India’s Laissez Faire Approach to Traffic is actually better – is it?

Filed in Uncategorized, May 2, 2006, 12:36 pm by

Cooper lauds the lack of traffic controls in India thus: (Via IFTF Future Now)

This morning I was delighted to come across this video of an apparently typical intersection in India. I can see no sign of any of the traffic engineering elements typical in the USA, Europe, and other areas, yet a relatively high volume of very mixed traffic (from pedestrians to bikes to large trucks) seems to flow very smoothly. About two thirds through the video a white car even drives against the flow of traffic, with no ill effects!

I have often wondered how this whole thing works because from the face of it, as Cooper observes, there are not too many accidents happening. But then there is one crucial element missing from the picture – Speed. The average speed of my car rarely reaches above 45Km/hour, which is approx 28 mph, just a tad over the residential zone speed limit in the USA. At that speed, you have enough reaction time to avoid accidents. Imagine what would happen if the average speed increases to 45-50 mph as in the USA. This chaotic traffic in India will create a carnage. Its the orderliness of the drivers in the USA and the traffic engineering elements present that allow people to drive at such high speeds and yet not collide with each other too frequently.

Search by John Battelle

Filed in Uncategorized, April 30, 2006, 3:45 am by , ,

Thanks to Nambikumar Palani for insisting that I read Search by John Battelle. There is no question that Google has transformed our lives and made Search an integral part of our lives. John has done an excellent job of chronicling the evolution of search with major emphasis on Google. I think, the concluding part, where he describes the future of search, could have been done better, explaining concepts like semantic web some more. Here are the few things I learnt from this book: 1. The Birth of Google. This chapter gave me goosebumps, where Larry Page describes how he thought of the web as a connected graph.

Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure. “Computer scientists love graphs,” Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace.

Fortunately, Wired Magazine published this chapter as an extract, for those that haven’t read the book yet.  The other beautiful concept is  – treating each link as a citation, which is the key in the enormously relevant results that Google generates. That of course, is an idea  carried over from academia, where every citation of a paper makes it more valuable. Yet, these 2 concepts are so simple. Steve Jobs calls Apple’s products “insanely great” and I would say Google’s products are “stupendously simple”.  Reams have been written about their sparse home page for it has a zero learning curve and is so addictive. 2. The whole ad-based business model that has Google’s share value skyrocketing,  was actually invented by Bill Gross’s Overture company which was subsequently bought over by Yahoo. 3. The entire history of Search starting from Archie to Lycos and others is fascinating. 4. John’s concept of a “Database of Intentions” is very interesting. When you are searching for something you are conveying a bit of your intent. 5. Google’s own history of growth. As John says, with the Google PR machine working over time, you are likely to have heard about most of the things in this section. Nambi Kumar Palani has produced a powerpoint-based review of  this book. You can read this for some more useful comments on this book. References:
1. Research done by a Dutch researcher Elke den Ouden shows:

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices.

Therefore, if you are designing products or web sites or whatever, keep it stupendously simple. 2. Management a la Google ($$) – this article in the WSJ by strategy guru Gary Hamel has been bashed in the blogosphere for its fawning and hyperbole. It nevertheless highlights some of the key management principles that make Google what it is.

 

Can birds think like humans?

Filed in Uncategorized, April 29, 2006, 11:20 am by

I had recently posted a link on my link blog about a fascinating article that describes how songbirds are able to learn grammar. Triggered by that article, I had a broader discussion with Priya Raju on whether birds or for that matter other animals can think and learn as we do. Its a pretty controversial issue because there are many scientists who hold the view that humans are unique in their ability to think in the way they do and other animals don’t have this capability.She reached out to the Wikipedia which has a chock full of fascinating information on bird intelligence:

Birds in particular were thought to be not intelligent because the size of the cerebral cortex (this is the part where most higher order thinking and decision making is known to happen in human beings). It turns out that birds actually use a different part of their brain (medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale) for such functions. Birds display all the classic traits associated with intelligence – advanced vision, social behavior, tool usage, language, migration, conceptual skills and other indicators like usage of medicines.

The last one, is particularly interesting, I had posted a while back about the peruvian macaws and their clay licks more from the perspective of a colorful spectacle. It turns out that the clay acts as an antacid which the birds need because they have feasted on a highly acidic diet. Some crows in Japan have learnt to break open walnuts by dropping them in the path of cars. Overall, as Ronald Kotulak says in the songbird article in the Chicago Tribune mentioned above, i think there is significant evidence to conclude that the last bastion of the uniqueness of human beings has fallen. References:
1. Soumya quoting from Discover points out that there is only a 2% difference between the chimp and human genome. 2. Japanese Macaques’ potato washing technique. Its hard to have not heard about this amazing animal behavior.

Managing the Mt. Everest of Email Services

Filed in Management,Technology, April 28, 2006, 12:03 am by

Although a few months old, here is an excellent article on Hotmail. ACM Queue – A Conversation with Phil Smoot – An engineer at Hotmail discusses the challenges of keeping one of the Web’s largest and oldest Internet services running 24/7. (Via Sajith Sankar)

A crab that lives inside an oyster and Quahog Pearls

Filed in Uncategorized, April 26, 2006, 1:27 pm by

Pinnotheres a.ka. Pea Crab lives inside oysters. It has a very soft shell and hence seeks protection by living inside an oyster. Priya Raju stumbled on this when she was looking for quahog pearls which is another rare product of nature – a pearl made by clams. It has been making waves for the price it fetches in the market. Queen Elizabeth is supposed to have an ornament with a purple quahog pearl in it.  

 Excerpt from http://www.preciousgemstones.com/gfsummer05.html

The quahog pearl is not technically a pearl since it does not come from an oyster. The quahog is a thick-shelled member of the clam family and are simply called “hard clams” or “hard-shell clams.”

(Via Priya Raju)