This book is a series of short edited essays by Richard Feynman, a Physics Nobel laureate. A lot of what Feynman says is reflective of the deep insight that he had regarding how society works. From his critique of the science education system in Brazil, to his observation that you need to enjoy your work to produce anything of significance, the book is full of interesting thoughts. His brilliant work in quantum physics is well known, but also interesting is the fact that Feynman was a deep intellectual thinker, who gave serious thought to the way society around him worked. His interaction with Albert Einstein also made for an interesting read.
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As part of Chuck Eesley’s online class, the participants were required to come up with a worst/best business idea. Surprisingly, thinking of the worst idea was not so easy. Whatever I could to think of, didn’t seem to be a bad idea. I think is a general phenomenon. Most nebulous ideas seem promising until you start crystallizing your thoughts. When you try and bring clarity to the thoughts, you realise there are more issues that need to be considered before declaring an idea “useful”. The following is the worst idea that I could think of. Selling free mobile phones in India. Customer Segment – Cost conscious customers, specially in rural areas. Advertisers who want to advertise to people in rural areas would be another customer segment. I was reading this blog http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/ , specifically, some class notes from Peter Thiel’s CS183, where some intriguing stuff came to notice. Peter Thiel questions the conventional wisdom of celebrating competition. His argument is persuasive, if there were perfect competition, there would not be much incentive for companies to work harder, since practically no profit is made, or rather profit is competed away. It is the monopolistic company that is really valuable, in so far as the investors are concerned. Infact, he goes onto say people are often competing without regard to the real reason for that competition – accomplishment. There is a general tendency to assume that the more difficult the competition, the greater the accomplishment, should you ace the competition. However, what this theory does is that it takes difficulty as a proxy for the level of accomplishment. That might not necessarily be true. Questioning the value of competition might be an interesting exercise. Logs have become an essential component of most systems in production. Infact, it would not be wrong to say that logs also support a large amount of development activity, despite the simplicity of the unobtrusive “print” statement. Besides being used for debugging, logs are being used in a variety of ways because of the sheer amount of information contained in them. For instance, logs are routinely used to understand usage patterns for customers/users using a web application (although converting free-text log messages to numeric feature vectors, which are input to the machine learning algorithms, is not a trivial task), to estimate resource usage from disk/network activity, to measure performance degradation, etc. However, because of the increasingly distributed nature of systems, analysing logs is not easy. There several challenges pertaining to the accuracy of the log data, the cost of maintaining such a complex system, the performance cost of logging information to log files, etc. that needs to be considered. An acm queue article provides a very good commentary on the state of logging. You probably already know what IMAP and POP3 are. However, this information can be very helpful, specially when setting up email clients that retrieve mail from webmail providers. IMAP is an open standard that allows you to retrieve email from mail servers. It stores emails on the remote server which implies that you can use multiple devices and access your email. Email clients which are using POP3 actually retrieve email from the remote server after which those emails are deleted from the server. IMAP is becoming the defacto standard. There is actually a really informative article that discusses these aspects of email standards elaborately. SMTP is the standard using which email is sent. An SMTP server uses an MX-record to find where to deliver a mail message. Email technology is perhaps the most widely used globally. It is very interesting to find out what is it that makes this technology work so well. I have not been writing regularly. Although I want to I couldn’t because of work and general indiscipline. I was having a conversation with a friend recently when he commented that there had been no update on this blog for a long time. I was surprised, a little happy that he was actively seeking content on this blog, but I was also disappointed at not being regular with writing. On introspecting, I realised that it definitely takes discipline to be regular with writing, atleast it does for me. What is intriguing is that when I was regular, writing was easier. I had more ideas on what to include as topics, infact, I usually had a pending list of topics on which I wanted to write. However, when I became somewhat irregular, I was having difficulty thinking about what to write. I hope to be more regular with writing. Writing helps bring clarity to thought apart from also making you better at writing I read this article recently on Freakonomics (To Develop Expertise, Motivation is Necessary but not Sufficient). It is actually quite interesting in the viewpoint it presents. The author argues that while motivation is definitely a necessity when it comes to improving expertise in a particular area of endeavor, it is not sufficient. For example, you must not only want to study but also know how to study to truly gain expertise. Deliberate practice is most often the “how”. Such practice is difficult, often requiring sustained concentration, but is also very productive. Read the article if you find this concept interesting. I have often used SSH, SCP, SFTP. However, I didnt quite know how these technologies work under the hood. So, I tried to get a basic understanding of their functioning. The basic requirement for SSH is host identification and encryption of data which is being transmitted. Of course, if you are connecting to a remote machine, you need to be authorized to do certain work. This part however, can be solved using techniques like RSA authentication. If you are connecting to machine X using ssh, you can send a session key encrypted with the public key of that host. Only if the server is who you think it is, would it have knowledge of the private part of the key pair. If the host you are establishing a connection to is not spoofing machine X, it would be able to decrypt the session key using the private part of the key pair. Hence, a session would be established with reliability. The session key chosen can be from one of a number of different cihpers. Online education has transformed (or skeptics might say has the potential to transform) how people get educated. Quality lectures are now available on a host of topics and can be accessed by people around the globe for free of charge (you still have to pay for the bandwidth). So, we have KhanAcademy boasting of hundreds of well prepared lectures spanning areas like Physics,Chemistry,Linear Algebra, Economics, Computer programming, etc. People can partake of the courses at their own pace. You also have the venerable MIT OCW which is a treasure trove of knowledge, and then there are similar courses offered online by many other eminent universities. Stanford has initiated an even bolder experiment – delivering official online classes – where instructors would give certificates of accomplishment to those who perform well on the course. The point I am trying to make is that there is an abundance of material online that provides access to university level knowledge material – something which would have been prohibitively expensive just some time ago. It is in the context of this ready availability of knowledge that I was having this discussion with a friend – where we wondered the following question – How does a virtual course compare to a classroom course – or to put it differently, how would a student who has access to the real classroom course compare to someone who is utilising the material online – is there a difference, if yes, how much ? The gist of the discussion was this - The internet presents us with so much information that it has become necessary to record information, links that we find useful, for later perusal. This is commonly facilitated by browsers through the option to bookmark links. Sophisticated directory structures for bookmarks can be created as the number of bookmarks in the collections increase. However, something better could be and has been done. Social bookmarking has the potential to not just help us record interesting bits of information but also to share that information (interest graph) with other users of the system. |
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