Thoughts

(TL)ea(cr)(hn)ing The title (TL)ea(cr)(hn)ing is by intention. Without rubbing much of our brain it spells out Teaching and Learning in a single line. Teaching and Learning are two sides of the same coin. Someone not so famous said, can I learn without teaching and can I teach without learning. Guess you learn even more as you teach and you teach only when you learn. Learn anytime, anywhere is the current trend with all those online courses being made available. Initially it was just the digitization of mortar courses and not it is using multimedia to stream the concept. People say that we have moved from a stance where it was bookish and limited to a few to a more open leaning system which is available to almost anyone and most of the times “free”. I still believe in a Guru shishya kind of a setup, where a student served the guru and in return may be he was imparted knowledge. The amount of effort that a student put in, in some sense di...

When we wanted to name our son, we did a Cntrl C Cntrl V (Cut-Paste) from our names and made up a name and thought that we had come out with a brilliant idea. The Cut-Paste worked well for us to get to a name that was (a) very simple, (b) easy to spell, with just five alphabets. No surname just the name. By the way we did get his passport also with just his name! SU nilna MIT a It is another thing that it was not very visible that our names was hidden in our son's name so we had to tell people we knew specifically how we had named our son. While some said we were lazy, some others took a cue and tried to name their new born the same way. So there were some compliments and there were some jeer. When we told our son about the way he was named, he insisted that he was not sure he liked his name!  However as far as I was concerned. I was under this illusion that we had done a great job by thinking of a CntrlC-CntrlV name. This was some twelve years ago. My twel...

Let us face it; all of us as undergraduates have faced the dilemma of what project I should choose as my final year Engineering project. Recently I was asked this question by a respected faculty of an Engineering College in Mumbai. "Can you please speak to our final year students on how they should go about choosing their final year projects?" I was not too sure if I knew myself what was a way, leave alone the best way, to choose a project. As I gathered my thoughts, the first thing I figured out is that it was not a synchronous process which could be put as a sequence of slides. Here are my (not so comprehensive) thoughts in a picture :-)    Am sure there is a bias towards the work that I do, however this picture (created as a MindMap using freeplay on Ubuntu and exported as jpg) should enable a final year engineering student ask the right questions to converge onto a project (s)he would love to do. Good Luck.

"Can you invest in L&T Emerging Business Fund? It is a NFO and the last date is tomorrow" asked me. I thought it should be a zippy thing to login to my trading portal and click a couple of buttons and it should happen. And I had not bothered to acknowledge the existence of telephone trading. I found that I was wrong; we are not yet done away with the mighty telephone. Read on ... I login to my trading account portal. After a little navigation I find that there is no option for an NFO under the L&T AMC. I do the next best thing .. start a chat. The chat is slow but finally I conclude that the only way this order can be placed is through telephone. I ask for a number and he chat "append your local area code and dial 3*5*3*6*". Is there a 1800 number I chat back? "No sir this is the only number". I dial 3*5*3*6*, choose "1" for English option, the first thing it asks me type in a TPIN which I do not have (thought I would only use the ...

Datasets Def: A dataset is a collection of data or a dataset consists of all of the information that needs analysis, generally the data is gathered during a survey.   You have great idea. You want to conduct some experiments. You collect your own data, test your idea and report results. Most often the data collected locally is small (to suit your experimentation). You submit your results and then there is a comment from a reviewer saying that  (a) your experiments have not been tested on a large public datasets and (b) you need to compare your results with existing literature. You can address (b) by implementing the existing algorithms and then running these algorithms on your small dataset. Obviously more work (need to implement an already known algorithm!) without much returns. Use of publicly available datasets is a a good idea. It addresses both (a) and (b)! You get to test you idea and experiment on a large public dataset You can compare your results with ...

Scene : Checked into a 5* in Mumbai, India. Want to try out the WiFi. A screen pops-up and asks for room number as the userid and surname as the Password. I try and get, "Invalid room number and Password Combination". My inference (illlogical) the hotel chaps must have goofed up my surname. I know my room number, I know my Surname! My Action  Me: Dial 0 Reception: How can I help you? ... Me: Looks like there is a cross talk Reception: No Sir, there is another girl laughing outside. Me: OK. The WiFi login page ..... Reception: I will connect you to the IT department ... Me: Hold ....... IT: Sir, you had a problem with WiFi .. can I help you. Me: Guess my surname has been spelled wrong ... IT: No Sir.. Please try to login .. Me: Surname ... IT: Please try sir, I am looking at the logs ... (creepy!) I will hold on Me Trying: 636, IT:Sir, you entered your surname wrong. Me:What? I know my surname! IT: You missed the second p the second time, Sir. Me:...

Exam Papers   [2013] International Math Olympiad also called IMO is conducted by SOF . Generally they have a first level qualifier; which allows students to write the second level IMO. This second level Previous Question Papers for VIII (Question Papers) standard might be useful.  [2013] International Science Olympiad also called NSO is  conducted by SOF . Generally they have a first level qualifier; which allows students to write the second level IMO. This second level Previous Question Papers for VIII (Question Papers) standard might be useful.