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.