Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Imagination meets Reality

At the northern hemisphere....

The starting cycle of life

The first moments in the adult life of a newly-hatched mosquito are captured by these macro images taken by photographer brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas
Slowly emerging from the water, over the course of five minutes the mosquito gradually adjusts to life in the outside world
Life span: Measuring up to 16mm in length, the mosquitoes live for anywhere up to one month

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1290526/Mosquito-emerges-deep-adult-life-outside-world.html#ixzz0sM4OsKAy

Opportunism

Psychology

Seen behind a T-shirt:
Psychology
Batch 09
"Your mind is my business"

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Society's changing address

When our generation was young and in school, we all used to call all people even slightly elder to us as "bhaiya/didi" (north India) or "anna/akka" (south India). Even people who were a year older were called like that and if people below your age call you only by your name, that would be disrespectful. Times have changed. Now people prefer to be called only by their names with no suffixes even by people twenty years younger. There are two possible reasons for this: People are more age conscious and more international exposure/norms. The first is obvious when my female friend and cousin sister dont want to be called aunties by even their 4 yr old niece/nephews. Maybe the popular image of an aunty is a 40 yr old with enough girth that even a baby elephant gets inferiority complex.
The second is perhaps because of the software companies' culture wherein people are addressed only by their first names mostly.
Just an observation and hence no conclusion!

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Creating value


Story 1:
How to sell off a dead donkey
A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died last night."
Kenny replied: "Well then, just give me my money back."
The farmer said: "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."
Kenny said: "OK then, just unload the donkey.."
The farmer asked: "What ya gonna do with him?"
Kenny: "I'm going to raffle him off." (Note: To raffle is to sell a thing by lottery - draw lot - to a group of people each paying the same amount for a ticket)
Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"
Kenny: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead."
A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?" Kenny: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made a profit of $898.00."
Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"
Kenny: "Just the guy who won. So I gave him back his two dollars."

*********************************************************************
Story 2:
A company has a debt of say 100 units and equity of 100. It splits up the company into 5 companies: 4 are debtless and the other takes all the debt. The one with excess debt shuts down and the other 4 companies take on more debt, do an IPO and prosper. Result: Tremendous value created for shareholders!

Moral: How many of you guys participated in things (eg:smsed to tv serials) thinking things are straight forward and were ignorant?
How come fooling people seems to be a very sustainable source of value creation?
I leave it to you to think it over...

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Women are very obedient!


The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy who was given real electric shocks. They found that 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six that had refused to comply were all male (54% of males were obedient); all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment