Satya Murthy

Sounrce: Times of India

Image copyright: http://www.michellemauk.com

Mumbai/ Ahmedabad: Every year by February, the sharp suits from corporate houses line up at the gates of IIM campuses hoping to recruit a bunch of bright young managers. The Indian Institute of Managements are snobbish about whom they let in, the blue-chip boys are cherry picked and accommodated, the rest left to wait in the rain. This year, things look rather different. Everyone—even former untouchables like start-ups—is welcome.
With the economy showing signs of distress, placement season this year has been squeezed of its juicy paychecks and headline-grabbing offers. Companies are recruiting fewer students and on more modest terms. When slot zero-day closed at IIMAhmedabad on Wednesday, it was clear that the recession had no exceptions. If 25 companies crammed into the IIM-A campus last year on slot zero-day, there were merely seven this year and 13 students landed up with offer letters as compared to dozens more last year.
Six consultancy firms and a private equity firm included Bain & Co, McKinsey and Boston Consultancy Group (BCG), with each making offers to three students each. The Bschool was tight lipped on the compensation packages.
“When times were better, students walking out of interview were pounced upon by friends enquiring about the package. Today, all we asked was whether he made it,’’ moaned a graduating student. The coming days are expected to see more Indian firms offer marketing profiles. Around 235 students registered to participate in the final placement. Around 40 students have accepted pre-placement offers and around 20 others have gone ahead and accepted lateral offers.
“Slow, very slow’’ is how the ISB spokesperson described the placement process which started in late December. Even more dampening, salaries are not going to surge by 30% to 40% from last year’s offers. ISB’s average salary went up from Rs 15 lakh in 2007 to Rs 19 lakh in 2008. The spokesperson added, “That kind of appreciation is unlikely this year.’’
The same fears are lurking in the IIM corridors. That is probably why each of them has decided to invite almost twice the number of companies this year.
An IIM professor has words of reassurance. He says that despite the gloom, as thousands of management graduates walk out clutching their precious MBA degrees, they must remember what they learnt in class. “It’s just part of the business cycle.’’ Placement blues on campuses Engineering Students To Graduate Soon But Companies Have No Jobs To Offer TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Hyderabad: Placement sessions in top engineering colleges in the city are yet to begin though final year students will soon graduate. In some institutions, placement sessions are getting endlessly postponed and interview dates being cancelled.
Though institutions were not too positive about recruitments this year due to the economic meltdown, a complete job freeze by companies was not expected. Some companies which had given offer letters to students have backed out from their promise by suspending their recruitment for six months. “We expected about a 20 per cent drop in the job market. But the meltdown has hit freshers badly as no company is even ready to hold interviews,” placement office of JNTU, Hyderabad, K Eswara Prasad said.
He said 60 per cent of the students are yet to get offer letters. The companies willing to recruit students include national companies with their bases in the city.
“Their requirements are not as big as the MNCs and other big companies which used to come for placements. Hence the number of students getting placements this year is also less,” a student said.
He said the students who got placements had got them as early as February 2008 when the meltdown blues had not started.
The placement session at Osmania University engineering college has been postponed twice as companies kept cancelling interview dates. “Only reputed companies in the market were allowed to participate in the recruitment process. We are now forced to call companies not included in the recruiters list earlier,” placement officer, JNTU said, V Uma Maheshwar said. When OU had a placement of 100 per cent in February 2008, it has not gone beyond 50 per cent this year.
The salary packages being offered by the companies are also less when compared to the previous year. While last year saw an all-time high of Rs 18 lakh per annum in JNTU and Rs 10.2 lakh per annum in Osmania University it has reduced to Rs 6.5-7 lakh in both the universities.
While at least five students shared the top salaries last year, this year only one person each has got the top salary in both the universities.
Students who graduated last year and were given offer letters by companies, however, complain that they have been kept waiting with no signs of being given the jobs so far. The students have lodged a complaint to the college authorities and Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) on the matter.

(This is supposedly a true account recorded in the Police Log of Sarasota, Florida.)

An elderly Florida lady did her shopping and, upon returning to her car, found four males in the act of leaving with her vehicle.

She dropped her shopping bags and drew her handgun, proceeding to scream at the top of her lungs, “I have a gun, and I know how to use it! Get out of the car!”

The four men didn’t wait for a second threat. They got out and ran like mad.

The lady, somewhat shaken, then proceeded to load her shopping bags into the back of the car and got into the driver’s seat. She was so shaken that she could not get her key into the ignition.

She tried and tried, and then she realized why. It was for the same reason that she had wondered why there was a football, a Frisbee and two 12-packs of beer in the front seat.

A few minutes later, she found her own car parked four or five spaces further down.

She loaded her bags into the car and drove to the police station to report her mistake.

The sergeant to whom she told the story couldn’t stop laughing.

He pointed to the end of the counter, where four pale man were reporting a car jacking by a mad, elderly woman described as white, less than five feet tall, glasses, curly white hair, and carrying a large handgun.

No charges were filed.

Moral of the story? If you’re going to have a senior moment…make it memorable.

Swindles in which someone overseas seeks access to a person’s bank account are so well known that most potential victims can spotthem in seconds.

But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country — of $27 million.

To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world.

The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.

Mr. Amos was arrested last month as he tried to enter the United States through Los Angeles, a prosecutor, Marcus A. Asner, said in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Mr. Amos, who was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, told a federal magistrate judge, “I’m not guilty, sir.” The judge, Andrew J. Peck, ordered him detained pending a further hearing. If convicted, he could face up to 30 years in prison, prosecutors said.

The fraud was uncovered after several banks where the conspirators held accounts returned money to Citibank, saying they had been unable to process the transactions, and an official of the National Bank of Ethiopia said that it did not recognize the transactions, according to a complaint signed by an F.B.I. agent, Bryan Trebelhorn.

A Citigroup spokeswoman said: “We have worked closely with law enforcement throughout the investigation and are pleased it has resulted in this arrest. Citi constantly reviews and upgrades its physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to detect, prevent and mitigate theft.”

A spokesman for the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington said, “We are aware of this unfortunate story.” He said the embassy was not involved in the legal proceedings, and declined further comment. Officials at the National Bank of Ethiopia could not be reached by phone for comment.

Prosecutors said the scheme began in September, when Citibank received a package with documents purportedly signed by officials of the Ethiopian bank instructing Citibank to accept instructions by fax. There was also a list of officials who could be called to confirm such requests. The signatures of the officials appeared to match those in Citibank’s records and were accepted by Citibank, the complaint says.

In October, Citibank received two dozen faxed requests for money to be wired, and it transferred $27 million to accounts controlled by the conspirators in Japan, South Korea, Australia, China, Cyprus and the United States, the complaint says.

Citibank called the officials whose names and numbers it had been given to verify the transactions, prosecutors said. The numbers turned out to be for cellphones in Nigeria, South Africa and Britain used by the conspirators.

Citibank, in its investigation, later determined the package of documents had come via courier from Lagos, Nigeria, rather than from the offices of the National Bank of Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa.

Citibank has credited back the lost funds to the National Bank of Ethiopia, said one person who was briefed about the situation.

While trying to save a 6-ounce kitten’s life, a fireman in Sweden accidentally inhaled the animal. The fireman survived. The kitten unfortunately did not.

From : Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World | February 4th, 2009 – 01:05 AM

I just came across an interview called “The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind” with psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. Sawyer’s research examines the secrets to the creative process, and the interview makes four great points that every small businessperson should take to heart:

1. Give yourself permission to think up many ideas. Creative people have tons of ideas, but most of the ideas simply don’t pan out. That’s okay because even though most of your ideas will suck, they help you get to the great ones. The trick is to let your mind wander and come up with many ideas and then cull the good from the bad. Nobody has only good ideas. (Almost everybody has selective memory, though, so they might think they had only good ideas.)
2. Keep chewing on the problem. Creativity is not about the rare giftedness of a “visionaries” and “geniuses” with their Eureka! moments. Research shows that most ideas are the result of thinking about a problem over a long period of time Creativity is about big numbers and hard work, so don’t feel frustrated if you haven’t had an epiphany yet. Certainly don’t believe that if you aren’t “gifted” (whatever that means), you’ll never come up with good ideas.
3. Build on ideas that came before. The iPod isn’t a miracle that came out of the blue—it was built on the Sony Walkman’s concept of a shirt-pocket device coupled with early MP3 players from other companies and the online store of a company like Amazon. The concept that creativity is built on what came before has important ramifications: consume information voraciously, go outside your market niche, and don’t be too proud to steal inspiration.
4. Put yourself in environment that will use different parts of your brain. Often this means taking a break. Sawyer refers to the three Bs—bathroom, bus, and bed—as places that stereotypically produce groundbreaking ideas. If you’re stuck on a project, try something that will get you to find new creative paths. One way to do this, for instance, is to schedule time for unstructured conversation with your peers. Personally, I get my best ideas while driving; this has led me to believe that if I bought a better car I would be more creative because I would drive more, but I digress.

If you do these things, some day an author like Sawyer may feature you in a book about creativity, and then you can claim that you’re a gifted visionary whose ideas come in flashes of brilliance during your regular ole awesomeness. Only you and I will know the truth. And if you like to read about innovation and creativity, check out Innovation.alltop.

Instructables is an awesome site of how-to guides. The content seems to be weighted towards clever and geeky projects rather than basic home improvement. While it’s easy to find a lesson on how to paint your laptop lid, it’s hard to find one on how to paint a room. Still, the design and layout of the lessons–most of which are photo illustrated–are beautiful.

Thanks to Godaddy – my old blog got fucked completely…I don’t have access to it anymore. So decided to switch to hostgator… and give it a fresh start! Over the next few weeks I will be populating this site further… watchout.
Cheers
Satya

Awesome stuff I found on the internet. It can be called an internet city or whats going on in my head! – Satya