Category: Company News

General New and announcements about Navacron LLC

Started Reading Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

Started Reading Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

Just got another valuable resource in learning polishing my cocos2d skills. Cocos2d is an excellent framework for developing 2D games. The book can be purchased from Packt Publishing. It comes with a few example games. Plan on reading through and learning more.

Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

http://link.packtpub.com/7CVH6K

Finished Natural Language Processing Course CS224N

Finished Natural Language Processing Course CS224N

Been a long time i havent written my blog. I was busy studying Natural Language Processing taught by Professor Chris Manning from Stanford. It was a a pretty useful course, and was very hands on with 3 programming assignments and a final project.

These are the few things that i learned and found very useful.

  • Machine translation using parallel corpa from different language. We implemented various IBM models for machine translations. Heart of them was EM algorithm
  • Creating language model one of the assignment made us create a language model from european parliment text and de scramble emails
  • Max Ent to label entities in a biological corpus
  • Wrote a part of speech parser

My final project was to predict stock volatility from quarterly transcripts. We used Scalar vector regression using features such as bag of words.

All in all it was a pretty useful and hands on course.

Muhammad Yunus Gramin Bank Bank For The Poor

This is a great lecture by Mohammad Younus the Nobel Peace Price Winner for work for micro credit for poor people. The lecture is very interesting how the bank for poor people works. He simply reverses the rules of modern day commercial banks and the bank still works. It is a non profit bank i.e. the earnings are re-invested into the bank. It is a truly an eye opener, that there are alternative ways of doing things.

The key concepts of operations are.

  • Small loans to poor people, with no collateral
  • No penalization if poor person cannot repay a loan. The only thing he looses he will not be able to get a loan again
  • Bank goes out to people, especially women, instead of people coming to the bank. The especially go for women who do not know what to do with the loan
  • The interest never exceeds the principal. This is in contrast to the loan sharks
  • No business plan needed for the loan. Every human is an enterpeneur
  • No training given to the loan beneficiary. The loan beneficiary uses own creativity to find the right business

It is truely amazing how this bank works. His goal is to have a world without poverty.