too much; others love to party, party, party. And most people would trade in bored and stagnant for a little stress if they were engaged in doing something they loved.