Mans.hu

Of life and all its colors

About everything that amazes and confounds me.

About / Blog / Contact

Categories

Chapter 1: Background on the History Series

by Leave a Comment

I’m terribly impressed with the level of history preserved in Europe, and how you can learn about history of places, and people that go back to at least two thousand years. This has kindled an interest in learning history, and I have decided to document what I learn here, and learn it in an ‘integrated fashion’.

What I mean by integrated fashion is that I don’t want to just learn history of a particular country or time period, but rather learn about all major cultures during that particular time period, and how they related to each other.

My starting point is of course India, and I’ve chosen India: A History by John Keay as the anchor to teach me about Indian history, and then I plan to Google about places and civilizations that the book touches, and learn what they looked like at that period in time.

It’s a huge project, and I’m optimistic that I will learn a lot, and enjoy it a lot. I’ll number this series, more for my convenience than anything so that I keep track of how many posts I write about it.

Names of Quality Theorists for the PMP Exam

by Leave a Comment

There are about a dozen quality theorists that you should be familiar with as far as the PMP exam is concerned. I have listed them down here along with the key things you should know about them for the exam.

  1. McLelland: Theory of Needs; States that people are motivated either by achievement, affiliation or power.
  2. Vroom: Expectancy Theory; People are motivated by positive outcomes, and expected rewards.
  3. Fledler: Contingency Theory; Leaders should adapt their management style to the situation.
  4. Ouchi: Theory Z; Provide a job for life for increasing employee loyalty.
  5. Tuckman: Tuckman’s Ladder; Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
  6. Juran: Quality by Design
  7. McGregor: Theory X and Y. X is people are lazy, and need to be micromanaged. Y is people are motivated, and need to be given more responsibility.
  8. Herzberg: Hygiene Theory; Hygiene factors (e.g. status, job security, salary, fringe benefits, work conditions, good pay, paid insurance, vacations) that do not give positive satisfaction or lead to higher motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence. The term “hygiene” is used in the sense that these are maintenance factors.
  9. Maslow: Hierarchy; People can only ascend to higher levels after fulfilling lower level needs.
  10. Deming: Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle, Quality is management’s responsibility.
  11. Philip Crosby: Zero Defects: identify processes to remove defects, quality is built in to the processes
  12. Pareto: Pareto Principle – 80/20 Rule
  13. Ishikawa: Fishbone Diagram

I made flashcards for these as well which are a useful way to memorize this.

How clever are you?

by Leave a Comment

Kind of disappointed at getting this amazing question wrong, but at least I didn’t make the common mistake that most people make. Also interesting to note that 100% of Google software engineers got it right.

 

Try it out for yourself here.

Sri Lankan male elephants have no tusks

by Leave a Comment

I read somewhere a little while ago that Sri Lankan male elephants have no tusks, and I was quite surprised by that since I vaguely knew that they are part of the Asian Elephants, and those males have tusks.

A look at Wikipedia reveals that only 7% of Sri Lankan males have tuskers, and they are even in fact smaller than what they used to be about a hundred years ago, even though within the Asian subspecies they are the biggest elephants.

The reason for no tusks, and the short size is possibly because the best specimens have been poached or domesticated over centuries.

From Wikipedia:

Sri Lankan elephants are the largest subspecies reaching a shoulder height of between 2 and 3.5 m (6.6 and 11.5 ft), weigh between 2,000 and 5,500 kg (4,400 and 12,100 lb), and have 19 pairs of ribs. Their skin color is darker than ofindicus and of sumatranus with larger and more distinct patches of depigmentation on ears, face, trunk and belly.[5]

Only 7% of males bear tusks.[6] According to the elephant census conducted in 2011 by the Wildlife Conservation Department of Sri Lanka, only 2% of the total population are tuskers.[citation needed]

Sri Lankan elephants are somewhat diminutive when compared with historical accounts dating back to 200 BC and with photographs taken in the 19th century during the time of colonial British rule of the island. The smaller size could possibly be the end result of a long-continued process of removing the physically best specimens from the potential breeding-stock through hunting or domestication (see insular dwarfism).[citation needed]