Fellowship at MDI, Research at MDI

Digital Life

2008-03-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

I am almost on the verge of discontinuing this blog as I have a new website Digital Life. That's the site I'll be running my show from now on. Feel free to visit the site.

What Have I been Upto

2008-01-27T09:01:00.001-08:00

Trust me you don't wanna know. But if you still insist, this is what I am into:

I am trying to find when the fourteenth canonical root is highly significant and shows that a set of predictors including size of house, purchase frequency of cake mix, and number of times you brush your teeth per day is related to age of oldest child living at home, laundry detergent preference, and frequency of extra-marital relations?

eTelemetry

2008-01-21T23:12:00.001-08:00

eTelemetry maps the "social graph" within an enterprise/organization/institute. Want to know who the movers and shakers are within your company? Ask the graph, not them.

How does it work?

Basically, eTelemetry monitors and analyzes email, IM, and web traffic. Through this intelligence it can help an enterprise to determine the networks that exist within its walls. Who is the go-to person for certain issues? Who are the people that veryone respects to answer certain types of questions? Who has the most contact with potential partners? And, though Telemetry doesn't necessarily pitch this use, who are the weak links in the corporate food chain tat can be RIF'd as necessary, i.e., those who do little and are relied on even less?

I'm willing to bet that in most companies the business development person has no clue how much activity is happening between the company and the prospective partner. eTelemetry's solutions would reveal these connections. Perhaps my company wants to do business with Oracle, for example. What if I knew that my developers actively collaborate with developers from Oracle on various open-source projects? That's power.

May be Google should buy the company :)

Technorati Tags: eTelemetry

I am back and gutsified....(May be!)

2007-12-01T05:13:00.001-08:00

It's been a long time since I've penned (typed) down something. A little bit of assignments, a little bit of ubuntu (linux distro) experience and a hell lot of lethargy has contributed to staying away from blogging. Nightouts with a purpose of ubuntufying my system and hell I've gutsified (Ubuntu 7.10 is code named gutsy gibbon) my system to the extent of it being gutsy gibbon.

Integrating compiz in gutys is a great feature. I am crossing my fingers for the next release of Ubuntu 8.04 code named Hardy Heron. Interesting philosophy behind the codification protocol is that every new release of Ubuntu has to has 2 parts. The first word has to be an adjective (like hardy, gutsy, feisty) and the second word has to be an animal (like Heron, Gibbon, Fawn respectively). The next release is due in April 2008. A little bit of head and you can guess the versions (6.06, 7.04, 7.10 and upcoming 8.04) are based on the month and date of release.

I'll talk a little more about what I have and how my desktop on Gutsy looks once I make my blog post from Linux. I'll also talk about how to be smart with dual booting having linux and windows together. The best part about this version is that for the first time on my lappy I have the famous compiz cube running.

Signing off...

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Linux, MDI, Research at MDI, Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Fesity Fawn, Research

Couple of quick quotes..

2007-11-05T06:40:00.001-08:00

"We are not into online advertising; we are into de-commoditization"

"Winners are not winners because they win, but because they are less of losers"

Technorati Tags: Research at MDI, Research

The Five Things That Yahoo! Search Can Do But Not Google

2007-10-31T03:21:00.001-07:00

Google is the world’s favorite search engine but there are a some cool things that you can do only in Yahoo!. Here they are:

1. Compose emails from the Yahoo! search box.

Type !mail abc@xyz.com in the Yahoo! search box and it will automatically compose a new email message for you in Yahoo! mail.

2. Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.

Type James Blunt lyrics (for lyrics of James Blunt songs) or Jmaes Blunt 1973 lyrics (for lyrics of a particular song)

3. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries

Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

4. Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.

For instance, type !wiki google in Yahoo! search box to search Google in Wikipedia.com. Other popular shortcuts are !ebay, !amazon, and !flickr. You can also execute these from the Firefox search box without changing the default search engine.

5. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.

A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org

Or take another example - How many stories on TechCrunch actually link to the PayPerPost, Arrington’s favorite topic. The answer here is:site:techcrunch.com linkdomain:payperpost.com

Technorati Tags: MDI, Research at MDI, Yahoo vs. Google, Google vs. Yahoo, Yahoo Operators.

How About Karaoke-Lyrics plugin unleashed

2007-10-31T03:03:00.001-07:00

How about some karaoke! If I'd say that most of the people (at least the ones I know) use Windows Media Player or Winamp. Wouldn't it be fun if you would be able to sing your favorite song as it is playing. Many would say that it's easy, just open a freaking browser window and search for the lyrics. What if I'd say that it's even more easier. All you have to do is to install what is popularly called as lyricsplugin. This is a small but awesome piece of software. As you play your favorite song the lyrics is pulled right into your players window. Here's a snapshot of how it can be integrated with WMP.

Technorati Tags: Lyricsplugin, Lyrics Plugin, MDI, Research at MDI, Information Management Research

I am not going to Boast

2007-10-31T02:36:00.001-07:00

I am not going to be boastful, at least not to the extent of being obnoxious. I just realized that I have a PR of 2. For the less tech savvy guys, PR is Google's patent technology to give ranks to the web-pages. One site can have multiple web pages and each of these pages have their own page rank. Let me scrape a few lines from how Google defines it's page rank.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Getting a pagerank of 2 is not a big deal, but getting it without any optimization effort is pretty neat. I am not going to struggle to take it to a higher level nor am I interested in selling posts on my blog and make some cheap money. But I'll keep a close eye on how the PR is making a progress.

Technorati Tags: PageRank, Information Management Research, Research at MDI, MDI, Research

I Need to go

2007-10-29T21:39:00.001-07:00

To promote their free online e-accounts, Dutch bank ING had their agency come up with a pretty funny idea: a virtual toilet. In just a few clicks you can have your virtual self release that tension and carry on surfing. What exactly the link is between going to the toilet and opening an e-account seems a bit of a far fetched link from some creatives who’ve spend a little too much time at the drawing board, I guess. But let’s stick with the idea that opening an e-account should be as easy as going to the toilet. Mind you, in real life I’d never take so much time to listen to the toilet lady and even virtually it takes too much time in my [humble] opinion before the link with the actual product is made. The mashed-up fashion brands during the pee-time spent (as a man) is pretty funny though and if you go pee as a girl, and that is truly the biggest gag in the clip, you need to invite a friend because “girls don’t go to the bathroom alone now do they”. Hah ! Brilliant !

Anyhow: Here’s a little timewaster for you: [click to play]

FeedBurner Feeds Are Not in Google Search Results Anymore

2007-10-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

Google has removed all FeedBurner RSS feeds from their main web search index. Even RSS feeds that are syndicated via the FeedBurner are no longer available in Google Search. This is true for all feeds that exist on FeedBurner irrespective of the NOINDEX settings that you may have configured through the FeedBurner Dashboard.

Though the XML feeds of Blogger blogs (blogspot.com/feeds/posts/.. and blogger.com/feeds/..) are still indexed by Google, it should not surprise if blogspot feeds also face the Google axe just like FeedBurner feeds.

This is probably an excellent step from Google for two reasons - one, it solves (to some extent) the problem of duplicate content and two, when non-techie users click on search results that point to RSS feeds and not regular web pages, they may not know how to deal with them and quickly leave.

Increasing Retail Impact of Social Networking

2007-10-23T04:47:00.000-07:00

According to a study done by Hitwise amount of UK Internet traffic online retailers receive from social networks increased by 153% between December 2006 and September 2007.

Online auction sites, in particular eBay, are the main retail beneficiaries of the social networking phenomenon, receiving 31.4% of all downstream traffic that Social Networks send to Shopping and Classifieds sites. The more traditional retail categories – Department Stores and Apparel and Accessories sites – are next, respectively receiving 1 in 8 and 1 in 9 of all UK retail visits from Social Networks. The close links between social networks and the entertainment industry help Music and Video & Games retailers, which are the fourth and fifth biggest beneficiaries respectively. Combined, these five categories account for 72% of all online retail traffic sent from social networks.

In September 2007, Social Networks accounted for 1 in every 20 UK Internet visits. In terms of Internet visits, Social Networking has grown by over 70% in the UK since last Christmas, and it is starting to have a serious impact on many different types of website. Social Networks are now the fourth most popular source of traffic for Shopping and Classifieds sites after Search, Email Services and other Shopping and Classified sites. And this traffic increasingly reflects British society as a whole. Social networks are no longer just for teenagers and students – between December 2006 and September 2007, the proportion of visitors aged 55+ to our Net Communities and Chat category, which is dominated by social networks, has increased by 63%, while the proportion coming from the 18 –24 age group has decreased by 19%.

In September 2006, www.facebook.com was the 126th most visited URL in the UK, but its market share has increased 30 fold over the last 12 months, from 0.056% of all UK Internet visits to 1.66% in September 2007. www.facebook.com is now the fifth most visited URL in the UK, and it is also the fifth most popular source of traffic for other websites. In the retail sector, www.facebook.com refers 1% of UK Internet traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites.

Since opening up to the general public in September 2006, Facebook’s growth has been driven by a combination of viral marketing and rapidly increasing brand awareness. A quarter of Facebook’s traffic comes from web-based email services, which is a combination of new invites and alerts to existing members. A further quarter comes from search engines, and an illustration of the site’s brand strength is the fact that ‘facebook’ is now the third most searched for term in the UK.

What I have been upto...

2007-10-21T22:13:00.001-07:00

I sometime wonder myself about what I am up to. Seems to the world that I am busy but I am not sure about it. The fact is I should be busy but I am not. I have been up with some assignments. Let me try to put down the assignments that I have been up with. One of the courses that I opted for in the first term was called as BPM (Business Process Management and I took up evaluation of Intalio, an open source BPMS as part of my readings in Business Process Management System. The assignment was pretty unique as I was evaluating the Intalio against the industry norms like BPMN and BPEL.

The second course that I credited was called as "Advances in Marketing Management". I had more than one assignment and all of them were pretty academically rigorous.

Another compulsory course that I has to take is called "Philosophies and Methodologies for Creating Knowledge" and this had two assignment. One of them (fortunately for me) has been submitted. The other assignment that I am working on and is keeping me busy is titled by me as "A Paradigmatic and Methodological Examination of CRM in IS: 1995 to 2007"

Now this is pretty hectic and hence time consuming. Second term is on it's way and I already have 2 very rigor assignments to start.

~May God bless me !

Technorati Tags: BPM, Marketing, AMM, Intaio, MDI, Research at MDI

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It's been a while

2007-10-05T06:47:00.001-07:00

I can curse myself or kick but it won't change the things. It's been a while and I have not written anything. I am talking this post as the one to start the good work again. So here we go. Let me write something I am listening to. It's a line from Pankaj Udhas' song.
"Intezar galat hai ke shaam ho jaye,
gar ho sake to abhi daur-e-jaam ho jae,
mujh jaise rindh ko bhi tuney, hashra mein ya rab
bula liya hai toh kuch intezaam ho jaye"

What an Irony....

2007-09-18T05:16:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: This post and for that matter any other post is solely my opinion (which might not have to be true/correct). Also, these opinions have nothing to do with my institute and my professional life at the institute. The opinions are very personal and cannot/should not be generalized to a group of people/users/students/others. These are strictly my personal thoughts which are not driven by motivation/influence from anyone. Readers of this post are free to use their comments on the post. However, I'll not by any means be responsible for comments from users on my post.

What an irony ! I just wished that we saw the world and the world of internet with a very open frame of mind. MDI (Management Development Institute) of which I am a doctoral student has blocked orkut.com. This is quite sad because of the wrong notion about orkut which most people believe is that it's just an online dating/relationship site, which is quite ironical because orkut.com is a platform where you also get to meet people of similar interest when it comes to your professional life as well. Say for example there are communities which are dedicated for "Doctoral Program in Management". Let me start assuming the reason behind the ban:

Just because it's a dating/relationship site.
Because people are wasting too much time on orkut (however the definition of wastage has to be critically scrutinized)
Because it's taking up too much of bandwidth.
Now let me start refuting the above assumptions based on further assumption (which are much closer to reality)

Assumption 2 that people are wasting too much of time holds no argument because there are countless other sites on internet which can cause the same problem.

Assumption 3 it's taking up too much of bandwidth holds no argument because there are other sites like youtube which has streaming videos and can cause a much larger collateral damage to the philosophy of saving bandwidth.

It's quite a sorry situation because I never thought that a matured institute will do something like this. The problem also is that Orkut is a big brand name. There are other sites like facebook.com which is also a platform to meet people and is not blocked. I am also pretty sure that the kind of filtering that is taking place based on either very well known restricted sites database or based on the heuristics/keywords matching in URL. There are countless other dating sites when you perform a google query:

online dating -inurl:dating

and will even have sites like http://www.socialfriendsonline.com/.

I am just hoping that this is a temporary testing that's been taken on. Otherwise we might have to even block google.com and other search engines which are gateway to stuff like the one above. Also, this leads to a more bigger and complex scenario. We all know that kids are smart enough to use web proxy (I am not going to suggest how it can be used because of the sensitivity of the issue) and this would lead to a 2 fold problem:

Bandwidth consumption: Proxy sites use too much of ads on their sites which clogs the network.
These sites are usually the ones which run on business model of downloading adwares/spywares/Trojans/viruses etc which compromises privacy of the user. You never know how long your online bank account password will be safe...
Let me just wish that this won't last for long because there is both good and bad side of technology and you have to chose whether you want to weigh bad one over the good one.

Peace!

Technorati Tags: orkut, orkutblocked, mdi, management development institute, research

My current Firefox extensions...

2007-09-15T11:54:00.001-07:00

I have been waiting to write a post on one of the best browsers I have known. I am a great fan of open source and even bigger of Firefox; most people also call it mozilla which is pretty ignorant because mozilla is much bigger an umbrella which also has Firefox. But I'd safely be able to say without any offense to anyone that today Firefox is much bigger a brand has overtaken the mozilla brand. I can boast of the fact that I am a pretty old user of Firefox. Actually since Firefox 0.6 version and today it's 2.0.0.6. Of course 2.0.0.6 is the public stable release release. However there are alpha versions of Firefox available; code name Gran Paradiso. Earlier this project was code named minefield. Wow I remember the details :).

For all those who have little idea about what Firefox is; Firefox is an open source browser just like Internet Explorer (Actually much better than Internet Explorer from Microsoft). Let me not even bother to compare the two because Firefox wins it with no competition. However, Firefox is open source that means it's free and it's source is open for you to modify and customize. I won't do that coz of my sorry incapabilities to understand the world of coding. However, for coding challenged people like me, Firefox has something very unique called as extensions. I love extensions coz they make Firefox a unique and powerful platform to rediscover web. I also can boast that I have some experience in writing Firefox extensions. I have written one when I was in Google. Let's not discuss the details as it is deemed classified :).

Let me tell you something that there are thousands of extensions out there at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1

and it is impossible to test and try each of the extension unless you are crazy and have reached the state of being obsessed. Let me also tell you that your favorite list of extensions will keep changing as per your needs. Right now my favorite extensions (not in that order) are:

Google Browser Sync
Google Notebook
Greasemonkey
Live Page Rank
Real Player Browser record Plugin
Scribefire (I am using this to blog this post)
ShowIP
StumbleUpon
Zotero
Do I need to describe what these extensions do? I don't think so ! Let's see how many of you will try the extensions !

Long live Open Source and the power of Community....Amen!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Extension, opensource, Vivek Kumar, Research, Research at MDI

This is not bad at all continued..........

2007-09-15T03:55:00.001-07:00

Well, I can't hold myself from doing more research about my name and how Google us weighing it. I did some more searches today and was ecstatic to see stuff like the one below:

This is so cool. Search for vivek kumar google and what you get is my blog right on top. Now I am starting to think do I really have to continue my PhD. I can just start doing some SEO consultancy. Naaa..... I am just kidding. Anyways it's nice to see that I am getting popular :).

This is not bad at all...

2007-09-14T01:46:00.001-07:00

I mean what is the importance of your name in Google. If found this pretty amazing today that my analytics suggested that people who reached my blog had 2 visitors who used vivek kumar as Google query. So I thought of checking it myself. I did a search on Google (google.co.in) and found that my blog with my name in of the posts features 49th in the result. I think it's not all that bad :)

Technorati Tags: vivek kumar, google, research at MDI, research

advanced search — query date range

2007-09-14T01:26:00.001-07:00

OK if any of you read Matt Cutts blog, then you must have already seen a post on this new advance search feature that's been added to Google. If you haven't and want to read what the heck is this all about, here you go. The new feature that's been added by Google is to search the pages for a particular query using the operator as_qdr (tentatively stands for advanced search — query date range) in address bar of Google.

OK if that's too tough to understand let's take an example. Let's say you are searching for the query research at MDI and you want to search for pages resulting using this query over last 2 weeks. All you have to do is just type the following in your address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?q=research+at+MDI&as_qdr=w2

You might wanna check out the first result :)

Of course I have used this example to show that over the past 2 weeks google has indexed around 26000 pages and the top result is from my blog. This also suggests that Google has crawled my blog in the last week 2 week. I am smart and I have not used as_qdr=w1 because my blog hasn't been crawled in last week.

The parameters that the operator as_qdr takes is as follows (scraping it from Matts Blog)

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)

w[number] - past number of weeks

y[number] - past number of years

So next time you want to refine your search and impress your colleagues and/or your clients feel free to boast about your uncanny knack of being a smart Google operators user.

Technorati Tags: as_qdr, advanced search — query date range, google, research at mdi, research

And who said linux wasn't eye-candy..

2007-09-11T10:29:00.001-07:00

Ignorance is bliss but not always. Definitely not when you have not tried any of the latest distros of linux. Linux beats the eye-candy effect of any of the operating systems. Be it Microsoft Vista or a Mac. Don't believe me. See for yourself.

This is not even close to my average level of creativity. What you see is my desktop of Ubuntu 7.04 popularly called as Feisty Fawn. There has been an alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10 code named gutsy gibbon. But I have not upgraded as the support for the repositories is missing.

The fading fire that you see in this picture is not part of the wallpaper but is a functionality of beryl window manager. When a window is closed it fades away like the one is above picture. I could not capture the wobbly desktop effects. This is a true master piece. More and more softwares are being supported. As you can see there is Adobe reader, skype and opera to name a few.

To capture the essence of what I feel about open source, I have made an entry for ubunutu in vista's boot loader as "Crusader of Free World".

Let there be piece and people get more chances of unleashing the power of community development.

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This is a test Blog using Adobe Contribute

2007-09-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Adobe contribute,Resarch
This is new blog post that I am typing in through adobe contribute. Adobe contribute seems a lot of fun and user friendly. Will write mote once I have tested it enough.

Series of Unfortunate events...

2007-09-08T08:58:00.001-07:00

I have been up with doing some assignments for my course in "Advances in Marketing Management". For my misfortune any topic that excites me has hardly any literature. For example topics like "Search Engine Marketing", "Advertising using RSS", "Blogs: A mean to achieve customer knowledge and brand Management".

May be it's such a new topic that it's been just practiced and there's very little literature on this. This excites me as well as scares me because I might have to give it up because there's no platform laid down by existing literature. However, I am not those types who give up. I am going to do my PhD in something related to above. Come what may....

Technorati Tags: research, research at MDI, Search Engine Marketing, Blog Marketing, RSS Marketing

Internet 2.0

2007-09-06T23:43:00.001-07:00

I was reading this article on Internet 2.0 and how it can facilitate the next generation CRM. The article talks about the tools that'd emerge out of the Internet 2.0 era and will lead CRM into new directions. I am scrapping part of a paragraph and will associate it with one of the mails that I got from Citibank. I'll leave it to my readers to relate the Gartner's finding to the mail I got.

Gartner's findings:

"According to Gartner Research, the average business-to-consumer company can save $26 million per year simply by delivering bills electronically and convincing as many of its customers as possible to seek help on a Web site before picking up the phone. The stakes for failing to accommodate the service demands of customers remain high."

The mail that I got had a subject "Help preserve the environment by saying yes to Statement on E-mail." Here's the mail:

Dear Cardmember,Thank you for paying your Citibank Credit Card bills at Citibank Online and/or for setting up Standing Instructions for the same. We appreciate the fact that you have adopted online payment for your Card bills at Citibank Online.You have been enjoying the convenience of receiving your Suvidha Account statement over E-mail (account no.xxxxxxxxxx). As a measure of our continued commitment towards making your banking experience more fruitful, we will henceforth be sending your Credit Card Statement for your Card no. xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx through E-mail, instead of the physical statement. As you may be already aware, Statement on E-mail* provides you with the following benefits: 1. You can download, print, save and archive your statements for future reference. 2. You get easy access to a soft copy of your Card statement through E-mail. 3. Secure, 128-bit encrypted statements, which always reach you on time. 4. You also help preserve the environment by saying NO to paper statements.However, if you would like to continue receiving paper statements for your Card, please login to Citibank Online at www.citibank.com/india or call 24-Hour CitiPhone to unsubscribe from the Statement on E-mail service.Warm regards,Citibank N.A., India

My readers are smart enough to associate Gartner's findings to Citibank's efforts :)

Technorati Tags: Internet 2.0, CRM, Gartner, Research, research at MDI, citibank

How about your favorite browser going campus

2007-09-06T22:29:00.001-07:00

Yeah, you guessed it right. In case you wanna have your favorite firefox as a campus version either you can download it from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/ or just add three extensions to your existing version of Firefox which makes it campus version.

These extensions are as follows:

FoxyTunes
StumbleUpon
Zotero
I am not going to discuss these extensions. The reason is because the best way to explore these extensions is to explore them yourself. May be there will be a post on StumbleUpon at some point of time. I have already posted about zotero and deliberately decided not to explain each of it's feature. BTW one of it's feature is timelining your library collection.

How about something as sexy as this...

2007-09-06T21:58:00.001-07:00

Caution: This post might lead to very addictive music listening habits. In case you are already one of those people who cannot live without music, this post might just make you transfer some funds to my account. I stumbled across a site called as musicovery.com. This site is about a music player right into your browser and you don't need to register or do any other kind of bullshit like downloading stuff.

This cool stuff just sits in your browser and plays the kind of music you want. I am still doing some feature testing of this and will keep posting about the stuff you can do. As of now it has to key features like genre of music and you can select option as per your mood in that genre. Then you have a time line and I find this out of this world.

Information to knowledge...

2007-09-05T11:27:00.001-07:00

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

You must be wondering what makes me start the post with the mission statement of one of the fastest growing company in the history of business. Before I answer this. Let me get critical of myself. With a research lense (apart from the contacts I wear), I always put my way of looking at things in a very narrow perspective. This is 2 way beneficial. One it gives me a scope to avoid the problem of viewing world from just one perspective and 2 it allows me to listen better and understand the lens of others.

As promised now I come back to answering the scope of Google's Mission statement in this post. I was reading an interesting distinguishing feature (thanks to Prof Saxena) of information in relation to information. No! we are not discussing the classic aspect of how information becomes knowledge and so forth. I context here is that "information is descriptive in nature whereas knowledge is associative". This doesn't bring down the importance of information over knowledge. But as Google has been maturing as a company and is continually providing breakthrough services, it looks like Google is moving towards getting into organizing knowledge from the perspective of customers. The core still remains organizing information, but as you put on a lens that looks at Google from a customer's perspective, I know that Google is keeping track of each of my actions, saving searches and every kind of data mining technique it can think of.

Cautiously I am still keeping my perspective narrow so that I am open for a discussion and would love to be proved long. Meanwhile, keep open yourself to get overloaded with information. But see how much of it you can convert to knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge, Knowledge Management, KM, IM, information, information management, research, research at MDI

Never think that you are smart...

2007-09-03T11:26:00.001-07:00

I know that we all are smart and there is no denying of this fact. But being over smart sometime makes you realize that it would have been better if you were ignorant. And if I can use the copyright phrase of my good friend Paul that "Ignorance is a Bliss".

OK coming down to the point. Well a couple of days back I tried something in which I thought I was a wizard. I tried installing Ubuntu gutsy gibbon (Thanks to Nikhil) without reading the instruction. I thought it was like a cake walk as it was in Windows XP. Now for windows XP you get good partitionning tools (thanks to torrents for the pirated stuff), but for Vista there is none. However, Vista has it's own tool called shrink. So, installing Ubuntu I messed up with my partition table and screwed up all the partitions. Thankfully I got back all the important docs doing some recovery.

Make sure if any one of you run the native partitions made using Vista, please follow the instructions at

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

May be you'll not lose your super sexy rare collection of songs from eskobar and other artists. Plus the tonnes of movies you have downloaded (why else do we need a laptop with 120 Gigs of Hard disk).

As the good saying goes "Better to be safe than worried (screwed up).....

Really Caught up..

2007-08-31T10:44:00.001-07:00

I don't know when this happened, but I am not the same person anymore. I just got to know from Nik that Ubuntu has come up with a new alpha release code named gutsy gibbon. Call it for the flavor of open source or strong community support, none of the Linux distros have excited me more than Ubuntu. More about gutsy gibbon.

The first thing that I am going to go today is hit www.torrentz.com and search for partition magic for Vista. Install it. Simultaneously download gutsy gibbon and get back to my good old days of playing with Linux. I am sure I haven't lost a technique to prove myself worthy of being "Crusader of open source". Long live community development. Peace!

Never shop at indiaplaza.in-Part II

2007-08-26T12:11:00.001-07:00

What a service. Those sorry bas****s are yet to deliver my shipment even after 20 days when the shipment time promised was 10 days. I am still waiting for the shipment to arrive. With the kind of experience I am having I am sure those Ass****s haven't even shipped my product.

I am lodging a complaint with the Consumer Online Resources & Empowerment Centre

Affirmative NEVER SHOP AT INDIAPLAZA.IN.

Finetune

2007-08-26T11:00:00.001-07:00

I think over a period of time I have become too critical of technology and new stuff coming up. However, not that critical as well. How about a wonderful site that caters to your need of unlimited music. A very dynamic site with amazing features and music.

The site in question is Finetune. A very nice site I came across as an alternative to pandora.com. Unfortunately, pandora doesn't allow music anymore to people outside US. Kind of racism. IP filtering is the basic idea with which the site filters it's traffic. However, there's an alternative. I am not comparing the 2 services because I've hardly used finetune.

Another great feature of finetune is it's desktop player. It requires Adobe AIR. So in case you want to have music right at your desktop you might wanna check out Finetune Desktop. Free stuff rocks ! Peace......

Long time..

2007-08-23T01:40:00.000-07:00
I know it's been a long time since I have posted something on the blog. The reason for that is because the term is ending and I am having nightmare of a time to get the assignments done. And other than that there is also an urgency in learning the art of reading a research paper. It's getting a little concerning that I am not able to critically examine a paper.

Anyways I also know that it's not an excuse for not writing frequently. I'll be writing a more on my research progress and how I am getting fascinated in classes I am undergoing. All that will be coming soon. Please keep posting your valuable feedback.

Boastful to the extent of being obnoxious :)

2007-08-13T23:21:00.001-07:00

This is called having a great image of yourself within you.

* There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures I allowed to live.
* Outer space exists because it’s afraid to be on the same planet with me.
* I counted to infinity - twice.
* When I do a push-up, I am not lifting myself up, I am pushing the Earth down.
* I am so fast, I can run around the world and punch myself in the back of the head.
* I don’t wear a watch, I decide what time it is. (LOL)
* I gave Mona Lisa that smile.
* I can slam a revolving door.
* There are no races, only countries of people I have beaten to different shades of black and blue.
* My house has no doors, only walls that I walks through.
* I can divide by zero.
* Newton’s Third Law is wrong: Although it states that for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,
there is no force equal in reaction to my turnaround kick.
* When taking the GRE, write “Vivek” for every answer. You will score over 1600.
* I have 12 moons. One of those moons is the Earth.
* I grind my coffee with my teeth and boil the water with my rage.
* Archeologists unearthed an old English dictionary dating back to the year 1236. It defined “victim” as “one who has encountered Vivek”
* If you Google search “Vivek getting kicked” you will generate zero results. It just doesn’t happen.
* I can drink an entire gallon of milk in thirty-seven seconds.
* I don’t bowl strikes, I just knock down one pin and the other nine faint.
* It takes me 20 minutes to watch 60 Minutes.
* The Bermuda Triangle used to be the Bermuda Square, until I kicked one of the corners off.
* There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I live in Gurgaon.
* I once ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. They made me blink.
* James Cameron wanted Me to play the Terminator. However, upon reflection, he realized that would have turned his movie into a documentary, so he went with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
* Thousands of years ago I came across a bear. It was so terrified that it fled north into the arctic. It was also so terrified that all of its decedents now have white hair.

Getting Heavy on sports..

2007-08-10T23:03:00.001-07:00

Almost a week now and the series of events are more or less focused on sports. From daily Gym to Table Tennis, Volleyball and Basketball. And the sessions are grueling and exhausting. But getting back to Games (I should say Sports rather) is fun. You have that piece of mind that your day is not wasted lying on the bed and not doing anything.

I hope I am not pushing myself too hard. And I am sure to take up cycling soon. How soon is a question. Just waiting for my home theater to get delivered so I can rock my room. For a change I am not talking studies, research or papers. Interestingly I am feeling happy about it. BTW yesterday I bought a Nike's Release model basketball with a sexy black attire.

I had a visitor..

2007-08-09T03:09:00.001-07:00

Wow! I cannot believe I had a Flock ambassador visiting my blog and commenting on the post where I talked about Flock. Here is comment section of the post that talks about Flock. Evan Hamilton is the person who commented on the post. He also has a blog that's actually pretty related to my interest areas as well. And I thought I could be lazy and get away from regular blogging. But these kind of visitors are the one's who encourage me to blog. And yeah trust me blogging about things other than the theme of your blog pays of sometimes.

Zotero - Unleasching the power of community development

2007-08-09T02:52:00.001-07:00

I've had the privilege of playing around with quite a good number of open source softwares and various their flavors. And I keep falling in love with Firefox each time there is a new extension that redefines my browsing experience. With my endeavor into Academic research and a basic requirement to read research papers and use them as citations made me look for a software that could manage bibliography. I was introduced to Zotero by Sumit; a colleague and senior at MDI. Zotero is a great piece of firefox extension that can make your research journey a very exciting and smooth one.

Zotero sits right into your browser and manages the research papers/journal articles for you. It's so smooth that even a novice can get addicted to it in no time. The power of community development is wonderful. May god bless open source. Amen!

Cool Web 2.0 Template

2007-08-08T12:09:00.001-07:00

I've just finished installing the Neo Template on my other blog and it looks awesome. I'll need some feed back though. Please keep commenting.

Changes to the Blog.

2007-08-08T06:14:00.001-07:00

I have been getting a good amount of feedback about the style of my blog. And after consolidating all of them I've finally decided to make a few changes. Please let me know your feedback. This will make me change things which you might not like on the blog. Thanks everyone for the valuable comments.

Systems Approach

2007-08-03T23:45:00.001-07:00

Systems Approach is a very popular approach for creating knowledge and being a researcher/consultant/investigator is systems approach. Following are the few terminologies applicable in systems approach.

Synergy: Effects in a reality (or model) that mean that the total is not the same as the sum of the parts.
Teleology: Purposefulness
Finality (dynamic teleology): Purposefulness over a period of time.
Systems Language: A terminology developed according to the systems approach.
System: A number of component and relations among them.
Open Systems: Systems that have connections to their environment.
Closed systems: Systems without connections to their environment.
Systems environment: The surroundings of a system.
Real systems: The object of a system study.
Systems model: The reproduction of this model.
Systems components: Parts of systems.
Subsystems: Systems that are parts of larger systems.
Supersystems: Systems that contain smaller systems.
Magnifying level: The degree of details in a systems analysis (or construction).
Systems relations: The connection among the components of a system.
Systems structure: Fixed, stable characteristics (static structure) and regular processes (dynamic structure).
Systems process: Courses of events of both regular and non-regular kind.
Systems perspective: Structural and/or processual.
Systems analysis: Description, explanation, and (possibly) understanding of an existing real system.
Systems construction: Building a new system.
Systems theory: Systems models and /or producer-product relations that are valid for more than one real system.

Never shop at indiaplaza.in

2007-08-03T00:20:00.001-07:00

If you are wondering why am I writing this post; the reason is because I faced the consequence of trying to shop online with a pathetic online store called as indiaplaza.in. Let me tell you the whole story. I was working for Google Hyderabad, before I moved to Gurgaon for my PhD. I got some gift voucher from my team at Google as a reward for achieving some milestone. The gift vouchers were to be redeemed at indiaplaza.in. I had Rs. 7500/- worth of gift voucher. And I wanted to buy a home theater worth Rs 12499.

I redeemed my gift voucher of Rs 7500 and the rest Rs 4999 I chose to pay through cheque. Now as I checked out I saw that they'll ship me my stuff once they'll receive the cheque and will be able to en-cash it. I realized this could take more than 20 days for my stuff to reach me (including the 10 days of shipment time indiaplaza talks about). So I chose to cancel the order and use my debit card instead. Now comes the funny part. I canceled the order and now I cannot redeem my gift vouchers as it says I've zero balance to redeem the amount. I called up their customer care at my expense and I get the wonderful news that they are going to take 4 days for revoking the redeemable amount. Are we talking about information age and internet shopping. This whole shit defeats the purpose of online shopping.

Another irony of all this sad experience is that I wrote them (customerservice@indiaplaza.in, info@indiaplaza.in) a mail yesterday evening and I am yet to hear from them. Following is the copy of the mail I sent them:

I just talked to your customer care, on my bloody expense of making a phone call (because ideally, it should be a toll free number). I was told by your customer care executive that it will take 4 freaking days to make my gift vouchers redeemable again. Are we talking about online shopping? What kind of a pathetic company you guys run. I canceled my order 010820070431 because I wanted to use my debit card so that I can avoid the delay of you receiving my cheque and can have my order shipped instantaneously.

I am sorry to say but this bullshit of taking 4 days defeats the purpose of having an online shopping company like yours and me doing online shopping with a company like yours. I am very disappointed by this and might not think of shopping with you guys. I am going to also ask my company Google India to stop buying gift coupons from you because others from my company will face a similar problem like this. I am going to mark this mail to the person in Google responsible for buying gift coupons for our company. I am going to blog about the pathetic service on my blog and you can see the story in couple of hours at

http://bloggingtheweb.blogspot.com

Thank you very much for the excellent online shopping experience that you are providing.

A really angry customer,
Vivek

I am waiting to hear from some moron sitting there and reading mails, if they are not busy licking somebody's a**.

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Process Management

2007-07-28T03:45:00.001-07:00

And the question why "Process Management" will haunt a few people and would be just another word to impress the vocab of business communication/language. I was doing this session on Process Measurement with Prof Saxena; KBC as he is popularly known as. And when I am in the class trying to relate it to something from my past corporate experience I start realizing how such big companies like the one I was working for sometime back can talk about management philosophies and water tight execution. They never define it around the process but around the team and in true sense it's quite ironical.

We are so ignorant to get into the system and forget to apply the things we have learned in our academics. True that management is to be practiced but do they really practice it. Why do I not see a manager or the head of a department, coming to the company and giving his/her process an improvement that's strategic in nature.

Let me critic a process very common in most of the organization. We talk about process improvement. Let's take HR hiring process. How many companies after a desired period of hiring a person evaluate whether their hiring of the above candidate was in fact justified. All these traditional hiring process suffer from the myopia of evaluating their team and process internally as to how many were the potential hire and how many got hired? What were the targets and what were the actuals? I am still curious to find that one organization which has an HR function that measures the outcome of whom they have hired. Let's say six months, does the HR evaluate whether the candidate which was hired for six months now is on expectations. Do they identify the strategic factors which might re-evolve their hiring process?

I am listening if there's someone who does these basic "Performance Measures" to complete the cycle of "Business Process Management".

The day as it goes by..

2007-07-25T07:11:00.001-07:00

Trying to find something constructive that was part of the day. I had the opportunity to attend the mock pre-thesis defense of one of the guys from our FPM programme and I am starting to realize that more than the content/outcome of your pre-thesis work is your ability to justify the methodology of your research. May be I am too new to understand and conclude that it's quite ironical.

What I am starting to realize already is that you must be very strong in your research fundamentals and this gives a real upper edge in justifying your work and marketing you work. If you are looking to do a Ph.D from MDI come prepared with the state of mind that you'll be doing hardcore studies in Research methodologies and importantly the philosophy of the way the knowledge is to be created. After all an FPM program is knowledge creation exercise.

Lethargic

2007-07-23T02:41:00.001-07:00

If anyone is wondering why I am not posting, the reason is, laziness. Moreover, got a little caught up with reading. Finally have a direction I think I can take for the quest of knowledge. I am getting closer (at least I fee that way as of now) to find my area of research. Seems like a pretty bold step as I am counting on future more than what is hot property today. Will try chipping in with a post or two today.

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BPM-An Introduction

2007-07-19T03:28:00.001-07:00

Business Process Management (BPM) is rapidly growing and becoming the technology for modeling, optimizing and automating business processes. Analyst firms predict the BPM market growth rate at 15 percent to 20 percent, which far outpaces the 3 percent to 4 percent growth rate predicted for ERP and CRM markets. BPM will continue to accelerate this momentum by expanding its ability to model, manage and optimize the business process flow.

Technology and drivers of business should provide an environment where better business applications can be developed with minimal effort. Business applications should closely align to business processes that can be readily adapted to the changing nature of business processes.

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Reality Assumption

2007-07-19T03:03:00.001-07:00

Analytical philosophy's assumption of quality of reality is that, the whole is the sum of it's parts. This means that once the researcher gets to know the different parts of the whole, the parts can be added together to get the total picture.

Knowledge created using Analytical approach is characterized as being independent of the observer.

The assumption behind the systems approach, different from the assumption underlying the the analytical approach, is that reality is arranged in such a way that the whole differs from sum of it's parts.

If we say that the whole is understood by characteristics of it's parts, we bring into picture the third approach known as the actors approach.

The Above three are the basic methodological approaches in Research.

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Get Im-ified.

2007-07-18T12:18:00.001-07:00

Although this is an old story and quite an old product launch, the technology is worth keeping an eye on. I am talking about a new IM based reminder service named imified. Did I just say reminder service ! Apologize me for giving a narrow scope for the product that might just be the next revolutionizing technology.

Let me talk a little more about it. But before that let me ask you a question that might sound stupid and give an impression of my high levels of ignorance which might be a bliss in my case. How many of you use Instant Messengers? If you think that's stupid enough, let me ask you another question. How many of you use AIM, MSN and Gtalk/Jabber? No points for guessing and this time I'll feel offended if you'll question me, "what the hell is wrong with you moron; why are you not naming the king of all IMs Yahoo?" I have a reason to not mention yahoo messenger here. So if you guys use IMs other than Yahoo as mention above please continue reading. For the people who cannot think beyond Yahoo Messenger, I am afraid you'll have to stop reading as this post will not bring any sort of enlightenment to you. As Yahoo is not supported by Imified.

Imified is a new concept and who else will be better able to define it than the site itself which says, "IMified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM
networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as
well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified
helps you get things done faster."

I'd suggest all you nerdies to check out the developers section because Imified has come out with it's own API and you can develop your own widgets for Imified.

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Web Crash 2007

2007-07-17T23:57:00.001-07:00
The Web Crash 2007 is a catastrophic event that has hit the world really badly . All th governments in the world are taking every measure to avoid mass paranoia. Let there be peace. I tried doing a CTRL+ALT+DEL on myself because I am so depressed about the Internet crashing, but I get a message "You are without an operating system, you moron !"

Embedded Video

Entrepreneur for creating Serial Entrepreneurs

2007-07-16T10:34:00.001-07:00

I was talking my ex-colleague and a very good friend Amaltas. And in some context he used the term Serial Entrepreneur. I was pretty curious to know if the terminology exists and to my surprise it does. However, very little has been talked about it. Moreover, the best I could find was from a German wiki and not too my surprise because Europe is known to come out with these real high quality philosophical thinking of ideas which gives new dimension to the philosophies of creating knowledge. Not going into too many details of Europe and it's role in knowledge creation but I must say the concept of post-modernization is a concept that was born out of Europe. To be precise from France.

Getting back to Serial Entrepreneur, I'd not like to discuss the context the term was used by Amaltas because strategically confidential reasons and I am sure in his context this word is worth a trademark. However, what the wiki mentions is an entrepreneur, who creates new enterprises again and again in relatively short time and sells them. I am ignorant of any example of such person from the world of business. However, as I say this I'll leave the readers with a clue and the clue is that Amaltas is an Entrepreneur for creating Serial Entrepreneurs.

Internet is for Porn! Part 2

2007-07-16T03:03:00.001-07:00

Embedded Video
Blogged with Flock

Internet is for Porn !

2007-07-16T02:59:00.001-07:00
A good video on censorship of pornography on Internet. However, we are not getting into any debate.
Embedded Video

Blogged with Flock

There's light at the end of the tunnel..

2007-07-14T09:58:00.001-07:00

And who told Firefox is the only open source browser. I might be contradicting myself by saying this because I am big time Firefox fan. However, I must say that Flock has arrived the arena. Yes, if you've not seen the new flock then I must say you have missed something new and something sweet.

The new tanned bluish look is just one of the changes. It comes with in-built features to instantaneous blogging. A new way to manage online media and a really eye-candy looks for the feed reader. However, there's a cost to it. The setup file is 10.4 MB compared to 5 MB of Firefox installation file. But in this era of cheap memories do you really care how much will the browser occupy the secondary memory storage. I have still not used it extensively to check if it fits the non-memory leaking benchmarks but I am sure even that won't be too much of constraint.

As far as support for extensions goes, I am sure with little bit of smartness you can bring every extension available to Firefox to work for flock. A big thumbs-up for flock and to the open source community.

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The World of Business Process Management

2007-07-14T04:34:00.001-07:00

An introduction to a not so unknown world of "Business Process Management" what is also an acronym for BPM. A brief wiki article can be had at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management. Let me dissect the term Business Process Management for you. First let me take management out of it and thankfully I don't have to go into the details of discussing what Management is. Let's now briefly talk about the term "Process". The word process has it's origin from Manufacturing as far as the field of business management goes.

"Process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties or attributes of an object or system."
Source: Wiki

Of late there has been an ~~urgency~~ or should I say evolved need to see Business Process as a resource just like human resource and other resources applicable in an organization. And because of this evolution to see Business Process as a resource there is a continuous need to manage it just like any other resource.

With changing influence of technology into business there were concepts like ERP which started gaining popularity. However, initially these efforts did not enjoy the success because they focused on department or functional areas of business. The myopia they struggled with was that they failed to understand that such efforts will provide multitude of success if the pattern to implement them was process oriented. However, on a larger perspective it also gave an insight that business should be looked from the criticality of process driven rather than function driven. The problem with a function driven approach is that it looks at the business from an in-house perspective. But as we all know that the success of any business today is driven by customers and hence the approach that the business should take today should be process driven. The process that focuses on customer satisfaction.

As a result of this advancement in the way the Business is starting to take advantages of process driven approach we see many companies (esp service-oriented) to boast about being 100% process oriented. Airtel, makes such a claim. I carefully used es service oriented. This is not to take anything away from manufacturing intensive firms' claim of being process intensive. However, there can be an eternal debate about how many of manufacturing firms have functions which are product oriented rather than service oriented.

We are now starting to see that companies are becoming more and more process oriented, but not many of them have reached a stage where they can brag about being process centric.

Let me briefly give theoretical elements involved in Business Process.

I think this should be it before I completely talk about my learnings of 4 hours today.

This is too Innovative.

2007-07-13T01:39:00.001-07:00

I cannot hold myself from blogging this. This might not be one of the best post AFA relevancy of my blog goes but I'd love to share this.

The above are the error codes for HTTP header response.

411 Length Required: The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content- Length. The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.

413 Request Entity Too Large: The server is refusing to process a request because the request entity is larger than the server is willing or able to process. The server MAY close the connection to prevent the client from continuing the request.

If the condition is temporary, the server SHOULD include a Retry- After header field to indicate that it is temporary and after what time the client MAY try again.

403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

200 OK: The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request, for example:
GET an entity corresponding to the requested resource is sent in the response;

HEAD the entity-header fields corresponding to the requested resource are sent in the response without any message-body;

POST an entity describing or containing the result of the action;

TRACE an entity containing the request message as received by the end server.
Originally found at http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/ladies/6792/

The Scientific Way

2007-07-13T00:00:00.001-07:00

Apologies for not posting yesterday. The reason is simple. In everyone's life there are some days known as wasted and yesterday was one of those days for me. Let's not get into wasting time on something that's already categorized as wasted.

As I mentioned in my posts "An encounter with the World of Philosophy", I am into the world of philosophies which leads to knowledge creation. We start with questioning what is science? I'd like to take some excerpts and try bringing myself closer to what is scientific way? Scientific way is specific aspects.

First, every attempt that claims to be scientific is based on explicit relationship between ideas and empirical observation and an attempt to be relevant to reality. Second, using a scientific approach necessarily means a conscious application of reasonably clear formulated rules. Third, using a scientific approach means that the scientist acknowledges that every member of society has a a legitimate right to protections form the public scrutiny of his or her private life.

Being a scientist and creating knowledge

It is not necessary for you to be a scientist in order to create knowledge or being a part of process of knowledge creation. A key difference between knowledge created by the scientific method compared with any other method (say as a consultant or any other kind of investigator) is that some kinds of studies do not present their methods and result for the public and critical scrutiny by other creators of knowledge. Both these ways of creating knowledge can be treated as Methodology for Creating Business Knowledge.

"Practiced" and "Reconstructed" Logic

Practiced logic is the path that researchers/consultants/investigators follow de facto.Reconstructed logic is presentation of this path.

Rendezvous with truth !

2007-07-11T09:53:00.001-07:00

Today was the day I learnt that it's not an easy life to be into academics and specially more importantly into an FPM programme. I was part of a presentation of what we call here as Pre-thesis defense. This is the time when a scholar presents post proposal work and has to defend his/her upcoming Ph.D.

From what I saw and felt the scenario is really tense and there's a grill down session on the proposed thesis. If you are the one defending the prethesis you better go with some psychiatrist advice on how to face pressure; immense pressure.

The professors show no mercy on questioning every aspect of your work. I'd not want to discuss here the person nor the prethesis that he was defending for the reasons of confidentiality. I am starting to believe that there's more than what meets the eyes when it comes to going about Ph.D.

I hope all of you'll pray for my survival :)

10 reasons why you should do research from MDI

2007-07-10T10:13:00.001-07:00

I am going to put down 10 reasons why one should choose MDI for research in Management. I am not making a case of me being a genius to cite these reasons when I am not even a week old to MDI. However, I am going to put the reasons from the perspective of a juvenile. However, I'd wish to revisit these 10 reasons every semester and see if I can modify them.

So here we go:

The Brand Name: When it comes to research in the field of management MDI is one of the most renowned institutes in India.
The Professors: I have had the opportunity to see 2 professors in action and they have been exceptional in what they have offered.
The course structure: The course structure for the research/FPM programmed here is one of the best in India.
Senior FPM Scholars: Senior FPM scholars in the colloquial language (it's corporate language as well) I'd say are really cool and chilled out. They are very helpful in every aspect.
Selection Process: The good thing about the selection process is it's not too sophisticated and with basic maths and decent English it's not too tough to make it into the interviews. I must however caution that if you are a fresher and are anything less than exceptional you better get some experience behind you.
Database of Journals
Library: The one phrase that comes to my mind is "State of Art".
Gym: Very close to perfect.
Accommodation
Me. No I am kidding! Still hunting for the 10th one :)

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The Debate Continues 2...

2007-07-10T06:41:00.001-07:00

Before I dive into discussing the eternal question whether Marketing is Science or Art. I'd like to share something that I've not felt through out my life. I'd like to introduce you to professor Ashok Pratap Arora. Professor Arora is one of the best professors I've met in my academic life. The genius of the man is questioning the most simplest terms which we take for granted. Questions like "What is science?; What is the role of logic in science?" He gets his student think about the challenges of marketing from the very basic of the subject itself. His style of teaching is intriguing and hence creating the curiosity that you want to get rid of right after the class. The persona of professor creates magic in the thought generation process of his students.

It's so easy to say that marketing is applied science. However, how do you distinguish pure science from applied science. And then the debate that "Are all pure sciences absolutely pure in nature?" I came out of his class at around 10:40 AM in the morning but I still feel I am in that room trying to understand the world from the very basic. And I suppose this is what is the purpose of a professor. The purpose inducing self learning in his students by giving them the curiosity to ponder the unknown. And trust me in Prof Arora's class everything (unless he chooses to explain something) is unknown. I am having my fingers crossed to prepare well for the next class but I know I'll go into the class with immense amount of unknown to be explored.

I'd have loved to answer the various questions I posed in the post The Debate Continues... but I guess I need to do a lot of reading to justify the answers and importantly gather enough courage to defend my point of view on the eternal debate.

I promise that there will be multiple post coming up in the series The Debate Continues...Let me conclude by sharing something.

Every Discipline takes something from other disciplines and so has Marketing. However, Marketing has grown so tall in stature that it's time for Marketing to contribute to other disciplines. Most important thing to remember is that Emphasis of Marketing is on "Exchange".

The Debate Continues...

2007-07-10T06:36:00.001-07:00

I am back with the ongoing question of whether "Marketing is Science or Art?" This is a question that's under scrutiny since the inceptions of Marketing as a discipline.

Keep watching this space for more.

~~Coming Soon~~......

I'd have tried giving my point of view on the above debatable topic. However, it deserves a dedicated separate post and hence I am going to publish it as part of my next post.

The First Sophisticated Seminar..

2007-07-09T05:29:00.001-07:00

Prof Abhishek Srivastava from the West Virginia University presented a seminar on "Encouraging Knowledge Sharing in organization". I won't discuss a lot about it because frankly I could not get most of it. However, what I could establish from my past work experience at Google and Juno, I am starting to believe that with very unique and special profiles it's not a win-win situation when it comes to Knowledge Sharing.

Let me tell you how. With what I've experienced as a Search Quality Analyst, Google, the best way to become an analyst is not to get tampered by the knowledge that might be passed in totality to you from some senior analyst. This would result in an unidirectional way of looking things and hence missing out on innovative part of the profile. I understand that this is a very juvenile hypothesis but I am starting to assume that there is need to get closer into this by doing a study. A very niche study but it should be fun.

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An Encounter with the World of Philosophy..

2007-07-08T07:40:00.001-07:00

I carefully chose the word encounter. I could have used the word rendezvous but for someone like me a rendezvous with the world of Philosophy is no less than an encounter. I mean a guy who's never been away from the objectives of science and technology is suddenly asked to get into the subjective ocean of philosophy.

It's not that I've never come close to reading philosophy and it's subset psychology. For that matter I've read a bit of Freud. But something like Penis envy is a new phrase. Let me just scrape something from wikipedia on penis envy.

"Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the supposed reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. According to Freud, the parallel reaction in boys to the realization that girls do not have a penis is Castration anxiety.

In contemporary culture, the term is sometimes used inexactly or metaphorically to refer to the idea that adult women wish they had a penis, or to refer to anxieties between men about the size of their genitals."

I might be sounding crazy as to why I am having this unimportant discussion on penis envy. The reason is because I am still trying to understand what psychology is. Contextually it's been said that Psychology is the Mother of All Sciences. However, physicist believe that psychologists have physics envy. Physics Envy; now this is what brought me into discussing penis envy. Anyways before I confuse myself and/or my readers with all the hoopla about the philosophical essence of psychology, I'll move into putting down the flavor of my first day of class at MDI.

The class was about the "Philosophy & Methodologies of Creating Knowledge" popularly known as PMCK. I must say my first stint with Professor Rajen Gupta has created a very strong impression about the class of the man and his eternal quest for being an assimilator (knowledge assimilation). And after having the privilege of hearing him the quote “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” has a sense of completeness.

Getting back to classes.

2007-07-07T20:45:00.001-07:00

The day has come when I am all set to convert the fear of getting back to school into the thrill of exploring unbound territories. Really, I mean the the field of knowledge; research specially is unbound by any boundaries. I might be wrong at this early stage and would be into juvenile thinking process but this all seems to me like dejavu.

I would hold my punches until I have the feel of the ring. But once I do I am all set for coup de grâce.

Oops.... was almost about to have a perfect start until I realized I'll be late if I don't get out of my indulgence of weblogging.

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The Journey has just begun..

2007-07-06T22:10:00.000-07:00
And I thought Google was the place I had the opportunity to meet and work with the best minds. How quickly the perspective can change. My first day at MDI as a FPM Scholar was an experience I'll never forget. Apart from settling down I had the chance to rendezvous with the seniors and the conversation was no less than rocket science sometimes. Their eyes glitter with passion for the institute, for the course, for their area of interest and for their professors.

I am looking forward to begin a new journey with excitement and a little bit of fear; fear from the unknown. Fear of returning to school after 3 years of casual corporate life....