Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There have been so many corruption scandals in recent times: the Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh apartments meant for Kargil martyrs, 2G spectrum (mis)allocation, the Karnataka CM & Co’s bribe taking spree. A few people even got sacked in all these scams: Suresh Kalmadi, Ashok Chavan, A Raja. Sure, none of them will ever be found guilty of anything, but even the sacking of such people is a big surprise. Why won’t anyone be found guilty? For one, they’ll just bribe their way out. Also, the prosecutors know they have blood on their hands (and money in their mattresses or Swiss accounts). If not in these scams, they’re guilty in others. So the prosecutors wouldn’t want to open the can of worms by ever imprisoning anyone else on corruption grounds. And even by some miracle if a couple of guys are ever prosecuted with sincerity, how long do you think the verdict will take to come? I’m not holding my breath. If we can’t even complete Ajmal Kasab’s trial 2 years after 26/11,...

Many people complain about being overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s out there today. I never really bought that times-were-simpler-back-then argument but couldn’t articulate why it couldn’t be right. And then I read this article that articulates very well why the information overload complaint is just a myth: “A woman in a farm kitchen had a LOT to consider–just mak­ing a cook­ing fire took con­stant atten­tion, and infor­ma­tion about the kind and qual­ity of the wood, the spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cook stove, the nature of the thing being cooked. The mod­ern cook flips on the burner, and his or her atten­tion, freed up, diverts to other things. She or he has much less infor­ma­tion to deal with. So what appears to us as “too much infor­ma­tion” could just be the free­dom from neces­sity. I don’t have to worry about find­ing and cut­ting and stor­ing fire­wood: I don’t even have to man­age a coal fur­nace. That atten­tion has been freed up f...

Chris Anderson, curator of TED and author of The Long Tail is a smart guy. And his book on the economics of Free makes for interesting reading. In that book, he points out an interesting difference between the physical and digital worlds when it comes to placement of ads and content. Anderson points out that traditional media build a Chinese Wall “between their editorial and advertising teams, to ensure that advertisers cannot influence the editorial e.g. by ensuring that a car ad is not next to a car story or a Sony ad anywhere near our reviews of Sony products.” In the digital world, he points out that companies like Google do the exact opposite: they match ads with content! Having made this observation, he then tries to analyze why such matching is taboo in print but so successful online…and with no loss of credibility? I was surprised Anderson doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. In print, the magazine/newspaper is the content provi...

That’s the statement that sort of summarizes the philosophy of the Internet: “Information wants to be free.” But that’s a mis -quote! Rather, it’s just a part of what Stewart Brand said more than 25 years back: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” Brand’s reaction to the misquote being so popular today that most people don’t even know the actual statements is quite interesting. He says it happens to memes : they propagate in their most efficient form, whether that was what was intended or not. I suspect that since most people want information to be free (who wants to pay for Britannica when you can get it for free on Wikipedia ?), so we’ ve just latched onto the part that suits us. Guess y...

Remember that James Bond movie, “ Tomorrow Never Dies ”? In it, a media mogul stages international incidents involving the world's superpowers. In one such staged incident, a deliberately messed up GPS system causes a British war vessel to think they’re still in international waters when in reality they’ve entered Chinese waters. Sounds very far fetched, right? Think again. Last week, Nicaraguan troops crossed the border into a neighbouring Costa Rican town. The funny thing in all this is that it wasn’t a planned invasion at all. Rather, the “ accidental invasion ” happened because the Nicaraguan troops used Google Maps , which mistakenly said the territory belonged to Nicaragua! Apparently, Google is human after all: it errs.

I love Star Trek . I liked the TV series far more than any of the movies based on the same though. I found it quite amusing when Spock was quoted in a Texas Supreme Court ruling recently! Check out the relevant part of that ruling: “ Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan 21 )…” And Footnote 21 says: “ See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities . Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book's opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock's famous line from his moment of sacrifice: "Don't grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of th...

Though I’m in the technology-does-way-more-good-than-harm camp, I agree with Annalee Newitz’s comments on the unpredictable impact of any technology over the long term. Her point even covered technologies that save lives. Like penicillin. Sure, it saved a whole lot of lives but then went on to “create problems we'd never imagined”. How? It forced bacteria to mutate to survive which in turn causes very hard to cure infections today. As per Newitz, this is the litmus test question one should ask when hearing the predicted impact of any technology: “Does the narrative promise you things that sound like religion?” In other words, do the predictions promise some kind of Utopia? If the answer is Yes, then we should be wary. On the other hand, this kind of predicted impact of any technology is likely to be closer to the truth: “… if that narrative deals with consequences, complications, and many possible outcomes, then you're getting closer to something like a potenti...