Carrot & Stick: that doesn’t work on Programmers!

Experiments

Carrot & Stick – by definition “a policy of offering a combination of rewards and punishment to induce behaviour”, perhaps the oldest methodology for motivation in organisations doesn’t work for tech companies. There are many reasons for that, I will discuss them later. Any engineering solution just can’t follow this kind of rigid methodology to motivate their employees. Still, I can see many software companies here in India and elsewhere following it blindly.

It was a great talk – ‘The Puzzle of Motivation‘ by Dan Pink. The quotes from the talk:

There is a mismatch between what science knowsand what business does.And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubbleof the economic collapse,is that too many organizations are making their decisions,their policies about talent and people,based on assumptions that are outdated,unexamined,and rooted more in folklore than in science.And if…

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Unsupervised learning of 3D structure from images

the morning paper

Unsupervised learning of 3D structure from images Rezende et al. (Google DeepMind) NIPS,2016

Earlier this week we looked at how deep nets can learn intuitive physics given an input of objects and the relations between them. If only there was some way to look at a 2D scene (e.g., an image from a camera) and build a 3D model of the objects in it and their relationships… Today’s paper choice is a big step in that direction, learning the 3D structure of objects from 2D observations.

The 2D projection of a scene is a complex function of the attributes and positions of the camera, lights and objects that make up the scene. If endowed with 3D understanding agents can abstract away from this complexity to form stable disentangled representations, e.g., recognizing that a chair is a chair whether seen from above or from…

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