Updated 2 May 2009: Received some wisdom from twitterers – @Shogun1947 @priyraju @akumaran

Prolog

On my internal to company blog i had introduced a new idea a few months back – in the prolog section of every blog post, i provide a link to interesting posts i had read that week. To my surprise, this has become very popular. This is somewhat like the FTOTW (fine tastings of the week) series i used to run on this blog. I decided to try the same idea on this blog also.

FTOTW

First, A. Prem, one of Cognizant’s Social CRM experts, blogs regularly about Social CRM on his blog. He has a tremendous grasp of the subject. He writes one of the leading blogs inside the company as well.  Rachel Laudan, one of my food anthropology blog friends, lives and blogs from Mexico. She has some great updates on the Swine Flu epidemic.  Bob Sutton paraphrases Scott Berkun to explain how managers become a**holes. How Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak gets things done.  Saraswathi, a former colleague, who now works in the social sector, had written a brilliant post on relationships a while back. must read.

Science  & Technology Careers in America

As someone who had lived in the USA for 10 years, i feel sad about the fact that American kids don’t take up science & technology careers as much as America needs them to.  The huge skills shortage that America faces is either filled by immigration or by outsourcing to other countries like India and China.

The stats from graduate programs and PhD programs also don’t bode that well. As of 2006, over 51% in grad programs in EE were foreign nationals and 71% in PhD programs were foreign. I don’t know how accurate these stats are. But the general perception in America is that Americans don’t like science & technology careers.

Paradise of Science

During our time in America, we used to wonder about, the kind of resources that are available to an American kid that Indian kids can not even dream. Every small city has a well-stocked library, a science center in the vicinity, several museums.

Even if one is a wee bit scientifically minded, there is plenty of resources to tap into.

By contrast, a city that plays host to over 6 MM people, Chennai, India does not have one well equipped museum or science center or library.

But Indian middle class kids, are taught right from when they are in the womb, that science  & technology careers are the be-all and end-all of living in this world.  Yes, this does create a large stereotypical population. But hey, how does that matter? When we want to find folks for science & technology jobs, we can find them easily without having to import them.

I am trying to find out, why American kids consider science & technology careers boring or geeky or nerdy or whatever?

What can be done to change this attitude of the American kids?

Epilog

If i am lucky, i may get to work in a project to improve American kids’ attitude towards science & technology careers. Please help me with your wisdom.

Through my CTO‘s blog, came across this company called Metaweb and their product – Freebase – a database for world’s data/knowledge. At the outset, it seems similar to Wikipedia and in fact Freebase has used Wikipedia as one its sources to seed its initial set of data. So, what is different about them from Wikipedia, Google Base etc.?

• Much like a content management system, they combine structured and free form data, maintain the association between them and more importantly leverage this to allow search based on both kinds of data. This kind of search can be more targeted.
  • Content types/classes can be defined and instances of these types become the meta-data/structured information. For example, facets of a person/place/thing are stored as structured data.
  • This way of organizing data allows one the ability to perform complex queries on structured data and can be combined with text search on unstructured data – ala content management system
• Freebase also provided APIs that allows applications to tap into this vast amount of data. Looks like this is one place Metaweb plans to monetize.

I did a search on “Gundappa” – my favorite cricket player and it did bring a list of available matches, and with “Gundappa Viswanath” I found the following tags/content types – “Person, Cricket Player, Cricket Bowler, Pro Athlete”. These types allow one to associate meta-data with Gundappa such as his Birth date, type of player etc. Of course, there is also a description/article (unstructured information) on him.

As my CTO has mentioned in his blog, I do think that this kind of “information base” has its own value within an enterprise.

I am amazed at the way the next wave/generation of applications web – based on social tagging, mashing up and information gathering/publishing is coming up. The true benefit is when such information can be mined in ways that allow us to find hidden meaning/purpose within them and then use such meaning to come with appropriate conclusions. From an Enterprise perspective, my General Manager – Dr. Ambuj Goyal has been stating this as “Freeing information and delivering information in the context of business needs” (Please note that I have paraphrased him).

Another interesting technology to look at is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - a way to combine human intelligence to solve a problem. Amazon does have a diverse portfolio and I believe they are one of the “cool” technology companies around, except they do not tout their own coolness!!.

Recently came across an interesting experiment being done by Forbes magazine with their orgchart wiki project. They are expecting the wider Internet community to update the org charts of the public companies. They already have uploaded the information about boards of directors for all public companies. They feature key companies like Apple and Google and Intel on the home page of the project.

One feature i thought they could easily add is links to articles they have written on the people featured in these org charts. For instance, i should be able to click on Steve Jobs and look at all the articles Forbes has written about him or featuring him.

Seems like an interesting use of Wiki (they actually use an Adobe Flash based UI instead of Ajax). What do you all think?

You must have all seen screencasts – a stream of screenshots with annotations of a session with a software application. This is the technique we use to explain how to use a software system. The person learning the new system must painstakingly go through the screencast, do the same actions on the system and learn to use the system step by step.

I have wondered for a long time, why we couldn’t create the equivalent of training wheels (which kids use to learn cycling) for learning applications. I had envisaged a scripting solution where you simply record your session and when you replay, the system walks you through step by step, pausing for you to do the task with prompts on what to do. Imagine how much easier it will be to train people on new systems. This could forever change the way we train people on new systems. Well, i never did anything about the idea like the other gazillion ideas i keep generating.

Today I was reading the June 2007 issue of IEEE Computer and I came across this article “Social Scripting for the web“:

As our business and personal lives move online, we must learn to carry out increasingly complicated tasks on the Web—for example, checking a bank account balance, setting up automatic bill payments, sharing photos with family, searching for real-estate listings, and ordering new business cards. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an expert watching over your shoulder and showing you how to do such things properly?

The Koala project at IBM’s Almaden Research Center ( www.research.ibm.com/koala) is aiming to create the next best thing: a wiki-type repository of instructions for Web applications that can help users automate common tasks.

In addition to being human-readable, Koala scripts are machine-understandable—the system can interpret each instruction and perform it automatically. At each step, Koala shows you what button to push and then does it for you. It can also fill in fields with your name, address, and other personal information.

I am so excited by this and can’t wait for the software to be released to the market. This may be hard to visualize for you. If that is the case, check out this Koala screencast on IBM’s site.

Ganesh, maybe you have access to this software inside the firewall? If you do, maybe you can update us [without violating confidentiality, of course].

David Troy has built 2 very interesting much-talked-about websites twittervision and flickrvision. Latest updates on the popular micro blogging site Twitter are plotted on a auto-refreshing Google Map on twittervision. Flickrvision does the same thing for photos uploaded on the popular photo sharing site Flickr.  If you need to while away time, these 2 sites are great. Just watching the updates pour in from around the world is quite fascinating – an internet equivalent of looking out of your window and observing the passers-by. Check it out.