RSK -> Forwards

Raw Bananas

2016-09-10T11:51:00.001+05:30

Marigold

2016-09-10T11:50:00.000+05:30

Way to Right Well

2016-09-10T11:48:00.004+05:30

Sound Advice

2016-09-10T11:45:00.003+05:30

Wumo Cartoons or Life 2015

2015-07-21T19:57:00.000+05:30

Wulff and Morgenthaler share these images on Wumo (formerly known as Wulffmorgenthaler). If you think you may have

seen their work before, it should come as no surprise – they are a fairly successful cartoon duo. Their rise to success

started in 2001, when they entered and won a cartoon competition. When they won, they received a one-month run of

their comic strip in Politiken, a national Danish newspaper. Their popularity soared with the new exposure, and they

soon found more and more publishers, including several blogs and newspapers throughout Scandinavia and Germany.

Their most recent accomplishment was becoming a regular cartoon strip in the New York Times.

as aww

awwAWW EX ZANE EX SW

What Does Your Coffee Habit Says About You ?

2015-07-21T12:15:00.003+05:30

Bernard Marr

Best-Selling Author, Keynote Speaker and Leading Business and Data Expert

What Your Coffee Habit Says About You

July 20, 2015 •

Do you just drink a cup of whatever’s brewing in the break room, or do you have to stop at the hippest, fanciest corner coffee shop for a carefully timed pour-over for your morning brew?

According to science, what you order up for your coffee break says a lot about your personality.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula conducted anobservational study of 1,000 coffee drinkers, which he reported in his book, You Are WHY You Eat, and I’ve “interpreted” his results in regards to common workplace personalities.

Black, brewed coffee: The middle manager

If you order your coffee black — and just plain coffee, thanks, none of this frou-frou stuff — you’re likely to be no-nonsense and straightforward. Obviously, they like to keep things simple. They can also sometimes be moody and set in their ways. They tend to be good with money and have professional jobs. According to the study, being abrupt and dismissive were also common traits — which is why that plain cup of Joe puts me in mind of an old-school middle manager.

Latte: The office yes! man

People who drink lattes tended to be people pleasers, and more neurotic than their black coffee counterparts. They’re always happy to go out of their way to please others, but don’t necessarily take very good care of themselves. They can be indecisive, and actually like having other people tell them what to do. They are good at remaining calm and supportive in the workplace.

Cappuccino: The art director

Like the drink itself, cappuccino people tend to be bubbly and lighthearted. They are warm, affectionate, and creative. They also tend to be passionate about their work, honest, and motivated. And while they make excellent friends, they tend to run with their own crowd, associating with other imaginative, creative people.

Mocha: The office flirt

You know the one: the guy or gal who is always falling in or out of love. They tend to be affectionate and compassionate, but also unreliable and have difficulty with commitment. They’re the ones always found in the break room or by the water cooler, looking for someone with whom to swap stories of their latest romantic endeavors — and they are chronic flirts.

Decaf with Soy Milk: The picky executive

These people tend to be high-maintenance. Only his executive assistant knows exactly how he likes his drinks (decaf double shot soy, extra hot with extra foam), and everyone must expend a lot of effort to please him. They can be picky to a fault and uncomfortable trying new things or thinking outside the established box. They come across as self-righteous and self-centered, and are at least as dreaded by their coworkers as their beleaguered baristas.

Frappuccino: The receptionist

People who order Frappuccinos and other sweet, flavored concoctions tend to be very fashionable and friendly. They are outgoing, adventurous, and courageous. They tend to be extroverted and love people — the perfect person to man the front desk. However, they can also sometimes need a reality check and can be reckless.

Of course, you could be a CEO with a sweet spot for Frappuccinos just as easily as you could be a creative art director who loves plain black coffee. As the study’s author said, “We are no more defined by our coffee orders than we are by our astrological signs.”

Finding Vivian Maiyer

2015-05-28T21:58:00.002+05:30

"Finding Vivian Maiyer" is about life of a eccentric but most

prolific and accomplished photographer of 40s and 50s.

During her lifetime she never published anything or even

thought of doing so.

It was by sheer chance that a regular bidder in auction

houses bought a bunch of negatives. It took him sometime to

realize the value of the treasure.......

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7JjVNfPfoM

MySnap : Floating?

2015-04-11T10:04:00.002+05:30

Employers are looking for ......

2015-04-11T10:03:00.003+05:30

( From the Economist, about USA)

....... Employers are not much interested in the education universities provide either. Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management interviewed 120 recruiters from American law firms, management consultancies and investment banks. Their principal filter was the applicant’s university. Unless he had attended one of the top institutions, he was not even considered. “Evaluators relied so intensely on ‘school’ as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms…but because of the perceived rigour of the admissions process,” Ms Rivera wrote. After the status of the institution, recruiters looked not at students’ grades but at their extracurricular activities, preferring the team sports—lacrosse, field-hockey and rowing—favoured by well-off white men. ..............

Pak general: No chances of India-Pakistan war

2015-04-06T15:39:00.002+05:30

'We have worked to create road blocks in the path of those who thought that there was space for conventional war despite Pakistan's nuclear weapons.'

'Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme is not open-ended and aligned with India only.'

'In this unstable regional environment, one nuclear power is trying to teach lessons to another nuclear power through the medium of small arms and mortar shells on the Line of Control, and bluster.'

'A historic opportunity of a lifetime beckons the leaderships of India and Pakistan to grasp, sit together and explore the possibilities of conflict resolution.'

Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com reports from Washington, DC on the way the Pakistan army views the Indian threat.

Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai(retd), who headed Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division for over 15 years and is adviser to the country's National Command, said his country has blocked the avenues for serious military operations by India by introducing a variety of tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal.

General Kidwai, one of Pakistan's most decorated generals, argued that tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan's arsenal made nuclear war with India less likely, adding, "I am fond of calling them weapons of peace -- the option of war is foreclosed."

The general was speaking at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington, DC.

"For 15 years, I and my colleagues in the SPD worked for deterrence to be strengthened in South Asia comprehensively so as to prevent war, to deter aggression, and thereby for peace, howsoever uneasy, to prevail," General Kidwai added.

"We have," General Kidwai said, "worked to create road blocks in the path of those who thought that there was space for conventional war despite nuclear weapons of Pakistan."

"By introducing a variety of tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan's inventory, and in the strategic stability debate," he reiterated, "we have blocked the avenues for serious military operations by the other side."

"The naivete of finding space for limited conventional war despite the proven nuclear capabilities of both sides went so far as to translate the thinking into an offensive doctrine -- the Cold Start Doctrine -- equivalent to a pre-programmed, pre-determined shooting from the hip posture, in quick time, commencing at the tactical level, graduating rapidly to the operational-strategic level, strangely oblivious of the nuclear Armageddon it could unleash in the process." the general said, targeting the Indian Army's Cold Start doctrine.

"It clearly was not thought through," General Kidwai felt.

"It was quite surreal when Kidwai was clinically talking about the needed range of Pakistan's nuclear weapons to cover entire Indian land mass," one observer at the conference pointed out, "particularly vis-a-vis the Shaheen-3 with its 2,750 kilometres range, sufficient to hit the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which many believe may be developed as India's military bases."

General Kidwai strongly defended the Nasr 'Shoot and Scoot' system as "a defence response to the offensive Indian Cold Start posture."

When asked by Peter Lavoy, the moderator of the discussion and the newly-minted senior director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, if Pakistan "considered the political impact of long-range nuclear weapons on non-Indian targets," General Kidwai shot back, "Did India and the other nuclear countries do so too?"

Asked if Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme would ever stop expanding, General Kidwai again invoked India, saying, "It is not open-ended and aligned with India only."

"The two realities of today's South Asian strategic situation are, one, notwithstanding the growing conventional asymmetries, the development and possession of sufficient numbers and varieties of nuclear weapons by both India and Pakistan has made war as an instrument of policy near-redundant," the general added.

"The tried and tested concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has ensured that."

"There was," General Kidwai said, "a time in the aftermath of the nuclear tests of 1998, when some people unwisely experimented with the idea that despite the nuclear overhang in South Asia, there was space for limited conventional war and therefore, one nuclear power might be able to overwhelm another nuclear power."

"It could be attributed to an inability to grasp the changed strategic environments of a nuclearised South Asia -- a learning curve perhaps," he said.

"Besides being dangerous thinking, it was also naive as the experience of the last 17 years has shown -- the idea didn't work in the escalation of 2001-2002 nor during the tensions of 2008 nor is it likely to work in the future," the general argued.

Secondly, he pointed out that "the historic coincidence of the near simultaneous emergence of two strong democratically elected governments in India and Pakistan with the advantages of comfortable majorities and the factor of reasonable time at their disposal to address longstanding issues with a sense and understanding of history. This has never happened before."

"These then are the two self-evident realities or givens of the South Asian situation today," he said, and noted, "When we look at the linkage of the two realities, it would make it seem that this just might be the historic opportunity of a lifetime waiting for the two leaderships to grasp, sit together, explore the possibilities of conflict resolution and, in a supreme statesman-like act, go for it, in a manner that all parties to the conflict end up on the winning side."

"No zero sum games, no oneupmanship," he said, and declared, "History and circumstance beckon. Whether history can be grasped remains to be seen."

General Kidwai could not resist throwing in the Kashmir imbroglio and taking pot shots at the US and the international community for ignoring Pakistan's entreaties to take up this issue and put pressure on India.

"Unfortunately those who say that conflict resolution alone will lead to true peace and stability leading to economic development are dismissed as revisionists -- as if seeking resolution to conflict was unnatural and nations should learn to live with conflicts and the status quo," he added.

"In this unstable regional environment," General Kidwai said, targeting India again, "one nuclear power is trying to teach lessons to another nuclear power through the medium of small arms and mortar shells on the Kashmir Line of Control, and bluster."

"Well-meaning nudges from well-meaning friends would be most helpful in the larger interest of international peace and stability in a region dubbed as a nuclear flashpoint," he said, and warned, "A hands-off approach, will be neither here nor there and, of course, the fleeting opportunity of history would have slipped."

The general also criticised the US for "one-sided and discriminatory overtures" in South Asia.

"My submission to friends who want to be helpful -- please note the inadvisability of aggravating the existing delicate strategic balance in a troubled South Asia by one sided and discriminatory overtures, he added."

"Discriminatory approach on issues like the Nuclear Suppliers Group exemption and NSG membership," he asserted, "is already proving to be counter-productive, and it will never be acceptable to Pakistan -- and will in no way contribute toward peace and stability."

The general -- who supervised the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons for many years -- acknowledged that "something I know worries the international community all the time -- the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the disturbed security environment of our region."

"For the last 15 years," he asserted, "Pakistan has taken its nuclear security obligations seriously. We understand the consequences of complacency."

"There is no complacency," General Kidwai claimed. "We have invested heavily in terms of money, manpower, equipment, weapons, training, preparedness and smart site security solutions."

"I say with full responsibility that nuclear security in Pakistan is a non-issue."

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

2015-04-05T12:13:00.001+05:30

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.

Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough -- so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share In the glory that was Multivac's.

For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.

But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.

The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.

Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public function, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it.

They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle.

"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever."

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. "Not forever," he said.

"Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."

"That's not forever."

"All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"

Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Twenty billion years isn't forever."

"Will, it will last our time, won't it?"

"So would the coal and uranium."

"All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a million times without ever worrying about fuel. You can't do THAT on coal and uranium. Ask Multivac, if you don't believe me."

"I don't have to ask Multivac. I know that."

"Then stop running down what Multivac's done for us," said Adell, blazing up. "It did all right."

"Who says it didn't? What I say is that a sun won't last forever. That's all I'm saying. We're safe for twenty billion years, but then what?" Lupov pointed a slightly shaky finger at the other. "And don't say we'll switch to another sun."

There was silence for a while. Adell put his glass to his lips only occasionally, and Lupov's eyes slowly closed. They rested.

Then Lupov's eyes snapped open. "You're thinking we'll switch to another sun when ours is done, aren't you?"

"I'm not thinking."

"Sure you are. You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and Who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one."

"I get it," said Adell. "Don't shout. When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too."

"Darn right they will," muttered Lupov. "It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it'll all have an end when all the stars run down. Some run down faster than others. Hell, the giants won't last a hundred million years. The sun will last twenty billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last a hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and everything will be dark. Entropy has to increase to maximum, that's all."

"I know all about entropy," said Adell, standing on his dignity.

"The hell you do."

"I know as much as you do."

"Then you know everything's got to run down someday."

"All right. Who says they won't?"

"You did, you poor sap. You said we had all the energy we needed, forever. You said 'forever.'"

"It was Adell's turn to be contrary. "Maybe we can build things up again someday," he said.

"Never."

"Why not? Someday."

"Never."

"Ask Multivac."

"You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can't be done."

Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age?

Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended.

Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

"No bet," whispered Lupov. They left hurriedly.

By next morning, the two, plagued with throbbing head and cottony mouth, had forgotten about the incident.

Jerrodd, Jerrodine, and Jerrodette I and II watched the starry picture in the visiplate change as the passage through hyperspace was completed in its non-time lapse. At once, the even powdering of stars gave way to the predominance of a single bright marble-disk, centered.

"That's X-23," said Jerrodd confidently. His thin hands clamped tightly behind his back and the knuckles whitened.

The little Jerrodettes, both girls, had experienced the hyperspace passage for the first time in their lives and were self-conscious over the momentary sensation of inside-outness. They buried their giggles and chased one another wildly about their mother, screaming, "We've reached X-23 -- we've reached X-23 -- we've ----"

"Quiet, children," said Jerrodine sharply. "Are you sure, Jerrodd?"

"What is there to be but sure?" asked Jerrodd, glancing up at the bulge of featureless metal just under the ceiling. It ran the length of the room, disappearing through the wall at either end. It was as long as the ship.

Jerrodd scarcely knew a thing about the thick rod of metal except that it was called a Microvac, that one asked it questions if one wished; that if one did not it still had its task of guiding the ship to a preordered destination; of feeding on energies from the various Sub-galactic Power Stations; of computing the equations for the hyperspacial jumps.

Jerrodd and his family had only to wait and live in the comfortable residence quarters of the ship.

Someone had once told Jerrodd that the "ac" at the end of "Microvac" stood for "analog computer" in ancient English, but he was on the edge of forgetting even that.

Jerrodine's eyes were moist as she watched the visiplate. "I can't help it. I feel funny about leaving Earth."

"Why for Pete's sake?" demanded Jerrodd. "We had nothing there. We'll have everything on X-23. You won't be alone. You won't be a pioneer. There are over a million people on the planet already. Good Lord, our great grandchildren will be looking for new worlds because X-23 will be overcrowded."

Then, after a reflective pause, "I tell you, it's a lucky thing the computers worked out interstellar travel the way the race is growing."

"I know, I know," said Jerrodine miserably.

Jerrodette I said promptly, "Our Microvac is the best Microvac in the world."

"I think so, too," said Jerrodd, tousling her hair.

It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship.

Jerrodd felt uplifted, as he always did when he thought that his own personal Microvac was many times more complicated than the ancient and primitive Multivac that had first tamed the Sun, and almost as complicated as Earth's Planetary AC (the largest) that had first solved the problem of hyperspatial travel and had made trips to the stars possible.

"So many stars, so many planets," sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. "I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now."

"Not forever," said Jerrodd, with a smile. "It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase."

"What's entropy, daddy?" shrilled Jerrodette II.

"Entropy, little sweet, is just a word which means the amount of running-down of the universe. Everything runs down, you know, like your little walkie-talkie robot, remember?"

"Can't you just put in a new power-unit, like with my robot?"

The stars are the power-units, dear. Once they're gone, there are no more power-units."

Jerrodette I at once set up a howl. "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down."

"Now look what you've done, " whispered Jerrodine, exasperated.

"How was I to know it would frighten them?" Jerrodd whispered back.

"Ask the Microvac," wailed Jerrodette I. "Ask him how to turn the stars on again."

"Go ahead," said Jerrodine. "It will quiet them down." (Jerrodette II was beginning to cry, also.)

Jarrodd shrugged. "Now, now, honeys. I'll ask Microvac. Don't worry, he'll tell us."

He asked the Microvac, adding quickly, "Print the answer."

Jerrodd cupped the strip of thin cellufilm and said cheerfully, "See now, the Microvac says it will take care of everything when the time comes so don't worry."

Jerrodine said, "and now children, it's time for bed. We'll be in our new home soon."

Jerrodd read the words on the cellufilm again before destroying it: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

He shrugged and looked at the visiplate. X-23 was just ahead.

VJ-23X of Lameth stared into the black depths of the three-dimensional, small-scale map of the Galaxy and said, "Are we ridiculous, I wonder, in being so concerned about the matter?"

MQ-17J of Nicron shook his head. "I think not. You know the Galaxy will be filled in five years at the present rate of expansion."

Both seemed in their early twenties, both were tall and perfectly formed.

"Still," said VJ-23X, "I hesitate to submit a pessimistic report to the Galactic Council."

"I wouldn't consider any other kind of report. Stir them up a bit. We've got to stir them up."

VJ-23X sighed. "Space is infinite. A hundred billion Galaxies are there for the taking. More."

"A hundred billion is not infinite and it's getting less infinite all the time. Consider! Twenty thousand years ago, mankind first solved the problem of utilizing stellar energy, and a few centuries later, interstellar travel became possible. It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the population doubles every ten years --"

VJ-23X interrupted. "We can thank immortality for that."

"Very well. Immortality exists and we have to take it into account. I admit it has its seamy side, this immortality. The Galactic AC has solved many problems for us, but in solving the problems of preventing old age and death, it has undone all its other solutions."

"Yet you wouldn't want to abandon life, I suppose."

"Not at all," snapped MQ-17J, softening it at once to, "Not yet. I'm by no means old enough. How old are you?"

"Two hundred twenty-three. And you?"

"I'm still under two hundred. --But to get back to my point. Population doubles every ten years. Once this Galaxy is filled, we'll have another filled in ten years. Another ten years and we'll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hundred years, we'll have filled a thousand Galaxies. In a thousand years, a million Galaxies. In ten thousand years, the entire known Universe. Then what?"

VJ-23X said, "As a side issue, there's a problem of transportation. I wonder how many sunpower units it will take to move Galaxies of individuals from one Galaxy to the next."

"A very good point. Already, mankind consumes two sunpower units per year."

"Most of it's wasted. After all, our own Galaxy alone pours out a thousand sunpower units a year and we only use two of those."

"Granted, but even with a hundred per cent efficiency, we can only stave off the end. Our energy requirements are going up in geometric progression even faster than our population. We'll run out of energy even sooner than we run out of Galaxies. A good point. A very good point."

"We'll just have to build new stars out of interstellar gas."

"Or out of dissipated heat?" asked MQ-17J, sarcastically.

"There may be some way to reverse entropy. We ought to ask the Galactic AC."

VJ-23X was not really serious, but MQ-17J pulled out his AC-contact from his pocket and placed it on the table before him.

"I've half a mind to," he said. "It's something the human race will have to face someday."

He stared somberly at his small AC-contact. It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind. Hyperspace considered, it was an integral part of the Galactic AC.

MQ-17J paused to wonder if someday in his immortal life he would get to see the Galactic AC. It was on a little world of its own, a spider webbing of force-beams holding the matter within which surges of sub-mesons took the place of the old clumsy molecular valves. Yet despite it's sub-etheric workings, the Galactic AC was known to be a full thousand feet across.

MQ-17J asked suddenly of his AC-contact, "Can entropy ever be reversed?"

VJ-23X looked startled and said at once, "Oh, say, I didn't really mean to have you ask that."

"Why not?"

"We both know entropy can't be reversed. You can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree."

"Do you have trees on your world?" asked MQ-17J.

The sound of the Galactic AC startled them into silence. Its voice came thin and beautiful out of the small AC-contact on the desk. It said: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

VJ-23X said, "See!"

The two men thereupon returned to the question of the report they were to make to the Galactic Council.

Zee Prime's mind spanned the new Galaxy with a faint interest in the countless twists of stars that powdered it. He had never seen this one before. Would he ever see them all? So many of them, each with its load of humanity - but a load that was almost a dead weight. More and more, the real essence of men was to be found out here, in space.

Minds, not bodies! The immortal bodies remained back on the planets, in suspension over the eons. Sometimes they roused for material activity but that was growing rarer. Few new individuals were coming into existence to join the incredibly mighty throng, but what matter? There was little room in the Universe for new individuals.

Zee Prime was roused out of his reverie upon coming across the wispy tendrils of another mind.

"I am Zee Prime," said Zee Prime. "And you?"

"I am Dee Sub Wun. Your Galaxy?"

"We call it only the Galaxy. And you?"

"We call ours the same. All men call their Galaxy their Galaxy and nothing more. Why not?"

"True. Since all Galaxies are the same."

"Not all Galaxies. On one particular Galaxy the race of man must have originated. That makes it different."

Zee Prime said, "On which one?"

"I cannot say. The Universal AC would know."

"Shall we ask him? I am suddenly curious."

Zee Prime's perceptions broadened until the Galaxies themselves shrunk and became a new, more diffuse powdering on a much larger background. So many hundreds of billions of them, all with their immortal beings, all carrying their load of intelligences with minds that drifted freely through space. And yet one of them was unique among them all in being the originals Galaxy. One of them had, in its vague and distant past, a period when it was the only Galaxy populated by man.

Zee Prime was consumed with curiosity to see this Galaxy and called, out: "Universal AC! On which Galaxy did mankind originate?"

The Universal AC heard, for on every world and throughout space, it had its receptors ready, and each receptor lead through hyperspace to some unknown point where the Universal AC kept itself aloof.

Zee Prime knew of only one man whose thoughts had penetrated within sensing distance of Universal AC, and he reported only a shining globe, two feet across, difficult to see.

"But how can that be all of Universal AC?" Zee Prime had asked.

"Most of it, " had been the answer, "is in hyperspace. In what form it is there I cannot imagine."

Nor could anyone, for the day had long since passed, Zee Prime knew, when any man had any part of the making of a universal AC. Each Universal AC designed and constructed its successor. Each, during its existence of a million years or more accumulated the necessary data to build a better and more intricate, more capable successor in which its own store of data and individuality would be submerged.

The Universal AC interrupted Zee Prime's wandering thoughts, not with words, but with guidance. Zee Prime's mentality was guided into the dim sea of Galaxies and one in particular enlarged into stars.

A thought came, infinitely distant, but infinitely clear. "THIS IS THE ORIGINAL GALAXY OF MAN."

But it was the same after all, the same as any other, and Zee Prime stifled his disappointment.

Dee Sub Wun, whose mind had accompanied the other, said suddenly, "And Is one of these stars the original star of Man?"

The Universal AC said, "MAN'S ORIGINAL STAR HAS GONE NOVA. IT IS NOW A WHITE DWARF."

"Did the men upon it die?" asked Zee Prime, startled and without thinking.

The Universal AC said, "A NEW WORLD, AS IN SUCH CASES, WAS CONSTRUCTED FOR THEIR PHYSICAL BODIES IN TIME."

"Yes, of course," said Zee Prime, but a sense of loss overwhelmed him even so. His mind released its hold on the original Galaxy of Man, let it spring back and lose itself among the blurred pin points. He never wanted to see it again.

Dee Sub Wun said, "What is wrong?"

"The stars are dying. The original star is dead."

"They must all die. Why not?"

"But when all energy is gone, our bodies will finally die, and you and I with them."

"It will take billions of years."

"I do not wish it to happen even after billions of years. Universal AC! How may stars be kept from dying?"

Dee sub Wun said in amusement, "You're asking how entropy might be reversed in direction."

And the Universal AC answered. "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

Zee Prime's thoughts fled back to his own Galaxy. He gave no further thought to Dee Sub Wun, whose body might be waiting on a galaxy a trillion light-years away, or on the star next to Zee Prime's own. It didn't matter.

Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built.

Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.

Man said, "The Universe is dying."

Man looked about at the dimming Galaxies. The giant stars, spendthrifts, were gone long ago, back in the dimmest of the dim far past. Almost all stars were white dwarfs, fading to the end.

New stars had been built of the dust between the stars, some by natural processes, some by Man himself, and those were going, too. White dwarfs might yet be crashed together and of the mighty forces so released, new stars built, but only one star for every thousand white dwarfs destroyed, and those would come to an end, too.

Man said, "Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the energy that is even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years."

"But even so," said Man, "eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, the energy once expended is gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase to the maximum."

Man said, "Can entropy not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC."

The Cosmic AC surrounded them but not in space. Not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and Nature no longer had meaning to any terms that Man could comprehend.

"Cosmic AC," said Man, "How may entropy be reversed?"

The Cosmic AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

Man said, "Collect additional data."

The Cosmic AC said, "I WILL DO SO. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESSORS AND I HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TIMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT."

"Will there come a time," said Man, "when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?"

The Cosmic AC said, "NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES."

Man said, "When will you have enough data to answer the question?"

"THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

"Will you keep working on it?" asked Man.

The Cosmic AC said, "I WILL."

Man said, "We shall wait."

"The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.

One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.

Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.

Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"

AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

Man's last mind fused and only AC existed -- and that in hyperspace.

Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light----

What Research ? ( from The Economist)

2015-04-01T10:43:00.001+05:30

False hope

Most trading strategies are not tested rigorously enough

Feb 21st 2015 | From the print edition

LET me tell you about the perfect investment offer. Each week you will receive a share recommendation from a fund manager, telling you whether the stock’s price will rise or fall over the next week. After ten weeks, if all the recommendations are proved right, then you should be more than willing to hand over your money for investment. After all, there will be just a one-in-a-thousand chance that the result is down to luck.

Alas, this is a well-known scam. The promoter sends out 100,000 e-mails, picking a stock at random. Half the recipients are told that the stock will rise; half that it will fall. After the first week, the 50,000 who received the successful recommendation will get a second e-mail; those that received the wrong information will be dropped from the list. And so on for ten weeks. At the end of the period, just by the law of averages, there should be 98 punters convinced of the manager’s genius and ready to entrust their savings.

This is a problem that has dogged scientists across many disciplines. There is a natural bias in favour of reporting statistically significant results—that a drug cures a disease, for example, or that a chemical causes cancer. Such results are more likely to be published in academic journals and to make the newspaper headlines. But when other scientists try to replicate the results, the link disappears because the initial result was a random outlier. The debunking studies, naturally, tend to be less well reported.As a paper published last year in the Journal of Portfolio Management argued, this is a classic example of the misuse of statistics. Conduct enough tests on a bunch of data—run through half a million genetic sequences to find a link with a disease, for example—and there will be many sequences that appear meaningful. But most will be the result of chance.

Faced with this problem, scientists have turned to tougher statistical tests. When searching for a subatomic particle called the Higgs Boson, they decided that to prove its existence, the results had to be five standard deviations from normal—a one-in-3.5-million chance.

Financial research is highly prone to statistical distortion. Academics have the choice of many thousands of stocks, bonds and currencies being traded across dozens of countries, complete with decades’ worth of daily price data. They can back-test thousands of correlations to find a few that appear to offer profitable strategies.

The paper points out that most financial research applies a two-standard-deviation (or “two sigma” in the jargon) test to see if the results are statistically significant. This is not rigorous enough.

One way round this problem is to use “out-of-sample” testing. If you have 20 years of data, then split them in half. If a strategy works in the first half of the data, see if it also does so in the second out-of-sample period. If not, it is probably a fluke.

The problem with out-of-sample testing is that researchers know what happened in the past, and may have designed their strategies accordingly: consciously avoiding bank stocks in 2007 and 2008, for example. In addition, slicing up the data means fewer observations, making it more difficult to discover relationships that are truly statistically significant.

Campbell Harvey, one of the report’s authors, says that the only true out-of-sample approach is to ignore the past and see whether the strategy works in future. But few investors or fund managers have the required patience. They want a winning strategy now, not in five years’ time.

The authors’ conclusions are stark. “Most of the empirical research in finance, whether published in academic journals or put into production as an active trading strategy by an investment manager, is likely false. This implies that half the financial products (promising out performance) that companies are selling to clients are false.”

For the academics, the lesson is simple. Much more rigorous analysis will be needed in future to reduce the number of “false positives” in the data. As for clients of the investment industry, they need to be much more sceptical about the brilliant trading strategies that fund managers try to sell them.

All this will leave many readers wondering how to invest their savings. That’s fine. Buttonwood has an investment strategy that is sure to boost your wealth. Just send your e-mail address and a stock tip will arrive every month...

^{Economist.com/blogs/buttonwood}

* “Evaluating Trading Strategies”, by C. Harvey and Y. Liu, Journal of Portfolio Management(2014)

The strange stories behind airports' 3-letter nicknames

2015-03-30T16:25:00.001+05:30

When booking flights online, knowing your local airport's code can come in handy.

There's 3,000 miles' difference between BUR (Burbank, California) and BTV (Burlington, Vermont). And you probably don't want to end up in Venezuela just in time for Oktoberfest (Munich's code is MUC, not MUN).

Those enigmatic three-letter signifiers that help you search for flights on Kayak or Priceline are doled out by the International Air Transport Association, and distinguish airports from one another. But the average traveler may not know where those letters come from.

Arizona-based designer Lynn Fisher, who travels a lot and loves trivia, became interested in the rationale behind those IATA codes a few years ago but couldn't find one place online that explained them all. She and developer Nick Crohn decided to create a website that did just that.

The result, airportcod.es, pairs a "unique aspect of each airport, whether it be architecture, art, or a great view," with its three-letter code and the origin story behind it. Some, like Fisher and Crohn's local airport, PHX, are straightforward; others are more obscure or random.

Visit their website to browse codes from more than 200 airports around the world. Here's a sample:

ARN
Stockholm Arlanda Airport, Stockholm
Stockholm's airport is named ARlaNda, a made-up word combining Arland, another name for the nearby parish of Ärlinghundra, and landa, the Swedish verb meaning "to land."

CDG
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris
Renamed and officially opened in 1974, France's largest airport is named after Charles De Gaulle, former president and founder of the French Fifth Republic.

CGK
Soekarno–Hatta International Airport, Jakarta, Indonesia
Soekarno–Hatta International serves the capital city of Jakarta and honors Indonesia's first president and first vice president. It receives its code from the CenGKareng district in the city of Tangerang, where it's located.

CVG
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Cincinnati
Serving the greater Cincinnati metro area, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky's airport code comes from the nearby city of CoVinGton.

DXB
Dubai International Airport, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
When Dubai International opened in 1960, the airport code DUB was already in use by Dublin. DuBai subbed an X for the U, making its unique airport code of DXB.

EWR
Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey
When airport codes switched from two letters to three, the Navy reserved all codes starting with N. NEWaRk, then, used the other letters in its name to make EWR.

Via Wikimedia CommonsStockholm Arlanda Airport

IAD
Dulles International Airport, Washington, D.C.
Dulles International Airport's three-letter code was once DIA. When handwritten, it was often misread as DCA, another Washington airport. It was reversed to IAD to avoid confusion.

LAX
Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles
Before the 1930s, airports had two-letter codes. When codes switched to three letters, many added the letter X to the end. LA (Los Angeles) became LAX. (See also:PDX.)

LHR
London Heathrow Airport, London
London HeathRow takes its name from Heathrow, a hamlet northwest of where the then-small airfield was started in 1929.

OGG
Kahului Airport, Kahului, Hawaii
Kahului Airport is named after its home city, but its airport code honors Hawaiian-born pilot Bertram J. HOGG.

ORD
O'Hare International Airport, Chicago
Before the airport was renamed after Medal of Honor recipient Edward O'Hare in 1949, it was known as ORcharD Field Airport.

SFO
San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco
When codes switched to three letters from two, many added the letter X to the end.San FranciscO instead used its last letter O.

SUX
Sioux Gateway Airport, Sioux City, Iowa
SioUX City petitioned twice to have its airport code, SUX, changed. With no great alternatives, it stuck with it and now uses the slogan "Fly SUX."

UIO
Mariscal Sucre International Airport, Quito, Ecuador
Mariscal Sucre International is named after Antonio José de Sucre, who fought for the independence of Quito, in what is now Ecuador. Because the Federal Communications Commission reserved codes starting with Q, it opted for other letters from its home city of QUItO.

YYZ
Pearson International Airport, Toronto
Airport codes starting with Y designate Canadian airports. The YZ isn't as clear but is said to be the old railway station code for Malton, an area west of Toronto where the airport is located.

For more airport codes and their origin stories, visit airportcod.es.

Nick Crohn is a senior JavaScript developer living in Chandler, Arizona.

Lynn Fisher is an artist and designer who lives in Chandler, Arizona.

A mini China in the heart of Mumbai

2015-03-29T08:12:00.001+05:30

With a lot of Chinese coming to BKC to shop for diamonds, stalls in the area are stocking up tea leaves from Fujian, serve snacks with chopsticks and have staff whose Mandarin is better than their english.

MUMBAI: Mumbai does not have its own China Town. The western business district of Bandra-Kurla Complex, though, is fast turning into a home for several middle-class working Chinese men and women, almost all of whom are there to pick diamonds from wholesale traders at the bourse.

Last year, the neighbouring country pipped India to become the largest buyer of gold. Since then, demand for diamonds has been rising, forcing corporations to send out their purchase teams to shop at BKC. This has seen the commercial suburb become a mini-China with residents who celebrate the spring festival and cook chow fun in rented apartments in and around BKC.

READ ALSO: 'We get best rate for diamonds in India'

Several Indian diamond traders, on their part, have set up sales verticals to cater to the Chinese demand. Their canteens are stocked with tea leaves from the hills of Fujian, perhaps the most famous tea distinguished by its smoky aroma and flavour. They serve snacks with natural-cut handmade ebony chopsticks. Their staff, many of whom don't know a word of English and are fluent only in a Gujarati, can reel off coherent Mandarin.

"This is the first time I am here to buy diamonds. Back in China and Hong Kong, demand for diamonds is many many many," says Zhang Gui Hua, who also has an English name, Alice, which she uses when in Mumbai. Alice adds that many other competitors are making a beeline for homes in Bandra and so their companies rent out premises for two to three years, even though most Chinese buyers travel back and forth as and when they get orders.

"Diamonds are cheaper in India than in Hong Kong where we earlier used to source the stones from. Now that demand has spiralled, companies with bulk orders are sending their staff to India where they get the best rate," says Ruang who, like the others, comes to the bourse with his magnifying loupe.

China surpassed Japan in 2011 to become the biggest diamond consuming nation, second only to the Unites States. Retail sales of diamond jewellery jumped 18% to $9.2billion in 2011. That had a local effect too: Sales in India gained 17%.

Ashok Gajera, proprietor of Laxmi Diamonds, says the Chinese always bought diamonds, but the quantity has increased and India is where they are sourcing most of their diamonds from.

"They are buying many more stones now. Also, earlier they used to be conscious of the quality and would only pick top quality diamonds. Now, with the demand, they even pick up a lot of the lower variety, for there is a market for that too."

The Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council had speculated the demand from China. Vipul Shah, chairman of the council, says China is a "promising big market" and while buyers are very regular at the BKC bourse, demand is only going to pick pace.

"We have been holding a lot of promotional and marketing exhibitions in Hong Kong. Buyers who come to BKC, handpick their orders, import them into Hong Kong and from there, the diamonds reach their factories in provinces of China," says Shah.

39 Commonly Misused Words and How to Use Them Correctly

2015-03-16T10:57:00.001+05:30

This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published atInc.com.

Where the mechanics of writing are concerned, I’m far from perfect. One example: I always struggle with who and whom.(Sometimes I’ll even rewrite a sentence just so I won’t have to worry about which is correct.)

And that’s a real problem. The same way one misspelled word can get your résumé tossed onto the reject pile, one misused word can negatively impact your entire message.

Fair or unfair, it happens all the time–so let’s make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

My post 30 Incorrectly Used Words That Can Make You Look Bad resulted in readers providing a number of other examples of misused words, and here are some of them. Once again I’ve picked words that are typically used in business settings, with special emphasis on words that spell checker won’t correct.

Here we go:

Advise and advice

Aside from the two words being pronounced differently (the sin advise sounds like az), advise is a verb while advice is a noun. Advice is what you give (whether or not the recipient is interested in that gift is a different issue altogether) when you advise someone.

So, “Thank you for the advise” is incorrect, while “I advise you not to bore me with your advice in the future” is correct if pretentious.

If you run into trouble, just say each word out loud and you’ll instantly know which makes sense; there’s no way you’d ever say, “I advice you to…”

Ultimate and penultimate

Recently I received a pitch from a PR professional that read, “(Acme Industries) provides the penultimate value-added services for discerning professionals.”

As Inigo would say, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ultimate means the best, or final, or last. Penultimate means the last but one, or second to last. (Or, as a Monty Python-inspired Michelangelo would say, “the Penultimate Supper!”)

But penultimate doesn’t mean second-best. Plus, I don’t think my PR friend meant to say her client offered second-class services. (I think she just thought the word sounded cool.)

Also, keep in mind that using ultimate is fraught with hyperbolic peril. Are you–or is what you provide–really the absolute best imaginable? That’s a tough standard to meet.

Well and good

Anyone who has children uses good more often than he or she should. Since kids pretty quickly learn what good means, “You did good, honey” is much more convenient and meaningful than “You did well, honey.”

But that doesn’t mean good is the correct word choice.

Good is an adjective that describes something; if you did a good job, then you do good work. Well is an adverb that describes how something was done; you can do your job well.

Where it gets tricky is when you describe, say, your health or emotional state. “I don’t feel well” is grammatically correct, even though many people (including me) often say, “I don’t feel too good.” On the other hand, “I don’t feel good about how he treated me” is correct; no one says, “I don’t feel well about how I’m treated.”

Confused? If you’re praising an employee and referring to the outcome say, “You did a good job.” If you’re referring to how the employee performed say, “You did incredibly well.”

And while you’re at it, stop saying good to your kids and usegreat instead, because no one–especially a kid–ever receives too much praise.

If and whether

If and whether are often interchangeable. If a yes/no condition is involved, then feel free to use either: “I wonder whether Jim will finish the project on time” or “I wonder if Jim will finish the project on time.” (Whether sounds a little more formal in this case, so consider your audience and how you wish to be perceived.)

What’s trickier is when a condition is not involved. “Let me know whether Marcia needs a projector for the meeting” isn’t conditional, because you want to be informed either way. “Let me know if Marcia needs a projector for the meeting” is conditional, because you only want to be told if she needs one.

And always use if when you introduce a condition. “If you hit your monthly target, I’ll increase your bonus” is correct; the condition is hitting the target and the bonus is the result. “Whether you are able to hit your monthly target is totally up to you” does not introduce a condition (unless you want the employee to infer that your thinly veiled threat is a condition of ongoing employment).

Stationary and stationery

You write on stationery. You get business stationery, such as letterhead and envelopes, printed.

But that box of envelopes is not stationary unless it’s not moving–and even then it’s still stationery.

Award and reward

An award is a prize. Musicians win Grammy Awards. Car companies win J.D. Power awards. Employees win Employee of the Month awards. Think of an award as the result of a contest or competition.

A reward is something given in return for effort, achievement, hard work, merit, etc. A sales commission is a reward. A bonus is a reward. A free trip for landing the most new customers is a reward.

Be happy when your employees win industry or civic awards, and reward them for the hard work and sacrifices they make to help your business grow.

Sympathy and empathy

Sympathy is acknowledging another person’s feelings. “I am sorry for your loss” means you understand the other person is grieving and want to recognize that fact.

Empathy is having the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and relate to how the person feels, at least in part because you’ve experienced those feelings yourself.

The difference is huge. Sympathy is passive; empathy is active. (Here’s a short video by Brené Brown that does a great job of describing the difference–and how empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection.)

Know the difference between sympathy and empathy, live the difference, and you’ll make a bigger difference in other people’s lives.

Criterion and criteria

A criterion is a principle or standard. If you have more than one criterion, those are referred to as criteria.

But if you want to be safe and you only have one issue to consider, just say standardor rule or benchmark. Then usecriteria for all the times there are multiple specifications or multiple criterion (OK, standards) involved.

Mute and moot

Think of mute like the button on your remote; it means unspoken or unable to speak. In the U.S., moot refers to something that is of no practical importance; a moot point is one that could be hypothetical or even (gasp!) academic. In British English, mootcan also mean debatable or open to debate.

So if you were planning an IPO, but your sales have plummeted, the idea of going public could be moot. And if you decide not to talk about it anymore, you will have gone mute on the subject.

Peak and peek

A peak is the highest point; climbers try to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Peekmeans quick glance, as in giving major customers a sneak peek at a new product before it’s officially unveiled, which hopefully helps sales peak at an unimaginable height.

Occasionally a marketer will try to “peak your interest” or “peek your interest,” but in that case the right word is pique, which means “to excite.” (Pique can also mean “to upset,” but hopefully that’s not what marketers intend.)

Aggressive and enthusiastic

Aggressive is a very popular business adjective: aggressive sales force, aggressive revenue projections, aggressive product rollout. But unfortunately, aggressive means ready to attack, or pursuing aims forcefully, possibly unduly so.

So do you really want an “aggressive” sales force?

Of course, most people have seen aggressive used that way for so long they don’t think of it negatively; to them it just means hard-charging, results-oriented, driven, etc., none of which are bad things.

But some people may not see it that way. So consider using words like enthusiastic,eager, committed, dedicated, or even (although it pains me to say it) passionate.

Then and than

Then refers in some way to time. “Let’s close this deal, and then we’ll celebrate!” Since the celebration comes after the sale, thenis correct.

Then is also often used with if. Think in terms of if-then statements: “If we don’t get to the office on time, then we won’t be able to close the deal today.”

Than involves a comparison. “Landing Customer A will result in higher revenue than landing Customer B,” or “Our sales team is more committed to building customer relationships than the competition is.”

Evoke and invoke

To evoke is to call to mind; an unusual smell might evoke a long-lost memory. To invoke is to call upon some thing: help, aid, or maybe a higher power.

So hopefully all your branding and messaging efforts evoke specific emotions in potential customers. But if they don’t, you might consider invoking the gods of commerce to aid you in your quest for profitability.

Or something like that.

Continuously and continually

Both words come from the root continue, but they mean very different things.Continuously means never ending. Hopefully your efforts to develop your employees are continuous, because you never want to stop improving their skills and their future.

Continual means whatever you’re referring to stops and starts. You might have frequent disagreements with your co-founder, but unless those discussions never end (which is unlikely, even though it might feel otherwise), then those disagreements are continual.

That’s why you should focus on continuous improvement but only plan to have continual meetings with your accountant: The former should never, ever stop, and the other (mercifully) should.

Systemic and systematic

If you’re in doubt, systematic is almost always the right word to use. Systematic means arranged or carried out according to a plan, method, or system. That’s why you can take a systematic approach to continuous improvement, or do a systematic evaluation of customer revenue or a systematic assessment of market conditions.

Systemic means belonging to or affecting the system as a whole. Poor morale could be systemic to your organization. Or bias against employee diversity could be systemic.

So if your organization is facing a pervasive problem, take a systematic approach to dealing with it—that’s probably the only way you’ll overcome it.

Impact and affect (and effect)

Many people (including until recently me) use impact when they should use affect. Impact doesn’t mean to influence;impact means to strike, collide, or pack firmly.

Affect means to influence: “Impatient investors affected our rollout date.”

And to make it more confusing, effect means to accomplish something: “The board effected a sweeping policy change.”

How you correctly use effect or affect can be tricky. For example, a board can affect changes by influencing them and can effect changes by directly implementing them. Bottom line, use effect if you’re making it happen, and affect if you’re having an impact on something that someone else is trying to make happen.

As for nouns, effect is almost always correct: “Employee morale has had a negative effect on productivity.” Affect refers to an emotional state, so unless you’re a psychologist, you probably have little reason to use it.

So stop saying you’ll “impact sales” or “impact the bottom line.” Use affect.

(And feel free to remind me when I screw that up, because I feel sure I’ll backslide.)

Between and among

Use between when you name separate and individual items. “The team will decide between Mary, Marcia, and Steve when we fill the open customer service position.” Mary, Marcia, and Steve are separate and distinct, so between is correct.

Use among when there are three or more items but they are not named separately. “The team will decide among a number of candidates when we fill the open customer service position.” Who are the candidates? You haven’t named them separately, s oamong is correct.

And we’re assuming there are more than two candidates; otherwise you’d say between. If there are two candidates you could say, “I just can’t decide between them.”

Everyday and every day

Every day means, yep, every day—each and every day. If you ate a bagel for breakfast each day this week, you had a bagel every day.

Everyday means commonplace or normal. Decide to wear your “everyday shoes” and that means you’ve chosen to wear the shoes you normally wear. That doesn’t mean you have to wear them every single day; it just means wearing them is a usual occurrence.

Another example is along and a long: Along means moving in a constant direction or a line, or in the company of others, whilea long means of great distance or duration. You wouldn’t stand in “along line,” but you might stand in a long line for a long time, along with a number of other people.

A couple more examples: a while and awhile, and any way andanyway.

If you’re in doubt, read what you write out loud. It’s unlikely you’ll think “Is there anyway you can help me?” sounds right.

Citi never reaps

2015-03-14T16:36:00.001+05:30

( from the Economist)

Citigroup

Citi never reaps

Making money from a global banking network is as difficult as it is alluring

WILLIAM BRADY (pictured, in the middle) and Howard Sheperd had each spent more than 30 years at National City Bank before becoming its leaders in 1948. But even after all that time, they were not really sure how the sprawling financial conglomerate that would become Citigroup made money. George Moore, who would later rise to chairman, was appointed head of a “New Look Committee” to unravel the mystery. His conclusion: “We have never really known just where we made our net profits, but have generally proceeded on the assumption that we should encourage the growth of all these businesses to the maximum, on the theory that the more they grow the more money we could make.”

The assumption under the current boss, Michael Corbat, is precisely the opposite. But working out how Citigroup makes its money—and therefore which parts of the business are most dispensable—is just as vexing. In total, Mr Corbat reckons 60 businesses have been sold since the crisis. Among them are brokerage arms in America and Japan, a student-loan operation and some credit-card units. The most visible contraction has been in Citi’s consumer business, which is shrinking from 50 countries to 24, and in America, from 14 cities to seven. This week, Citi announced the sale of OneMain Financial, a subsidiary that makes high-interest consumer loans, and a stake in Akbank, a Turkish lender.

In spite of all this restructuring, Citi’s performance remains dismal. Part of the problem is the endless restructuring itself: provisions related to it were $148m in the first quarter of 2013, $75m in the second, $133m in the third, $234m in the fourth, $211m in the first quarter of 2014, $397m in the second, $382m in the third and $655m in the fourth, according to S&P Capital IQ, a financial-data firm. Its return on equity last year was 3.4%. Regulators have frozen its dividend at one cent per share (a yield of less than 0.1%) since the crisis. Even as the share prices of other American banks approach or pass their pre-crisis peaks, Citi’s is down by 90% (see chart). Its market capitalisation is well below its book value, suggesting it would be more valuable if broken up.

On March 11th the Federal Reserve will reveal the results of the second of the two annual “stress tests” it conducts for big banks, which attempt to simulate downturns to make sure that banks have enough capital to withstand them. Citi failed this test in 2012 and in 2014, and as a result has not been allowed to raise its dividend. The first failure prompted the depature of its then chief executive, Vikram Pandit; a third one would probably put an end to Mr Corbat’s tenure.

Citi’s sprawl is hard to fathom. It is present in 101 countries, and handles $3 trillion of transactions daily. It finances $600 billion in trade every year. More than half its deposits are foreign—far more than any other American bank, according to Moebs Services, a research firm. Foreign operations provide 60% of its revenue; two-thirds come from emerging markets. This part of the bank initially catered to multinationals, and to the American government and military. But as ever more, and smaller, firms expanded abroad, its customer base grew.

Citi’s international presence has always been both a strength and a liability. Take its Chinese operations, which helped keep the bank afloat in the 1930s, only to be forcibly closed in 1949. By the same token, Banamex, its Mexican unit, has been one of the most profitable parts of the bank, but lost $360m due to fraud in 2013. Frank Vanderlip, the CEO who first expanded abroad, nearly killed the bank with a hefty bet on Russia just before the revolution. He was succeeded by James Stillman, who staked Citi’s fortunes on global sugar markets with similarly disastrous results. Next up was “Sunshine Charley” Mitchell, who expanded both abroad and at home in the run-up to the Depression, leaving the bank in need of its first government bail-out.

If anything, the risks of big international operations appear to be growing. The fines and investigations the bank faced for its dealings in American mortgages before the crisis seem to be fading away. But it faces continuing litigation over allegations that it manipulated currency markets and interest rates and helped its clients launder money. Banamex is the subject of a fresh investigation; foreign transactions that may have helped companies to avoid American taxes have also caught the authorities’ attention.

Increasingly, big banks are held responsible not only for their own misdeeds, but also for the conduct of their clients. They have to be on the look-out not only for specific crimes like fraud, but for unsavoury people and activities, from tax evasion to terrorism, more generally.

On top of this, big global banks face ever higher capital requirements, with overlapping regulations set in multiple jurisdictions. The discussion of Citi’s obligations in this respect in its latest regulatory filing extends over 17 pages. The most important elements, says Steven Chubak, an analyst with Nomura Securities, are the 9% in common equity demanded by international banking standards (more than double the pre-crisis level of 4%) and various surcharges imposed by the Fed, which push the total to 11%. Further impositions may be on the way, including a “countercyclical capital buffer”. Rules on holdings of liquid assets add yet more complication and expense. Each time the overall capital requirement increases by a percentage point, Citi’s return on equity declines by a similar amount, Mr Chubak estimates.

These rules are giving smaller banks, or purely domestically focused ones, a competitive advantage. American banks that regulators do not consider systemic, for instance, need an equity buffer of just 7%. Even Wells Fargo, America’s biggest bank by market capitalisation, must hold only 10%, Mr Chubak estimates, thanks to its domestic focus. It is no coincidence that Wells recently exceeded the record valuation for an American financial firm set by Citi in 2001, of $283 billion.

Mr Corbat’s response to all this, and Mr Pandit’s before him, has been to shrink and simplify. Citi’s workforce has dropped by over a third since 2007, from 375,000 to 241,000. It will continue to fall. Consumer businesses are being jettisoned in various countries in the Middle East and Latin America, where concerns about money-laundering and financing terrorism are most acute.

But just how far to go is hard to decide. Some activities still look like anomalies: it is the only big bank that uses proprietary designs for its cash machines. Others, such as OneMain, are easily shorn, but very profitable: its return on equity is 19%.

Reducing the retail business is especially fraught. Citi initially tried to shrink its operations in Texas to two cities, Dallas and Houston. But customers were put off by its diminished presence, so it was forced to pull out of the state altogether. Analysts question whether it has an adequate network in the suburbs of Chicago and Boston to preserve its business in those cities.

Contraction abroad carries similar risks. Operations in obscure or hazard-prone countries may provide little or no return on their own, but may also be where Citi provides the greatest value to multinationals, in that companies have few reputable alternatives when doing business in such places. Hiving off Citi’s corporate business in different countries would not make any sense: American clients come to it for seamless access to foreign markets, and vice versa.

It is possible that Citi is already shrinking too much, consuming the seed corn that will produce profits later on, speculates Charles Peabody, an analyst with Portales Partners. Operations like retail banking, brokerage and asset management take time to build but provide steady pay-outs once established. It is this part of Citi that is being shed.

What remains is a more opaque and volatile corporate bank. Citi, Mr Peabody says, has recently become far more eager to undertake various risky sorts of transactions, such as “bought deals”, in which a bank buys a huge block of shares in the hope that it can sell them in smaller parcels at a profit. The most recent data from American regulators, from September, show that Citi held derivatives contracts with a notional value of $70 trillion—far more than any other commercial bank.

Citi says it is simply catering to its customers, who want to hedge against movements in commodities and currencies. But it is also on an increasingly urgent hunt for decent profits. How to produce them, however, is a question that has bedevilled Citigroup for more than a century.

Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious

2015-03-04T06:12:00.001+05:30

Curries, rice, naan bread, samosas and pakora. (iStock)

Indian food, with its hodgepodge of ingredients and intoxicating aromas, is coveted around the world. The labor-intensive cuisine and its mix of spices is more often than not a revelation for those who sit down to eat it for the first time. Heavy doses of cardamom, cayenne, tamarind and other flavors can overwhelm an unfamiliar palate. Together, they help form the pillars of what tastes so good to so many people.

But behind the appeal of Indian food — what makes it so novel and so delicious — is also a stranger and subtler truth. In a large new analysis of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered perhaps the key reason why Indian food tastes so unique: It does something radical with flavors, something very different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western culture. And it does it at the molecular level.

Before we go further, let's take a step back and consider what flavors are and how they interact. If you were to hold a microscope to most Western dishes, you would find an interesting but not all-too-surprising trend. Popular food pairings in this part of the world combine ingredients that share like flavors, which food chemists have broken down into their molecular parts — precise chemical compounds that, when combined, give off a distinct taste.

Most of the compounds have scientific names, though one of the simpler compounds is acetal, which, as the food chemist George Burdock has written, is "refreshing, pleasant, and [has a] fruity-green odor," and can be found in whiskey, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, there are just over 50 flavor compounds in each food ingredient.

A nifty chart shared by Scientific American in 2013 shows which foods share the most flavor compounds with others and which food pairings have the most flavor compounds in common. Peanut butter and roasted peanuts have one of the most significant overlaps (no surprise there). But there are connections that are more difficult to predict: strawberries, for instance, have more in common with white wine than they do with apples, oranges or honey.

Data crunching Indian recipes

Chefs in the West like to make dishes with ingredients that have overlapping flavors. But not all cuisines adhere to the same rule. Many Asian cuisines have been shown to belie the trend by favoring dishes with ingredients that don't overlap in flavor. And Indian food, in particular, is one of the most powerful counterexamples.

Researchers at the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur crunched data on several thousand recipes from a popular online recipe site called TarlaDalal.com. They broke each dish down to its ingredients, and then compared how often and heavily ingredients share flavor compounds.

The answer? Not too often.

Here's an easy way to make sense of what they did, through the lens of a single, theoretical dish. Say you have a dish with 4 different ingredients, like the one below:

Each one of those ingredients has its own list of flavor compounds. And any two of those ingredients' lists might have some overlap. Take the coconut and onion, for instance. We can all agree that these two things are pretty different, but we can also see (in the Venn diagram below) that there's some overlap in their flavor make-up. (Ignore the math symbols.)

You could create the same diagram for all the ingredients with overlapping flavor compounds, as in this diagram. There are six that have overlap. (Again, ignore the math.)

The researchers did this for each of the several thousand recipes, which used a total of 200 ingredients. They examined how much the underlying flavor compounds overlapped in single dishes and discovered something very different from Western cuisines. Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don't overlap at all.

"We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected," the researchers wrote.

In other words, the more overlap two ingredients have in flavor, the less likely they are to appear in the same Indian dish.

The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.

More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne, the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry. And when a dish contains cayenne, the researchers found, it's unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. The same can be said of green bell pepper, coriander and garam masala, which are nearly as ubiquitous in Indian cuisine.

"Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients," the researchers noted.

Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine—were found to be associated with just the opposite: flavor pairings that match. When any of those ingredients appeared in an Indian dish, there was a good chance there would be a lot of flavor overlap.

A lesson for all chefs

The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other. The cuisine is complicated, no doubt: the average Indian dish, after all, contains at least 7 ingredients, and the total number of ingredients observed by the researchers amounted to almost 200 out of the roughly 381 observed around the world. But all those ingredients — and the spices especially — are all uniquely important because in any single dish, each one brings a unique flavor.

But the upshot should also be a thought that we might be approaching food from the wrong angle. Combining ingredients with like flavors is a useful (and often delicious) strategy, but it might be a somewhat misleading rule of thumb. Indian cuisine, after all, is cherished globally, and yet hinges on a decidedly different ingredient pairing logic.

Roberto A. Ferdman is a reporter for Wonkblog covering food, economics, immigration and other things. He was previously a staff writer at Quartz.

The office cubicle ( from the Economist )

2015-03-03T11:16:00.001+05:30

Inside the box

How workers ended up in cubes—and how they could break free

IN THE 1960s, Robert Propst, an inventor and artist who had patents in heart valves, livestock-tagging machines and aeroplane parts, was asked by Herman Miller, an American design company, to find problems outside the furniture industry that could be solved with design. He flooded the company with concepts ranging from agriculture to medicine, but in the end found himself drawn to the problems of office life. He was particularly troubled by how sedentary people were. The consequences were clear in insurance and medical data. As a sufferer from back pain, he understood the need for regular movement and good posture.

Propst thought workers should have standing and sitting desks. He designed a perching seat, dreamed up display surfaces and created a prototype napping pad, an inch and a quarter thick and two feet wide (3cm by 60cm), that could be hung up for storage. Sleeping in the office, he thought, would make people more productive. He was, in many ways, ahead of his time.

His ideas culminated in the first modular office system, the “Action Office 2”, in 1968. At that time many firms put managers in offices and their subordinates in open “bullpens”, at pedestal desks lined in rows. Now this space could be broken up by vertical panels that slotted together in many ways. Propst suggested giving each worker a clamshell arrangement that offered both privacy and a view, and equipping it with desks of different heights. Areas for informal meetings and coffee could be created. The possibilities were endless.

Best, Propst believed, would be to join the panels at 120º angles. But his customers realised that they could squeeze more people in if they constructed cubes. A rigid 90º connector was therefore designed to join a panel to one, two or three more. Thus was born the cubicle, and Propst came to be known as its creator. He was horrified.

Other furniture-makers, including Haworth, Steelcase and Knoll, were soon producing their own systems. Cubicles were cheap, and meant a growing professional class could be packed in like battery hens, but with the illusion of individual offices. In America cubicles benefited from a tweak to the tax code that made it easier to write off depreciating assets such as furniture. Between 1977 and 1997 sales in America grew 20-fold.

The march of the cubicle continues. Around 40m North Americans now work in cubicles and they are being installed from Bangalore to Beijing. In 2012 Meg Whitman, the boss of Hewlett-Packard, turfed executives out of corner offices and into cubicles. Even publishers are converting. Last year Hachette installed 520 cubes in its pricey Manhattan headquarters. The boss has one, too—albeit, with a window.

The sick bay

At first, chopping bullpens up into boxes seemed to fit with a new egalitarian mood. Some management theorists regarded cubicles as an uprising against the old order, where the desks of office serfs were lined up for inspection, factory-style, by managers who emerged from plush private domains. But not everyone agreed. George Nelson, a famed designer for Herman Miller, wrote to a colleague in 1970 that cubicles were “dehumanising” and suited for “corporate zombies, the walking dead”. The Dilbert cartoons of Scott Adams have long espoused the cause of the dispirited cubicle denizen and branded cubicles a sign of an uncaring employer.

And as they have become near-ubiquitous, it has become increasingly clear that far from offering a clever compromise between the economy of open-plan and the privacy of individual offices, cubicles are in many ways worse than either. In particular, they cause a number of health problems, some less obvious than others.

Their rise coincided with the energy crisis of the 1970s, which prompted firms to make buildings more airtight. While artificial ventilation recirculated fumes silently released by carpets, wall coverings and the fabric of the cubicles themselves, their high walls added to the problem by obstructing airflow. Office workers complained of headaches, fatigue, coughs, sinus infections and even cancers.

After many years, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recognised formaldehyde, one of the substances emitted, as a probable carcinogen and regulated its use. Modern office furniture is less toxic. Between 1985 and 2005 the level of formaldehyde given off by cubicles fell by half. But poor ventilation is still common. Many studies have shown it causes lower productivity and increased sick leave.

Other cubicle-related health problems have taken longer to emerge. Because cubicles provide only the illusion of privacy, not the real thing, they do nothing to stop infectious diseases. Sharing an office raises the chances of getting more than two colds a year. In 2011 Danish scientists found that workers whose offices held at least six people took 62% more sick leave than those in private offices. And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too.

Open-plan offices are noisier and more interruption-prone. Too much noise causes high blood pressure, sleep problems and difficulty in concentrating. And cubicles’ flimsy walls do little to dampen sound. In studies where sound levels were raised from 39 to 51 decibels—roughly equivalent to moving from an average living room to a road with light traffic—participants were more tired and less motivated.

Whereas cubicles fail to block unwanted noise, they do all too well at blocking much-needed light. Many cubicle-dwellers see no daylight during office hours, with miserable effects on their well-being. A recent study found that workers deprived of sunlight get less sleep and physical activity than those who sit by windows. There are likely to be other ill effects from sitting in an artificially lit box all day: hospital patients recover faster and take fewer painkillers when they have more daylight.

Views matter, too. A study in 2003 in Sacramento found that call-centre workers with the best views processed calls 6-12% faster than those with no view. Office workers with better views were much more likely to describe themselves as healthy, and less likely to say they were fatigued. They also performed 10-25% better on tests of mental function and memory recall. Higher cubicle partitions were associated with working more slowly.

Cubicles even make people behave badly. Researchers at Cornell studied 229 employees at eight firms and found that those in cubicles were more prone than those in open-plan offices to have long, loud conversations—sometimes unrelated to work—with colleagues or on the phone. The reason seems to be that cubicles mask the social cues such as facial expressions and body language that influence social interactions. They thus make it easier to eat a smelly lunch or guffaw on the phone, oblivious to the reactions of those nearby. Those missing cues also interfere with other elements of good etiquette, such as not startling people or interrupting them when they are busy.

So partial privacy is in some ways worse than none at all. Conversations in cubicles are widely audible, but it is impossible to know who is listening, and humans, who made it through prehistory by keeping an ear out for predators, like to know where sounds are coming from. In a cubicle farm the origins of a sound—a chatting colleague, a ringing phone or a tapping keyboard—are hard to decipher. People try to adjust to the unsatisfactory combination of public and private: some say “knock knock” when approaching a cubicle; signs and headphones are used to signal “do not disturb”. Workers, the Cornell study suggested, like closed offices best of all. But open-plan offices are preferred to cubicles.

Why, then, are cubicle farms still being built? Perhaps because privacy is so valued that office planners opt for the illusion of it, rather than the undisguised reality of communal space. And a cubicle can be personalised: how about wallpaper, a rug, fairy lights or a chandelier? Some cube-dwellers hang curtains at the entrance, and it is possible to buy a door. One website shows how to make a fake window. It is all reminiscent of laboratory mice building nests in the most unpropitious surroundings.

On top of all this, cubicle workers who feel that the walls are closing in on them are onto something. When cubicle spaces are renovated, says a design firm, they often shrink from eight feet by ten per person, to five foot by five. In 1994 the average North American office worker had 90 square feet of space. By 2010 this was 75 square feet. (Executive management gained floor space over the same period, according to the International Facility Management Association.)

For reasons of economy, if nothing else, a return to private offices seems unlikely. But mobile technology is making it possible to work anywhere. Could it also offer an escape from the cubicle farm?

Breaking down barriers

One early attempt to reshape the workplace to take advantage of new technology was the “future office” created by Chiat/Day, an American advertising agency, in the 1990s. Data ports were scattered around so that workers could plug in their (pre-wireless) laptops wherever they were. Receivers in the ceiling allowed them to use radiophones. Intended to mimic a college campus, it had neither private offices nor cubicles, but instead clusters of couches and tabletops, with almost no personal space apart from some small lockers.

Design magazines loved it, but it was a disaster. One employee took to carting her things around in a child’s red wagon. Work suffered as people lost documents and struggled to find laptops, phones or places to sit. Turf wars ensued as some camped out in favourite spots or ordered underlings to arrive early to nab equipment.

Now Herman Miller, the firm that, however unintentionally, started the shift to cubicles, is trying to reshape the office yet again. The “Living Office” is a new attempt to combine the best of private and social space. It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and separated by low, clear partitions. Workers can also perch at a counter-top next to the coffee station, or lounge on sofas in a plaza or café-style seating in a courtyard. Benches nicknamed “landing strips” are placed outside conference rooms to encourage post-meeting chats. Pods are available for concentrated work, and even for relaxation. Everywhere there are glass-encased meeting rooms and a few solo spaces. About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk.

Light streams in and sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory.

Open-plan and flexible workspaces are spreading. Almost all the offices Herman Miller supplies in Asia are now open-plan; Microsoft’s Singapore offices have no assigned desks. When open-plan offices are designed to suit a wide variety of working styles and tasks, even senior executives can be keen. One at Mars Drinks in West Chester, Pennsylvania, is slightly wistful when he recalls his previous job, which came with a private office with a balcony overlooking the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. But he is more productive now, he says, in an open-plan area with other senior staff.

Such redesigns could be a more palatable way to save space than simply squeezing workers into smaller boxes. Intel recently decided to rethink its offices when it realised that 60% of its cubicles were empty most of the time. Herman Miller, which practises what it preaches, has about seven desks per ten staff at its own offices; even senior managers work in a cluster of open-plan desks. At Britain’s Department for Trade and Industry, occupancy levels rarely reached 60%; it and several other British public-sector organisations have done similar redesigns, cutting from one desk per person to around eight desks per ten.

What workers need from their offices has long been clear. A flexible workspace that encourages movement, combined with mobile technology, could finally liberate them from the cubicle farm—but only if employers pay heed to the evidence, rather than the short-term savings. Even cubicles were Utopian before the accountants took over.

Life After ........

2015-02-05T17:09:00.001+05:30

Davaun T Kurcz

n a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the

other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be

something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare

ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery.

What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light

than here.

Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from

our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t

understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And

eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord

supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical

cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically

excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and

maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need

this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life,

then why has no one has ever come back from there?

Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is

nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us

nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will

meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother?

That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded

by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her

this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that

She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in

silence and you focus and you really listen, you can

perceive Her presence,and you can hear Her loving voice,

calling down from above.”

- Útmutató a Léleknek

About a Brilliant Child Artist.......

2015-01-31T17:36:00.002+05:30

About Edmund Thomas Clint: http://youtu.be/nNmEMz0D5JY

India's dilemma

2015-01-23T20:40:00.002+05:30

Paradoxes and Dilemmas

N.N.Sachitanand

Here is a perfect analysis of India's dilemma which no body wants to look at and do the needful to resolve it. Not sure whether even Modi will resolve it

That India is a land of extreme contrasts and diversity has almost become a cliché. What is much lesser known is that it is also a nation of paradoxes. And, arising from these paradoxes are dilemmas which almost paralyse the government from taking bold, curative steps.

Take , for example, energy. The country has the fourth largest coal reserves in the world . Coal is crucial to the growth of electricity availability in the country since 60 % of our power generation comes from coal-fired power plants. Logically, our thermal power plants should have been having comfortable stocks of coal. In fact,   India should have been a major coal exporter.

Contrarily, our output of domestic coal has been so low as to leave many of our power plants perennially teetering on low coal stocks.   Instead of exporting coal our imports of the mineral have been steadily rising for the past decade . Last year we were the world’s third largest importer of coal at 180 million tonnes.

Why have we not been able to raise our domestic coal production in line with the growing demand from the power sector ? Part of the problem is the inefficiency of the public sector mining company, Coal India Ltd., which was a near monopoly till recently.

But, the short supply is also because most of our coal deposits lie in forested and tribal areas and tough environmental as well as land acquisition laws prevent quick opening up and expansion of mines. The dilemma here : how can we preserve our forests and protect tribal habitations and yet mine more coal to provide energy for the nation’s growth ?

For those advocating alternatives , here are some cold facts. The nuclear route has proved very expensive and is dependent on imported fuel; big hydro has its own environmental issues while   solar and wind power cannot provide base loads.

Let us come to the issue of food security. The foundation of providing this security is the store of grain with the Government - owned Food Corporation of India ( FCI ). The paradox here is that FCI’s godowns are bulging with grain, so much so that there is no covered storage place left. A 2013 report estimated that FCI had a 40-percent shortage in storage space, for a total stock of 82 million tonnes. The corporation has to store fresh purchases in the open, with consequent loss from rain and rodents. Yet, there are millions who, if not starving , do not have enough to eat.

But the FCI cannot just give away the grains it cannot store for that would cause a collapse in the market price of food grains and put farmers in distress. Nor can it stop purchase of grains from the farmers since procurement by the FCI is not just to shore up for an emergency backup but also to provide a floor price, to ensure that farmers are not forced into a distress sale. So, even with bulging stocks, part of which is rotting and no place to store, the FCI has to go on buying. There is the dilemma.

India is known to contain the world’s largest population of diabetics, somewhere around 65 million. And this number is growing by leaps and bounds due to our genetic makeup ( higher degree of insulin resistance ) , increasingly sedentary lifestyle and poor food habits. In such a situation, the last thing one would expect the Government to do is to enable the general population to access sugar at lower, controlled prices and support sugar cane farming. Yet, that is precisely what it has been doing all these years.

Sugar cane is one of the most irrigation-intensive crops ( several times that of cereal crops ) and surface water is quite scarce in most regions of the country. So , sugar cane farmers resort to ground water irrigation. In fact, ground water accounts for over 80 % of the irrigation of sugar cane fields in two of the major sugar producing states – Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. This has resulted in drastic drops in the water table in most of the sugar cane producing regions. The dilemma for the Government is that if it frees sugar from controls, prices of the commodity could rise in this sugar-crazy nation, alienating a large chunk of the electorate.

It is very well known that alcohol addiction leads to domestic disharmony and violence, law and order problems. It takes an annual toll of 2.5 million lives due to diseases like liver cirrhosis, accidents arising from drunk driving etc. Spending on alcohol is one of the primary causes of sustained poverty among the low income group . Mahatma Gandhi’s impassioned plea for temperance was based on this fact.

Rightfully, for the welfare of the people, all state governments should impose prohibition. Yet, barring Gujarat, the home state of the Mahatma, prohibition is not in force elsewhere in the country. The dilemma here for the states is that taxes from liquor sales are a major source of their revenue. Then again, prohibition brings in its wake the production and distribution of illicit liquor as well as smuggling , with the consequent crime and health problems.

Air pollution arising from motor vehicle exhaust has become a major health problem in urban India. This has been the fallout of the economic liberalisation of 1991 which germinated a booming automobile industry with motor vehicle sales zooming up to 15 million 2/3 wheelers, 1.81 million passenger vehicles and 0.69 million commercial vehicles in 2013. In the coming years, this large annual addition to the stock of motor vehicles populating our roads is just going to go up, if the automobile industry’s plans fructify.

The problem is our cities are not designed , in terms of their road infrastructure ( both quality and quantity ) , to carry such a huge volume of motor vehicles. All it will lead to is more traffic chaos, more air pollution and more deaths and disabilities due to road accidents . The answer is staring the Government in the face : increase public transport and reduce the ease of acquisition of personal vehicles as the Singapore Government has been doing all these years.

But the dilemma is that the automobile industry is a major growth driver of the new economy . At its present rate of growth , the automobile industry’s turnover ( vehicles plus components ) is expected to touch $ 145 billion by 2016. It will account then for 10 % of the GDP and employ over 25 million persons.

If the Government tries to deccelerate the automobile industry’s growth by restricting acquisition of personal vehicles, the effect on the economy may be catastrophic. It is a Hobson’s choice for the country – endure increasing ill health due to pollution or economic ill-health due to curbing the indsutry !

The most ironic paradox, perhaps, concerns tobacco. That the consumption of tobacco products leads to cancer, pulmonary problems ( particularly TB ) and other diseases is well established. A research paper estimated that the economic cost of dealing with the deleterious effects of tobacco use in India in 2004 was around to be $1.7 billion , which was 16% more than the total excise tax revenues collected from all tobacco products in the financial year 2003–04 !

So far , the Government’s way of dealing with this is in a mild, peripheral manner, such as advertisement campaigns in the media about the ill effects of tobacco consumption, ban on distribution of chewing tobacco products, prohibiting smoking in public places, imposing heavy taxes on tobacco products etc. All these have hardly dented the consumption of tobacco in the country.

The most effective way to eradicate the problem is to put an end to the cultivation of tobacco in the country. India is the world’s third largest producer of tobacco. But this banning will mean jeopardising the livelihood of some 3.5 million persons engaged in tobacco farming, 5 million employed in bidi rolling ( mostly impoverished women ) and a few lakh tribals involved in collecting tendu leaves used in bidis, not to mention the loss of income to the lakhs of petty shop owners vending tobacco products.

So , there we have it : very tough choices faced by the Government - lives versus livelihood; health versus revenue; development versus environment; employment versus status quo and so on. It almost seems as if it is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t .

INTERVIEW : Math Genius Professor Manjul Bhargava: Full Transcript

2015-01-22T13:10:00.002+05:30

This is a good one..... do spend some time on it.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/india-questions-math-genius-professor-manjul-bhargava-full-transcript-651924

Manjul Bhargava (born 8 August 1974) is a Canadian-American mathematician. He is the R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, the Stieltjes Professor of Number Theory at Leiden University, and also holds Adjunct Professorships at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of Hyderabad. He is known primarily for his contributions to number theory.

Bhargava was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014. According to the International Mathematical Union citation, he was awarded the prize "for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves."

Harvard and MIT ( from the Outlook magazine)

2015-01-22T13:09:00.002+05:30

Quants vs Quals

Much has been said about the cultural differences between Harvard and its neighbour, MIT, the latter allegedly being quantitative in its approach, the former more qualitative. The story goes that at a local Cambridge supermart, an Express checkout counter had a great big sign above it saying, ‘FOR SHOPPERS WITH 5 PACKAGES OR LESS’. A student lands up here with a trolley piled high with groceries. The cashier turns to him, wearily, and asks, “So, are you one of those Harvard grads who can’t count, or one of those MIT ones who can’t read?”

About Human Brain ....

2014-12-19T22:27:00.000+05:30

The human brain is the single most complex thing in the known universe. Even in this time of medical wonders, we still have not been able to uncover the full secrets of this incredible organ. However, we do know some things about the most important organ in the body, and here are some interesting ones you should definitely know about:

1. The belief that humans only use 10% of their brains is incorrect. Each part of the brain has a specific function and the average person uses all the various parts of the brain.

2. Have you ever had such a headache it felt like your brain is going to explode? That's not actually your brain hurting, because the brain has no pain receptors at all. Mother nature assumes you don't need it because it's never exposed (thankfully) and is usually protected by our thick skull.

3.You must think that your buttocks are the fattiest part of the body, but it is in fact the brain with the most fat % in the body, about 60% of it is fat.

4. The brain has a texture similar to tofu, and enough liquid to fill a 2 liter (half a gallon) tank.

5. Thought creates 'pathways' that connect different parts of the brain. The more we repeat a thought, the more that pathway will become more central, wide and stable. That is why it is important not to think over and over about negative things, because they become permanent, and strong, pathways in your mind, and the chances are will force themselves on you more and more.

6. We think about 70,000 thoughts a day. A large part of these are 'automatic' thoughts that we repeat a lot, using our most 'established' thought pathways.

7. Most people dream about 4-7 dreams a night. 50% of those dreams are forgotten in the first minutes after waking. And the one we remember is usually one we were either just dreaming or a mix of all the dreams we had put together. No wonder they always seem so confusing.

8. Sleep is usually the time the brain uses to organize and put together the memories is accumulated throughout the day. And so, in many cases, before making big decisions it's better to 'sleep on it'.

9. The messages between the various brain cells (neurons) are passed in the form of weak electrical pulses. The brain creates 23 watt of electricity while awake, enough to light a lightbulb.

An image of a neuron

10. While we laugh, about 5 areas lit up in the brain simultaneously. So it's no laughing matter, laughing.

11. The reason tickling makes us laugh is that the brain becomes 'surprised' by this kind of touch, which is first interpreted as a threat. The uncontrollable laughter is actually a panic response by the body. That is why it's not possible to tickle ourselves.

12. The human brain has more 'wrinkles' and crevices than those of other animals. In this way, the brain gets more surface space, while staying at around the same size, and it is part of the reason for our increased intelligence.

13. Brain cells, or neurons, are not only found in the brain, but exist everywhere in the body the brain needs to send orders to, and all of them are connected to the brain.

14. Some archaeological findings think that our cranium has gotten smaller over the ages, but that doesn't mean our brain has become less powerful, only more efficient (see #12).

15. The brain alone uses 20% of all the oxygen we breathe and over 25% of the sugar we consume. Meaning, deep thoughts might cost the body resources just like sports can. Who said chess players are not athletes too?

16. The female and male sexual hormones cause a different brain to develop. Studies have found siginificant difference in the brain functions of male and female during social situations, decision making, pressure situations and more.

17. The brain isn't fully developed until the teen years are over. Multitasking, showing empathy and good decision making are some of the skills that develop a little later. This, we're sure you'll agree - explains A LOT.

18. The brain is constantly changing. Damage to one part of it may cause that part to change to a different location in the brain, especially if you are a baby or a child. Beyond that, every thought, experience or skill we encounter and learn changes the structure of our brain.

19. Memories aren't built in a linear progression. We only remember 'pictures' or moments, and we put together a story from them ourselves. That is why it's tricky to trust your memory, because you may have done some 'editing' without knowing it.

MySnaps from Jeddah

2014-12-09T18:34:00.001+05:30