"Myth of a Strong Leader" by Archie Brown is from Bill Gates book recommendation. Pause a moment and think about the title. Every now and then you will hear something saying "Strong Leader", you never hear people saying "we need a weak leader".
The book's title is that, the concept of "Strong Leader" is a myth. According to the book, an effective person works by collaboration, flexibility and never becomes a center point of decision making.
In this short TED talk video, Salman Khan pitches for mastery based learning. It means that if there is a bar (say 100%) for mastery, then the variable in the learning should be how many hours one spends to attain that bar. Until the bar of 100% mastery is attained, the student should not be considered the master of the subject, and should not just move on the next class/course.
We adopted the current system because it was impractical for mastery based learning previously, but given our computational resources, mastery based learning is very much practical today.
Parkinson's is not curable (yet). Folks with Parkinsons will have a progressively degenerating muscular order. But I have seen folks with Parkinsons live for very long time with only slight impairment.
It's well knowm it is a brain disorder and caused due to stress. There is a recent news (http://www.bbc.com/news/health-38173287) that it might due to bacteria in the gut. If it were due to bacteria in the gut, then the cure is near.
I wrote a short technical howto on installing Adminer on Mac. If you use Databases on Mac, give this a try:
This article in new york times by Dalai Lama was a good one to read. I collected these important points from the article.
A small hint comes from interesting research about how people thrive. In one shocking experiment, researchers found that senior citizens who didn’t feel useful to others were nearly three times as likely to die prematurely as those who did feel useful. This speaks to a broader human truth: We all need to be needed.
Being “needed” does not entail selfish pride or unhealthy attachment to the worldly esteem of others. Rather, it consists of a natural human hunger to serve our fellow men and women. As the 13th-century Buddhist sages taught, “If one lights a fire for others, it will also brighten one’s own way.”
Feeling superfluous is a blow to the human spirit. It leads to social isolation and emotional pain, and creates the conditions for negative emotions to take root.
Indeed, what unites the two of us in friendship and collaboration is not shared politics or the same religion. It is something simpler: a shared belief in compassion, in human dignity, in the intrinsic usefulness of every person to contribute positively for a better and more meaningful world.
Happy Gandhi Jayanthi to all.
Gandhi's thought that I like to remember the most today is Knowledge without character is a social sin.
A very exciting thing happened this week.
Elon Musk laid out a plan for human beings like us to travel to mars and start a civilization there.
This is a multi-year plan, and there will be multiple rockets carrying humans and cargo. It seems it will take 3 months to reach to the destination and it has be done with Earth and Mars are in sync, which happens every 28 months.
Elon Musk's SpaceX team is trying to reduce the cost to a affordable level of 200K USD per ticket. If the ticket happens to be more than 5x this, it will still be worth it.
The design of the rocket, the system architecture and the entire plan was really impressive. Here is the link to the presentation that Elon Musk gave.
If you are truly interested, this whole video for 1 hour gives a good overview.
There are short teaser video as well, like this one.
Things just got real!
We got the Netflix subscription recently and one of the movies I watched after getting Netflix was "Saving Private Ryan". Surprisingly, I had not watched this movie earlier. Every time I watched the opening scene, I had simply given up and that was enough of the movie for me.
Now, that I completely watched it, this movie just my regard for "Steven Speilberg" as the director. I can think of no other movie that is as brilliant, portraying human emotions, as this one. The war is shown in its brutality. Soldiers holding on religion as the moment of truth is shown dearly.
The characters in the movie include Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) who shows extraordinary leadership and Private Jackson (Barry Pepper), a highly reliable, accurate marksman, who quotes bible, gives himself unto god, as he fights his enemies.
Everything about this movie was great.
The Emerald Route is a travelogue written by R.K. Narayan. In this book, he details the cultural and mythological history of various cities in Karnataka. Narayan presents the mythological history alongside factual accounts of the places, offering readers a glimpse into his unique perspective. He narrates these stories as if they are true events that occurred in those locations.
For example, Narayan recounts the story of Sankara, who was born with a predetermined lifespan of 16 years. Determined to make the most of his time, Sankara studied all the scholarly works by the age of 10, became a monk, and began preaching. When he turned 16, a debate took place between Vyasa and Sankara. Vyasa, the original author of the work Sankara was discussing, engaged in a prolonged debate with him. Unaware of Vyasa's identity, Sankara held firmly to his stance. When the debate showed no signs of resolution, one of Sankara's students called for a truce. Impressed by Sankara's profound knowledge of his own work, Vyasa granted him a boon to live for another 16 years.
Another fascinating story is set in Srirangapatinam, where, during one of the battles that Tipu Sultan lost, he was forced to surrender two of his sons, aged 9 and 11, as hostages to the British as part of the conditions of surrender. It is said that Tipu Sultan later managed to secure their release by paying a substantial ransom to the British.
Filled with stories like these, which provide an account of the history and culture of various towns in Karnataka, this book was a pleasure to read.
There are many supporting studies on this, and I came another one which explicitly stated that
Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance
The study suggests that parents should praise their children for the efforts they put in their tasks instead of praising the accomplishments or their intelligence for accomplishing the task.
Excerpt from the paper.
Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more lowability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.