random ramblings

This weekend, I was reading interview with editor of The Guardian in Hindu , came across this:- If you believe there is a revolution going everywhere else in information and you take a decision early on to cut yourself off from that, then it’s difficult to see how you can experiment in future. My suspicion is that in the next 10 years, the most extraordinary things will happen in terms of information, how we find it, how we search for it, how we present it. And I want to be as open as possible to all that. There has been this drumbeat of change in news and in general publishing – with web first and now mobile and other devices such as iPad and Kindle gaining more prominence. But what struck me there was the intention to keep the organization open to that change, getting positioned to take advantage of it than work to minimize the impact of the change. Other thing was about predictions. Same article in Hindu mentions about mobiles and saw this Gartner research which is related to...

I was reading this on Chinese way of tests in schools vs US . Article was talking about a kid “who was clearly not “ready” to read” and “(US) law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade” so that kids don’t start anxious about tests. Again not a consideration for us. My daughter, 3 and 1/2, is starting to read words in Malayalam and English. And it will be the case with most of our children – we don’t really consider the readiness factor all that much. Our parents don’t have too much against scolding the kid, forcing them to sit and study and make them ready rather than let them develop at their own pace. For “Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less (tests).” – at the same time, we usually don’t have that consideration of kids having fun while choosing school or education. It might be a good thing in early ages, but that attitude towards education – that pretty much it is about passing test...

I have read Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, so wanted to finish off his books – completed Blink and reading What the Dog Saw and Other Stories now. The subjects that he takes up may not be very sophisticated and I doubt if many authors can write an entire book or even a chapter on them – but he somehow manages to write a book and make it entertaining. Usually making something “pop” (fiction, movies, and science) is looked at as making it somewhat less in quality – but I feel in many cases that the information might remain available only to experts otherwise. I had read “Made to Stick” sometime back – about making your ideas sticky by simplifying the concept, telling stories that are used to remember the concept etc. It will be hard to enjoy a serious psychology article, but I think that is where Malcolm Gladwell is succeeding – telling stories to make things sticky. Basic concept of this book is also very simple – our unconscious mind is deciding many things making ...