Rahul GaitondeSiva Prasad Cotipalli from the class of 2005 at IIM Kozhikode, my alma mater, is the founder of dhanaX, an India-specific person-to-person money-lending platform (read a profile of dhanaX here).
Siva has been made a TED Fellow this year. The purpose of the TED Fellowship is to “bring together young world-changers and trailblazers who have shown unusual accomplishment and exceptional courage”.
David Brooks spent time with the best and the brightest students at Princeton University and found some surprising (and disconcerting) things about the character of “America’s future elite”:
Today’s elite kids are likely to spend their afternoons and weekends shuttling from one skill-enhancing activity to the next. By the time they reach college, they take this sort of pace for granted, sometimes at a cost. In 1985 only 18 percent of college freshmen told the annual University of California at Los Angeles freshman norms survey that they felt “overwhelmed.” Now 28 percent of college freshmen say they feel that way.
But in general they are happy with their lot. Neil Howe and William Strauss surveyed young people for their book Millennials Rising (2000); they found America’s young to be generally a hardworking, cheerful, earnest, and deferential group. Howe and Strauss listed their respondents’ traits, which accord pretty well with what I found at Princeton: “They’re optimists … They’re cooperative team players … They accept authority … They’re rule followers.” The authors paint a picture of incredibly wholesome youths who will correct the narcissism and nihilism of their Boomer parents.
From April 2001. These undergraduates were in the middle of an amazing economic boom – just after the technology-fuelled boom of the past 5 years and just before the financial services for the next 5.
The article is massive – several thousand words – but it qualifies as a must-read for its depth, insight and clarity in writing.
The popular, quick, fast, small, mobile phone browser gets a shiny upgrade. Now has tabbed browsing, Google Chrome-like speed-dial for most-used sites, a password manager. Also pretty user interface touch-ups.
The BBC has made a collection of episodes from the hugely popular Tomorrow’s World programme available online. Easily my most-watched (non-cartoon) show in the early to mid-90s.
AMD says it will give up the decades-old industry practice of marketing computers with numbers and jargon, moving to a simple system based on how people use their computers, not how the industry manufactures them.
The old tradition of flogging 220 different combinations of A.M.D. chips has been traded in and replaced with three categories of PCs: See, Share and Create systems (the designations roughly line up with “good,” better” and “best”).
I guess those categories mean computers for browsing, computers for playing movies, music and games, and computers for multimedia processing (creating movies, photoshopping and suchlike).
At Intel too, marketers say they will now attempt what Apple has been doing since at least 1984:
“We have been looking at the automotive industry,” said Ms. Conrad. “Computers have become an emotional purchase like cars. We’re getting very emotional with our marketing and advertising.”
Nat Friedman describes his experience using a student to take dictation for emails and code while recovering from a broken wrist:
He sits at the other end of my desk on a separate computer while I conduct the machine with my left hand, jumping from mail to mail, opening buffers, reading web pages, and generally doing the interactive low-latency low-volume typing tasks myself. He can see everything I’m doing because my desktop is shared over the network. And when I need to enter a large block of text, well, I just start talking, he types, and the words appear on the screen.
If I don’t look up from the screen, I can pretend he’s not there and that I have the world’s most powerful speech recognition engine. So I have a sneak peek into what computers will be like when speech recognition works really well.
Also, it turns out that context is very important for accuracy:
It’s hard to recognize speech.
It’s hard to wreck a nice beach.
A research project at Stanford is creating an open-source programmable camera, dubbed the Frankencamera:
We are therefore building an open-source camera platform that runs Linux, is fully programmable (including its digital signal processor) and connected to the Internet, and accommodates SLR lenses and SLR-quality sensors. Our current prototype (3rd and 4th images above) is constructed from off-the-shelf parts, in some cases borrowed from dead cameras. It’s also ugly – hence the name.
Commercial cameras – whether point-and-shoot or DSLR – are too hard to hack into to do the several interesting things that enthusiasts want to do in-camera. But they can write custom code to get the Frankencamera to go well beyond clicking pictures:
… tone mapping for high dynamic range imaging, in-camera panoramic stitching, motion blur removal, handshake blur removal, post-capture refocusing,depth of field extension (not the same as refocusing), flash-noflash imaging, advanced video stabilization, dark flash photography, glare removal, dehazing.
80 camera crews filmed vignettes of life in Berlin non-stop for 24 hours in September 2008, ending up with 750 hours of material. On September 5th 2009, the film was broadcast on TV channels in Europe, and streamed online.
The documentary features highly varied scenes as the film dips into several milieus in the city. Viewers can watch the editor-in-chief of Europe’s top selling daily, Bild’s Kai Diekmann, as he does his morning analysis of the previous day’s paper or they can accompany Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit as he attends a pro-education event in the Kreuzberg district.
Also featured are a garbage collector, a teacher, a drug addict, a child, among others. This website has 24 film clips, one for each hour of the day in Berlin.
Not very, according to this interactive graph on the Wall Street Journal. The accompanying article is about how Governments across the region, even democratic ones, have increased restrictions on access to online content.
India appears to be one of the more free nations, although the article contends that the Government selectively filters access to sites “relating to national unity and state security”, as well as some Internet tools.
Companies are wary about upgrading to Windows 7 after the previous upgrade to “failed Vista” (in the words of a CIO). The Economic Times has more. Of course, some didn’t even bother:
“There’s a learning fatigue if you have new OS every two years,” said Essar Group’s CIO Vijay Mehra, adding, “Our current OS, Windows XP, is stable and we see no compelling reason to upgrade.” Essar has about 350 servers, 7,000 laptop users and 3,000 on the desktop.
Windows XP, released in October 2001, is eight years old.