Sudipta's Life

When I was growing up, Parker pens were a big deal. Those special pens were expensive and given as gifts on special occasions. Think of your sacred thread ceremony (পৈতে), the birthday where you also happened to top your class final exams, or the special uncle who visited after five years and had to prove that he was well off - that is when you received one. Almost as a rule, we would stash those away. Possibly to give away as gifts to other kids on special occasions, or to be opened when the "time was right". I revered these pens, of course, and any time I heard of a professor or someone who wrote with one of those, it immediately elevated them into a haloed status for me. It either symbolized wealth, or erudition, or both. On that day, we were about to go to a sacred thread ceremony of some social acquaintance. I was tasked with finding a good pen set from our cupboard where these were stored. I started going through these one by one. For those of you unfamiliar with ...

A very interesting research study once came out of Stanford University, led by Prof Walter Mischel. It was called the Marshmallow test . They put four-year-old kids in a small room, put a small toffee in front of them and gave them two choices. If the child could wait for 10 mins, he/she will get two chocolates. If, however, the kid decided to just eat the candy right there and not eat it, that would be the end of the experiment... no more extra chocolates for the kids. Watch the video below of how some kids struggled against the inner urge and temptation :) Later on, they kept track of what happened to each of these children... how did they do when they grew up? As it turns out, the children who were able to hold off that temptation successfully and got two chocolates as the reward did extremely well in life. The ones who were the quickest to jump the gun were also the ones who ended up in gangs, became small-time crooks, etc. This concept of "holding off" or worki...

It all began when a professor at my (undergraduate) college showed up in our lab and asked, "So who here is the guy who knows everything about computers?". Admittedly, such people have never existed. However, for all practical purposes, when a professor in his fifties comes and asks the system administrator of the college about "computers", you can be reasonably sure that the sys admin has the skills to do/fix whatever the professor is looking for. The system administrator in this case being yours truly, and the professor being someone not from Computer Sciences (no offence!). Like any good "computer-person", I dutifully asked, "What do you need? I am the system administrator" He literally looked me up and down, and said, "No, who is the person here who knows everything here? The person who takes care of all this?". He was pointing at all the 100+ computers around the room. Had it been the Sudipta of today, I would have deferre...

Boys will always be boys, they say. And rightly so - since the basic urge to show off or brag never seems to go away. And I use the idiom here to denote the sentiment of competitiveness rather than people of a particular gender: please don't lose the point of the post amidst all the he/she madness. When you are talking about little kids playing on the field, the bragging rights can be earned by who can throw a stone the furthest, or who has taken the most number of catches. See, those numbers matter. However, when you talk about geeks at the computer keyboard, the metric for this comparison changes. Before I delve into the details, let me set the record straight on some things. Your idea of the computer geek might be the meek nerdy guy with glasses hunched over his laptop who can barely look at a girl straight in her eyes. Sorry to break this news to you, but such people are rare and do not make your typical software engineer in the real world. We do in fact play football, drive...

I was returning home after some tuition classes one day. This was when I was in class 11-12, (for my readers in the US, this is your "high school"). In a more or less crowded mini-bus, a stranger with a stubble of a beard and a "knowing" smile came and sat beside me. He was about 45 years of age. Lungi clad, unshaven for a couple of days maybe, with a "jhola" in hand from which two or three plastic bags and vegetables were peeping out: this person seemed very friendly and simple. We exchanged pleasantries and he commented on the school bag I was carrying. Out of courtesy, I told him that I was a student at that time and I was returning back from some tuitions, preparing for my JEE and Higher Secondary exam and stuff like that. - "Where do you study?" I answered. The next question took me by surprise, though: - "Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?" -"About what?" -"Oh nothing big... just about some stuff yo...

This post has gone through three different names. At first, it was called "Why study the theory", and was juggling between the words "theory" and "history". Then I mentally named it "Start from scratch". Until, finally as you see above, it has been renamed to "Reinvent the wheel". Quite simply, I believe there is knowledge to be gained from re-inventing the wheel. If nothing else, there is knowledge in being aware of the background of wheel-making. To know what can go wrong, and how to fix it if something has gone wrong in the process. You will know what purpose it serves, and what other substitutes might exist and why certain design decisions were made. I know this sounds contradictory to what a lot of common wisdom says. But I will try to argue my point nonetheless. And by the wheel, I am speaking metaphorically of course. When there are easy steps outlined that tell you exactly what you need to do, life will always be easy. Think...

I just realized that there have been only 35 posts this year (not including this one), which is a very low number. I usually try to post during the weekends, but making up for missed weekends is a problem. Well I want to get the number to at least 40... so hopefully I'll make that number to 40 in the next ten days. :) Also, as is the tradition on the blog, I would like to invite all my readers to submit a guest post for the year-end post. Criteria: you don't have a blog or if you do, you haven't written there in at least 6 months. Well, now is the chance to scribble away at those creative quills of yours! :) ---------------------------------- I read Rashmi's blog post titled CAT: Restore the faith a few days back. Instead of posting a lengthy comment there, I thought I'd make my own blog post. Basically, I do not agree with her conclusions and have some counter-arguments. I think the heart of the CAT administrators was in the right place - they just lost sight of...

When I was a kid, I was a fan/supporter/follower of anything my dad would support. I honestly had no idea of why to support or not to support someone. My rule was pretty simple -- if my father supported and/or cheered for a team, I was going to support it too. So during the India-West Indies test series my uncles would root for Vengsarkar or Javagal Srinath, and my father would laugh at them when Clive Lloyd or Gordon Greenidge would butcher them apart. It was friendly banter, of course, but as far as I was concerned, this was absolute fun as a four-year-old to be cheering louder than anybody else every time a wicket fell or a six was belted. Naturally, by default, I became a "supporter" of Mohun Bagan because my father was one. And by supporter, I mean I was happy when I got news of them winning, especially over arch rival East Bengal. But beyond that - who were the strikers playing in the next match, which little known all-Maharashtra tournament did they win recently, wha...

It has become a fad nowadays to denounce formal education. If not denounce, a lot of us think the process is futile, and that the knowledge gathered there would be of no use in the future in most of the professions we go into. This idea was triggered more by Rashmi 's posts trying to answer her daughter's questions about why she needs to go to school. (Read the second part here ) Make no mistake, I agree with a lot of her points of view. But the point that I don't agree with is that you have learned most of what you will need to know (the three R's and basic math and social science) and should be done with formal education from then on. I've heard similar views from other people over cups of tea, when they cut jokes like "Why the hell do I need to know what wars Akbar fought?" or "Why should I care what type of ocean drift goes past Russia?". This post actually is a response to such questions. The idea is not to assimilate facts, but to discove...

A lot of things seem strange, when you think about it at a point of time 10 years later. The trouble with this way of chewing the cud is that you didn't learn how to tell apart the straw from the gold then. One of the bigger things that come to mind as I think about the days at the hostel there was the food. A good way of looking at it is that given the kind of food I used to have there, the food at any other place after that has seemed heavenly. People lost 5-10 kilos as soon as they joined our engineering college in the first year. I, on the other hand, gained a kilo or two. The reason was I had seen so much bad food while I was in my first boarding school that the food at the college tasted heavenly. I'll explain why. All curries in the school tasted the same -- you had to ask what was cooked when: you wouldn't know until you were told. We used to wonder how someone could cut fish into such small pieces, how 2 tiny pieces of chicken once a week was supposed to be enough,...

I have been meaning to start this series of posts on what I believe has been wrong with various educational institutions which I've studied in. I might stir up a hornet's nest by posting these, and therefore I need to ask you to go and read the disclaimer before you start suing anybody else. Also, the reason this dirty linen needs to be washed in public is that it will get enough attention. In systems where accountability is almost zero, external pressure can sometimes work wonders. Let me clarify at the very outset as well, that each of these places have been very valuable in my life: I've learned a lot in each of these. But sometimes you need to call a spade a spade, and the time is ripe that I should give up pretensions and get public what the scene behind the goody-goody curtain was. Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith, Purulia. Set in a very remote place almost without good city comforts and very poor road/rail access (as opposed to a major city), it was an ideal setting for...

Update: this is the link that triggered the following tirade: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070910/asp/bengal/story_8298531.asp We proudly celebrated our Teachers' Day on September 5th. Speeches were held; some fat-ass minister came and inaugrated the occasion by lighting a lamp or two. I'm pretty sure, wherever you were, you had elaborate ceremonies. You showed off your lifelong gratitude to your 'teacher'-s by presenting them bouquets and feeding them a few samosas and Pepsi. Our honourable President, Ms Pratibha Patil, also presented the National Teachers' Award to a select few teachers. Oh, lest I forget, it was "for their lifelong contributions to the nation". Only, in her case, instead of cold samosas and Pepsi, she handed over a few certificates and there was a ceremony for an hour or so. The rest, as they say, is history . The grand message of the ceremony was, "You lousy teachers... you have been teaching all your life but you still haven...

With the new fall academic session around the corner, a few myths I feel need to be busted for people who are about to come and join various US universities. First of all, the deal with on campus and off campus. Many of ye hopefuls might be accustomed to the fortress-like miniature city as the campus of a university, where a mighty brick and mortar fence guards the premises, and holds the sanctity intact of what you know as the 'campus'. Here in the US, however, there is rarely such a wall around the whole place. City roads often pass right through the middle of the univeristy, and the campus of the university generally is a region or a part of the city rather than a segregated block. Thus, off-campus housing doesn't mean that you are left in forlorn corners where you have to travel every day to reach the safe haven of the university. Neither does on-campus housing mean that you live in a noise-free (and noisier people free) zone. Quite the opposite, actually. A second fanc...

The best ideas come to me at the worst of times. What else can explain me sitting down to write this blog post at 3:00 a.m.? Actually, blog post ideas take some time to coagulate in the head. The seed, or the little irritation is planted by some event or some random memory. And then it sits there for days, sometimes weeks, gathering layers upon layers of ideas and coherence in the warmth of the oyster shell. And then, one moment of inspiration and a cup of warm coffee later, they tumble out, sparkling as ever to form the beads on this necklace. Even as I write, I have at least 4 unpublished drafts sitting in the list of posts, waiting for me to find words to express them with. And then there are some more ideas that are just churning in my head --- some deliciously sarcastic, some chuckling-ly funny and some others that talk of serious topics. But these aren't all that keep my head occupied all the time. There are thoughts about assignments and presentations which are due in a coup...

One of the attractions of studying in a big university is that you get seminars and talks from people all around the world, from all sorts of interesting disciplines like psychology, linguistics, astronomy, etc. About a couple of weeks back, we had a very interesting talk by Dr. Scott Nowson from the Centre for Lanugage Technologies at Macquaire University in Australia. The topic of the talk was, "The Secret Language of Blogs: It's not WHAT you did, it's HOW you blogged it". Among other things, his research focuses on "linguistic analysis to explore personality and gender difference in the language of weblogs" [quoted from his homepage]. Needless to say, I didn't need a second invitation to go for the talk! The results and the conclusions he presented were based on the analysis of 71 blogs, recorded over a single month. All of them had answered and passed around some meme which was a 41 point psychology questionnaire to determine the profiles of the peo...

When I came to the university about 3-4 months ago, I was all charged up about doing research projects, publishing papers, etc. I always imagined myself to be this hidden wizard of computer science who will just race through the tons of research papers and practically become an authority on research in my field within a span of a year. Pretty soon, I signed up for some reading groups where they discussed papers, I took courses that dived straight into the core of my research interest, and was suddenly beginning to feel good about myself. More importantly, professors and other senior researchers here are more than happy if you go up to them after having read an extra paper or two and ask questions about them. So I tried to bury myself in the research papers and journals and stuff like that. But it was then that the realisation struck that I know practically nothing of the field and the subject! So while I would plough on and on through 15 or 20 pages of a research paper, I'd hardly ...

Originally posted here on edulix I keep receiving queries from people (especially CS/ ECE) and there are common queries regarding UT Austin. I am not an expert here, but I'll try to put together answers to the most frequent questions. This I'll also copy-paste in my blog and in the testimonial for the Unisearch feature, so that even if this thread gets drowned, someone can locate it. 0. Should I apply? Yes, this is a ground rule question-answer that you must read before the rest of the stuff. It is generally difficult to say if you'll be admitted, and in all cases this is an Ambitious bet for anyone. However, just a 1480 on the GRE or 300 on the TOEFL will not do: you need to show something extra, something stellar that makes you stand out among the pool of applicants to reasonably expect a call from this place. The above numbers are just indicators, and not absolute values. See the AGRE question below for some more decision making help about your applciation. 1. Fu...

I receive a lot of emails these days from people, asking me to evaluate their University lists, statements of purpose, whether their GRE scores are good or not, etc. While some of them I answer personally, others are redirected to better places like edulix , or suitably to ask better people: I have no idea in blazes how good the University of Toronto is, for example, in civil engineering. But there is a common thing that I need to tell these people: involving the application process and the statement of purpose, in general what it means to become a graduate student as I perceive it now. The basic point about an SoP is its purpose: what is your purpose in getting an MS or a PhD degree? How much value and priority do you assign to research, to learning, just because it quenches some thirst within you? If you love to do research, to explore and tweak around, it will show through in your daily day-to-day actions. As for example, how dedicatedly can you browse through the archives of endles...