Invention & Innovation

Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas. Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. This is best described by comparing Thomas Edison with Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison was as innovator because he made money from his ideas. Nikola Tesla was an inventor. Tesla spent money to create his inventions but was unable to monetize them.

Reference:
1. Wikipedia

Fields in Information Retrieval

Wikipedia defines Information Retrieval (IR) as a science of searching for documents, information within documents and metadata for documents [1]. Web searching is an application of IR.

There are several fields in IR. Some of them are listed as follows:

• IR Theory and Formal Models
• Performance, Scalability, Architectures, Efficiency, Platforms
• Indexing, Query representation, Query reformulation, Structure-based representation, XML
• Metadata, Social tagging
• Evaluation methods and metrics, Experimental design, Test collection
• Interactive IR, User studies, User models, Task-based IR
• User interfaces and visualization
• Web IR (e.g. link analysis, query log analysis, ad targeting)
• Digital libraries
• Enterprise Search, Intranet, Desktop, Adversarial IR
• Distributed IR, peer to peer IR, Mobile IR, Fusion/Combination
• Cross-language retrieval, Multilingual retrieval, Machine translation for IR
• Multimedia IR
• Topic detection and tracking, Routing, Content-based filtering, Collaborative filtering, Agents, Spam filtering
• Question answering, Natural language processing for IR, Summarization, Lexical acquisition
• Text Data Mining
• Text Categorization, Clustering
• Other domain-specific IR (e.g., Genomic IR, legal IR, IR for chemical structures)
• Blog and online-community search

References:

1. Wikipedia

FUN: Sense of Humor

The head of the firing squad asked the condemned man, "Before we shoot you, would you like a last cigarette?" And the prisoner replied, "No thanks, I'm trying to quit smoking!"

References

1. Sense of Humor
2. How important is a sense of humor
   

Keep your eyes on the destination, not on the road

This is a very crucial adage. It says that we should be very attentive towards our goal. To reach at the destination, there might be many ways some of which may be shorter than others. However, it is not important to look at these roads because the ultimate thing is whether one reached at destination or not. No matter which way he takes, he is not successful unless he gets what he wants.

Fun: I like doctors but I don't like who doctors

Doctor as a noun represents the people who are experts in medicine and treats people when they are ill. However, doctor as a verb means several things. One who doctors changes documents to deceive people. Similarly, doctoring equally mean adding poisonous materials into foods and drinks. So, what do you think , do you always like doctor ?

Info: How dangerious an atomic bomb would be?

Source: Wikipedia

Two major types of atomic bomb were developed by the United States during World War II: a uranium-based device (codenamed "Little Boy") whose fissile material was highly enriched uranium, and a plutonium-based device ("Fat Man") whose plutonium was derived from uranium-238.

The uranium-based Little Boy device became the first nuclear weapon used in war when it was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of TNT, the blast and thermal wave of the bomb destroyed nearly 50,000 buildings and killed approximately 75,000 people.

Initially it was believed that uranium was relatively rare, and that nuclear proliferation could be avoided by simply buying up all known uranium stocks, but within a decade large deposits of it were discovered in many places around the world.

View: Free Banana VS Paid Mango

Tell me, what do you do when you have to study or know about something. Most probably you ask your friends unless you don't have Internet facility. Otherwise, the de facto means of getting any information is the web. For example, imagine a person wants to know about Nepal. No doubt, he uses his favourite search engine, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, and queries the term Nepal. If he doesn't like the articles in the result set provided by the search engine, he tries with other sources. This is what happenes to me. Last year, when I wanted to study 'French Revolution', I asked Google which offered me Wikipedia as the first source. Actually, I didn't like the article in Wikipedia and tried in MSN Encarta. The article in Encarta about French Revolution was awesome.

Recently, I wanted to refreshed the French Revolution. This time I tried 'French Revolution Encarta' in Google because I already knew that the article there was very good. Unfortunately, I was offered an error page with this information: "The MSN Encarta page you are trying to visit has been discontinued...". I was unhappy to know that the good article is no more available other than in Google's cache.

This raised me a few questions : why the article is not accessible ? May be I need to pay now because MSN Encarta is not free unlike Wikipedia. I again went to Wikipedia to know more about MSN Encarta and found that it is DEAD JUST A WEEK AGO. Wikipedia says, "In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site in all countries except Japan was closed on October 31, 2009. Japan's Encarta site will close on December 31, 2009".

The point I want to express is not about my way of accessing information. Rather, it is about the way people consume information. On one hand, Wikipedia, which is a outcome of freelancers' contribution, is gaining momentum. On the other hand, MSN Encarta, which is a commercial product of Microsoft, is vanishing. What does this indicate ? This is the crux of this article.

My answer is simple: the former one is the 'Free Banana' and the later one is the 'Paid Mango'. In my view, given Free Bananas and Paid Mangoes, even a person, who is a fan of Mango, takes Banana simply because of the tag: FREE. That is to say, very few people are willing to pay for a service leaving a similar free service behind.

In conclusion, the way people consume information has changed. People choose free services not the paid services which is tantamount to choosing between Free Bananas and Paid Mangoes. No matter how sweet mangoes are, no one wants to buy them when bananas are readily available for free.

Freedom: Fall of Berlin Wall

Guns can do nothing; barriers can do nothing - they just intimidate people for days or may be for few years; they may claim few lives. No weapons are needed to counter-attack junta and dictators. Just need to make people aware of their RIGHTS and FREEDOMS. Look at the "Fall of Berlin Wall" in 9th Nov 1989. Anybody who has visited Berlin must have a bag of words at this moment: November 9, 1989; Berlin Wall; East and West Germany; Brandenburg Gate; Checkpoint Charlie; People's Freedom.