Blogs

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Are you sure you know the world around you? Let’s have a quiz, shall we? Given the current population growth rate of the world (1-2% per year) and given that today, we have about 2 billion children, what will be the number of children present in 2100? 4 billion, 6 billion or 8 billion.

What kind of biases plague us? What should be do to watch out for those? How can we aware of what is going on in the world? What are the worldly facts that we have got wrong? Do smarter people on the planet get all these facts correctly?

Take the test here first - http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Also, check this site out for https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness/

Uh… oh! A ton of unanswered questions. Listen to Krishna as he talks about the book “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Books and Stuff Podcast - Episode 5 - How to increase your Financial IQ

in Learning

2018-12-05

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - For a change, it was Bala who discussed about the book that he read.

How can one be intelligent about money? How does currency differ from money? For once, Bala read a book on one of his pet subjects - investing. Krishna took it as an opportunity to kick back and grill Bala about “How to increase your financial IQ” - Income sources, protecting your money, budgeting, leveraging and using financial information seem to be the best points out of the book. Listen till the end for a bonus feature!

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Design Thinking - A Primer (MOOC Open for Registration)

in Teaching

2018-11-22

It was August 2011, a few months before I quit the company, a gentleman tossed a question at me, “If I lose my job as a Java programmer to a computer which will write Java code by itself, then so will you. Without me, who will you teach?”

I had merely applied one of the trends of technology evolution and showed the participants of my workshop a demo that they would understand. Code that might write itself.

I had by no means hinted that I was going to fire him. But, I thought about this for quite some time.

Who will replace professors, trainers and consultants?

It is better that I replace myself rather than someone else, so I decided to record it all into a computer and deliver it as a course.

So, here goes. I am very glad to announce the launch of an online course on Design Thinking on an online platform called NPTEL - National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. I am co-teaching this course with Prof. Ashwin Mahalingam from IIT, Madras. The course is available at https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc19%5Fmg23/. The course is now open for registration and we will start in Feb 2019. The wonderful folks at IISER, Pune, hard working people at NPTEL, my creative teaching assistant, Siddharth Maturi and his buddies - Nithin, Sam and Suprativ helped us with making this course possible.

Books and stuff podcast - Episode 4 - How 'Thinking in Bets' can simplify decision making

in Learning

2018-10-09

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Krishna narrates his own views and what he picked up from a book about a psychology professor who became a Poker champion.

Krishna shares his views on Dr. Annie Duke’s theories on decision making. Krishna personally struggled with making the simplest of decisions and this book resonates with his growth to a person who now thinks in bets. Listen to the podcast to know about this.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Books and Stuff Podcast - Episode 3 - Half Lion

in Learning

2018-08-01

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Krishna narrates his own views and what he picked up from a book on Ex-Prime Minister of India, P V Narasimha Rao.

What can one learn from a Prime Minister who masterfully pulled a country out of recession and socialism while keeping a slender majority at bay, while pursuing his own passion of life long learning? Listen to the podcast to know about this.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Books and Stuff Podcast - Episode 2 - Learning to Learn

in Learning

2018-07-18

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

What strategy did you use while studying or learning a course at school/college? Mine was simple: read, then read one more time, and then wake up in the morning and read again.

Magically, just after the exams, all the learnings vanished from my head. All these years, I wondered about why that happened. Let’s find out from our learned friend, Krishna.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

How to Be Smarter About the Innovation Trends of the World? Deadline Tomorrow

in Teaching

2018-04-05

Can inventing be taught or is it in your genes? The perennial question that hounds a lot of us. G. Altshuller and his colleagues set out to prove that the art of inventing could be taught. So what’s up in the world of inventing and invention after they set out with this job? What are some of the hot trends in this field? Here is a great opportunity for you to find out.

Books and Stuff Podcast - Episode 1 - Deep Work How to Focus in a Distracted World

in Learning

2018-03-28

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Krishna likes to read books, but Bala doesn’t.

Bala likes to write, but Krishna doesn’t.

They both love to talk!

So, Bala and Krishna decided to talk about what Krishna reads.

And thus the idea of recording their chatter was born.

The two friends will discuss books they love.

This series of podcasts is for busy people. People who’d love to learn about a book without having to read one. And maybe the podcast will inspire them to get their hands on a book that interests them.

Feel free to leave your recommendations via social media or in the comments section below.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

TRIZ India Podcast Murali Interviews Darrell Mann

By murali in Learning

2018-03-14

Murali Loganathan, a research scholar at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India had a tete-a-tete podcast recording with Darrell Mann, CEO and Technical Director of Systematic Innovation Ltd. Enjoy!

How to Visualize Your System in Four Simple Steps

in Teaching

2018-02-28

It was the winter of 2010. Mr. Murphy had a whale of a time with us fledgling professors at one of the premium centres of technology in the country. IIT Madras.

Murphy’s laws proved right.

Everything went wrong - the promised projector was out, our taxi had a flat tyre, my fellow professor’s laptop wouldn’t boot up, the students showed up on time for the class.

All disasters.

In spite of all these setbacks, Prakash (my co-professor) and I had a blast with the students. The students presented a few socially relevant problems that they were going to work on. My rest of the post will talk about one such case where visual representation helped us assimilate what the students initially attempted to explain through words. In the process, you can learn a thing or two about representing a system visually.