Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Pedestrians often complain about drivers, well, driving like lunatics. But the other side of the story (there’s always another side) is the dangers that pedestrians create on the road, thanks to the cellphone! It’s almost as if pedestrians think they have what Donald Evans called The App of Invulnerability : “There was of old a myth or fairytale in which the hero acquired a magic cloak which, though light as gossamer, rendered its wearer invulnerable to weapons.  Is there an app we haven’t heard about that bestows invulnerability on its downloader?  With that app – surely an Apple product – you can walk through battlefields, and bullets will bend around you, arrows will be repelled, and spears will turn into flowers.  Lacking a battlefield, you can ignore all traffic signals as you cross even the busiest of highways.  Havoc may reign around you as cars pile up, swerve onto sidewalks, and crash into jersey walls, but no harm will come to you.” That was way ba...

You’ll hear a lot about (lack of) privacy on the Internet, and as expected, Facebook is the lightning rod for much of the criticism on this count. But is that really true? That’s the question Ian Leslie asks in his article, “Too much information” : “But what if the problem isn't Facebook’s privacy settings, but our own?” Is the problem that we have evolved for sharing in tribal societies and our privacy instincts are not suited for the super massive community of the Internet? So what are some of these rules that are now mis-firing? For one, mistrust of authority figures and institutions. Thus, if a government asks for personal data, we cringe and ask why? But if we are offered a chance to share it voluntarily (on the Internet), we don’t think much. This offer of a choice then feeds into our feeling of control. We made the choice, so we feel we must be in control. Except we aren’t, at least, not on the Internet. And even less so on Facebook, where the privacy rules kee...

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and ex-CEO of Infosys, was one of the guest speakers at a tech symposium at my office earlier today. The topic of his talk was not technology, rather, it was about the Aadhaar card initiative that he drives. He started with the reason behind the need for such a card: unique proof of identity that can’t be duplicated . He pointed if you have such a non-duplicatable ID, a lot of systems can be built on top of that. So no, this card isn’t just about getting subsidies on that gas cylinder or for use as a KYC proof. A lot more possibilities exist, but more on that later. So why not build on top of an existing ID system? Like the passport or PAN card? 1)       Those can (and have been) forged. If you try and build a database where some entries are already suspect, nobody knows which part of it to trust! 2)      Most people have nothing to prove their identity anyway, not even birth certificates. Hence biom...

It’s hard to imagine, but there are still large chunks of mankind that don’t have access to high speed connectivity even in the Western world , not just parts of Africa and Asia. Of the world’s population of 7 billion, only 2.7 billion are wired. Obviously, the company that benefits the most when more and more people get online is Google. No wonder then that it is Google that wants to create systems to allow anyone, anywhere to get connected…after all, smartphones are getting cheaper and cheaper. With cellphones, we bypassed laying cables as the way to provide connectivity. And now Google decided to bypass transmission towers (well, ok, they didn’t eliminate transmission towers altogether) by putting up balloons in the sky! Project Loon as it is called, aims at putting a ring of balloons around the globe that act as your wireless network. Plus, of course, a few ground stations to close the loop. And they also install special antennas in those remote areas that they seek to connec...

All that news about the rupee crashing, the West printing money to bailout/restart their economies and the Euro in trouble due to its being the child of an economic but not political union makes you realize how easily your cash loses value because of incompetent or populist government policies. Not trusting the government is why the Internet came up with this virtual currency called the bitcoin. Yup, that’s currency as in the dollar, pound or rupee. Difference is that it was created by the Internet, not a nation. And guess what? It is accepted at many stores world over; and also traded by individuals. Some even use it to buy properties! Of course, such high value trades are a minority, but it gives you an idea that the currency isn’t anywhere as obscure as you might have thought at first. Also, bitcoin accounts can’t be frozen by some government authority. Which, of course, is a double-edged sword. So how do you get bitcoins? First you install the wallet software on your comp...

Recently, Richard Dawkins tweeted: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” If you take the tweet at its literal meaning, Noah Millman’s response would make sense: “Here’s a handy-dandy little fact to throw out there: 20% of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jews. This despite the fact that Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population... At first glance, it would seem that if the “it’s all culture” folks mean what they say, the implication would be that we should all become Jews.” Or you could take Isaac Chotiner’s approach: be tough on Dawkins for such a generalization, but also consider a more nuanced reading of the tweet: “Dawkins was (I think) trying to say that a belief system human beings choose to follow has impaired their development. ” I think the phrase “choose to follow” hits the nail on the head. The United (or Disunited) States of Islam’istan are not exactly kno...

When the government tried to roll back the scope of RTI, there was the expected outrage from “people like us”. But if you thought that ours is the only free society where the government tries such things (Repressive, dictatorial societies won’t even start such an initiative to begin with), think again. The Irish are even more clumsy in how they tried to roll back their equivalent of RTI, the Freedom of Information Bill. Take this clause from their bill: “The FOI body shall take reasonable steps to search for and extract the records to which the request relates, having due regard to the steps that would be considered reasonable if the records were held in paper format ” Let me expand that clause in bold:  The Irish bureaucrat will have the right to reject a request for a record by conducting this wonderful thought experiment: 1)       Assume that records aren’t computerized; instead, assume everything is on paper and filed in cabinets that may be...

I read this awesome Clayton Cubitt article on the implication of the ubiquity of cameras on photography . He starts with how a photographer used to be “like a hunter”: “(Henri) Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter.” That instant when a photographer clicked his camera was the Decisive Moment. And so it used to be a blink-and-you-missed-it world: “One photographer. One lens. One camera. One angle. One moment. Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” Fast forward to the present day: “Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera…With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced ...

Theories that change the world rarely get accepted easily. But you knew that already. Here’s what is new: I used to think that this was a problem only in fields where you have an existing (and usually entrenched) theory. Surely the problem shouldn’t occur if a theory is creating a new field altogether? After all, who would be the old guard who would feel threatened or fight it, right? Wrong. Poor Louis Bachelier learnt that the hard way. He wrote his doctoral thesis in 1900 and his idea was to bring probability theory into the world of finance. The man had invented mathematical finance! So who was getting in the way? Wasn’t this a new field? His thesis evaluators! For 2 reasons: 1)       Maths was emerging from a period of crisis. Starting in 1860, many well-known theorems were shown to contain errors, which led mathematicians to fear that the foundation of their discipline was crumbling. So they chose to be conservative: did it make sense to say...

You know how they tell you to follow your dream? To do what excites you? Or, if that’s not possible, be passionate about what you do. Gets to you, doesn’t it, especially since most people are stuck in, well, boring jobs? Guess what, all that hype about passion might all be, well, hype. Sure, there may be a handful of people who did follow their heart and became hugely successful, but they are such a microscopic minority that it would be very risky to try that course. Or so Scott Adams would have us believe. So what are Adams’ reasons behind his assertion? For one, he argues that passion (often) blinds you to reality. Which, more often than not, will lead to disaster. Of course, it’s passion and being somewhat blind to the obstacles that produces outcomes that change the world. But the success rate for passionate people is low. Of course, this being Adams, he suspects a cynical reason as to why many successful people talk about passion: “Naturally those successful pe...

Places with similar sounding names often caused confusion in geography tests at school. So it was kind of fun to write a blog about real world instances, where such confusion cost more than just a top grade. I remember my friend who was supposed to pick up his wife at the airport when she landed in the US. His wife told him she was landing in New York, when in fact she was landing at Newark! My friend ended up at the wrong airport, but fortunately, Newark is just half an hour driving distance from the more famous city. The next incident was after the Boston marathon bombings this year. The bombers were identified as ex-Chechyans but many Twitter users confused that with the Czech Republic! Very bad publicity for the Czechs, right? So much so that Petr Gandalovič, the Czech Ambassador to the US, had to issue a statement: “The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Feder...

When Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, bought the Washington Post , my cousin sent me this analysis by AnantGoenka , of the Indian Express group. Goenka laments: “The Washington Post brand…once considered priceless, now has a value.” So price equals value? This reminds me of what Mike Masnick wrote in a recent post titled “There Is No 'True' Price For Anything” : “Someone doesn't seem to understand the difference between price and value...Price and value are not the same thing. Just because a price is low, it does not mean the value is low.” Goenka cites the Hindustan Times being valued at Rs 2,250 crores compared to the Post's valuation of Rs 1,550 crore. Is the Hindustan Times more valuable than the Post, he asks?Hello...the Internet has being eating into journalism in the West, not in India...not yet anyway. The pricing reflects the ground realities of the US, not India! Goenka complains about the price not reflecting the brand value (it jus...

If you knew what the future would be, could you change it? Sci-fi loves that question; philosophers argue about it since it impacts the determinism v/s free will debate. And then are people who analyze the question with data! Like Scott Adams, who framed the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters : “Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it.” Adams’ examples of disaster scenarios that got averted because we anticipated them and had time enough to do something about it include the Malthusian doomsday (population would grow exponentially while food production would only grow linearly) and the Y2K problem. I think there is something to Adams observation. Except that he should an additional condition: People should have the freedom to do something about it. To see why that additional condition is needed, think of George Orwell’s prophetic books, Animal Farm and 1984 . Guess what? Communism played...

See that pale blue dot in the pic below? That’s earth as seen from Saturn (900 million miles away), taken by the Cassini spacecraft. And guess what: “It's very difficult to capture pictures of the Earth from this distance because we're so relatively close to the Sun.” When alive, Carl Sagan hoped such a pic might be taken by Voyager. What he wrote in “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” would apply just as much to the Cassini pic: “Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. ” Why the desire? “It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. ” But more importantly: “There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth's surface; not our machines; not ourselves. Fr...

On the one hand, the smartphone has become that all-in-one, Swiss army knife kind of device. It has a calendar, camera, music player, compass...and oh yeah, it can also be used to make calls! That's convergence for you. On the other hand, there's the PC/laptop whose functionality split into multiple devices, each dedicated for just one purpose. So there's the Kindle for reading; iPad for playing games and surfing; smart TV for watching movies and so on. That's divergence. These trends seem strange at first...since they are the opposites of each other. Until, that is, someone tells you the pattern behind what diverges and what converges. Here's how Ben Thompson put it: “The divergent effects of the iPhone and iPad make total sense when looked at from a human-centered perspective. The phone is often the only device you have when out-and-about, so the more capable the better; the iPad is usually used when stationary, when it’s more conceivable to ha...

Would you like a (virtual) personal assistant? Not as a status symbol (obviously not, it’s virtual, who would see it?), but as someone that reminds you of that next item on your to-do list or how bad traffic is on the route you will be taking. Sure, you could search for all that info online, but what if the phone just “knows” what is relevant to you and shows it before you even ask? For free? Mathew Ingram talked about such a service, Google Now, in his article titled “The Google Now dilemma: Yes, it’s kind of creepy — but it’s also incredibly useful” . So how does Google Now work? “…it just collects a broad range of information about you and your activity from your search history, your calendar, your email, web services you are signed into, and so on, and then uses that to show you information that is relevant to what you are doing or where you happen to be.” It does all this only if you give permission for the feature to activate: and unlike Facebook, the default setting...