Avial

 Some of the recent LLS grants programs are listed below New Idea : A new grant program to identify highly novel research strategies with potential to fundamentally change the way of blood cancer diagnosis and treatment. The researchers will receive a one-year $100k grant. Screen to Lead : Funds for developing potential drugs that inhibit recently discovered cancer-driving molecules. Quest for Cures : Funds for research focusing on the following areas: Monitoring tumor cell heterogeneity and its contribution to response or resistance to therapy. Molecular mechanisms to identify and direct subsets of patients with B-cell malignancies  to the right therapy. The role of the tumor micro-environment in initiation and maintenance of blood cancers Support cancer research by contributing to my Fund Raiser at  http://pages.teamintraining.org/sd/rnr14/kjayaraman#My-Fundraising-Page

I started learning about this organization called Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, LLS ( http://www.lls.org/ ). They are a pioneer organization in enabling cutting edge cancer research. LLS has directly collaborated with researchers in premier institutes like John Hopkins University in funding and guiding the direction of cancer research. For instance, a big break-through known as T-cell immunotherapy (training the patients immune system to kill cancer cells specifically) is an outcome of LLS' vision and funding. The end to cancer is near. Through LLS, we need to focus our efforts, funds and time efficiently to make it happen sooner. In a mission to help this organization, I have pledge to raise $3000. To spread awareness, I am getting out of my comfort zone and training a Marathon race in San Diego. Please make a donation in support of my efforts to accelerate the cures for cancer. You can contribute directly online at this webpage:  http://pages.teamintraining.org/sd/rnr...

Woke up this morning with these questions: What are the real world problems today? Which one am I trying to solve?  I can think of a few problems * Energy Crisis * Food, Water and Shelter (there are many without these)  * Animosity arising out of cultural differences * Eradication of multiple diseases * Education Please do contribute to my list. I believe that I am solving the Energy Crisis, indirectly, by making energy efficient electronics  . Would love to do something more obvious. Karthik

I am sure that many of you already know what an Arduino is. For those who are unfamiliar with an Arduino, it is an open source hardware project. It empowers electronics hobbyists to build awesome projects without having to waste too much time on the dirty work. For more accurate description, I strongly urge you to read:  http://arduino.cc/ If you are looking for a more powerful piece of hardware, you should be getting a raspberry pi:  http://www.raspberrypi.org/  Its a $50 CPU; you could connect external mouse, key board and monitor to have a bare-bones computer. Using an arduino, one can read data of sensors easily. For instance, temperature could be read out of an temperature sensor IC. Based on the type of the sensor IC, the value of the temperature is either analog (as in LM35), in which case we could use the pins A0-A5 to directly read the output of the sensor, or if we use a sensor like TC74A0 we could use the I2C protocol to read the temperature out of the memo...

I have always found gardening to be a pleasurable activity. During the summer holidays (school days), my sister and I visited my grandparents. Watering plants used to one of the evening routines. Over a few summers, we have seen beautiful flowers, tender okras (ladies finger), coconut trees grow tall, banana plants spread uncontrollably, etc. But my simple contribution then was to water the plants. Hobby Revisited In the last one year, I have revived interest in gardening. My friend Ketan gave me "money plant", mint and basil. Money plant has not yet fetched me any money: I am still a Phd student trying to graduate as soon as I can. But the plant is growing well and is awaiting to be re-potted. The mint plant died in the winter despite my best efforts. Yes, I did take a lot of efforts to keep it alive. I talked to the plant everyday motivated by J.C. Bose's suggestion. Even placed a light bulb closed to the plant: (1) Light for photosynthesis. (2) Heat to keep it warm...

Click here to view this photo book larger Turn your favorite photos into a photo book at Shutterfly.com .

Google has come up with an interesting social networking platform - Google+. It has some nice features, pleasant look and most importantly an intuitive interface. Will it be a Facebook killer? Here is my take on it. Circles  Google has gone one step ahead of Facebook in creating an online society. As in reality, some friends are closer than the others even on the web. It is desirable to share photos or status updates with only certain group of friends instead of everyone. Circles in Google+ allows one to do this by way of organizing friends. While Facebook also has a way to organize friends, I don't find it as intuitive as Circles; probably circles is marketed while its counterpart's utility is not. Hangout For me, if anything can recreate the feeling of society, then its got to be the concept of get together for a conversation. Hangout is designed to do this precisely. If you are chatting with people in a circle, the others in that circle are invited to come hang out....

I was at Baltimore last week to attend RFIC Symposium. I had the chance to try (read forced to try; food in conferences are sad and overpriced) a sandwich shop called Jimmy John's (JJ's) which was right outside the conference venue. They serve very good sandwiches which are actually cheaper than subway. However, their USP is ATTITUDE. Check these out: Do's and Dont's at JJ's More Stuff Nice one. I will use it to sell my recipe sometime :-).  This is super cool. It works well in my case, at least the last one. Really??  Do you use that in $5 sandwiches?? Dig at Jack Daniels.  Didn't get this one myself. May be they are talking about pork sandwiches flying off their shelves.. Not sure... "16 things it took me 50 years to realize" - Dave Barry  1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative the same night. 2. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not...

The title song from the movie Dum Maaro Dum is my favorite item song of the year so far. It has sultry Deepika Padukone groving to some catchy tunes; credit goes to the original composer, R.D.Burman. The remixed version, particularly the lyrics, has attracted a lot of criticism. I think it is mainly because of the cult status of the original version and rather lewd lyrics in the modern version. I started following Hindi movies after Dilwale Dulhaniya leke gayen and Kuch Kuch Ho Chuka Tha. If Zeenat Aman was the star of 1971 version, I felt Deepika Padukone was equally good in the new one. I will probably watch the 120min movie just for this 4 min song. You can be smarter and watch the song here and lyrics are as below. Hai Phir Dekh Raha Hai Aaj Aankh Sek Raha Hai Kal Haath Sekega Aaj Dhil Choda Hai Kal Khud He Rokega Aaj Mere Liye Chair Kich Raha Hai Kal Meri Skirt Kichega Kichega Ki Nahi Aakad Bakkad Bombay Bo Aasi Nabbe Pure So Sau Rupiyon Ka Dum Jo Lun Do Sau Gum Ho U...

I am a vim loyalist. Features in Emacs like compiling latex code and viewing the output without having to switch to the terminal is awesome. However, having used vim (and recently gvim) for more than 5 years, its easier for me to write scripts for vim to implement the cool features of Emacs rather than switch to Emacs. Below is a simple shell script to compile latex document and show the output without leaving the editor.  #! /bin/sh  source=$1  infile=${source%.tex}  latex $infile  bibtex $infile  latex $infile  latex $infile  dvips $infile.dvi  ps2pdf $infile.ps  evince $infile.pdf You can use pdflatex instead of latex. Also, I use evince to view the pdf because any update in the file is updated in the viewer without having to restart it (unlike acroread). The script (I call it compile_latex.sh) needs to be saved in a directory included in the PATH. Now comes the vim part. The following line needs to be added in .vimr...

The last decade witnessed quick and drastic revolutions in various fields of technology. (Children growing up in that period would not appreciate a large number of sci-fi movies :-). ) Google conquered the web world while facebook defined e-society. Electronics have been applied extensively to improve every aspect of life; watch out for electronics in toilet paper. Communication has become so fast and cheap (read free) that collaboration with my professor was not affected when he left to Belgium on a sabbatical. Thanks to amazon.com, our shopping strategies have changed. Overall, our lifestyles have changed; food and language are probably the only common aspects that I share with my grand parents, who have chosen to abstain from this never ending revolution. Among the developments (too humble a word; don't have a superlative term at the tip of my finger now) that have taken place in the last ten years, I have picked my three favorite ones Smart-phone I own a blackberry which ...

Driven by a high data rate and need for efficient spectrum utilization, modern communication standards like MoCA usually feature OFDM which has a high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). This constrains the designers to resort to the most linear version of PA, a Class-A PA. In addition to having a poor maximum efficiency, a Class-A PA’s efficiency degrades rapidly under back-off. On the other hand, a Class-B PA, albeit very non-linear compared to a Class-A PA, has a higher maximum efficiency and it degrades less rapidly under back-off. Similar to the idea of pre-equalization used in communication, the input signal of the PA could be pre-distorted effectively to compensate for its non-linearity. In standard CMOS process, particularly with technology downscaling, the cost of digital signal processing has reduced dramatically, making it a smart choice to implement the pre-distortion in the digital domain. If you are interested in working on this problem, please contact me....

Having been deprived of this Madras Style Kurma for 2 years now, I have learnt to make this amazing dish , purely out of desperation. I thank Abinesh for teaching me this recipe. Folks, it tasted better than any "South Indian restaurant in the US" could offer. Following is the recipe. Ingredients 1) Scraped Cocunut - 50g 2) Fennel Seeds - 1 table spoon 3) Channa Dal - 50g 4) Tomatoes -2 5) Onions - 2 6) Ginger-Garlic paste - 3 tbl spoon 7) Cloves - 3 8) Cinnamon - half a stick 9) Turmeric powder - 1 tea spoon 10) Sambar powder - 3 table spoon 11) Salt - As per personal taste (roughly 1 table spoon) 12) Vegetables - Cauliflower/ Peas Procedure 1) Cocunut, channa dal and fennel seeds are ground to paste. 2) On a frying pan, oil is heated. Cloves and cinnamon are added to the oil. 3) Finely chopped onions are cooked (till golden brown), followed by the addition of ginger-garlic paste. 4) After the raw smell of ginger-garlic is gone, boiled vegetables are adde...

Indian government recently announced the launch of Sakshat - a $35 tablet. The tablet has 2 GB RAM, no hard disk, USB port, and built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. It comes with a PDF reader, multimedia player, video conferencing, Web browser, and word processor. If all these work, I think we have a product which is worth every cent spent on it. However, I am still not gung-ho about the product. South East Asian countries manufacture electronic products that are imitations of big brands at a very cheap price. My Taiwanese friend claims that an iPhone equivalent and look alike costs $15 in the streets of Taipei. These products suffer from poor reputation; they are branded unreliable. Sakshat, I fear, might turn out to be one such product. Indian govt. should have waited till Sakshat was field tested before making tall claims about it. From business point of view, the press release stunt was unnecessary because the market was guaranteed anyway. Gaining international reputation being the mot...

One could have the balls to try mountain biking but the real challenge is to have them intact at the end. I believe that I do, because of the urge in me to get on the bike again and complete the trail that beat me. Alas, if only I could walk. Folks, I went mountain biking on Pacific Ridge Trail, Irvine, CA last saturday with a couple of friends from Broadcom. I have biked earlier on Whiting ranch wilderness park trail. This trail, facing NewPort Beach for a stretch, is supposed to be more scenic. The first third of the trail was narrow and winding with bushes on either side, demanding intense concentration. After a water-break at a summit, we started going down on a broader path (a highway by mountain biking standards) at a high velocity. Blame the lapse in concentration or the the view on my left and or the speed (that thrills but kills), I did not notice the sand in front of me. The sudden slow down along with my poor technique in navigating sand caused the front wheel to wobble and...

Austin, I am told, is the only liberal city in an otherwise conservative state of Texas. Though irrelevant to this topic, I like adding that :-). It is the capital of Texas, fourth largest city in the lone-star state and fifteenth largest in the country. Austin was a part of my long weekend travel plan that included San Antonio. I reached Austin on the 3rd of July, late in the night and left on the 6th of July before daybreak. Day One - 4th of July Meeting with Anuranjan and Navin Anuranjan Jha was my senior at CISL Lab, Columbia University who graduated just when I joined the lab. Anu (as he is fondly called) and me share a common interest - Running. We met for lunch (actually he picked me up from Kumar's house) at Trudy's, a Tex-Mex cuisine. We had some elaborate discussions on half marathon/ marathon training, music that inspires running, music in general, general fundaes on life, life, ... :-). To cut the long story short, we did a lot of catching up. After meeting Anu, I ...

I promised Kumar to visit him at Austin during the Independence day long weekend. However due to exorbitant ticket prices ($500 for round trip to AUS from SNA), I took a flight to San Antonio for my onward journey, where Kumar joined me. In retrospect, it was a wise decision as I might not have visited this historical city otherwise. La Alamo After watching Colbert interview (read make fun of) the mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, during the week before my trip, I was eager to visit La Alamo which is the venue of a pivotal event in Texas Revolution, Battle of the Alamo. During this battle, a Mexican army of more than 2000 soldiers were defended by a Texian army of 200 soldiers for 13 days before the Texians capitulated. Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texian army with aid from adventurers from United States defeated the Mexicans, thus ending the revolution. This monument tells the story of important personalities of this war. Artifacts such as the guns, swords, knives, letters a...

June 28, 2010 Dear Karthik Tripurari: I would like to express my appreciation for your submission to CICC 2010 of the paper entitled: ID#: 231 Title: A Digitally Controlled CMOS Phase Shifter with Frequency Doubling for Multiple-Antenna, Direct-Conversion Transceiver Systems With the large number of submitted papers and a limited number of time slots available for presentations, the committee had a particularly challenging task this year to determine which papers were accepted. I regret to inform you that we were unable to include your paper in this year's program. I look forward to seeing you at this year's conference and hope that you will consider submitting a paper for CICC 2011. Sincerely, Tom Andre Technical Program Chairman

"2 States- The Story of My Marriage" is a novel by Chetan Bhagat about love, struggle and marriage of a Punjabi boy from Delhi and Tamilian girl (oops should I say Iyer?) from Mylapore, Madras (also called Chennai these days). Act I: The Boy ('s family) and the Girl ('s family) Meet The story begins in IIMA dining hall, where Krish (the boy) meets Ananya (the girl) and develops a crush instantaneously. On the other hand, Ananya finds him to be a "safe-zone guy", who is content with just friendship with girls (There can never be a safe-zone guy in this world. That is inhuman.) and deal of "friendship" is made. With time, additional benifits get added to the deal and it evolves into love. Behaving maturely, they decide to marry only with their parents consent. Their parents meet during the convocation ceremony but Northie-Southie incompatibility issues surface. Act II: The Boy Impresses the Girl's Family Having failed in their first attempt, Kri...

I upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 10.04. The update went smooth except for 2 glitches. Wifi did not work initially but it got sorted by itself upon restarting the system. Secondly, youtube videos played without sound while amarok worked just fine. The problem turned out to be a conflict between flash 9 and 10. Typing about:plugin in firefox address bar confirmed this and rm ~/.mozilla//plugins/libflashplayer.so solved the problem. Also, I installed the Mac OS theme for my desktop. The desktop is as shown in the screenshot below. If you like it and want to try for your desktop, just follow the instructions on http://maketecheasier.com/turn-ubuntu-lucid-mac-os-x/2010/06/01