I recently came across a news article on the disproportionately devastating impact of COVID19 pandemic on the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy.1 This news motivated me to revisit and learn more about the event that happened over 35 years ago. The Bhopal gas leak tragedy is the world’s worst industrial disaster. Methyl iscocyanate (MIC),… Continue reading Analysis — Bhopal tragedy: neither a sabotage nor a routine maintenance operation gone wrong
Category: Management
Innovation – What is the secret sauce?
This week, Harris county, TX, saw an unprecedented amount of rainfall during the hurricane/tropical storm Harvey. The city of Houston and surrounding areas have been frequently affected by flooding in the past two decade or so, which led ProPublica to describe Houston: Boom Town to Flood Town. A major portion of the article is devoted… Continue reading Innovation – What is the secret sauce?
Marissa Mayer for Uber CEO – It will work.
I recently came across two news items, one from Vanity Fair and the other from Inc, on possible future role for Marissa Mayer as the CEO of Uber. Uber has a very interesting year, including a high profile intellectual property dispute with Google’s autonomous driving car division: Waymo, a series of horrible sexual harassment cases,… Continue reading Marissa Mayer for Uber CEO – It will work.
Forced errors – Lessons from an accounting scandal.
In 2015 Toshiba corporation based in Minato, Tokyo, Japan, disclosed to its investors of a major corporate accounting malpractice. The accounting scandal dated back to the 2008 financial collapse. When the market forces became unfavorable, Toshiba resorted to the terrible art of creative accounting practices a.k.a cooking the books. Toshiba created a very interesting mechanism… Continue reading Forced errors – Lessons from an accounting scandal.
Fine tuning the cloud – Making machines learn faster.
In a previous post I discussed how easy it was to setup machine learning libraries in python using virtual machines (vm) hosted in the cloud. Today, I am going to add more details to it. This post covers how to make machine learning code run faster. This post will help any user compile a tensorflow… Continue reading Fine tuning the cloud – Making machines learn faster.
Research and development – When is a good time to invest?
Businesses have limited resources. How to efficiently manage them is an art. A key controversial area of spending is always research and development (R&D). As a start-up we are even more constrained than a regular well established business. Therefore the question I often encounter: Is that a great idea to invest in research and development.… Continue reading Research and development – When is a good time to invest?
Democracy and science – What South Sudan teaches us?
I had an incredible opportunity to participate in a Doctors without borders (MSF) initiative to fill-in missing geographic information data into satellite images. This is an incredibly important process to figure out a huge number of operational details for aid agencies and non-profit organizations like MSF. This includes resource allocation, rapid disaster relief, quick response… Continue reading Democracy and science – What South Sudan teaches us?
Quantifying trust – An essential necessity for any business.
This post is an evolving set of ideas to quantify trust in decision making systems and processes. For me, an empirical definition of trust is the relative distance of a decision from the ground truth. Quantifying and optimizing trust in decision making systems are therefore highly important. This process will make systems that are involved… Continue reading Quantifying trust – An essential necessity for any business.
If I were a time traveler – Lessons learned.
If I were a time traveler, I would have traveled back exactly 121 years to witness one of the most important discoveries of modern medicine: x-ray. The photograph above on the left is the first ever recorded x-ray photograph of human anatomy and on the right is the photo of Wilhelm Röntgen, the man who… Continue reading If I were a time traveler – Lessons learned.
What is next – The future of research.
Every year, from 2010 onward, Redmonk publishes a bi-annual comparison of the popularity of programming languages relative to one another using data from GitHub and Stack Overflow. One list is compiled for the summer and another one for the spring. Among top 15 programming languages in the spring 2016 list, only one exclusively scientific and statistical programming language is… Continue reading What is next – The future of research.