Randy Pausch – Time Management

Just as the Randy’s Last Lecture was inspiring, I found his lecture on time management even more useful, perhaps because I had such poor time management skills. The lecture contains lots of nuggets of wisdom that are practical and easy to follow. You might want to also download the power point slides to accompany when watching the lecture.

Randy Pausch – Living life to the fullest

Randy Pausch is lecturer at Carnegie Mello University. He is full of life, exuberance and humor. And he is dying from pancreatic cancer. Watch his uplifting and inspiring “Last Lecture” to find out about his message on living life to the fullest, a video that has been downloaded several millions times over the web. Alternatively, you can watch the shortened version of Randy’s talk on the Oprah Winfrey show.

America America

Anti-american song based on the music of a nice Tamil and very well edited. And I learned a new word too – “bushit”

Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story

 “Imagine a world where everyone had access to the sum of all human knowledge… that’s what we are doing with Wikipedia”

– Jimmy Wales

I have been a long time supporter and fan of Wikipedia and am excited to know that a documentary is being made about it. Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story is expected to be released for international audience in 2008. In the meanwhile here is the trailer.

Olympic 2012 logo – the worst ever

I meant to blog about this when I first saw it but the shock of it was too much. Here is the result of what £400,000 and many years of planning has produced. Weep and cry at this stupidity!

My first reaction was what the heck is this horrible shocking pink grafiti is. Then a friend pointed out that it resembles Lisa Simpson performing oral sex. To add insult to the injury, the logo which will be used for olympics and paralympics, was feared to cause epilepsy episodes. A blogger has even compared it to several other poorly drawn olympic logos but the London 2012 is the worst by far!

I don’t really understand how they could have gone from the very decent and appealing logo used in the Olympic bid to this piece of garbage.

BBC news online has been accepting submissions for alternative Olympic logo proposal and here are some. Given that these were probably done by non-professional designers in a short space of time, they are vastly superior to the official one.

Reasons to use R

I use a statistical software called R (http://www.R-project.org). I would highly recommend anyone who needs to manipulate, analyse and visualise data to check the software out.

Here are some reasons to use R over other statistical softwares:

1. It is completely free to download and use without restrictions.
2. It is also open source which means you can read the source code of all functions and modify it yourself.
3. It has good documentation for most functions. There are a number of significantly well written introductory R books, tutorials, reference cards, reference manuals, vignettes and newsletters.
4. A sensible default values and error messages is available for most functions. This is because majority of the functions and packages are written by experts in the field who are aware of the common and frequent pitfalls that a naive user might fall into.
5. Large number of packages dealing with many areas of applications. A lot of statistical procedures are already available, so you do not need to waste time re-inventing the wheel everytime. Plus the many different ways to store, manipulate, analyse and visualise your data, though a bit overwhelming to new users at first, is intended to make you think about your data.
6. Active, responsive and vibrant R community as seen in the helpful R mailing lists. But please do check the helpful posting guide before posting in order to ellicit the informative responses.
7. Ability to work in an interactive and Integrated Development Environment which means you are able to debug errors and visualise results on the fly without having to first compile and then execute it.
8. Cross platform compatability means that you are able to develop it on one environment and then implement it in many different platforms with nominal changes (if any). I usually develop and test the codes on either Windows of Mac with small datasets before running the codes on bigger datasets or bigger simulations on large UNIX or on Linux clusters.
9. Various benchmark shows that R is just as fast or faster than many statistical softwares for various tasks. Here is an example of such a benchmark test which is outdated but still indicative. Many personal experience of people who have used multiple statistical softwares suggest that R codes are much easier to understand (but this depends on how one writes it).
10. One can use Sweaveto automate reports that need to be compiled on regular or frequent basis.

BioConductor contains a collection of many R packages that specifically deal with analysis of genomic data (e.g. SAGE, SNP, sequence, microarrays, array CGH, proteomics, biological annotations and ontologies). This is a the fist choice of tools for many statisticians and leading experts in the field. Thus this is where the software for many proposed new methods becomes first available.

14 Lessons on Money

Rarely have I came across an article or blog that made me want to write a comment immediately, even before I had completed reading the article. So it was a big surprise for me to have across this wonderful article that strangely echoed my views on money exactly and in a much more elegant manner. I just had to write a comment.

The summary goes “Does your view on money share these characteristics? If not, then it could be one of the main reasons you haven’t found your path to financial sustainability or independence yet.”