kramarao

I used them to implement a random number generator in an embedded system to generate morse code, for training ham radio operators. I also used him KMP algorithm for writing pattern matchers.

I suspect that most of these algorithms have been implemented and available as libraries for people to use. The challenge of programming has moved from designing such isolated algorithms to modeling the problems, modularizing the code, creating an evolutionary path for a system, and balancing the wants of tomorrow with the needs of today.

Still, if you are working at the core problems of organizing, searching, sorting, managing data, you might might the books useful.

There are couple of books by Leo Rosten, Joy of Yiddish and Joy of Yinglish, that teaches Yiddish words through jokes and anecdotes. It used be my bedside reading for an year! Once you learn Yiddish words and the phrases, the sitcom dialogues started making more sense (like "from your lips to God's ears" or such turn of phrase).

The focus on the tools in entirely justified. The reason is this:

You really should not be looking at it as a CMS. It is a complete workflow system. In short, these are the systems that the business depends on to write stories, edit stories, publish stories, syndicate stories, promote stories, and so on.

An advantage of a proper system is not merely 10% efficiency: 1. It can impose a process, where none existed before. Perhaps, this can be a quality check process. It can be user feedback process. It can be promotion of journalists process. A process can improve operations and the outcome.

2. It can automate a process. Even if process exists today, if it is not automated, it may not be enforced. We do not have measurement on how well the process is adhered to; who is using it and who is not; what the costs of not using the process are.

3. It can optimize a process. If we can automate and measure, then improvement is natural.

In addition to all these process improvements, something like Chorus can even improve the way it is reaching the customers. For instance, the costs of pushing to different channels is negligible. Their cards based context education system is considered innovative in the industry.

If you look at the existing publishing platforms, you will understand how CMS can change the game. See more about Chorus here: http://pfauth.com/publishing-platforms/vox-medias-chorus . If you want to see the competition that the rest use, see: http://www.ccieurope.com/solutions/NewsGate/ (this is the new version-- think about the previous version and then you can understand the excitement about Chorus).

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

Besides the selective enforcement of laws, most laws themselves discriminate against the poor.

I grew up in rural India, where banks were non-existent. People kept the money locked up in houses or worse yet, lent to the local money lender, who may or may not pay on demand. The government in those days introduced postal savings plan, which helped people greatly. That was my introduction to banking as well. Here are some observations:

1. Banks were inaccessible to poor people. Too much paper work. Too far away. Too difficult to conduct business. I hope with new bank accounts all these are changing too.

2. Saving is not new. People save money; even poor people do save. But, then, if the savings are in women's hands, it is spent more wisely. Historically, the only way women could store the money was in gold. Eventually, gold itself because such a coveted possession, it's monetary value was not exploited for capital needs. Bank accounts may not have these problems.

3. Historically, the only reason rural folks went to bank is to take loans, under some government project. And, that had a big potential for corruption. People had to pay money to take the loans. The funny thing was the underlying assumption is that the borrowers need not pay money back, since the government will write it off, for some election purposes.

4. Money transfers for poor is new. I think that would work lot better. And, perhaps giving to women would make it work whole lot better. In my observation, there is lot of social and cultural conditioning in seeing the kids doing better than the parents, the mothers will try to put the money to use. Whether they have the financial education or not, different issue.

5. Any system will be exploited over time. I think it is important to shake them up every few years to disturb the existing power structures, especially in the relationship between the government and the people.

This is standard undergraduate question in algorithms when I went to college. If you need N log(N) solution, look up in-situ mergesort. If you don't care about the order of algorithm, there are much simpler intuitive ways of doing it.

Assume that you have two sorted arrays A and B. At the end of it, A followed by B needs to be sorted. Here is a simple algorithm:

Sort(A,B):

    if A[0] is greater than B[0], swap A[0] and B[0]. 
        Bubble up B[0] to its right place (that is make B sorted).

   Sort(A+1, B) -- stop if A reached its end.

Naive implementation, such as this is N^2. Leaving it to readers to make it N log(N), which is actually trivial.

That comes to a different point. When I was going to college in Computer science, we had to go through at least three courses in algorithms. We used to hand code most algorithms optimizing for the situation at hand. I suppose the advent of good libraries, and the bottlenecks elsewhere in the systems means that this generation may not find fundamentals of algorithms much use. Instead, they may find concepts in abstraction, higher order functions etc more useful.