Blog Changed
Hello Friends,
I have shifted my blog from wordpress to self-hosted wordpress blog. The link of the blog is http://blog.sthakur.com . Please update your blogroll and start following my new blog site.
Universal Health Care : NZ, IN and USA
A few days ago, i got to knew average American view on universal healthcare. I think they are quite in dark by propaganda from elected officials and the lobbyists from insurance companies. I want to present the view of one of our friend from New Zealand : Nik Grimmett .
Here are the links provided by Nik.
0. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7510121.stm
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6765210/Britain-has-among-worst-cancer-survival-rates-in-developed-world.html
2. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434
3. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/17/1/225.pdf
People, please please wake up. Don’t remain in matrix .
5 points to remember while following feeds
I used to blog , not a lot, but I did in some interval. Later, I started following other people’s blog via RSS. I continued adding feeds to my RSS reader and I grew a lot during these 6-7 month. It took me a good amount of deliberate effort to correct my RSS reading habit so that I am not on RSS reader 6-7 hours per day
1. RSS is not email. You don’t need to read all of them one by one. You can read the heading only read the content if you find the heading Interesting.
2. Manage Site those publish Large number of content. Sites like Psychology Today or ScienceBlogs post large number of post due number of bloggers and blogs on them. You can manage them by just following the post of your favourite blogger and skipping other.
3.Manage Large tech-blogs. Tech-blogs like TechCrunch, CrunchGear , lifehacker or tech-news size like cnet, zdnet . you can follow the feed by tag. For example I follow hackers tag on good gear guide . You can do the same on non-tech also.
4.Use Star or favourite option. This is to bookmark your favourite post and yes share too if you use Greader or newsgator.
5.Use Read it later to read interesting topic later. It is on cloud .So you can read them from any location using addon on your favourite browser or other browsers.
Bonus:
Here is post that tells you how to use facebook without visiting facebook just to check content updates.
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Prisoner’s dilemma is problem in a game theory. It was framed at RAND by Merill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950. Albert Tucker formalized the problem by adding the prisoner statements and giving name ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’.
It touches various fields of science : evolution, game theory, cooperation, altruism, reciprocal altruism, moralism for some names.
The classic statement is :
‘Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?’
We have an iterated version of the dilemma known as ‘Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma’
Solutions:
I will be posting different strategy for PD and about its occurrences in future posts.
Lost Phone
Friends, I lost my cell today. So, don’t be confused why I stopped calling . Sending your phone no on mail will be very helpful. I will get back in touch as soon as I get a new cell.
The Stanford University
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband,dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the president of Harvard’s outer office. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn’t even deserve to be in Cambridge.
She frowned. “We want to see the president,” the man said softly. “He’ll be busy all day,” the secretary snapped. “We’ll wait,” the lady replied. For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away.
They didn’t. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted to do. “Maybe if they just see you for a few minutes, they’ll leave,” she told him.
And he sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn’t have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple. The lady told him, “We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. And my husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus.”
The president wasn’t touched, he was shocked. “Madam,” he said gruffly. “We can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery”. “Oh, no,” the lady explained quickly. “We don’t want to erect a statue.
We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.” The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, then exclaimed, “A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard.” For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased. He could get rid of them now. And the lady turned to her husband and said quietly, “Is that all it costs to start a University? Why don’t we just start our own?” Her husband nodded. The president’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. And Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
Update: This story is not correct, for more details see http://www.snopes.com/glurge/stanford.asp
The way of Unorthodox thinking
The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen.
“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”
One student replied:
“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.
For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use.
On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
“Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.”
“Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.”
“But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sqroot (l / g).”
“Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.”
“If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.”
“But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him ‘If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper’.”
The student was Niels Bohr, the only person from Denmark to win the Nobel prize for Physics.
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