In April 2011, my organization from Bangladesh signed a contract with Khan Academy and their partners, Agami from the U.S. to translate and localize their education content in Bangladesh. It took nearly seven months to finalize the deal, meticulously reviewing the requirements, capacity to execute and leadership of the contract. A social enterprise working in … Continue reading A Non-Engineer’s Year in Silicon Valley
How Oakland PD is Collecting Sensitive Location Data
Police cars mounted with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are always winding their way through the streets of Oakland. The cameras are recording the plate numbers of vehicles in the front and behind, as well as collecting footage on the surrounding areas. The policy of the Oakland Police Department (PD) is to utilize ALPR technology … Continue reading How Oakland PD is Collecting Sensitive Location Data
Musings #1
To this day, I have had 6 near-death experiences. The funny thing about nearly dying is that you don't feel like it's about to happen -- it feels uneventful and can be summed up in the sensation of a microsecond. I had often felt I was dying when I had a migraine pain or a … Continue reading Musings #1
Correlation between Mineral Resources and GDP on the World Map
Open source spatial maps are plentiful, however finding something that evokes the curious mind can be challenging. I was curious to understand if the natural resource distribution of countries correlated with their gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, meaning if particular countries that had an abundance of mineral resources, will they also have a higher … Continue reading Correlation between Mineral Resources and GDP on the World Map
#4
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered … Continue reading #4
#3
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Why I Took a Break from My One True Calling
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I looked at Thomas with surprise. He is unreasonably tall, so every time I look at him, I actually have to look up. He is wearing a lemon cotton shirt, his legs uncomfortably folded underneath the low dinner table. His company has just signed a … Continue reading Why I Took a Break from My One True Calling
#2
But the subject of war never came up until Billy brought it up himself. Somebody in the zoo crowd asked him through the lecturer what the most valuable thing he had learned on Tralfamadore was so far, and Billy replied, “How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace! As you know, I … Continue reading #2
#1
Each clump of symbol is a brief, urgent message -- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all once, not one after the other. There isn't a particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that when seen all at once, they produce an image of … Continue reading #1
Inside Bangladesh’s Night of Terror
Published in Huffington Post | December 06, 2017 Minutes before, the upscale restaurant had been brimming with life. “I was waiting for my food when they walked inside—barely a year or two older than me, wearing jeans and t-shirts. Within minutes they pointed their weapons at us, killed the foreigners and took us hostage,” says … Continue reading Inside Bangladesh’s Night of Terror
sabhanazrashiddiya.com 