Viswanathan K's Thoughts

It’s possible to translate stuff from one language to another without having any clue about either language involved! After all, that’s how Google Translate operates: it’s just an algorithm (albeit an extremely good one) that mines a huge amount of articles in different languages to create its word/phrase map. Which it then uses to translate. No human in involved in translating anything. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough for most purposes? Absolutely, yes. I remember this article a long time back by Kevin Kelly on whether this “Google approach” could be applied to science as well: have an algorithm look at all the data we get from all the sensors, satellite pics and Large Hadron Colliders of the world. If the algorithm is smart enough, it’ll come up with patterns of nature and even make predictions. Of course, that approach doesn’t lead to any understanding or comprehension, but do we even need to worry about understanding, Kelly asked? I always felt the answer to that question w...

Everyone’s familiar with apologies that are not sincere or don’t sound sincere. But have you run into a situation where the sincere apology itself offended others? If not, check out what happened to Starbucks in Argentina. Some time back, Starbucks ran out of the imported cups with the Starbucks logo in Argentina. So the company decided to use blank cups made locally. They also decided to proactively apologize via Facebook and Twitter: “We apologize, as due to a temporary supply shortage, some shops are using national cups and sleeves. Salutations.” The choice of wording couldn’t have been worse, could it? It sounds as if they are apologizing for using Argentine cups, doesn’t it? No wonder the reaction was angry and, unsurprisingly, went viral on Twitter. And so Starbucks ended up apologizing for the apology. Starbucks was trying to be upfront and transparent about the situation; instead it just got into more trouble. I guess that’s why they say that no good deed goes unpunished!

Take these examples of companies that dreamed up ideas, technologies and even prototypes but then didn’t make products of them: -          Did you know that Nokia came up with a phone with a color touchscreen set above a single button? 7 years before the iPhone ? But they never started making those phones. And now the same Nokia is being driven closer and closer to bankruptcy by the very same smartphone that they didn’t productize. Is that ironical or what? -          Nokia also came up with a tablet computer with a touchscreen in the late 90’s. Again, they didn’t make the product finally. Apple came up with the same class of products (iPad’s) years later and still dominates that market. -          Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready way back in 1998. Bill Gates shot it down. A decade later, Amazon made the Kindle. -        ...

Ever since our daughter came into our lives, I started taking a lot of photos of her. Pretty soon, I got bored of them and started playing around with photo editing tools on the phone. Like applying all those Instagram filters. When I tired of them, I found other free phone apps like Be Funky, PicsArt, AfterFocus and ColorSplash that provided other features/effects. Soon enough I began to feel that the phone is too inconvenient to do serious (aka realistic) editing because of its small size. And so I found equivalent PC based tools, like GIMP. The PC tools offer a lot finer control compared to the phone: that in turn allows for a lot better special effects. Like this colour with black & white pic: Recently, one of my friends showed me a tool (Photoscape) that makes it easier than ever before to clone parts of one photo onto another (Of course, even then you need practice and patience, but still, this tool allowed me to do a whole lot of things not possible before).  Like tak...

I use Wikipedia a lot, but I never felt that the topics (I mean the topics, not the content) were mostly male-centric. Then again, I am a guy, so I wouldn’t notice such a thing even if it hit me with a sledgehammer. Anyways, it came as a surprise to find this article say that Wikipedia had topic bias! It all started off with a question to the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, as to how even esoteric topics that only men care about, like the over 100 Linux variants, get covered whereas some “some fluffy girl topic” (like make-up) or Kate Middleton’s wedding gown get voted off the site as being irrelevant. Wales responded that he personally believed that they should keep the article on Kate’s gown because of the dress’ presumable long-term effect on fashion. Well ok, such examples trivialize the issue (as one comment said, “I really see this idea that keeping this article does something to remedy the gender imbalance here to be facile at best and insulting at worst.”). But look ...

“For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page.” -          WSJ article e-Book readers like the Kindle and other reader apps on the iPad and Android can and do track how you read. Whether you read the acknowledgments or skip it. Do you read the book at one sitting or multiple sittings? Did you finish reading the book or did you drop off in the middle? And if you dropped off, was it after the first few pages or half-way into it? All this data is then shared with publishers who assess which styles hold the reader’s attention. They help identify which points make a book boring and cause drop offs. The publishers in turn pass that feedback on to authors. Another feature of e-book readers is that they allow readers to highlight passages they like. Or to add their own comments. Amazon even lists the most highlighted parts of books on their site. This is a far bet...

Ever wondered if not being cool can work to your advantage? Sounds nonsensical, right? After all, as teenagers, weren’t most of us dieing to be cool? Aren’t most brands willing to give their soul to be perceived to be cool? And yet, Samsung found itself in the bitter-sweet situation of being exonerated from the charge of violating Apple’s iPad patents because the judge felt that, hold your breath, “(Samsung’s tablets) are not as cool”! I wonder if Samsung is celebrating its lack of coolness, er, the verdict? Or would it rather been seen as cool, and by association to have infringed the patents? I guess you really can’t win them all!

Did you hear that Britain decided to rename Big Ben in honour of their Queen a few weeks back? Really, renaming such a famous monument, that’s the best they could do for their beloved Queen-for-all-time? Many Brits opposed the idea saying the clock tower was too famous to rename. I liked the idiotic government answer to that point: they said they realized most people would still call it Big Ben, and they were fine with that, but the official name would be changed anyway. Wow! And I thought this madness to rename famous monuments and places is an Indian habit. I guess the Brits copied us on this one: the Congress renamed Connaught Place in honour of their king, Rajiv Gandhi, even though everyone continues to call it by the old name. On a somewhat parallel note, I found this blog by Jeff Jarvis wondering whether the smartphone should be called a phone at all amusing. The trigger for his question was that in UK, they did a study to see what people use their smartphones for. And phone c...

I have never liked the idea of making promises. Being a firm believer in free will (and hence an unpredictable future), my rational side is always saying, “A promise is about future actions; how can anyone know for sure what they might or might not do in the future?” And yet so many people make promises. And so many recipients feel good hearing those promises made.  Why, I wondered? As with so many other things, I learnt the answer from Hollywood! In the movie, The Amazing Spider Man , Spidey walks into the classroom late (as usual). When his teacher comments on that, he promises her that it’s the last time he will be late. Upon which she says, “Don't make promises that you can't keep.” To which our hero replies, “But those are the best ones.” And that was the answer to my question: a promise is all about what the listener wants to hear . Before you get all moralistic about it, it’s (usually) a white lie. It’s made to make the receiver feel good. Now th...

One of my aunts, an ex-journalist, recently asked me: “Which magazines and papers do you read?” I struggled to name any particular papers or magazines that I read. I found that weird because I read a lot. Well, ok, I surf a lot (and read a lot as a result). In any case, I wondered why then was I struggling to answer her? It struck me only later that there is such a huge impact that the Internet had made even on how I read ! Here is how that happened. When I surf using the PC/laptop, I almost always go to aggregator sites like Google News and Freshnews.org (aggregator sites show the contents from multiple sites). If I find a headline (and the first two lines from the article) that I like at the aggregator site, I click and then read the entire article. On my phone, I use equivalent apps like Flipboard and Pulse that work the same way: aggregators that I customize to display articles from sites/topics I like. Again, I click on what I like and read the article that I am forwarded to. ...