Surviving Limitation of Innovation !!

I'm very sorry to say that, innovation in our country is limited by number of limiting factors. 

Scarcity of appropriate material is sure to be one of them. People in our country have lots of plans and dreams and most of the time their dreams shatter because of the limit imposed by few rusty government policies. We cannot import any gadgets from the abroad. If we request our relatives or friends living abroad, the item is simply 'LOST' in between the airports' conveyor belt. Some are 'LOST' in the customs department. Some of them simply can't be imported because the government is too busy to pay attention to our demands.

Encouragement is also a big factor. Some people are simply not motivated enough and it is not their fault. In leading universities around the world, they are not content by reading a book. They want to implement the knowledge of the book in a real world scenario. In our universities, students are only required to take a written test at the end of the semester. If the lab teacher is enthusiastic enough, he may give you a semester long project which is anything but challenging.

Had there been more challenging local competitions, I'm sure you would have seen a dramatic improvement of our countries engineering skills. Cricket fans will find it easier to relate. Had Sakib Al Hasan not participated in IPL, he might not have been so great in the subsequent games. I read this fact in some news paper article. Same applies for education. If we have our own world class competition, we will do much better in the international ones.

Recently, a search engine was launched in Bangla, called "Pipilika". A praise worthy effort. What hurts  me though is a quote from my favorite Professor, Dr. Md. Jafor Iqbal. He said the interaction of Public universities and IT companies are too low. With this search engine, it has been proved that our Public Universities students can do it too.

What really hurt me is that Jafor sir used the phrase "Public University" in his statement. As if those of us who are studying in so called "Private University" can do nothing. I don't really blame him. There are some fundamental differences in between Public and Private universities. The only way we can change this general outlook is by showing the world what we are capable of.

Surviving the Death of Google Reader

When google reader was there, (Google reader is scheduled for a shutdown!) I would subscribe all the blogs I found to be useful, but later on I would forget to log in to google reader and read all the new updates. Now that Google Reader is scheduled for a permanent shutdown I suddenly realised, I never came back to read the feeds.

Anyway, I had to find alternative. So I immediately contacted Sadaf Noor, who redirected me to an article on lifehacker.com. There I found 5 alternative. Out of five I registered on 3 feed readers and been trying out for last 2/3 days. Here's what I make of it so far:


Feedly:

Incredibly simple user interface. It supposed to have a suggestive reading system, but I'm yet to figure that part out.

Pulse.me:

Amazing user interface. Arranges all your feeds according to date. Love that way they adopted windows 8 display concept.

Netvibes:

Absolutely amazing. Their feed is not so good as others, but the dashboard feature is on a new level that no one has ever gone before. I typed in "Renewable Energy" and the quality & quantity of the information present on the dashboard is mind bogling.


So far I'm yet to decide which is the best one.

Surviving Knowledge

It funny to me how people impose a price tag on knowledge now-a-days. Almost in every literary creation, you'll see the phases, "Illegal to reproduce without the permission of the author". The reason is not very clear to me.

What I feel, the warning should be like,"Feel free to use it as a reference to your document/book/article. Just make sure you cite it is my work and my creation. Unless you do that, I'll find you and I'll kill you".

In this context, I must mention that I'm a huge fan of Salman Khan, the creator of "Khan Academy". My friend Moeen thinks otherwise. He is infuriated by the fact that, "Khan Academy" make huge profit basing on voluntary work of the people. I think the opposite. I'm not sure whether or not "Khan Academy" makes a 'Huge' profit, I'm cool until and unless, the knowledge is provided for free to those who crave it; unlike sites like scribd.com, great resource but poor philosophy and more business involved.

Having said all of this, I've a plan to produce my own study material to be distributed for free. That is with collaboration of WNES.

Surviving JavaScripts!!!

JavaScripts. They are everywhere. Since my Desktop collapsed I'm using my Dad's old Laptop. In normal conditions, it does fine. But when I try to load multiple web pages at once, it dies on me. It just cannot take the load. I thought a 1 GHz processor and 256 RAM should get me through. As I discovered, the amount of script and the processing power these pages demand are enormous. Everyday I have to waste over an hour just to get these script processed.
Allah help me.