Minority Report using Internet!

Man! Some startling facts about privacy by Google's Eric Schmidt.

"If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go."

"Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos! People will find it's very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot...But society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content."

Shivers!

Solar Energy for Rural India

Harsh Hande, is the CEO of Selco a solar energy company trying to work on spreading light across swathes of rural india through solar batter. The profile of the company's work in NYT is impressive. Great to hear of such a positive effort being highlighted.

End of Blogging!!!???

Wtf? I just started to blog and the Economists has declared that blogging is dead. The reason is that it is just becoming another mainstream media activity. Some of the early pioneers of blogging have stopped because as they have grown popular and well-read, the activity has lost the personal touch for them. Worse, some of the big companies like gawker which employs bloggers is even laying off bloggers!

Just a while back, I was arguing against Sir Vidia's thesis that books are dead due to internet and now this! Atleast, books have been around as a dominant medium for few centuries, but blogging is just about a decade old.

Well, I dont buy this. Blogging is not dead, atleast for me. Infact, I think it is only just beginning to grow. Thats because, I think, blogging has the potential to replace or augment social networking sites like orkut and facebook. Already, in the more highly literate and writing section of the web, communities of bloggers are growing who regularly read and comment each others' work. In this way, blogging can bring together people having similar interests but seperated by geography. 

Ofcourse, it might be that blogging might not be as commercializable as book publishing but if there is sufficient interest, some innovative idea can come to make money out of this as well.

To the Moon!-II

India's unmanned moon explorer Chandrayaan is now orbitting around the moon. This seems to have been the most tricky part of the operation though ofcourse most of the non-technical people had no clue.

A relieved  Nair said today's operation was the "most crucial moment" in the mission."We have done it," he declared.
"For the last 20 minutes, almost all our hearts were at a standstill," Nair said immediately after the the challenging manoeuvre was carried out. 

Related post : To the moon!

Two Coronations

In the space of two days, we got to know who is going to lead the world's most powerful democracy and newest. Barack Obama will become the next President of the United States of America and Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck will  be the new King of the Bhutan in South Asia.

Bhutan's experiments with democracy is unusual in the sense that it is top-down instead of bottoms up. The previous King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, 52 had decided that Bhutan should change with the rest of the world and adopt a better political structure. But he was concerned with any rapid change disrupting this highly traditional Buddhist Kingdom. There was a lot of protest by the people when he announced his decision to convert Bhutan to a constitutional monarchy (maybe like Great Britain in the future). He announced elections where two political parties campaigned on almost similar pro-monarchy agenda. As the next step, he announced the handover of his post to his eldest son and hence the coronation.

These seem to be good times for democracy in the South Asian neighbourhood and would be interesting to see how the little kingdom evolves under the new 'tyrant'.

Local Talent

To the moon!

Within the next two hours, ISRO will launch India's unmanned mission to moon. The probe called chandrayaan will carry equipments for scientific study of lunar environment. It is an expensive and ambitious effort for a country grappling to provide food for a big part of its population. Hope everything goes well.

Update: Launch Success!

Amen

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day to highlight the issue of global poverty. I should post something but since I do not have anything to say, I will just point to my previous post.

They are not too exciting or ground breaking but they are mine :)

http://neomilieu.blogspot.com/search?q=poverty

Coelho on future of Book

Paulo Coelho gives his views about the future of  book in this beautiful and thought-provoking essay.

Guajrat and NRIs(Macaccas)

The western state of Gujarat in India is going for polls and the ruling BJP government headed by Mr. Narendra Modi is trying to get re-elected. Modi is a polarizing leader with strong supporters and virulent opposers. But this speech by Modi goes way above the limit.

So what does that have to do with me, an NRI? Well firstly, Gujarat is the home state of nearly 40% of NRI's atleast in the USA. But apart from that, this again provides a justification for posts like these and these, where NRI bloggers have attacked the record of freedom in India and they have been opposed by other NRI bloggers for being armchair critic.

While I do agree that just because someone is an armchair critic, his arguments cannot be trivialized but I also feel that it is understandable for them to be given less credibility. And the sad thing is that this issue is indeed very important and the recent Gujarat speech is a good example of that.

As like countless other NRIs, I came over to America not looking for more freedom, but for opportunity (economic and otherwise). So, it does seem a bit silly to criticize India and say that we won't go back because of lack of freedom. I think that both India and US have their share of problems in this regard and neither is superior to the other. Though life in US seems to be infinitely more comfortable (as it is in countries like Singapore, Malaysia etc).

There are problems aplenty in India. The question is whether to remain an armchair critic or do something about it.

Research on reservation in India

Researchers from Princeton University and the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies have published findings which show that caste-based discrimination exists in job opportunities in private sector in India. More of the story here.

An interesting part of the news article was-
The studies, however, cast some doubt on whether, without government intervention, the self-interest of theoretically economically "rational" recruiters, who would want to minimise wage bills by recruiting from the widest possible pool of qualified talent, would be sufficient to correct the problem.

This argument has been given even for the affirmative action against women and minorities. It basically says that if having diversity in work place helps an organization, then organization doing that will become fitter and over time will become more successful and this trend will come in automatically without legistlation.

While this argument is appealing from a darwinian point of view, there is some amount of subtelity involved. Maybe this might be better explained by someone with more experience in genetics but I would still try to give my understanding.

While I think that there is some benefit which comes out of diversity in workplace, but I think ultimately success is much more strongly dependent on people (irrespective of their background). So diversity will not per-se give organization fitness advantage. But what it will do, is that it will give chance to someone extremely gifted from that background to work in a conducive environment. So I think that affirmative action or reservation gives the society an opportunity to sample its population more uniformly so as to throw up one talented individual.

These arguments are making me more convinced of the need for affirmative action or reservations for long term benefits of the organization. And they might have to be legistlated in.

OLPC

Prof. Nicholas Negroponte might be one of the most important names that many of us might not have heard of before. He is a professor at MIT, who had a role in pioneering many of the technologies like wireless connectivity etc which now seem ubiquitous.

His latest effort the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is highly commendable as it tries to use commerce to raise money for education of the poorest children around the world.

I wish I could buy one of those XO laptop but seems to be a bit over my budget at the moment.

Depressing news on the social front

For all the good economic news coming from India, there are nothing too positive happening on the social front. Education is still not reaching the masses in an effective way.
The recent report of UN puts this in quantitative terms. More on this on rediff.

A relevant part -
"It will not be correct to say that the illiteracy rate has not been reduced despite major schemes such as the National Literacy Mission and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan," the minister said.

Train of dreams!

This story in the IHT describing a travel in the third class of Pushpak express serving the poor migrants from Indian villages to mumbai is an interesting read. The story of hopes and sufferings that the migrants have to go through is certainly something which inspires countless bollywood movies.
Hope President Kalam's PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas) initiative is strengthened.

Energy needed

Tom Friedman writes in the International herald tribune about the experiments underway in rural India to make the benefits globalization available. He points out that the major stumbling block right now is the energy/electricity availability.

Kind of makes the US-India nuclear deal seem more urgent.

"The trouble with India"

A well thought article a lot of it being what we know already. Infrastructure should be India's top priority, but it shouldnt be at the cost of social sector reform. Thats what even Chandrababu Naidu has learnt.