blog@Yantrajaal

As a prolific user of Twitter, I have more than 11K tweets on my timeline but I realised that in most cases I have either retweeted others' tweets or at best forwarded or commented upon the contents of various websites. How many times have I said anything original? Actually not a trivial number! I have nearly 4000 original "words of wisdom" that I hereby bequeath to posterity! How did I arrive at this list? Well I downloaded all my Tweets till 5 March 2016 into a spreadsheet and then using some simple text processing commands, I eliminated retweets and any tweets that contained a reference to any URL. Unfortunately that eliminated tweets referring to my own work as well but that was the price I had to pay to create this. Finally, here it is ... a collection of my pure and original thoughts from the last seven years!

Rise of the digital autonomous corporation Think of a company that offers a service that helps people track their assets and transfer the same to others on the basis of validated instructions -- similar to a current account with cheque facility. Think of the same company as hiring people to do this and paying them for their effort with shares in the company -- sweat equity. Think of this company as being in operation since 2009 and the value of its shares spiking to US$ 1200 before stabilising at around US$ 200 over the past two years. Think of this company having a current market capitalisation of around US$ 5.5 billion. Now what if this company were to have to no human managers and but only programs on multiple computers interacting with each other!  Is such an unmanaged company possible? Strangely enough, it is possible, it does exist today and it is called Bitcoin. The only twist in the the tale is that the only asset being tracked by the company also happens to be the sh...

India has a glorious tradition in higher education that stretches back to the hoary antiquity of Nalanda and Takshila but today this tradition is under stress. We have too few colleges for our kids and most of these lack the infrastructure (“hardware”) or the faculty (“wetware”) necessary to deliver the kind of programs (“software”) necessary to be world class institutions. In an earlier article we had explored how inexpensive technology could address this problem and here we explore structural issues that may offer useful alternatives. image indolinkenglish There are different kinds of reasons why we do not have enough good colleges. In the case of government, or public-sector, colleges it is a combination of lack of money, mismanagement and political interference. Central universities and institutions are better off but they too are plagued by cronyism and inefficient use of money. Instead of creating multiple IITs and IIMs in far flung parts of the country we should have incre...