GalaTime

1. @pluggdin “Only 13% of existing internet users in India prefer to read in English” … wow! we need an explosion in local language content!

2. MIT TR / Physics arXiv (http://bit.ly/17S5hn): Why compressive sensing will change the world; new sampling method => 25x more compression !

3. http://bit.ly/3kV7wc, @mcuban asks: Are (Your) Tweets Copyrighted? Do you ‘own’ Facebook status updates? See comments on ‘fair use’, etc.

4. Via Scott Adams (dilbert.com): “The white collar sector is all about no activity punctuated occasionally by useless activities.”

5. Just discovered ‘Secret History of Silicon Valley’ video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=…); also a 4-part blog post at SteveBlank.com

6. For macro-econ geeks (http://bit.ly/m8kGv): Slides & papers from NIPFP-DEA Program on Capital Flows

7. Bank Nifty down almost 9%, ICICI -12%: Financial year end madness? End of bear market rally? Bad quarter in the making? Election jitters?

8. http://lipikaar.com/ & http://quillpad.in/ - there’s hope for local language content. Add a 3G netbook for 10k & there’s your Internet boom!

9. SSRN (http://bit.ly/16lxY): Neurofinance: Bridging Psychology, Neurology, and Investor Behavior; primer on manic-depressive humans & markets

10. TCrunch: Follow the Mobile User (http://bit.ly/10zKj) - “Good speed + unlimited data plans”; critical for Indian startups, but ignored often

11. Fred, A VC (http://bit.ly/dbf1T): Venture capital asset class returned 9-10% p.a. since mid-90s (ex-Google). Too much $$$, not much quality?

12. Big Money (http://bit.ly/bV1Q) ‘How Hedge Funds Will Survive’; Avg HF leverage down from 2 to 1.15; Macro & distressed debt funds to win big

13. Times Online, Is there any gold inside Fort Knox (http://bit.ly/6gHMC): Supposedly $137B; Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) doubts it.

14. Forbes (http://bit.ly/t6f3G): $500B oil price manipulation / fraud by Goldman et al w.r.t. short oil bets by Semgroup. Highly speculative.

15. Wolfram blog on minimum inventory/maximum diversity systems (http://bit.ly/uB1Wy): restricted means liberate invention, restraint is freedom

16. Sulabh Sanitation (http://sulabhinternational.org) founder & “action-sociologist” Dr. Pathak wins 2009 Stockholm Water Prize

17. Wilmott on *existing* good risk mgmt: CrashMetrics (http://bit.ly/3r1mFO) is a worst-case scenario model, with no reliance on probabilities.

18. “It is time Indian scientists recognize that Saraswati (knowledge) & Lakshmi (wealth) should coexist” R A Mashelkar, ex-DG CSIR - Amen!

19. http://bit.ly/Tnod SciAm: What can magicians (masters of exploiting nuances of human perception, attention & awareness) teach neuroscience?

20. Ocean Tomo - patent auctioneer - doesn’t find buyers (http://bit.ly/19vqFA) “Cos. don’t want open info around IP, want to keep it close”

21. Slate on Narcissistic personality disorder (http://bit.ly/XycE): a cultural virus that has spread … over the past several decades.

22. Saw a talk on the excellent Bell Bajao (http://bellbajao.org/) campaign at #SIMC’s cyber media conclave; check out http://breakthrough.tv

1. Hindu (http://bit.ly/3cFIzm) on digital divide: Gujarati (local language) vs. English. Mobile vs. Desktop. Rural (local) vs. Urban (global).

2. Median price for an existing, single-family detached home in California peaked at $600K in mid-07, now at $245K, down 60%! Deflation anyone?

3. The theme for the 2009 edition of the MCCIA (http://mcciapune.com/) #Pune expo (http://punexpo.com) is Innovation

4. DNA http://bit.ly/GYy8r - Not a single original drug brand from India; need R&D $$$ for Center for Cellular & Molecular Biology, CDRI, NIPER

5. http://bit.ly/34yvk GaryNorth buys Soros’ call for 30% drop in CRE & hyperinflation: “He made $$ in currencies, the toughest mkt there is.”

6. RT @ngkabra “What is the monkeysphere?” http://is.gd/2hxG (You can’t have more than 150 friends!) … cracked me up

7. Kessler, WSJ (http://bit.ly/RqoNP): “hedgies’ bear raid saved us 5-10 years’ of bank earning disappointments as they worked off bad loans”

8. Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #pune #tech #startups

9. DNA (http://bit.ly/xiJd2)- Mumbai mall owner “looking at starting daily rent collection from retailers based on a revenue-share model” Ouch.

10. Happy days (aka Sensex targets) are here again! UBS says 13,500 by Mar ‘10 (Bloomberg: http://bit.ly/VTOq); next up - Jhunjhunwala on CNBC

11. Bespoke ‘09 country snapshot (http://bit.ly/582lP): all four BRIC countries are now in the black for ‘09, India’s the laggard, China up 30%

12. RT @novoseek 10 science PhD-related blogs you should read http://bit.ly/NYUIH; novo | seek (novoseek.com) is a biomedical search engine

13. RT @venturehacks The latest Wilson Sonsini Entrepreneurs Report has a new excerpt from Pitching Hacks & Q4 2008 financing http://bit.ly/brk

14. BBC Health (http://bit.ly/iCfx): Salt is ‘natural mood-booster’; average adult should eat < 6g a day; guessing avg Indian intake much more

15. RT @pkedrosky a few people have asked, so here is the BBC list of the top 50 documentaries

1. “Advertising (twittering?) is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.” -George Santayana

2. #Freescale (Reuters http://bit.ly/Kolzp) - must go bust or piss off earlier lenders; hangover from LBO gone wild; $4B+ loan at 40c on the $

3. NYT (http://bit.ly/BOdBw) piece on Freeman Dyson & global warming - “protecting the biosphere is not as important as fighting war, poverty.”

4. Princeton mathematicians (http://bit.ly/1ae1mc): “if humans have free will, then elementary particles (eg atoms) possess free will as well.”

5. Post by @venturehacks ‘Opening board meetings to the entire company’ (http://bit.ly/n4YC); give info, encourage thinking ~ CEO, avoid gossip

6. RT @sh00nya TED India registrations open http://is.gd/p0oR US$2,400, incl housing, meals and airport shuttle. india page http://is.gd/oEnO

7. MIT TechReview (http://bit.ly/CZ4aE): Brain on a Silicon Chip; 200k neurons and 50M synapses; in perspective, human brain has 100B neurons!

1. RT @sandygautam Academic Earth (academicearth.org) Is The Hulu For Education (TechCrunch: http://ff.im/-1Ik89)

2. R&DE (a DRDO lab) in #Pune is developing a lightweight, carbon fibre smart bridge, can hold a fully loaded battle tank, http://bit.ly/Gz5M0

3. ars technica, http://bit.ly/HA1Xf, #MIT to make all faculty publications to be open access, available via the http://dspace.org repository

4. NYT on Google’s MapReduce, Hadoop and Cloudera (http://bit.ly/nYvN): distributed search & analysis applied to genomics, retailing & finance

5. Montier: Cheap insurance vs inflation / deflation (http://bit.ly/NF2u7): TIPS, gold, dividend swaps, inflation swaps & Spain / Portugal CDS

6. WSJ India (http://bit.ly/bu6RD): India’s Auto Sector Growth – A Mirage? “the passenger car industry is likely to decline 5 - 7% in 2009-10″

7. Bloomberg (http://bit.ly/OFhz): Indian bonds worst performers in ‘09 among 10 local-currency debt indexes; Rs 200B in govt stimulus spending

8. http://indiainnovates.in/ by DST, Lockheed Martin, Indo-US STF, IC2 Institute and FICCI; “accelerate the launch of Indian early-stage tech”

9. Mint: Slowdown brings bounty to Indian ship-breaking town, Alang (http://bit.ly/KZO9R); 250 in ‘09; ship-breaking / recycling employs 500k

10. PLoS: Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk (http://bit.ly/R2Hu2); no CNBC please!

11. U.S. Total Credit Market Debt by Sector: 1929-2008 (http://bit.ly/zWs0I) via @pkedrosky; what if credit drops to 150% of GDP from 300%+ now.

1. http://vcenterlibrary.org/ - new library to be launched by Venture Center; am looking for reliable book distributors, esp. for foreign books

2. http://innovationpark.org/, a resource center of NCL #Pune, houses the Venture Center, where I’m exploring technology commercialization

3. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com; Arvind Gupta, scientist at IUCAA in #Pune creates toys from scrap / junk to teach scientific principles

4. Indo-US Science & Technology Forum (http://bit.ly/15y06): India Innovation Pioneers Challenge 2009; Business plan competition

5. Risk-as-Feelings hypothesis by George Loewenstein (via The Frontal Cortex, http://bit.ly/3iiaBQ); “get lobotomies for hedge fund managers?”

6. #Pune - http://bit.ly/43wPvw - SIMC ‘National Cyber Media Conclave 2009′ on Sat 3/28 at Lavale campus; details at http://ncmc2009.ning.com/

7. Nifty at 3k; equity, F&O volumes are up; inflation is tamed; interest rates going down; Mobius is bullish; RIL & banks rocking; all is well!

8. http://bit.ly/5BNRm - On Hedge Funds, by @infoarbitrage “commingling of assets with vastly different liquidity characteristics doesn’t work”

9. WSJ (http://bit.ly/10JeeM): Debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing for bankrupt companies - a symptom of the hangover after the LBO party.

10. MIT TechRvew http://bit.ly/yNJ73: First rule of ant traffic: No overtaking!; the velocity remains the same even while the density increases.

11. RT @freemanindia: … a hands-on (free) startup workshop this Sunday (3/29) at SeedInfoTech in Pune - http://punestartupworkshop.pbwiki.com

12. [post] BSE, NSE, FT/MCX - All one big happy family? (http://bit.ly/UnmkU); “why get into mudslinging when you have a lucrative game going?”

There’s always been a gap between the (huge) volume of articles I come across every day and how many of those I can pass along to readers of GalaTime. In the past, I’ve used del.icio.us to bookmark ones that I could not blog about, but that’s more of a passive solution.

Going forward, I will micro-blog using Twitter; my username is @kaushikgala, and once you get your own Twitter account, you can ‘follow’ me there. For those that aren’t keen on signing up for yet another web service, I have two suggestions:

• Check the GalaTime home page every day, where I have embedded my Twitter feed
• Read my daily Twitter summary post, starting today; I’ll cut-paste my Tweets here.

1. [post] Good judgement & Meta-cognition (http://bit.ly/tfctR), “the best predictor of good judgment is the willingness to introspect”

2. http://nclinnovations.org/ showcases technologies & intellectual property developed at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), #Pune, India.

3. Blast from the past: Feb ‘04 article on bleeding-edge biotech in #Pune (BioSpectrum: http://bit.ly/tfctR); what’s the status on those now?

4. Limit on FII investments in corporate debt upped to $15B (SEBI: http://bit.ly/17HUuf); 24 bidders; big 3 are Barclays, StanChart, DeutscheBk

5. Akruti City (NSE: http://bit.ly/SicyR) down 26%+; big fight between operators/traders; NSE to remove it from F&O set; huge volumes today!

6. Food Prices Continue To Deflate (HardAssets: http://bit.ly/fYU17); not in India though (BizStd: http://bit.ly/hpUl) despite 0.44% inflation

7. eFalk (http://bit.ly/tfctR): an i-bank captures a 12% one-day spike in the IPO price via overpriced, but worthless, research sold to a fund.

8. NewSci (http://bit.ly/egE5d): Why money messes with your mind - “money, like nicotine or cocaine, can activate the brain’s pleasure centres”

9. SEBI paper (http://bit.ly/RENrR): Should market hours be increased? To 9, 10, 24×7? Will Udayan sleep? How many snacks will the gujjus need?