Following notes are taken from the lecture delivered by Jane Chen:

Premature babies struggle to stay alive after their birth as they are unable to control their
body temperature. They don’t have have enough fat on their body to stay warm. Around 20 million premature babies are born around the world every year.4 million of these babies do not survive.

Those who survive have chances of getting severe long term health problems . In the first month of the baby’s life, its only job is to grow. Due to the battle with hypothermia, premature baby’s organs can’t grow normally which can lead to problems like diabetes,heart disease and low IQ.

Many of these problems can be solved if these babies are kept warm. In the developed countries incubators are used widely to keep premature babies warm. The traditional incubators need electricity and cost up to 20000 dollars. Due to these reasons, it is not cost effective solution in rural areas of developing countries.

The rural people try to find local solution to this problem like tying hot water bottle around baby’s body
or placing them under light bulb. These methods are ineffective and unsafe. Jane Chen’s team designed a sleeping bag for the babies which has pouch of bag attached to it back. It has face changing material like wax which has melting point close to the body temperature of the human body. This bag can be easily sterilized. This bag creates warm micro environment for the baby. The pouch maintain constant temperature for 4-6 hours after heating. It can be reheated again. The cost of this bag is approximately 25 dollars.

Following are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Steve Jobs:-

Lets continue with our discussion. Steve jobs was lucky to find what he liked to do early in life. He started Apple in his garage when he was 26. In 10 years Apple grew to be 2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees.

At the age of 30, Steve Jobs was fired from the Apple, the company he had started. Steve Jobs feels that being fired by Apple was one of the best things that had happened to him. He decided to start over. He felt like a beginner again. During next five years he started companies like Next and Pixar. Pixar is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Only thing that kept him going was the fact that he liked to do what he did everyday as job. Steve says,”Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid thinking that you have something to loose.”

Steve is a cancer survivor. Having closer encounter to death, Steve feels that our time on earth is limited. He believes that following our intuition should be the primary focus of our life. Everything else should be secondary.

Following are the notes taken from the lecture given by Steve Jobs at the graduation ceremony of Stanford University:-

Steve jobs is a drop out from the college. His biological mother was unwed graduate student. She wanted her son to be adopted by educated people. He was adopted by a couple who had not graduated from college. They promised his biological mother that they would send him to college.

Eventually Steve Jobs did go to college. The idea of going to college and spending all the money they saved for years didn’t work well with him. Dropping out of college wasn’t a bad experience for him. Now he was not forced to take the courses that he did not like . He started to take voluntary courses which had real interest in.

He was not having dorm room. He returned coke bottles for 5 cents deposits to buy food with. He used to walk 7 miles down the town to Hare Krishna temple every Sunday night to get one good meal for the week.

The calligraphy class that Steve Jobs took during that time helped him to design the typography for the Mac computer 10 years later.

You have to believe that the dots you are following will connect somehow in the future. The trust that the dots will connect in the future won’t make you afraid when you are following the path not followed by others.

We will continue this in next post.

Lets continue our post based on the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Dan Gilbert:-

Human beings have non cognitive processes running in their brain which can help them synthesize the reality into a virtual reality. This virtual reality helps them to create a balanced state , a state of happiness.

We believe that synthetic happiness might not be of the same quality as that of the natural happiness. Synthetic happiness can be as real as the natural happiness which we reach when we achieve the paradigm that we set for ourselves. Even the amnesic people tend to believe that the things that they own are better than the things that they don’t own. We might think that amnesic people don’t really know that they own something or not. Even though that happens to be the case, amnesic people are also able to create synthetic happiness for themselves.

In a experiment, 10 students were asked to choose the picture from a set of 2 pictures. They were promised that they can get the other picture if they were unsatisfied with the picture they chose. Other 10 students were asked to choose a picture and told that they would have to stick with the picture they choose.

The results showed that the student who were give choice to return the picture were more likely to be unhappy with the picture they chose. The student who were not given the choice were more likely to be happy with the picture they chose because they created synthetic happiness in their mind regarding the picture they chose.

These are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Dan Gilbert:-

Human brain has increased in size over the period of thousands of the years. This helps the human brain today to simulate the future with the help of part of the brain called as frontal cortex.

Year after losing the legs and year after losing the legs, two different people can be equally happy. Different outcomes are more different than they really are. Different results have less impact on the human being over the period of time.

The person who was exonerated after 37 years for the crime he had not committed felt the experience as glorious. We would have thought that he should have felt miserable for losing all those precious years of life.

These are the examples of synthetic happiness created by the human brain. Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we really want. Synthetic happiness is what we create for ourselves when we don’t get what we really want. Synthetic happiness can be as long lasting as real happiness.

Other example of synthetic happiness would be buying a less expensive car when you really want to buy expensive car. Over the period of the time, we convince ourselves our car is the real value for money.

We will continue this discussion in the next part.

These are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Gary Flake, which explains the use of the pivots for web exploration:-

The whole of the data in which we consume is greater than the sum of the parts. Pivot can be used to filter the data in charts using different filters. This helps to view the information in different ways which changes the context of the data each time the data is viewed using different filter criteria.

Pivot can change the way in which the information can be used. It can help to navigate the web as a means to summarize the data. It helps to drill in and drill down the web pages in certain manner which can help us to develop the trends. Mostly drill in and drill down has context to data. Pivot can help us treat web pages as data.

Pivot helps us to analyze the web pages based on the content of the web pages or the category of the information the web page is related to. Pivot is a tool which is under experimentation currently. Pivot can change the information can be used over the web as it involves the analyzing the content of the web. It can help us surf the web in efficient way and efficiently direct us to the information we intend to retrieve .

Lets continue our discussion based on Bill Gate’s lecture regarding alternative ways which can be used for reducing CO2 emissions.

The area required for non conventional energy sources like solar energy and wind energy is much more as compared to the conventional energy plants and the cost of construction is much high. The problem of storage of energy also exists when we try to generate energy using non conventional energy sources like wind and solar power plants.

Terra-power is one of the alternative ways for generation of energy which considers burning Uranium to 99 percent capacity which results in reduction in waste and increase in the efficiency of the nuclear power plants.

These alternative sources of energy can help us reduce the CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Implementation of all these alternatives would need substantial investment in research projects, provision of subsidies to those who try to implement these ideas.

The key part in this process is to come up with a solid research which will lead to pilot research projects. These pilot research projects can then lay the foundation for multiple possible solutions which can be implemented on mass basis.

It is quite important than different people come up with different research ideas which will give us more possibilities of success in reducing the emissions. There is also a chance that different approaches can be combined to create more cheap and sustainable solution.

Following are the notes taken from the lecture delivered by Bill Gates regarding the energy issues:-

Price of energy has declined over the decades. As the energy consumption increases, the CO2 emissions increase in proportion. This leads to increase in the average temperature. The only solution to this problem is reduction in energy consumption which can lead to reduction in CO2 emissions. The world today has a population of around 6.8 billion. The amount of CO2 emissions are directly proportional to population, services consumed by people, efficiency of the services and amount of CO2 generated per the unit of energy production.

This demands for finding out the ways in which we can control the population. It also demands for devising the efficient services which consume less energy for the same amount of work done. The major solutions which we can consider for energy production are :-
1)Carbon capture while producing the energy using fossil fuels: This demands for designing the system to trap the carbon produced by burning the fossil fuels , pressurize it to convert it into liquid form and store it. The storage can be a critical issue as the volume would be high.
2)Nuclear Energy: – The problems to be solved with this would be the cost of energy production, safety and the long term waste.
3)Wind Energy
4)Solar Energy
5)Solar Thermal Energy

We will continue this discussion in the next part.

Following are the notes taken from the lecture given by Sendhil Mullainathan:-

Diarrhea can be attributed as one of the major reasons for child mortality in India.  In 1960, India had child mortality rate closer to 24%. Diarrhea was one of the major reasons for the mortality. The efforts were taken to reduce the deaths due to diarrhea. One of the major solutions was the use of oral rehydration salts.

Current child mortality rate in India is closer to 6.5%. Nearly 400,000 children die annually in India even today. Many of these deaths are preventable.The problem with eliminating the problems like diarrhea completely lies in educating people about the solutions. Most of the people do not believe in the solutions ,as the solutions don’t seem to be logical to them. If we ask the people in remote villages in India: ” Should we increase or decrease the water consumption for the kids having diarrhea?”

At lease 50 percent of the people would answer that the water consumption should be reduced.The problem lies in the education of the people about solution to the problem. Most of the times scientific
advance do not gurantee a solution as long as the awareness regarding the solution is not generated among the people. Complete elimination of the diarrhea needs generation of awareness regarding the use
of rehydrations salts as a prominent solution for diarrhea.

Most of the times, we look at the car as product. In other way, car can be seen as the extension of the personality of the person who owns the car. This brings the emotional angle to the design of the car, which is much different the the mechanical aspect of the car.

People working on car design consider the car as sculpture , which gets perfected through many trial and errors. The designer tries to discover different part of his own personality while designing the new car.

The  design team goes through several designs before finalizing the design for any car model.  Each design is owned by a bunch of designers. Every artist loves their creation. The same happens with car designers. It is difficult for the design team lead to trash the ideas of his design team members in the process of capturing the best design for the new car model.

Engineers are supposed to implement the designs. Designers and engineers need to be on the same page for implementing the car manufacturing process. Once the car designer offloads his design to the engineers, its the job of the engineers to come up with the solution to  blend the design to sustain the engineering forces.