Tarun's blog

2005-09-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40520

Oh ... one of those guys who keep searching for inner meanings in life. Funny aint it ?

2005-09-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Oooh ... feel just like that when I am writing my proposal. Got a conference to go to the week after the next.

By the way I went to a Thai restruant yesterday. Had duck and eggplant curry. Odd combination ...eh ? But was great.

Creative thinking in engineering

2004-08-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=c080104

Just got back from Pensylvannia. The article above talks about creativity and how to induce engineers to think creatively. There are some standard techniques like brainstorming and synetics. I was talking with a group of friends of mine and we were supposed to come up with creative ideas on what kind of startup business to get into. My thoughts on how to induce creative ideas are as follows.

1. You could ask the group to make a list of their ideas, which they think are worthy and bring them to the meeting. The participants can then have a discussion of their ideas and choose the one that is the most suitable to the problem.

2. One could motivate the participants in the group by promising a reward or some sort of prize, but then this could lead to each person aggressively marketing his idea and cutting out other ideas. Care should be taken to avoid such a situation.

3. Having a diverse group helps a lot. Having too many experts in the same area could lead to all the members thinking along the same lines and may lead to the same idea being marketed by all the participants.

4. An open culture in the company wherein thinking outside the box is encouraged should prevail.

Wednesday August 04 , 2004

MESSENGER on its way

2004-08-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

MESSENGER on its way. Yuppee. Its been great fun to see the images broadcast by CASSINI, NASA's mission to saturn. We hope to see such images from MESSENGER too. I have been reading about CASSINI and MESSENGER for a long time. The very fact that man has put a probe up there in the sky to look at saturn and the probe was sent on an unmanned mission for 7 long years to finally reach saturn this year, makes me feel proud of him. Though people would argue that space missions are not useful to the society, space research should be continued for the sense of adventure and scientific conquest.