A JVM Lover

These days, both at work and at home I run into problems because of what seems to be a slow internet connection. Unfortunately there is no way of ascertaining that as I have no easy and reliable measure of the Quality of Service that I am getting.  Probably the service providers might be able to do that, but its definitely not in their best interest to share with the rest of the world how many times their network failed. Similar story goes with the cellular communication system. There was a time when the calls dropped frequently; but it was difficult to place the due blame on the network provider because there was no measure of network quality that was available to a consumer. I think a Quality of Service monitor that can be placed in the end user's hands is definitely a great subject for research and development. Probably it will fit the bill for a good student project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGBfsdCNsE This interview done by Doordarshan really touched me. We need doers like Raghu Rajan who also think positively.

I was Googling for the potential applications of data science. My search was inspired by the fact that India has a government data portal - data.gov.in . Soon, I was delighted to find that since my last look at the topic, something new has happened. It is - http://www.opendata500.com/ - which is really a list of 500 companies who have created businesses out of open government data. Now, that is very encouraging ! Because, like many I too am a believer that any sustainable human endeavor should also make economic sense (there are a few but, very important exceptions).

TODO: Write this up better. Some interesting tools and websites  Blogs: http://flowingdata.com/ ,  www.visualizing.org Visualization tools for programmers:  JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - http://philogb.github.io/jit/ jqPlot - http://www.jqplot.com/ Google Charts -  https://developers.google.com/chart/ All three provides a good collection of chart types D3js - http://d3js.org/ Let me call it the jQuery for data visualization. Really appropriate for customized data visualization for the web.

Most of what you are going to read are based on my personal experience as a student of physics myself. But, I think you should have a look. I am a student of engineering now and doesn't do much of fundamental physics these days. But back in high school I used to enjoy it. More than anything else, the class textbook from the NCERT was my primary guide as I put a lot of emphasis on understanding the concept more than drilling problems or memorizing formulae. However, I was lucky enough to have done even the testing types of questions of the  IIT  JEE decently well. But, after gaining good exposure to a variety of smart students at college I now think I have found a better way of learning physics. This is what I wish to write about here. To put it in a nutshell, The concepts are short and easy. Learn them quick and easy. Work hard on solving problems, raising the difficulty level slowly but steadily. As I said, I used to spend a lot of time reading the textbook. I d...