Why we should not be ranking our educational institutions

The Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India has come up with National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) to rank all educational institutions of higher education in India. I tried to dig deeper and do some research on my own to find out if this will help us build a better education system for us in the country.

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Digest - 21st March, 2017

It has been a while since my last digest (previously known as weekly) post. This is mostly because I am not consuming as much information online. So, here is a list of things I liked on the internet and I think are worth sharing.

I am just in awe of this amazing work by Mike Kelly. The series is called Airportraits and the artist has merged more than 8 hours of air traffic at various airports in a single picture. You can also check this gallery out.

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Digest - 16th October, 2016

I will start with a great GIF this impressive bowling form and a even better release.

I enjoyed watching this pretty dated YouTube video featuring Warren Buffett and Bill Gates about success. I just stumbled upon this video and I have never seen any of Buffet's videos or read his work before, I enjoyed clarity in his thoughts as well as his simple way of explaining fairly complex ideas.

Few interesting discussions on Reddit, one about Why are we trying to colonize Mars. One takeaway for me from this discussion was how you don't often realize that such ambitious targets increase the rate of innovation, while solving difficult problems like these we find better solutions for our current problems. As from one of the comments:

"As Neal deGrasse Tyson said, for every dollar invested in NASA, there is a $14 economic return just from the innovation that comes out of solving problems. Pyrex bakeware came out of trying to develop rocket noses, WD-40 was the 40th attempt at making a compound that would Displace Water, that's Water Displacement attempt #40, the internet as a whole came out of a scientists who wanted a better way of linking scientific papers to the documents they cite in their bibliographies."

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Digest - 9th October, 2016

Here is a quick weekly roundup about things I liked or found worth sharing this past week. I am inspired by @punchagan's "What I Liked" posts and this seems like a great idea to pursue.

I really liked this blog series on Functional Programming, it starts with a good introduction and gradually warms you up to the various functional concepts.

I am huge fan of the Hidden Brain podcast, and this last week I loved two of their episodes.

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Better commute planning with commute.py

My office recently moved to one of the busiest commercial areas in the suburbs, which is good since a lot of people travel there from different parts of the city. The public transport system is good, has a nice frequency and is cheap. But as always with too many commuters come bad traffic conditions and discomfort. For someone like me who wants to minimize the time and cost spent during the commute, while at the same time maximize the comfort this became an interesting problem to solve.

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[Q] How does it feel to not qualify in IIT JEE?

I failed IIT JEE. Got an abysmal score in BITSAT, AIEEE and Maharashtra CET. Its not that I had not tried hard, and I won't be playing the blame games on anyone but the truth is "I had failed".

I was very disappointed and so were my parents, and I felt somewhere I have let them down. I was low on confidence.

I had to prove my myself, and earn my family's confidence back.

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Few interesting python scripts

This is a collection of few of my python scripts which I am particularly proud of, few gems from collection which were mostly result of my curiosity and laziness ;-). The scripts here are for educational and demo purposes. They were intended to be a proof of concept, not most of them are not maintained.

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[Q] Do I need to be expert in mathematics to become a great programmer?

(I am assuming by "programming expert" you mean "a good software developer/engineer" by your usage of words like "build many constructive things out of it")

TL;DR version If you want to become a web/mobile application developer, you don't need to be very good at mathematics.

If you are interested in fields like Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Statistical analysis, you will require good mathematical skills if not exceptional.

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[Q] What is the most important thing you learnt as a software engineer through experience?

Couple of months back I completed my first year at Enthought. Before that I have worked twice in Google Summer of Code for Drupal. There are quite a few things I learnt while working on various projects:

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[Weekend Project] DropHere

/images/drophere/drophere.jpg

A few weeks back, I wrote DropHere. Its written using CoffeeScript, Node.js and Express.js and some HTML5 Drag and Drop APIs.

I created this project as a simple drag-and-drop file uploading service. It uploads files to relevant file uploading service. For example, if you drop an image file, it will be uploaded to Imgur and similarly text files will be uploaded to Pastebin.

You can check out the live demo over here.

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