Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A few days back, just before boarding her flight to Africa, Justine Sacco, the communications director for InterActiveCorp (IAC) tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” What happened next will make even warp speed seem like a crawl. “A mob with 140-character pitchforks” sprang up, as Nick Bilton described it . Her tweet “set off an avalanche of fury — on Twitter, on Facebook and in the news media across the globe”, as Jeff Bercovici put it . 12 hours later, IAC fired Sacco (12 hours was also the duration of her flight). That’s the pace of the Internet for you. So many others tweet idiotic and offensive things. So why did Sacco evoke such a strong reaction? Mostly because she was not a nobody: “Justine’s professional affiliation with billionaire Barry Diller and his well-known companies made her seem important, not just some random crank; a number of other ill-advised tweets provided fresh fodder and the outline of a caricature; her j...

The second Harry Potter book had this blurb:  “I’ve yet to find a child who can put it down. Magic stuff.” Considering how popular the series became with adults and kids, and made JK Rowling the first billionaire author in history, it’s easy to laugh at that blurb. Only kids can’t put it down? Does magic appeal only to kids? Really? Benefit of hindsight aside, it made me realize that Maurice Sendak was right on how books get (mis)categorized: “I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” JRR Tolkien went a step further and questioned whether even fairy tales are only for children, not adults : “In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”...

The Onion has lots of satirical and/or caustic articles on a variety of topics. Like take this recent article on the insanity of society demanding that people be ambitious (socially, professionally, financially, you name it) even if they are perfectly happy as they are. The article in question is about an imaginary guy named Michael Husmer: “an unmotivated washout who’s perfectly comfortable being a nobody for the rest of his life.” So is he living without creature comforts? Nope, he: “is able to afford a comfortable lifestyle without going into debt.” Is he bored then? Actually, he is quite engaged, just not in pursuits that society approves: “he has nothing better to do than “sit around all day” being an involved member of his community and using his ample free time to follow pursuits that give him genuine pleasure.” How can somebody not want to face the pressure and stress that comes with ambition, one of his friends wondered: “he’s still hanging around the s...

I read this adapted extract from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution , and boy, I am already drooling to read the book. In 2005, Google was already working on its smartphone project. But two years later, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, Google felt like the “iPhone was a kick in the stomach”. Here’s how one of the architects of Android (Google’s smartphone OS), Chris DeSalvo, described his reaction to the iPhone: “As a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’…What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties.” Google’s plans for the smartphone market were based on three points: 1)       Eventually, technology and bandwidth would allow people to surf on the move, via their phones. 2)      Telecom carriers would have to come around to the phone-as-more-than-something-to-make-calls-with view (feels like such an ancient view today, doesn’t it?). ...

In the Internet Age, some complain about information overload: too many mails, tweets, status updates…while others are happy to be in an era where we have access to every conceivable piece of information and point of view, with little or no censorship. Except that both of the above views might just be myths. Or at least that’s the view of these 2 books I will talk about. The first book, The Information Diet by Clay Johnson, argues that since time immemorial there’s been way more information than any one individual can absorb; and thus the only thing that has changed today is the ease of access to information. Now add to that the fact that nobody is forcing you to consume all that information; and the logical conclusion is that the real problem is voluntary information over-consumption! And isn’t over-consumption an easy problem to solve? As the blogger Shane Parrish said: “It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.” But is that the entire reality? Some...

Ed Yang wrote this article about how metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions ; and hence should be used with care. Why we use metaphors is obvious: “Good metaphors can make a complex and obtuse world seem exciting and accessible.” What’s the flip side? Yang points to some study done at Stanford on what kind of measures people advocate as a response to increasing crime. The finding was that the metaphors used to describe crime had a big impact on the responses. Thus people who heard these metaphors: “One common frame portrays crime as a disease , one that plagues cities, infects communities, and spreads in epidemics or waves.” preferred “curative” measures like creating jobs. Whereas those heard a different metaphor: “Another depicts crime as a predator – criminals prey upon their victims , and they need to be hunted or caught .” preferred measures like increased policing and tougher jail sentences. The trouble with metaphors starts when you (mis)apply aspec...

The Internet is changing the language, what Megan Garber describes as “of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language”. Like when it added a new preposition to English: the word, “because” : “Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.” Or take how texting via those chat apps of the smartphone world has converted the “neutral” period (full-stop) into something more aggressive. As Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics, explains : “In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all. In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’” Or take how “LOL” which used to stand for “Laugh(ing) Out Loud” is now increasingly used to denote sarcasm in text. As Lucy Ferriss wrote : ...

Back in 2009, Erick Schonfeld, an editor at TechCrunch wrote: “Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.” That’s pretty much what Twitter and Facebook have done: “The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” Brian Eno describes the stream thus: “The right word is 'unfinished.'...Permanently unfinished.” Or as Alexis Madrigal writes : “No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.” Madrigal explains why this trend has exploded since 2009: “In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things.” But Madrigal feels the trend is now reversing. Why? Because more and more people now feel overwhelmed by the never-endin...

What is MOOC? The short answer: distance education meets the Internet. The slightly longer answer as per Wikipedia: “A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs).” Many top universities are on board and have their own MOOC courses: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon to name a few. But many in education question the efficacy of online education, and ask whether face to face interactions can ever be replaced. Of course, many dismiss their concerns saying that being in the education business, the critics have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So it was kind of amusing to see the tables being turned with a couple of critics of MOOC questioning both the motive...

Jerry Brotton argues in his book, A History of the World in 12 Maps , that mapmaking has always been a contentious topic, from Ptolemy to Google Maps. Or at least that’s what one book review says. Maps always “shaped—and were shaped by—various political, religious and social movements” , says the review. There were 3 maps I found interesting from his list. The first was the eponymous Mercator map, the one we have all grown up from school, named after the Belgian cartographer Gerard Mercator. It was drawn way back in 1569 and has surprisingly never been improved on, despite its obvious drawback. As a less than 7 year old, I remember a jigsaw puzzle of the world’s map that made it look like Greenland was bigger than India! Wikipedia goes one further and points out that : “Greenland takes as much space on the map as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times greater.” The cause of such severe distortion is obvious: The Mercator map attempts to “chart the contours of ...

Their first phone, X1i, cost Rs 2,150 and was a big success in rural India. Today, they are the 3 rd largest seller of mobile phones in India overall; and 2 nd largest in the smartphone segment. Their revenue for the first 6 months of this year was Rs 3,100 crores and they hope to be a billion dollar company this year. That company is Micromax, the Gurgaon based Indian company. In a (mobile) world dominated by Samsung and Apple, what is Micromax’s strategy? They are OK “ to buy technology that is one generation old”. Which isn’t as bad as it sounds, given that “a generation in the smartphone space is often measured in just a few months” , as Forbes puts it . Then they offer “‘good enough’ options for a fraction of the price charged by the ‘premium’ products.” Good enough at low prices. That approach makes perfect sense in a country like India that is very price conscious. Add to that the fact that only 18% of Indians own a smartphone; and you have a huge number who wil...

As a kid getting ready to go to engineering college, I am ashamed to say I barely knew the difference between science and technology (engineering) back then (they don’t ask such questions in the IIT-JEE exam). It took me a few years of being at work to finally get the difference. Or so I thought. Well ok, I was right about the parts I knew but turns out there are other aspects as well. I learnt all this after reading a few excerpts from the book, Radical Abundance , by Eric Drexler. First the part I already knew: “Scientific inquiry expands the scope of human perception and understanding; engineering design expands the scope of human plans and results.” Ok, that’s it: that’s all I knew. Drexler goes on to point out that in real life, the two fields often mix: “Engineering new instruments enables inquiry, while scientific inquiry can enable design.” and it is because of this intertwining of the two which can often “obscure how deeply they differ.” So what is this ...

When it comes to things related to the Internet, European governments and bureaucrats live in a dream world of their own, totally disconnected from reality, the power of technology and the ingenuity of algorithms. The latest instance is the European Parliament’s attempt at data protection on the Net. The easy (and naïve) approach to data protection would be to ban almost any form of data sharing. But the EU is not that dumb. They know that data sets can be mined for useful patterns in lots of fields, like in healthcare. But here is where the EU is divorced from reality: they believe there are such things as anonymous data and “pseudonymised” data (date where true identifiers have been replaced with pseudonyms). Based on that misconception, they exempted the first category from regulation and subjected the second to milder regulation. But as Seth David Schoen said: “Just because something seems anonymous at first glance, doesn't mean it really is – both because of the ...

The Americans believe that everyone should get equal opportunities. Whether you use or squander those opportunities decides your outcome; and that’s that. The system doesn’t owe or guarantee you success. Of course, even the Americans haven’t managed to implement that. College education is expensive; which is why most students (including Americans) need scholarships. Now deciding who should get a scholarship isn’t easy: the difficulty of identifying the most meritorious kid is obvious (it is so subjective and how much time can you spend with each kid to even and try guess anyway?). So some groups decide to base it on money, money that the kid (or his parents) has. And contrary to what you might expect, many of these groups give scholarships to the relatively richer ones (middle class instead of poor). Why? Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic : “"After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce afflue...

Ben Thompson, author of the blog Stratechery , found this question on Quora , asking who he was. He was bit irritated with the question (I’ll get to why in a minute): Re-read that question again: the person asking the question knows Thompson to be the author of the blog, which, by the way, is how Thompson wants to be known:  “I’m a person, I put myself out there on this blog, and I trust that what I write represents me well.” But that’s never enough, is it? Thompson again: “I’ve been quoted as “Microsoft’s Ben Thompson,” as “former Apple intern Ben Thompson,” and “batshit crazy Ben Thompson.” I actually wish the third were true, because, unlike the first two, the descriptor rests on what I write, not on some sort of vague authority derived from whoever is signing my paychecks.” A variant of the Thompson’s point is why authors often write anonymously.  As Maria Bustillos explained : “Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a...

Europeans love to dismiss Americans as being dumb. True, many Americans are dumb; sometimes unbelievably so (just check out the stuff on TV). But there are also many super-smart guys, both in the pure sciences as well as in the world of business and engineering. A.A.Gill did the math(s): “America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined.” And then there have been companies like Ford, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook that have invented whole new worlds at varying times in history. I guess America has the smartest and the dumbest. Europeans don’t like shades of grey; they like to stereotype entire groups of people. And not just in recent times. Gill again: “It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual.” Europeans accuse Americans of not knowing satire or irony. Gill dismisses that as Euro love for indirect techniques of communication: “What Americans value a...

Pope Francis is ruffling feathers within the church. For instance, can you believe he said this in an interview? “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense.” Or that politics: “ has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres.” Imagine the implication on laws on homosexuality or abortions in the West! And then the Pope criticized capitalism: “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose…(the absolute autonomy of the marketplace) reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. ” That criticism reminded me of this 1999 article by Harvey Cox , a professor of divinity at Harvard University, who compared religion (Christianity in particular) with capitalism. This line sums up his...