This song and the movie series has always inspired me whenever iv felt low and ascertain the fact songs can truly inspire.....
The Song: The measure of a man - Performed by Elton John, Penned by - Alan Menken
The Movie: Rocky V
These battered hand are all you own
This broken heart has turned to stone
Go hang your glory on the wall
There comes a time when castles fall
And all that's left is shifting in the sand
You're out of time, you're out of place
Look at your face
That's the measure of a man
This coat that fits you like a glove
These dirty streets you learned to love
So welcome back my long lost friend
You've been to hell and back again
God alone knows how you crossed that span
Back on the beat, back to the start
Trust in your heart
That's the measure of a man
It's the fire in the eyes, the lines on the hand
It's the things you understand
Permanent ties from which you once ran
That's the measure of a man
You've come full circle, now you're home
Without the gold, without the chrome
And this is where you've always been
You had to lose so you could win
And rise above your troubles while you can
Now you can love, now you can lose
Now you can choose
That's the measure of a man
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Watch out for the Red Dragon.....
Statistics due this week are expected to show that China is on track this year to pass Germany as the world's third-biggest national economy, behind the U.S. and Japan, in another indication of the rapid change of the global balance of power, according to a media report Sunday.
Recent estimates put the size of China's gross domestic product in the past year at $2.8 trillion, breathing down the neck of Germany's $2.9 trillion national output for the period, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition. Only the U.S. at $13.2 trillion and Japan at $4.4 trillion have bigger economies, according to International Monetary Fund data cited by the Journal.
Chinese government data for the second quarter, expected Thursday, are expected to show that Chinese output grew by around 11% in this year's first half, a rate that economists think China will maintain this year, according to the report, which noted that even optimistic predictions for German growth, at close to 3%, are no match for that.
As recently as 1999, China was only the world's seventh-biggest economy, the Journal said. It has since passed Italy, France and the United Kingdom and could pass Japan in a decade if it maintains its current rate of growth, according to the report.
By another measure known as purchasing-power parity, China is already the world's second-biggest economy. the Journal said. If exchange rates are adjusted to equalize the cost of goods in different countries, then China's total output was worth $10 trillion last year, according to estimates by the IMF cited by the Journal.
That eclipses Japan's $4.2 trillion and Germany's $2.6 trillion, and is hot on the heels of the U.S.'s $13 trillion economy by that measure, the Journal said, adding that purchasing-power parity tends to make developing economies appear bigger than comparisons using current exchange rates, because a dollar can often buy more goods in poor countries than in rich ones.
China's imminent overtaking of Germany is only one instance of a broader global shift, according to the report. As populous countries such as China and India become major forces in the world economy, established powers such as Europe, Japan and the U.S. are becoming relatively less important, the Journal said. Many economists already argue that global growth is becoming less dependent on the U.S. economy, which has slowed in the past year without greatly affecting others, according to the report
Recent estimates put the size of China's gross domestic product in the past year at $2.8 trillion, breathing down the neck of Germany's $2.9 trillion national output for the period, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition. Only the U.S. at $13.2 trillion and Japan at $4.4 trillion have bigger economies, according to International Monetary Fund data cited by the Journal.
Chinese government data for the second quarter, expected Thursday, are expected to show that Chinese output grew by around 11% in this year's first half, a rate that economists think China will maintain this year, according to the report, which noted that even optimistic predictions for German growth, at close to 3%, are no match for that.
As recently as 1999, China was only the world's seventh-biggest economy, the Journal said. It has since passed Italy, France and the United Kingdom and could pass Japan in a decade if it maintains its current rate of growth, according to the report.
By another measure known as purchasing-power parity, China is already the world's second-biggest economy. the Journal said. If exchange rates are adjusted to equalize the cost of goods in different countries, then China's total output was worth $10 trillion last year, according to estimates by the IMF cited by the Journal.
That eclipses Japan's $4.2 trillion and Germany's $2.6 trillion, and is hot on the heels of the U.S.'s $13 trillion economy by that measure, the Journal said, adding that purchasing-power parity tends to make developing economies appear bigger than comparisons using current exchange rates, because a dollar can often buy more goods in poor countries than in rich ones.
China's imminent overtaking of Germany is only one instance of a broader global shift, according to the report. As populous countries such as China and India become major forces in the world economy, established powers such as Europe, Japan and the U.S. are becoming relatively less important, the Journal said. Many economists already argue that global growth is becoming less dependent on the U.S. economy, which has slowed in the past year without greatly affecting others, according to the report
Disruptive Technology?... and ...what is that?
A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market.
A very impactive definition right...well iam writing this after the launch of www.marketsimplified.com from the shelves of my elder brother's Innovative Technology Start - up called Inxs Asia (www.inxsasia.com).
About my brother:
Venkat Rangan
A Technology Entrepreneur by birth, who with a visionary zeal has brought INXS and UBAC from a concept on a piece of paper to a platform on the verge of a revolution in less than 12 months. Venkat is a graduate in Business Administration from University of Madras, Chennai and has had start up experience ranging from Pacific Multimedia, a multimedia company servicing clients like Citibank and Ford and was Co-Founder of Media IPX(Singapore), a startup developing Online Media Convergence Network. The immense experience and exposure so gained have been instrumental in the development of INXS Technologies. Venkat’s single minded devotion to this vision has been the source of great motivation and inspiration to the entire team at INXS.
About Inxs Asia:
INXS Technologies provides technology to build complex financial applications that set the benchmark for elegance and deliver performance to the users.
The FoundationBuilt in year 2006 UBAC Financial Platform development offers previously unthought of capabilities and cuts short development time to a matter of days, while a ground-up design of financial infrastructure would take months or years and depend upon obsolete technology and constraints carried from several generation beyond the time of internet itself.
UBAC financial platform conforms to open standards where available and establishes open unrestricted standards otherwise by provided a published Open API Architecture. Using this say a brazilian startup can deliver a mobile financial application to Japanese market with 2 weeks what otherwise would have taken years.
A very impactive definition right...well iam writing this after the launch of www.marketsimplified.com from the shelves of my elder brother's Innovative Technology Start - up called Inxs Asia (www.inxsasia.com).
About my brother:
Venkat Rangan
A Technology Entrepreneur by birth, who with a visionary zeal has brought INXS and UBAC from a concept on a piece of paper to a platform on the verge of a revolution in less than 12 months. Venkat is a graduate in Business Administration from University of Madras, Chennai and has had start up experience ranging from Pacific Multimedia, a multimedia company servicing clients like Citibank and Ford and was Co-Founder of Media IPX(Singapore), a startup developing Online Media Convergence Network. The immense experience and exposure so gained have been instrumental in the development of INXS Technologies. Venkat’s single minded devotion to this vision has been the source of great motivation and inspiration to the entire team at INXS.
About Inxs Asia:
INXS Technologies provides technology to build complex financial applications that set the benchmark for elegance and deliver performance to the users.
The FoundationBuilt in year 2006 UBAC Financial Platform development offers previously unthought of capabilities and cuts short development time to a matter of days, while a ground-up design of financial infrastructure would take months or years and depend upon obsolete technology and constraints carried from several generation beyond the time of internet itself.
UBAC financial platform conforms to open standards where available and establishes open unrestricted standards otherwise by provided a published Open API Architecture. Using this say a brazilian startup can deliver a mobile financial application to Japanese market with 2 weeks what otherwise would have taken years.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The Stockdale Paradox
The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner's rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise system—after x minutes, you can say certain things—that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for 25 letters, c doubling for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down. After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor.
You can understand, then, my anticipation at the prospect of spending part of an afternoon with Stockdale. One of my students had written his paper on Stockdale, who happened to be a senior research fellow studying the Stoic philosophers at the Hoover Institution right across the street from my office, and Stockdale invited the two of us for lunch. In preparation, I read In Love and War, the book Stockdale and his wife had written in alternating chapters, chronicling their experiences during those eight years.
As I moved through the book, I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak—the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors, and so forth. And then, it dawned on me: “Here I am sitting in my warm and comfortable office, looking out over the beautiful Stanford campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I’m getting depressed reading this, and I know the end of the story! I know that he gets out, reunites with his family, becomes a national hero, and gets to spend the later years of his life studying philosophy on this same beautiful campus. If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
* * *
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
You can understand, then, my anticipation at the prospect of spending part of an afternoon with Stockdale. One of my students had written his paper on Stockdale, who happened to be a senior research fellow studying the Stoic philosophers at the Hoover Institution right across the street from my office, and Stockdale invited the two of us for lunch. In preparation, I read In Love and War, the book Stockdale and his wife had written in alternating chapters, chronicling their experiences during those eight years.
As I moved through the book, I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak—the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors, and so forth. And then, it dawned on me: “Here I am sitting in my warm and comfortable office, looking out over the beautiful Stanford campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I’m getting depressed reading this, and I know the end of the story! I know that he gets out, reunites with his family, becomes a national hero, and gets to spend the later years of his life studying philosophy on this same beautiful campus. If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
* * *
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox?
Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox?
This is a wonderful article on Human Behaviour
The fox is a cunning creature, able to devise a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox circles around the hedgehog’s den, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty—the fox looks like the sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a dowdier creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.
The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail. The hedgehog, minding his own business, wanders right into the path of the fox. “Aha, I’ve got you now!” thinks the fox. He leaps out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks, “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” Rolling up into a perfect little ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The fox, bounding toward his prey, sees the hedgehog defense and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest, the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, some version of this battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place, and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.
Berlin extrapolated from this little parable to divide people into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels,” says Berlin, never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple—indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.
Princeton professor Marvin Bressler pointed out the power of the hedgehog during one of our long conversations: “You want to know what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart? They’re hedgehogs.” Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam Smith and division of labor—they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and simplified it. “Those who leave the biggest footprints,” said Bressler, “have thousands calling after them, ‘Good idea, but you went too far!’ ”
To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. Quite the contrary. They understand that the essence of profound insight is simplicity. What could be more simple than e = mc2? What could be simpler than the idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego, and superego? What could be more elegant than Adam Smith’s pin factory and “invisible hand?” No, the hedgehogs aren’t simpletons; they have a piercing insight that allows them to see through complexity and discern underlying patterns. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.
This is a wonderful article on Human Behaviour
The fox is a cunning creature, able to devise a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox circles around the hedgehog’s den, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty—the fox looks like the sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a dowdier creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.
The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail. The hedgehog, minding his own business, wanders right into the path of the fox. “Aha, I’ve got you now!” thinks the fox. He leaps out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks, “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” Rolling up into a perfect little ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The fox, bounding toward his prey, sees the hedgehog defense and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest, the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, some version of this battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place, and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.
Berlin extrapolated from this little parable to divide people into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels,” says Berlin, never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple—indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.
Princeton professor Marvin Bressler pointed out the power of the hedgehog during one of our long conversations: “You want to know what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart? They’re hedgehogs.” Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam Smith and division of labor—they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and simplified it. “Those who leave the biggest footprints,” said Bressler, “have thousands calling after them, ‘Good idea, but you went too far!’ ”
To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. Quite the contrary. They understand that the essence of profound insight is simplicity. What could be more simple than e = mc2? What could be simpler than the idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego, and superego? What could be more elegant than Adam Smith’s pin factory and “invisible hand?” No, the hedgehogs aren’t simpletons; they have a piercing insight that allows them to see through complexity and discern underlying patterns. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.
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