Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:36:00 GMT
Having coffee with AliB and discussing lecturing reminded me of one of the best presentations I've ever seen: Hans Rosling at TED and debunking myths about the developing world.
Even if you're not interested in the subject, it's worth checking out just to see how cool his presentation of otherwise rather boring statistics is. His company, Gapminder also got bought by Google a few weeks ago, so chances are Analytics will get more interesting soon.
Posted in politics | 1 comment
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:32:00 GMT
A fellow passenger on a flight from New York to San Francisco was reading an interesting book called "The World is Flat: a brief history of the 21st century" (amazon). I'm on the same flight a few weeks later, so I picked up a copy to pass the time and have discovered one of the best books I've read in a long time!
The author, Thomas Friedman, works for the New York Times as their foreign affairs correspondent, and this book is packed full of references to interviews he has conducted with people ranging from the CEOs of multinational companies (e.g. the heads of Wipro and Infosys in India), all the way to small business owners in China and India.
His thesis is that the "world is flat" due to the convergence of factors ranging from the obvious: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of personal computing, to the seemingly boring: supply chain management by Walmart. Where the book excels is its engaging presentation; rather than adoptic a polemic, argumentative style, Friedman instead quotes interviews with someone relevant to the field at hand. Books like this often annoy me with technical inaccuracies when they cover topics such as open-source software, but Friedman has great discussions with people such as Brian Behlendorf and Craig Mundie!
I'm still working my way through it (next hop: NYC to SFO), but the first half has been fantastic and has really changed my views (read: woken me up) to just how integral out-sourcing is to successfully conduct business today. The book, much like the content it presents, is studiously up-to-date as of 2006, and the author apparently plans to continue to keep it as a "presentist" publication which conveys a sense of the current state of the world and not the past or future.
Posted in politics, books | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by avsm
Sat, 30 Nov 2002 23:55:00 GMT
Went to an interesting lecture called "Face to Face with Political Islam", given at King's College by Dr. Francois Burgat. He was basically plugging his new book, but the questions afterwards led to spirited discussion about the lack of leading, moderate Islamic parties in the West, and why this was (the strong Christian/Jewish control of Western media, voter apathy, etc). Also some contrasts to the growth of similar trends in Hinduism, but why that hasn't had as much impact on world politics as Islam.
I think I'll sign up for more of these kinds of talks in the future ... I missed the series of lectures that Edward Said gave here in Cambridge, which sounded fantastic.
Posted in cambridge, politics | no comments
