Lets help each other!

Hi friends,

How are you doing? Hope you all are in the best of your health and spirits. The reason for this post is that I solicit your help in a small project I am working on. Please read on for details.

We sure spent/spend quite a number of hours in planning for a long weekend trip or any other trip. In most cases, we would call friends in or around the city where we plan to visit and get their inputs about the things we are interested in. With this information, we make an itinerary, find hotels, book cars/air-tickets, get maps etc and we are on our way.

If we don't have a friend, we would search on net for hours to come up with a good itinerary, but we still have a concern about how it would turn out. Obviously, it takes more energy and time to plan using Internet, not to mention the lower confidence in itinerary.

We faced the hassle quite a few times and came up with the idea of making a simple webapp which can help us out. Basically what it does is build on the knowledge of people who have already been to these places and give you real advice you can use. Eg. I have put in few of the places you can visit around San Diego as he knows it best. So if any of you want to visit San Diego, you can use the information put in by me to make your decisions.

Right now the application is pretty simple but we are aiming to make it more sophisticated so that when you ask - "Hey! I got two days vacation and want to visit San Diego and I am interested in beach activities, could you tell me what places I should be visiting" and you get a nice itinerary with attractions to visit, approximate time it takes to cover each attraction and suggestions on where you could stay etc. We would like to share our experiences of our trips so that we can help our friends in planning their trips. In this regard we solicit your inputs on the trips you must have been to, you planned to or any other information you could provide us.

To make it easier for you to enter the details, please use the following site:

http://svn-rknowsys.no-ip.info:28333/

Please help us in:
1. Gathering information/interesting tour details you must have had. Please provide as much details as possible.
2. Gathering feedback on the information collection forms/method used.
3. Any other improvements and any suggestions on what could be of value to you in planning your next trip.

All you have to do is go to the web-site and fill in the details of places you know best. For Eg. KC lives in Hyderabad and can fill in information about Charminar, Golconda, other historical places (and there are many) in and around Hyderabad.

We appreciate your help in advance. Please contact either

Suresh(mrdsureshkumar@gmail.com) or

KC(kcramakrishna@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

Please pass on to other friends who you think might be able to help us.

Thanks
Suresh

Presentation Skills!

Wow.. thats a really huge topic to think about.
I am in a class that teaches about the power point (are you wondering a class on PPT? yes, it is a class about it. If you dont know people make money giving lectures about PPT, word, outlook etc. and you always wondered if it was difficult to quit your job and do something else! huh!). Ok! PPT is for presentation. And this lady here is freaking me out. Half the time she laughs for no reason. I should term it as guffaw. And every once in a while she guffaws and says I have been teaching this class for probably15 years.
If someone is teaching this for 15 years, I expect that they know a good deal about the PPT and more so, I would expect they have better presentation skills. Lets leave this lady aside. It is no fun postmorteming her.
But this beckons a question. What are good presentation skills? What are the things you should keep in mind while preparing a presentation? How should you have your animation in a presentation? How do you keep your audience captivated? How important are these fancy stuff available in ppt?
(oh! btw, she laughed again : ) )
What are the differences between a report and a presentation? Both provide information, but what are extra points to take care of while preparing a presentation?

What has names got to do with how you perform in future?

intriguing question:
1. Does your name reflect anything on your performance in school or in future?

This is the same question that Levitt asked in Freakonomics. Apparently you would think not. But there is an interesting reasoning behind why the names do affect how you would fair. No parent would knowingly name their kids like Temptress, Winner, Loser etc. I am not making up names, these are real names. So, if someone did name their kids like this, then they are either illiterate, they dont know the meaning or they thought it is cool to name like that. And who would think it is cool? The parents who name their kids like this are bound to be bad parents. Hence, it will show up while bringing up the kids. Seems like parents who named their kids like that are either black, single-parent, low-income, illiterate. That should tell you something about it. Of course you can read more about it in Freakonomics.

Now here is my question:
How does the names affect in India? Which name is the most successful name in India? What is the most popular name in India?

IPC !

IPC = Indian Penal Code.
I have a friend whom I havent met personally yet, but I did hold good conversations with.
So once I ventured into discussion about IPC.

1. Seems like there are 511 sections in it. The moment I saw 511, the only thing I could remember is it is the largest number you can represent with 9-bits. Few DSPs have maximum loopcount of 511 because they could only afford 9-bits for its representation. Anyway, this should say that I am a true electrical engineer.
2. IPR laws are still in nascent in India and there seems to be a growing interest in it.
3. Section 302 is what we hear the most in movies. yes, you guessed it, the capital punishment. For some reason I thought it was removed, or amended. Seems like they do sentence people to death. Side line question: what authority does the judge or the system possess to kill someone? oh btw, here is an interesting trivia: each time a judge sentences someone to death, they break the nib of the pen with which they write the sentence. you know why? it is supposed to symbolize that they shouldnt get anymore of such cases where they need to sentence death penalty. I wonder what they would do if they start writing with ballpoint pens. I believe they would just throw the pen away :)
4. Two kind of laws: civil and criminal, broadly.

Questions for the week!

1. What is the difference between economics and finances?
2. How does economics influence the social behaviour?

"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to
work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work." interesting. i wd say economics actually explain how things work as they do.

3. what has falling prices of coffins got to do anything with economics?
4. what is an incentive?
An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a
bad thing.
There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is
an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying
to beat it.

Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million
American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly.
It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule.
Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a
Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children—children who
had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished,
representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
(Really? I need to explore more on this. Can such thing happen?)

5. Why is Vonage not picking up? Why is Time-Warner pushing for digital-telephony?

APR vs APY

Ever wondered what the difference between APR and APY is? And why credit cards always quote APR and banks always quote APY? What difference does it make if we quote APR or APY? From a lenders point of view we always like to get a bigger number, thats why we get APY quoted from a savings/checking account. From a borrowers point of view, we like to get lower numbers. Thats why you get APR quoted.

Here is something from a website: studentplatinum

Basically, APR = Period Rate x Periods per Year
APY = (1 + Period Rate) ^Periods Per Year - 1

so when a credit card quotes a 12% APR, you actually end up paying 12.68% by the end of APY.
And when bank says it has a CD with APY 12.68% all you are getting at the end of one month is 1% of what you put in.

here is another good article from investopedia

So next time you got two different options, make sure you compare apples to apples and get the numbers to correct units. (isn't it a basic engineering principle ??)

qns to be answered!

1. what is the main purpose behind this research? more important to me, who funded it? ;)

To me it seems like they are conducting some experiments on humpback whales. but can anyone write in the comments more about it if you know anything..

2. What does cognition mean?
While reading the above article I came across this word called cognition. Though I have a hunch about what cognition is, I wanted to find out what exactly the defintion of cognition is. here is what i found:

American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary :
The mental faculty of knowing, which includes perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, judging, reasoning, and imagining.

American Heritage Dictionary
The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

As always of course, there is a hell lot of information on wikipedia. The root of the word seems to be Latin: cognoscere, "to know". The same root gives rise to words like recognition. now, this recognition is re-knowing. This essentially means that we must have encountered that entity whichever we are "recognizing" earlier. I wonder then what that process of storing a new entity called. Can anyone tell what that word is? I believe registering is one thing. But there ought to be a better word.

3. When do we start recognizing the things around us?
I didnt do much research on this topic. But this is just a random question, when do we start recognizing things around us. Moreover, when do we start cognition process? another philosophical question is, when do we recognize ourselves? for eg., if a kid looks himself into the mirror, does he realize it is himself, or does he think it is someone else? when does he start recognizing that it is himself?

4. what is the rationale behind airline code shares?
huh! this topic came up when Aditya (San Diego) and I were discussing about miles and connecting flights. What are code shares, how does airlines benefit from code shares? As is my belief, for every such reasons, there got to be a economy related reason. So i ventured out to find out why this is so. guess what, wiki has an article on it. From airlines perspective it does make sense to have code sharing. Earlier only small airliners used to do that since major airlines must have thought that it is not necessary. this might be because they were already flying to many places. Even though code sharing is good for airlines and most of the times for a traveller, it might not be the best all the times for traveller. Here is an article on why it might be so.