"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -- Henry Wadsworth

[Source: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27506.html]

I am selling my Bajaj Pulsar 150 DTS-i bike. First owner. It has run only a measly 12500 kms. It is in excellent condition and gives 50 kilometers to a liter. I bought this back in college and am looking to sell it now. It has run so little mainly because I was away from chennai most of the time.

Please do pass on the word if you know anyone looking to buy a second hand bike in Chennai, India.

If interested mail me on pulsarsale [at] prashblog [dot] com

I had earlier worked upon a project that very closely mimicked a social network. Alas, I had no experience with databases then and we set forth to build the project on a relational database. I have since been trying to learn more about graph databases and how they are used by the various "web 2.0" companies. I came across this excellent introductory presentation on Graph Databases on highscalability.com.

Get the presentation from http://markorodriguez.com/Lectures_files/risk-symposium2009.pdf

Tags: Graph Database, Database, Relational, Graph

[Source: GraphJam]

There are many factors to consider before deciding between pursuing a Ph.D. and a Masters degree. A Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) is a terminal degree. It is in effect a recognition that you have have mastered and have produced signficant original contribution to a body of human knowledge. A masters degree on the other hand is aimed at increasing your breadth of knowledge in a particular area.

Career Options
A Ph.D. degree prepares you for a career in research - be it in Academia or in the Industry. Professors in most reputable universities are expected to hold a Ph.D. degree. As is the case with researchers in Industrial labs. Industrial Labs that hire Ph.D. holders in computer science include Microsoft Research Labs, IBM Research Labs, AT&T-Bell Labs, etc. A masters degree on the other hand is a much more hands on training for the industry. It will prepare you to meet the industry problems with an improved perspective as compared to an undergrad.

Funding Opportunities
Most Ph.D. candidates are funded from Day 1. Whereas as a masters student it is often harder to obtain employment within the university. Professors prefer to fund Ph.D. candidates rather than Masters students simply because the Ph.D. students will remain in the university for a longer time and will hence be able to produce much more significant work along with the professor.

Choice of Universities
The number of students chosen for the Masters program is significantly more than the number of students taken on every year as Ph.D. students. This coupled with the fact that professors will have to allocate a part of their funding for Ph.D. students, makes it a lot more easier for students to obtain admissions for the masters program at their choice universities.

Previous Experience
If you have significant research experience either during your undergrad or with industry experience, and you are certain that you will enjoy a career in research, then a Masters degree will hold limited appeal as it doesn't quite polish your profile as much meet the requirements of a research career.

Personal Commitments
A doctoral degree will take anywhere between 4 and 7 years to finish whereas a masters degree can be finished in a year and a half to 2 years. Many folks will not be able to undertake a commitment for such long time intervals. Also to be noted is that most universities offer a Masters degree to the students after 2 years (once they finish their masters course requirement). So even in the tragic chance that you have to drop out of your Ph.D. program, you will still have a masters degree.

Other strong reasons
I personally consider choosing to pursue a Masters degree a less risky option. Folks who dont have a very strong academic past might choose to pursue a Masters degree at a lesser known university in the US before applying for Ph.D programs at better universities. Also, if you are still unsure about whether you are cut out for the research career, you can choose to do a Masters degree to get a wiff of the research career before you decide.

While I have by no means exhaustively covered the guidelines for choosing between a masters and a doctoral program, I hope this will help you start thinking in the right direction. Also, please do leave a comment if there were other factors that influenced your decision.

Tags: Ph.D, Masters, Graduate, Education

For those of you who are not familiar with TED and have not been following my "other" blog at DesiTech, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED is happening in India for the first time. TED is a conference where the really really interesting people are given an opportunity to address the amazing audience. More information about TED here and here.

TED is inviting folks to apply for the TED fellowship. As a TED fellow not only do you ride alone with the amazing brand name of TED, you also get additional benefits. Past TED fellows include Yatin Sethi (Design researcher for Ashoka-Youth Venture; Cofounder of Pankhudi Foundation which aims to benefit underprivileged children in India. India/U.S), Esther K. Chae (Actor/playwright -- her one-woman show explores a North Korean spy and the attempts to unmask her; Yale Drama alum. U.S./Korea), Taghi Amirani (Iranian physicist turned documentary filmmaker, has filmed the Taliban and NASA scientists), Sheila Ochugboju (Operational Director of Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network; science educator. Nigeria/U.K) and Mohammad Tauheed (Architect; Founder of ArchSociety.com -- an online community for architects. Bangladesh).

A copy of their detailed press release calling for fellows is available at http://docs.google.com/View?id=ajk5rhcd8zzc_72dmtkcpgr

Tags: TED, TEDIndia, DesiTech

Well not really... if you think you are a dummy then stop right here and read no further. "Apping for Dummies" is just a catchy title and this is my blog, so go figure. Oops wait, we didn't define what "Apping" was did we? Apping is jargon for applying for higher studies. This post will focus on lessons I had learnt when I applied for higher education in the USA. Hopefully this will help you get some much needed 'gyan'. Before we start, I hope you are reading this well before you have started your App process. Time is necesssary to tune your profile. Time is essential for identifying your target universities. Time is all you need to ensure a happy app season!

Some of the first steps before you start your App process is to ask yourself a few questions:

• Why do you want to go in for higher studies?
  Why a masters or a Ph.D. in the US? Is it for you to enter the job market in the US? Is it for the additional pay? Do you want to take a teaching job? Do you want the additional time to decide what you want to do with your life? Is it for the exposure to multiple cultures and academic environments?
• What is your area of interest?
  This is an especially hard question to answer. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was in the 3^rd year of my undergrad! But it will do you a load of good if you actually invest some quality time thinking of what is the general area you want to concentrate on. This will help you when you have to choose your university, your advisor and so on. Also, it will help you write a most clear Statement of Purpose!
• What are your future plans?
  Do you want to turn Entrepreneurial? Do you want to take up a technical job? Go into the management ladder? Go in for even higher education? Take up a teaching job?
• What is your financial dependance?
  Can you fund yourself for the first quarter? Many students get some kind of TA or RA financial aid after their first quarter at the university. Most Ph.D. students get funded right from the first quarter, however it is much harder to get a Ph.D. admit as compared to a masters admit.
• M.S. or Ph.D.?
  The application is quite different for either. While MS prepares you mostly for working in the industry, a Ph.D. trains you in conducting individual research which will gears you towards a job in the acaedmia or an industrial research lab.

This will be a series of posts rather than one big monolithic post. So gear up for more in the next post.

Tags: Education, MS, PhD, Higher Education, Graduate, Engineering

Following up on iDemocracy Camp, Selvam has created a social network around this on Ning. Head over to http://idemocracy.ning.com/ and sign up if you are even vaguely interested in this space.

You might also be interested in the list of online democracy sites that Selvam had coallated. The list is also on the group's discussion list: http://idemocracy.ning.com/forum/topics/list-of-online-democracy-sites.

Tags: iDemocracyCamp, iDemocracyCampChennai

Ok. I am guessing, I am _really_ back to blogging now. I attended an "iDemocracy Camp" today. Which roughly translates to a BarCamp focused on e-Governance. The meet was organized by Selvam from eMoksha.org.

The meet started off with a round of introductions and Selvam broke the ice with a short presentation on social initiatives in the democracy space. This was followed by a round of short talks by folks in the audience who had themselves started social initiatives. There was an uber cool duo - Alok and Gautam from Karnataka Learning Partnership. The duo is involved in working with over 1400 primary schools run by the GoI by providing learning materials in local languages, training the govt school teachers, etc. More importantly they are involved in a series of measures to understand how the initiatives are making an impact in the lives of the students. How their overall appreciation of education improves, how it reduces dropout rates, etc. Their intention is to bring it to a stage of adequate maturity where the Govt can make critical decisions using these metrics.

There was also a couple of folks (Prashanth and Bharat) from the AP2009 team who narrated their war stories. Finally, there was also a talk on how much community participation is required in the Open Street Maps project. The presenter (Arun Ganesh) also spoke of some alliances he had initiated with the MTC bus corporation to use OSM.

Some central takeaways from the meet:

• There are a number of social initiatives in the e-governance space in India who are duplicating effort. There has to be more interaction between the initiatives to share data and development efforts


• What works in the UK and other parts of the world needn't work in India, typically because of the scale at which it will have to work in India. Gautam shared an interesting anecdote about how he used the Indian postal system for information dissemination in creative ways. To very poorly paraphrase his quote - "To solve Indias problem, the process lies not in creating new solutions but by using the existing infrastructre in more creative ways"


• When approaching bureaucratic officials, the pitch has to focus around how the initiative will solve their problems rather than the public pitch of solving citizen concerns


• There is general consensus on the requirement of freely available geographic data (of the kind Open Street Maps provides) but with additional accuracy and authenticity


• RTI by itself is an excellent tool, but using RTI to gather data is a tedious process, since technology itself is not embedded into the process


• Merely acquiring humongous amounts of data isn't enough, there also has to be a focus on how to parse this data and make actionable decisions about of them

One glaring point that I very vehemently disagree upon was the general sentiment that "profitability" is a crime. Some presenters even called it the "Indian mentality" to be self centered because they did not contribute to open source projects without expecting some kind of appreciation in return. I found the AP2009 guys almost apologetic about having used Ads to provide revenue for their site. Perhaps my apprehension of this feeling is because I have the same Indian mentality or perhaps its my ardent adoration of Ayn Rand's principles, but I believe that there are immense opportunities in this space. If an initiative was to bring more efficient and make government functioning easily accessible to the masses, there is a very large income generation potential. The only real way to bring the most skilled folks to work on such social initiatives is to offer monetary incentives in addition to the social karma.