Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Alan Jacobs banned laptops (and other internet-enabled devices) from his class. His reason was that his students were getting distracted. My instinctive reaction was to disagree with him: shouldn't he accept the reality of the ubiquitous connected device and adapt his teaching to align with them? Who refers to a book after college anyway (except for ultra-specialized topics)? Don't we just dip into the perfect recall of Google? Then recently, at work, I found it better to learn a new field (pneumatics and mechanical engineering) by taking notes on a book than on my laptop. The laptop was distracting me with every new mail and message. Clay Shirky sums it up perfectly: “Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting.” On the other hand, aren't many teachers bad at teaching? Did any of us ever learn anything from those teachers even in the pre-connected-device-in-every-pocket era? But Shirky brings out a point I hadn't realized (even though it was right under my nos...

Most of my friends will talk about their kids being extremely comfortable with smartphones and iPads. Few of us are worried about that though; at most, we are irritated that kids monopolize those gadgets to the extent that we don’t get to use them! Apart from the obvious benefit of letting kids play with gadgets (the parents get some time off), does Ben Popper’s argument below even make giving the gadgets to kids a good thing? “We’re born with about 2,500 synapses per neuron, but by age three we’ll have around 15,000. From that point the number of neural connections actually begins to decrease...For me, that’s an argument in favor of giving my son access to technology at an early age. If the paradigm for his budding mind is swiping through apps and playing interactive games, he will be geared to build great digital tools. Why would I emphasize spending time with books when they will likely be dusty artifacts by the time he’s a teenager, relics of another age like the telegraph...

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...

All those smart devices seem to have taken the next step. Whether for good or bad is a matter of opinion though. With the falling price of sensors, almost every item can be fitted with one. Add a piece of software, often free, and you could be “seeing social engineering disguised as product engineering”. Huh? Take BinCam, a good old trash bin fitted with a smartphone on the top lid. When you drop stuff into the bin, it takes a pic, sends it to Mechanical Turk where freelancers check if your garbage proves whether or not you really care for the environment! And eventually, your photo appears on your Facebook page…to shame you. At least the BinCam is voluntary, you might say. And the idea is positive: to shame you into being better. Similar ideas include smart scales that tweet your weight online to add pressure on you to stick to that diet; smart medicine bottles that ping you and your doc if you aren’t taking that medication; smart forks that tell you are eating too fast and sma...