Ring out the old - Ring in the new

12 more days and I would be seeing my 22nd year on this planet..
I have completed almost one third of my life..
I am getting a feeling that life is short.. There is so much to do .. so much to learn.. and so little time!

Each individual is an organisation.. The one with inputs/ revenue/ profit ramp ups/ knowledge acquisition.. and a lot more
Being in GE is a great experience.. There is a lots of stress on continuos learning.
"Life is like rowing upsream. To stop learning is to fall back" goes a Chinese adage..

It is really amazing of how such a mammoth like GE is able to move in an agile manner..
[It is not agile in all businesses]
As some GE veteran said, GE is a mammoth [huge company] with the soul of a teenager [a small company] (I dont remember what he said correctly.. but this is what he meant.. And with what I have seen till now, I feel that this i true.. [I dont feel that it is true]

Things that I have in mind [that are pending]
1. GRE
2. EEDP x
3. Get an electric gat
4. Learn Sanskrit x
5. Read the entire Bhagvad gita x
6. Learn swimming
7. Learn the violin x
8. Do some work on machine learning <-- x/ Collaborative filtering / Semantic search
9.form a band, Get an album out. x
10 . Do some work on ML/CF.. get some papers published.. [agressive goal. but need to chalk out a plan to achieve this]
11. Improve my accent/intonation.. Half of the time people do not understand what I say! : (

As of now, 1,2,8,10 and 11 are at the top of the stack. Their order would be
1. GRE
2. extraction of Semantics/Semantic search/ collaborative filtering + IISc

Need to talk to a friend on what he has to say!

I have three options right now
1. MS [Mech/Coms] Fall 2008
2. MBA 2013
3. Stay in GE for the rest of the life [I am enjoying it].. but paisa!..is the factor

I need to decide.. and decide fast

What is Web 2.0

Just came across Web 2.0 conference in greg linden's blog. What is web 2.0 ? a new version of the internet :)).. How can the internet have a version.. Is is just a marketing hype?

The need to have this versioning comes from the fact that the business models/ technology on the web are changing.. The web is becoming user driven.. user generated content [Wikipedia], user centred content, content recommended for the user [Findory], user collaboration.. and the list goes on..

Oreilly has a nice article on this.

Here they mention the changing scenarion by example

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

Collaborative Filtering

Directory of Related papers

TASTE
Wikipedia
WEKA

rashmi sinha's papers/ blog
jun wangs collaborative filtering resources

COLLABORATIVE FILTERING FOR USENET NEWS

search google for : "collaborative filtering" taste

Things I need to know more about CF.

1. Bayesian text classifier
2. Collaborative filtering. Neighbourhood based algorithms (KNN?)
3. Pearson Correlation

The Chain Game and its implications in Managing Companies

I just had an outing with the children of Vishwas (an NGO) at lalbagh, bangalore. We played a couple of games. The children were bubbling with enthusiasm throughout..

One of the games that we played was the Chain Game. Let me describe the game for you..
1. One player is chosen as the initiator of the chain [The nucleus]
2. This nucleus has to catch the other players who are the part of the game.
3. Once he gets hold of someone, the victim and the nucleus have to form a chain and go after the remaining people.
4. This continues till only one player is left [he is the winner]

I observed that:
1. Smaller the size of the chain, the better the
a] Agility
b] Co-ordination
c] Swift reaction to changes in the external environment.

As the chain grows, the internal friction increases, coherence decreases, conflicts of interest arise, the system becomes clumsy [externally]..
Although there is lots of energy in the system in terms of [force]energy of individual components, the forces of the components tend to nullify one another...

Thats what happens to big conglomerates like GE, Intel.. and this may also happen to Google in may be 50 years or so..

Ideal strategy would be breaking the link.. This will create multiple nuclei which will act independantly of each other but work towards the common goal.. Capturing the entire market [or killing out the competition]..

Something similar to the Agent in Matrix [the virus]..
What do I name this technique.... Viral capture?