Jai Kamal's Blog : Work in Progress

Imagine the biggest thing that you have ever seen with your naked eyes. Most probably, a mountain or an ocean will come to your mind. But, the biggest thing that all of us have ever seen is the system of stars, and we see them every day. The only thing is that we don't realize that they are too big despite all of us know that they are too big since our childhood.  Let's deep dive into the star system, enjoy one of the most beautiful videos on this, and become a child again. Before reading further, in order to appreciate the thought communicated here, first watch the video carefully. There is no doubt such videos increase curiosity and provokes us to seek the answers to many questions such as how this system was created? If the universe is expanding, then what is bigger than the universe? Can we ever travel to a different galaxy? Is there life on other planets as well? Is there any other species significantly more powerful than us? Can they reach our planet earth? But, probably ...

Have you ever wondered how much food do we waste? Is the food, if stopped from wasting, enough to feed all human beings? Well, I didn't ask such questions until  I saw a video on Facebook last year.  I was surprised to know that we currently produce more food than all humans can consume. I was under the impression that we don't produce enough, and that's why some people go hungry.  No doubt, the video was an eye-opener for me. Today also I came across a similar video and again I am stunned. There are many such videos on YouTube that highlight the problem of food wastage. Image source: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) According to FAO , one-third of all food produced for human consumption gets wasted. This waste is an enormous amount. If not wasted, this food should be more than enough to feed all those who go hungry.  What can we do? We can do at least our bit. In our individual capacities, we can practice good food habits such as buying...

Today news is being circulated that Amazon is launching  "Palm scanners" for secure transactions. Can we trust this transaction system? Probably NO. Because data breaches are too common nowadays and the impact of misuse of this particular system is huge.                       Recently one night at 2 AM,  I and one of my friends were planning to have a cup of coffee so that we can wake up till morning and finish some work. While the milk was boiling, we thought of watching a video on YouTube. Our eyes popped out of our heads after watching the very first advertisement. Seeing Ad was not a problem for us, we were surprised why YouTube's recommender system gives an Ad about coffee even before the coffee was prepared. I never searched about "Coffee" in any of my devices for at least 15 days prior to this event. The only way YouTube could get this information if some app on mobile was recording my voice (obviously, w...

Whenever I have too much to do in the last hours, it reminds me of one person. Guess who? Mahendra Singh Dhoni. I have not witnessed such an exceptional player in pressure situations. I like him so much that I pasted his image on my wall ( the same image I have used in this blog).  Look at the calmness on his face. Such a calm face in tough situations!  In nerve-wracking situations, I used to look at this image and calm myself down. On several occasions, this image works as a motivation for me to perform well in the last hours. Trust me, I have won in almost all of those occasions. There is no doubt Dhoni is the most successful finisher in the history of cricket.  Among all the last over chases, I like the chase of 23 runs in an IPL game most. If you can chase 23 runs in one over, that too with two dot balls in first four balls, isn't it some kind of miracle? Image source: https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/3m0FYPhLPt6HSkxHzkeaZI/How-does-Mahendra-Singh-Dhonis-scorecard-as-...

The motivation for writing this blog comes from a post recently shared by one of my friends as his WhatsApp Status. His status reads like this    "If you feel anguished about the elephant killing in Kerala but you yourself love eating non-veg food just for your taste buds, then you are the part of the problem".  I immediately replied to his status "So true". But later on, I gave it a thought and I changed my mind.  In the aftermath of the incident of  the elephant killing in Kerala , a lot of posts similar to this were shared across social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram among many others. The main reason for sharing such posts could be to criticize people for their hypocrisy, make them feel guilty, and try to change their food consumption practices. Are people empathetic in one case ( Killing of the elephant) and they are not empathetic in other cases ( say, killing of chicken)?  Yes, they are and they are in...

I  joined PhD program in June 2017, around two and a half years ago. I have learned  many things (both academic and non-academic) during this period. The focus of this article is to highlight some major academic learnings. Discipline and Consistency  Research is a mix of interesting and mundane tasks. Unfortunately, a lot more mundane tasks than interesting ones. Who will not love to finish interesting work ? The problem arises when you meet a roadblock of mundane tasks. To finish them, you need discipline. You will have to put your heart aside and try to finish tasks at hand like a duty. Consistency can outperform intensity when it comes to a long journey like PhD. A typical engineering student mindset suggest to complete things by working intensely in last hours.  At times they think themselves like Dhoni who can finish game in the last overs. But, this strategy doesn't seem to work well when it comes to PhD which is much like a test match. In test ma...

Ram , a 26 years old MBA student at one of the prestigious institutes in India, is known for his academic excellence and decision making skills. He has been a bright student throughout his life and his family has a lot of hope from him. He is lucky to have parents who don’t force their decision on him and he has been taking his own decisions since class 12th. He is proud of his strategy that he takes the best possible choice at every stage. He has ability to find what is best for him as he has very clear preferences and ability to calculate the payoffs from actions. For example, after completing class 12th, he decided to take admissions in B.Tech. and after completing B.Tech. he choose to work rather than going for higher education. After 2 years of work, he decided to pursue MBA. So far he has taken the best possible alternative, according to his preferences, at each stage of his life and he has reaped benefits of this strategy. Now, he is supposed to sort companies in his preference...

There is no doubt that we have limited time. We need to allocate this time to numerous activities according to our own life goals and preferences. What are those activities? I have categorised them into four major heads: Work, Health, Social Life and Happiness. Work This consists of the tasks that is expected while fulfilling professional duties. For professors, it can be activities such teaching, doing research, admin duties and many others. Health  The activities to keep yourself healthy such as enough sleep , good food and  daily exercising. Here, I am  concerned with physical health only. Mental health is assumed to be in shape if one is keeping track of  fourth head "Happiness" and also I am ignoring exceptional cases for simplicity. Social Life Giving required time to family , friends and society, in that order. It is crucial to give time not only to family but also to friends and society in general. Happiness One may extract happiness from va...

India could have won the match easily with the kind of form they were in. But they failed in this crucial match. I am not here to do a post-match analysis like a pseudo-expert on cricket (Most Indian Spectators are. I was like them too, not long ago.), rather I am here with a different viewpoint on this loss. It is very easy to criticise cricketers but can we learn from this event? What did India lack ? 1. Luck: Yes, it is true that luck didn't favour. The playing conditions in first 45 minutes of overcast conditions in England is harsh for batsmen. Had Virat Kohli been given not out, New-zealand might have reviewed it and their review could have turned down as it was umpire's call. Who could have imagined a direct hit from Martin Guptill to run out Dhoni. And you can find few more instances like these. Can we blame luck for loss? No. It can never be an excuse as no team has control over it. 2. Preparedness for worst cases:  They were not prepared to face such a s...

Time is precious, it flies very fast. We realize it only when we are about to fail or we have just failed to achieve something really important. On other occasions, we remain ignorant of value of time. Remember, we have enough time for major tasks and we need prioritization for that.Once you learn that, no one can stop you to become the person you want to be.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

There are two types of people Who work only when there is a lot of pressure on them. They need to be pushed through deadline, appraisal, assessment, training etc. Who are self motivated. They work better if they have freedom. We can belong to any of the above categories. Actually, we belong to both depending upon the task. Let us take the example of Virat Kohli, He might need a push in bowling. Does he need any push in batting? obviously not. In my opinion, if he is pushed for batting, his performance might decrease. In other words, he needs freedom in batting. In General, the freedom could be in setting your deadline, choosing the style of working , identifying the set of tasks to reach the goal  etc. Do you need full freedom? No! If given full freedom you might not perform at all.Let me take my own example, In semester vacations, my productivity is lower than normal semester days.I generally start my vacation with full enthusiasm with some ambitious goals.For first fe...

I think there is need of MOOCs for all the levels of education (Primary,Secondary, Senior Secondary, Higher Education) in different educational medium(Hindi, English, Tamil , Telugu, Gujarati etc). The main advantage of MOOCs is its accessibility, thus it can help us in addressing the problems related to Quantity. Refer my old blog-post for categorization of problems in education. It can also cater to the Quality of education provided that MOOCs are created by top schools. one such example is NPTEL, where professors from IITs, IISc and other premier institute contribute for quality MOOCs. NPTEL is focused only to Engineering courses.There is need of developing such MOOCs in social sciences and humanities also. In my opinion, we can develop MOOCs for K-12 education as well. Schools across India differ in terms of quality, pedagogies and curriculum. We can ask top schools of India such as DPS,Chinmaya vidyalaya, Kendriya vidyalaya etc to come up with MOOCs. In this way, we will be able ...

Let me describe one common scenario "The race". Two persons A and B are running on parallel and straight tracks in a 5 day race. A person is considered as successful at any stage if he is ahead of other. A started with a point 200 km ahead of the point from which B had started. In other words, A had head start of 200 Km. A travelled with 20km/h and B travelled with 15 km/h for first day. Next day, A travelled with 20km/h and B increased its speed to 20km/h. On the third day, B further increased its speed to 25km/h while A travelled at same speed 20km/hr. Who is ahead at the end of 3rd day? Obviously A is ahead by 2000km as he was already having a head-start of 2000km. even though B has outperformed A on day 3, he hasn't won the game. Wait! Game is not yet over. However, B can take two decisions at this stage: a) Even though he is trying harder than A, he is still behind A and hence he should give up. b) He should give tougher fight to win as he has travelled more ...

According to Wikipedia, " Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through delivery of content and instruction via digital and online media with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace ." These models of learning is used by both job market and academia. There are various models such as flex, Rotation, Self-Blend, enriched virtual model, la carte model etc. Three major models are discussed below. Flex Model In this model most of the instructions are online.Teachers provide assistance in-person only if there is need of assistance.The schedule of classes is decided by students and face-to-face interaction is minimal in this model. Rotation Model In this model mode of instructions (online & onsite) are rotated on a routine basis. This rotation schedule is generally decided by teachers. Students mostly learn at traditional schools with brick and mortar structure. Self-Blend Model In this model students th...

This is a branch of economics which deals with economic concerns of education policy. It starts with the basic demand for education and financing of education but it is not limited to that framework. A lot of work has been done including Becker's Human Capital theory, Screening Hypothesis, Job market signalling , capability approach, social choice approach etc. Some economists have also worked on below mentioned topics: Education and economic growth(Endogenous growth theory) Education as a public good Financing of public education Returns to education Economic assessment of training schemes Measuring productivity and Input out analysis Market failure in education In my opinion, a lot of work is still needs to done in this field. some of the topics of future research could be "Economics of technology enabled education", "Finance of PPP in education" etc.

I am just posting  my experience of participating in StatWars- An event conducted by Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi in its annual flagship event Vishleshan. (Eventually, I ended up winning the event). As this event was related to predictive analytics, those who do not have much Idea of predictive analysis can refer to my past post  How can you learn Predictive Modelling? Introduction to StatWars In this event we were asked to predict whether the residents of the city will purchase the one time investment scheme or not. The full problem description is here . My Methodology Before explaining the methodology, I assume you have some idea of four algorithms namely logistic regression, random forest, decision tree and knn. I used an ensemble of these four data mining algorithms. There are two ways of understanding my code 1. Read Individual codes and then read Ensemble.R (Which might take longer but this is better way) 2. Just read the Ensemble.R and forg...

Let us start with the introduction of predictive analytics. Before Knowing what it is and how it suits us, it is worthless to learn that skill. What is Predictive Analytics? According to SAS ,"Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine-learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data." Other definitions are just one click away from you .Just google it.  that is why google has become a verb from a noun :) Why Predictive Analytics? As stated earlier, this is one of the most important question to be answered first. (the only exception is that if you have passion to learn new things in life, you can skip this and start learning) Predictive Analytics is a part of Data Science(It's a subset of Data Science) and we all know that Data Science is the sexiest job of 21st century. you can refer that Oct 2012 HBR article  here . A lot of other sources such as   Forbes,  Inc,  Adobe  have al...

Indian Education system has many severe problems. They can be categorized under four heads : Quality,Quantity, Financing and Others. Quality Poor Rankings of Indian Institutes Quality of teachers Students don't have skill-sets required by industry Old Curriculum Poor quality of primary education  Quantity Low literacy rate Increasing demand of education as the population is increasing(education accessibility) limited seats in Universities Financing Lack of Infrastructure  Short Supply of Educators Salary structure of teachers Others Indian education system promotes Rat Race Lack of ambition(risk taking ability) for entrepreneurship in students Lack of proper career  counselling  Rote Learning Note: In rest of the blog, I will try to write about the solutions to above problems. Edit #1: (March 03,2017)   I found a beautiful question on quora. I wasamazed to see so many answers to this question. Some of the answers are really good. https://www.quora.com/What...

    The motivation for writing this article is Fort Minor’s song “ Remember the name ”. Is there any composition of attributes /skills/qualities that are required to become successful? If we assume that if people remember your name, it means you are successful, then according to that song they have said following compositions will work fine: “Ten percent luck, Twenty percent skill, Fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name” Do you agree with those compositions? Or do you have a different composition according to you? Anyways, let us forget about the song and we should focus on our main discussion that what is the recipe of being successful. Even if we want to make a cup of tea, which is considered to be the simplest item to be cooked after the ban on Maggi in India, we need to have a proper mix of ingredients of tea. Similarly is there any recipe for being successful?...