“We are facing a huge deficit in people to not only handle big data, but more importantly to have the knowledge and skills to generate value from data — dealing with the non-stop tsunami. How do you aggregate and filter data, how do you present the data, how do you analyze them to gain insights, how do you use the insights to aid decision-making, and then how do you integrate this from an industry point of view into your business process? The whole thing is hugely important for the future.”

Good questions. But education alone may not be answer. How about moving some of the data(base) experts and content analysis experts into this field?

The problem in solely focusing on teaching this stuff is that students do not have enough context about industry needs. While educational institutions teach theory, there is very little industry alignment or effort to understand industry needs. This problem cannot be solved in isolation. It has to be part of a bigger picture and spending a year or so in doing a variety of projects helping the industry.

Great thoughts by Scott Chacon on Handy Tools for Optimizing Your Team.

I don’t think it applies just to developers. This may be the assumptions with which we want to welcome any new member into a team, community or organization. We can assume that they have these qualities unless proven wrong.

Meta:

I have a confession to make. This is not how I always looked at people. It took me a long time to figure out even some of the basic ideas of how to work with people.

knowledge of emerging trends in scholarly communications and library and information technologies.

Qualifications:
MLS degree (or recognized equivalent) from an ALA-accredited program;
demonstrated large-scale project management expertise;
demonstrated experience with XML, applying metadata standards and schema, and controlled vocabularies;
demonstrated expertise with one or more metadata manipulation and scripting languages (e.g. XSLT, Perl, Python);
demonstrated applied web application development experience, including familiarity with development frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Django), and application programming language(s) such as Java, PHP, or others;
familiarity with semantic and linked data standards such as RDF and OWL;

Text/Data manipulation, scripting and meta data – are these  the new skills needed in science, engineering and knowledge work?

Here are some thoughts.

1. You need an entrepreneurial spirit. These are people who are willing to risk their careers on building some thing to solve a pressing problem. They should be willing to give up short term gains to pursue their dreams.
2. You need a culture that reacts to failure well. This will take time to build.
3. It will help to have a few successful entrepreneurs who did well. That is happening very slowly. It will also help to have people who have done well in their careers and are willing to try something new.
4. It needs a community. Communities are starting in Chennai – TiE Chennai Startup SIG, Nasscom Emerge, Chennai Open Coffee Club, Chennai Geeks and several other tech groups.
5. It requires great educational institutions. I don’t think we have enough.
6. Our Universities have to turn into research engines. There are a handful of institutions that do this a bit. Not enough, though.
7. We need to have proximity to great people who have built products. That is beginning to happen.
8. We need a spirit of collaboration. That is beginning to happen too.
9. We need capital infrastructure. This includes angel investors, venture capitalists, financial institutions and other supporting services. What we have now is nowhere near what we need.
10. We have the first generation of incubators.  They provide space and infrastructure but not what entrepreneurs really need – guidance in building a business from customer validation to business development. There are a few experiments happening and hopefully their success will inspire others.
11. A knowledge of the market would help. It is beginning to happen thanks to the Web.
12. We need lots and lots of conversations on both successes and failures. This is beginning to happen.
13. We need the spirit of bootstrapping. Out of necessity (due to the lack of funding sources), this is probably going to be the default model of building a business.
14. We have good experience in building service companies. How can we leverage this to move into products?
15. We have to find something unique and stuff that matters. This is much harder to come up with but not impossible.

There are encouraging signs. More and more product companies are showing up at the annual Nasscom product conclave every year. Incubators have a chance to play the role of catalysts. I think there is an opportunity here to find some unique problems and solve them.

What are your thoughts?

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

I have difficulty in accepting this view. Not sure why, for I cannot argue against this possibility. Infiintely Stupidity? is a video worth watching. This half an hour journey is guaranteed to stimulate you and make you think.

• Darwin’s Natural Selection
• Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
• The discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions
• Emergence
• Pavlovian conditioning
• Two brain systems
• Chance shaping Personality
• People become what they do
• Group polarization

Link to the article

Meta: After some Googling, I found 2012 : “What is your favorite deep, Elegant or Beautiful Explanation” 

These 189 responses are going to take a while to digest

The strange history of “Think Python”
(Allen B. Downey)
In January 1999 I was preparing to teach an introductory programming class in Java. I had
taught it three times and I was getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high
and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of achievement was too low.
One of the problems I saw was the books. They were too big, with too much unnecessary
detail about Java, and not enough high-level guidance about how to program. And they all
suffered from the trap door effect: they would start out easy, proceed gradually, and then
somewhere around Chapter 5 the bottom would fall out. The students would get too much
new material, too fast, and I would spend the rest of the semester picking up the pieces.
Two weeks before the first day of classes, I decided to write my own book. My goals were:
• Keep it short. It is better for students to read 10 pages than not read 50 pages.
• Be careful with vocabulary. I tried to minimize the jargon and define each term at
first use.
• Build gradually. To avoid trap doors, I took the most difficult topics and split them
into a series of small steps.
• Focus on programming, not the programming language. I included the minimum
useful subset of Java and left out the rest.
I needed a title, so on a whim I chose How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

Focus on programming, not the programming language. That is it. That may be the magic formula. But I would add a couple more. Start with some really interesting, engaging problems. It is more difficult than it looks. I like how Moran starts out teaching Java in his Stanford Course.  ”Interesting and Engaging” can be different for different people.

For me, it is a tug of war between insulting the intelligence of my students (by being too basic and boring the good ones) and being too obscure to start with.

1. A shared (social?) bookmark – something I want to remember with some context
2. A fleeting thought – something I want to capture but mull over later
3. An opinion – an opinion fragment, really. It may be mine or something that I resonate with
4. A question – I may not even state it as a question but sometimes it is really a question
5. A quote – I don’t always put it in quotes but the link provides a context
6. An idea – Something I want to throw out there and see what people think
7. A signal – Mostly to myself but it is kind of public
8. A note – Lots of times it is just a note (with no opinion or endorsement attached)
9. Reflection – You know what I mean
10. Just a way of thinking aloud – Think along with me, it says (sometimes).

What is it to you?

We started with – What, Why and How of Innovation and discussed Ideas and Innovation. We covered a variety of topics on why students should do startups, how to do innovation in colleges, how students can make money and a few other orthogonal topics.

• What is innovation? – Implementation of an idea and creating value
• How do you start innovation – Not taking things for granted, starting with some ideas and building upon them
• Ideas – There are no good or bad ideas. All ideas are good starting points.
• Why Innovate – The urge to improve, to meet market challenges, for self-development
• Where do ideas come from – Fulfilling needs, meeting challenges, solving problems, incrementally improvements
• Why do a (student)  startup? – to understand entrepreneurship by practicing it, for independence, for fun

We finally ended up with the topic on how students can make money. Here are some ideas from students themselves:

1.  Teaching other (younger, high school students)
2. Doing projects for seniors (this was something I did not expect at all)
3. Creating niche online magazines (example given was a car magazine)
4. Selling customized T-shirts
5. Managing Events
6. On line data entry
7. Writing documentation
8. Note taking (for students by students)
9. Blogging
10. Helping companies work on promotional activities (marketing help)
11. Amazon Mechanical Turk (my addition)

-

1. obspy.core 0.6.0o  - a Python framework for seismological observatories.
2. opencl-for-python 0.4.0  Open CL Python bindings
3. Clyther 0.3-beta  OpenCL Python integration
4. selenium 2.16.0  Python bindings for Selenium
5. bliss 0.1.17  A native Python implementation of the OGF SAGA standard (GFD.90).
6. fandjango 4.0.1 Fandjango makes it stupidly easy to create Facebook applications with Django.
7. pyramid_skins 1.0 Templating framework for Pyramid.
8. stoqdrivers 0.9.14 Python fiscal printer (ECF) drivers
9. FilterPype 0.3.1 FilterPype is a process-flow pipes-and-filters Python framework.
10. Flask-DebugToolbar 0.6 A port of the Django debug toolbar to Flask
11. Astropysics 0.1.dev-r1142 Astrophysics libraries for Python
12. PyTeVCat 1.1.2 Python wrapper for TeVCat
13. OpenSRS 0.1.1 Higher level Python interface to the OpenSRS XML API
14. django-coverage 1.2.2 Django Test Coverage App.
15. django-user-metrics 0.1 capture metrics for each user
16. joblib 0.6.0a Lightweight pipelining: using Python functions as pipeline jobs.
17. django-maintenancemode 0.9.3.1 Django-maintenancemode allows you to temporary shutdown your site for maintenance work
18. django-configglue 0.6.1 Django commands for managing configglue generated settings
19. pyperry 1.2.8 Python library for querying and mapping data through generic interfaces (this is a port of the Ruby “perry” library)
20. python-sld 1.0.6 A simple python library that enables dynamic SLD creation and manipulation.
21. django-sld 1.0.4 A simple django library that generates SLD documents from geographic models.
22. django-threaded-messages 0.1.26 User-to-user threaded messaging system (similar to facebook) for Django
23. django-wysiwyg-forms 0.1.0 A What You See Is What You Get form editor for Django.
24. sleekxmpp 1.0 SleekXMPP is an elegant Python library for XMPP (aka Jabber, Google Talk, etc).
25. django-debug-toolbar 0.9.1 A configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response.
26. django-envelope 0.4.1 A contact form app for Django
27. crawler 0.1.2 python crawler.Do you want to receive these alerts in your email? Let us know by sending a message.
    

1. Silk ported from Kindle Fire to rooted Android devices, other web browsers now jealous
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Guess what? I found two packages for creating piples and filters today through my Infostream alerts  -  FilterPype  and Joblib.

Pypes and Filters is a framework for working with data. The purpose of Pypes and Filters is to make it easy to manipulate streams of data by “filtering” the data through Filters that in turn form a Pipeline, or Pype.

Here are some features from the Introduction page.

FilterPype is being used for multi-level data analysis, but could be applied to many other areas where it is difficult to split up a system into small independent parts.

Some of its features:

• Advanced algorithms broken down into simple data filter coroutines
• Pipelines constructed from filters in the new FilterPype mini-language
• Domain experts assemble pipelines with no Python knowledge required
• Sub-pipelines and filters linked by automatic pipeline construction
• All standard operations available: branching, joining and looping
• Recursive coroutine pipes allowing calculation of e.g. factorials
• Using it is like writing a synchronous multi-threaded program

Joblib is a set of tools to provide lightweight pipelining in Python. In particular, joblib offers:

• transparent disk-caching of the output values and lazy re-evaluation (memoize pattern)
• easy simple parallel computing
• logging and tracing of the execution

Planning to give both a try. Have you used any of these?

Strategic technology consulting will be an innovative service offering that gains traction in 2012. As more and more organizations start grappling with cloud computing models, technology scatter, virtualization, managing remote workers and branch offices, etc., the necessity for a company to come in and assess the current network environment and make recommendations for technological improvements that can provide significant business advantages will become apparent. – Heinan Landa, Optimal 

My addition:

It is not just physical networks but both internal and external social networks layered on top of that. Making sense of technology scatter can certainly help many organizations.

1. To check email when I am not at my desk
2. To check time and date (I don’t wear a watch)
3. To turn off sound while going into meetings and taking naps
4. To take pictures and share it with family/friends instantly
5. To tweet and read tweets when I am on the road
6. To make quick notes or jot ideas (using Ever Note)
7. To check the calendar
8. To play a few games
9. Occasionally to get a sense of direction (with a compass app)
10.  Occasionally to find directions (using Google maps)
11. Once in a while make meek attempts to manage my time using Pomodoro task application
12. Even less frequently to fill my Got To Do list which I never look at  till it is too late
13. Very rarely as a flashlight (using the flashlight app)
14. To entertain little kids with applications like Paint Joy. They always want games that I don’t have.

There are lots of other peripheral uses but they don’t count as much. As it is in books and bookmarks and other web related activities, my ambitions for doing things far outweigh my actual use. So there are a bunch of apps that I downloaded but never used.

What about you?

So I decided to get a bit smarter and simply Google “things to do in Chennai” (not sure why I did not think of it earlier).

Here is a partial list

Things to Do in Chennai (Madras) – Chennai (Madras) Attractions – TripAdvisor – 34 things

Things to do in Chennai (Madras) – Lonely Planet  - 89 things

30 Things To do in Chennai... well, 30 things

A comprehensive (unnumbered) list from Wiki Travel – too lazy to count

100 things to do in Chennai (but only 8 entries so far) on Facebook

I was happy to see that Google brought my own well intention-ed but purely executed Facebook page (the last entry in the list) on the first page of the results.

I know there are several overlaps and some day I may merge all these and clean it up. Till then…

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

What happens when you can change books? I can definitely see advantages. For example, books on programming  can incrementally change. They can cover new  language features, tools, and add examples to explain new features.

So if you can change books to keep pace with the changes in underlying subjects:

• Do they need version numbers for books?
• Will there be MVP versions of the book that are free and a finished version that can be paid for?
• Will there be a notification service to let you know of changes?

http://webbeep.it/audio/Wish+Every+One+a+Happy+New+Year.mp3

I created this from a little fun service  from Danny Ayers.

There are two things cool about this service. One is the ability to send your web beep as a URL. Another is that for the first time I have seen a request for comments on G+.

A professional programmer ought to be able to pick worthwhile problems to attack. Engineering is the art of building cost-effective solutions to problems that society regards as significant. A person who blindly does what he or she is told, without independently figuring out the context and significance of the problem, is not doing engineering. A professional programmer needs to be able to sit at a meeting with decision makers, prepared with substantial domain knowledge, and make significant contributions to the discussion. A professional programmer needs to be skilled at clean-sheet-of-paper designs.

Some are small (about a para) and some of them are kind of long. Just quickly browse through them and figure out which ones you want to dig a little deeper into.

Social Media

Blogging

How Do You Promote Your Blogs?

From the welcome address:

echovme is  knowledge partner for M.O.P Vaishnav College.  I ike that term “knowledge partner”. It is much broader than a digital marketer or social media consultant. Glad to see that they are partnering with educational institutions.
They announced the launch of Social Media Youth Association (smya). I love this quote about the goals of SMYA.

Enlarging the minds of youth…

A noble cause and that will have a large impact.

Snippets from Sorav’s talk

• Pioneering social media in education (I think this is big. There is a great opportunity to innovate).
• Social media is the future of business communication (This is true and was amplified by Mahesh Murthy in his talk)
• Social media is in its infancy (Echoes of this theme were heard throughout the day. This means that there are lots of opportunities to innovate)
• Social media is not just Facebook and Twitter (I am glad that Sorav mentioned this. This will be the theme of my un-conference session)

The first panel was about “Social Media in Business Eco-system” and I hastily jotted down a few gems.

• We have just seen the tip of the iceberg with social media
• Three broad reasons people get involved in Social Media – colleagues have it, competitors are in it, our customers are on it
• Social media can be used for customer service, attention and retention (Pay attention to Attention and Google it if you can, especially “attention economy”)
• Differences between promises and delivery easily show up on social media. So promise less and deliver more.
• Social Media Feedback is a product validation tool (it is also one of the best ways to discover product champions)
• Emotions are the same whether it is B2B or B2C (I love this part. Social media is perceived to be mostly for B2C)
• It is better to look at Social media from a different view – high involvement vs low involvement products rather than B2B or B2C (I agree).
• About ROI – it is difficult to measure but you need metrics to identify the success of your social media program
• Why is ROI difficult to measure? Social media is both tactical and strategic. There are patterns like “research online, purchase offline” that makes it difficult to pin down the ripple effects of social media
• A question from the audience and a very relevant one was “what about social media for small companies?” I hope we can find some answers during the rest of the conference.

Mahesh’s talk was brilliant, one of the best talks I heard in a while. His topic was “20 rules of marketing”. He first took on the 4Ps of marketing and discussed them in the context of today’s global economy.

• Products exist on shelves and brands exist in people’s minds
• Pricing is dynamic. Variable pricing beats fixed pricing any day (so, feel free to experiment with pricing)
• Placement – Everywhere beats fixed place
• Everything (to buy) is just a browser away today
• What is common between Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Ferrari? They don’t advertise.
• Can you build it so that the product becomes the advertisement? This is true of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
• It is time to let go of 4Ps (marketing teachers need to relearn marketing!)
• Marketing IQ is inversely proportional to the marketing budget
• Digital is not a niche. It is mainstream (Mahesh showed the stats of readership/viewership and engagement in several media. There is a lot of scope for discussion about these slides.)
• Digital (marketing) is now the 800lb gorilla.
• Social(marketing) is growing at an average of 250% CAGR
• We trust digital much more than TV advertisements (Ah! The trust factor)
• Is your story worth repeating? (Mahesh used the term “remarkworthy” several times. I will take a leaf from Kathy Sierra and ask – are your customer stories  worth repeating?)
• CCD (Cafe Coffee Day) is all digital (marketing). For a business that depends mostly on walk ins it is amazing
• Talk about your space and not just about your product. (People go to CCD page on Facebook to learn about coffee and not about CCD itself)
• Create an editorial that is remarkworthy
• EdgeRank is more important than Like Count. (this was confirmed in the Facebook session on the second day)
• Don’t tie yourself into non agile systems (willing to explore, experiment, change and see what is working)
• Google alerts is not a tracking system. It will give you one in 200 mentions (we knew this for a while and that is why we invented Infostreams – a little shameless plug).

If the first few sessions were any indication, this conference is going to rock. Great job by echovme team.

Meta:

I was rushing off to the conference and in the previous version had several embarrassing typos. Fixed most of them, I think.