Confessions of a Lecturer !!! Unit II

LOLism !!!

Hi Guys (and Gals), welcome back. I am sure U must be wondering y this post is called LOLism :D.?

Well the reason is obvious, I will share all the dumbness that I have encountered during my tenure of lecturership in the last month. So here we go,

Chapter 1 :-

One fine lecture, I was dictating some topic, I explained it on the blackboard and asked the students to draw the diagram. After that I said, "Write Down". One smart student asked, "Sir where to write". ( I said to myself ' Write on my head bloody') Then me again, " where else ? in the notebook of course". ** entire class bursts into laughter**

Chapter 2 : -

My college has a OMS ( Outside Maharashtra Seat) quota. So most of the students are from other states and most of them are Bihari. So the other day, I was teaching Creating Table in Oracle to the students. I gave the syntax to the students, and asked them to create a table of their own. Some were able to do it, some couldn't and the latter had their doubts cleared about Creating a Table in Oracle. So after almost all the students had their tables created, one fine student stood up and asked, " Sir mujhe plz batayiye TABLEWAA kaise banate hai", **laughter in the class**.

When I went to his PC to see what he had written, the Create Table statement looked like this, --->
Create Tablewaa Student ( Rollno number(3), Name varchar2(10));

Consequence is left to the readers to guess. ( I couldn't stop smilling, but somehow had enough patience to explain the correct version of Create Tablewaa statement).

Later on came to know that one of his colleagues from Bihar had asked him, "TABLEWAA banana hai". (OMG)

PS: - This post is not intended to offend the sentiments of the Biharis.

The Hall of Infame !!!

The recent furor about the Indian players not signing the WADA ( World Anti Doping Agency) has compelled us to rethink about the drug scandals in the past, and how WADA is taking preventive measures to curb the practice of taking drugs. However, this does not mean I support any one particular party in this speculation.

Let's take a look back at some of the incidents in the past where cricketers were found guilty of taking drugs for performance enhancement.

In 2003, just when the World Cup was about to start the Legendary leg spinner Shane Warne was sent home from South Africa after the drug test conducted by Cricket Australia. The drug that Warne used is said to be used to mask the presence of other drugs.


In 2008, the Indian Premier League revealed that a player had tested positive for banned substances during the first edition of the tournament and on July 14, it was revealed that the player in question was Asif.On February 11, 2009, the IPL confirmed that Asif had tested positive for steroids and subsequently imposed a one year ban on him, ending on September 21, 2009. Shortly before the IPL's announcement, Asif was released of his contract by the Delhi DareDevils.

Mohammad Asif's teammate Shoaib Akhtar has been also caught guilty of taking drugs umpteen number of times. A former PCB spokesperson had always suspected Shoaib for doping due to his reluctance towards drug test.

If we go on counting such occurences in the history of Cricket, we would have number of them.

• Legendary England all-rounder Sir Ian Botham was suspended briefly in 1986 for smoking cannabis.
• Asim Butt played three matches in the 2005 season for Scotland, taking three wickets but being expensive, before he tested positive for ecstasy during a match with Somerset.
• Former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming survived controversy in 1995 when he was caught and admitted to smoking marijuana with teammates Matthew Hart and Dion Nash while on the tour to South Africa at their hotel. Nash and Hart were suspended following the incident.
• In May 2005, former England all-rounder Dermot Reeve revealed that he was addicted to cocaine, and that he had commentated on a Test match the previous year under the influence of the drug. Reeve also admitted to using Marijuana whilst he was an active player for Warwickshire but only out of season.

The above incidents are a few of the incidents which can malign the spirit of cricket. But it certainly does not mean all cricketers undergo such (mal)practices. The fact that whether our Indian cricketers should sign the WADA contract or not, is left to them and WADA. As genuine Cricket fans, all we want to see is PURE cricket.

Microsoft's New Search Engine !!! Bing !!!

So here we are again, the clash of the Titans continues. Microsoft has decided to revamp it's LIVE search ( and take on Google search ) and renamed it as Bing. But it's not that only the name has changed. MS has added a whole lot of features. Here are a few of them ( in fact lot's of them).

When I logged on to Bing for the first time, here's what I got







So let's go deeper into the new LIVE search engine.

According to Microsoft, Bing lets you find Web content fast and excels at refining searches so that you can unearth the lowest airfares, discover reviews of neighborhood boutiques, or track down reliable health information from the Mayo Clinic.



In Bing, Microsoft introduces a Quick Previews feature that provides a text-based synopsis of the pages displayed in your search results. When you drag your mouse cursor over individual search results, a Quick Previews box of data pops up, containing information from the site.

Bing peppers its search results with what Microsoft calls Instant Answers. As the name implies, Instant Answers entries serve up answers to common questions related to currency conversion, weather forecasts, movie times, or whatever you're investigating.

Save & Share lets you save, organize, and share recent searches. You can share searches with Facebook or Windows Live friends, or save them to your Microsoft SkyDrive folder. The Save & Share function not only allows you to save your favorite searches, but also lets you organize them into folders and add notes to them.

According to Microsoft, 50 percent of all searches are repeats; saving your favorite searches offers a shortcut to the results of a search that you might otherwise have to repeat from scratch.

The primary difference between Live Search and Bing is the user interface. Bing Image and Video Search is more intuitive than its predecessor, Microsoft says, and all of the filtering tools are conveniently and consistently grouped in the Explorer Pane.

Microsoft retooled Live Search's Image and Video Search to make it easier for users to find full-length TV shows, music videos, and other video content from leading content providers such as Hulu and YouTube.

Microsoft has updated the search engine's interface so that you can extract what the company calls “sentiment” regarding a particular service or business. This feature works by scanning consumer product ratings from sites such as CitySearch.com and Yelp.com, and mashing those results together with Bing search results.

For example, a search for “Chinese restaurants” brings up a 'Local' tab in the left-hand pane (the Explorer Pane) of the search results page. Select this tab, and you can browse local Chinese restaurants within a geographical area you select. Click on one of the restaurants listed in the search results, and Bing serves up a Score Card containing ratings for several key criteria: 'Atmosphere', 'Food Quality', and 'Return Potential'.

Suppose that you're shopping for a Nikon D90 digital SLR (or some other product). Bing will deliver detailed reports--not search results--for the product in question, pulling images, pricing information, user reviews, expert reviews, and much more from various Web sites and neatly displaying the information on a single page. Search reports include active data that you can sort by various criteria, yielding product details in one click, along with expert reviews from leading tech Web sites.

Using technology that it acquired when it purchased Farecast in 2008, Microsoft brings some uniquely advanced technology to search queries involving travel and buying tickets. Farecast, a tool for comparing airfares, uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you should purchase your airline ticket. The Farecast technology is tightly integrated with Bing, so you can use advanced pricing tools from within Bing's search results.

Farecast technology enables Microsoft to bring smarts to the task of finding good prices for hotel reservations. When you search for accommodations within a specific region, Bing travel results show you a category of results that it calls Hotel Deals. According to Microsoft, Bing calculates the historical price of a room at a specific hotel, compares that price with the current rate that the hotel is offering, and assesses whether the current price is a good deal or not.

Bing offers a wealth of new content from the Mayo Clinic, allowing it to serve up reliable data on health topics such as diabetes, cancer, and swine flu. A test query for "swine flu" yielded a Mayo Clinic overview of the H1N1 type A influenza strain.