mind × the + gap ™

The Election season is upon us again, and it is only fitting that The Supreme Court of India has taken up a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Electoral Bonds that were introduced in 2017 as a means of donations to political parties.  The capital involved is expectedly huge. After all, India is the world’s fifth largest economy and the most populous nation that goes through a 5-year election cycle with an overlap between 28 state elections and the national one. Electoral Bonds, as a fund-raising instrument, are primarily targeted towards corporates – including public limited companies except for those run by the government. And while the constitutional bench of Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice would evaluate it for constitutionality, it is important to conduct an analysis from the perspective of Companies Act 2013 as well as from the purview of good Corporate governance. This article offers an in-depth analysis of these implications.  Historica...

A tribute to Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who  introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book  The Innovator's Dilemma , which, in turn, led  The Economist  to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time."  Even more influential  for some would be his 2012 co-authored book How Will You Measure Your Life? . [try here ]. Christensen  passed away in Boston on Jan 23, 2020.

If you haven't taken the Stanford's Machine Learning MOOC by Prof Andrew Ng on Coursera, you are less likely to be taken seriously in the AI community. Or so they say. Somewhere in 2008 Andrew Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program that placed a number of Stanford courses online, for free. Andrew himself was responsible for teaching one of these courses, Machine Learning, which consisted of video lectures by him, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class. The "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and started in October 2011, with over 100,000 students registered for its first iteration; and became one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford professors. Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller left Stanford to co-found Coursera in 2012. The Machine Learning course was one of the key offerings on the platform. And it continues to be #1 (check  here ,  here , or comprehensively here...

JEFF BEZOS SPENT AN EVENTFUL TIME with his larger Amazon.com engineering team in India recently. The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here ] ). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course). In between these two was a private dinner organised with a dozen or so CEO's in Bangalore. This paraphrased post is thanks to one of them [try here ] "minuting" the following five points that Jeff talked about among other things. #1: What was the hardest moment of your life? Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon. Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out t...

Cheers to Life!

There are two kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are broadly defined by wiki as follows: The Pygmalion effect , or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. On the other hand is the Golem effect , in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The theme was in the main stray of many English literary works during the victorian era. One of which is George Bernard Shaw's play titled "Pygmalion" from which Rosenthal effect gets its name. In Shaw's play, the protagonist, a professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. (The pl...

YOU CAN CONSIDER GOOGLE your friend only if the two of you play games with each other -- especially with Google the search box. I call our little game Bubble-game. The rule is simple. You need to come up with a vaguely familiar term that you know from somewhere -- desirably from within the Google Apps ecosystem that you personally use on various gadgets. Again, the only rule is that the term should be only vaguely familiar, if at all. It is not necessary to know the precise spelling. So then, you turn to Google.com and ask. From within the context of your 'relationship' with Google, the algorithm would suggest to you the possible answers in the form of search results. And depending on how extensively you use Google --or, to put it more socially-- depending on how well Google 'knows' you, you should find traces in the search results that may indicate where you might have encountered the term for the first time and the subsequent info-branches it created thereafter: ...

IN THE INTRODUCTORY paragraph of this legendary paper for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker writes: We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.  But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change the course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years. To do those things well, you will need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence. Marking a small foot...

(My junior) Noble: I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom, for me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world  I see skies of blue, and clouds of white The bright blessed day, dark sacred night And I think to myself What a wonderful world  The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky Are also on the faces, of people going by I see friends shaking hands, sayin', "How do you do?" They're really sayin', "I love you"  I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow They'll learn much more, than I'll ever know And I think to myself What a wonderful world  Yes, I think to myself What a wonderful world Oh yeah...   ~ Louis Armstrong Real:  http://youtu.be/CF3zDhm6EC8

Welcome 2013 as the twenty-first century moves into teen ages. Season's Greetings, and Best Wishes.

Earlier this month SEED magazine published this very interesting article by George Sugihara, theoretical biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, on how deep mathematical models tie the events of climat change, epileptic seizure, fishery collapses, and risk management surrounding the global financial crisis. Excerpts: [...] Economics is not typically thought of as a global systems problem. Indeed, investment banks are famous for a brand of tunnel vision that focuses risk management at the individual firm level and ignores the difficult and costlier, albeit less frequent, systemic or financial-web problem. Monitoring the ecosystem-like network of firms with interlocking balance sheets is not in the risk manager’s job description. A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean managem...

Here  is to revisit Lewis Pugh's amazing 10m "Radical, tactical shift" TED talk, declaring, "There is nothing more powerful than a made-up mind." See also: Go here for Lewis Pugh's personal pages. Go here for Pugh's TED profile, and here for the video on TED's YouTube channel.

From Ivo Velitchkov's Enterprise Architecture blog - "Beliefs and Capabilities": [try here ] "From the observable data and experience we select some and affix meaning to it. This forms the basis of our assumptions. And then we come to conclusions which in turn influence our beliefs. Our beliefs are the basis of our actions which bring more data and experience from which we select some, affix meaning and so on. We tend to believe that we affix meaning to the observable data, oblivious of the selection we always make. In a similar way we believe that we draw conclusions by clear reasoning, while we actually always apply some assumptions." Beliefs and Capabilities: The Inference Cycle: See also: Go here for Chris Argyris's Harvard paper: Teaching Smart People How To Learn [PDF] Go here for SystemWiki entry - Ladder of Inference: Short Circuiting Reality Go here for Argyris's theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational le...

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." — Neil Armstrong Signature of Aerospace engineer Neil Armstrong, the "giant leap" guy who helped keep the moon relevant and  famous for science.

In this persuasive lecture on ethics about modern diet and eating habits, Dr Peter Singer , the Utilitarian philosopher and professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, highlights and questions ethical issues concerning food involving animals, its corresponding cost to the ecology and considerations for animal rights that the humans have been, perhaps rather conveniently, avoiding to acknowledge. In his typical free-thinking, lets-face-it approach characterized by pragmatism rooted in down-to-earth reality, one can clearly bear witness to Prof Singer avoiding all possible temptations or invitations to indulging into any kind of rhetoric. Or so much as letting any sentimentalities enter into the frame of reasoning even while discussing gross cruelty to animals and the overall ecological impact it draws. The approach remains factual and clinical, and the presentation is driven by data in its most part. For philosophical indulgences around the issue, the Q...

This blog entry is a fan-post about choosing the three best blog entires that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has posted over the month of March '12. Arguably, this is also a lazy task. Understandably, this will need some explaining. Scott Adams is a genius with hypnotic calibre. He can even prove it by producing a certain Certification in Hypnotism that hangs on his office wall, and about which we, the ardent followers of his humor blog at Dilbert.com and elsewhere such as his occasional NYT and WSJ columns, have heard more often than perhaps the issuing authorities themselves. That a certain obscure yet timely reference or reminder of being a certified hypnotist can turn his otherwise benign looking paragraphs into mesmerizing wand of a wizard is something only a certified hypnotist can do (I agree that this logic defeats itself, but I never claimed that hypnotism has anything to do with logic. If you have read Scott as regularly as he writes you have already le...