What is Bible?

For me, Bible is a very important book in the life of every Christian. When I was young and started reading it for the first time, it provided me all the information which my parents wanted me to know. So, I believed that Bible was all about principles and laws that every child should know to grow. A few years later, when I was walked through Bible for my confirmation, I understood that It’s not just for the young, but also for the youth. Later, after a few years when I was moved by the Lord, I took the Bible again and this time it was very different experience for me. I could sense that the Bible can speak to me in a way that it made me realize what my life is all about.

The verses, even the ones that I remembered reading when I was young made a different, but clear sense to me. I then realized, Bible is not just a book for reading. It is much more than that. I am very sure that Bible has made miracles in many lives like mine. I happened to read that Douglas MacArthur, an American five-star general and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, who was the Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II, happened to tell this. "Believe me sir, never a night goes by, be I ever so tired, but I read the word of God before I go to bed"

So, I wanted the readers of this article understand the elaborate definition of Bible which could help you talk about it with anyone who wants to know about it. With the help of my dear Pattima, Mrs. H Paul Pandian, I am able to give a detailed definition of Bible below.

Definition of Bible

This book contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy,  its percepts are binding, its histories are true and its decisions are immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveller's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword and the Christian's character.

Here paradise is restored, heaven opened and the gates of hell disclosed. Christ is its grand object; our good is its design and the story of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently and prayerfully.

It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory and a river of pleasure. It is given you in life and will be opened in the judgment and will be remembered for ever. It involves the highest responsibility will reward the greatest labour and will condemn all who trifle with its scared contents.

Facts seen in Bible

Books	66
Chapters	1189
Verses	31,373
Words	7,73,693
The longest verse	Esther 8:9
The shorter Verse	John 11:35
Chapters which are alike in Psalm 107	9,16,21,31
Verses with same ending in Psalm	Psalm 136
Chapters which are alike	Isaiah 39; II Kings 19
Very beautiful chapters	I Cor.13 & Psalm 23
The largest book in Bible	The book of the prophet Isaiah with 66 chapters
God's beautiful promises	1) Psalm 37:4 2) Matt 11:28 3) John 6:37 4) John 14:2
The shortest book in the Bible	Epistle of John with 294 words in 14 verses

 

How many hours are required to read through the Bible?

The Bible contains about 3 million letters, 31,000 verses and 1,189 chapters. About 38 hours are needed to read through the Old Testament and 11 hours for the New Testament. This gives a total of 49 hours for the complete Bible.

In ordinary talking speed, it takes 70 hours and 40 minutes to read the Bible aloud. By reading 4 chapters per day; you may finish reading in 1 year (365 days).

YOU ARE WHAT YOU REPEATEDLY DO

The famous Aristotle once said "We are what we repeatedly do". I used to refer this famous quote in almost all of my presentations. I firmly believe that is not just your physical personality that is important, but it is also the inner personality that implies who you are. I remember reading somewhere, "You decide your habits, and Habits will decide you future".

Once a king was standing in the balcony of his palace from where he spotted a young women begging from door to door for food. He was angry that she was begging at this young age and ordered the guards to bring her to him. When she was summoned at the court, the king was astonished by her beauty and his anger turned into love and asked her to marry him. She immediately accepted and the wedding was a splendid affair.

The usual story would end here with "they lived happily ever after". But in this story begins here.

The queen believed that she had the luck of her lifetime to have married the king of the country. As a queen, she could eat anything in the world without begging. She feasted everyday with the best delicacies in the country. But there seemed to be some problem that the queen started losing her weight. The king was baffled when the queen lost her weight and become skin and bone. He brought in the best of doctors from the country to find out the problem, but all in vain.

One day the queen said to the king, "Give me one month time". She continued "During this time, I will stay inside a room and no one including you should see me. My food must be given to be though the window". The king agreed, and in a months’ time, the queen become hale and healthy as she was before.

The surprised king was curious to find out how this happened. That night, he hid himself under the bed and waited. As soon as the food was given to the queen, she split the food in to four equal halves and kept them in the four corners of the room. The she visited each corner, and cried out begging for food and then ate the food.

King was speechless on seeing this. However they both lived happily ever after (Of course, the queen continued to beg for food in her palace bedroom).

Your habit decides who you are and its sheer effect decides how your future will be. It is up to you to decide your habits and the duration you want to stick to it.

Bigdata – The latest art in decision making – Part 3 - “Bigdata’s role in predicting the US Presidential Election 2012”

The mind-boggling reality of Exabytes(1 EB = 1000 Petabytes = 1 billion Gigabytes),Zettabytes (1 ZB = 1000 Exabytes = 1 billion Terrabytes)and, soon to come, Yottabytes (1 YB = 1000 Zettabytes = 1 trillion Terrabytes), is well beyond the grasp of our intuition. An Economist video reports that the quantity  of global data is forecast to be an staggering 7,910 Exabytes by 2015, over 60 times greater than 2005. Twitter alone generates over 230 million tweets each day, equivalent to 46 megabits of data per second.

In the near future, people will live in a world of sensors and software in which their “every move is instantly digitized and added to the flood of public data. This is where a statistician (also referred as a Quant) will use is capability to forecast almost everything you need. As my topic suggests, Bigdata has indeed changed the way of traditional decision making style.

I wish to share with you the results of the US Presidential Elections 2012, which many of you would have studied on the internet and how big data has influenced the prediction of the results. Nate Silver, a political blogger had a clean sweep of 50-50 states plus the District of Columbia in forecasting the results of the election. He is neither a pundit nor a former politician, yet he made it.

How did he do it?

With Bigdata in hands, Silver uses the polls of other firms as a data stream that he analyzes and models. His methodology is highly developed, but it boils down to a handful of things. First, he looks at all available polls, except those with patently flawed methodologies. Second, he weights these polls on factors affecting their accuracy. Third, he fits regression curves and trend lines that bring the various polls together. Finally, he runs simulations on key parameters in his models. From all of this, he calculates several results, including two crucial ones – a predicted outcome and the odds of that prediction coming true.

Bigdata redefines expertise
 
Gurus and gut-feel won’t cut it in a world of Big Data, not in politics or marketing. Big Data requires statisticians (quants) who can wrestle it to the ground. In a world flooded with data, good, solid quantitative analytics will be table stakes for success.

Bigdata – The latest art in decision making – Part 2 - "How Bigdata changes your life"

The below listed are some of the major domains where the Bigdata's potential can be fully realized (Figure 1). There will be a transformative impact across the broad spectrum of everyday tasks and activities, both complex and common. These domains have opportunities with potential to improve efficiency and effectiveness, enabling organizations to do more with less and also produce high quality outputs.

                                                                         Figure 1

Data can also be leveraged to improve products as they are used. For example, a mobile phone that has learned its user's habits and preferences, that holds applications and data tailored to that particular user's needs, and therefore will be more valuable than a new device that is not customized to a users ‘ need.
The use of big data can enable improved health outcomes, lower prices due to transparency, and a better match between products and consumer needs. The use of real time traffic information to inform navigation will create a quantifiable consumer surplus through savings on time spent traveling and on fuel consumption.

Bigdata – The latest art in decision making

 What is Bigdata?

Big Data is a large pool of data that is brought together and analyzed to distinguish patterns and make better decisions. These analyzed patterns become the basis of competition and growth for individual firms, enhancing productivity and creating significant value for the quality of products and services.

The True Nature of Big Data

Big Data represents a revolutionary step forward from traditional data analysis, characterized by its four main elements: variety, volume, velocity and Value.

The variety of data comes in two flavors: structured and unstructured. Structured data enters a data warehouse already tagged and is easily sorted. The vast majority of today’s data, however, is unstructured, and fed by sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and video content. It’s random, difficult to analyze, and enormous.

The sheer volume of Big Data overwhelms the normal data warehouse. For example, Facebook reports that its users register 2.7 billion likes and comments per day. For many, this magnitude of data is intimidating: they can’t keep up with it, much less sort it, analyze it, and extract value from it.

All of that data can be challenging to manage when flooding in at a velocity that, for many players, far outpaces their processing ability. In order for Big Data to be a game changer, it needs to be analyzed at a rate that matches the blistering speed at which information enters data warehouses. In microseconds, decisions must be made as to whether a particular bit of data deserves to be captured, and whether it has relevance when combined with other data.

The truthfulness and quality of data is the most important frontier to fuel new insights and ideas. However, focus is required in order to increase the ability to make the right decisions. The value (also termed as Veracity, Variability) tells us how fast the data can be analyzed and acted upon to provide business value

Uses for big data

The vision for big data is that organizations will be able to harness relevant data and use it to make the best decisions. Technologies today not only support the collection and storage of large amounts of data, they provide the ability to understand and take advantage of its full value, which helps organizations run more efficiently and profitably. For instance, with big data and big data analytics, it is possible to:

• Mine customer data for insights that drive new strategies for customer acquisition, retention, campaign optimization and next best offers.
• Recalculate entire risk portfolios in minutes and understand future possibilities to mitigate risk.
• Generate retail coupons at the point of sale based on the customer's current and past purchases, ensuring a higher redemption rate.
• Send tailored recommendations to mobile devices at just the right time, while customers are in the right location to take advantage of offers.
• Analyze data from social media to detect new market trends and changes in demand.
• Use clickstream analysis and data mining to detect fraudulent behavior.
• Determine root causes of failures, issues and defects by investigating user sessions, network logs and machine sensors.

and more...

Outcome based Training Model – The paradigm shift

Training is an integral part in every organization regardless of the size, which decides the fate of ROI of the relevant business involved. In today’s scenario, we have a lot of the Generation X and Generation Y engineers, where the training program should actually accelerate their technical and behavioral competency.

Outdated or Outcome

We are still prolonging with the doing the same things the same way while the market demand has changed and there are a lot of uncertainty in business outcome. As business owners and investors, it becomes our responsibility to deploy capital in the most efficient manner to achieve our business outcome. Training being the key factor for business growth, we should think on “outcome-based” method rather than the outdated-based in-order to the same thing in a more effective and efficient way.

Outcome-based thinking

The moment you shift to an “outcome-based” mode, you can build your business faster than before by thinking like an investor and forcing your employees to think the same. Outcome-based thinking encourages teams both internally and externally to question everything, structure curiosity into research, think openly, and create innovative solutions.

Outcome-based Training model

I am proposing a revolutionary new model for training a trainee. 'Outcome-based' Training model brings in the flavor of earn and learn concept. The time and effort they spend on their learning contributes a percentage of the growth for your business.

The image described below explains the conceptual differences between traditional and outcome-based training model.

The process flow of the model
The object-based training model brings in increased satisfaction of learning since it provides the freedom of learning both requirements based and experience based. The below mentioned image explains the process flow of the training model.

Object-based Training model promises high level of training for any type of organization as it facilitates the achievement of the outcomes, characterized by its appropriateness to each learner’s development level and active and experienced-based learning. Moreover, knowing that this system is going to be used would also give the learner, the freedom to study the content in a way that helps learning it. Object based model must not just involve the management and the training department, but everybody in the organization including employees from different groups for successful implementation.

Footboard Employees

It has been 4 months now since I started commuting by bus in Chennai. A real 45 minutes of experience from home to office every day. I enjoy each day of my travel with new scenarios each day, meeting new faces, same route, different ticket rates yet the destination is the same. Last week, I had a sudden flash in my mind, why not it be just compared with the current trend of IT organization.

I have given the below picture for illustrative purpose, so that we all have a common understanding. The text that appears Green refers to people on bus and the text in Blue refers to/for people in Organization

            

   The Driver     

 

The driver/owner of the bus/business, who sincerely drives the bus/business to its desired destination. He always feels that driving is the only responsibility of his job.

• He has the complete control over the opening and closing of the entry doors of the bus/business.
• He is least worried about the passengers/employees/Senior passengers/senior employees/women with a baby/any employee for that matter standing even while applying sudden brakes.
• He Will not turn back or check out on the passengers/employees even if there is some chaos inside the bus/business.

 The Conductor 

The conductor/Manager is the actual powerful person in the bus/business.

• He indicates the driver when to open/close the doors of the bus/business for the get-in/on-board and get-down/release of passengers/employees.
• He may (or may not) get up from his seat/location to collect/meet tickets from the passengers/employees. It becomes the duty of the passengers/employees to get/meet tickets for safe travel.
• He may (or may not) have the exact change to give back to the passengers, but he can stop the bus anytime and ask you to get down anywhere if you don’t have the exact fare/change.

  The Passengers in Seat  

• People who board the bus within a couple of stations may easily find a seat and occupy. For them the possibility of choosing a row/window seat is high.
• For those who board after that it is quite a challenge and it becomes mandatory that they should fit themselves in the available seat or keep standing.
• It is hard to find the person sitting comfortably (??) to get up and give his/her seat for an elderly/handicapped/woman with a baby.

  Foot boarded Passengers 

• These are people who have to accommodate themselves in the available space with their belongings as well.
• These people standing in the aisle will obviously be waiting for an opportunity to grab any emptying seat.
• The real challenge is when the bus is loaded with people. One should be lucky enough to stand close to the emptying seat so that, there is bright chance of grabbing the seat (‘cos someone else among the crowd will also be eyeing for the seat)
• It is very painful to know (yet, it is fact) that the rule of "Ladies" seat for ladies ONLY strictly applies here. Yet, I said it is painful because "Ladies can still occupy the places where it is NOT marked for Ladies. I sincerely urge the authorities to mark "For Men" markers on buses in near future.

You can have your own assumptions on my comparisons stated above. Yet, the point i wish to let know and also the conclusion of my article is, all those who travel in this bus including the driver and the conductor are subject to change due to various reasons, yet the bus/business remains the same.