Wonderfest New Year Message

PROFUNDITY.  Ideally, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, science is skepticism married to wonder. Note that wonder comes first: it is probably the first emotion we experience after birth! It is certainly the emotion that Wonderfest strives to nourish beyond childhood. With humility, science asks some of the deepest questions. And it often provides wondrous, natural, even mechanistic answers that make mysticism and the supernatural seem banal. Our species yearns for transcendence, and, strangely, science delivers. Not in the afterlife, but in THIS life — as it helps us to transcend personal egocentricism, conceptual anthropocentrism, and cosmic geocentrism.  Sometimes, at its best, science also fills us with awe — with deep acknowledgment of the mysterious rather than the mystical.

 

"All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike," said Einstein, "and yet it is the most precious thing we have."

New Sony QX Series “Lens-Style Cameras”

The innovative Cyber-shot® DSC-QX100 and DSC-QX10 models utilize Wi-Fi® connectivity to instantly transform a connected smartphone into a versatile, powerful photographic tool, allowing it to shoot high-quality images and HD videos to rival a premium compact camera.  It's an entirely new and different way for consumers to capture and share memories with friends and family.

http://blog.sony.com/press/new-sony-qx-series-lens-style-cameras-redefine-the-mobile-photography-experience/

This when camera makers are getting kicked where it hurts. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/29/us-japan-cameras-idUSBRE9BS0CC20131229

Poverty Of Our Elite | Saba Naqvi

Very well Said by Saba Naqvi !! 

Certainly, Devyani's arrest should have been handled with greater sensitivity. Equally, it is true that the US applies different principles to itself and the rest of the world. But in the Devyani episode, we too have violated the spirit of one fundamental principle.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288936

Italian Copter Scandal Puts Defense Deals Worth Billions in Jeopardy - NYTimes.com

India is investigating allegations that AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of state-controlled Finmeccanica, bribed the former Indian Air Force chief, Shashi Tyagi, through his cousins. Mr. Tyagi has denied the accusations.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/italian-copter-scandal-puts-defense-deals-worth-billions-in-jeopardy/

The Trouble With India's MIG-21 Fighter Jets - NYTimes.com

The modernization of the Indian Air Force has been excruciatingly slow because of the long process of approving procurements and irregularities in deals, thanks to red tape and corruption. Controversies like the recent bribery scandal on a deal for helicopters worth $750 million have constantly plagued the Indian armed forces.

Other than bureaucratic and financial irregularities, India's indigenous defense programs, such as the Light Combat Aircraft, which is slated to replace the MIG-21 fleet, are running decades behind schedule. Meanwhile new deals like the Medium Multi-role Combat Aircraft program, won by Dassault Aviation Group of France, are still on the negotiation table, adding to unending delays in modernization efforts.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/the-trouble-with-indian-air-forces-mig-21-fighter-jets/?_r=0

The Singh doctrine - Indian Express

This article seemed to be just full of flowery language with no substance."Radical redefinition" with not one result to show !! Come-on at-least give us one example of what his articulation meant to the common man. 
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-singh-doctrine/1191321/0

Isha Yoga

I attended the Isha Inner Engineering class last weekend. 

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev's arguments (as per my understanding) : 

1. To achieve your highest potential as a human being you need to use abilities other than the ones you are conscious about. For this, you need to strengthen your body and mind using ancient Indian practices of yoga and meditation.  Anyways there is proof (by the scientific method) that yoga and meditation can only help the physical well being of a person. 

2. When people become meditative and are able to expand their minds beyond their immediate physical compulsions they automatically become better citizens of the world. 

3. Yoga and meditation are not at the cost of regular life activities. They are in addition and should aid one's life goals. 

I have been trying to reconcile skeptical responses to what was proposed and here are my thoughts : 

Any goal we set for our lives has to be rooted in some understanding of who we are. So far we know that one possibility is that we (life on earth) are a random chemical reaction in space and similar chemical reactions are likely to have occurred in other points in space. Humans in particular were successful by being social and by learning to communicate. 

So a person could continue to live by trying to make a good life for oneself. Social norms will make sure that you are not able to prey on others. In this lifestyle we rely on civility to curb our animal instincts. Civility is valued by humans only when the question of their survival is not dominant in their minds. So we try to establish a relatively safe and healthy society to the best of our ability. 

Now, lets say, one of us discovers a way to accelerate this process and increase our mental acuity. Wouldn't we try to learn this technique and enhance our lives as individuals and as a society. However if this method is not completely in line with the approach (rationality) that has made us a successful species, could we argue that its not worth pursuing? A rational approach would be to examine a theory that had been accepted by a part of the species (Yoga in India) at some point in the past and if it has merits, then employ those for betterment of individuals and the society. 

Remember, we are being civil and social to achieve individual happiness and pleasure. If this non-rational (although I think its very much rational in its approach only seems irrational in the conclusions it draws - and that too because the conclusions about human experiences are very personal and so cannot find a reliable group expression - its like the philosophical question about the experience of the color "red".) approach additionally promises that, by allowing us to see our complete nature (sub-conscious, conscious, physical and any others that might be) it can help us achieve happiness and pleasure for no cost, then why should we object to trying it. 

There is a valid fear that proponents and teachers of this theory could gain power over people and take undue advantage of the students. India is a living example of this phenomenon. Unfortunately there is not much we can do as a society to stop brain-washing - even a good educational system might not guarantee rational citizens.

For an individual the simple test is to not believe in a ritual just because someone is suggesting it. Experimenting is cheap and risk-free in the case its a breathing technique or an exercise. With these basic suggestions if one does not feel any improvements then there should not be any motivation to trust the proponent of the idea. 

Alai - Wave of Bliss

Intel inside IoT

Intel announces a Quark based Arduino board called Galileo. Forbes reports on Intel's IoT processor and the synthesizable core they are providing. EETimes has some more details about the fact that the Quark Core is AMBA compatible. The IP is not available in TSM technology right now. It comes with its Windriver OS and McAfee Security software stack. Another article talks about Intel's grander plan for an Intelligent Systems Framework. 

Higgs Boson

NYT carries an interesting article this week about the race amongst physicists to discover the Higgs boson. Great illustrations and good story. The whole race seems to be about finding the signs of Higgs Boson disintegration in all of the traces captured from millions of collisions - A massive data analysis operation. The details of the smart techniques to search for this are still beyond the grasp of the common man I guess :) 

Reading it I also realized that the so called elementary particles arent things I had read about or even known about.  This lecture by Dr. Sao Lan Wu explains the model further  

Standard model of Physics : 

Rachmaninoff - Vocalise performed by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg

She is playing this week at Cal

audio for gaming

I just learnt that in gaming more realistic audio is created when you convolve the impulse response of a room in which the user is with the sound from the game. This is called convolution reverb.

How do they capture the impulse response of a space ?  (from wiki above)

An impulse response is a recording of the reverberation that is caused by an acoustic space when an ideal impulse is played. However, an ideal impulse is a mathematical construct, and cannot exist in reality, as it would have to be infinitesimally narrow in time. Therefore, approximations have to be used: the sound of an electric spark, starter pistol shot or the bursting of a balloon, for instance. A recording of this approximated ideal impulse may be used directly as an impulse response. Techniques involving starter pistols and balloons are sometimes referred to as transient methods, and the response is contained at the beginning of the recording in an impulse.
Another technique, referred to as the sine sweep method, covers the entire audible frequency range, which can result in a broader-range, and higher-quality, impulse response. This involves the use of a longer sound to excite a space (typically a sine sweep), which is then put through a process of deconvolution to produce an impulse response. This approach has the advantage that such sounds are less susceptible to distortion; however, it requires more sophisticated processing to produce a usable impulse response.
A third approach involves using maximum-length sequences, but this is difficult in practice because such sequences are highly susceptible to distortion.
The impulse response of a system is equal to the inverse Fourier Transform of the cross-correlation of the output of the system with the auto-correlation of the input to the system. For example, to sample the acoustic properties of a larger space such as a small church or cathedral, the space can simply be excited using white noise, with the result recorded both near the source, and somewhere else in the space. The coefficients of a finite impulse response can then be generated using the mathematical approach mentioned above.

Web Intelligence and Data Analysis - Unit 1 (coursera)

Reverse Turing Test : Machines are trying to understand who is using it based on usage patterns. Example : Captcha trys to determine if its a human or a machine trying to login. 

WebScale AI : Face recognition, Google language conversion, IBM Watson playing jeopardy 

Big Data: Map Reduce paradigm to analyze data on the web when its not in the form of clean traditional databases. 

Kryder's Law : Talks about the Rate of data storage density outstripping the rate of Moore's Law. 

Web Intelligence is used for predicting : online advertizing, guaging consumer sentiment and predicting behavior, processing twitter words to spot trends 

source : https://class.coursera.org/bigdata-003/class/index

Jony Ive quote

"I think, very often, you can't call out by attribute or name areas of value," says Ive regarding what people look for when using a product. "But I do think that we sense when somebody has cared. And one thing that is incontrovertible is how much we've cared."

I think this is true (via bloomberg article on apple)

advaita is not subjective idealism

I am trusting the explanation here 

In advaita, objects really do exist. Ishvara is the material cause, as well as the efficient cause of the universe. The point is that the substratum of their existence is brahman alone. In the case of Berkeley, however, the objects only exist in the mind of God, as it were.

So where idealism claims that all matter is an idea in the mind of God, advaita says matter exists independent of observer but the basis of all this matter and the obeserver is all God. 

online reputation management

We have so many start-up companies out to make money by making life easier. Shopping, cab-service, resources for small business. The flip side is many of these create jobs for people who are savvy enough to be able to make their services available on these platforms.  

Kindle Direct Publishing ; Trulia  ; Unity - Video game Development ; etsy ; taskrabbit  ; Weebly ; uber ; Instacart  (Source : http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/the-data-factory/ minute 16 - 20 ) 

How do people manage their reputations across maybe 2-3 of these platforms providing them work ? Say I make money off of being taskRabbit and build a reputation how do I move my customers to taskBunny if I start advertising my services there. If one of these platforms go down because of their business model will you have to rebuild your reputation on a new platform all over again. There cant be a service for that. Are standards going to be developed to hold data about my reputation ?  This is simple if I can summarize this in a resume with 4-5 references, but what if I am a plumber whose reputation is a function of feedback from 1000 people over 5-6 years.

Double Indexation benefits.

I didn't know that Indian government was allowing inflation to factored in when computing the capital gains from Mutual fund gains. Why don't they allow this for Fixed deposits.

Example from livemint

Say, you invest Rs.1 lakh in a 14-month FMP today, in the month of February. Every year, the the government releases the cost inflation index figure of the current financial year. Assume that your indexed cost price goes up 8% next year and by another 8% the following year (2014-15; the financial year in which you will sell your scheme). In this case, your cost price gets inflated—at least on paper—to Rs.1.17 lakh. Since the cost price is more than the sale price (Rs.1.12 lakh), you end up paying no tax. 

via onemint and livemint

comfort zone and risk taking

I was reading some of the interviews in the "corner office" section of NYT - specially today's interview with the CEO of Cognizant. It got me wondering about why "being in one's comfort zone" is seen as a negative. But on the other hand rituals and "company culture" is seen as helpful. 

Looks like "being in one's comfort zone" automatically implies that one will not risk to venture out of this zone. The rituals and culture in this case would be so as to encourage risk-taking. Making people feel that its ok to risk and lose, as long as you come back up stronger and having learnt something useful. 

This kind of culture seems to value individuals who are restless for the next success. Putting this in terms of basic Hindu Philosophy of the "trigunas" - this culture is tuned to heighten the Rajas in individuals. The hunter-gatherer society worked out because the gatherers provided sustenance in times when the hunters were not successful in their high risk gambits - and glory was all the hunters. If everyone were to pursue glory the whole society would collapse. 

But we don't seem to have any doubt that as a society we will reward the highest risk takers. One possible reason is that, low risk behavior is what comes naturally and there is a need for strong incentive for high risk behavior.  So by constructing such culture we are trying to support rarer human instincts. 

juvenile Rapist ?

It pisses me off, no end that the rapist in the 2012 Brutal Delhi Rape case gets just 3 years in a juvenile prison. Come on !! This person, juvenile or not, is really not fit to be part of the society. And if the debate on death sentence is an unsettled one then atleast do not let him mix with the rest of the society. Is Jurisprudence devoid of basic common sense ? Is it designed to be that way ? 

Most of the people making a case for dealing with juveniles differently seem to be making a case for rehabilitation v/s punishment. Which in my opinion should apply for adults too. Why start with the assumption that a young person is more likely to benefit from rehab. I don't think this is about impaired "reasoning abilities or impulse control", always. Its premeditated and cold blooded in a lot of cases. 

Charles Stimson, Herittage foundation says : 

"An example spanning both classes was 16-year-old Sarah Johnson's plot to murder her parents and pin the crime on an intruder. Her case was transferred to adult court, and Johnson was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. 

A key to providing appropriate punishment across a wide range of cases is the transfer process. In some states, judges decide whether to grant the state's request to move a juvenile to adult court; in others, removal is automatic for certain specified crimes, usually murder. This is how we separate out those few crimes committed by juveniles deserving of adult trial and punishment."

nyt debate ; debate.org ; cliffsnotes on the argument 

When Lenders Are Not Paid Back - NYTimes.com

[via NYT] Eminent domain in Richmond and Bond returns in Detroit will make borrowing difficult for others across the country.

If the effort in Richmond succeeds, the 624 homeowners involved and more in other cities that use the eminent domain approach will benefit from lower payments (and the investors in Mortgage Resolution Partners will see a payoff), but potential home buyers nationwide will be examined with a more jaundiced eye from their lenders than is now the case. Indeed, the reaction of financial markets to the Chrysler bankruptcy suggests that favorable court rulings or other such tidings could lead to higher mortgage interest rates nationwide even before the final outcome is known on the legality of this use of eminent domain.

Just as other municipalities in Michigan are finding it more difficult to borrow in the wake of Detroit's proposal to change the historical understanding of its bond obligations, so too might American families face a steeper challenge as they look to become homeowners if lenders cannot count on homes' standing as collateral behind mortgage loans.

Wanted - A Boring Leader for the Fed - NYTimes.com

[via NYT] looks like obama is going the Other way drumming up the importance of the selection of the next chairman. But below analysis seems reasonable. 

Where the Fed must be held more accountable is for its oversight of banks. It is banks, not the government, that effectively create most of the money we use, by extending credit where it is most needed. As we've painfully learned, banks can over-lend and even set off an economic collapse.

Before the crisis the Fed seemingly lost all capacity for the painstaking, boots-on-the-ground supervision of the banks under its purview. And, effective or not, top-down monetary interventions remain attractive to the Fed's top brass. Running what amounts to a hedge fund on steroids is more glamorous and exciting than managing a regulatory bureaucracy. Perhaps the most important qualification for the next Fed leader is one all too rare in Washington: humility.

SumAll has pay openbook via NYT Corner Office

Dane Atkinson of SumAll, on Making Pay an Open Book - all employees know what anyone in the company makes. http://nyti.ms/17sa1ru

I am not sure it works well though - there is more that Dane might be doing to build trust - this is just one of those that makes good headlines

"When we first started with this, we'd send out the package details of every new hire to the entire team. That caused a lot of stress. So we've switched that and now just their peer group will know the new hire's compensation and be forced to a vote. " 

"We have a trial on-boarding process. Anyone we hire goes into a 45-day test period. But we have a really high bar, and only about 65 percent make it through. At the end we have a fresh, clean start and we decide if we want to get married." 

Happy Independence Day

I hadn't thought about how the last 3 lines contrast with the previous 2 in Tagore's poem : 

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

....
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I love(?) the melding of clear stream of reason being led by "my Father". 

It must've been a day of great hope in 1947 for a whole lot of people in India. Hopefully there are more such days in the future of the people of this nation !! 

Cryptography at Khan Academy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf9KjCKmDcU&feature=share&list=EC7AEDF86AABA1AA9A

Khan Academy - Cryptography playlist 

Fundamental theorem of arithmetic - Composite numbers have a unique prime factorization.  

Substitution  Cipher (example Caesar Cipher - actually used by Julius Caesar) Fixed shift of every letter - Broken based on the frequency of the Letters in the English language. 

Polyalphabetic Ciphers - Shift based on a password. 

One Time Pad - random shifts for every letter based on a key - The encrypted message has equal letter frequencies. So code cannot be broken just based on the Cipher Text. 

Bill Gates and Aamir Khan on India

Bill Gates and Aamir Khan on NDTV 

I was surprised that aamir held himself so well with Bill Gates. 

Gates : "If you think about whats one of the most tragic things in life. A lot of things come to mind. One of the things that comes to mind is a parent having to bury their child. Vaccines are important to fix this. Rich kids not at risk getting this and poor kids very much at risk not getting this - indicates innovation gone wrong". 

Aamir : "India budgets 1.4% of GDP for healthcare. Poor people probably pay more in indirect taxes as a proportion of their incomes. So they should consider it a right to hold the govt. accountable." 

Aamir " engage with life around you." 

The World as I see it - Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Who rules ?

Wisdom of the crowds is not through gamification. Gamification produces intelligence  of crowds and doesn't assume highly informed crowds. 

Governing decisions for large societies : 

Can't be by individuals who presume to know everything. 

Can't be by small groups of people with specialized information. 

Best bet seems to be through complex interlocked systems. Are we informed enough to traverse this system and empowered enough to appeal for changes in the system.  

How do we leave it all up to business-people , who by definition have a narrow focus on gains for the few ? 

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Reactions to change

Plantos miros - grows tall , offers dependable shade , flowers rarely , copes with changes fairly well but doesn't morph itself to adapt. 

Plantos morphos -   changes with age and environment showing visibly new features , more seeds and new branches.

Plantos stuntos - don't  show signs of maturity, flower regularly as long as things don't change around them, need support. 

If they had free will, and were rational would there be just one type ?

Morphos seems very successful , is it really ?

 Or is it just losing itself everytime it changes. Wouldn't you want to shelter the morphos in the shade of miros - if you were the gardener.  

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Union Line Cemetery

via goodreads

Union Line Cemetery

by Anthony Watkins 

In a graveyard in Mississippi
Lie the bones of a woman I loved
And those of a man I did not,
Though I am more like him than her.

Down a paved road off the federal highway 
Slicing diagonally from Mobile,
The road turns sharply as if
It was meant to dead end.

But as if someone moved the gates
The road bends goes on precisely south 
While the sun goes west away from the graves.

Marble benches wait through the undisturbed dust
For me to stop to pick sand spurs from my dress socks
And prick my fingers and remember I am alive.

While under clumps of low growing weeds,
Neat green grass and bare spots
These dead people rest in a Mississippi summer quiet, 
As they do in winter beneath a midnight ice storm.

Dead, yes, they are dead,
But I am alive and they are why I am so.
They keep us, our families, ourselves alive.

I wonder if in a few years when I am dead,
Ashes tossed in the Mississippi,
Will I hold anyone connected or only be dust,

Forever blown about where the delta turns to sea? 

Inbox has gone google again

We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more. All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done. Sometimes it feels like our inboxes are controlling us, rather than the other way around. 

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-new-inbox-that-puts-you-back-in.html?m=1

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Past : 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkJs47FjBKc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Present: 

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/04/30/pkg-kapur-india-drought.cnn.html?hpt=hp_c1#/video/bestoftv/2013/04/30/pkg-kapur-india-drought.cnn

http://blogs.reuters.com/the-human-impact/2013/05/02/indias-drought-a-natural-calamity-or-a-man-made-one/

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Poisoned places

Npr.org search poisoned places

Particles from exhaust get 10x toxicity when combined with heat and other chemicals on the environment. We don't test for that today. 

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

GoogleTalk - Gamification

GoogleTalk !! 

Gabe Zicherman - Gamification Revolution (Book) 

chatter

Wow why so much time motivating gamification. Most guys are sold on it. Anyways this isnt solid data. 

- Try googling "managing millenials" 

- Kids like Instgramming and messaging so much that they would rather not drive. (Research by an automobile company). WTF !! Really !! - These tools have kids on frequent Dopamine hits !! 

- You cant stop the millenials from this path of gaming that they are on. You HAVE TO JOIN THEM !! ( :( really - I always thought the rule was the latest trends are the most recently outdates ones. Maybe the  next generation will move the needle maybe a bit towards the genX) 

I don't think you need to say - Millenials are gamers and so engage them with a Gamification strategy. I actually believe anyone is better engaged with gamification. 

I am getting bored after 25 mins. Too many examples. Ok ok I understood it works. I am more interested in how to implement this (on myself or in a small group setting) 

concepts: 

- Dopamine Hit - Challenge - Achievement - Dopamine - Pleasure  - Games let us loop through this cycle again and again. 

- Fluid Intelligence - Figure our way out. V/s Regurgitating learnt information

- Techno-physio Evolution - Both Genotype and PhenoType evolutions affected by tehcnology. Example: Lifespan increases. 

- Society valuing interaction with machines more than interactions with other humans. Autistic individuals have a strength here. 

- "One ring to rule them all"

questions 

1. How to keep people engaged using gamification techniques. 

  NYT wrote about - in 2 years relationships change from romantic to companionship - Habituation. Habituation enemy of long term engagement. One technique is make rewards unpredictable.

2. Any problems where you wouldnt use gamification ?  Whats the mechanics of gamification ? 

 - No clean specification of mechanics. Use gamification to do gamification. Visit gamification.co 

 - Everything is defined-by/based-on engagement. So gamify everything !! 

3. Make simulations only as interesting as the real world.

4. What are some stumbling blocks in Enterprise gamification ? 

- Most places roll out things by fiat. - thats a big NO

5. Can gamification be used to reduce engagement in cases like addictions ? 

yes. Alcohol Anon. Gamification drives mastery (of control)

 

Covered California

Big Insurance providers opt to wait and watch. Providers signing up leave out high cost health case provider networks to make plans affordable. 

$300 average premium in california and 40% will be eligible for subsidy and only 16% of California expected to sign up for this. 

[link] No more exclusions based on prior conditions, the mandate to buy insurance even if you're healthy and subsidies to make insurance affordable for lower-income people.  Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee is planning a $236 million marketing campaign -- paid for by the federal government -- to recruit healthy, uninsured people to the exchange. Lee hopes to enroll 1.4 million Californians in 2014 and millions more in succeeding years.

[kqed] When setting an individual's premium, insurance plans in the exchange may look at only three factors: age, where you live and family size. Insurance companies may no longer use your health condition or your health history to set premiums. People may no longer be turned down for pre-existing conditions.

[kqed] fears abound that young people's premiums will skyrocket because the health law limits the difference in price between plans for the young and old.

Steve Jobs - Walter Issacson

Listening to this audio book. Why did Issacson choose this guy to write about. There is zero inspiration to be derived from his life and accomplishments. Smart guy who is rude and throws childlike tantrums - thats all that I got from the book. No subtle lessons to learn from his life - No taste of the impact  of any of his accomplishments - the life of bouazizi would've been so much more interesting. What a bloody waste !! 

Revolution 2.0

Revolution 2.0 

Wael Ghonim's book on the egyptian struggle is inspiring, insightful and fast. He has a good story to tell - his personal and that of his country's. Although there are sections where it seems as if he is not telling the whole truth. But what was interesting to me was that the demands that the protesters in Tahrir square were all problems that India is blighted by as well. Corruption, Poverty, unemployment. Maybe the level of police atrocities was too much in Egypt and the level of unemployment was  higher too. But the way I saw it - if these hadnt been at the levels that they were in Egypt the youth wouldn't have had the balls to come out in protest. Indian youth has no incentive to participate in something like this. Especially after what we see is the long term result of a leader-less revolution that has no constructive plan on the other side of the revolution. Living in a society does mean having strong institutions - if the existing institutions are all rotten it makes sense to tear them down. But then until new ones replace these you have no roof over your head. And then you have people ready to fall back into their old groves making the emergence of newer institutions even more difficult. I dont know if we have examples of societies that have been able to get rid of such major rot in the systems. Would be nice if someone funded studies and experiments on these things instead of investing in enabling farmville. 

 

Gangs of Wasseypur

what  super shitty movie "gangs of wasseypur". Maybe life is like this - but its hard to believe so Much shit happens with such speed. Its as if he took life filtered out any semblance of joy from it and then played the remaining at 5x the speed. No shades of gray in any character. Its all f*ing black. Its so tempting to take a break from the cloyingly sweet SRK and flying chiffons - but this is a bit too bitter a view. 

Cellular computing explained

via NPRs Morning edition  with a super easy to understand graphic

His switch, which he calls a "transcriptor," is a piece of DNA that he can flip on and off, using chemicals called enzymes. Endy put several of these DNA switches inside his bacteria. He could use the switches to build logic circuits that program each cell's behavior. For example, he could tell a cell to change color in the presence of both enzyme A and enzyme B. That's a simple program: IF enzyme A AND enzyme B [are present] THEN turn green. For an in-depth look, checkout Endy's explanation on youtube

Timothy Lu a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also building cellular computers. He can see lots of ways they could be used. For example, you could program cells to automatically scan your bowels for chemical signals of cancer and let you know if they find any.