Life seems to be a never-ending cycle of tests. One is tested from the day they are born through the life's many struggles and obstacles. Tests in schools. Tests for uni. Tests for jobs. Tests for medical diagnosis. Tests for friendship. Tests from parents. Tests from background screening. Tests from banks. Tests from insurance. Tests of emotions. Tests in relationships. Tests of spirituality. Tests of love. Tests of blood. Tests of mental agility. Tests of behaviors. Tests of personality. Tests of psychology. Tests of languages. Tests of standardization. Tests and more Tests. It is like one can never recover from all these unnecessary tests that come our way. Academic tests measure absolutely nothing. Job tests measure absolutely nothing. The world has gone mad with testing people all the time. At times, the one testing does not even bother to even evaluate it and just goes for the score. Is life really reduced to a score and a race to the finish? Have we reduced the life to a mere competition rather than a lesson? We are increasingly living in shallowness, superficial, one-dimensional, mundane, depthless and trivialized world of cosmic energy.
29 July 2022
22 July 2022
21 July 2022
Non-Compliant Queries
Writing adhoc queries to a database is non-compliant. It is always better to formalize the queries into programmatic transformation code. Aside from that, queries should be versioned and trackable so a change data capture could be reported into a downstream system for transparency as a continuation of data lineage. Non-compliant queries not only break governance standards, but in a highly regulated sector could result in fines for an organization.
20 July 2022
What Makes an Effective Leader
- Leaders inspire and motivate others to succeed
- Leaders make sensible, timely, and impactful decisions
- Leaders are compassionate, understand people, and their sentiments
- Leaders instill a sense of hope in others
- Leaders make great communicators and provide convincing arguments
- Leaders make great enablers and achievers
- Leaders make great visionaries and this trait often turns them into role models
- Leaders prefer to use terms like 'We' rather than 'I'
- Leaders take control but delegate when it is necessary
- Leaders empower others to be at their best, but also acknowledge their human side to making mistakes
- Leaders invests in people
- Leaders stay focused during critical situations and times of crisis
- Leaders are great influencers
- Leaders are results-oriented and open for change
- Leaders make good mentors and coaches
- Leaders are self-aware
18 July 2022
Economic Effects of Migrant Workers
The net effects of immigration has on a local economy include the below:
- Stress and pressures on local services
- Stress and pressures on healthcare
- Stress and pressures on housing
- Stress and pressures on infrastructure
- Stress and pressures on education
- Net effects to quality of life
- Net effects to urbanization
- Net effects to environment
- Net effects to overpopulation
- Net effects to competition
- Net effects to crime and security
- Net effects to local law enforcement
- Net effects to local unemployment rates in respect of immigration
- Net effects to consumer spending behavior
- Net effects to local exchange rate
- Net effects to payscales
- Net effects to inflation
- Net effects to taxes
Energy Supply and Demand
Why have energy controlled by a few? Why not let everyone supply their own energy as a crowd sourcing affair and use it as a form of monetization. Households could be self-sustainable with solar power, biofuel, and hydropower. These are fundamentally the three greatest sources of abundant energy available in every densely populated society. Sunlight could be used to generate energy. Human and animal waste from bathrooms as well as plant waste from gardening could be used for biofuel. And, hydropower generated from water. Any surplus could be sold on the open market for nearby stores and businesses to consume and buy. Buildings could then buy and sell as well. Government could use such means to light up streets and public services. Overtime reaping benefits in a highly competitive world where energy prices could be sustained by supply and demand as well as create abundance of renewable energy. This might even provide an additional source of revenue for households that need an additional source of income. Mass electrical charge points could be provided by every household to build the energy supplies, no longer requiring the gas station on a street corner. Eventually, leading to a society free of dependency from hiked oil prices. And, the rise of automotive that is dependent only on renewable energy sources. These methods might further solve issues with rising waste sewage, process innovation for recycling, and more controlled use of water consumption. Houses become self-powering rather than stuck on a grid. Even the broadband access could be treated as an extension of a decentralized monetization service for supply and demand. Clean living becomes an ultimate environmental reality. The open traded market for energy could become a new ecommerce product both for C2B, C2C, B2C, B2B. As people move on towards suburbs and rural areas, with vast spaces of land people could produce even more energy. Farmers could sustain their livelihoods as an alternative to agriculture and cattle sources. No more monopolization of energy by a few capitalist ventures.
17 July 2022
Non-Degree Finance Courses
MIT OpenCourseware:
- Behavior Economics and Finance
- Blockchain and Money
- Competitive Decision Making and Negotiation
- Early Stage Capital
- Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
- Entrepreneurial Finance
- Entrepreneurial Marketing
- Entrepreneurial Sales
- Financial Accounting
- Financial and Managerial Accounting
- Financial Management
- Financial Theory 1
- Financial Theory 2
- Fintech: Shaping The Financial World
- Investments
- Negotiation and Conflict Management
- New Enterprises
- Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans
- Practice of Finance: Advanced Corporate Risk Management
- Pricing
- Technology Strategy
- The Analytics Edge
- Topics in Mathematics with Applications in Finance
- Strategic Management 1
- Strategic Management 2
- Business Analysis and Financial Statements
Non-Degree Law Courses
MIT OpenCourseware:
- Law for Corporate Finance and Financial Markets
- Law for Mergers and Acquisitions
- Constitutional Law: Structures of Power and Individual Rights
- Ethics and The Law on The Electronic Frontier
- Introduction to Copyright Law
- Patents, Copyrights, and Law of Intellectual Rights
- Law for Entrepreneur and Manager
KG Embeddings
Bilinear:
- DisMult
- ComplEX
- ANALOGY
- SimplE
Non-Bilinear:
- HolE
- TuckER
Geometric Pure Translational:
- TransE
- TransH
- TransR
- TransD
- TransA
Geometric Translational with Additional Embeddings:
- STransE
- CrossE
Geometric Roto-Translational:
- TorusE
- RotatE
Convolutional Neural Networks:
- ConvE
- ConvR
- ConvKB
Capsule Neural Networks:
- CapsE
Recurrent Neural Networks:
- RSN
14 July 2022
Selflessness
In modern western societies, people like to emphasize their volunteering activities. However, this entirely defeats the purpose of charity and volunteering. By definition volunteering is supposed to be a selfless act where one doesn't declare it as an achievement, take credit for it, or boast about it. By doing so, not only does it invalidate the intention, action, and effort but the whole essence of selflessness. It is about putting someone else first. In some religions it is expected that a person gives or does something of this nature anonymously without any form of recognition or reward. University applications look for volunteer activities. Resumes contain volunteer activities. What are people trying to gain from declaring such activities that they did in a selfless act?
12 July 2022
Future of Workforce
As AI becomes more ubiquitous in society, we are likely to see a massive shift which will be gradual in nature. More service level workers will be hired that can be replaceable for an organization when times get tough so they are easy to re-hire with rudimentary requirement of skills and in most cases this will relate to operating and managing robots. Such roles will act as buffers between management and robots to facilitate human-in-the-loop automation. The structure will become so flat that economies of scale will mean mass unemployment and degradation of the workforce at large where organizations will shrink in their hiring of human resources. Management of people will transform into the management of robots. As life becomes more simple and mundane so will it mean complexities of lifestyle and living standards between a huge rich vs poor divide. Societal class structures will inevitably mean makeshift barriers will be errected to keep the untouchable poor away from the rich resourceful. Security will take on a whole new transformation, in most cases violating freedoms and data protection rights of individuals. Education will become a widespread online learning experience for many, while lacking in quality, and the on-campus learning experience a privilege for a few. The few humans controlling the economies of the world will use robots against annihilation of the human race, what will be regarded as part of the eugenics movement. In many cases, this may take the shape of concentration camps while pandemics will be a natural course of action for population control. We have witnessed such scenes of societal destruction and urban decay play out in a multitude of movies, in most cases what is defined as sci-fi. However, as we move through the times, we come to realize that sci-fi is more and more becoming a reality for humans. It is the human that defines and creates a seed of ethics inside the artificial machine. What if this human is unethical? What if they are immoral? What if they build biases inside the programmable machine? We already see such issues of biases in machine learning models of today which are only to get more and more sophisticated. As time goes on, it is the human role that will no longer fit in the puzzle of the world. The future looks bleak for humans in the world of artificial intelligence and even superintelligence.
10 July 2022
Quantum Natural Language Processing
- Quantum Natural Language Processing
- A Gentle Introduction To Quantum NLP
- Mathematical Foundations for Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning
- Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Machine Learning Models
- A Graphical Approach To Measurement-based Quantum Computing
- The Mathematics of Text Structure
- Functional Question Answering
- Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing
- Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics
- Interacting Quantum Observables
- A Retargetable Compiler for NISQ Devices
- Quantum Natural Language Processing
- A Gentle Introduction to QNLP
- Compositional Natural Language Processing
8 July 2022
Interview Questions
Some companies have interview processes that involve psychometric and behavioral questions. However, what is the point of such questions and how do they relate to the job? In many cases, such questions are so personal that they end up violating GDPR in the way candidate profiles are assessed, stored and processed. What is the point of mapping shapes through a hole? What is the point of so many unnecessary tests? The candidate likely already has a degree and to obtain that they likely had to also sit multitude of tests. It seems like tests are an endless cycle for people when it comes to recruitment. And, having multiple stages in an interview process not only increases the bias with the number of interviews, but also reduces the probability of someone passing all the stages. Invariably, the interview questions do not match the job, and there is only so many ways an interviewer can ask questions to a candidate. No doubt such tests are defined on the advice of Phd individuals who want to test others but are too incompetent to have practical skills of their own. In many cases behavioral and psychometric tests are flawed as statistics is used to evaluate candidate answers, and those answers are very much subjective and purely academic. Such subjective evaluation also leads to rejection to suitable roles and incorrect recommendations to roles for which the candidate may not have any prior experience. No wonder organizations struggle to hire people because for every aspect of work Phd individuals are providing and dictating incorrect guidance determined through flawed academic analysis which rarely takes into account outliers, while pigeonholing people into artificial groups of biases. Phd individuals in the IT sector have really made a mess of the field and this is likely to grow as more and more get hired into professional workplaces in organizations with very little to offer in terms of practical returns. Perhaps, this is also a reflection of how academia is a failure to societies at large and the Phd qualification, in particular, that produces such incompetence where one percent of the population dictates to the world on how things should be done. HR processes are only going to get worse and more competitive where academic potential weighs higher than practical experiences leading to stymied organizational performance and growth. The ultimate goal of an application and interview process should not be overly complicated and academic in nature. The whole objective is to evaluate the skills of the candidate to do the job which is more practical in nature. So, what if they are not a cultural fit in their approach to life or that they can't be bothered to do silly hackerank tests. Pointless tests tell very little about candidates anyway. Not to mention they may be incorrectly worded or just expect a subjective way of doing something. Not everyone can fit neatly in a square box. The only real way to conduct interviews is to have a friendly, approachable discussion about the job and the skills required to do it, with as minimum stages as possible rather than dragging the process on an endless cycle of subjective evaluations, at the expense of using costly and implausible third-party systems.
NLP courses
DeepLearning.ai - NLP Specialization
- Affective Computing
- Advanced Natural Language Processing
- Computational Models of Discourse
- Natural language and Computational Representation of Knowledge
- Linguistic courses
CMU Natural Language Processing
Racist Organizations
It is true when an organization struggles to fill roles they are merely professing to the fact that their biases and discrimination are holding them back from determining the right candidate for the job. Increasingly, recruitment agencies are removing candidate background information such as name, address, and such from resumes to emphasize the fact that it is really the content of work that matches the job not what race, gender, or background someone is. In many instances, candidates even change their names to fit in with the employer ideals and stand a better chance for an interview. One only has to look at the people within any given organization on linkedin to get the eagle eye view of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. In fact, an organization that rejects an asian or black for a technical role may in fact do it because most of the people that work there are white and this can be easily seen on the types of people that work there and their backgrounds. In many occasions employers may scrutinize on candidates if they are non-white especially on their education backgrounds. On other instances it is merely a case of utter racism that comes into play. Roles like natural language processing and computational linguistics are often seen as roles for white individuals especially as the employer assumes that non-whites may not know how to write and speak english. Such baseless biases are rampant in the IT industry across the sectors. Some recruiters just don't like working with non-whites. Others look at all muslims as terrorists so avoid hiring them altogether, while blacks may be seen as difficult or challenging to interact with in the workplace. All these biases are holding back the asian and black communities from jobs and quality education which may be the point all along. The lesser jobs they have and the lower standard of education they have means they can be kept in control and monitored in lower paying jobs where they are not able to hold authority, influence others, and make significant impactful decisions for society at large. This is also a mere sense of distrust and fear of the non-whites as well the need to maintain the status quo. A typical aspect that one can see transpiring is when a white person gets caught being racist they immediately release an apology. But, what good is this apology anyway when it is made only because they got caught, not that their actions were wrong. They are still likely to hold the same views unless they get caught again for some other reason. Why is it always the non-white being attacked in society? It is bizarre that the majority of wealthy economic societies are in the west dictating the terms of global supply and demand. While the countries with the richest reserves of natural resources are in the east. Is it any wonder that for the last few decades west has always had a reason to target an attack on the east which in most cases was either due to oil or some other naturally abundant resource? There has never been a time in such a long time where the east targeted the west especially in form of greed for resources. This imbalance of power has had severe ramifications across the economic divide and something seriously has to be done to level the playing field. Two fundamental factors that could reduce the economic disparity in the east is to transfer more economic funding towards sustainability and educational efforts which in both short-term and long-term could prove a surefire way of increasing the global balance. The transformation could then be made visible through job creation, reduction of debt, support for the disadvantaged, better educational institutions, more startup innovation, accountability audits for corruption, and sheer economic development for the future. This will undoubtedly create a sustainable form of enrichment to the east without being hampered by the west. Sustainability and increased educational opportunities leads to both social, economic, and environmental improvements in multiple dimensions which eventually eclipses and influences complex fabric of societal systems.
5 July 2022
Inconsiderate Universities
The following list the types of things that make a bad university.
- Never get back to your enquiries within 24-48 hrs
- Don't prioritize or who can't be bothered about students
- Really slow admin processes you are bound to be frustrated for the entire academic period, it really is not worth it
- Terrible housing if you are looking for on-campus living
- Lecturers have no office hours and don't go out of their way to make themselves accessible to students
- Don't sympathize or show any empathy for students
- High faculty turnover
- Consistently drop in rankings each year
- Low student satisfaction
- Antiquated systems and IT
- Unhelpful staff
- Make mistakes even on academic transcripts
- Grade incorrectly
- Hold biases and discriminate on students
- Staff take kickbacks and discriminate on the admissions process
- Very low graduation rates or very high acceptance rates
- No accreditation for their courses
- Struggle to get funding for research and teaching and dependent completely on intake of students
- Probationary status or where abuse/harassment/discrimination are rampant
- Cannot separate education from religion
- Lack student services
- Driven by profits over quality of education
- No scholarship or alumni progams
- Terrible teaching methods
- Don't have any form of recognized research program or a poor publishing record
- Poor collaborative record with other established institutions both for teaching and research
- Poor health and safety record
- Poor international recognition
- Poor job prospects after graduation
- Unrecognized credential
- Poorly rated on government metrics for teaching and research quality
- Academic programs are not designed through standardized guidelines and recommendations
- Lacks diversity, equity, and inclusion in their processes
- Graduates from the university have little change in their prospects, and often lack ethics in how they conduct themselves in society
- the institution gives nothing back to society or the local community either via jobs, funding, charity, regeneration programs, or cultivating urban improvements
- the institution has misleading and complicated processes for admissions and in most cases done on purpose to cover up for biases and discrimination
- work experiences are asked for but not used for admissions
- trying to get students to take more prerequisites in order to make more money or the fact that they don't have that many advanced courses that are supposed to make the course interesting
- most of the courses that they advertise on open days are rarely available for students
3 July 2022
What makes a sucky Employer
Increasingly, in a competitive world, many organizations are becoming the worst places to work for employees and the worst places to apply for candidates. The below sheds some light on questionable employer practices.
- Employers that stress diversity, equity, and inclusion but have very little reflecting that in their management team or recruitment practices
- Employers that hide behind the facade of cultural fit to discriminate on candidates and employees
- Employers that want people from top schools but have very low compensation packages
- Employers that want everything but don't want to offer anything in return
- Employers that expect their employees to lie and cheat to customers
- Employers that have disgruntled customers and bad customer service practices
- Employers that have cheap and terrible products to sell to customers or can't be bothered to understand the frustrations of the customer, identify the gaps in market, and take the necessary steps to improve their business model
- Employers that have terrible work life balance for employees
- Employers that treat their employees like disposable goods
- Employers that care more about where you went to school rather than what you did with your degree
- Employers that are pretentious and procrastinate with employees
- Employers that can't be bothered about candidates during the hiring process and display unprofessional practices
- Employers that have terrible record of dealing with abuse, harassment and discrimination in the workplace
- Employers that are unethical and lack the sense of social responsibility
- Employers during tough times will always look to job cuts as a point of cutting costs rather than reducing red tape between managers
- Employers that have poor incentives for training and career growth
- Employers that don't appreciate good employees and overcompensate bad employees
- Employers that have high turnover as a result of bad recruitment and cultural practices
- Employers that don't realize that it is a two way street between them and customers, employees, and candidates
- Employers that don't realize their brand value can drop in a second through bad social media reviews
- Employers that don't value customers, employees, and candidates will lose business in long run
- Employers that don't make themselves accessible to the public
- Employers that are out of touch with reality and the internal issues in the organization
- Employers that don't listen to customers, employees, and candidate feedback and put it into action to improve both the product, service, and the workplace
- Employers that display a total lack of empathy towards customers, employees, or candidates
- Employers that don't take the time to quality check their products before selling to customers
- Employers that don't care about the privacy rights of customers, employees, and candidates nor take the necessary steps of care to protect their personal data
- Employers that don't have an effective health and safety induction process
- Employers that are disorganized, badly managed, and hire clueless individuals
- Employers that have core values that includes teamwork, valuing people, and integrity while not practicing any of it in the workplace, especially if valuing people involves making them redundant at the drop of a hat or not valuing customer service
- Employers that mostly have bad reviews from their customers, candidates, and employees
- Employers that have biased and discriminatory processes for employee performance reviews for bonuses, increments and promotions
- Employers that don't provide support for maternity and paternity leave
- Employers that have dodgy benefits packages
- Employers that expect employees to work during holiday leave
- Employers that provide bonuses to their mgmt for mass layoffs
- Employers that pay huge pay packages to mgmt but are stingy when it comes to paying their employees
- Employers that don't have sustainability in their business model nor take initiatives to protect the environment
- Employers that don't provide days off for volunteering to employees
Phd Incompetence
Academia is very different from the practical world. In academia, foundational skills are measured through exams and rudimentary coursework. While in practical world, organizations want people that can do the job under uncertainty, huge amounts of complexity, efficiently process noisy data, adaptability to change, and a requirement for following best practices. At some point in a person's career, work experience far surpasses academics both educationally and in problem solving. The below points highlight the typical patterns of behavior that Phd individuals display in the work place and academia:
- Will want to command authority simply because they hold a Phd which may not even be in a technical field and totally unrelated to the job
- Will measure someone's skills by the amount of degrees they hold and where they got them from
- Will expect others to help them with 80% of their job
- Will struggle to convert theory into practice
- Will take years to do something that could be done in months by an engineer
- Will reject perfectly good candidates simply because they don't hold a Phd like they do or went to a certain university like they did
- Will advertise for roles where job titles are miss-aligned to job descriptions to miss-lead candidates
- Will be enamored by the amount of papers they have published even though many of them are either plagiarized, summary synthesis of other papers, lack technical depth, incorrect in plausible theory, or are simply too unimportant to hold any real value to an organization
- Will ask really dumb questions to engineers and then expect them to sound deep like asking what is unit testing
- Will reject the very same people with experience in academic admissions to universities while lacking the same skills themselves
- Will try to take credit for other people's work
- Will have questionable basic foundational skills for the job, but will call themselves as experts anyway
- Will have multiple published papers that have different topical headings but basically the same content
- Will spend majority of their time hacking through things but will expect others to think they are following a scientific method or process
- Will usually have no clue themselves as to what they are doing
- Will introduce biases into their data just because they can and no one will question them for it, they will then produce such flawed and biased results and expect everyone to call them experts
- Will have no real accountability for their work output in organizations
- Will likely make terrible leaders or managers of people
- Will struggle to teach others the very same concepts that they call themselves experts in because they don't fully understand the concepts either
- Will make silly reasons as to why they need to hire more people on the team, even when it is really part of their own job to know how to do
- Will expect anyone that doesn't hold a Phd does not know what they are talking about
- Will likely patronize and discriminate on non-Phd people in the workplace
- Will reject people if they hold a difference of opinion to themselves
- Will likely be very insecure and take offense if their skills or work is criticized or is taken into question purely because they assume they are experts because they have a Phd, eventhough that Phd could be in cartoonism
- Will likely add more cost to organization for all the help they will need to be able to do their job, and the job that they do amounts to very little in quantifiable value
- Will likely leave a forgettable mark in organization especially as most of their work would already be done by others
- Will tend to hire people that will not be a threat to them or highlight their deficiencies in the workplace
- Will likely not know how to read a CV/resume
- Will reject approaches that are outside of their own discipline, knowledge, or comfort zone
- Will not be adaptable to change outside of what they already know
- Will likely hamper organizational productivity and efficiencies in work output and provide incorrect recommendations to management
- Will produce incorrect models which then influences flawed strategic decisions within organizations
- Will likely only have questionable academic skills with jupyter notebooks, matlab, or tools that will require huge amount of effort to refactor and productionize
- Will likely be expected to teach what they can't put into a practical implementation
- Will likely not have basic skills in data structures and software engineering or the background of things that they will look for in admissions applications to universities
- Will focus on theory all day long but be clueless about how to apply any of it in practice
- Will likely lack fundamental work experience to put them in a position of seniority to call them experts in organizations
- Will likely struggle to take such things as uncertainty, noisy data, biases, complexity, and context into account within their work output and likely expect someone else to sort out for them
- Will likely for all the things they call themselves an expert in, they will expect someone else to do for them
- Will likely be the weakest link in organizations expected to be an expert in an area, but a master of none when it comes to practical implementations
- Will likely be unprofessional when interacting with non-Phd individuals and not value their time
- Will get easy access to funding for their research projects but the work output will not be sufficient to justify the cost, and at times a lot of that funding may be deceptively used to fund other projects in other research teams or faculties
- Will require an awful lot of mentoring to be able to do even simple tasks, making you wonder how in the world they could be called experts or have achieved a Phd
- Will act like a grasshopper with the absence of legs in the workplace
- Will use overly complicated methods rather than approach it first with the simplest solution
- Will use academic approaches to solve non-academic problems in most cases the approach they use will be inefficient and unworkable for prime time production