thoughtmap - Tumblr blog

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

How TEDActive changed me

This year I went to TEDActive. It was the most life-changing experience I've ever been through. The TEDActive experience changed how I felt about everything - experiencing debates between different subjects and participating in stimulating discussions gave me a different perspective on how people used and interacted with technology.

Firstly, I'd like to highlight some of the key talks I took away from TED this year. From the first few sessions, there was a talk about an artist, Phil Hansen, who had a problem with his joints, and this problem didn’t let him draw straight. Most people would take this as a problem and leave art, and that’s exactly what he did. But after a while he came back into art and discovered that he was able to create these extremely unique paintings using his problem.

The most fascinating part was what happened later – he began to create these incredible pieces of art, which only lasted a certain amount of time, and then they would be gone. He was creating art that would never have existed but that was the beauty of it, and he named his series of pieces “Goodbye Art” - an example would be creating art using a lot of candles and then blowing them out.

What I took away from this talk was the fact that you can create something that you’re intrigued in for yourself and to express your thoughts into something physical even if it doesn’t last. You don't always have to do something that lasts forever, but sometimes even the smallest projects count. This is an incredible process of creating something you have always had in your mind and actually discovering that it was an awesome idea. In addition, it was also a way for him to do art that would suit his joint problem.

Secondly, there was an amazing artist called Beardy Man who some of you might have heard of. He makes the most incredible noises from his mouth and to above and beyond he worked with a few companies to create a machine that would allow him to record his voice and be able to play and remix those sounds in real time. But the crazy part is that leveraging his voice he is able to record sounds he makes and remix them together to create music that goes beyond what humans can do.

Moreover, I was also inspired by two other talks by two teenagers who pretty much blew my mind. Firstly, there was an 18 year old, Taylor Wilson, who created a Nuclear fusion reactor at the age of 14, and currently is in high school working as Nuclear Scientist.

And secondly there is Jack Andraka a 15-year-old student who discovered a way to diagnose pancreatic cancer and reduced the costs by over 1000% from 30,000$ to around 4$. This would mean that people would easily be able to detect if they have pancreatic cancer or not and be able to cure it at a very early age thereby also in a way finding a way to cure early staged pancreatic cancer.

These individuals really inspired me as from a very young age they were able to go above and beyond and understand their talents and really create something that would change the world. It’s incredible to me that these individuals were able to have such dedication and passion to teach themselves something so complex as Nuclear Physics and create a diagnose for a disease that even Ph.D level students are trying to find. It’s not everyday where you meet individuals who dedicate their lives into doing something so difficult and achieve success in those fields.

Other incredible people: Camille Seaman – incredible photography of clouds, storms, and snow.

Sleepy Man Bangjo Boys – group of 3 musicians (10 year, 14 year, 15 year) who create the most stimulating and unique music.

Shane Koyczan – the most touching and incredible poet to date.

Lastly, I’d like to point out the questions and inspirations I got from TEDActive and give you a feel of the outcome of the stimulating debate. In participating with people from around the world I understood that there is a huge amount of people who want to learn how to program but don’t get the resources and guidance to. Most people aren’t the best at learning online or don’t have Internet access so in talking to people who have tried to get people together to use Codeacademy and other resources they said that they’d actually prefer if they actually had people come and teach them programming.

In addition, if you teach a child something personally it’s more likely that he would run away and learn even more about what you teach him, and the same could potentially apply to programming. From that moment I was inspired to one day travel around different parts of the world where I can teach at least a group of people who are extremely passionate about programming but can’t pay to do so. The most amazing part was that I met individuals who did run TEDx organizations all around Africa, Asia, and America and some of them were looking for people to come and inspire their audience to learn how to program. There is a real passion in certain parts of the world to create iPhone apps or simple websites.

Moreover, I also discovered that there’s an amazing amount of things to still discover in this world. I was particularly inspired by a musical piece at TED which basically was like an orchestra but that consisted of people around the world using Skype technology in real time. I felt that that was an incredible application of something that already existed and something I had never thought of in the past. I also came up with so many ideas during the TED conference where one of my friends and I built TEDMemes which is still in progress and I was able to talk to people about Dubsit which is a personal knowledge management tool.

I also came out with a lot more knowledge. I met individuals who are working on solving everyday problems but coming with ingenious ideas because they consider the solutions from the perspectives of every individual that uses that problem, and that is not new to everyone but something I had never been directly exposed to. I met people from Microsoft who told me that they were creating products that were designed to be more natural to the individual and had different philosophies from the Google Glasses, where they wanted computers to assist individuals and not integrate into individuals. I felt that it was a unique perspective.

One interesting example was the fact that when you wear the glasses you could potentially record moments where you are fighting with your girlfriend and those moments will be stored somewhere on the cloud and then you’d be able to remember all the moments you have ever had. Or when you walk into someone cheating on you and now you’ve it on video and you’d obsess over it forever. That’s horrible.. I’m not for remembering every moment because I love to forget stuff that I don’t want to remember anymore and I know it’s easy to delete but how many people actually delete memories? I would have never came up with this point alone and felt so connected to these incredible individuals at this conference.

They also told me that they were in the progress of building a Universal Translator, which translates everything using your own personal voice. It exposed me to a new world where there was so much going on. The talk by Elon Musk on his SpaceX program also showed how advanced we are outside governmental airspace in creating technology that would one day take us beyond earth. We’re not too far away from actually going into space and being able to experience something that 50 years ago almost no one had experienced before.

In addition, I was also able to change my mindset on solutions. I met individuals who were trying to change the world but with the simplest solutions. Individuals who don’t need a billion dollars to solve the world issues on climate change and actually have results. There was an incredible TED speaker, Allan Savory, who is trying to change the world climate problem by grazing animals at places where land is extremely dry. His methodology actually had results and doesn’t involve an insane amount of money, and by his calculations we could actually change the world climate change by using his methods.

These simple solutions are the ones, which can actually make a difference. Combing this with my passion of web technology I was able to realize that I don’t actually have to build everything for my product. I was able to use APIs from different areas and integrate it to build something incredible. Using small building blocks that people have spent hours and hours on and using these blocks can actually give amazing results and potentially change the world.

I would recommend TEDActive to everyone. It’s an amazing experience, which everyone should go through once, and TED is an amazing platform for everyone. The main part of the conference is not the talks themselves you can watch them later but the incredible people you get to meet and discuss the talks with. These people are simply incredible. I promise you.

#TED #TEDActive #TEDActive 2013 #Incredible #Experience #Lifechanging #Life #Platform #TEDTalks

0 notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Panel with the folks at Y Combinator

On Thursday the 16th of November there was a panel with some of the awesome companies at Y Combinator. It was moderated by Alexis Ohanian the co-founder of Reddit and a Y Combinator ambassador (I recommend you to checkout his book). The companies were also very cool - there was RapGenius, Shoptiques and Tutorspree, and I've attached the links below if you're interested in checking them out.

RapGenius

Rap Genius is your guide to the meaning of rap lyrics, You can listen to songs, read their lyrics, and click the lines that interest you for pop-up explanations – we have thousands of canonical rap songs explained.

Shoptiques

Shoptiques.com brings boutique shopping online. A one-of-kind online destination for discovering and exploring local boutiques across the country, Shoptiques.com lets you instantly jet set from New York to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Miami and beyond.

Tutorspree

Tutorspree is a market place for high quality tutoring. They provide high quality, and "the best" tutors.

What I got out of the experience:

One of the key things I learnt during this talk was the concept of do what you need. The representative of Shoptiques explained how she wanted to be differentiated from the "other women in the room", and wanted to have cloths that people usually don't find in expensive and stores like Chanel. She went to Paris and bought shoes that people loved and she wanted to bring that to her friends and to the U.S where people could buy them online and that's how I understood Shoptiques came into play. It was a need for her, and something she had a burning desire for. It reminded me of a book called "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill - a great read and very inspiring, it tells us about how our burning desire and our willingness to succeed helps us in actually succeeding. It's something I saw that was reflected in her talk.

Another thing that was pointed out is if you're passionate about it, do it. The site RapGenius is an great concept but if they weren't passionate about rapping or about music it wouldn't be something that they would work hard for. It seemed like it would be very hard to start and manage a business if you're purely in it for the money and not the joy of seeing it through to it's success, and as stereotypically said the key to success is hard work. Moreover, I also learnt that other start-up firms don't have business plans and they all admitted to not personally having a business plan and only having it for the investors.

On the other hand, they also commented on the process of starting up their firms. They explained how it is very important to find the right partner and they stressed it a lot. The comparison they used was it is as important as finding the right person to marry. They said you'll spend "12-18 hours a day" sitting next to them - which is the truth, you'll always be next to one person if you're the only two people in the company.

Something else I also learnt from my other seminars is that it's very difficult to find an investor, there will be 99 investors which will reject you before you get that 1 that will accept you. If you map it as a normal distribution there is that 0.3% on the left which is on board with your idea right away, the next 35% is on board with your idea after persuasion and the rest would just ignore you. The more and more people I talk to about investments I learn that this is true, and it is very difficult to find a person who is wealthy, investing and shares the same vision as you.

The representative from Shoptiques also commented that during the process of the programmers actually making the site, people who are advertising and marketing should be doing even more to promote and get feedback/data on the company. Which is very interesting as it is true, the non-programming founder should be doing the paperwork and finding the right resources and markets to start deploying and advertising in.

Lastly, the most important thing I learnt was if you wanted to do something, just do it. While in college I don't have much to lose, I'm gaining education and getting ready to get to a process where I could or couldn't be ready for this. I'm not going to know if I'm ready if I don't actually practice what I want to be ready for. I remember someone saying that the first 3-4 projects they did weren't the most successful and it's your 5th 6th or 7th project that works, and so do those 4 projects at school and fail. Facebook is an anomaly in the startup business and not many sites can do what they have done in such a short period. It's very difficult and the conditions that it was in really allowed it to grow how it did and these conditions are very hard to find.

#Y Combinator #Panel #Outcome #Rapgenius #Shoptiques #Tutorspree #Experience

1 note · View note

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Visit to New York Times

A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the New York Times office alongside my peers from the Freshmen circuit and of my peers from Tech@NYU. It was an incredible experience and I learnt how technically advanced the New York Times was.

Generally people see it as an online news paper but they actually have a team of 150 members who are working hard to develop the site and to develop the mobile app. We were able to meet the people behind the mobile, Matthew Bischoff (@mb) and Brian Capps (@brianhax), and they were doing amazing things with the mobile app and had shown us a preview of how they deployed and programmed the app itself. The system there was particularly interesting were they had testers in the news room and all around the New York Times office and every night they released an alpha build (after they pushed it on GitHub) and they had beta builds and they were automatically updated in the devices of the testers. This allowed them to get instant feedback on their products which was pretty amazing for me as a developer. I was able to get down some of the products they used, including Green Hopper for bug management and Hockey app for beta testing.

There was also a particularly interesting engineer at New York Times who worked with Steve Jobs on the iPad before it was released. He gave an interesting report on his experience and one of the key things i learnt was that only 5% of the Apple staff had actually met with Steve Jobs before, which was very interesting to me as I would have thought that the CEO of a company would meet alot more than 5% of the individuals. I also learnt that only a few individuals had the knowledge that the iPad existed within the company itself which is also particularly interesting as this shows the secretive nature of the company itself.

We were also about to see some of the unique features they have been developing at the Research and Development lab at New York Times, which was incredibly amazing seeing as they were a newspaper. They were in progress to develop a mirror, which would allow you to read the news, check your calender, tells you descriptions of your medicine (only if it has an RFID tag on it) and also uses facial recognition and the Microsoft Kinect to track your motion. I've attached an image of it below. If you click it you'll be able to see a story by Engadget which includes a video of the working demo.

Moreover, they were also working on a software called Cascade which is a data visualization software, written in Javascript, of tweets of articles by New York Times and their lifetimes. They said that they weren't creating these products to sell them, although they did have a venture side to the research and development, but to see what the future of newspapers and reporting is and to be ready for it.

#New York Times #NYT #Visit #Tech@NYU #Experience

1 note · View note

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Showering & Knowledge

I've stumbled upon the idea that the most amazing thoughts I've had and the most amazing ideas I've had are usually developed and processed during a bath or a shower. The reasoning behind it seems very interesting as I don't get the same stimulation of thought and relaxation when I'm not in the shower. There's an interesting answer on Quora that explains this and sums it up pretty well:

Reasoning There are a couple of reasons that this effect occurs and I will step through each method and ways to emulate this.

1) First of all it is a change of state, and a different pattern of thinking (eg you are doing something different - it could be using a skipping rope, boxing practice, listening to music etc). One note, a friend of mine on Twitter (joidesign) has found that taking a shower with your socks on helps her to have better creative ideas. No idea if this works, but it does for her.

2) The main impact is relaxation - eg you are not trying to be thinking, you are just relaxing and feeling good. Meditation would easily reproduce this effect, or finding something relaxing to do where you are just lazily thinking without much effort.

3) The impact of negative ions.

Applications taken from Shower Thought Principle 1) Don't live or work in a space with no fresh air unless the air conditioning system contains an ion generator.

2) Purchase a room ion generator to keep in the room in which you spend the most time, and run it when you are not getting any outside air.

3) Take frequent breaks in fresh air, and when you can't, open the window!

#Shower #Knowledge #Quora #Reasoning

0 notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Paths to the Whitehouse

During the Elections New York Times posted an awesome simulation tool to see the different paths of who can win in Elections. If you haven't checked it out I recommended you to check it out it's an amazing feature that they used to express the probabilities and mathematics behind what could actually happen.

As a Mathematics and Computer Science student this fascinates me, as they would have had to think about so many different scenarios and past data in order to create something like this. You would have to think about an algorithm that updates as you feed more data to it and calculates all the possible ways each president can win. By the end I remember that it said that if Obama won Florida he would have won the Election and as I looked at the statistics of what the Electoral Votes said at that point it didn't seem true. But as I looked at that fact that California and Massachusetts would go to president Obama I realized that it is true! The algorithm was also designed to calculate the probability of who had won each state in the past.

I'm not sure how complex it was to build for the New York Times Graphics Department to build this but it's an amazing extra feature.

Paths to the White House

#Whitehouse #Paths #White House #New York Times #Simulation #Data Journalism

0 notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Fitbit Ultra

Recently I purchased a Fitbit Ultra, and I believe it's one of the most useful things I have bought in a long time. It's very simple and easy to use - I just put it in my pocket at the beginning of the day, and at the end of the day I plug it into my computer and it shows me the amount of steps I've walked, how far I've walked, and estimates the amount of calories I've burnt, which is amazing! It also logs the time I spent sleeping at night, and also during the day, which is great for a college student. I've been able to catch up on my sleep, and aim for a set amount of steps everyday. You can see what the activity menu online looks like below, and I bought a second-hand version so I think the floor counter was broken, but it was a bargain price. I've also been able to track the intake of my food, I log what I eat on my Fitbit iPhone app, and it tells me how many calories I've been eating throughout the day, and compares it to the calories I've taken over the last few day/weeks/months.

Another key feature, which I think is important is that it helps you reach a target weight, or to lose a set amount of weight. It calculates how much you want to lose, and when it thinks you'll lose this weight by. It's been a great experience using it, I've walked more steps to reach more goals, watched my sleeping patterns, and ate according to my diet regulations. I strongly urge every college student to buy a type of FitBit, not just the Ultra but there are many kinds. You can find the different types here.

#Fitbit Ultra #Fit #Bit #Ultra #Fitbit #Review

0 notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

ShortcutFoo

ShortcutFoo is a great way to learn shortcuts of your favorite applications. This tool has really helped me in my productivity and in using Eclipse, or Sublime Text 2, or even Gmail. I'm not able to use keyboard shortcuts at lightning speed, and this platform is great. It is free to a certain extent, but then you have to pay for membership, which I guess is a disappointment, but to help increase productivity its well worth the $8.99 one time payment.

#Shourtcut #Foo #ShortcutFoo #Eclipse #Productivity

0 notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Text

Data Journalism With The New York Times

Tonight at 7:30, or on Wednesday 14th of November 2012 there is a Data Journalism talk where the New York Times are coming in to show different representations of data. Here is some of the information provided by the Tech@NYU board:

At this workshop, we'll delve into API's, which are programmable data sources: You'll come away knowing how to get data from an API, and where you can go to visualize that data in interesting ways. NYT developers Mark Strictland and Dan Souther will guide us through the workshop, and will take questions about data journalism in general and at the Times specifically.

Rumor is that they might be recruiting for internship positions, so don't miss it! I'll later add on a blog post here explaining the event and explaining some of the API's and information they give in their talk.

If you're interested in looking at this here is the event link:

http://nyudatajournalism.eventbrite.com/

Summary

The talk with the New York Times technology group was very interesting. I previously didn't think that newspapers or even online news media used so much technology and user interaction designs. It's crazy, their API's and their advance features in Javascript are incredible. I also found out that one of their developers primarily built Backbone.JS which came to me as quite surprising.

If you're interested in finding out about the API the link will be below, but the API is pretty much how you would think it to be. It contains searching articles, but this search only returns a summary and gives the link to go and look at it. I found out helped in not only marketing but during a discussion with another one of my friends I realized that it could be used to bring in more readers from sites like Google News which depend on their API. They have quite a vast amount of functions that you could use, and they used some of these to make calls and create graphs and pie charts which is interesting but not high level. They also suggested to use java script libraries such as d3.JS and their API to create some amazing things, and something I think I'll have a go at in the future. But now days you could create some of those graphs using simplified tools like CartoDB (https://cartodb.com/journalism).

I got a response on how their site is designed in basics: their frontend apparently is designed in traditional PHP, while their backend databases are in Oracle, and I believe Mongo, which they added quite recently. They have quite a large web-developer team and also a research and development team which most companies don't. If you're interested in Internships they have a view available for sophomore and juniors students, and job placements for rising seniors. They are encouraging more younger students to apply and will look for web talent if you're interested in applying (http://www.nytco.com/careers/internships/academic-year.html).

#Data #Data Journalism #Journalism #NYT #New York Times #New York #Times #The Times #Newspaper

2 notes · View notes

thoughtmap · 11 years

Video

youtube

Knowledge Graphs

Google has been working on using knowledge graphs of information with their search to give a better search experience for their users. If you haven't previously seen the video they released a while ago I have attached.

After seeing this video and after looking through a lot of the other companies which are trying to create this types of graphs (SeatGeek has an awesome one in progress!) I've been also trying to develop a small scale application that will allow me to add information and it would automatically be inserted in the right position and in the right place.

The premise of my application is to connect people with similar interests and ideas together. At NYU we've formed a small project called Bridge (not released to public yet) and we're trying to connect students together through interests and ideas and I've been working on a side project to test once we have some sample data of students. I'm wanting to take interests and ideas of different individuals and put it into a database and represent each person as a node that will connect to different people. Then there will be different lines that will represent different connections between people, such as: red -> friendship, blue -> following, green: similar interests, and black -> similar ideas. This is a small project but this will not just allow to visually see the connections between ideas and interests of students but also be a small tool to find the person who shares the most interests/ideas and link them together.

Moreover, recently I've read a study on Twitter that explains how Twitter needs to get the user to follow 10 people for them to return back to the site, Facebook needs to get the user to friend at least 7 people, and Dropbox needs their users to create one folder. This is quite interesting, and the data would speed up the process and help them better advertise in their correct markets. In the future I'd like to see tools using these data analysis that will allow people to easily measure this data for their sites.

Lastly, if you want to experiment on trying to make visualizations of these sorts - There is an amazing Javascript library on GitHub.

#Knowledge #Graph #Google #Search #Engine #NYU

1 note · View note