While thousands of Mumbaikars spent their weekend lighting crackers on Marine Drive, Twitter members like Anaggh Desai decided to use the power of Web 2.0 [...]]]> Ed Note: This is a guest post is authored by Mahafreed Irani. Mahafreed is a journalist with the Times of India in Mumbai. She blogs here and tweets here. /Ed Note.

While thousands of Mumbaikars spent their weekend lighting crackers on Marine Drive, Twitter members like Anaggh Desai decided to use the power of Web 2.0 to raise money for charity. On Saturday morning, the 46-year-old Mumbai-based entrepreneur asked people to send him a Deepwish (Diwali greeting on Twitter), “For every wish received, I will contribute 0.25p to NGO Goonj’’. Excited by the idea, 41 other tweeple (members of the social networking site) decided to donate amounts ranging from 50p to Rs 5 for every greeting tweeted at them. By the end of two days, an amount of Rs 55,000 was collected from tweeple all over India and even the US and Saudi Arabia towards `educating the girl child’.

On his blog, Desai, who otherwise regularly tweets one-liners, wrote, “I am putting my money where my mouth is and will donate Rs 100 for every Diwali gift received, Rs 5 for every comment on my blog, 50p for every SMS greeting and 25p for every wish on Facebook, Twitter or via email’’.

Excited by the idea, popular tweeple like @b50 mobilized people and posted updates like “476 tweets x Rs 63.75 = 30,345. Those were the effort of 42 people on per tweet basis,’’ from time to time, to thank “ Twitteristan’’ and get more contributors.

While some deepwishes were as brief as, “Play it safe’’ the idea was to get creative and tweet “some genuine, original heartfelt stuff’’. So timelines were clogged with wishful updates asking for, `friendly Indo-Pak ties, non-polluting crackers and no water scarcity’. Actress Gul Panag tweeted, “I wish I could be 4 again, and 12 and 16 and 18. Meanwhile wish to donate to charity.’’

This is not the first time members of the networking site have come together to raise money for charity. Indian tweeple have earlier participated in twestivals, multi-charity fundraising campaigns organised on Twitter.

It has been quite a while since my last post. The blog’s been dying of neglect- it seemed right to attempt a resuscitation.

In recent news- I’m now pursuing a research fellowship at IIT Bombay. This is an MHRD funded project that aims to develop and deploy open source simulation [...]]]> Guess who’s back? <noise of crickets chirping>

It has been quite a while since my last post. The blog’s been dying of neglect- it seemed right to attempt a resuscitation.

In recent news- I’m now pursuing a research fellowship at IIT Bombay. This is an MHRD funded project that aims to develop and deploy open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB and OrCAD. My area of interest here is Control Systems and the tool I use is Scilab- though I have been trying my hand at Python (which is also used extensively under this project). Do let me know if you’re ever in the vicinity of the Controls and Computing Lab there.

In my spare time, I’ve been working on a pet project in the Siemens High Voltage lab at my alma mater VJTI (feels funny calling myself an alumnus considering I was a student there just a few months ago). This involves automating the control of the Pulse Transformer there- something that can easily be extended to other equipment in the lab and elsewhere. Both projects are fairly interdisciplinary and immensely satisfying.

I haven’t been attending as many events as I had been while I was back at VJTI- so this weekend’s Barcamp turned out to be a welcome relief, if only to remind me of the hustle and bustle of VJTI. More about that in a future post.

I’ve also been following some very interesting projects and endeavours at VJTI- There is a LOT of good stuff happening. Some efforts are fairly visible, while there are a few gems in the shadows.

While I’ve been away from this blog- I’ve been trying to maintain an “aggregation” blog where I post everything that’s between a blog post and a tweet. I’ve found posterous to be a great way to conveniently share stuff online.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to write an article for the Times Group on what one could do if one was benched at work or had his/her placement deferred. It was published in Mumbai and Bangalore Mirror.

Today I found out that I was featured in an article last year- I hadn’t a clue. The article was about the Mumbai Terror Attacks that I’ve written about earlier.

I really hope I blog more often now. I’m getting tired of doing comeback posts. Got something you think I should talk about? Email it in to ‘ideas’ at this domain.

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This appeared on the front page of the Times of India today. [...]]]> I’ll skip the part where I apologize about the uncharacteristically long delay since my last post. With the term coming to a close and my exams around the corner, I probably won’t be able to post too often for the next few weeks either.

—

This appeared on the front page of the Times of India today. And this was a feature piece inside:

Two weeks ago- October 11th to be precise, I donated blood at a drive in my college. They coupled it with a free Thalassaemia checkup- something that is normally prohibitively expensive.

The drive was carried out by the Think Foundation in association with the State Blood Transfusion Council. It was managed by a group of doctors from KEM Hospital and by student volunteers.

Vinay Shetty, the Vice President of the Think Foundation, a non-government organization that organizes voluntary blood donation drives and helps create awareness about thalassaemia, oversaw the drive. I got the opportunity to have a long chat with him.

Mr Shetty happens to be an alumnus of my college. Mr Shetty has been involved blood donation drives ever since his college days. He organized his first drive at the age of 19 when he convinced his old high school to hold a blood donation drive on their grounds. The folks from the hospital who came to collect the blood came prepared with enough blood bags for just 50 people. They arrived to find a line with many times as many people waiting. They had to send someone back to the hospital to get more blood bags. Needless to say, at the end of the day the lady in charge was gushing with joy.

A few years ago, the person in charge of the blood bank at Breach Candy hospital noticed him- he had accompanied a number of donors to the hospital. He told her about his activities in blood donations. She asked him if he had ever heard of thalassaemia. When he responded in the negative, she directed him towards a society that works with people afflicted with the condition. Ever since, he has been working towards spreading awareness about the genetic blood disease. (In fact, when he came over to my college for the blood donation drive, he went from class to class delivering talks on both issues- blood donation as well as thalassaemia)

An issue he brought up during our conversation was platelet donation. This is something that isn’t very well known. I had never heard about this before, and from the look of things, neither had anybody else I spoke to about this later, save one individual. It is a life saving procedure that helps patients with problems that arise due to platelet dysfunctions and low platelet counts- basically helps people undergoing chemotherapy, those who have AIDS, aplastic anemia and a number of other diseases.

Though the actual donation takes more than an hour, one can donate again after as less as 3 days, unlike regular blood donations, which require a 90 day gap between consecutive donations.

To this end, the Think Foundation has helped establish the ‘Lifesavers’ Club‘, a joint collaboration with the State Blood Transfusion Council and Doctors For You, a group of doctors from KEM hospital.

Beyond his work with blood donation, thalassaemia awareness and platelet donation, Mr Shetty has also been involved in organizing inter-school chess championships and chess championships for the visually impaired. Does the Bournvita inter-school chess championship ring a bell? He’s the man behind it.

I found these very touching videos through this blog, which in turn I found a couple of hours ago through someone else’s blog. The blog itself is highly recommended reading. It’s not often I ask you to read a blog without having followed it for a while, but the posts there, the first few ones [...]]]>

I found these very touching videos through this blog, which in turn I found a couple of hours ago through someone else’s blog. The blog itself is highly recommended reading. It’s not often I ask you to read a blog without having followed it for a while, but the posts there, the first few ones at least, are captivating.

(For those who haven’t figured it out already, the title is from the song by the same name by the Bee Gees, again- highly recommended)

The latest buzz on the blogosphere is the unmasking of Fake Steve Jobs- the anonymous blogger who, for more than a year now has assumed the self-interpreted persona of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. A very creative interpretation at that.

‘The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs’ is one of my favourite blogs- the kind one looks forward [...]]]>

The latest buzz on the blogosphere is the unmasking of Fake Steve Jobs- the anonymous blogger who, for more than a year now has assumed the self-interpreted persona of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. A very creative interpretation at that.

‘The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs’ is one of my favourite blogs- the kind one looks forward to each day. Funny, nay- hilarious in its parodical portrayal of Steve Jobs. And the blog is popular too. 700,000 hits last month. His readers have included, at one point or the other, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs himself. The real one.

Well, I’m not too happy about the fact that he’s been unmasked. I enjoyed the intrigue. And from what I can see from the post that did the dirty deed, not a lot of people are happy either. Read the comments.

So who is FSJ? Daniel Lyons. A reporter for Forbes. Read this for a more thorough account. His real blog is here. His colleagues at Forbes have been having a blast through all this.

Through all this, I hope that this does not dilute FSJ’s voice. He claims it wont. He promises to come back ‘badder than ever‘. Well, in FJS’s very own inimitable style, peace and love. Namaste!

I get a LOT of email forwards everyday. While I appreciate the concern some of you seem to have about my lifespan, the lifespan of my mother/father/brother/sister, my love life, my wealth, the safely of my computer system…, I beg that you act with some discretion before you hit that ‘forward’ button.

Why should I [...]]]> Dear All,

I get a LOT of email forwards everyday. While I appreciate the concern some of you seem to have about my lifespan, the lifespan of my mother/father/brother/sister, my love life, my wealth, the safely of my computer system…, I beg that you act with some discretion before you hit that ‘forward’ button.

Why should I care, you ask?

Well, there are some people who get hundreds of emails a day. Yes such people exist. These people have to spend a significant amount of time and effort going through their inboxes weeding out the bad emails. There is so much more one could get done if one did not have all that spam to go through.

Bandwidth costs and Disk space.

One of the ways spammers aggregate email addresses is by sending out these forwards. So all those people who are so concerned about that poor girl with cancer dying suddenly find themselves the recipients of tons of spam.

Recognizing a chain letter

Chain letters and most hoax messages all have a similar pattern. From the older printed letters to the newer electronic kind, they all have three recognizable parts:

• A hook.
• A threat.
• A request.

The Hook

First, there is a hook, to catch your interest and get you to read the rest of the letter. Hooks used to be “Make Money Fast” or “Get Rich” or similar statements related to making money for little or no work. Electronic chain letters also use the “free money” type of hooks, but have added hooks like “Danger!” and “Virus Alert” or “A Little Girl Is Dying”. These tie into our fear for the survival of our computers or into our sympathy for some poor unfortunate person.

The Threat

When you are hooked, you read on to the threat. Most threats used to warn you about the terrible things that will happen if you do not maintain the chain. However, others play on greed or sympathy to get you to pass the letter on. The threat often contains official or technical sounding language to get you to believe it is real.

The Request

Finally, the request. Some older chain letters ask you to mail a dollar to the top ten names on the letter and then pass it on. The electronic ones simply admonish you to “Distribute this letter to as many people as possible.” They never mention clogging the Internet or the fact that the message is a fake, they only want you to pass it on to others.

Why People Send Chain Letters and Hoax Messages

Only the original writer knows the real reason, but some possibilities are:

• To see how far a letter will go.
• To harass another person (include an e-mail address and ask everyone to send mail, like the Tommy Hilfiger email).
• To bilk money out of people using a pyramid scheme.
• To kill some other chain letter (e.g. Make Money Fast).
• To damage a person’s or organization’s reputation.

What to do when you receive a chain email:

• If it sounds ridiculous, it probably is. Delete it.
• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Delete it.
• If you’re unsure, do not send it out. Verify it’s authenticity. Snopes and Hoaxbusters are great places to do so. Google will work fine in most cases as well.
• If there is no contact information, it’s probably fake. Legitimate warnings and solicitations will always have complete contact information from the person sending the message and will often be signed with a cryptographic signature
• Even if there is contact information, be wary. It’s quite easy for anyone to get back at someone they’ve got a grudge against. One common way seems to be to send out emails asking for blood donors. These emails often have the name of a person with their phone number. Most of these people go through hell dealing with the phone calls they get from concerned strangers.
• One way of stopping yourself from getting annoying chain mails is by using the ‘reply-to-all’ button with a link to Snopes. The humiliation that follows generally stops the other person from ever forwarding emails. Use this with the utmost care.
• If you don’t want to risk losing friends over this, send a private reply to the person who sent you the email and include a link to Snopes.

If the email is great and you’re sure it isn’t a hoax,

• Whatever you do, do not send out the email to everyone you know.
• Determine whether a person will appreciate the email before choosing to send it to him/her.
• Add a brief message to the top of the email explaining why you’re sending the message. Don’t send it if you can’t think of one.
• Delete all the email backlog before sending out the message. It’s a real pain to have to scroll down through thousands of lines of text and ugly graphics to have to read like ten lines! Copy and paste instead.

Move on if you read any of this in the email:

• If you love your mom/dad/brother/sister and want to add 5/10.20 years to his/her life, email this to everyone on your contacts list.
• If you don’t send this email out to everyone on your contacts list, you will never fall in love/the person you love will hate you.
• in the next 60 seconds send this to all the people on ur list and
  the person that u are thinkin of will do something special to show how
  much they care about u! if i dont get dis back i guess ur not my
  friend. If u have alot of love for someone copy and send to ur whole
  list in r true love will surely come 2wards u!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• If you don’t send this to anyone in the next 10 minutes, you will have bad luck all your life.

I know it annoys a lot of you when your email gets slammed with jokes, hoaxes, chain letters and the like. It annoys me, too. But I do appreciate receiving real inspirational/interesting stuff from friends. All I ask is that you be just a bit more discriminate in what you send.

Most of what you forward is to your friends. Well, you wouldn’t want to threaten your friends, would you? What would you call a statement like “If you don’t forward this, you’ll have bad luck all your life”? You wouldn’t want to manipulate them emotionally as well right? It takes about a minute to check the authenticity of an email. Sending out bad emails persistently will cause you to lose your credibility.

P.S. The reason I am posting this (well, beyond the fact that I get scores of bad emails each day) is that I got an email saying something along the lines of:

“If you have a function/party at your home and if there is
excess food available at the end, don’t hesitate to call 1098 (only in
India) – child helpline. They will come and collect the food. Please
circulate this message which can help feed many children.”

1098 is the emergency line of ChildLine India, a charity. They will not come and collect any excess good you might have. There are other ways of using that food. Be imaginative.

P.P.S. Read this for another great point of view.

P.P.P.S. Some material is shamelessly copied from Hoaxbusters.

If you can’t see the embed above, check it out on YouTube.

It was quite an intensive course, albeit at the beginners’ level. It was rather extensive as well, and was not [...]]]> So I finally wrapped up the stock market course I’ve been going to. It was a four day stint at the BSE that began on the 2^nd of this month and ended yesterday.

It was quite an intensive course, albeit at the beginners’ level. It was rather extensive as well, and was not limited to the stock markets. They taught us about the bond market and derivatives market as well.

The course consisted of a set of four 1½ to 2 hour lectures each day. Most lectures included PowerPoint presentations, with very few speakers choosing to go extempore or use the board. All lectures were delivered by professionals, each an expert in his field. This part I found rather impressive, each could answer every question thrown at him. Despite the fact that there were more than 80 students in the class, it was pretty interactive, not the monologues we’re used to elsewhere.

Day 1:

The first day started with a lecture on secondary markets by Amrut Coutinho. This was more or less an introductory lecture. He talked about the various types of markets, market players, their objectives, various terms used in the markets and behavioural economics.

The next lecture was about the BSE’s OnLine Trading system, BOLT for short. He spent a few minutes on the process of book building and trading cycles, the rest of the time on the BOLT. This is the computer network that connects brokers using a screen based trading system, unlike the open outcry system that the folks at the NYMEX and CME still use.

During the next lecture, Coutinho came back to talk about processes like trading, clearing, settlement and surveillance.

The last lecture of the day was on Dematerialization and Depositories, and the various technicalities associated.

Day 2:

The first lecture started with a lecture on Indices, the numbers, so to speak, that we read about in the financial papers. The index of choice was the Sensex, but they gave us a sufficient amount of information about various other market and sectoral indices as well.

Then we had a great lecture on Debt markets by T Ramji. This one was more or less an extempore act, with bits of humour thrown in for good measure. The speaker used various (mis)management stories to explain what one should and should not invest in.

The last lecture was on Technical analysis, which is basically the use of charts to forecast trends in the market and to make decisions based on these observations. The speaker was Hemen Kapadia, who I hear is a famous day trader and analyst. I Googled him and found a respectable number of hits. This guy is apparently a regular on a number of news channels, I could see that quite a few students had heard of him before. A lot of students were rather bored by the end of the lecture however, they could not grasp the concepts. It was obvious that without a strong background in math, calculus particularly, the subject would be incomprehensible. I found this subject particularly fascinating.

Day 3:

Day 3 did not begin too nicely for me. The train I took in the morning got stuck behind one that had broken down. I was a bit late when I got to the exchange, but thankfully, I didn’t miss much.

The first lecture was about Primary markets and book building…. IPOs in simpler terms. We went through all the key players, the processes involved, the red herring prospectus and the types of investors. The second lecture was an extension of the first, and was about the whole listing process.

The third lecture was on Fundamental analysis… this was probably the best we had. The lecture was taken by Vijay Paradkar who is, amongst other things, a venture capitalist. At the beginning he said that he would clarify the subject by confusing us. And confuse us he did. He used a bunch of great examples to explain the paradox between perception and reality in the market. He did not really clarify anything then, he had a lecture with us the next day. A cliffhanger, employed to perfection if you ask me.

The last one was on Grievances and Arbitration. Always a good thing to know.

Day 4:

The last day didn’t begin all that great either, the first speaker turned up about a half hour late. The lecture was about Mutual Funds and the speaker was this guy from ICICI. He explained the subject fairly well, but rushed through the end.

The second and fourth lectures were on derivatives… futures and options basically. Somewhat complex, but the guy did a pretty good job.

The third lecture was the second part of the Fundamental analysis series. He clarified everything during this lecture and explained all the factors to look at before investing. As before the lecture was brilliant.

Overall view:

Right off the bat, I can say that the course was great. I thank all the people who recommended the course to me. The course provided an Indian perspective of the market. The course venue was comfortable and the faculty and administration were complete professionals. The food was great (Oh yeah… I forgot to mention, they provided brunch, lunch and tea).

The flipside… I feel that the course was a bit short. They did not cover either the commodities markets or the currency markets. Both these topics were mentioned in passing, but the speakers did not elaborate. I wish that the course organizers had extended the course by a day and had included, in addition to the commodities and currency markets, topics like insurance, entrepreneurship, foreign markets, personal finance and financial planning.

On the whole… I would recommend this course to anyone who invests at present, or plans on investing anytime soon. Get in touch with the folks at the stock exchange. They are helpful, responsive and honest. Yup, they are quite honest. A couple of people did ask the course administrator whether or not they should take up any of the advanced level courses. The guy said that it wasn’t really a good idea without some work experience or some experience of having invested in the stock market.