blog@Yantrajaal

In two earlier posts, I had introduced the concept of DIGITALICs as a new discipline of study in management schools and had also explained it further in one of the famous Praxis Lockdown Lectures . Now we at Praxis Business School have taken the next step of actually introducing these concepts into the curriculum of the 2 year AICTE approved Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) Program. A key challenge is the availability of textbooks that can introduce the correct technology to management students who do not come from computer science and other programming backgrounds. To overcome this Praxis Business School, under the Praxis Press Program has come out with these two textbooks. Python for Business Managers - is a textbook for the Foundations of Data Science course that is compulsory for all first year management students. This is a small, 64 page book that not only teaches the student how to analyse data with Python but also sets him up for a deep dive into data science. In In...

 The big question .... What is my IKIGAI Find purpose .. Stephanie Sieghoertner

One of the enduring tragedies of journalism today is its inability to monetize the significant intellectual effort that goes into creating great articles. With so much content being available 'free' readers have become increasingly reluctant to pay for articles that they read. Print magazines that have moved their contents to the digital format have tried protecting their IP behind paywalls and subscription mechanisms. Many users find this too cumbersome and opt either to read the few free articles or to simply go somewhere else. Which is a tragedy. What we would want is a micropayment mechanism that allows individuals to pay for articles that they actually want to read without having to bother about annual subscriptions tied to credit cards and other relatively complicated payment mechanisms. In an earlier post that was also published in Swarajya  in 2016, I had explored how browser based crypto-wallets could be used to make micro payments and I am delighted to note and repo...

Why this book?  After years of being talked about and featured in science fiction, artificial intelligence is finally showing up in the world around us. But before we delve into artificial intelligence, do we understand what normal, natural human intelligence is? For sure, there is no simple, single definition of intelligence, but it can be broken into a number of tasks, or categories of tasks. At one end of the spectrum we have raw, computational power that allows us to solve complex but logical problems, while at the other end we have abstract, philosophical concepts like being conscious and  self-awareness and have motivation and morality. In between are four kinds of tasks that are seen as intelligent - the ability to predict future outcomes, to react successfully to unexpected circumstances, to resolve between ambiguous situations and to create something new and original. Complex logical problems can be resolved with traditional computer programming while the philosophica...

Once the basic architecture or the big picture of the blockchain ecosystem -- as explained in Part I of this article -- is understood, we can now move into the nuts-and-bolts of actually building a software application. To do so, we need the following four pieces : An Ether wallet - to store Ether and pay it out when necessary A Solidity development environment or IDE to build contracts A connection service provider that allows client software to connect to the Ethereum network A platform or IDE to build a client software that can execute transactions against Solidity contracts residing on the blockchain 1. The Ether Wallet - MetaMask An ether wallet is a Solidity contract with an address ( think Bank Account Number)  and a private-key (think Specimen Signature in a Bank Account) that resides on the blockchain. What is commonly understood as an ether wallet is actually a client application that can execute payment transactions from the Solidity wallet-contract. So we will refer to...

With Bitcoin and cryptofinance in the news, blockchain programming has suddenly become very important but most people - including many programmers - do not have a clear idea on how to write a program on the blockchain. This article is not about theoretical concepts like Merkle Trees and SHA256 Hash. It is about how to write an application that creates, reads, updates and deletes a data record from a 'database' on the blockchain. A CRUD application. If you are impressed by Powerpoint slides in Zoom Webinars, you may skip this article, but if you are a programmer -- professionals or hobbyist -- do read on. You will end up writing your first blockchain application without too much sweat. I first came across Bitcoins as currency in the virtual world of Second Life and wrote about " Bitcoins - my first look at a new currency " in 2013 and then I struggled to wrap my head around this fantastic concept for almost a year until I reached a point where I could write " Bitc...

  Located this coin among others in a locker being cleaned out. Charanpreet Singh helped me decode the text that reads 19 Zarb Murshidabad and Badshah Alam Shah 1204. Used this information to get some more information from an auction site. Deepawali acquisition!

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of years you would know for sure that things are happening in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Rapid developments in the area of artificial neural networks has spawned a brood of useful architectures - CNN, RNN, GAN - that have been used to solve a range of very interesting problems. These include, among others control of autonomous or self driving vehicles identifying visual elements in a scenery recognising faces or connecting bio-metrics to individual identities automatic translation from one language to another generating text and visual content that is indistinguishable from that generated by human intellect. While these applications have created considerable excitement both in the technical as well as in the commercial community, there has been an undercurrent of resentment among certain people against what they view as ethical issues that are yet to be unresolved.  To understand what is at stake let us consider...

Abstract : Information, or rather information technology, is the basis of the digital economy that we live in but is there something more fundamental to information that goes beyond the thousands of  digital computers that we come in touch with in our daily lives? This article explores how information could be the basis of the material world itself, which in turn is merely a simulation generated by the proces sing of information. To do so we note that in social media and in Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) users live in a world that is not what it seems to be.  This leads to the question whether the world that we see around us is really real, or as described in Sankar’s Vedanta and the movie Matrix, is a simulation. This simulation hypothesis is explored further on the basis of Brian Whitworths paper on the feasibility of the world  being an illusion. Finally we demonstrate how this illusory world can be created purely on the basis of information thr...

That "information is power" is a statement that is often made both figuratively and loosely, but can it be literally true? Is it possible to find links between information and the stuff that they refer to in physics text books? Obviously the information that you read in the newspaper cannot be easily related to the power that causes a light bulb to glow. To simplify both sides of the equivalence, or analogy, and see if we can find a real link between the two, we begin with .... ( read on )

 

We are all familiar with carbon intelligence - the natural human intelligence that has given us everything from the fire and the wheel,  through the Ved, Upanishad, the Mahabharat, the Laws of Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Thermodynamics all the way through to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Near the end of this journey we have run into silicon intelligence or the artificial intelligence that is demonstrated by machine learning and neural networks that has given us autonomous vehicles and software that learns to play very realistic games. But somewhere along the line these two forms of intelligence -- carbon and silicon -- are coming together to create what sci-fi has been talking about for many years : the cyborg -- part human and part machine. Where are we on this technology? Is it still science fiction? or is fiction becoming a fact. I explore this idea in this lecture that I delivered to the incoming  (July 2020) batch of  Data Science students at the Praxis Business ...

Managing a business enterprise is impossible if the manager is not at ease with dealing with data. While soft skills and EQ are important, when push comes to shove it is data on the table that really matters. Data driven decisions are the backbone of any efficient enterprise. It is said that data is the new oil because of its intrinsic value. This is why the most powerful companies on the planet, like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon owe their immense clout  to the huge amount of data that they have accumulated about people and their behaviour. Gathering, storing, managing these multi-terabytes (or more) of data is loosely referred to as Big Data. But using this data to draw inferences about the past and more importantly making predictions about the future is Data Science. Managers in the past were not unaware of or indifferent to the importance of data. Many of them have been using spreadsheets like Excel to assist them in their daily work. However the volume of data in th...