Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When you transmit a message across any medium (wires, cables, fiber optics, or even wireless!), you have a few common problems. I’ll focus on one of those problems in this blog, namely the optimal way to “encode” the message. Encoding is easy to understand: -          In the digital world, everything is a 1 or a 0. So we need to assign combinations of 1’s and 0’s to mean every letter of a language. Encoding is coming up with such a unique combination of 1’s and 0’s. -          Encoding, however, is not the same as encrypting a message. For example, Morse code has a way to represent every character but it’s not a secret. So we say a message in Morse is encoded but not encrypted. An important practical consideration in coming up with an encoding scheme is to minimize the number of symbols while transmitting a message. Why? Because transmitting more symbols costs more power or more bandwidth or both....

There’s a category of fiction meant for YA (young adult). The age band is 13 to 17 years (too old to be called children; but not yet adults). Increasingly, plenty of adults (not just YA’s) like YA fiction. So much so that Ruth Graham laments : “The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride.” Plenty of such readers admit that they like the “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia” of YA fiction. So what is Graham’s grouse? “YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.” And she also dislikes the simplistic endings: it’s all “weeping or cheerin...

Remember Monica Lewinsky? Long, long ago, she was the White House intern who almost brought down Bill Clinton. A while back, she gave a TED talk titled The Price of Shame . Her “crime”? At age 22, she fell in love with the President of the US. As a result, she got sucked into “the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before”. Really, you wonder? Haven't there been so many other stories/scandals? Lewinsky explains what was different, but first remember this happened in 1998: “Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, or watching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere, and when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first time the traditional news was usurp...

There was a time when this was how science was done, wrote Jon Turney: “Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally.” But now? “All the action is in silicon — not in the world, or even the lab.” ‘Silicon’ as in algorithms, data mining and computer simulations. Kevin Kelly noticed this trend in his 2008 article where he pointed out that Google Translate uses “zillions of datapoints which in aggregate link "this to that" from one language to another”. What does that technique for understanding, he wondered? “If you can learn how to spell without knowing anything about the rules or grammar of spelling, and if you can learn how to translate languages without having any theory or concepts about grammar of the languages you are translating, then what else can you learn without having a theory?” George Box famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Box’s comment became all the more ...

Fine print. The stuff that is hidden in some corner of a contract. Or worded in un-understandable language. Or displayed in the most unreadable font in the smallest possible size. Nancy Kim feels things just got worse in the digital world with wrap contracts, online contracts “that can be entered into by clicking on a link or on an ‘accept’ icon” by citing this example: “In [a] disheartening example of abuse by wrap contract, a company threatened to fine a consumer named Jen Palmer $3500 for posting a negative review about it on a consumer review website. The company, KlearGear, didn’t claim that the review was false; rather, it claimed that her review ran afoul of a non-disparagement clause in the company’s online terms of sale.” But is that really true? I am more inclined to agree with John Kay on his “wisdom” in never bothering to read those “silly reams of terms and conditions” : “(Any company’s) continued success depends on maintaining their reputation with their cu...

A while back, I wrote about how many Asian companies are going “mobile only” and dropping their websites altogether. The primary reasons for that were more people accessed the Net via their phones than PC’s and low broadband speeds. Now Ben Evans gives several reasons why the “mobile only” approach makes sense even for many Western companies ! He starts by referring to the old computer science saying that “a computer should never ask you a question that it should be able to work out the answer to”. And guess what? “A smartphone knows much more than a PC did…It can see who your friends are, where you spend your time, what photos you've taken, whether you're walking or running and what your credit card is.” And so: “The sensors, APIs and data that are available (with permission - mostly) to a service you want to use on a smartphone are vastly greater than for a website isolated within a web browser on a PC. Each of those senso...

Recently, I read these 2 very contrasting articles on the future of museums. The first one was by Eric Gibson. Aptly titled The Overexposed Museum , he described what he considers the omnipresent threat to museums: smartphones and their ability to take photos. But surely, this isn’t a new “threat”, is it? Didn’t we always find hordes of (mostly Japanese) photographers at the Mona Lisa in the pre-smartphone era? No, says Gibson, there is one big difference: the smartphone pic can be “instantly shared”. Combine that with the selfie and the purpose of the museum visit changes, or so argues Gibson: “The most revolutionary innovation of all, however, has been the inclusion of a second, inward-facing lens. It allows a person to hold the device at arm’s length, frame the image in the viewfinder-screen and snap a self-portrait—a “selfie.” The result is the introduction of a new culture of photography into the museum. Rather than contemplating the works on view, visitors now pose next ...

When the mobile revolution happened, it was cited as an example of how places like India and Africa bypassed landlines and went directly to cellphones. Then came the smartphone and it, says Steven Sinofsky , has continued the trend of helping poorer countries leapfrog to the next level: “Smartphones skipped over the PC. Mobile banking skipped over plastic cards and banks.” People like us (who have both PC’s and smartphones) would assume that Sinfosky’s point about smartphones skipping the PC in many countries doesn’t apply to India. Think again. Smartphones drive so much business, and conversely PC’s drive so little of it, that Flipkart has decided to shut down their website within a year. In other words, all their business would be via the smartphone (and tablet) app alone! Michael Adnani, Flipkart’s VP of retail, gives the numbers : “A year ago, 6% of our traffic was coming from mobile. In less than 18 months, that traffic is 10-fold.” 10-fold increase! That’s 60%! Wo...

Jennifer Szalai described guilty pleasures thus: “Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal—genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies … —that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification.” And Shonda Rhimes tells what she doesn’t like about the term: “I object to neither the pleasure, nor the guilt; it’s the modifying of one by the other that works my nerves, the awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.” Neither does Szalai: “What’s even more perverse is that these so-called “guilty pleasures” never involve actual transgression: the bland escapades of Bridget Jones are a guilty pleasure; the depraved orgies of the Marquis de Sade are not.” Ironically the term caught on in the late 90’s right about when the culture wars (high brow vs low brow) were coming to an end and “cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter”. Szalai wonders if the timing actual...

In today’s world, privacy is a buzzword. Most curse Facebook for its impossibly difficult privacy settings (as if that wasn’t bad enough, they change the rules frequently). Then there are the government agencies world over that like to snoop on their enemies and more and more now, even their own citizens. (In case of dictatorships, citizens are the enemies!) So if privacy is such a good thing worth protecting, why is it, asks Scott Adams : “We tend to fear losing our privacy until it's gone. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about.” Adams cites instances where we benefit by giving up our privacy: online dating services (matrimonial sites in India), (even) more relevant search results on Google, deals from shops or sites you frequent, or even (shudder) the joy of having your friends “like” your posts on Facebook! Of course, what many protest is corporate surveillance: Google, Facebook and Twitter lead the pack. Adams anticipates the protest against government survei...