Exciting times ahead

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Photo credit: Ochinko)

I have always dreamt of studying at the great institutions of the world like Stanford & MIT. Till now, it has just been a dream. But now the dream has come true atleast virtually.

Now great universities like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley have their courses online. Yes we had open courseware from MIT before but we now have courses which are even more interesting and captivating.

Thanks Khan Academy for starting this revolution. Though just a humble beginning, you have inspired many others and showed the way.

The most exciting ones are Udacity, edX and coursera. Just browse through them and pick your courses. I have taken web application engineering course in Udacity and learnt many things which I could have learnt with great difficulty very easily. It was taught by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and was really useful. I learnt about MemCached, Replication & Sharding from there in context. I am very very excited to take the new courses and courses unrelated to our work but which we are interested in from the very best in the world. Exciting times ahead indeed.

If you are are student, then I don't think there are better times than this :) . If you have read till here, do yourself a favour and just check out the below sites.

Udacity
edX
coursera

Versatile Mr. Richard Feynmann

I am not sure how many of you know about him. He is a nobel prize winning physicist. He is not talked about in the same breadth as Einstein or Edison and so he is not so famous (atleast I didn't know about him previously). I came to know of him from reddit where a link to one of his lectures was posted. It was very interesting. In no time, I came to his online home,  and started reading the anecdotes about him. Of particular interest was a speech given by him called - "What is Science" upon reading which I had a plenty of aha moments. Read the whole article. It is a gem. In that lecture Feynmann talks about how he learnt what science is. It is really amazing. Talking about how he got interested in science, he says

My father did it to me. When my mother was carrying me, it is reported--I am not directly aware of the conversation--my father said that "if it's a boy, he'll be a scientist." How did he do it? He never told me I should be a scientist. He was not a scientist; he was a businessman, a sales manager of a uniform company, but he read about science and loved it.When I was very young--the earliest story I know--when I still ate in a high chair, my father would play a game with me after dinner.He had brought a whole lot of old rectangular bathroom floor tiles from some place in Long Island City. We sat them up on end, one next to the other, and I was allowed to push the end one and watch the whole thing go down. So far, so good.Next, the game improved. The tiles were different colors. I must put one white, two blues, one white, two blues, and another white and then two blues--I may want to put another blue, but it must be a white. You recognize already the usual insidious cleverness; first delight him in play, and then slowly inject material of educational value.Well, my mother, who is a much more feeling woman, began to realize the insidiousness of his efforts and said, "Mel, please let the poor child put a blue tile if he wants to." My father said, "No, I want him to pay attention to patterns. It is the only thing I can do that is mathematics at this earliest level." If I were giving a talk on "what is mathematics," I would already have answered you. Mathematics is looking for patterns. (The fact is that this education had some effect. We had a direct experimental test, at the time I got to kindergarten. We had weaving in those days. They've taken it out; it's too difficult for children. We used to weave colored paper through vertical strips and make patterns. The kindergarten teacher was so amazed that she sent a special letter home to report that this child was very unusual, because he seemed to be able to figure out ahead of time what pattern he was going to get, and made amazingly intricate patterns. So the tile game did do something to me.)

Another interesting story hitting why just knowing the name of the effect or thing doesn't mean anything.

On the weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about nature, and so an, in the process. But the other children, friends of mine also wanted to go, and tried to get my father to take them. He didn't want to, because he said I was more advanced. I'm not trying to tell you how to teach, because what my father was doing was with a class of just one student; if he had a class of more than one, he was incapable of doing it.So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those day's as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."He said, 'It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody's name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say "the Fitz-Cronin effect," and I ask "What is the effect?" and I can't remember the name.I would like to say a word or two--may I interrupt my little tale--about words and definitions, because it is necessary to learn the words.It is not science. That doesn't mean, just because it is not science, that we don't have to teach the words. We are not talking about what to teach; we are talking about what science is. It is not science to know how to change Centigrade to Fahrenheit. It's necessary, but it is not exactly science. In the same sense, if you were discussing what art is, you wouldn't say art is the knowledge of the fact that a 3-B pencil is softer than a 2-H pencil. It's a distinct difference. That doesn't mean an art teacher shouldn't teach that, or that an artist gets along very well if he doesn't know that. (Actually, you can find out in a minute by trying it; but that's a scientific way that art teachers may not think of explaining.)In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, and that's all right. It's a good idea to try to see the difference, and it's a good idea to know when we are teaching the tools of science, such as words, and when we are teaching science itself.

there are many such stories, about inertia, about law of conservation of energy etc.. and we can feel the wonder he felt when he learnt about that. It is such an interesting story.  I was very much impressed by this talk. So I got hold of his book 'Surely you are joking Mr Feynmann' and started reading.

In that book in one place, he talks about his experience teaching Brazilian students who would answer any question but still not understand anything. It was because of the people just learning by rote and not really understanding anything.

If you think that all he did was just study, do research and teach then you are terribly mistaken. He is a versatile genius. He, at various times, was a radio repairman, a samba player and dancer in Brazil, a tumba drum player, a very experienced professional lock-picker (his stories about how he used to pick locks in Los Alamos are very interesting), an accomplished painter (so much so that he painted commissioned pictures),  a learner and speaker of other foreign languages(Spanish, Portugese, Japanese)
,a mayan hieroglyphics solver (he loved puzzles), a mind reader (literally) , a hallucination experiencer and many more. He really had a very very interesting life. Apart from the things mentioned above regarding what is science, I also learnt a very easy way of understanding physical theories. You just have to apply that theory on a valid physical object and see if the observations in the theories are right. that is a very very easy way to understand and remember the theories. I wonder why we don't do this more often.  I read the whole book in one sitting. It is full of  really witty, funny and interesting stories. You will come out with a whole different feeling after you read the book. You will really become a lot more interested in science. Even if you don't have any interest also, it is a very good read

What education in school should be...

I feel that education should help us discover ourselves and a good value based education to be the solution for lot of the ills plaguing the world. 

I discovered a wonderful article on the mindset of children at gayatrivantillu searching for some recipes. I was amazed with that and I reproduce the whole article verbatim here.

Can we really provide what our Child wants?

Following are the two articles which appeared in Hindu a new paper in India. Reading both these articles would definitely make us ponder on the captioned topic.

============================================================

Inumella Sesikala in Hindu dated 08/11/09

Amma, I don’t want to go to school.

I am just a child, Ma. I want someone to tell me stories and teach me. I want to watch tadpoles and butterflies and know what they eat, where they sleep. I want to climb a hill and catch a cloud to see what it is made of.

I want to wait with my hands in the stream and feel the fish swimming.

I want to run with the puppies, sing with the birds, and play with paper-boats in the rain.

I want to lie down on the soft green grass and hear the wind whisper.

Only then I want to learn more about them from the printed word.

Only after my imagination is fired, my thirst to know more has begun, a seed of ‘Why?’ is planted in my brain.

Amma, I feel trapped in the prison-like classroom. I feel my spirit slowly weakening with the monotonous teaching. Often, when I ask a basic question our teachers say, “No time for all that. Let us finish the syllabus.”

I get tired of studying just for marks without pausing to truly understand.

I want to go to the museum with my classmates and hear my teacher explain the stories of the artefacts.

I want plenty of nature trips where real Biology classes would be held.

I want to see colourful videos of volcanic eruptions and deep-sea dwellings.

I want our whole school to visit together the historic and cultural places in my city.

I want to learn astronomy after looking through a telescope once.

I don’t want to just read them in my textbooks; I want to see, hear, touch, smell and taste whatever I can. I want to experience.

Why can’t the school make at least one such trip every year?

And, I cannot stoop down anymore to carry my school sack. My back is ready to break. Why should I carry all the books everyday? Why can’t we have only two subjects per day? Or, why don’t we have lockers like in the Western schools? And, why should I squeeze in that over-crowded auto?

But, Amma, growing up no longer seems to be fun. I see only more of homework, winter projects, summer classes, weekly tests, monthly tests, quarterly, half-yearly and annual exams, external competitive exams, more tests, more competitions, more pressure, more stress…

When can I sing, paint, dance, swim, or cycle?

When I can just play cricket or even hide-and-seek?

What happened to that minimum sleep that you always say a child needs?

Why should I always study, study?

Amma, I am scared of increasing atrocities by untrustworthy teachers, ragging-raving seniors, acid-loving nuts, perverted adults…

Ma, right now, I don’t want to be a doctor, engineer or anything else.

I just want to feel safe and secure, play and learn without any stress before I become an adult like you.

I only want to enjoy my childhood, Ma.

=======================================

The former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, writes in Hindu dated 12/11/09:

I was happy to see the article “I only want to enjoy my childhood, ma” by Inumella Sesikala (Open Page, Nov. 8). I liked the article very much, which is a dream of every child. Creativity of children has to come out from the classroom. Some of us had such opportunities. Our children should go to primary school only at the age of six. Till then, we have to promote creativity of the children with great teachers and an innovative classroom environment.

Yesterday, when I was reading the book Spiritual Intelligence, The Ultimate Intelligence by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, I came across the poem, “ The Student’s prayer.”

“The young son of a Chilean biologist, Umberto Maturana, became unhappy at school because he felt his teachers were making it impossible for him to learn. They wanted to teach him what they knew, rather than drawing out what he needed to learn. As a result Maturana wrote “ The Student’s Prayer”, of which this translation is an abridged version. It perfectly expresses the spiritually intelligent individual’s response to the conforming pressures of parents, teachers, bosses or the crowd.

The Student’s Prayer

Don’t impose on me what you know,

I want to explore the unknown

And be the source of my own discoveries.

Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.

The world of your truth can be my limitation;

Your wisdom my negation.

Don’t instruct me; let’s walk together.

Let my richness begin where yours ends.

Show me so that I can stand

On your shoulders.

Reveal yourself so that I can be

Something different.

You believe that every human being

Can love and create.

I understand, then, your fear

When I ask you to live according to your wisdom.

You will not know who I am

By listening to yourself.

Don’t instruct me; let me be.

Your failure is that I be identical to you.”

I thought, there is a connectivity among young hearts even beyond ocean — “I only want to enjoy my childhood, ma” and “The Student’s Prayer.”

It gives an amazing clarity about how teaching school kids should be. 

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How I ended up taking up Engineering ? - Thanks to my maths teacher.!!!

I grew up in a very picturesque village called Devapur, in Adilabad District of Andhra Pradesh, India which is surrounded by hills on every side. During the reason season with clouds touching the peaks of the hills, it will be just amazing. Just around our colony, if we walk for some distance we will go in to the hills and the picture below is one of the entry into those forests on the hill. I and some friends of mine used to just around in the hills in the evenings of summers. 

One of the routes into the forests 

I love being in nature. We had a big vegetable garden behind our house. Every year before the start of rainy season, I would gather seeds of bottle gourd, ridge gourd, bitter gourd, beans,tindora, spinach etc and wait for the first rains to plant them. I used to have an amazing feeling seeing them germinate, grow. After some days we used to build supports for the creepers to grow and wait for them to bear fruits. Then I used to pluck them with pride after they grow sufficiently. To stop from cows or pigs from eating all these, I, my brother, my father and mother worked hard before the start of rainy season to build a fence around our house. To this day I remember the memories of those days. It used to be hard work and  we had a lemon tree in the backyard, sometimes we got pricked by the thorns but at the end of the day it felt so satisfactory. Also, we had a very big playground in our village and I used to enjoy a lot sitting on the grass in the big ground with wind blowing on my face. Everyone would have had memories of playing the ground, but I was very bad at games - that is another story though.  We had all sorts of fruit trees in our house. Guava, Pomegranate, custard-apple, mango, berries, banana trees around our house. I used to be very proud of our garden and I loved being in nature. When I learned of photosynthesis, plant propogation etc, i was naturally interested. Botany interested me. So I kind of decided that I would be mostly studying botany later. 

A view from my backyard

But all of this changed after seventh standard. We got one teacher named Shailaja, for mathematics.  I was a not up to the mark in mathematics. In the sixth standard, I didn't understand half of the syllabus especially geometry and got just 60% marks in the annual exams. So I was not that interested in mathematics. But Shailaja madam was very passionate about maths.More than what she taught, how she taught was very much instrumental in making me lose my fear of mathematics. She used to tell us about Shakuntala Devi. That year we had equations and in-equations in our syllabus. So she used to give us puzzles on solving equations which were very much fun to solve. She also told me to solve all the example problems in the text book. All these went a long way in increasing my interest in mathematics. We again had the same teacher again in our X standard. By this time, I was very much confident in my ability in mathematics.

One day, madam told us her own story of how she always wanted to be an engineer and told the story of Ramanujam and his mathematical prowess. We were floored at the story. She increased the profile of maths over other subjects and she romanticized engineering which in turn increased my interest in mathematics more 

And I ended up getting 99% in mathematics.!!! 

So now I was equally open to going mpc way or bipc way. After coming to know that medical education takes a lot of time, I finally ended up taking MPC and going on to become an engineer.  

So thank you Shailaja mam if I have successfully completed my engineering and working here in the US, it is because of you.. 

Of all my school teachers, my English teacher and Maths teacher have influenced my life very much. Though I couldn't know the importance then, I can appreciate them better now. I always wanted to thank them personally but due to various reasons I couldn't express that. So here are my thanks to them. My thanks to my English teacher is here.

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Want to Invest in Stocks ? An Excellent Introduction To Investing Basics

I just came across an amazing video lecture series by Salman Khan, (not the actor)  of the Khan Academy. He was an employee of a hedge fund company before resigning to make videos full time. His youtube channel has millions of views and it has changed lives of lot of people. He says he got the inspiration to quit working in the hedge fund company after he received this mail from one youtube user.

Mr. Khan,No teacher has ever done me any good--this may sound harsh but I mean it quite literally. I was force fed medication to keep me from talking and chastised for not speaking out when called on. Where I am from blacks are not welcomed with open arms into schools--my mother and her sisters had to go to a small shack two hours from home when they went to school. About five years ago my family collected enough money to move from where i was born, so that I could have a chance at having an education and living a real life. But without a real mastery of elementary math I was slow to progress. I am now in college and learning more than I ever have in my life. But an inadequate math background has been holding me back. I found the Kahn Academy in June of 2009, right after I completed Math 141 ( a college algebra course). I have spent the entire summer on your youtube page. And I just wanted to thank you for everything you are doing. You are a Godsend. Last week I tested for a math placement exam and I am now in Honors Math 200. No question was answered incorrectly. My placement test holder was so impressed by the breadth of my knowledge of math that he said I should be in Linear algebra. Mr. Khan, I can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family. I wish you and the Khan Academy the best of luck,

His channel has about 4100 videos, which he created working part-time. It is really amazing.

India is an attractive destination for investing in the stock market. But if you don't know what to look for while investing you might end up loosing a lot of money. With this aim, i was looking for good startup tutorials on investing. And this series by Sal is a good answer for that. Just check it out and you will be thankful.I am embedding the first video of the series here for sampling


Thanks Khan. You are inspiring.

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Imagining the Future...The Venus Project

I would like to tell you some stories... First two individual stories of Henry and Nitin... 

Henry were having a treat at their home because his daughter, Jane got admitted into Yale University. But the next day the family was aghast to know that they cannot send Jane his daughter to Yale. The reason was that Henry was laid off when his corporation downsized sending some of their jobs to offshore. Henry's job was fitting the precision gears in a car manufacturing company. It was a very specialized job and Henry was proud of it. He pretty much worked on the same thing his whole life and now suddenly he was left jobless. All the competitors of his company had also outsourced that job to some other country. There was no way he could get a new job so soon. All of his family's dreams were finished now. He just took a home loan to buy housing which was available cheap due to the collapse of the housing bubble. In just a few days his life became upside down..!!!

Nitin loved dancing but his father always wanted his son to study in IIT and hence pushed him. He would never allow him to practice dance and added to that he sent him to various coachings for IIT entrance from VIII standard itself. Grudgingly, Nitin moved forward till his +2. And the pressure from his father was increasing daily. On the results day,  Nitin's corpse came home. He couldn't pass his +2 exams. People who came to pay their last homages reminisced how well he had danced in the annual day celebrations in his college. 

So what did you fee? Did you feel that those two were unfortunate lot among all of us or that these are general trends in the society? 

What happens if all the jobs are outsourced and they have more people who don't have any work? What happens if the creativity of every child is nipped out in the bud and they are not allowed to do what they want to? What if a whole country has more people dependent on government subsidies rather than the money they earn? Do you find it difficult to imagine that in the future there might be water wars? What happens if a country doesn't have any energy and also doesn't have money to import it? These and many other thoughts were swimming in my mind before I gave up those thoughts. But by chance I discovered something called 'TheVenusProject' a project started by a scientist called   JACQUE FRESCO  who feels that we have all that is required to solve all the problems in the world. He says that we can go beyond politics, war and poverty and achieve a high quality of living for everyone. 

To give you a short summary of it. You all know that all the things we consume are coming from the earth only. If we need to produce something, everything physical is only coming from the earth. Money was invented as a means of exchange of value. But that is not sufficient now as with money it is possible to artificially alter the balance of correct exchange. Just imagine if there is no money. We can just walk into a shop and get whatever we want. See how much pressure it relieves on Henry's life. That means he need not worry about their food. If there is no obligation of earning money then why would anyone be stuck at a job which he doesn't like or why would Nitin's father push him to study in any particular college? It would grant human's enormous freedom to do what they want. Yes you might think then how will the work we do get done? There he takes the help of highly developed AI based machines which do most of our work. No, don't think tangentially like the bad robot in I, Robot. Robots are always machines and they just follow our instructions. You might get the doubts like how will people and what about the scarcity of oil and water? Jack again tells us various renewable energy alternatives and talks about building houses on the oceans. Now think about it again. Don't you think it is possible?

I certainly think that we are going in that direction only but the thing is that it might take a lot of time before people realize that money is not being used correctly. And the people who are at a a powerful position always want to maintain a status quo and hence it won't be short of another revolution before government stops using money. But then we would have moved into a  different phase of human evolution. It might not happen in our lifetime but surely it will happen. What do you think ?

There are couple of books available from his website. 

I it is way ahead of its time, but surely one day or the other this condition will be reached. And we as hopefuls can speed it up by spreading it. 

I am super excited about this. Hope it reaches majority of people in the world.

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Educating one child at a time.

One of my friend was discussing with me about a leader who is viewed as the man of the masses. While people lionise  him as a great leader who changed the face of A.P with many new water projects, insurance for the poor and free power and other doles. And now the new Chief minister has no option but to revert back all of those schemes, owing to the dire situation of finances in the state but still the old leader is one who is thought of a being  a great leader. This is all ignorance of what happened really.India spends large part of its GDP for education of its people but the results are poor. Atanu forcefully argues that the government of India has a vested interest in keeping all the people uneducated. Thats why I feel that education is a must for a change of the future of India. And hence education is one topic which is close to me in relation to development of India and of every person.
With all the negative news around, listening to one Ted talk has made me feel hopeful.

It was the talk of Shukla Bose, the founder of Parikrma Humanity Foundation in Ted. She says how they have started a school for children of slumdwellers. They teach them from KG till PUC, so that they can build the future of each child without caring about the numbers. They will give them meals three times, they will help if there are any problems in the family of the student. If all that is not enough, they teach these people in English medium in ICSE syllabus, the best syllabus in India. What made me feel so happy was that the children speaking English so fluently better than what I could speak at that time. It gives me so much hope that if the mode successfully replicated can do a lot to improve education in India.

Go watch the video here



They teach arts, music and sports too. There is a report done by Neilsen saying that the students have done a lot better compared to normal students in other government schools.

Their model is end to end education with emphasis on circle of life, education, healthcare, family care and nutrition. Not only regular teachers, but professors and other countries and universities like Stanford also give guest lectures here. Due to this the students grow in confidence that they are no way underprivileged compared to students in other schools. Also their activities are supported by many Corporates but I am sure, they could use your donations. To teach their method to other schools, they have started an Education Transformation Center. I wish them all the best and just imagine if there are more schools like this all over the country. If you are interested in contributing to a better India, surely this would be a great avenue.
Head over here to contribute. Parikrma has made India a lot better by educating just 'one child at a time.'

This is another step in the direction where real leaders will be hailed and people who earn hundreds of crores illegally and splash a crore on various populist schemes will be rightly nailed. Long way to go but a step in the right direction... Long live parikrma

To This Government I Vote

My company is conducting a competion on 'My Vote goes to' ... As the readers of the blog know, development of our country being one of my passions, I decided to submit an entry. 

This is what I am planning to submit 

My government is one which doesn’t make me worry about security, terrorism, power cuts or bad infrastructure but provides a healthy environment where I can mind my own business.

My government is one which doesn’t fragment the society based on caste, religion or region but recognizes all are created equal and provides a level playing field for equitable development.

 My government is one which doesn’t stop with providing temporary relief like handouts when calamities strike but work towards eliminating the root of the problem to provide permanent solutions.  

My government is one which doesn’t stunt growth through reservations and quotas but gives everyone the confidence and empowerment to break the shackles and grow in the world.

My government is one which doesn’t make availing basic government services a dreadful thing but makes it a pleasure by eliminating corruption and automating processes.

My government is one where the disabled or people unable to work are not made to feel that world is a bad place to live but are given confidence that they can not only live with dignity but serve uniquely.

My government is one which works more to provide better education, livelihood, healthcare, security and faster justice to its people than thinking of each as a business to make money.

My government is one which doesn’t get caught up in petty religious or personal issues, but work on promoting sustainable livelihood and world peace.

My government is one which has grand vision for the county and is willing to lead the citizens towards it by encouraging research and innovation.

What other things can we give to the government?? 

Obstacles to learning - How to make learning permanent

I am an avid reader. I read a lot, but lot of it is not sticky in the sense that I forget most of it soon. Though I read some for passing time, some being interesting and some more being necessary. I just came across this  post in Purple Pointr blog. 

He mentions three reasons for it, namely not understanding the words, going too fast and missing some concepts and just reading the theory without application. Now I understand that i've been guilty of these three things which affected my retention of things learned. If we and use this, surely it would be of great help. 

Ofcourse, the best way to get something is to teach it.