The Other Blog

It's been a month since i started blogging at Posterous, and it's been good. So far, i have been cross-posting all my posts here too. To avoid further wrath of the DRY god, i will now quit doing so.

If you are one of the three readers of this blog (including you, mom), please point your browsers and your feed-readers to this. There's where the occasional action will be henceforth.

See you on the other side!

Twitter And Me

I gave it an honest shot. I really did. I gave it my time, tried to understand it, attempted to see its positives and looked beyond its #fails. I was not judgmental and i did not base my opinion on its looks. It was immensely popular, yet not snobbish. It was the talk of the town, yet not materialistic. Everyone loved it, and it reciprocated in equal measure. But, something was amiss.

Twitter almost never gave me anything interesting. The noise to signal ratio was too high and it was too much trouble trying to find that diamond in the coal mine. The mine was too dark, there were not enough search lights and i didn't really know where to look. Maybe the gems were strewn all around me, but they were just too hard for me to find.

Twitter promised me conversations. It lied. I would reply to someone's tweet and they would only reply to that hours later. By then, i would have lost interest in continuing any conversation. I had painted pictures in my head about conversations like birds chirping in the morning; imagined music in the cacophony; thought about whispers late in the night. Twitter let me down - not only were conversations painful, discussions with groups of people greater than 2 was almost impossible. You picked me up only to crash me down, T.

Twitter was stingy. I could never say anything meaningful in the meagre 140 characters. I had to include a hyperlink to another place. I noticed that almost anyone who wanted to say anything remotely interesting also did the same. Was it a link sharing service? Don't we have them aplenty already? Because of it being niggardly, people misunderstood Twitter. They thought it was a social network, when it was a micro blogging platform. They thought it was a place to meet old friends, when it was actually a place to express oneself. It wasn't facebook, but nobody believed it. And as the world descended into sms-speak once again, it was time to alight.

Twitter was also too demanding. It wanted too much of my time and attention. The more people i followed, the harder it became to comprehend if anyone was real; much less what anyone was saying. Constantly fighting to keep up with all tweets, i found myself exhausted and disillusioned. I wanted my space. I wanted out.

In a different world, at a different time, maybe things might have worked out. Maybe, if Twitter allowed me to actually have conversations, if it allowed me to follow topics i was interested in and not just people i didn't know, if only people took 'followers' less seriously and did not make it an ego trip, if it did not sink into spewing spam and marketing gimmicks, maybe if following more than 20 people did not mean drinking from a fire hose, maybe, just maybe, if there was a purpose to all this.

Till then, Twitter, can we be just friends?

Cross-posted from my other blog

Rethinking Education

Education is a subject close to my heart and there is no question there is a crisis in the field. We should rethink how we want to proceed answer fundamental questions like what does education mean and what should it try to achieve.

What is education

All scientific principles can be whittled down to a few basic axioms. Peter Brook, a director, said the following about the most basic elements of theater -

"... a man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and that is all i need for an act of theater to be engaged."

What are the most basic elements of education? You need someone eager to learn about a subject they love and you need someone to help them learn it. To paraphrase Peter Brook,

"... a man studies what he loves whilst someone else is facilitating him, and that is all i need for an act of education to be engaged."

You can take away the designated teacher, the classroom, the examinations, the textbooks and yet, you can have education. Don't bring in language, compulsory subjects, homework or fees, and yet, we can have education. That is a very liberating thought.

What should education aim to achieve

Education cannot work in isolation, of course. It is an integral part of society and it has to play the most important role in employability. Today's education system is based on the industrial revolution and the need for engineers and scientists. It is arcane and doesn't make any sense anymore. The world has changed unrecognizably since then (unlike my aunts who insist on asking me if i recognize them every time i see them) and it is imperative that education catches up. The opportunities for employment in this new world are tremendous - the world of art has opened up, the internet has cut across all sections, sports is under a greater spotlight than ever before and the world is in dire need to inspirational leaders. If education provides a launch pad into new careers like being a musician, a web designer or an entrepreneur, the prospects of making a viable living increase dramatically. Vocation training won't be something a person takes up because he couldn't get into an engineering college, anymore. The real world also works in a manner different from what is taught in schools today. Education should enable one to be a fantastic team player, to interact with and relate to diverse cultures from across the world, to learn to work with schedules and deadlines and to take decisions with systematic thought.

Sir Ken Robinson tells a story about a little girl in a drawing class. The teacher walks up to her and asks her what she is drawing and the girl tells her that she's making a picture of God. The teacher says, "But, no one knows what God looks like" and the girl replies, "In 10 minutes, they will". Today's education system systematically kills the innate creativity that everyone is born with. Education should encourage individualism and creative expression. It should compel children to question the norm and to think independently. It should facilitate original thinking and provide avenues to express ideas.

Technology is omnipresent in our lives today and education has to use it. We have to inculcate elements of social interaction, electronic communication, rich media and the vast resources on the internet while educating children. It is something they have grown up with, can relate to and is something that comes naturally to them. There are already an ubiquity of websites that promote learning through technology - right from open source textbooks to open universities and everything in between. We must be careful to not get too carried away by this though, and must realize that technology is but the catalyst and not the crutch. Technology is not the panacea to our ills and it needs to get out of the way once it has served its purpose.

We always aim to educate children for a world vastly different from the one we live in and it is hard to predict the future. But, basing it on the past is not the way forward.

Cross-posted from my other blog

Pandora For The Internet?

Before we get started, if you haven't already, read about the Music Genome Project. I'll wait. Wouldn't it be great if we have such a categorization and recommendation engine for information on the web? The music genome project categorizes music based on nearly 400 attributes. Surely, if we can do it for music, we can do it for text.

To narrow down the task a little, we could consider only blogs and leave out everything else. We can begin analyzing text on two basic attributes - form and function. By function, i refer to the content of the text, the subject that it tackles. And by form, i refer to the structure of the text, the emotion and the style of writing.

Function can be ascertained by diligent categorization based on the words used in the article. The overall content of the blog would help determine the general topic (blogs on technology or entertainment would generally write articles related to those areas). Parsing the text to look for specific terms and applying bayesian filters would provide a probability of the article belonging to a certain narrow topic (programming in python, iphone games or reviews of movies starring salma hayek). Another way of narrowing on the topic is to follow outgoing links and determining the general content of those webpages. The system would also group related topics in hierarchies.

Form is a little more difficult to categorize. We can divide form into two components: structure and sentiment. Structure consists of characteristics such as - the length of the article, the number of words in a sentence, the type of words or phrases used, the amount of dialogue, the density of the text, the use of language constructs like active vs passive voice, 1st person vs 3rd person and so on, the use of punctuation, the number of sentences in a paragraph, the rhythm of the text determined by the syllables - and then derive various metrics from these numbers. This would be one manner of categorization. Sentiment, on the other hand, is harder to determine. It is slightly easier in music (you can determine the rhythm, type of instruments used, the raaga, etc to home in on the sentiment), but it is much harder in english. It is very difficult to determine characteristics such as irony, sarcasm or humor by parsing text. Moreover, different cultures have different ways of expressing sentiments which renders any universal algorithm irrelevant. Having said that, some sentiments can be a trifle more easy to gauge - like anger, joy, sadness or want (by words, phrases, sentence lengths, punctuation used, etc).

How does all this help? It will help one wade through the garbage of the internet to find the little gems that we care about. If you liked an article, it would help you find other articles - perhaps on similar topics and with similar writing style - that you would be eager to read. It would also provide an opportunity to serendipitously discover great articles or pieces of information. Don't community powered recommendation engines already do this? Well, i would argue that they don't. Mostly, the articles submitted are what the original reader liked and not necessarily what you might enjoy (even if you are interested in the topic). Making a fully automated system can tailor content exactly as you would want it.

The system could sneak in a few surprises - like showing you an article with similar style on a completely unrelated topic to gauge your response and learn from it. It could also learn your reading patterns - what kind of articles you like reading in the morning vs reading at night, reading over the week vs reading over the weekend - and tune itself accordingly. It could show you articles based on your current mood. Over time, it would know what you want to read better than you do. As scary as that sounds, i think it's a beautiful thing.

I think it's time we stopped manually adding feeds to our feedreader. I think it's time we have an Internet Genome Project.

Originally posted on my other blog

Should Computers Be Free?

There has been a lot of talk about the $100 laptop and how it is going to change education. I believe that in the next 3-5 years, all laptops and computers will be free*.

Unless you have been living under a rock or are not in the technology field, you would have heard about the 'next big thing' - Cloud Computing. Simply put, it means that none of your data will be stored on your personal computer. Everything will be stored somewhere on someone else's server at someone's cost. All you would need is a web browser to access all this content. Before you get too paranoid and possessive about your content, remember that email works this way today. Almost all our photos are also online. Slowly, all our files, documents, music, movies - everything we own on our computers today will be stored on the 'cloud'. There are certain fears, but largely, this is a good thing.

One of the implications of storing data remotely is that you do not need a powerful operating system anymore - any simple version of linux will do, or in the future, a simple browser-based OS will also suffice. Too much disk space is obviously not required, since almost nothing will be stored on your computer (probably only temporary copies of files you are working on, but that doesn't matter). You don't need powerful hardware such as high amount of RAM or powerful microprocessors.

Let us speculate. Let's say the computer runs of a free operating system, has about 2GB of storage, about 512MB of RAM and a small processor. The cost of a GB of harddisk space today is about 10 cents, RAM costs about $10 per GB and Intel's atom processors cost about $20. So, the whole computer (including the screen, keyboard, ethernet card, etc) - when mass produced - will not cost more than $30. Another way to think about this - the configurations on modern mobile phones are more than sufficient to run this.

Now, imagine a scenario where an ISP like Bharati or BSNL decides to tie up with computer manufactures to mass produce these machines. Then, they give away these machines for free. They only charge people for the internet usage; internet usage which uses wifi or GPRS (the ISPs also control the mobile network) according to the available network. In essence, you pay for using the cloud and there is no upfront cost. This will follow models familiar today with mobile phones - prepaid or monthly payments.

With computers free, now they can be given away to all educational institutions in the world - and where there is no internet access, they will use the mobile networks. Governments can give these away, and subsidize the internet data costs to poor people, who can use it to network, get information on weather, buying / selling rates of commodities, gain knowledge of the latest techniques in agriculture and so much more. People in remote areas can have accounts and make bank transactions even if there are no branches for hundreds of miles. You will friend your maid on facebook and your watchman will follow you on twitter.

The more exciting part, of making computer devices free, is that it can take turns we haven't even imagined today. Touch screen displays can be installed in public transport that can play videos from YouTube, children in rural areas can attend classes taught in modern schools 'live', devices installed at periodic intervals on streets can show maps with local data - restaurants, bus stops, movie theaters and more, school textbooks will be electronic devices that extract the latest data from open source collaborative reading material and all public phones will be free as they would make calls over IP. With an ubiquitous internet device, the opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship are endless.

Imagine a world where everyone - and i mean every single person - is connected and is online. The $0 computer will, truly, change the world.

* - you might still have to pay some shipping fee or tax, but i'll leave that out for now.

Originally posted on my other blog