What a shame. It had a great tour for everyone, where one saw the famed” Toyota Way(Link to Wikipedia)” at work including anyone stopping the assembly and a continuous line of trucks of South California every 30 minutes or so which included parts to be used in the next few hours, the JIT(Just In Time) assembly.

It had a right from Matrix kind of Robot section with machines welding and working on Car & Truck bodies at an amazing speed.

Here is a video from a very similar robot:

More information:

• Web Tour webpage from 2007 From Archive.org
• Edmunds.com story on the plant

Here is an image which shows places in Santa Barbara

And here is an interactive Flash widget for Peru.

One of the researcher behind this is Mor Naaman

Try India and San Francisco, see if you can find Yoga in the Presidio or find out why Machu Pichcu does not show up in Peru.

Summary & Notes:
1.Delaying gratification results in achievement. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

2.To create self-control, move it or yourself away from it.

What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

3. It is both, nature and nurture.

“you might not practice delay as much and you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. Then you won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.”

My (Amit’s) own belief is, genes give some a head start.

4. It can be controlled.

Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes.

5. The real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice.

“This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training”

My (Amit’s) own favorite, keep a wishlist for them.

Need to get started again….

A lot local to where we live(d) and a bit too much in the past.

He wrote an article which is eye opening. Po Bronson’s The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids in New York Magazine. It is a 5 page article, so I summarized it here.

Short summary:

-85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. But a growing body of research strongly suggests, giving kids the label of “smart” might actually be causing nonperformance.

-Takeaway from the study on praise versus effort. “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
-Parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

-To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. Sincerity of praise is also crucial.

-Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

-When students transition into junior high, some who’d done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they’ve been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery—increasing effort—they view as just further proof of their failure.
-But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response (a chemical reaction you develop), governed by a circuit in the brain. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward, telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success] on the horizon.-The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

—————————————
What to do\Actions (Some from article, some mine at the end):

-Develop the mind-set that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder.

-Social Praiser: What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didn’t want Luke to feel left out.

-Specific-type praise: This was easier said than done.Every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates, but he’s easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, “You played great.” And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied. Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

-Reasons for parents being the real praise junkies: 

• Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated.

• We put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments and hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me.

• Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are here for you, we believe in you.

-Cultivate habits and awareness of effort and it’s rewards. Also, focus on improvements due to effort.

-Ensure they at times are beyond their comfort zone, experience failure and work to success from there. The movie, “Meet the Robinsons” has a good example of handling failure.
-When someone praises your child, instead of saying Thanks! (it was hard work! ), deflect it a bit, saying “Thanks for your words”.
-Work together, one parent cannot do it by himself\herself and work for the Child’s growth, not our own emotional needs.

————————————–

One example study from the many in article:

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles.

The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”.

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

You might also want to read my earlier summary of Secrets of greatness: Practice and Hard work bring success: Articles on becoming Great. The key: Time, Smart Hard work & Visualization

She explains part of TARP US bank plan and the decisions in front of US in general, overall she is candid, intelligent and yet appropriately funny.
Here is part 2 of the interview from hulu.com, you will have to tolerate an advertisement before the interview.

PS: Yes, that means the break from blogging is over. Maybe I can delete the earlier post and no one will notice!

He who seeks truth shall find beauty

He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification

He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow being will find the joy of self expression

He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature

Through nature and the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek truth
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

-From TED Talk by Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?

Bio & Links to his buildings in the talk

Comfort of feeling safe with a person

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out,

just as they are — chaff and grain together — certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,

keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

-George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

Wisdom and Enlightenment

Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self requires strength.

-Tao Te Ching, Translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

New Paradigms for Full Engagement

Old Paradigm                         New Paradigm
Manage time                            Manage energy
Avoid stress                             Seek stress
Life is a marathon                    Life is a series of sprints
Downtime is wasted time       Downtime is productive time
Rewards fuel performance       Purpose fuels performance
Self-discipline rules                 Rituals rules

-The book, The Power of Full Engagement, page 6.

Photo of Golden Temple, Amritsar India courtesy voobie on Flickr.

The links are to Wikipedia Design Pattern pages which I liked over the Portland pattern repository for overview:

• Factory pattern: Any method which creates an objects, initializes it and returns it. socket.getInputStream(), Executors.newFixedThreadPool(), Collections.singleton(), etc

• Iterator pattern: Used to traverse collections. Collection.getIterator()

• Decorator pattern: Use to wrap\convert Streams adding functionality to them. Not Adapter pattern due to added functionality. Wrap a FileInputStream into a Reader and use .readLine() to read lines.

• Chain-of-responsibility pattern: The streams as above, the Streams chained handle the request and pass it after operating on it. Criteria, an alternative to HQL in Hibernate.

• Strategy pattern: Concrete strategies to implement family of algorithms which are interchangeable. All collections are strategies, accessible using a common interface, depending what what is stored, Map interface can be HashMap, TreeMap, LinkedHashMap

• Template method pattern: Define the skeleton of an algorithm in an operation, deferring some steps to subclasses. java.util.AbstractCollection expects iterator, size, add and provides addAll, clear, contains, containsAll, isEmpty, remove, etc.

• Singleton pattern: Java Security Manager, System.getSecurityManager(); Socket accept and other permissions

• Prototype pattern: Has a Cloneable marker interface, which indicates to Object.clone() that it is legal\safe to make a field copy. Should not be done for open files, self-allocated memory, ….

• Observer pattern: Built in support in JDK including Observer interface & Observable classes.

There are many more such as Thread pool pattern, Inversion of control which forms the basis of Spring framework and so on.

I would like to see the following ones this year.

These ideas were triggered from my own search fora proposal and have some link to my own background of a Web services backend engineer on Linux.

On Grid Programming

• Real life MapReduce examples using Apache Hadoop with Java & Streaming API

This would cover pseudo and real code for actual real life examples for Map Reduce, going beyond what is there at the end of the Google Map Reduce white paper. These would be projects powered by Apache Hadoop.

• Tour of Facebook\Apache Thrift

This would cover different aspects including serialization across same language, data transfer using their transport API & across different languages

• HDFS setup and access from Java\Rails

This would be for those considering using it as a DFS without Map Reduce. Leo touched on the topic in the blog entry, Rearchitecting Twitter

General Programming

• Java web frameworks and how they fit in together?

Unlike say Rails, Java has a wide array of web frameworks, see Wikipedia’s list in Java enterprise platform category. It might make sense to highlight a few like Raible did earlier, Comparing JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts 2, Tapestry and Wicket, however showing different ones as used in the Terracota Exam App.

• Python libraries and packages you were not aware of

The title says it all.

• Becoming a better Python Programmer

Something beyond the coding standards and idioms in the PEPs.

Desktop & Tools

• Linux desktop applications you might not know about
  

Again the title says it all, for example, for me, this would cover Amarok for playing music files, TakeNote or Tuxcards for outline note taking, Freemind for mind mapping and more, this would begin where the Linux Journal Readers‘ Choice Awards 2008 end.

• Top Open Source Personal productivity tools

The title says it all

• Best Open Source Developer Tools

This is a tricky one and would require multiple programmers to come up with a complete list, a Kernel programmer would be happy using vi\emacs, while a Java one would use Eclipse or Netbeans and so on.

If you are interested in presenting these, do consider making a proposal at the OSCON 2009 Call for Participation. The last date is Feb 3rd 2009.

Presenters get a free pass to the regular conference.

Number of Job openings as per Craigslist:

• Java: 352
• C++: 113
• Python: 114
• PHP: 371
• Rails: 48
• C#: 88
• Perl: 180

Observations:

The above comparision has some bias including the fact that Perl & Python are regarded as Scripting language and only in some case get a job on their own, unlike say Rails or Java.

Right now Craigslist is the best Job search website for Tech Jobs in the bay area

Average Salaries from Indeed.com:

Observations:

Rails & PHP average salaries are about 5% lower than all others and they drop further if paired with Developer instead of Engineer.

I picked Mountain View, CA which has a fair share of different companies and the radius will pick up San Jose, Redwood city, etc.

Nation-wide Salary Trends from Indeed.com:

Observations:

The top four programming languages are PHP, Java, Perl & Rails. Caveat, Due to the fact that indeed.com searches other job sites, the duplicate posting rate might be high, however it would apply to all postings.

For a different view on the same topic, see my earlier blog post, Top Programming Languages as derived from book sales and TIOBE Programming Community index.

Here is my version, bold are done and underlined are worth a try in the future.

1. Started your own blog

2. Slept under the stars

3. Played in a band

4. Visited Hawaii

5. Watched a meteor shower

6. Given more than you can afford to charity

7. Been to Disneyland

8. Climbed a mountain

9. Held a praying mantis

10. Sang a solo

11. Bungee jumped

12. Visited Paris

13. Watched a lightning storm

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch

15. Adopted a child

16. Had food poisoning

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty

18. Grown your own vegetables

19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France

20. Slept on an overnight train

21. Had a pillow fight

22. Hitch hiked

23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill

24. Built a snow fort

25. Held a lamb

26. Gone skinny dipping

27. Run a Marathon

28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice

29. Seen a total eclipse

30. Watched a sunrise or sunset

31. Hit a home run

32. Been on a cruise

33. Seen Niagara Falls in person

34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors

35. Seen an Amish community

36. Taught yourself a new language

37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person

39. Gone rock climbing

40. Seen Michelangelo’s David

41. Sung karaoke

42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt

43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant

44. Visited Africa

45. Walked on a beach by moonlight

46. Been transported in an ambulance

47. Had your portrait painted

48. Gone deep sea fishing

49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling

52. Kissed in the rain

53. Played in the mud

54. Gone to a drive-in theater

55. Been in a movie

56. Visited the Great Wall of China

57. Started a business

58. Taken a martial arts class

59. Visited Russia

60. Served at a soup kitchen

61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies

62. Gone whale watching

63. Got flowers for no reason

64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma

65. Gone sky diving

66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp

67. Bounced a check

68. Flown in a helicopter

69. Saved a favorite childhood toy

70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial

71. Eaten caviar

72. Pieced a quilt

73. Stood in Times Square

74. Toured the Everglades

75. Been fired or laid off from a job

76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London

77. Broken a bone

78. Been on a speeding motorcycle

79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person

80. Published a book

81. Visited the Vatican

82. Bought a brand new car

83. Walked in Jerusalem

84. Had your picture in the newspaper

85. Read the entire Bible

86. Visited the White House

87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating

88. Had chickenpox

89. Saved someone’s life

90. Sat on a jury

91. Met someone famous

92. Joined a book club

93. Lost a loved one

94. Had a baby

95. Seen the Alamo in person

96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake

97. Been involved in a law suit

98. Owned a mobile phone

99. Been stung by a bee

100. Read an entire book in one day

Summary:

Done: 27/100 =27%

To be done: 26/100 = 26%

0% of the 6719 people who have taken this quiz are like you.

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I’m a Self-Improving Spiritual Romantic

I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out.

I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle.

I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life — where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management — with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not.

The complete letter at Daily Brief blog at portfolio.com.

The summary of the book, it asks the reader to keep things simple and divide all incoming money into three categories, the Expenses into Must Haves & Wants. The remaining is Savings.

Must Haves are those expenses, you would not stop even if you did not have a job for an year or two, like Basic food, House, Fuel, etc. Rest are all Wants such as TV, Restaurants, etc.
Over long periods, particularly years, keep the above in following percentages:

Must Haves 50%, Wants 30% & Savings 20%

Within a few days of this, we had tracked our expenses and broadly knew more about our expenditure then we ever did.

The book has suggestions on how to bring the Pie back in balance. Beyond that it covers many other areas such as house purchase, etc.

More information:

Two of the book’s chapter are available from the official All your worth website: The Truth about Money and Financial CPR

It’s All Your Money blog has a detailed review of the book: Balanced Money Formula. He has shared a spreadsheet in the review that allows tracking money and follows the balanced money formula from All your worth.
The Simple Dollar blog also has a detailed review of the book: Review: All Your Worth

For you:
Finally, this book might not be the right Personal Finance book for you, depending on your spending habits, earnings, age, savings, etc.

Simple Dollar blog has an article with some suggestions in This Is the Right Personal Finance Book for You!

As part of discovering a way to do expense management and budgeting, I tried multiple software and online web sites for US residents including Microsoft Money, Quicken Online, Yodlee moneycenter & mint.com. I did not try geezeo.com, wesabi.com or Quicken.

mint.com is shaping up to be quite feature complete website and it has the killer\distinguishing feature which makes expense tracking practical and possible. Automatic expense categorization.

Enter an account, say your credit card. It will download the data and categorize the expenses and give you a chart like below with the details.

In comparison, I had to manually categorize all the expenses in Microsoft Money and just gave up when I realized how much work that was. Yodlee moneycenter has the categorization features and other advanced ones such as investment, however mint.com is better designed, for example yodlee logs me out in 2-3 minutes and hence mint.com is more usable.

Features I found useful at mint.com

• Automatic expense categorization (Knows Safeway is groceries). One can override or fix expense categorization
• Custom categories under any parent, this very useful feature was added recently.
• Simple way of setting and tracking budgets
• Can download and work with all our accounts such as bank, credit card and credit union.
• Is secure and you can cancel it with a single button and everything detail stored is gone.
• Very nice pie chart for expenses within fixed periods
• Search functionality for transactions including search by category or vendor
• Can be useful within an hour or less.
• Investment support including tracking performance of each time or portfolio, compare against indices
• Net worth summary page

There are many more that might appeal to others.

Features missing at mint.com

• Expense chart needs work, the pie chart does not remember last search range and resets back to all months. Need more charts including showing increase in categories.
• Graphs for networth growth, this itself will get many of the financial bloggers such as www.1stmillionat33.com using mint.
• No retirement planning

If you live in the US, I would suggest trying it out, it is a major step in saving money.

Start by watching the Mint Demo. Then put a credit card and watch the trends for a week or four.