SAST Wingees

REST explained

A very interesting attempt at explaining what REST – “Representational State Transfer”is!!

Why you should stay active in your alumni networks?

If you had any lingering doubts on why you should continue to keep in touch with your university/college friends, read this article in Stanford Business. (Via Aarthi Srinath). Excerpt:

Around the globe and across the years, the GSB connection brings added value to thousands of Stanford alums. The idea of a network as a secretive, unfriendly club has been replaced with the vision of an open-ended chain of people who can communicate, collaborate, and learn from one another.

Why didn’t the Incas invent the wheel?

This question has been bothering me since I visited an Inca Exhibit at the Florida International Museum a decade or so ago. When I visited the Macchu Picchu in Peru, 2 years back, I could not still find the answer. On the contrary, when our guide pointed to a 300-tonne stone in the Sacsay Huaman site in Cuzco, the question became more troubling. How did the Incas haul such large stones without using the wheel? You could also argue that the magnificent Macchu Picchu built on top of a mountain couldn’t also have been built without using some sort of wheeled transportation.

However, the fact remains that Incas did not use the wheel. I was discussing this conundrum with Priya Raju, she asked a couple of interesting questions – did other mesoamerican cultures like Aztecs and Mayas use the wheel? What about other primitive cultures in sub-saharan africa or the australian aborigines?

It turns out none of these cultures used the wheel – there are however some clay toys having wheels in mesoamerica and some scientists also believe that the Incas used wooden rollers to transport heavy objects. Given that the wheel was so rare in the ancient world,  it is reasonable to conclude that the wheel must have been the product of a breakthrough invention. This breakthrough was achieved by an unknown brilliant inventor in Sumeria who invented the wheel in 3500 B.C.  Scientists believe that the presence of draft animals in the middle east created the environment for the invention of the wheel. By contrast the new world did not have any draft animals.  From Sumeria, the wheel spread to the rest of the western world.

The wheel is such a fundamental invention that its hard to imagine the modern world advancing so much without the wheel.

1. Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope answers the question “why did the peoples of the new world fail to invent the wheel”.

2. Our friend Joe Kissell taking on the Invention of the Wheel in ITOTD. As always, Joe points to some excellent references on this topic.

3. Roda on the Wikipedia. Its a malaysian page, but don’t despair, as you scroll down the material is in English and has some excellent content.

4. Chinese Bronze Age Wheeled Vehicles.  Ancient China seems to have invented the wheel independently.

Nokia 6682

I was on the lookout for a smart phone and after quite a bit of research settled on Nokia 6682. I have to say that so far I have been very happy with the phone and pleasantly surprised with what the phone can offer. My criteria for the phone were the following – * It has to be a phone first – Good call quality and reception with standard phone features that we have
   come to expect from a cell/mobile phone.
* Must work with the service provider I was interested in – Cingular, and must be reasonably priced.
* It has to have basic and intuitive PDA functionalities – Nice way to organize contacts/calendar, decent
   email/browsing capability, ability to sync. with PC etc.
* It needs to play MP3 – primarily for podcasts, and so sound quality was compromisable
* Both H/W, S/W expandability would be a very good to have; meaning memory expansion and new
   software installation. Based on the above I settled on Nokia 6682. I signed up for one of those 2 year contracts (shared family plan) with Cingular through a 3rd party vendor – cellularchoices. Eventually I should end up getting 2 phones (other being razr) for free after various kinds of rebates. The phone comes with a RS-MMC card slot and Symbian 6.0. The deal includes a 64MB RS-MMC card and the phone itself comes with quite a bit f free software such as Quick Office suite (can read word, xls and ppts), Adobe PDF reader, basic music player, rudimentary file manager, opera etc. The file manager and music players (there are two, one of them being from realplayer) that come with phone were pretty rudimentary, and after some surfing I found two *very* good (and free to boot) applications to replace the above – FExplorer – To manage files and directories
oggplay – To play mp3 and other audio files I have subsequently replaced the 64 MB card with a 1 GB one (note that 6682 needs the memory card to work with 1.8V to lengthen battery life)  that I got from meritline.  The only other phone that I seriously considered was – SE w800i. I went with the 6682 since I thought it offered similar value for cheaper price (or in my case none :). Based on reviews, looks like you cannot go wrong with w800i either. Being a walkman phone, w800i it will obviously have better mp3/sound quality. To conclude, I do have to say that I have been very happy with my Nokia 6682 so far, and it has satisfied my requirements very well. Ganesh

Book Buzz – Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense

Yahoo reports that Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton of  Stanford University are out to destroy well-worn myths in management in this book that is scheduled to come out – Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management.

Myths that are covered:

MYTH 1. Financial Incentives Drive Good Performance

MYTH 2. First-Movers Have the Advantage

MYTH 3. Layoffs Are a Good Way to Cut Costs

MYTH 4. Mergers Are a Good Idea

MYTH 5. Life and Work Should Be Kept Separate

Nambikumar Palani,who spotted this item, says “can’t wait to read this book”.