Help expedite cancer research by donating your idle computer time

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.

What makes you happy?

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  them.
On the other hand, scientists have also studied, what really makes people happy and specially why are some people happier than others. Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, UC Riverside CA researcher and author of the book The How of Happiness answers this question in her book by examining the traits, behaviors, habits and values of happy people. In fact, she has some advice that can improve happiness in life:

• Cherish everyday's moment - According to Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, people who cherish everyday's moments like "smell the roses" and watch children playing are much more happier than those who ignore these.
• Be optimistic - this is another way of saying, always smile even when you don't fell like smiling. Researchers claim that even people that are not born with "half glass full" attitude can learn and overtime that becomes habit. 
• Have meaningful goals - Whether its work or home, doing things that are significant and enjoyable at the same time will make you happy. Scientists believe that happiness lies at the intersection of pleasure and meaning. We all try to find means for thriving at work and when we find those means we find happiness, don't we?
• Compare yourself with your own achievements -  Dr. Lyubomirsky says comparing ourselves with others are more damaging to our self esteem and happiness than anything else. If at all, you want to compare, then compare with your own achievements over time. 
• Make good friends - Researchers believe that being surrounded by shallow acquaintances is damaging to your happiness, instead make good friends - a close relationship based on understanding and caring.   Happy people maintain deep relationship with friends and share fine human values. 
• Get involved with the life of others - Research indicates that volunteering and contributing to the lives of others makes you more happy. Smaller things like celebrating other's success at work, passing on valuable skills to others and listening to a friend 's problem gives us happiness for sure. 

While I am going in search of my own happiness :-)  you enjoy your day and don't forget to tell us "what makes you happy?"

Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering SEKE 2010 conference

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.

Alaska - The Last Frontier

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 Victoria BC Canada

Manage risk of your portfolio

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 on the portfolio. Next I am going to play with the system by adding and merging other portfolio with this one and see if it changes the buy sell recommendation. If you have used Portfoliomonkey, please let me know what you think of its analytic results.

Diaspora project @ kickstarter raised $200k

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, you can join their mailing list.  Wish you all the best Diaspora team !!