I wrote in a recent post about how I love finding links between different facts that I have learnt. I also thoroughly enjoy linking this with some quick "number testing".
Last Saturday, I was driving from Dehradun to Delhi with my family when my father said, "We had gone to see an old hydel power project that takes water from a river. They have built a tunnel through the mountain for this and all the equipment is buried in the earth. Though it was built in the 1970s, it is in good condition and looks very impressive. The tunnel is about 15 feet across and the total head of water is about 100 meters of height. The plan was to generate about 100 MW through 3 stages, of which 2 have been built."
My first reaction was, "100 MW through just a 15 feet tunnel? That's too much!"
Then I began to calculate. 15 feet is about 5 meters, say. That is, 2.5 m radius. Or area of about 6Pi or 18 sq m approximately.
Now every meter length of the tunnel contained 18 tons of water (one ton of water is 1000 kg). This was falling 100 meters. Work done is force x distance. Force here is 18000 kg mass into 9.8 m/sec sq acceleration (due to gravity) or 180,000 Newtons. So if this acts for 100 meters, we are talking of 18 million Joules of potential energy from 1 meter of water.
What would be the speed of the water? We have all seen how water rushes out of such hydel tunnels. 20 meters going out in a second is not inconceivable IMHO. So we have a possibility of 18*20 million Joules/second or 360 MW. So we are in the same ballpark.
Now, there will be a loss due to conversion efficiency etc. The tunnel may not be full. So a 100MW generation is plausible.
I hope my calculations are correct (I am now a rusty engineer!) My estimates may also be off by a bit, so the numbers might be quite inaccurate. But here I'm emphasizing more the need to start to cross check these calculations - whether in engineering or in business or in general life - rather than just accepting what is given to you. I think this is an important trait of the best executives.
I'll give some more examples in the next post.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Blog policy
From time to time, students submit "comments" for the blog that are not directly connected to the blog topics (perhaps they appear connected to them but not to me) and so I do not publish them. I request those folks to send me emails instead, so that I can respond to their questions and concerns. All the students at Indore and Ahmedabad have my Proton email ID.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Linking things small and big
I *love* to see patterns and make connections between seemingly disparate things. It makes all the reading, thinking and education seem worthwhile. (Perhaps these patterns are sometimes illusory, but as long as they keep me smiling....)
This is today's example:
When I try to publish this blog, I often find it unresponsive. I used to think something was wrong with Proton's FTP server but at such times, I began to find that www.blogger.com was itself inaccessible. And that has nothing to do with Proton's FTP server.
So I checked further and found that at such times, even Gmail was often unavailable. But there was no corresponding online uproar. I don't think Gmail is down that often. So it was a local issue. But other sites (like the New York Times) were opening just fine.
Then I read in the Economist that Barack Obama is a proponent of keeping the Internet free of controls. For example, he does not want to let US ISPs reduce the bandwidth available to users to access data-heavy sites such as YouTube. Access should be uniform, he believes.
Then yesterday, I put two and two together - the problem I see is probably because Indian ISPs are limiting the bandwidth going to Gmail, Blogger and other Google sites because that is where much of the traffic is. When there is a bandwidth crunch, these must be the sites to become inoperational first. If India were to adopt what Obama proposes, this would not happen - all sites would slow down together.
Anyone know if this is true? It is an interesting theory.
This is today's example:
When I try to publish this blog, I often find it unresponsive. I used to think something was wrong with Proton's FTP server but at such times, I began to find that www.blogger.com was itself inaccessible. And that has nothing to do with Proton's FTP server.
So I checked further and found that at such times, even Gmail was often unavailable. But there was no corresponding online uproar. I don't think Gmail is down that often. So it was a local issue. But other sites (like the New York Times) were opening just fine.
Then I read in the Economist that Barack Obama is a proponent of keeping the Internet free of controls. For example, he does not want to let US ISPs reduce the bandwidth available to users to access data-heavy sites such as YouTube. Access should be uniform, he believes.
Then yesterday, I put two and two together - the problem I see is probably because Indian ISPs are limiting the bandwidth going to Gmail, Blogger and other Google sites because that is where much of the traffic is. When there is a bandwidth crunch, these must be the sites to become inoperational first. If India were to adopt what Obama proposes, this would not happen - all sites would slow down together.
Anyone know if this is true? It is an interesting theory.
Hobbies and happiness
One of my favorite writers and guiding lights is the British philosopher/mathematician/writer/historian Bertrand Russell. He was such an amazing intellect that I will devote an entire post to him sometime. But here I am only concerned with one of his suggestions in "The Conquest of Happiness": to be happy, pick up a hobby.
Russell gives the example of a stamp collector who can get tremendous happiness and satisfaction from reviewing his collection from time to time. This is high quality happiness - it does not hurt anyone else, it does not depend on anyone else, it can be called up at any time.
I was reminded of this when I came upon my friend Vaibhav Gadodia's blog post on photographing a kingfisher (click here to read this and other interesting posts such as this one - you may even want to become a regular reader of Habitually Good). Vaibhav is a highly busy (and intelligent) technical person. Still he takes time out for his photography, which he started barely a year ago. The quality of his pictures has steadily increased and he posts the best ones on the web (click on the picture below to get to the Flickr photostream).
An interesting side effect is that he now has yet another thing to discuss with people he meets in the course of his work. So he does not appear as a one-dimensional techie to them. He is now even more successful at sales.
Do you have a hobby that you are proud of? What is it?
Russell gives the example of a stamp collector who can get tremendous happiness and satisfaction from reviewing his collection from time to time. This is high quality happiness - it does not hurt anyone else, it does not depend on anyone else, it can be called up at any time.
I was reminded of this when I came upon my friend Vaibhav Gadodia's blog post on photographing a kingfisher (click here to read this and other interesting posts such as this one - you may even want to become a regular reader of Habitually Good). Vaibhav is a highly busy (and intelligent) technical person. Still he takes time out for his photography, which he started barely a year ago. The quality of his pictures has steadily increased and he posts the best ones on the web (click on the picture below to get to the Flickr photostream).
An interesting side effect is that he now has yet another thing to discuss with people he meets in the course of his work. So he does not appear as a one-dimensional techie to them. He is now even more successful at sales.
Do you have a hobby that you are proud of? What is it?
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Career planning as I see it
This week, I was asked some very interesting questions by a Times of India journalist about career planning. I wrote quite a bit in reply. Then I realized that the paper would probably only carry a few snippets, so I thought I could share the rest with my own students. It will be particularly appropriate for those who are going to be making their first career choices in the coming months.
On the importance of career planning:
The most important part of career planning is the vision part – knowing who you want to be, or at least knowing what you want to achieve. In my opinion, the more tactical part of knowing exactly how to get there is less important. And the purely operational part of knowing exactly when to get exactly where is even less important.
It may be useful to have short term goals, but it is far more important to have a long term vision to which you can guide your short term career decisions.
Each month, we take many decisions that influence our career paths. Most of these are quite reversible in the short term – next month you can take decisions differently and set your career in a different direction. There is a lot of flexibility – so there are literally millions of ways to get from point A today to point B twenty years down the road!
It is most important to know what the final goal is and to believe in it and visualize it, and you will get there. If you can dream and stick to your dreams and work hard for your dreams, you will most probably make them come true! It’s really that simple.
On whether career planning should be done early in life or after getting into a career:
I do think that the vision for the career should be created early in life. At that time, the mind is fresh and has the ability to dream big. As we get older and encounter more obstacles, most of us start to limit our dreams, even as our capabilities and strengths are actually increasing! This is one of the big paradoxes of life.
I must say I really like it when young people want to be the best in the world at something. It does not matter if that “something” is a small thing. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you want to be a chef. I would much prefer you want to be the best chef in even a smaller city, say, Dehradun, in perhaps a particular cuisine, say, Mediterranean cooking, rather than just wanting to be a cook. That’s the kind of vision and clarity that you can act on to guide your career choices. For me, defining a vision such as this is the most important part of career planning.
I sometimes find young people very obsessed with their job titles and pay scales from day 1 without having a vision. They are mistaken if they think they are planning their career well! They don’t even know where they want to be in 20 years, but they are very worried and conflicted about making the wrong decision tomorrow about which job to accept and at what pay scale. I don’t think that sort of approach to one’s career is very helpful. I would even call it “needless career worrying”.
In my book, it is better to know that you want to be the best Mediterranean chef in Dehradun and working towards that, rather than having no vision but worrying endlessly about whether you should join job A which is offering you a package of X or job B which is offering you a package of Y.
On the importance of career planning during the early days of one's career:
I think the best planning for one’s career is finding out what skills (and in fact even temperament) one needs to cultivate in order to be successful in one’s final goal. I like to invoke Sri Sri Ravishankar’s advice made in another context (on how to achieve happiness): “Fake it until you make it!” That is, visualize yourself at your final goal and imagine how you will have to act for that and what you will have to know, and start to become that way. This is an ongoing task and the sooner you start, the better.
At the same time, young people should not be too obsessed with what job title and package they are getting in which year of their career.
On how career planning helps advance a career:
Most importantly, career planning helps set a goal. That is 75% of the importance of effective career planning, in my opinion. The remaining 25% is that it helps define how to get to that goal, so that the goal can be achieved in a robust and efficient way.
On the role of organizations in career planning:
The organization can play three roles – to inspire, to counsel, and to train.
Inspiration here consists of showing what is possible. Typically, the most senior people of the organization can inspire dreams in the younger employees. For example, Subroto Bagchi inspires the people at MindTree, just as Vikram Sehgal inspires the people at Nagarro.
The counseling helps assess the intrinsic aptitude, strengths, priorities and preferences of the employee and tries to fit these to potential career paths in the company. At Nagarro, we have an initiative called Best Fit Mapping through which we “show the mirror” to employees so that they can understand their own personality types and figure out which career paths suit them.
The training helps fill the holes in the employee’s portfolio of skills and capabilities in order to perform well in the career paths he or she chooses. We focus a lot on this at Nagarro, and have launched our own Nagarro University initiative to make sure that the training aspect matches the career planning.
On the importance of career planning:
The most important part of career planning is the vision part – knowing who you want to be, or at least knowing what you want to achieve. In my opinion, the more tactical part of knowing exactly how to get there is less important. And the purely operational part of knowing exactly when to get exactly where is even less important.
It may be useful to have short term goals, but it is far more important to have a long term vision to which you can guide your short term career decisions.
Each month, we take many decisions that influence our career paths. Most of these are quite reversible in the short term – next month you can take decisions differently and set your career in a different direction. There is a lot of flexibility – so there are literally millions of ways to get from point A today to point B twenty years down the road!
It is most important to know what the final goal is and to believe in it and visualize it, and you will get there. If you can dream and stick to your dreams and work hard for your dreams, you will most probably make them come true! It’s really that simple.
On whether career planning should be done early in life or after getting into a career:
I do think that the vision for the career should be created early in life. At that time, the mind is fresh and has the ability to dream big. As we get older and encounter more obstacles, most of us start to limit our dreams, even as our capabilities and strengths are actually increasing! This is one of the big paradoxes of life.
I must say I really like it when young people want to be the best in the world at something. It does not matter if that “something” is a small thing. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you want to be a chef. I would much prefer you want to be the best chef in even a smaller city, say, Dehradun, in perhaps a particular cuisine, say, Mediterranean cooking, rather than just wanting to be a cook. That’s the kind of vision and clarity that you can act on to guide your career choices. For me, defining a vision such as this is the most important part of career planning.
I sometimes find young people very obsessed with their job titles and pay scales from day 1 without having a vision. They are mistaken if they think they are planning their career well! They don’t even know where they want to be in 20 years, but they are very worried and conflicted about making the wrong decision tomorrow about which job to accept and at what pay scale. I don’t think that sort of approach to one’s career is very helpful. I would even call it “needless career worrying”.
In my book, it is better to know that you want to be the best Mediterranean chef in Dehradun and working towards that, rather than having no vision but worrying endlessly about whether you should join job A which is offering you a package of X or job B which is offering you a package of Y.
On the importance of career planning during the early days of one's career:
I think the best planning for one’s career is finding out what skills (and in fact even temperament) one needs to cultivate in order to be successful in one’s final goal. I like to invoke Sri Sri Ravishankar’s advice made in another context (on how to achieve happiness): “Fake it until you make it!” That is, visualize yourself at your final goal and imagine how you will have to act for that and what you will have to know, and start to become that way. This is an ongoing task and the sooner you start, the better.
At the same time, young people should not be too obsessed with what job title and package they are getting in which year of their career.
On how career planning helps advance a career:
Most importantly, career planning helps set a goal. That is 75% of the importance of effective career planning, in my opinion. The remaining 25% is that it helps define how to get to that goal, so that the goal can be achieved in a robust and efficient way.
On the role of organizations in career planning:
The organization can play three roles – to inspire, to counsel, and to train.
Inspiration here consists of showing what is possible. Typically, the most senior people of the organization can inspire dreams in the younger employees. For example, Subroto Bagchi inspires the people at MindTree, just as Vikram Sehgal inspires the people at Nagarro.
The counseling helps assess the intrinsic aptitude, strengths, priorities and preferences of the employee and tries to fit these to potential career paths in the company. At Nagarro, we have an initiative called Best Fit Mapping through which we “show the mirror” to employees so that they can understand their own personality types and figure out which career paths suit them.
The training helps fill the holes in the employee’s portfolio of skills and capabilities in order to perform well in the career paths he or she chooses. We focus a lot on this at Nagarro, and have launched our own Nagarro University initiative to make sure that the training aspect matches the career planning.
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