Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently, there were a lot of articles that tore into Foxconn’s factory at Sriperumbudur, which has a predominantly female workforce. Raghu S Jaitley summarizes the view of those articles: “Restrictive working conditions, poor food, low pay, long hours, semi-skilled work, lack of unions - you get the gist.”   Jaitley then makes an interesting comparison to how the call center and BPO industry was described two decades back: “The mental and physical toll on workers doing the night shift, long hours and low pay, the mental stress of faking an accent and getting abused by customers on the other end of the call, the low quality of work with no future prospects, the packing of workers in a cramped van that was used for commuting to the offices and the unhealthy food served in the canteens. And, of course, no unions.” Sound similar to the Foxconn factory? Fast forward, he says, to present day. BPO’s moved up the value chain, the kind of work improved, and career opportunities ...

Everyone, left or right, feels the Internet is biased. Too much of what we see on Facebook, WhatsApp, Google search results, news sites etc is either biased or outright fake. The problem is even more dangerous with AI chatbots like ChatGPT. After all, you ask it a specific question and it generates an answer. But the answers it produces depend on the kind of input it learns from. And since the data it learns from is biased, what it learns and creates as answers is biased too.   What could be a solution to the bias problem? (I’ll leave fake out of this blog).   Google tried to address the problem in its AI chatbot named Gemini. By finetuning Gemini to give certain kinds of answers, and not give other kinds of responses. The intention was to “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias (e.g. sexism, racism etc )”, wrote Andrew Sullivan. But as Nate Silver pointed out: “Unbiasedness is hard to define .” As if that wasn’t hard enough, “cultural, social and legal norms...

The last chapter in Ed Yong’s book, Immense World , is about the pollution we humans cause and its impact on the creatures around us. My initial though was, god, I hope he isn’t going to end this awesome book on a paternalistic, preachy note about industrial pollution and deforestation…   I needn’t have worried, because Yong does not talk of CO2, global warming, deforestation, poaching and the likes. Wait, so there’s other damage we do? Yes, it involves stuff most of us don’t even realize is a form of pollution too.   The first one is light pollution. Yes, light can be a form of pollution. “It is jarring for us to think of light as a pollutant, but it becomes one when it creeps into times and places where it doesn’t belong.” After all: “Light at night is a uniquely anthropomorphic phenomenon.” Until we lit up the planet, the “daily and seasonal rhythms of bright and dark” were fixed. Physicists knew this problem for long – it prevented them from seeing the un...

A while back, I wrote about how intelligence and errors go hand in hand, and therefore, AI will make mistakes. This is a scary prospect for many people –we are going to entrust and empower AI in more and more matters, but they’ll inevitably make some mistakes?   Rahul Matthan describes an interesting idea on how we can make AI “safer”. By replicating the practice of the airline industry: “It is safer to sit in a plane 10,000 metres above sea level than in a speeding car anywhere in the world. Unlike every other high-risk sector, the airline industry truly knows how to learn from failure.” Individuals and companies learn from their mistakes. But the aviation industry is unique in this matter: “It (airline industry) has put in place mechanisms that not only ensure that the company involved learns and improves, but that those findings are transmitted across the industry so that everyone benefits.”   Therefore, argues Matthan: “If AI is as dangerous as so many p...

In the last but one chapter of Immense World , Ed Yong reminds us of something that was easy to forget given the level of detail each chapter had on one particular sense. Animals’ don’t use just one sense, they use a combo. How do mosquitoes identify the individual to suck blood from? By sensing their body heat and the release of carbon dioxide. Scientists tried masking one of the two signals, and the mosquito would still home in on its, er, food source.   It is obvious why animals use multiple senses: “Each sense has pros and cons, and each stimulus is useful in some circumstances and useless in others.” Beyond complementing each other, senses can also “combine”. In humans, it is rare and we call it “synesthesia” (For people with this ability/condition, sounds have colors, words have tastes and so on). “This perceptual blurring is special among humans, but standard to other creatures.” How do we know this? Because the neurons in their brain that receive signals from o...

The West and the countries that are starting to get richer now, including China and India, don’t agree on how to address the problem of global warming. While everyone agrees that it is a problem, the “what” should be done, “how much” should be done by different countries, and how much the West should “pay” the still developing countries to switch to less polluting (but more expensive) technologies are highly contentious topics.   It was in that context that I was reading Rakshit Shetty’s post on China’s steps. While they, like India, argue with the West on all of the above, the Chinese know they can’t continue doing things they’ve always been done either. China today tops on both fronts: (1) largest CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter; and also (2) largest capacity for renewables and hydroelectricity. It is also the second-largest for nuclear power and expected to be the leader in biofuel production.   The West can talk about putting a limit on how mu...

Magnetoreception refers to the ability to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field for context. A very interesting thought experiment on this topic was to change the magnetic field around such species and see if they changed direction. In practice, that’s easy to do with small animals, but how could one try that with something as big as a whale? Sounds impossible, except nature itself creates such situations, says Ed Yong in Immense World : “The sun periodically throws cosmic tantrums and produces solar storms – streams of radiation and charged particles that affect the Earth’s magnetic field.” Scientists collated 33 years of data on healthy whales that inexplicably stranded themselves onto beaches. They then compared that with the data on solar activity. And bingo! On days with the most intense solar storms, gray whales were four times more likely to beach themselves.   The magnetic field has two components. The first one is inclination , the angle at which the geomagnet...

The semiconductor chip industry is now at the heart of geopolitics. America decided to squeeze two of its adversaries wrt access to semiconductor chips – Russia across the spectrum, and China only wrt high-end chips. To try and counter that, Russia smuggles chips from other countries; and China has decided to accelerate its in-country chip industry.   As Taiwan gets increasingly in the crosshairs of China, it sets off alarm bells everywhere because the world’s highest-end chip manufacturer is a Taiwanese company named TSMC. Cut off TSMC in the event of a war or siege, and the whole world will be impacted. America has therefore been pressurizing Taiwanese companies to move their chip manufacturing to other countries – US, Japan etc. Most wonder about the cost impact of moving things to a rich country, but here America’s geopolitical interests trump cost considerations.   India sees this as an opportunity to take baby steps in the chip manufacturing industry. Job creation aside...

Electricity. Species like the electric eel use it. But for humans to understand them, they had to first discover and learn about the concept of electricity, explains Ed Yong in Immense World ! In fact, the study of electric fish is intertwined with the study of electricity. They inspired the design of the first synthetic battery. And fuelled the discovery that muscles and nerves run on electrical currents.   The electric organ on the fish’s tail is like a small battery. It creates an electric field around the animal. Current flows from one end of the organ, through the water, to the other end. All living things nearby act as conductors and increase the flow of current, while insulators (like rocks) reduce the flow of current. These changes affect the voltage on different parts of the fish’s skin. To draw an analogy with our sense of vision: “Conductors shine brightly… insulators cast electric shadows.”   Electric fishes use electricity for locating things. But, unli...

Everyone agrees on the need to switch to renewable energy sources – away from coal, petroleum etc. For obvious reasons. But, as Rahul Matthan says , any such switch also requires a re-think and overhaul of our power grid.   The major problem with renewable energy, aside from cost? “Renewable energy is notoriously fickle. All it takes for supply to be disrupted is slightly overcast skies or a subtle change in weather that becalms the winds. ” Solving that problem requires effective energy storage solutions to be established. Expecting only the power grid companies to accomplish this won’t work. And, argues Matthan, that is not that the best approach.   What does Matthan have in mind? For example, he says, take electric vehicles. Many of them can store more energy than they need – or maybe, after charging, it didn’t get used. A possible change here is as follows: “We need to… install a bi-directional charging unit so that EVs recharge their batteries whenever ele...

How bats navigate is well known – via sonar (sound waves) and their reflection. Correct, and it involves at least 10 challenges, lists Ed Yong in in Immense World : (1) distance. Sound loses energy quickly, so the bat can only detect objects at 6-9 yards; (2) volume. Bats “scream” at volumes of nearly 138 dB (that’s as loud as a jet engine). It must be deafening for the bat; (3) speed. It needs to send and process sound very quickly. After all, its prey will dodge and move; (4) overlapping. It would be easy to get lost in its own echoes. Which is the first echo? The third echo?; (5) multiple frequencies. Bats sound out at multiple frequencies – lower frequencies help identify large objects; higher frequencies with small objects. There is so much different info coming in via the echoes and it has to be made sense of; (6) adjustments. In the scan mode, a certain combo of frequencies and duration makes sense. Once a prey has been identified, a different combo is needed; (7) clutte...

In a recent post by Mohammed Zeeshan, I saw how viewing everything about India through the prism of Modi can blind you. For example, he can’t see that foreign policy don’t win votes and elections domestically – so that is an area which isn’t influenced (often or much) by domestic politics. Except perhaps in case of Pakistan matters, but that’s an exception.   Zeeshan writes at length about concerns in some pockets of the US foreign policy organization about India, specifically “What are… (Americans) getting out of this relationship?”. The irritants included India’s lack of support on Ukraine or Taiwan; that it won’t fight alongside US forces anywhere (e.g. the Suez/Red Sea now); and the fact that it felt emboldened enough to target a US citizen that they considered a terrorist on American soil.   And yet, America continues to support and woo India, sell higher end military tech, he says. Why, he wonders? More importantly, how long before concerns like the one listed ...

The sense of hearing has some advantages over every other sense, explains Ed Yong in Immense World . Unlike touch, hearing can operate over distances. Unlike vision, it can operate in darkness and through objects. Unlike surface vibrations, it can operate in air and water. Unlike smell, which needs time for the molecules to disperse, sound is very quick. No wonder then that some animals make so much use of hearing.   But sound has a major disadvantage – interference by other sounds. The noise of the bird’s own wings flapping, for example. The owl has solved this problem by making its own flapping almost impossibly quiet or more accurately, the sound its wings make are at a frequency that neither the owl nor its prey can hear.   Some sense organs seem symmetrically placed in all animals. Like ears. Not always. A drawback of symmetrical ears (like ours) is that if a sound hits both ears simultaneously, then the animal cannot make out if it came from above or below. That’...

When the Ukraine war started, the West was sure that their economic countermeasures against Russia would cripple it and force an early end to the war. The EU would stop buying oil and natural gas. Western companies would shut shop in Russia, from Visa and Mastercard to McDonald’s. Russia would be kicked out of the international financial system. Sanctions imposed.   Did things work out as expected? Nope, the Ukraine war continues, and Russia has had positive economic growth despite all Western efforts.   On the other hand, there is the Israel war in Gaza that has been going on for several months, with no end in sight. Despite no sanctions, and in fact, complete support from the West (well ok, America really; and what America says, the West follows), Israel’s economy shrank by 5.2% on a quarter-by-quarter comparison . “The sharp drop was caused in part by the call-up of 300,000 reservists, who had to leave behind their workplaces and businesses to embark on months o...