Do What Matters

World Community Grid is the world's largest public computing grid(hub) to tackle problems that help humanity. Now a days, we use laptops at work place and switch it off and bring home with us when we leave office. But if you have a desktop computer either at home or office that is continuously on, you can think about registering it to donate the idle computing time to make a difference. See this video and read more about the various projects that are being executed at world community grid.

When we think about what will make us happy, we are often wrong, so I started googling if there are any scientific study done on this subject.  Indeed there are, and scientists like Daniel Gilbert  professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller Stumbling on Happiness  believe that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it. Gilbert conducted research by asking people how much they will like a future event about which they knew nothing except how much other strangers have enjoyed them. Basically Gilbert concluded that we are very poor at predicting our own happiness, however we can predict better about our own happiness by knowing how much a stranger had enjoyed by doing / buying the same thing. Probably, online marketers have learned from this aspect of human psychology to market goods and services along with stranger's experience (user feedback and recommendation)  about  t...

SEKE2010 conference is organized annually by Knowledge System Institute of Illinois. They organize half day workshops on variety of emerging topics in Software Engineering and QA. Take a look below: Green Computing and Software Engineering Embedded Software Engineering Search Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Secured Software Development and Engineering Service-Oriented Computing and Engineering Software Validation, Tools, and Test Automation Paper submission dates are over now, but I heard they are still accepting good papers. Take a look at their website and shoot an email if you have something cool to present.

No postings for a week, Thanks to Norwegian Cruiseline ! They charge fifteen dollars for 10 mins of internet access on board. Good reason to escape from www jungle while you are cruising. A 7 day cruise on Norwegian Pearl was full on fun ! This was my first cruise and first to Alaska, guests are treated as celebrities. 24x7 entertainmaint and food and needless to say about the natural beauties. Here are few pictures of the Last Frontier I will post Day to Day Activities later.. The Pearl Salmon Hatchery @ Juneau, Alaska                                                              Medenhall Bay Glacier Juneau, Alaska View of docked cruiselines from Roberts Tramway Up White Pass Yukon Railroad, Skagway, Alaska USA Canada Border at White Pass Mendenhall Bay Glacier The Parliament at Victoria BC Canada The Empress at Victo...

I recently came across a powerful investment analytic tool called portfoliomonkey.com The website is not associated with any investment house and backed by advisors from academia and investment professionals. I am not sure how much to trust its risk analysis on my portfolio, but at least something is better than nothing, when it comes to quantitative analysis of investment portfolio. To get started, you can sign up and add your investment symbols and value in the system. You can fake it if you are just trying to test the system, I entered correctly and it came back with a PM (Portfolio Monkey) score of 2.5 out of 5. The PM score consists of 3 indicators Average expected return, Volatility and Efficiency ratio(which basically is calculated by dividing Return by volatility. The system then allow users to Optimize, compare and discover the portfolio. I tried Optimize option and it created a graph of expected portfolio value and also suggested actions to achieve optimized return based o...

On May 13 post , I wrote about the story of 3 NYU students who created a prototype of an Open source social network software called Diaspora and promised public to bring the live version at the end of summer if they could raise at least $10,000. Guess what ...6479 people supported them with more than $200,000 in a pledge on kickstarter.com I have observed something like this first time, when 3 college students got so much media attention and general public, not venture capitalists funded them on a platform like kickstarter. This is like micro financing of dotcom in my opinion and very good for innovation. Timing was just right for these three guys because facebook was getting beaten up pretty much every day in the media in last few weeks over the controversial privacy issue. I have a feeling that diaspora project will be a success story and start a different trend in getting innovative ideas to the market place. If you interesting in keeping yourself up-to-date with the project, yo...