Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Advanced Google search tips

Check out the advanced Google search tips: the synonym and number range search might be useful.

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Manmohan Singh hot favorite for UN Secretary General

Akila claims that Manmohan Singh's name is high on the list of potential Kofi Annan's successors. The US, though, favors Tony Blair for the post.


Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Rubicon Consulting Spark

I went to a networking dinner called 'Spark' hosted by Rubicon Consulting at Zibibbo's in Palo Alto.

Here, I am with a bunch of Apple alumni and others. Apple is like the Bhagvad Gita. It has had everything you can think of - for about 20 years. Most of the people here are Marketing folks.

Michael Mace, ex-Palm Chief Competitive Officer: Web 2.0 is like the Steel mini-mills example of Clay Christensen.

Mace: Microsoft is obsessed with advertising. Can you bite its business?

Question: Is this mosquitoes vs dinosaurs or mammals vs dinosaurs?

Nilofer: Let developers build your ecosystem.

McKinsey: 93% of IT budgets are precommitted to maintenance.

Mace: Mobile is closed. Carriers control marketing. OS market is fragmented. Java app writers for phones spend 70% of time customizing apps for mobile.

Mace: Watch mobile carefully. Look for opportunities in Wi-Fi and other unregulated (non-carrier) markets. RIM worked on BellSouth's fringe network. Create pull. Watch mobile platforms. Linux on mobile is highly customized.

Mace: T-Mobile insisting on WiFi-cellular phones.

EV-DO is great and game-changing.

Nilofer: Different types of ads based on your role as a buyer, seller of beer etc.

Web 2.0: Peers, endorsements etc is the only thing that matters. 70% of ads on top and side are never viewed. Rankings, top contributions...

Interesting company: Notovo

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Monday, May 08, 2006

Palo Alto Library

I am always amazed by the type of gadgets the kids at Palo Alto Library have. Palo Alto kids have the newest iPods, sleekest laptops and coolest cell phones. Very geek chic, these kids...


Sunday, May 07, 2006

Europe's government-funded research

I saw yet another item about how European governments think science, technology (IST) and innovation are their ticket to a renaissance in the 21st century. The EU, through its framework programs, are funding private and academic research to the tune of a billion Euros a year, and there's more to be had for the asking in Germany, France, UK and everywhere else.

Good research does come out of this. I know of two such projects: CoBIs and PROMISE. Slashdot reports a cool EU project every other week or so. But there is pretty much no quick commercialization of this research. Venture capital in Europe is still struggling and the society still frowns upon failed entrepreneurs.

It will take 3-5 more years for Europe to figure this out, but if it does, in the next 10 years, European innovation will be front-page news on a daily basis and more than a few Google's will emerge.

US venture capitalists should be smart and look at the European government-funded research and nurture it - there's some good stuff going on there.

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Wikipedia, Open Source and X Prize: Different ways to do things

It's cool how Wikipedia has become such a great tool, how open source has become so important, and how the idea of the X Prize is being taken so very seriously by everyone including NASA. While Wikipedia and Open Source are similar, the X Prize concept is different but has been equally effective in terms of spurring and nurturing innovation.

The only commonality between the three is that there is no prior 'selection' of who will perform the task by a business or a government. Anyone can compete or participate.


Pramod Mahajan worth Rs. 2000 crore

Indian Express quotes Pravin Mahajan: Pramod Mahajan may have been worth Rs. 2000 crore.

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Crazy Freakonomics story: Why are star soccer players born in January, February or March?

Freakonomics
A Star Is Made
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

What might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn't know for certain if there is breast cancer or not. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years later, when no cancer develops. Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training. "Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for each case," he says. "Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice."

If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle of why so many elite soccer players are born early in the year.

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem — that will turn them into elites.

This may be bad news if you are a rabid soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month. But keep practicing: a child conceived on this Sunday in early May would probably be born by next February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family section.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

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Gravity-based movement game: very cool

(Via Digg), the gravity-based movement game. Read the info first.

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Ash Kotak's Hijra

Anshu and I went to watch Ash Kotak's Hijra at the New Conservatory Theater in San Francisco yesterday. It's an excellent play, very fast and snappy and more like a sit-com, as Anshu described it. Sukanya is acting in it. It'll be playing until May 21st, 4 times a week.

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