Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Why are so many people so anti-Aadhar? The book, The Aadhar Effect , goes into the reasons, and offer their take on the validity (or not) of those concerns. One concern is that Aadhar has changed from an identity project to an identification project: “An identity project would give power to the people… An identification project empowers the state.” Another concern is that it has morphed from a voluntary system to practically a mandatory system. A third concern from certain social activists is, well, interesting. They worry that Aadhar is changing the process of how a government is made to take care of the poor. Earlier, the model was to push for and get a legal resolution (e.g. an entitled amount or whatever) and then use that as the basis to demand that the government pay up. But with Aadhar, everything changes to a money transfer program. Would this model gradually erode the need for legal resolutions? And if that happened, could governments just stop paying altoget...

Apple is loved; Google is admired more than it is loved; and Facebook? Though used almost as universally as Google, yet it is criticized by almost everyone. No matter what Facebook or Mark Zuckerburg do, people will find a way to find fault. They’ll hate it and still use the site… Take Safety Check, a Facebook feature that is activated in specific areas at specific times when disaster strikes. It allows users to flag themselves as safe after a disaster for friends and family to see. It was activated after the Nepal earthquake and after the Paris attacks and now during the Chennai flooding. But it didn’t activate the same after a recent terrorist attack in Beirut. So why Paris and why not Beirut? Two reasons , said Facebook VP, Alex Shultz: 1)       There was lot of activity on Facebook as events unfolded in Paris (“Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones. ”). 2)  ...

Evgeny Morozov calls Silicon Valley the Teflon Industry : “no matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick”! Part of the reason, he says, is that any criticism gets “framed as a debate over “the digital”: “This is where the “digital debate” leads us astray: it knows how to talk about tools but is barely capable of talking about social, political, and economic systems that these tools enable and disable, amplify and pacify.” And then there’s the lingo of such debates: they involve words like “information”, “networks” and “Internet”. Which, let’s face it, are terms synonymous with progress. And that would make any critic of the same a Luddite! Morozov is also pissed with Silicon Valley’s grand mission statements about changing the world and making it a better place. As if that’s the only thing driving them, not profits. Branding (bragging?) aside, he points out there are privacy risks with the: “data-centric model of Silicon Valley capitalism seeks to conve...

Google succeeded in its mission of organizing the information of the world. So it's now our move: how do we consume more of that information? Speed reading apps claim to help do that, at least on our phones. Many criticize such apps saying that promote reading without any comprehension. But were we really reading and comprehending much even before these apps, asks Alex Balk : “Basically nobody reads anything, the few people who do read things don't read all of it, and the two people who do read all of it are basically the ones tasked with checking for typos, so they are not actually retaining anything anyway.” Harsh, you say? Balk rubs it in further: “You might as well be lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna for all the actual comprehension and retention going on.” Don't bother Googling the Latin sounding parts of the lines above. The phrase has the appearance of an intelligent Lat...

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...

Once India launched its Mars mission, many Western journalists started criticizing the attempt. No, this was “not coming from cheap tabloids, but reputed media houses”, as Balaji Viswanathan points out . So what is their problem? Wrong priorities, they say. Why spend on space exploration instead of addressing poverty and providing toilets, they thunder? Viswanathan counters by pointing out: “Apparently the other countries engaging in scientific research face no poverty... India doesn’t have more toilets, not because we don’t have extra 450 crores, but because of our poor execution of things.” Why the hypocrisy? After all, when NASA or the Europeans go to space, Western news doesn’t ever read: “NASA begins its moon mission despite failing to manage hurricane relief” or “European Space Agency launches a satellite despite the inability to control religious riots in Paris and Tottenham, London” Perhaps it is racism: when the Aussies launch, it apparently makes sense. Bu...

At school, you’re told about C14 dating and how it is used to date ancient humans and their tools. So it came as surprise to learn about all the questions and criticism that surround the accuracy of this dating technique. But first, one needs to understand a bit more about the background of C14 than what’s usually taught. And the first step in that path is to learn how C14 is produced in the first place. The short version is that cosmic rays bombard the atmosphere with enough force to produce C14. And this is also where the first criticism of C14 dating starts: the earth’s magnetic field influences how many cosmic rays are deflected away from earth. Which in turn influences the amount of C14 that is produced. And here’s the kicker: the earth’s magnetic field changes over time ! In other words, the amount of C14 at different periods of time varies. So how do you know the amount of C14 that was there in a sample that’s 20,000 years old v/s 3,000 years old? When an item is...

Many Indians were upset with an article in Time magazine criticizing Indians. Apparently, so many Indians voiced their unhappiness with the article that both Time and the author, Joel Stein, posted apologies (You can see them at the end of the article). For a change, it wasn’t about the IT folks who “steal” American jobs. Rather, it was a criticism of Indians who live in the US. Or more specifically, the ones who live in one city: Edison, New Jersey. Most Indians familiar with the US know of Edison for that very reason. But hey, let a white guy say the same thing and we are up in arms! As long as we are spoken (and thought) highly of as the smart doctors and software engineers from India, we are very lapping up the complements. We love it when the Americans “ assumed all Indians were geniuses ”. Then, says Stein, some of those “geniuses” in Edison started bringing in their “ merchant cousins ”. Who in turn brought in their “ even-less-bright cousins ”. And then he says, “ we started...