Is social media damaging your career and life?

Prof. Newport at Georgetown University says, "the harms of social media to your career are being underemphasized." [1]. Social media can be hugely distracting, killing creativity -- but *worse* is addictive along with other technology [2]. Some of the smartest brains in the world design these app to keep us engaged. While my Egyptian friends credit Facebook for their Arabian Spring, it harms children's language and communication development. For Adults, it is a time sink of around 4 hours a day on average. The irony is that the more time you spend, the worse you might feel [3].

Alter's advice -- author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping us Hooked -- to technology addiction by picking up a screen-free time for some part of the day [2].  I only do Facebook for promoting my pet project budgetnow [4], but suffering the ills of a mechanical life, and actively looking for ways out. Radio is one escape, audio books while commuting is another.

[1] Social media is damaging your career, CBC 10m
[2] Why technology is addictive and what to do about it, CBC 27m
[3] The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel, Harvard Business Review 
[4] budgetnow.ca: A fast, free and anonymous budgeting system.

No taxes in the Middle east -- myth or reality?

Let's talk about Dubai for foreigners -- probably the most hip city in the middle east, and compare it to GTA. Yes, there is no income tax. But...there are taxes that you may not see...sales tax, property tax, highway tolls...

And there is no public health, no public education, no child benefits, no employment insurance, no pension.

Housing for an average family is more expensive, clothing is more expensive. Can't lease/finance a vehicle for 0% finance. I crunched the numbers and no income tax does NOT offset other expenses and benefits that I get at home in Canada.

Budgeting was hard problem for me as a married PhD student at Queen's University. Empathizing with students and other salaried workers, I developed a *free*, anonymous and fast budgeting system [1]. My interactive application allows users to try "what-if" scenarios to save more, and provides "Jump Start" for investing the surplus cash.

[1] http://budgetnow.ca/

Credits: Sanaa Wasi, Jawad Arshad

Time is Money!

Time is limited (only 24 hours in a day) but money is NOT?! Trading money for time is not a bad idea if invested in something more meaningful, such as automating the damn chore that eats your time in the first place.

One example of this is using Walmart Grocery Pickup. Select and pay for the items from home, and pick up at the scheduled time. Walmart remembers your past purchases, so future purchases can bank on past further relieving you from making a laundry list. Better than home delivery as you are NOT home bound at the time of delivery.

Another example is buying lottery online instead of buying it at a store possibly waiting in line...and then later checking if won anything. Why not buy online using PlayOLG, and it emails you if you win anything.

Credits: Imran Bashir

9 + 1m HIIT is similar to 50m of moderate exercise!!!

Scientifically, 1m of high intensity interval training (HIIT) + 9m padding produces similar results of 50m moderate exercise. This includes treatment of free radicals, cleaning up of rusty protein and increased energy generation at microcondia of a cell. Hear the entire program at CBC (15m). 

The exercise routine:

• warm up
• 20s extensive climbing, running or biking
• break
• another 20s
• break
• another 20s
• cool down

10m, you are done! Saved you 40m + gym fees :-)

Near-clouds: Bringing Public Clouds to Users’ Doorsteps

The rate of data growth in many domains is straining our ability to manage and analyze it. Cloud computing appears as a promising platform for data-intensive computing because it offers “infinite” resources on demand, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Surprisingly, we observe that public clouds are not being used for “serious” data-processing on a continuous basis except by the cloud vendors. We primarily attribute this observation to the long data transfer times over wide-area networks between the clients and the centralized public clouds. We introduce the idea of a near-cloud that brings a public cloud in the close proximity of a user to overcome the data transfer bottlenecks. The near-clouds also provide a unique opportunity to localize the privacy and security policies to boost confidence of a user in using shared resources for data processing. To the cloud providers, near-cloud ensures a minimum constant stream of revenue from dedicated clients.

[1]        R. Mian, et al., "Near-Clouds: Bringing Public Clouds to Users' Doorsteps", in The 9th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Madeira, Portugal, 2014, p. (accepted).

Estimating Resource Costs of Executing Data-Intensive Workloads in Public Clouds

The promise of “infinite” resources given by the cloud computing paradigm has led to recent interest in exploiting clouds for large-scale data-intensive computing. In this paper, we present an analytical model to estimate the resource costs for executing data-intensive workloads in a public cloud. The cost model quantifies the cost-effectiveness of a resource configuration for a given workload with consumer performance requirements expressed as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and is a key component of a larger framework for resource provisioning in clouds. We instantiate the cost model for the Amazon cloud, and experimentally evaluate the impact of key factors on the accuracy of the model.

We formulate the constructs for modeling the cost of workload execution in a public cloud. We present a cost model for workload execution, and evaluate it in the Amazon cloud. Our cost model is workload aware and provides cost at the granularity of an hour. More importantly, we explore methods for building and instantiating a cost model for workload execution in IaaS-based clouds. These methods are relevant for other IaaS GoGrid or RackSpace. We believe that our cost model provides a basis for modeling dollar-cost for executing any workload type in the Amazon cloud. We anticipate that the users considering clouds for executing their application would find the cost model useful.

Our cost model provides an hourly cost of workload execution, and assumes that the data already exists in the cloud. The experimental evaluation shows that our cost model is a suitable tool for estimating the cost of workload execution for the pay-as-go-scheme in the Amazon clouds.

We vary the use-cases in the user-controllable variables: (a) workloads, (b) VM types and the (c) SLOs’ specifications. Our evaluation workloads consist of analytical, transactional and mixed types. We consider different workload combinations on different VM types. We also specify SLOs on the transactions and the queries belonging to different tenants. The SLOs vary in their threshold and penalty values. The absoluteaverage error in estimating configuration costs across all experiments is 6.28%, which is about $0.02 of the total measured cost of the configurations on average. With the scarcity of training samples, we are unable to verify the distribution of results and resort to using average as the aggregation method. Therefore, these results must be taken with caution.

The current cost model, while adequate for workload execution in a single zone, needs to be expanded in order to deal with any inter-zone and inter-region communication costs. Also we do not address the cost of maintaining consistency between replicas, leaving it as future work.

R. Mian, et al., "Estimating Resource Costs of Executing Data-Intensive Workloads in Public Clouds," School of Computing, Queen's University Technical Report#: 2013-613, 2013. http://research.cs.queensu.ca/TechReports/Reports/2013-613.pdf

Standing up to a bully boss -- are you kidding me?

Well, if you don't it gets worse -- research shows!!!

Handle a fired up boss calmly and assertively, CBC states -- easier said than done..right??? I had better luck keeping the conversation focused on work, and seeking his/her advice because s/he ain't listening. I would try to avoid the situation in the first place by keeping things transparent and informed. Also, surprise your boss with "above and beyond" bits here and there. But why not work for a smaller company where you are really needed!!!