Nobel Sayings

The University of Chicago has one of the best economics departments in the world. Their school of business is right there too. Their Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago has a nice lounge and a bunch of quotes from the Nobel Laureates who taught at Chicago. It is really interetsing.

The main purpose of economics is to understand and help alleviate poverty, and there is an intimate and transparent relation between investments in human capital and the alleviation of poverty.
Gary S. Becker

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.
George J. Stigler

If you torture the data long enough, nature will confess.
Ronald H. Coase

When I first discovered options, I became very excited about the possibility that there was a contract that enabled you to only be able to take the upside of the return and not the downside. And that being able to take the upside only had value-and that was really exciting.
Myron S. Scholes

When one contemplates the powerful impact of sustained economic growth on human welfare, it is hard to think about anything else.
Robert E. Lucas Jr.

By investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choices available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.
Theodore W. Schultz

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman.

It is a rare public policy that promotes fairness and social justice and, at the same time, promotes productivity in the economy.
James J. Heckman

One cannot understand current political and ethical trends, or properly forecast future economic developments, without understanding the cycles in religious feelings in American history and the social, economic and political movements that they have generated.
Robert W. Fogel

What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.
Merton H. Miller

System Performance

Over my career, I have focused on Oracle Performance and System Performance in general. I worked at Hotsos which was one of the best companies in the world on the topic of Oracle performance. Hotsos pioneered a product around Workload Characterization which was a mainframe approach and Method-R pioneered by Cary Millsap.

At Hotsos, I came up with this approach for System Performance and hope this helps.

Workload Characterization:

Workload characterization is the process of logging and tracking work done in the database by users and its associated computing costs. This data than can be studied to understand the nature of the workload and its overall impact.

Workload can be handled in one of five ways.
Eliminate – Clearly the easiest option to pursue due to the minimal effort involved and simple procedures needed to accomplish this step. We estimate that 25-50% of workload in any system is waste and can be easily eliminated and processes put in place to avoid the recurrence of the workload

Tune – If the workload is a useful workload (i.e. work is accomplished by the user), we can then assess if it needs to be tuned by using Method R. This usually involves tuning of SQL statements to consume less Logical I/O’s and computing resources like parsing etc. If the resource consumption of computing is still high, an assessment needs to be made on whether the complexity of the business requirement is worth the cost of the computing necessary to accomplish this workload. This is a hard business question and needs to be answered keeping all the stakeholders interest in mind.

Train – We find that well tuned programs can suffer from runaway workload by improper desktop procedures or user not trained to use the functionality of the software to efficiently accomplish their work. This is true in Order Management where a blind search for Orders and Customers can potentially take down the database with its demand of resources.

Reschedule – Sometimes, large batch workload runs during peak hours creating a competition for resources and slows all the workload on the system. In this case, this workload will need to be rescheduled to a non-peak time. This can be difficult in global system where there are no non-peak windows except for a small time on the weekend.

Relocate – Ad-Hoc Reports and Batch reports can be potentially made to run on a copy of the production database thereby offloading the workload demand off to the reporting database. This can significantly reduce the competition for resources and improve overall workload throughput.


The order in which to approach it economically is

1.) Eliminate

2.) Train

3.) Re-schedule

4.) Tune/Optimize Code

5.) Re-locate


Thanks
Mahesh

Aggie

I am an Aggie which  means an alumnus of Texas A&M University. Texas A&M or A&M or Aggieland as it is known has its main campus at College Station. In Texas, you will see car signs by native Texans which say "Texan by Birth, Aggie by the grace of God". It is funny and nice. I am however Indian by birth and I chose to live in Texas since I came to the US in 1993. I am an Aggie as I went to Texas A&M. I am a US citizen now. I came up with a slight twist.


"Indian by Birth,
Texan by Choice,
Aggie by the grace of god".

Mahesh

This day, that age - Feb. 11

Growing up in South India, the newspaper, "The Hindu" was the paper of choice. They used to have a small section called, "This day, that age" and would highlight what happened 50 years ago. I thought it was very cool. In the same spirit, I would like to bring attention to what happened on Feb.11, 1861. Lincoln had been elected President and was heading to Washington leaving behind friends in Springfield, Illinois. A moving speech called "The Farewell Address" was delivered by Lincoln, Read and enjoy.

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

A child's education

I have a daughter Sanjana. She is three and a half years old. She is a joy . Anyway she goes to a montessori. We started noticing that she was not focusing when she was doing her ABC's or her 123's. So my wife started spending time with her after school and she is now doing really well.

It is funny and weird because Nimmi (my wife) and I strongly believe that education of children is parent's responsibility first and the teacher/school's second. We had kind of not focused on her as we thought that since she was going to a Montessori, we did not have to worry. This was a wake-up call for us.

Mohana Chandrasekharan National English School

I went to National English School in Gopalapuram, Chennai/Madras from my kindergarten until my 6th grade. It was one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I remembered something in my 5th standard recently and I thought I would blog about it.

NES as it was known then was very rigorous with monthly exams to test learning and knowledge etc. I was an OK student in my class until my 4th grade. And 5th grade came. In my first monthly exam, I had failed in all my classes. That was not a good thing. My mom totally freaked out.

Mohana Chandrasekharan was the principal of the school and was a strong willed woman who ran the school very well. My mom came to school and check on me with the principal and the teachers. I got called in to the principal room which was not a good thing.

I go in and see my mom with all my teachers and the principal. The principal then asks me to open my notebooks and sure enough I don't have anything written down. She then asks one teacher each day to monitor me while I catch up with my notes and make sure that I was reading and studying what I was writing down after classes.

This went on for a month and every day a teacher would stay with me while I caught up after classes.

I was monitored for a couple of more months. The habit of taking down notes, reading and studying them helped and by end of the year in my annual/final exams, I was fifth in my class. From the bottom of the barrel to the top 5 in a class of 40 was nice indeed. I surprised a whole bunch of people with that.

That practice helped me throught my academic life from NES to CIT and to Texas A&M.

Thanks Mrs. Chandrasekharan.

Mahesh

Effective or Efficient

A lot of times, we hear people talk about efficiency. Let us say it takes 2 hours to produce a widget. Let us say by cutting corners, you get it down to an hour and 48 minutes. You have achieved an efficiency of 10% not which is not bad. What if "you think out of the box" and figure out an innovative way of making the same widget in 30 minutes. That is a 75% improvement which is much better.

When you hear people talk about efficiency, it always helps to take a step back and look at the task in question and ask whether there is a more effective way of doing it. The quest for efficiency does not necessarily have to preclude an option for effectiveness. In fact, it should be a first check.

Making an ineffective process efficient is like masking the symptom of a problem.

Go forth and be effective and efficiency will follow.