Yantrakaal

In two earlier posts, I had introduced the concept of DIGITALICs as a new discipline of study in management schools and had also explained it further in one of the famous Praxis Lockdown Lectures . Now we at Praxis Business School have taken the next step of actually introducing these concepts into the curriculum of the 2 year AICTE approved Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) Program. A key challenge is the availability of textbooks that can introduce the correct technology to management students who do not come from computer science and other programming backgrounds. To overcome this Praxis Business School, under the Praxis Press Program has come out with these two textbooks. Python for Business Managers - is a textbook for the Foundations of Data Science course that is compulsory for all first year management students. This is a small, 64 page book that not only teaches the student how to analyse data with Python but also sets him up for a deep dive into data science. In In...

 The big question .... What is my IKIGAI Find purpose .. Stephanie Sieghoertner

One of the enduring tragedies of journalism today is its inability to monetize the significant intellectual effort that goes into creating great articles. With so much content being available 'free' readers have become increasingly reluctant to pay for articles that they read. Print magazines that have moved their contents to the digital format have tried protecting their IP behind paywalls and subscription mechanisms. Many users find this too cumbersome and opt either to read the few free articles or to simply go somewhere else. Which is a tragedy. What we would want is a micropayment mechanism that allows individuals to pay for articles that they actually want to read without having to bother about annual subscriptions tied to credit cards and other relatively complicated payment mechanisms. In an earlier post that was also published in Swarajya  in 2016, I had explored how browser based crypto-wallets could be used to make micro payments and I am delighted to note and repo...

Why this book?  After years of being talked about and featured in science fiction, artificial intelligence is finally showing up in the world around us. But before we delve into artificial intelligence, do we understand what normal, natural human intelligence is? For sure, there is no simple, single definition of intelligence, but it can be broken into a number of tasks, or categories of tasks. At one end of the spectrum we have raw, computational power that allows us to solve complex but logical problems, while at the other end we have abstract, philosophical concepts like being conscious and  self-awareness and have motivation and morality. In between are four kinds of tasks that are seen as intelligent - the ability to predict future outcomes, to react successfully to unexpected circumstances, to resolve between ambiguous situations and to create something new and original. Complex logical problems can be resolved with traditional computer programming while the philosophica...

Once the basic architecture or the big picture of the blockchain ecosystem -- as explained in Part I of this article -- is understood, we can now move into the nuts-and-bolts of actually building a software application. To do so, we need the following four pieces : An Ether wallet - to store Ether and pay it out when necessary A Solidity development environment or IDE to build contracts A connection service provider that allows client software to connect to the Ethereum network A platform or IDE to build a client software that can execute transactions against Solidity contracts residing on the blockchain 1. The Ether Wallet - MetaMask An ether wallet is a Solidity contract with an address ( think Bank Account Number)  and a private-key (think Specimen Signature in a Bank Account) that resides on the blockchain. What is commonly understood as an ether wallet is actually a client application that can execute payment transactions from the Solidity wallet-contract. So we will refer to...

With Bitcoin and cryptofinance in the news, blockchain programming has suddenly become very important but most people - including many programmers - do not have a clear idea on how to write a program on the blockchain. This article is not about theoretical concepts like Merkle Trees and SHA256 Hash. It is about how to write an application that creates, reads, updates and deletes a data record from a 'database' on the blockchain. A CRUD application. If you are impressed by Powerpoint slides in Zoom Webinars, you may skip this article, but if you are a programmer -- professionals or hobbyist -- do read on. You will end up writing your first blockchain application without too much sweat. I first came across Bitcoins as currency in the virtual world of Second Life and wrote about " Bitcoins - my first look at a new currency " in 2013 and then I struggled to wrap my head around this fantastic concept for almost a year until I reached a point where I could write " Bitc...

  Located this coin among others in a locker being cleaned out. Charanpreet Singh helped me decode the text that reads 19 Zarb Murshidabad and Badshah Alam Shah 1204. Used this information to get some more information from an auction site. Deepawali acquisition!