Internet pioneers honored

From Phys.org:

Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Marc Andreessen of the United States will share the first ever £1 million (1.2 million euro) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with Louis Pouzin of France and Tim Berners-Lee of Britain. "The emergence of the Internet and the web involved many teams of people all over the world," said Alec Broers, chair of the judging panel. "However, these five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the Internet and web as a coherent system and brought them into public use."

StartupSchool.in

An article in the Hindu on tech entrepreneur Freeman Murray (with some useful information on the startup scene in India) :

He’s been there, done that and, as a result, is one of Silicon Valley’s success stories. Now, renowned entrepreneur, angel investor and tech wiz Freeman Murray is in Kerala to teach young entrepreneurs the tricks of the trade. Freeman has set up StartupSchool.in in Kochi. It’s a three-month residential mentoring programme designed to help a new generation of entrepreneurs create mobile and internet-based start-ups. The programme is hosted by StartupVillage.in and is run in partnership with Jaaga, a Bangalore-based art and technology space that Freeman co-founded in 2009. 

“The time is right to be an IT entrepreneur in India,” says Freeman, who was in the city to share his success story at the TEDx talks organised at the College of Engineering Trivandrum. “In India there is a very large, very young population who are eager to be part of the internet revolution. Now the mobile revolution has sort of added on to it. However, there is a lack of experienced developers. The world is hungry for high-end software developers and India seems to have potentially millions people who are eager to do this. And so the soup here is very exciting,” adds Freeman. He should know. After all, he was “lucky enough” to grow with the World Wide Web as it happened in Silicon Valley in the 90s.

Update: Thanks to Anand for the post text.

The $1 million bus stop

Read the Washington Post for the full article. The caption under the picture says it all.

Arlington County's new $1 million bus stop on Columbia Pike at Walter Reed Drive features an electronic bus tracking map. However, the roof may not keep rain off the heads of those waiting.

Update (Mar 27): Thanks to Anand for the post text.

Is the Presidential System a better system for India?

Speaking of Shashi Tharoor: it has been a major thoughtpoint of Shashi Tharoor's over the past couple of years that India would be better off with a Presidential System. Would a Presidential System be better for India? My short answer is : No. More on that below, but just to clarify : this is what I was talking about when I said that "I don't believe much of the other stuff [Tharoor] has written as well" in my previous post. 

A sampling of his opinion on this matter : 

“I believe that the Presidential system would be far better in our country than the Parliamentary system because of the nature of our polity and the fact that we have so many political parties, coalition governments have the say in the last couple of decades,” Tharoor said. He also said, “Parliamentary system sadly privileges a situation where checks and balances outweigh the possibility of decisive action and instead of electing someone to get something done and then holding him/her accountable at the next elections, we are essentially forced to elect someone who spends a large portion of their time try ing to stay in power rather than exercising their power in terms of effective governance.” 

Vivek Dehejia in the New York Times argued against this proposal raising four major points against the idea.

(1) The best government is the one you can get rid of most easily. (2) Voting patterns are not independent of the electoral system, and you may get something you didn’t wish for.  (3) Lack of decisiveness in government is not always, or even usually, socially undesirable. (4) Because of its complexity and importance, great prudence should be exercised in introducing sweeping constitutional reforms.

Points #3 and #4 are arguably the most weighty ones, the one with the most bearing on the matter at hand. The economy of India is doing quite well now that the government is out of the way in the growth sectors and there is no reason to bring it back in. Further to these points, here are three other reasons why the Presidential System is not a good one for India.

Where Apps Meet Work

From the New York Times:

Some apps onto which employees may move company information, like Facebook and Amazon, are well known. Others, like Remember the Milk, used for completing tasks, or CloudElephant, a data backup service, are news even to some of the experts in I.T. Skyhigh Networks, which recently started monitoring personal use of apps, has counted more than 1,200 services used in corporate networks from personal devices. 

Skyhigh signs up for each service, along with 1,000 others that have not yet touched a corporate network, and researches them for security issues, like whether people can share data anonymously, or how easy it is to get inside the system and obtain another customer’s data. The company then tunes a customer’s corporate network to allow services to have different degrees of access to information. 

“We have to be careful how we inspect for security vulnerabilities, since we don’t want to get arrested ourselves,” says Rajiv Gupta, the chief executive at Skyhigh. “What makes an iPhone interesting and scary is what happens in the cloud, and how I can upload things with one device and then download them to another from someplace else.” 

The problem of data leakage is as old as someone taking a carbon copy home on the weekend. What is different today is how people can take data with a finger swipe, and how little they know about whether a service has malware or how much it can see of what is going on elsewhere in a phone.

Shashi Tharoor on the English language - some errors in his analysis

This article by Shashi Tharoor in the New York Times came up on the BAQC Facebook group earlier today.

An English friend of mine says that he nearly had a heart attack on a flight in the United States when the American pilot announced that the plane would be airborne "momentarily.' 'In British English, the language my friend speaks, "momentarily" means "for a moment," and he thought the pilot was suggesting an imminent crash soon after takeoff. In American English, however, "momentarily" means "in a moment," and the pilot was merely appeasing the impatient passengers.

I had my suspicions that Shashi Tharoor was not, in fact, accurately representing the subject matter. I had my suspicions, that's all. This is not intended to be a commentary on Shashi Tharoor himself. Although I hate to miss out on any opportunity to call into question a politician's motives.

Some of it was pretty clearly false.

A British linguist once told a New York audience that whereas a double negative could make a positive, there was no language in the world in which a double positive made a negative. A heckler put paid to his thesis in forthright American: "Yeah, right."

So, yeah, this is an old joke. "Yeah, yeah" and "Yeah, right" are two instances of usage in the English language where two positives seem to make a negative. But it occurred to me that, besides that problem, Shashi Tharoor was mistaken in ascribing this to the differences between British usage of the English language versus American. It is, in fact, a matter of context. (This would be studied as part of what is known as pragmatics in linguistics.) Even a British speaker of the English could say 'yeah, right' (and also 'yeah, yeah') to imply disagreement. The tone of voice is what would give away the context in this case. Unless, of course, the speaker is a teenager. Those fellows give nothing away.

As for Shashi Tharoor's point on the usage of the word "momentarily", it turns out that Mark Liberman has written up an entire post on this topic.

Cavett wrote: 

When the flight attendant would say, “We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,” I used to enjoy replying, “Will there be time to get off?” But I see the forces of darkness have prevailed, and this and many wrong uses are now deemed acceptable by the alleged guardians of our language, the too-quickly supine dictionary makers. Are they afraid of being judged “not with it”? What ever happened to, “Everybody does it don’t make it right”? 

I chose the quotation because it's an especially clear example of the sentiment that usage, no matter how widespread and how authoritative, doesn't outweigh the peever's sense that a certain usage is somehow morally wrong. But having chosen the passage, I felt in duty bound to check the implication that the evil sense of momentarily is a recent development, limited to ill-educated flight attendants and similar corporate drudges.

It was my understanding too that the word 'momentarily' should be used in the sense of 'for a moment'. People who use the word 'momentarily' in the 'soon' sense may strike some as ill-educated or under-educated but that usage, in fact, has some history to it. It is merely a deprecated usage of the word. It has little do with the differences between British and American English. So, anyway, Shashi Tharoor is quite mistaken on many points in this article. I don't believe much of the other stuff he has written as well. Poor Mr. Tharoor. The trouble with being a politician is nobody believes you even when you are being sincere. Because it is just so hard for anybody to tell.

The Civil War is not yet over

The Civil War is not yet over. For some, it is still raging on. One very interesting experiment to confirm the attitude of people from the American South is described below. The science of the brain never ceases to fascinate. 

In the early 1990's, two psychologists at the University of Michigan—Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett—decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor. . . . So they decided to gather together a group of young men and insult them. Their methodology was disarmingly simple. "We sat down and tried to figure out what is the insult that would go to the heart of a 18 to 20 year old's brain," Cohen says. "It didn't take too long to come up with 'asshole.'" 

The experiment went like this. The social science building at the University of Michigan has a long narrow hallway in the basement, lined with filing cabinets. The young men were called into a classroom, one by one, and asked to fill out a questionnaire. Then they were told to drop off the questionnaire at the end of the hallway and return to the classroom—an innocent, seemingly simple academic exercise. 

For half the young men, that was it. They were the control group. For the other half, there was a catch. As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, another man—a confederate of the experimenters—walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. The already narrow hallway was now even narrower. As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed. He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder and, in a low but audible voice, he said the trigger word—"asshole."

Update (Mar 27) : Thanks to Anand for the post text.