You have journeyed all the way with me, and we are here. Let me remind you of our wonderful journey together. And let me re-introduce myself. I am the Entrepreneur. I was tiny and unicellular, I moved around in the prebiotic soup. I am sure , you mighty observer, must have dismissed my micro and insignificant activity. I was helpless and vulnerable, and many the likes of me just vanished without a whimper.I somehow managed to survive, barely. I just hanged on enough till the next major evolutionary step. Despite the harsh conditions (more…)

Tags: Evolution, Physical law, Psychology, Reality, Social Sciences

Courtsey : http://www.cindoc.csic.es

Imagine millions of neurons made up of simple chemical substances. And when they are meshed together they give rise to an amazing phenomena what we call as human brain.The magic of human brain does not occur because of the individual neurons but because of the way they are connected. Any system has two parts: component and connections. Almost always it is the type of connections which govern the system’s behavior.And those connections give rise to behavior which (more…)

Tags: Applications, Combinatorics, Complex systems, Connectivity, Emergence, Graph theory, Human brain, Math, World Wide Web

Coutsey : www.scu.edu

There are a few books which impact you on so many levels and from so many angles. ‘ Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty‘ by Prof. Muhammad Yunus is one of them for me. The book is about the story of Grameen-Bank and how it came about, how it expanded and how it changed the life of millions of people. The book is just unputdownable.(Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus got the Noble Peace Prize in 2006.) I read around 200 pages in just first sitting.(it has 277 pages.)Through this book I witnessed the very soul of entrepreneurship and have gleaned some lessons for you:

(1) Believe in the creative spirit of yourself and others around you. When Prof.Yunus started the Grameen Bank his basic premise was the power of creativity of the borrowers of micro-loans. Without believing in the creative spirit of the poor borrowers, there is no way micro lending would have succeeded. Even if you are just self employed, if you believe in the creativity of your model and the people who use it, quickly your model will be adopted far and wide. That is also what happened with open source technology.

(2)An entrepreneur has to see through social conditioning. Entrepreneurship has one major thing in common with philosophy of science. That thing is (more…)

Tags: Bank, Banker to the Poor, Business, Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Poverty

Courtsey: farm1.static.flickr.com

I love communicating with people and sharing ideas with them. And most of the conversations are
fulfilling and productive and we both end up learning from each other. However, there are times
when I find some glaring logical fallacies in our language which hinder communication and stunt intellectual growth.I do not mind them when we are talking informally, but in any serious conversation logical fallacies can create major misunderstandings.Those are the ghosts worthy of exorcism. Here are some common logical fallacies which I observed.

(1) “Statistically most of the Indian policemen have mustache. Mohan is an Indian policeman hence he should have a mustache.”
This sort of argument suffers from a basic statistical mistake. Statistics talks about things in bulk. It does not say anything about one particular case. Hence to draw particular conclusions from statistical data is fallacious. Mohan might be an Indian policeman but you cannot infer from that that he must have a mustache.

(2) “I found evidence of no disease.”
There is no such thing like (more…)

Tags: Fallacy, Informal Logic, Loaded question, Luck, Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Statistics