this game is rigged

At lunch we were discussing how ass-backwards the sales approach has been this quarter. I said, with my usual animation, "When you are falling from a 100-story building, until 50th floor it feels like flying."

CrazyFinger.

William McDonough on cradle to cradle design | Video on TED.com

Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time."

William McDonough on cradle to cradle design | Video on TED.com

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Dean Ornish says your genes are not your fate | Video on TED.com

Dean Ornish shares new research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle habits can affect a person at a genetic level. For instance, he says, when you live healthier, eat better, exercise, and love more, your brain cells actually increase.

Dean Ornish says your genes are not your fate | Video on TED.com

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Bose in US Inventors Hall of Fame

Dr Bose, a former MIT professor of electrical engineering who has revolutionized the quality and concept of stereo loudspeakers, is only the second Indian American after Dr Rangaswamy Srinivasan, whose invention of ultraviolet surgical and dental procedures resulted in what is known today as LASIK surgery, to be inducted in the Hall of Fame.

According to MIT's biography of Dr Bose, who is both an alumnus and former professor of the institution, his passion for technology continued at MIT, where he earned Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering. He embarked after his BS on a personal crusade to invent a stereo loudspeaker that would reproduce, in a domestic setting, the vivid sound that a member of the audience hears at a great concert hall.

In 1956, he was asked to join the faculty at MIT, where he taught until 2001. His research at MIT led to the development of new, patented technologies.

In time he succeeded in achieving this goal inventing the direct/reflecting speaker system in 1968, one of the first stereo loudspeakers to utilize the space around them instead of reproducing sound as if in a vacuum. He has also worldwide fame with customized sound systems for automobiles and active noise reducing headphones.

The Hall of Fame has noted that under his leadership 100 per cent of profits of the company are reinvested back into the company, enabling advancements in non-audio areas.

In 2004, after 25 years of research, he introduced a revolutionary suspension system that combines superior comfort and control in the same vehicle.

Bose in US Inventors Hall of Fame

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rediff.com: A crorepati who lives in a hut!

He instead started a catering business of his own, inspired by his mother who once sold idlis on the pavements of Chennai, worked as an ayah in an Anganvadi to educate him and his siblings. As a child, he also sold idlis in the slum where he lived. "We talk about India shining and India growing, but we should ensure that people do not die of hunger. We can be a developed country but we should not leave the poor people behind. I am worried for them because I know what hunger is and I still remember the days I was hungry," says Sarathbabu.

In August 2006, Sarathbabu's entrepreneurial dream came true with Foodking. He had no personal ambition but wanted to buy a house and a car for his mother. He has bought a car but is yet to buy a house for his mother. The "foodking" still lives in the same hut in Madipakkam in Chennai. Today, Foodking has six units and 200 employees, and the turnover of the company is Rs.32 lakh a month. But it has not been a bed of roses for Sarathbabu. After struggling and making losses in the first year, he managed a turnaround in 2007.

rediff.com: A crorepati who lives in a hut!

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Ron Paul and Charlie Wilson’s War

In the polarized world of Wilson, there is only Good and Evil. At the time, Communist Russia was the Devil himself and had to be stopped at all costs…even if it meant sending weapons to bin Laden’s friends – the future Taliban. And while there was no explicit mention of bin Laden, there doesn’t need to be. Whether we armed bin Laden is irrelevant. The movie makes it clear that we allied ourselves with religious zealots, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who is now listed as a terrorist). Even if we didn’t directly fund or train him, did we not support his cause? Were these rebels not labeled "freedom fighters"?

A powerful illustration of this flip-flopping comes when some powerful Congressman goes to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan to chant, "God is Great" in Arabic. Imagine doing that today! And this is exactly what Ron Paul is decrying. He understands that the world is complex and changing, filled not with monoliths but nuance. He is too humble to profess to mete out perfect justice.

Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. He was a summer fellow at the Mises Institute in 2007.

School kid? writing like this? Terrific!

Genentech's Gamble

For a time, his maverick approach produced an impressive winning streak. Soon after he took over as CEO, he briefly amped up Genentech's research spending to 50% of the company's sales—more than twice what most drug companies spend on R&D. The resulting stream of hit drugs pushed Genentech's sales up from $1 billion to $9 billion since 1999, and the company swung from a $1 billion loss that year to profits of $2 billion in 2006. Genentech's market cap soared past $75 billion, surpassing the valuations of Amgen (AMGN), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), and Schering-Plough (SGP).

To prove it, Levinson is taking on one of the most treacherous areas of medicine. He's targeting diseases that arise when the immune system becomes deranged, attacking the very tissues and organs it's supposed to protect. These so-called auto­immune diseases include multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and more than 80 other ailments for which there are few effective or lasting treatments. Together, they afflict some 23.5 million Americans and are so disruptive for victims that they cost the U.S. health-care system $100 billion a year—nearly double the economic burden of cancer.

Levinson himself is still in the thick of scientific decision-making. When newly hired researchers defend their early-stage research in meetings, he often drops in to pepper them with questions. It's rare for pharmaceutical CEOs to get so deeply involved in research that isn't anywhere close to yielding marketable products, Scheller says. Adds Vishva Dixit, vice-president for discovery research, "He'll send us e-mails at 2 a.m. about some journal article, and he'll say: 'Have you read this paper? Look at figure 5, panel E.' He's the CEO, and he's sitting at night, pondering science. That's an awfully powerful message to the rank and file."

Buxfer

Buxfer allows you to login using an already existing account with a third-party service such as Google, Yahoo, and OpenID. During authentication, your password for the third-party account is NOT stored by Buxfer.

Shashank Pandit: http://gs4086.sp.cs.cmu.edu/~shashank/homepage/htmlfiles/index.php

Source trackback: http://paul.rutgers.edu/~ramittal/

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/people/directory.php?type=GraduateStudent

Yes. I was going through all the profiles of Rutgers CS students.

Design

WhiteSquid

My name is G. Navdeep Raj, I am 18. I live work, and study in Bangalore, India. I’m relatively young to be doing what I’m doing. But if it’s any consolation I’ve thought about nothing but Design the time I was 11.

I took what I loved most and I made it my profession. And I think that’s the best way to describe me as a person. I’m very proud of the success of White Squid. Especially the fact that I took the road less traveled and arrived a little later, but on my own pure and untainted terms. I’m doing it my way.

Apart from my duties, I enjoy photography, experimenting here and there with whatever style presents itself. I picked up a Nikon Coolpix 8700 in mid-2005 and hope to be get professional with it very soon.

Deziner Folio


Bloggers Choice Awards

How Keki Gharda stunned the MNC giants

I could read a 500-page book in a day, it is a peculiar form of rapid reading that I have evolved myself. I would glance through the page almost line by line and if it is a description of a house or a room, or the protagonist, I would skip through. In around eight hours I could tell you reasonably well the contents of a 500-page book.

In 1965, he started his company in a small rented shed with a drum as a table and a carboy for a chair. Over the next four decades Gharda Chemicals has repeatedly flummoxed multinationals like Sandoz, Bayer and Hoechst by making their products at a fraction of the cost through technological virtuosity.

In the process it has recorded many firsts in dyestuffs, pesticides, veterinary drugs and polymers which have fetched dozens of awards from the government and industry. In 2004 Gharda became not only the first Indian but also the first Asian to win the prestigious Chemical Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Chemists for his extraordinary achievements in the chemical industry.

He is now setting up his dream project, a top-notch technical college a few hours drive from Mumbai. Excerpts from an interview with MoneyLIFE editors Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu that was punctuated by many jokes, wisecracks and funny anecdotes from a young man of 77.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design - Ideas Worth Spreading

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. Over time, you'll see us add talks and performances from other events, and solicit submissions from you, as well. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

The TED Conference, held annually in Monterey, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and all the big global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn't work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

Microfluidic Device for the Capture and Concentration of Bacteria

Effective detection of bacterial pathogens in large sample volumes is a challenging problem. Pre-concentration routines currently in practice before the actual detection process are cumbersome and hard to automate. An effort is made to address the problem of volume discrepancy between day-to-day samples and the concentrated samples needed for analysis. Principles of conceptual design are used in formulating the ‘Need Statement’, ‘Function Structure’ and in identifying the ‘Critical Design Parameters’ and ‘Design Constraints’. Electrokinetic phenomena are used to exploit the surface charges on bacteria. Electrophoresis is used to transport the bacteria to electrode surface and “Electrostatic trapping” is then used to capture these microbes on the electrode surface. The captured microbes can then be concentrated in a concentrator unit.

A prototype microfluidic device is fabricated for showing the proof of concept. Optimization is done to minimize hydraulic power consumption and wetted volume. Observations from the initial prototype device along with the optimization results are used in building a new prototype device. Operation of this device is demonstrated by capture of bacteria from flow. Qualitative studies are conducted and preliminary quantification is also done.

Arvind Kejriwal - Parivartan: Right to Information

We have to simplify this process and in this the Bihar government has taken the lead. The state has set up a right to information telephone line where you don't need to draft your application -- the biggest problem in RTI is to submit your application.

While drafting the application you have to use the right language and your questions have to be very sharp, then you have to find an officer to whom you have to submit the information, which is a Herculean task, you have to make a Rs 10 demand draft, then you don't know in whose name the demand draft has to be made, it is not available on the Web site or in any notification. So filing the RTI information is a big job.

The Bihar government has taken the lead, it has hired a call centre. Any citizen of Bihar, from any part of Bihar can call that number, give his name, address and say I want this information from the Bihar government.

He doesn't need to know the name of the officer, he doesn't need to make a demand draft, his voice gets recorded on the other side and that becomes his application and the ten rupees he is supposed to deposit comes as his phone bill.

The call centre takes a printout of the application and forwards it to the concerned officer and if this person does not get information in 30 days' time, he can again call the call centre and say I am not satisfied with the information I've got or I did not get information in 30 days. Again the recorded voice becomes the appeal.

This is a great experiment that is being done by the Bihar government which needs to be replicated all over the country, especially when you have large sections of the population that is illiterate.

Delusions of skill and of grandeur

Industry pundits like Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, and other respected, successful people who have achieved fame and fortune dismissed Smalltalk in the 70s and 80s. Virtual machines? Garbage collection? Integrated development environments? Clearly, this had no place in business computing. You know why? Too slow. Too weird. And, actually, too innovative for their pea-brains to recognize the significance of. Respected industry pundits knew that serious business computing had to be done using serious systems programming languages like C, assembly language, or C++. Now no one would think of developing a business application that has to be rapidly brought to market in a language that wasn’t garbage-collected, and, if at all possible, dynamically typed. What was useless academic research is now common sense. Now Ruby, an interesting rehash of Smalltalk ideas into a form more palatable to people used to C-style syntax, is the shit for creating web applications and enterprise integration.

Arrington and the rest of the Web 2.0 echo chamber nitwits think they know what’s innovative and where things are going. They don’t and they never have. They have no appreciation of the fact that they owe their entire careers to the work of people in academic and industry labs. The TCP/IP stack and the Internet; GUIs, the WIMP interface, and pointing devices; IDEs; garbage collection; virtual machines; relational databases; dynamic typing (Michael Arrington doesn’t know what many of those things actually are, of course); all of this comes from people with PhDs at places like Berkeley, MIT, IBM, and Xerox. When they create it, it is useless and worthless. Twenty years later, navel-gazing pundits like Michael Arrington are confronted by the fact that they have become essential in creating computer software. It then becomes common sense and it’s perfectly OK to take credit for the things done in labs by forgotten names long ago.

Where is the praise for the real innovators like Alan Kay? Kay’s work with Smalltalk and human factors strongly influenced nearly everything we consider essential today. But Michael Arrington doesn’t care about Alan Kay or any of the other people responsible for the stuff that is now his livelihood. Does Alan Kay work at Google? Does he have a me-too startup with a faux-reflecty logo and an Ajax chat application in beta? No? Then forget him.

Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002

Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture

It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.

Let's talk about software patents. There's a guy, Mr. Gates, who's brilliant, right? He's brilliant. A brilliant business man; he has some insights, he is even a brilliant policy maker. Here's what he wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Here's the first thing I'm sure you've read of Bill Gates that you all 100 percent agree with. Gates is right. He is absolutely right. Then we shift into the genius business man: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Excluding future competitors.

Most people who study the poor ...

'Most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes'

How did you go around winning the confidence of the people there?

Most reporters and academics spend a few weeks or, if they are lucky, a few months, getting information and data. I spent over a decade. Many people who write about these communities are armchair critics full of false assumptions. They are not ready to get out of the hallowed halls of Ivy League institutions.

Some of them assumed that people in these depressed areas had no family values, no respect for law, and no higher aspirations. But I would soon come to question those assumptions. And because I went directly into the neglected communities with an open mind, I was able to discover many things.

My visits not only enabled people to gain confidence in me, but it also helped me to see many sides of my informants. I was able to see them grow over time. That I stayed around to watch them make mistakes and pick themselves up engendered their confidence in me -- most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Street Fight

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: city workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, power and -- in a surprising twist -- race. Both Booker and James are African-American Democrats, but when the mayor accuses the Ivy League educated Booker of not being "really black" it forces voters to examine both how we define race in this country. "We tell our children to get educated," one Newarker says, "and when they do, we call them white. What kind of a message does that send?"

From CoryBooker.com

Newark is a city of limitless strength and unbounded potential. It is a city of hope and promise. Newark is a city of accomplishment and a city of struggle. Newark's people, like the bricks from our Brick City nickname, are strong, resilient, enduring, and when we come together there is nothing we cannot create or achieve.

We are a people committed to strong, safe neighborhoods, to thriving schools and abundant economic opportunity. We are a city that rejoices and luxuriates in the arts and culture and have a history of setting the very rhythm for an entire nation. We are a city that boasts of great universities, houses of worship that span back decades and centuries, parks designed by America's greatest urban landscape designers and a transportation system that literally connects the globe.

Newark is a great American city. It is representative of America's success and her continuing efforts to make real the promise of this nation to everyone. Within Newark's borders lie many of America's greatest stories, some of her most courageous activists and some of her most sobering challenges. The future of our country will be defined here --by the children in our schools, the young men and women entering the workforce and by how our community meets the challenges before us. The future is now.

Street Fight tells a gripping story of the underbelly of democracy where elections are not about spin-doctors, media consultants, or photo ops. In Newark, we discover, elections are won and lost in the streets.