We cleared the first part (poster presentation) of final round and were amongst the TOP 5 from the whole state. The second (& last) part was power point presentation for 100 marks. It was split into 4 sections each of 25 marks – depth of knowledge, applicability of project, question & answers, presentation.

Each finalist was given 8 minutes for presentation. I finished them in 4 minutes and used the next 4 minutes for demonstration of our apps. To show the apps on mobile, I had to go near them. It was a long oval shaped table usually used in conference room. The judges were on one end and I was on the other end. It was something I did then at the 4th minute, that cost us the prize. I jumped from my end and entered in the interior part of that oval shaped table, walked straight to the judges, showed them apps, and came back. The judges said nothing. Then there were some Q&A, I responded promptly.

The last question I was asked by one of the judges, “This name “android”,  have you given it to the project”? !!! (No comments on this)

That was the end of it! I

After the results were declared, I found out that my excitement & dynamic action – of going near them and showing them the demo cost us the prize. Perhaps the judges were offended by my act and fact that I did not ask for their permission whether I could come closer to them and show the apps.

The final round is happening today, like right now. The competition will run for two days – 7 & 8 Jan.

Place – Krishi Vidyapeeth, Dapoli, Ratnagiri.

Today we have to present our posters, the shortlisted candidates will present oral presentation on 8th. About 500 teams from all the regions of Maharashtra are selected for this final round.

I have a firm belief that our project – Mathematics Android Apps – will win in this competition. If in case we do not win, there could be only one justification for that – that the judges could not perceive the true potential of our project!

Result will be declared on 9th. Stay tuned!

Our project - Solve Complex Maths Problems Using Our Android Apps – was selected from Zonal lever (Nashik Zone).

The second round – University Zone (Pune) – was held yesterday i.e. 26 Dec 2012.  Result is yet to be declared.

We have developed android apps for maths students & teachers. With these apps users can solve derivative, integration, linear & non-linear equations, interpolation, matrix calculations etc.
They can be used to verify the answers. Unique thing about our apps is you can get step by step solutions as well. User interface is just perfect.

You can download the apps from this website.

http://androidmathematics.com

I intend to write more frequently from now onwards and wish to make it active blog.

I was wondering what exactly I should write about. This is what I came up with.

1. I read books frequently. I can write about them.

2. About my life experiences.

3. Social issues. (India/World affairs).

4. Philosophy.

5. Mathematics.

6. Interesting / Innovative thoughts.

If you can suggest any topics, please do.

Case 1 – A poor adivasi lady from some village was selling some tiny birds on the road for her bread and butter for the day. A police came, took her to the court, made her pay Rs. 200 fine.

Case 2 – Another villager was sitting in some government office, smoking bidi. It’s not allowed. He was taken to the court and made to pay fine!

Thousands of such cases happen daily in India.
Why is our law ecosystem so efficient when it comes to the poor?
We say that everyone is equal under the law. That’s great.
But law is mostly used against the poor, rich gets away with the law.

Come on India, where are thy morals?

Let’s analyze the case 1. Poor lady – working hard for her bread & butter – no regular income source – no place to sell the birds (that might just be one time thing).
Legally speaking, selling stuff on the road without license is illegal we all know. But what morals give you right to punish that lady? Are you an idealist who apply the law every time no matter who you are up against? If so, then sure go ahead.
But if you cannot or do not have guts to apply them on the rich, then in the court of moral law you have no right to apply them on someone who’s striving so hard to ‘live’.

The point I want to make is this.
The rich get away because of our corrupt ecosystem. That’s different issue.
But if you cannot help someone earn their living, then at least you should look upon them from humanity point of view rather than legal view.

When Savarkar wrote ‘Indian war of independence 1857′, he emphasized on Hindu-Muslim unity. He consciously accepted it, promoted it. He was 25 then. Later on when he was in Andaman, he studied Koran and found out fallacy about that thought (as per his thoughts. I’m not implying anything here).

One of the reasons is -

Islam does not allow its followers to accept the boundaries of Nation. It transcends beyond that. Their first and foremost faith lies towards their religion according to Koran. So true believers in Islam religion, naturally they put Islam before Nation. (Here Nation implies the Idea of Nation and not the actual Nation as such)

Ambedkar too studied Islam and found that, Islam divides the world in two parts. Islam territory & Non-Islam territory
The proper terminologies are

Dar al-Islam – House/abode of Islam – The land where Islam runs.

Dar al-Harb – House of war – Where Islam doesn’t runs.

As per Islam religion, they can call jihad and other Islamic Nations can wage war on the ‘House of war’ to convert it to ‘House of Islam’.

Later on such ideologies of Islam religion led some Hindus feel the need of Hindurashtra – that all ‘Hindus’ should come together to defend themselves. They are deliberately giving more importance to religion to develop Hindu-Muslim conflict for their own selfish political interests.

They are corrupting other people’s minds (Hindu & Muslim both).

But we should sincerely think that as we all are here on the same land, we have to live, to survive and that too with our neighbors who might belong to any religion. More importantly we have to and we want to enjoy our precious life. So we all have no other option but to deliberately & consciously live together. Harmoniously.

I think most of us have realized this and that’s perhaps the reason why India is quite stable in the context of Muslims in India. There were some exceptions, but given the rate of progress of India due to globalization, we have no time to think about religious issues. And as the time passed since our independence, we have now come to know the futility of such religious issues.

India is on the verge of becoming global superpower. But along with that we have to make sure that the benefits of our so called ‘progress’ reach to the other end of the tail – the poor unheard Indian (of any religion). Thus we have got to maintain our brotherhood. That’s the demand of our time.

About Workshop

CAS Worshop, FOSSME, Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana, Pune.
(CAS = Computer Algebra system
FOSSME = Free Open Source Software for Maths Education)

It was aimed at maths research students & professors on how mathematicians can use open source tools for their research/teaching.

Tools we used 

SAGE, PARI GP, Maxima, GAP.

We worked on thin-clients. 6 terminals 1 server. 2GB RAM is enough for running these maths tools on linux on 6 terminals simultaneously!

BP called upon some very eminent speakers having great expertise & experience on those tools.
There were 70 participants from all over India. Especially from South India, Delhi, Lucknow, West Bengal. Stay arrangements were done in hostel. Got a chance to stay in hostel after 18 months (after BE). Cherished each & every moment.

About people I met –

Met many interesting people in the workshop. Here is brief intro about some of them.

Pavel & Rajlaxmi: Recently married. Love marriage. She stood 1st, he stood 2nd from Jadavpur university(WB). Cool couple. Their story is dramatic, interesting & appealing. Both are doing Ph.D. now. Pavel is kind of cool nerd. He once participated & actually won the reality TV show conducted by Sourav Ganguly. And so got a chance to meet Dada!

Soumitra. Again Ph.D. student. Artist too. He takes a plain T-shirt, and draw some funny stuff on it by colors. So his every tee is unique!

Paltu completed his MSc from IIT Kharagpur & doing Ph.D. now. Interesting character.

These 4 guys study in the same university (Jadavpur). Came together. They all have visited Shanti Niketan Ashram & watched many movies directed by Satyajeet Ray. I realized that Bengali people are very fond of & proud of their movies, unlike Marathi people.
We 5 spent great time with each other & will cherish the memories life long.

Kuldeep - He was my room mate at the hostel along with Paltu & Soumitra. Professor in Agra university. Married. Always pulling legs of others. Very pleasent character.

Aziz - My partner for “PC sharing” during the workshop. Professor in a college in Nanded. Had totally awesome beard. Cannot call it beard actually. It was like DCH style, but with the length of almost 5cms. It’s totally cool. He did almost all the worksheets that we had to do.

Speakers

Sourav Sen Gupta – A very dynamic speker from WB. He had knowledge about almost every thing that was taught in the workshops. Sage, Maxima, Cryptography etc. He delivered excellent lectures on cryptography. I bet, everyone will remember “%interact” feature of sage he shared with us.

Kapil Paranjape - A very cool speaker from IISER, Mohali. Taught us GP Pari. It’s heaven for number theorists! He demonstrated the efficiency of different algorithms for finding & testing the large primes.

Rajendra Pawale - Professor from Mumbai University. Taught how to calculate derivative (single/double) or Integration of the equation, plot the graph, solve the differential equations & stuff like that using Maxima.

Ravi Kulkarni – Demonstrated the use of GAP for finding the basis of equations.

The food was awesome. Hospitality was splendid. Thanks to Mr. Joshi, in charge of administration.

Front row: L to R: Manas, Rajlaxmi, Pavel
Back side: L to R: Paltu & Soumitra

Aziz, my workshop partner.

Workshop Hall

Apart from workshop:

Incidentally TJY yatris, (http://jagritiyatra.com) scheduled a meet on 30th at FC college. The same day, BMCC college hosted & organized a documentary on Gandhi on eve of his death anniversary. So I bunked the afternoon session. Attended the meet first. Met 2010 yatris. Some of them were working/interested in android, showed them the cool apps we developed! (http://dexterltd.com/android.html)

TJY meet at cafeteria in Ranade college (besides Ferguson College).

Attended the documentary session in the evening. The documentary was almost 60 yrs old & recently published.
A day prior to that (29 Jan), they called upon a person who actually witnessed the assassination. I missed that talk.

Documentary on Gandhi, Firodia hostel, BMCC College.

Well, overall, the week was awesome. Life is all about experiences and I’m fortunate for getting chances to experience such experiences.

Here are ’3 mistakes of my life’ as far as this first expt is concerned.

1. As I started off, I learnt that I had no mustard at all. (Lesson – Always ensure that you have proper ingredients especially mustard at the start)

2. I fried garlic, chilly & jira in oil a little longer. The chilly ‘almost’ turned coal black. (Lesson – Don’t fry chilly in oil for a long period. )

3. I used 1 onion for 2 eggs. The onion got half its size when fried up completely. So my bhurji’s total volume got smaller that I expected and so the volume of my dinner got smaller, and i still had appetite after the dinner. (Lesson – use 2 onions for 2 eggs)

In 1980s What Apple had been to IBM once, was Microsoft to Apple. What Microsoft was to Apple, Google is to Microsoft now. What Google is to Microsoft now, Facebook is gonna be to Google!

Google’s chief business model – advertising – is a derived one. It’s not strong or fundamental, not ‘give and take’ business. It’s all the traffic game. Anyone generating a real huge traffic on it’s website is a potential threat to Google. Facebook tops them all. Beautifully. Perfectly.

Let’s analyze how..

• Facebook is addictive & user engaging site.
• How many search queries you make on google every day? 10? 50? 100?
• How long do you stay on google page as whole in a day?
• A few minutes at max. It’s so short/quick. Search – click – move on.

If you don’t get right page, again do the same. Compare it with the time you spend on fb. It’s lot more. (The average time a user spends on facebook in a day is 32 minutes! The number is increasing day by day).

Facebook is building a great ecosystem around it. With it’s graph/Old rest API, anyone can build an app/game on fb. There are thousands of apps & games on fb. Apps are increasing day by day (Even we at dexter have launched over 12 apps).

Games like mafia wars, farmville helps engage user more deeply in facebook ecosystem.

‘Like’ button is close to become ubiquitous.

Same for ‘Facebook Connect’. Google ID is good, works on the whole google ecosystem. But ‘Facebook Connect’ is amazing, a great no. of third party sites are already using it.

Facebook page! You own a business? NGO? Shop?Any damn entity? Well facebook page is there for you. One page for every details on your business. It tells what your business/ngo/shop is upto.

Facebook is an epidemic. It has already destroyed orkut. It’s on its way to slay myspace now.

Many telecom operators are already giving free access to facebook on mobile. (Facebook may develop it’s own mobile (A idea just out of the blue. Facebook should consider it if it hasn’t thought about it yet. ** To facebook – Contact me here and I’ll tell you how to thank me if you do work on this one.**))

What does all this signify?

Growing user base. Growing no of apps/games. Increasing user engagement time on fb. Increasing traffic! More importantly, involved & concrete traffic! Facebook knows who is doing what (like google) and can display the ad just! If that’s not enough, the app & game developers can put advertising as per their choice on their apps.

Now, what’s the aim of advertisers? To reach large but correct audience in an effective manner! Facebook fits perfectly. We are beginning to see a change in the trends of advertisers. Though the change is small, it’s quite enough to threaten google. And that’s a big deal.

Facebook is competing with google on different grounds.

1. With the video sharing facility on facebook, it’s becoming a threat to youtube. It’s too early to say that, but again all the above mentioned points help boost the video business of facebook.

2. Facebook is having a very large repository for online photo storage. It’s large enough to compete picasa & flickr.

This is the positive side of having a good ecosystem (Microsoft fails miserably on this one).

With almost 500mn users worldwide, Facebook is on the roll! Facebook is playing it beautifully. It has found the key – ‘ecosystem’. If it continues to play it’s cards right, we shall see a great battle on the web!

Don’t jump to any conclusions. The quest DOES NOT take another form like ‘what’s the facebook killer?’. Give a break to Google. Everyone deserves a chance. Let’s see how google answers. There’s a lot left to be seen.

Most of the emotions which, eventually, disturb us are caused by our own thoughts. Both unconscious thoughts & conscious. The more you think about something, the more intense emotion will be. As Epictetus says – events are impersonal & indifferent. It’s what we make out of those thoughts, the way we perceive a fact cause a particular feeling inside us. It becomes more intense with more thoughts (irrational thoughts mostly) on it.

Lets take a real time example.
Situation – you get an opportunity to speak in front of 200 people, but you don’t dare do it (lack of stage daring).
What happens inside your mind – “I’m not habituated with public speaking, moreover I don’t know how I’ll perform. If I don’t do it right, people will laugh at me. I had better keep mum.”

You talk above dialogue with yourself, resulting into you keeping mum with a feeling of anxiety & fear. (Later or you repent about it – why didn’t I go for it? It starts disturbing you again.) This ‘thoughtful’ conversation is actually the culprit which is creating emotions in you and manipulating your actions.

Lets see what happens exactly in general n how to treat it.

Step 1 – Events that take place in your life– (Here, you get a chance to speak on the stage..)
Step 2 – ‘You’ talk to ‘yourself’ (As mentioned above)(Mostly this is irrational talk)
Step 3 – You ‘experience the feeling’ and ‘behave’ accordingly
Step 4 – Rigorously analyze the irrational thoughts you did in step 2, and destroy them
Step 5 – Replace those irrational thoughts with the stronger rational thoughts which will result healthy emotions in you. (eg. In this case, “I have got to give it a try. I may talk well. I wont come to know till I try. So lets do this!”)

Some times, when two or more people are involved in your emotional state, it mostly happens because of the standards (or expectations) you have set in your mind for them. Lets say you are angry over someone. It is because he/she didn’t live up to what ‘you thought’ he/she should live up to. Had he lived up to it, instead of being angry, you would have been happy for him (perhaps would have offered a treat to him). Thus you need to tell your mind – “I expect ‘blah blah’ from him. But I know he’s human and he may not live up to the expectation. If he does, great! If he doesn’t, well, that’s part of life and I have to accept that. But I won’t let it manipulate me.” This is what exactly a rational thought is. In step 5 mentioned above, you are replacing you irrational thoughts with such rational thoughts.

Every time you notice your emotional state degrading, remember the 5 step program mentioned above. Implement it consciously. And you will be back to your usual state pretty soon.

(Dr. Albert Ellis has shed great light on this topic. You may as well refer to his works for detailed study.)

(Note – in the above case, I rather prefer keeping ‘no expectations’ from anyone. But practically it’s difficult for most of the people, so my take on this – for the masses is – as I said above – keep expectations, but don’t let them manipulate you).