whats going on now?
I shifted bases from boston to new york.....well, nyc is not far away from boston anyways. I just joined GS and am looking forward to learn a whole lot from my peers and superiors here, who seem to be very experienced and capable.
The West Coast is one entirely different place when compared with the East. Its not even funny........the urban sprawl, the really wide freeways, awesome weather and great, inexpensive food ! Happened to spend time with my cousin bro and bhabhi ji in San Diego. Great place with a really interesting city layout - NS (I5), EW (I15) and of course the Bay and the Pacific Ocean ! Attractions I had been to during the stay: Point Loma, La Jolla beaches, San Diego zoo, coastal strips, coronado county with its awesome restaurants, beaches and hang-out joints. I left San Diego for LA to spend time with friends. Met Vitanshu - a close pal right from freshman days back in India, and visited the Universal Studios, the campus of USC n UCLA, and also other interesting malls/coastal areas.....n also the night-life! Well, thats what has been done so far......more to follow.
Well, the world seems so different after graduation.......although I do feel kinda weird not being mad busy now. Things I have been upto of late:-
1. IAP classes in PERL and the like.
2. Meeting friends
3. Planning trips to different places (n going there too :)
4. Apartment-hunting in New York City (the toughest thing to do if you want a good place thats not expensive)
5. Administrative work after graduation. Btw, email address after graduation should be andyraj@alum.mit.edu
While this is a great time of the year to be with loved ones, I have done exactly the opposite :) Worked on the thesis report and paper.
However, I will take this chance to wish everyone (all netizens) a Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!
I also express my deepest condolences to all asians who lost their loved ones in the Tsunami disaster, especially those in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and
the southern Indian states and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. To make a difference to the relief efforts in India, may I suggest this site -> www.aidindia.org.
A recent CNN article reported that people who put on a few extra pounds may be able to blame a lack of sleep for the added weight Researchers opine that losing sleep can raise levels of hormones linked with appetite and eating behavior.
In one study, people who slept only four hours a night for two nights had an 18 percent reduction in leptin, a hormone that tells the brain there is no need for more food, and a 28 percent increase in ghrelin, which triggers hunger.
For more details, http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/diet.fitness/12/06/sleep.weight.gain.reut/index.html
Well, the classes are coming to an end.....the good news is that I got one final and the thesis to submit now. Should not be a big problem hopefully :)
But, yeah, had a good conference in Orlando last month.....and our presentation did some good reviews and constructive feedback.
Check out www.aln.ucf.edu (concurrent sessions 4) for further details.
Miscellaneous events:
- Gotta purchase a new phone + service.
- Shopping for christmas/new year
- Plan trips within and outside the US
- Wait for my work authorization and start working (make real money).....
Chris Evans recently wrote about the relation between IQ and the Presidential candidiate choice.
http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm
This link has been visited by atleast a million people and I would highly recommend it to all those (like me)
who just couldnt understand or logically explain the election results. Not that I am pro-Bush or pro-Kerry!
What am I upto these days? Mad busy for starters..........
1. Classwork - Law and Policy classes to finish up requirements for the Dual Degree
2. Thesis, thesis and more thesis - to finish up my degree!
3. TA work for 1.00 - the core JAVA class and isn't it turning out to be an interesting yet painful experience....
4. Preparation for the 10th Sloan ALN conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks in Orlando, FL (Nov 12-14)
http://www.aln.ucf.edu
5. Deciding between job offers to start in March :)
6. Dont wanna forget latin dancing moves.....so yeah, do some salsa and casino rueda and am now concentrating more on style rather than knowing the moves, which I do know anyways.
Pic with my summer group - Global Markets Research IT (38th floor - Deutsche Bank-Wall Street NYC).
I was recently working on crontab in SUSE linux and found these resources very useful:
http://support.easystreet.com/hosting/nwunix/usingcron.htm
http://kb.indiana.edu/data/afiz.html
Cron is one of the basic facilities available on a Linux installation, and as a matter of fact, on almost every UNIX box. In a nutshell, cron is a systemwide scheduling daemon (a 'daemon' is a service that runs on your Linux machine, normally in the background where you don't notice its presence) that takes a configuration file called a 'crontab', and runs daemons or other applications depending on the time and date you set. It's very necessary for some system applications to run at certain invervals, and you can utilize it as a regular user to run things for you as well. For instance, one may have a collection of JAVA classes that generate real-time user activity reports and publish them using Cocoon. These classes need to be 'batched' at certain time intervals, which can in turn be done very easily using the crontab.
The 'crontab' is basically a plain text file that you can create on your own, and there is a corresponding 'crontab' command that's used to edit these files and initialize them with the cron daemon. Once your crontab is complete, it will be loaded into memory and used by cron, which will check once a minute to see if there is anything that needs to be run. You can have cron run things for you once a minute, once an hour, or even once a month. This is very useful for having backups run at night while no-one is using the machine, or to run a script once an hour or so that checks on a machine's status and emails you the results somewhere else.
So, yeah, have fun scripting!
My friend Chang pointed me to this really interesting article which talked about trading markets for political futures : e.g. outcome of the 2004 Presidential race. Then I checked out the University of Iowa's site on such markets. They are operated by faculty at the University of Iowa Henry B. Tippie College of Business as part of the research and teaching mission. These markets are small-scale, real-money futures markets where contract payoffs depend on economic and political events such as elections. There could be different kinds of markets such as political, economic indicator or even classroom markets!
Imagine this:
The IEM MSFT (Microsoft) Price Level Market is a real-money futures market where contract payoffs will be determined by the stock price of Microsoft. Does this mean that we could trade on any event that is intrinsically probabilistic? If Yes, how is this different from betting on a chance event? Some food for thought.
http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem
I have been looking into some analysis for credit default swaps at DB, which is the main variety of credit derivatives in the market now. But, what really are credit derivatives? A credit derivative can be defined as an arrangement that allows one party (Protection buyer) to transfer credit risk of a reference asset, which it may or may not own, to other party (s) that behave as protection sellers.
For instance, consider 2 lending organizations say Banks A and B. Bank A specializes in lending to the automobile industry, while Bank B focuses on lending to the FMCG industry. Both banks suffer from risk of portfolio concentration and should diversify their portfolios to remain safer. Credit derivatives offer the easy solution here: both banks without reducing or transferring portfolios could buy into the risks of each other. Bank B buys a part of the risk of Bank A for a fee, and vice versa. Hence, both banks diversify their risks and their returns too. The fee that is obtained as part of the derivative contract is part of the return from the portfolio held by the other party/bank.
Its interesting to note the growth of the credit derivatives (CD) market (which has surpassed any previous expectations). In 2002, the global market was estimated at ~ $ 2 Trillion, and is expected to be around $ 5 Trillion by end of 2004. London continues to be the dominant center in global CD market ahead of NYC and Asia.
Here's an interesting URL for Credit Derivatives: http://www.credit-deriv.com/creprime.htm
I have recently been working on Apache Cocoon. Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concept of separation of concerns and component-based web development. This ensures collaborative development without stepping into each other's shoes. Its interesting to see the parallels with the .NET Web Framework. Cocoon implements (its) concepts by use of 'component pipilines' - each pipeline specializing in a particular operation. So, one can hook together components into pipelines without any required programming.
Cocoon has been designed to coexist and interoperate side-by-side with existing J2EE solutions or to give them new functionality without requiring any change in the existing infrastructure. Cocoon interacts with many data sources, including filesystems, RDBMS, LDAP, native XML databases, SAP® systems and network-based data sources. It adapts content delivery to the capabilities of different devices like HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF, to name just a few.
URL for more details on Cocoon: http://cocoon.apache.org/
I am working currently on the LDAP servers in DB, NYC. LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is interesting stuff especially for database administrators and web devs. IBM Redbooks have a good LDAP Tutorial - http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG244986.html
X.500 is interesting stuff- X.500 is the original set of directory standards from ISO, which used the communication protocol DAP. LDAP is Lightweight DAP (Directory Access Protocol), a slightly different version of the old DAP. Whilst LDAP was originally just a protocol for talking to X.500 directories, the term LDAP has practically replaced X.500.
Landed in NYC on 06/03. I am interning on Wall Street, which is full of investment banks with smart people from all over the world. The city looks good, and going by what people say, it should be a sunny summer!
Jeff Jarvis kick-started the session with the concept of “tradeblogs”. Social software built on such tradeblogs have millions of users in the network serviced by a common technical support software. So, there are 2 firm types here-one focusing on community building(A) and other in-charge of technical implementation (B). Both firms share revenues in the beginning and revenue shares might change in subsequent years. Usually, owners (firm A) can leave the other firm B and take away all their content (blogs). But, firm B archives these blogs and only trade copies.
Blogging can be extended as a business in the following ways:
- Sell advertising:- ads such as BlogAds, RSSads, and google adsense; finding sponsors; pay-per click advertising; have consumers pay for an add-free blog site; join and create networks.
- Become a media property:- build consumersite like Gawker etc.; Trade sites like PaidContent.org; build local sites with local consumers (e.g. a local product firm in western massachusetts might find it expensive to advertise through newspapers etc. It might choose to leverage the local community built by the local blog site); build brand and sell out (DailyCandy); Trade Weblog especially in publishing firms such as McGraw Hill.
- Sell products indirectly (meaning for others):- Amazon effective deals; eBay affiliate (experts on arcane products); offering community-based knowledge in electronic/other form as in eBooks.
- Sell products directly:- sell books one has written (e.g. Lileks); sell albums you've made (e.g. Ken Layne); sell art and T-Shirts; Create books from one's own blog and sell (e.g. Tony Pierce); offering subsription service to buy your content; Personalized services as in travel blog writers; sell weed files (http://weedshare.com).
- Blogs for Hire (selling openly for audience):- blogs for blogging company (e.g. GawkerMedia, Creative Weblogging); blog for companies; for publications (CalPundit); blog for a product (e.g. Hugh MacLeod on movie blog); blog for politicians (dean); blog for organizations like charities, and political parties; and blog for trade association.
- To benefit your core business:- use to promote consulting (ride bruner); to promote service (e.g. Denise Howell and a law firm); to get free-lance writing gigs (Tim Blair); use blogs to get book contracts; use blogs to get hired for publications; use to smoke out whats happening in your world and make contacts.
- Sell Services like consulting about anything, or about blogging, and translation.
- Ask for Contribution from Readers:- Andrew Sullivan; hold an online rent party; hold charity eBay auctions for your blog (people donate things instead of money; sales go to support the blog).
- Ask contributions from Rich people:- foundation grants; starting a blog foundation to support worthy blogs.
- Sell content:- sell to readers; syndicate blog content to other sites (e.g. IWantMedia); Developing specific content packages and selling them as PDF reports.
- Sell previous memberships:- members get newsletters, can post comments, and get content early and complete RSS feeds.
- Bring people together:- run meet-ups, MatchMakers etc.
- Search provider for BlogSphere:- search and RSS feed offloading.
Challenges:-
- Statistics:- advertisers' demand like blog audience and usage, total audience size, network blogs, traffic, demographics, and behavior; means of tracking not just downloads but also views - for RSS feeds.
- Ad Serving:- Sophisticated targeting:- by content, audience/author, demographic or geography; performance statistics like advertiser's return on investments; standard structure for advertising messages (creative standards), so that advertisers can more easily syndicate ads across blogs; serving and advertising RSS feeds.
- Payment and Network structure:- Blogs to take credit card information? like Paypal? Infrastructure for direct sales, and for membership across a network of blogs.
Concluding remarks:-
Need for a trade association for (business) blogs which would ensure credibility in face of taking advertising and also look at effective measurements and estimation of blog traffic.