Yantrakaal

I recently saw two movies on Indian mathematicians, the first on Shakuntala Devi and the second -- The Man Who Knew Infinity -- on Srinivas Ramanujan. Obviously both these mathematicians are very well known in India and to a certain extent, or in certain circles, in the world as well. Both Shakuntala Devi and Ramanujan seemed to have magical or supernatural abilities to see or visualize solutions to mathematical problems. Of course, Ramanujan was several orders of magnitude higher than Shakuntala. His work on Number Theory, -- the Queen of Mathematics ( where Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences) -- was vastly more significant or exciting compared to the mere complexity of arithmetic computations that Shakuntala could demonstrate. But then, if Shakuntala had not been deprived of her childhood and childhood schooling by her avaricious father, who made Shakuntala earn money for the family, she might have had the opportunity to demonstrate more significant abilities. But we are not h...

With regard to a close relationship, you may encounter turbulence. The full moon of April 26 might be difficult for you because unpredictable Uranus will be conjunct the Sun, making things quite unstable, and this would directly affect your living quarters. At the same time, Uranus will directly oppose the full moon in your house of marriage and committed partnerships. This full moon could involve your steady, live-in sweetheart, your spouse, or someone you collaborate with closely to do your job. A sudden tearing away from the status quo is likely to result. Your landlord may tell you the rent will go up (too high in your opinion) or that the building you live in has been sold, and you will need to move soon. This unexpected news may rattle you, but as you think of it, it may be for the best—you need more room. It’s possible you are breaking up with your romantic partner, and in that case, you would be moving out. It appears the onus of finding a new place to live will fall to you, n...

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...