2,170 karma · joined June 12, 2009
After living outside India for 12 years since my undergraduate period, I didn't think I would adjust well after moving back, but I did (despite the power-cuts, etc.). Leisure truly is the greatest luxury you can have, provided your basic needs (which include a decent internet connection) are met.
I currently am in a cushy job that doesn't excite me, and intend to move back again, this time hopefully for good.
I'm from Kerala - things may be slightly better here than say Bihar but not by a whole lot.
The Indian public deserves an equal or greater share of the blame. Government is the people's responsibility in a democracy. If governance sucks, the citizens are not doing their job.
That may be true. But I still think that candid, unapologetic appraisals of what's wrong with developing countries may be just what the doctor ordered for things to change.
I myself am an Indian and while I'm yet to see someone covered in his or her own feces in India, I'd agree with the general sentiment of that article: it's an honest, heart-felt piece. I'd like to change the state of affairs in my country, but the task is so f*cking huge that you don't know where to start or even whether you can do anything at all. If perhaps more Indians start feeling that things are NOT acceptable here, maybe we might see the beginnings of change, just like how it was with India's own independence struggle.
1. The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Paul Zeitz.
2. How to Solve It by George Polya.
I'd also recommend learning any of the competition Mathematics topics like number theory, combinatorics or geometry as base material to improve your problem solving skills. I have also found the Schaum's series on Combinatorics and Graph Theory concise and useful.
As a developer, you never know what kind of applications people need or are looking to create, but you get ideas from the projects that are posted. Most projects I'm interested in are clones with a "twist". For example, there was a request to clone zocdoc, but with a twist. There was project for rental items management software that I worked on. Another that combined invoicing and job scheduling for people such as plumbers and landscapers. Currently I'm working on a clone of elance but for a different industry. I would have known NONE of this if I weren't freelancing.
With Microsoft (for their Vancouver office, 2007) - the interviews were pretty technical, but not severely challenging. I was unhappy with my job at the time, had prepared very well over a period of months for coding-type problems, and was "in shape". The toughest question they asked was, 1) how to serialize a binary tree, 2) how would you compress the representation given that the tree was not full. They were immediately impressed when I asked then whether they intended me to write the deserialization code as well - the thought had apparently never struck the other interviewees. They asked me to code it up, and I did.
With Google (Bangalore, 2011) - I was way out of shape for this, having not programmed in a while. The phone interview required me to write two programs, one of which was to check whether a sudoku puzzle configuration was in the solved state, and the other to generate all subsets of a given set that had a particular cardinality. I managed to code the programs relatively easily. I was selected for the onsite interview, where they asked me mainly questions on dynamic programming. There was also a question on counting frequencies of letters in a massive corpus of text, and on how I'd implement a certain feature displayed in the search results that Google returns. The outcome: they didn't say outright that I failed the interview, but that there has been some change on their side, blah blah and would I be willing to wait for some more time? Obviously I had not done well enough to clear the bar.
Overall I got the impression that Google's version was more centered on competitive programming-type problems than Microsoft's, which was more software engineering-centric. MS definitely much easier than Google.
I was wondering if you guys could make Mathematics more problem solving centric (see www.artofproblemsolving.com for an example approach. Also "The Art and Craft of Problem Solving" by Paul Zeitz and George Polya's "How to solve it")
Most of the Mathematics in school curriculum is just plug n' chug work at a slightly higher level. Students do not get any insights into how really good problem solvers solve tough problems. Mathematics competitions such as the regional and international olympiads give students an exposure to such type of problem solving, but this experience is limited to a narrow pool of students who through pure serendipity discovered how intellectually rewarding problem solving can be. Perhaps if training materials were more widely available, more students would be able to get a glimpse of Mathematical problem solving at a totally different level.
In a previous life, I used to tutor O-level and A-level students in Mathematics in Singapore. The transformation some of them had when exposed to say principles in Polya's "How to solve it" was phenomenal. All too often I wished I had access to more easily accessible training materials that I could give them (and that I myself could learn from!). I'm sure there are plenty of teachers in my position all over the world.
1. The "physical" aspect of mental reading - mentally sounding out the words that are in front of me. This is quite fast already and is pretty mechanical.
2. Converting the words into meaning and registering it in my mind. This is the much harder task, and you actively need to focus to do this.
To see that these two are indeed parallel processes, notice that it's possible to "read" something in your mind without any of it actually registering while you think of something else, say a narrative about just how awesome your life would be if X or Y were true. I often have to actively break the internal narrative and pull myself back to focusing on what's read.
The focusing part is the real bottleneck, not the mechanical reading part. This is painfully obvious especially when you are trying to learn information-dense material such as Mathematics, where you have to pause to recall definitions, follow argumentation, and so on.
Currently what's frustrating is that we subject everyone to the same level of training. Those whose interest lie elsewhere are subjected to unnecessary and meaningless torture, while those who are really interested in Mathematics as a subject are left to their own devices to find additional training (which thankfully is easier these days than when I was a kid, though it could be made substantially easier still).
<QUOTE> My versions are faithful to the content of the originals, but are plainer and more straightforward in manner. I could have made them even plainer, but that would have taken them further than I wanted to go from the stylistic feel of the originals. I love the original texts, and am glad to have spent years wrestling with them in their pristine form. I do wish, though, that through the years I could also have read them sometimes with all my energy going into the philosophy. </QUOTE>
To the OP, two overviews of Western Philosophy (of the analytic variety) I'd suggest are Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy" (http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html) and Nagel's "What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy".
> Summarizing the article: "Genius is just hard work? Prove it, you have 10 years to produce genius level work. Any takers?"
two examples that leap to mind are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r#Background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography
Two examples famous in India are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Tendulkar#Early_years_an...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand#Personal_life
I don't like it very much either, because in real life I have to pay the price for the stereotyping. However, stereotyping is a perfectly normal thing for humans to do, and I strongly recommend that we DO NOT make people feel guilty for it, especially in cases where it'd be quite warranted. This doesn't mean that we are all free to stereotype - it just means that we should not expect extremely unnatural behavior from others.
Indians I'm sure don't have any qualms exploiting any positive stereotypes associated with us. I suggest we own the negative stereotypes as well.
It's... not that easy.
Most people would agree that parents have a duty to take care of their children. India has a value system where children are expected to reciprocate when they grow up. Parents sacrifice a great deal for their children in India, and I'm not just speaking of financial aspects (though that can be substantial). In most families, the children, their education and their future success are the "grand projects" that the families' day to day lives revolve around. Even as a human unconditioned by any cultural idiosyncrasies, I think you do have a responsibility to treat them kindly.
However, this doesn't mean that you have to blindly adopt their notions of success. In my case, I had to negotiate with them to redefine their ideas of a meaningful, fulfilling life so that I could be free.
The parallel was not between the specific route and methodology used, but the eventual outcome: the religious extremists must come to be viewed with the same revulsion with which the Nazis are viewed today. My point was that this can happen only through a massive propaganda campaign generously supported from outside.
IMO, what we really need is a MASSIVE propaganda effort to isolate Islamist ideologues within Pakistan. Not sure how this will happen, but the parallel I have in mind is the downfall of Nazism in Germany. If NATO along sympathetic states like India pool their resources together, I think it should be possible to buy out/instigate/support any number of revolutionaries within Pakistan who will effectively portray the Islamists as the cancer of not just Pakistan, but of mankind itself.
Instances of 'inborn intelligence' never cease to amaze me. How in the world do the larvae know in which order to eat the organs?!
If you have an instinct that is pretty low-level (say, pulling your hands away from a hot object), you could argue that your biology has been selected by evolution to respond in a particular way to that stimulus. I can also understand adults exhibiting a higher-level of intelligence - they could have learned it from their community or from direct experience. But tabula rasa minds exhibiting complex intelligence is just mind boggling.
“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
IMO, this quote demonstrates a phenomenon I've long suspected to hold with the books that I read. The essence of a book's or an article's content is captured by a few key ideas and phrases (e.g., 'gestalt of knowledge', 'wraith of memory' in this case), but merely knowing these phrases is not enough. You need to read the entire book to have a sensation of the ideas getting fleshed out. The article on 'metrosexuals', the pamphlet on "the third estate", and the book on 'positioning' are other examples I can think of where this phenomenon plays out.
A rich 3-dimensional idea in the author's mind gets transformed into words. The words themselves are just information. You then fight with the words to reconstruct the idea with all its original potency in your mind. It is not necessary for you to recall every little detail of it unless you are an academic or specialist in the field.
But I thought it conveyed its content in an interesting way. Articles such as these IMO convey more than just objective information. You imbibe a subjective component as well from such things as the language, analogies and quotations used. There's a difference between saying,
"Fundamentals are really, really important."
and quoting someone accomplished in his field as saying,
"Faithfulness to the fundamentals is something that becomes second nature to a professional."
The latter conveys a certain mindset, an attitude that the former doesn't, and this has real value.
Quote:
"But it is hard to tease out what Norman and Suzanne Priebatsch — a biotech entrepreneur and a financial adviser at SmithBarney, respectively — bequeathed ..."
His parents, who were successful in their fields, took the effort to groom him from childhood. Nurture is definitely at least as important as nature in this case, IMO.
1. For historical reasons, men got a head-start in the software sector.
2. Software sector came to be seen as a male-dominated field.
3. Both the recruiters and candidates adjust their behavior based on the "knowledge" that software-jobs are more suited for men than women.
I think such accidental clustering happens in many other fields. For e.g., here is a situation where men are the victims: http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html
Man, have we some issues to work through!