Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We have unbelievably huge amounts of data about pretty much everything that is getting generated, stored and tracked. And yet intelligence agencies don’t seem to be able to put all that data together to nail terrorists before they strike. Why can’t they connect the dots, we ask? And in the question lies the answer, according to some. Huh? Sound very Zen? We use the wrong metaphor (connecting the dots), then take that metaphor to its logical conclusion (a figure should emerge), and are surprised when real life doesn’t imitate our childhood books! When put like that, it does seem pretty stupid, doesn’t it? As Bruce Schneier wrote : “In real life, the dots can only be numbered after the fact…In hindsight, we know who the bad guys are. Before the fact, there are an enormous number of potential bad guys…The television show "Person of Interest" is fiction, not fact.” Besides, with so many “dots”, Schneier says it is very tough to know which dots form the “image” and w...

Ever wondered why the cell phone doesn’t have a dial tone? I found the reason in an excerpt from the book, The Idea Factor . Phil Porter made a deliberate decision (and a radical one for the time because it was the opposite of what people were used to) that a cell phone shouldn’t have a dial tone. So what were Porter’s reasons? First, he didn’t want the caller to feel rushed while making a call. Think of how we scramble to dial the numbers on the landline, before the dial tone “expires” and you’ll know what Porter was trying to spare you. Second, this approach cuts down on the time that a phone uses a connection: instead of starting from the moment you picked up the receiver, the connection happened only when you pressed Dial. Better bandwidth usage, in engineering speak. As it turned out, the second reason is what allowed for SMS’s to come in later. How’s that, you ask? It’s because in SMS’s too, you type first, press Send later. To appreciate this point, imagine hav...

Everyone uses Google Maps: we realized (even more) how good it is after the disaster that was Apple Maps. In the US, of course, Google uses its famous self-driven cars to go around places and collect data to populate the Maps and Street View databases. But in places like India?  Jessica Pfund, Google’s Maps Product Manager, said: “We couldn’t buy maps in India. It wasn’t a question of money; there were just no maps to buy… Naturally, our engineers (in India) really wanted their hometowns to appear on the map. ” Which is why came up with Google Map Maker, an online tool to allow users to fill in maps with landmarks and details. This was way back in 2008 and India was among the first countries where it was launched (It was launched in the US in 2011 and in the UK only a few months back! Well ok, in those countries the maps were already so good, but still…). It works Wikipedia style, with users correcting other users. But do Indians actually fill in such maps? Do enough of u...

On June 11, the US navy announced that they would stop transmitting internal communications in all-caps. Because lowercase messages, they said, “provide a more readable format”. It took them this long to figure that out? And then they wonder why there are jokes about Military Intelligence being a contradiction in terms? Ok, so the rest of us non-military folks (“civilians” in military speak) always knew that convention says that if it’s all-caps, then you must be screaming. But have you ever wondered whether all-caps is ever a good thing? In the sense that all caps might convey the message better than the regular style? Lindy West says YES (that’s in all-caps, in case you missed it). Given below are a few reasons. First off, they convey what you really feel: “I LOVE THE UNFILTERED, UNAPOLOGETIC PUSHINESS OF ALL-CAPS. I LOVE THE BREAK FROM PROPRIETY. I LOVE THE HONESTY OF IT. I LOVE LETTING LOUD FEELINGS BE LOUD.” Which is why, she argues: “ALL-CAPS ARE A VITAL LITERARY ...

Remember those 1 liners or phrases that you see on pretty much every book that praises it to the skies? “Terrific book…witty and thought provoking”. “Combines readability with meatiness”. The publishing industry calls them blurbs. I used to wonder how the first edition of a book could have any blurbs? How had anyone managed to read it before it was published? Well, the answer is kind of obvious. As Scott Adams described it: “A typical blurb process might involve picking some famous authors in the success field and asking my publisher to ask their publishers to ask the famous authors to 1) Read my book, and 2) Write glowing reviews.” Adams felt this process was wrong and too made up. Which is why he decided on a new approach for his own upcoming book, How to Fail Almost Every Time and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life . He decided that he would allow readers of his blog to come up with blurbs for his book before the book was released! But wait a minute, surely his ...

If you are tired of all those social networking apps that keep you up to date on every imaginable activity your friends have been doing, then you’ll enjoy the idea of these 2 apps: the first one is asocial, the second one mixes things up (literally). Apps like Foursquare keep track of where your friends are. Scott Garner devised this app called “Hell is Other People” that uses Foursquare data to tell you about places to avoid so that you don’t bump into your friends! The app is designed for days you want some peace and quiet; or for people who just want to be left alone. Garner says the app is “partially a satire” on social media. The second app is Instapuzzle. This one is aimed at people who get tired of staring at the endless stream of photos everyone seems to post via Instagram. How many filter applied photos can you see before you drift off, right? Instapuzzle allows you to select a photo and a difficulty level. It then splits the photo and scatters the pieces. You job i...

Google just bought Waze, the company that developed an app that warns you about traffic jams and suggests diversions to take. In case you were wondering how that is any different (or better) than what you might hear on the good old radio, then these lines by Jeff Jarvis should help understand: “ A long-ago colleague of mine said his rule was to go wherever the radio traffic reports said there was a jam because (a) by the time they found out about it, the jam was gone and (b) every other idiot was listening to the radio and avoiding that spot themselves.” So how does a phone app like Waze address these two problems? Well, Waze solves the first problem – delay in identifying jams – by collecting data from all those smartphones in real time and then inferring where the jam is. How? If lots of people on a route slow down or barely appear to move (stop and go traffic), then the Waze servers infer there must be a jam. And warn the others to take alternative routes. Since your mov...

As a kid, my brother and I loved playing with Lego. Best toy ever, in my opinion. It’s been ages since I played with them last, which is perhaps why I missed this trend wrt Lego “minifigures” (that’s the term used to refer to those toy figures of Legoland; popularly shortened to “minifigs”). Apparently, the trend started in 1989 as per some study at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand: the minifigs shifted more and more to “scowling, frowning or snarling rather than smiling” . Have a look at this pic to see what they mean: Wait, did I just say university study? Yup, that’s not a typo. Apparently, play is too important to be left to the kids (to paraphrase that famous saying about wars and generals). As this Telegraph article put it: “The report is full of scatter graphs and tables that show the “results of the linear curve estimations across the six emotion categories” and a comically obtuse k-cluster analysis of spacemen versus cavemen characters… I kid...

My almost 2 year old daughter just started showing her cave-woman instincts: she has taken to mural art, aka scribbling on the walls. I guess we just joined the ranks of “those whose children have destroyed the walls of their home with crayon doodling” (methinks one should leave doodles to Google, but hey, when do kids listen, right?) Anyways, her scribbling is why I liked this article about a new type of paint called IdeaPaint. The intent of IdeaPaint is to let you (age no bar) scribble on the wall. Goodbye whiteboard, hello wall: that could well by the byline for their future ads when they sell it to corporate customers (which they already do). (Now you see why I needed my daughter’s vandalism to appreciate this paint? Without her, it would have sounded like work related stuff and I would have moved on). So what’s wrong with whiteboards? IdeaPaint’s William Belknap answers: “(it is simpler) instead of buying a whiteboard and all that goes with it, things which are rep...

There’s that famous observation that if someone tells you to not think about an elephant, then that’s the exact thing that will leap to your mind. Pretty much all of us know that’s how our minds work, right? Reverse psychology is the technical term for the phenomenon. Except, it turns out only we humans know that. The Gods apparently didn’t know. At least not the Western ones anyway. Remember what they told Eve in the Garden of Eden? Eat anything except that apple. No prizes for guessing what she was going to do, is there? She didn’t need a snake to “make her do it”; she’d have done it anyway. That’s just the way we humans are wired. Or take that tale about Pandora’s box: the Gods gave her a box and tell her to not open it. Yeah, like she was not going to let curiosity or rebellious tendencies get the better of her! Almost makes you think that the (Western) gods were either dumb or wanted some wicked fun, doesn’t it? Take your pick which reason it was: it’s kind of like...

The existing QWERTY keyboard was designed in the typewriter era to slow down typing. To prevent the typist from hitting keys too fast; because then they would get jammed. Ok, pretty much everyone knows that. But now the typewriter is dead. And we have moved to the electronic keyboards on our touchscreens. Keys jamming is no longer a problem; and yet we stick to the QWERTY. Because everyone is familiar with it already, we don’t want to rock the boat and switch to a more efficient layout. So are we doomed to stick with the QWERTY because of legacy reasons? There is hope in the horizon. After all, we now live in the brave new world of apps for (smart)phones. Where developers write apps for free. Where users are willing to try something new; and drop it if it isn’t good. No money changes hands; so both developers and users are willing to experiment. Including experimenting with the (touchscreen) keyboard. Notice how many smartphone users use only their (two) thumbs to type?...

Nicholas Carr (he of the “ Is Google making us stupid? ” article fame) just released his new book, The Big Switch . In his blog , he wrote an essay adapted from one of the chapters of the book. He starts with what he seeks to question, the notion that the Internet is the great emancipator: “The Net is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” declare Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their new book,   The New Digital Age . “Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips.”… Seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the Web was routinely portrayed as a new frontier .” Then Carr gets down to business, calling the above notion “at best a half-truth and at worst a delusion ”: “The Internet in particular put enormous power into the hands of individuals, but they put even greater power into the hands of companies, governments, and other institutions .” He may be partly right about that; but he gets his history al...

I have been a huge admirer of George Orwell ever since I read Animal Farm . Then there was 1984 , which was so eerily prophetic that it made you wonder if the guy had managed to build a time machine… Orwell also wrote a famous essay, “Politics and the English Language” , in 1946. His argument went pretty much like this: “…the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.” But this may be the one time that Orwell got it wrong. Or possibly a case where politicians and corporate bigwigs wised up and started achieving the same goals as before by being clear ! Huh? Take a complex issue. Use a simple (ideally catchy) phrase to describe your view on that complex issue and bingo! It is memorable, hence likely to be repeated; it sounds like common sense, and hence accompanied with that sense of obviousness. Did I just define sound bytes? Isn’t that exactly what you hea...

Statistics is all about analyzing data for patterns. In the past, the size and quality of the sample set was critical. Sometimes, even a problem. Enter Big Data. Or as Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger wrote in their article, The Rise of Big Data wrote: “But if we collect all the data -- “n = all,” to use the terminology of statistics -- the problem disappears.” Sure, “n = all” is an exaggeration. But it is true that the size of data samples has gone through the roof over the last decade or so. And no, Big Data doesn’t just refer to the size of the data: “Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it “datafication.”” A few examples would help understand “datafication” better: take location and friendship. They got datafied due to GPS and Facebook respectively! And if datafication is here, can algorithms be far behind? Google Translate is based on statisti...

Everybody tells white lies. We usually don’t feel bad or guilty about them. But do we have the right to lie ? The question is rooted in free speech. If everyone has the right to free speech, does that also include the right to lie? Outside of committing perjury, that is. An America judge, Judge Kozinski, spoke very well about this: “Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy ("No, I don't live around here"); to avoid hurt feelings ("Friday is my study night"); to make others feel better ("Gee you've gotten skinny"); to avoid recriminations ("I only lost $10 at poker"); to prevent grief ("The doc says you're getting better"); to maintain domestic tranquility ("She’s just a friend"); to avoid social stigma ("I just haven't met the right woman"); for career advancement ("I'm sooo lucky to have a smart boss like you"); to avoid...