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

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

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Couple of quick quotes..

"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

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

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

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

What an Irony....

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:

1. Just because it's a dating/relationship site.
2. Because people are wasting too much time on orkut (however the definition of wastage has to be critically scrutinized)
3. 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:

1. Bandwidth consumption: Proxy sites use too much of ads on their sites which clogs the network.
2. 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

advanced search — query date range

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..

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

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...

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

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

Information to knowledge...

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

Really Caught up..

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!

Getting Heavy on sports..

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.

Zotero - Unleasching the power of community development

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!

The day as it goes by..

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.

Reality Assumption

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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The First Sophisticated Seminar..

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..

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.