Tag Archives: Technology

The nexus of science, engineering and business.

India's Research Gap

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The Telegraph writes about a recent scientometric exercise comparing India’s and China’s science & technology workforce. The results are eye-opening for anyone who still believes that China and India can still be compared at roughly the same level. If I were an Indian policymaker I’d give up the organized S&T stats game as lost for the medium term and focus on other things instead.

  China India
Research Workforce 850,000 115,000
Fresh doctorates per year 40,000 4,500
Per Capita Research Spending $12.15 $3.53
Share of global research publications 5% 1.9%

1. Re-architect the education system starting at the primary level. China’s education push in the late 1970s is really paying off now, while India is bedazzled by its IITs and IIMs that service a vanishingly small fraction of its population. Merely rebranding other institutions with the IIT rubric isn’t helpful, what’s far more essential is a commitment to good universal primary education — something we have just not seen in the past.

2. Promote private research and entrepreneurship. India’s free-er society ought to produce world-class companies — and India’s large conglomerates are doing well in this regard. What’s missing is a systematic effort to encourage start-ups as low-cost test-tubes of innovation. It’s great that the SEZs are trying to cut red tape and aiming at a 7-day approval cycle for new companies, but why can’t a similar time-frame be applied across the country?

3. Stop complaining about talent being poached away. (which is what the PM’s scientific advisor is doing in the Telegraph article.) Instead figure out what how you can network with the poachers and use their help to help you grow the economy to the point where you’re less worried about poaching.

The communication in Current Science can be found here.

Quick Bits: Violence, English, Solar

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Some of this is old news, but I had to flush my bloggable bookmarks queue, so here goes…

  • Solar Cells reach 40% efficiency. Slashdot notes that this means a sunlit area 265 miles square could meet the world’s energy needs. More practically, developing but energy-poor countries like India may have just found a way out of their energy trap. Solar panel infrastructure on roofs and two-way metering are just some innovations that would let Indian cities improve their residents’ quality of life in an environmentally friendly way.
  • “…In the end, America may be stronger for it.” Anti-offshoring lobbyist Scott Irwin shuts down his lobby group. (via)
  • Patent laws stifle drug innovation (via)
  • The Decline of Violence (via)
  • A Middle Ground on Climate, from the NYT. And reaction from RealClimate. (via)
  • English: a Celtic language with Germanic words?
  • “Extraterrestial Intelligent beings do not exist.”

Flat-Rate 3G Internet

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Mobile operator 3 is all set to offer ADSL/Cable-style flat-rate pricing plans for people using their 3G network. UK service will begin next month, other countries are slated to follow soon. This was long overdue; I remember the complete cluelessness on a 3 rep’s face in 2003 when I asked him why I had to pay extra to send email on a network touting its data capabilities. 3 and its cohorts seem to have gotten the religion now, with Sony-Ericsson’s President quoted as saying “Moving to flat rate charging is the key to unlocking the value of the mobile internet”. No kidding.

Quick Bits: Zotero, Hotmail, Feet

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  • ‘Intelligent’ prosthetic feet
  • Hotmail is now offering 1GB of storage space in all markets. Apparently this goes up to 2GB when your Hotmail account is upgraded to Windows Live Mail (paying users get double, i.e., 4GB).
  • Zotero is a citation manager that works within Firefox. Pretty useful, especially for those who find systems like Endnote overly complex. (via BoingBoing)

The A380 Defections Begin

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Fedex is cancelling its order of 10 A380s because of Airbus’ delivery delays, and getting 15 Boeing 777s instead. This comes after Virgin Atlantic’s deferment of its order for 10 planes last month. Of the big customers left (scroll down for ‘A380 Orders So Far’ on this page) Emirates is already making threatening noises and has cancelled some A340 orders, Singapore Airlines could cancel or ask for a deferment (which results in no money flowing into Airbus’ coffers, although I’m guessing they’ll book the revenue anyway), and UPS will be under pressure to look at Boeing as well. Only Lufthansa and Air France look like reliable customers.

Given the number of people Airbus employ, none of this is likely to be well-received in Europe. However, given the reorganisations at Airbus the A380 delays have prompted, a leaner, more effective Airbus may be the lemonade that came out of the A380 lemon.

Google+Sun: No Fireworks, For Now

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After getting excited (against my better judgement) about today’s Google+Sun announcement, it’s turned out that the all the noise was primarily about a marketing junket — the most notable software announcement was an earthshaking Google Toolbar bundling deal.

I was expecting some noise about Google and OO — perhaps a Save to Google Storage in OO’s Save As dialog, or beefed up OO document search powered by Google. In retrospect, of course, both of those were silly — Google’s ‘standards’ approach would mean the only way they’d ever offer file storage would be WebDAV and Google Desktop already searches OO files just fine.

Of course, the Web 2.0 types who got excited about a ‘webified’ OpenOffice (like many of Scoble’s commenters) had better not hold their breath. Current browser technology, even with AJAX, is very fragile (Gmail’s autosave, for example, is very flaky and I’d be very interested to see if Yahoo’s new mail handles drag/drop well — Oddpost had frequent problems) and definitely not the platform you’d want to build a solid productivity app on. And OO.o’s desktop heritage pretty much precludes it from being an effective browser-based cross-platform app… Google would have better luck with Mozilla’s XULRunner (and given Google’s wooing of the Mozilla foundation and Eric Schmidt’s refusal to get into discussing Open Office today I believe they have come to the same conclusion).

Consequences for Google: What is interesting is that with today’s announcement it’s the second time Google fans have expected red meat but come away disappointed. As a Google user since google.stanford.edu, I associate Google with simplicity and simplification — i.e., Google’s products reduce noise, not add to it. Google Search obviously reduced search noise, Gmail (either by itself or by scaring the bejeezus out of its competitors) reduced noise by removing the tedium of constantly having to delete email. Google Talk added to the noise by adding Yet Another Client to an already crowded market, and today’s announcement did not help matters. Google’s upcoming Calendar product had better be orders-of-magnitude stunning for the company to recover some of its mojo.

Be careful of what you want, you might just get it

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Robert, stop conversing with the market and start shipping something that people can actually use. Neither Apple nor Google converse much with the market and both are doing quite well, from what I see.

That said, since you wanted a conversation, forget about RSS for a minute and get your fundamentals right — that means Mail. Calendaring. (My MSN, thankfully, is in much better shape.) I pay $20 a year for Hotmail and it’s embarassing that it still doesn’t have autocomplete, or that last I checked it won’t allow me to save a message into my Sent Items folder unless I click a checkbox. Every freaking time. You invented Ajax. Great. Use it. Time was when IE4-powered DHTML ran circles around NS4. Why are you ceding the space to Firefox today? And if you’ve got people who can make start.com, why are they kept in a sandbox and not allowed to touch the rest of MSN?

The way I see it, Microsoft has taken a strategic decision that Firefox and LAMP have commoditized the web so it’s time to cut losses, stop spending millions on IE and squeeze profits out of the fraction of users who will pay to have a marginally richer ‘integrated’ experience (with IE7 and XAML). Prove me wrong. Ship something to show me Microsoft still cares about putting great, usable apps on the web.

Shooting the Common Carrier

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If you mail a bomb through the post, the law doesn’t hold the post responsible. However, if you sell porn on Baazee (now Ebay’s Indian arm), Baazee’s CEO Avnish Bajaj goes to jail.

For those who don’t know about the Delhi MMS scandal, here’s coverage. This ‘unexpected consequence’ was triggered by a college kid using Baazee to sell VCDs of that clip — apparently innocuously labeled “Delhi girls having fun” — on Baazee. For those who want to know why Baazee’s CEO’s arrest was brain-dead, there’s a great thread now running on India-GII.

All over the world, and indeed even in India, network service providers are given “common carrier” exemptions as long as they cooperate with the authorities. The ‘arrest first, look up the law later’ attitude the Indian police have displayed here do them no credit.

Update: several news outlets, including Rediff and the Indian Express, reported Friday Dec 17 that “anyone who transmitted [will] face action.” Considering the video made the rounds in Delhi on MMS far before it got sold on VCDs in Palika Bazaar, I wonder when Airtel and Hutch (Delhi’s leading MMS providers) will be taken to task (hint: never).

The Digital Bourgeoisie

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Instapundit talks about how easily accessible bits are changing the fundamentals of several industries, and finds the creeping hand of Karl Marx. For example in computer software

the first indication came when the falling price of computers crossed the point where the average programmer could afford to own a computer capable of producing the code from which he typically earned his living. This meant that, for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the ownership of the most critical tool of production in the most critical industry of the world’s leading economy was readily affordable by the individual worker. Throughout the first three decades of the Information Age, the individual worker was still dependent on his employer for his means of production, just as any textile worker in Manchester or Lawrence was in 1840.

Suddenly, this changed. Now it is as if a steelworker could afford his own blast furnace or rolling mill, an automobile worker his own assembly line.

It is hardly surprising that the nascent free software movement exploded in the early 90s, especially after Linus’ success with Linux — powered by cheap x86 processors and a cheap data network (the Internet) the share-alike academic ideal of MIT AI Lab became a practical reality for millions of users.

As pointed out, there are lots of interesting implications for webloggers (free news/opinion creators) and audio- and video-casters (free broadcasters): the entreched media will find it hard to compete in an environment where one-man shops can reach out as much as they do. Like the computer software industry, entrenched media will not die, but it will have to change.