Category Archives: Science and Technology

Long overdue

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A great many tipsters are informing us that People Magazine has included an Indian American as one of its Sexiest Men Alive. Yeah, he’s half Indian and he is “sexy.” So what, I say? That doesn’t really seem that blog-worthy to me. However, what eventually convinced me as to the importance of getting this story out to the people isn’t the fact that he is representing Indian Americans, but rather that he is a proxy for the previously unacknowledged sexiness of all geologists in the Earth and Space Sciences Departments of schools in the University of California system. Meet Michael Manga:

People magazine has featured a geophysicist of Indian origin alongside the likes of U2 frontman Bono in the ‘Smart Guys’ section of its ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ issue.

Michael Manga, a 37-year-old geology professor of UC Berkeley, who won the $500,000 MacArthur ‘genius’ grant earlier in 2005, shares pages with stars like Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Orlando Bloom among others.

“My first inclination, of course, was to say no, because that’s not how I perceive myself,” Manga, father of two boys, said. “But it is a way to let people know about science and that it is OK to be a scientist.” [link]

I think it is a particularly sad commentary on the decadence of our culture that it has taken THIS long to point out that there are in fact “sexy” Indian geologists that deserve to share the same page as Bono.

Manga was one of only two men in academia admitted to the ranks of America’s dreamiest dudes. “That’s why I agreed to do this,” he explains.

“I wanted to get information out to people who wouldn’t normally hear or see anything about science.”

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Not even a mouse

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‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse…

All along, I thought desis were good at forming cliques. Actually, it turns out they’re good at click farming — hiring people to click ads on your own Web site to earn pay-per-click payments fraudulently.

The Jan. 2006 issue of Wired mentions this widely-disseminated ToI scare story from last year:

With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar [in New Delhi]. Maya’s job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn’t care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it’s $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month… “It’s boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day…” [Link]

Because search engines make their money whether the clicks are from legitimate customers or from scammers, they are only weakly incentivized to prevent the fraud. Those being ripped off: the small businesses who advertise.

Clicks are bought to boost number of hits for web ads or online advertisers who are not tracking user location. [Link]

Users are careful to avoid triggering anti-fraud algorithms by not clicking too often:

“I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited if you stay online for a fixed time,” says another user. [Link]

Similarly, spammers are using image captcha farms in India — hiring people to enter the anti-spam picture codes which Web sites require to prove that you’re not a spammer.

Against this backdrop of outright theft, gold farming starts looking legitimate.

Related posts: Why isn’t gold farming big in India?, With a little help from my friends

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Your palace on the ground

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An Air India flight Monday from L.A. to Delhi turned into a comedy of errors which delayed the passengers by two whole days (thanks, Saheli). First day, a tire blew out on takeoff:

As the plane took off, Gursharan said, it shook after a tire burst, startling passengers. The Boeing 747-400 flew over the ocean and circled, dumped fuel and then returned for a bumpy emergency landing. The landing gear dug into the runway, leaving a 7,000-foot-long field of debris that took 40 employees hours to clean up… [Link]

And the Concorde proved that runway debris is murderous.

… the teenager and his family turned on the news to see footage of their plane landing amid a shower of sparks… Airport officials said the pilots made a wise choice to take off, explaining that, if they had aborted, they might not have had enough runway to stop the heavy, fully fueled aircraft. [Link]

Next day, different plane, an engine problem led to a minor passenger revolt:

Flight 136 pushed back from the gate… 2 1/2 hours late… one of the four engines was malfunctioning… the flight crew didn’t provide more detailed information, passengers said, leaving them trapped on the packed jumbo jet for about five hours… Finally, Wenz, the professor, said he just walked through a door that attendants had opened. He climbed down the stairs and off the plane to wait on the tarmac. Other passengers, he said, followed. [Link]

Taking a Delhi-to-Chennai train would’ve been faster than this flight. Last year, an Air India crew forgot to drop landing gear. So if you’re flying Air India, here’s a cheery thought: it may not be Jet Airways, but it sure beats Aeroflot.

Related posts: Air India more efficient than ever, Open skies and Air India

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Not so Intelligent Designing

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I really wanted to write a post about the U.S. Federal Court slapping down “Intelligent Design” in Dover, Pennsylvania today:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled today that it is unconstitutional to compel teachers there to present “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation to evolution because it amounts to establishing religion in public schools.

I couldn’t find a strong Desi-angle beyond what we’ve already blogged about though. So instead, I’ve decided to write a post about “Un-intelligent Design.” Most people know that Hitler’s Third Reich was fascinated by the occult and was always looking for mystical weapons and methods in order to defeat the Allies. Essentially, that is what the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark is about. He is also thought to have been fascinated by Eastern religions. After reading the following article out today in the Scotsman, I wondered if the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin might have been reading up on his Hindu mythology when he came up with this VERY unintelligent design idea:

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior…

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat…”

Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail. [Link]

Sick, sick, sick. Nothing is going to convince me that they were really “volunteers.” I wondered if Stalin may have been inspired by Hanuman’s story. He is after all the mightiest of warriors and proved himself during the Ramayana War. He was conceived more naturally…well sort of.

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The Subcontinent Gardener

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Wired says a real-life Constant Gardener scenario has just begun playing out in India. New rules against generic knockoffs of Western drugs have emboldened pharmaceutical companies to use India’s poor as cheap drug testing guinea pigs (via Slashdot):

… multinational corporations are riding high on the trend toward globalization by taking advantage of India’s educated work force and deep poverty to turn South Asia into the world’s largest clinical-testing petri dish… trials account for more than 40 percent of drug-development costs. The study also found that performing the studies in India can bring the price down by about 60 percent…

… in March, everything changed when India submitted to pressure from the World Trade Organization to stop the practice and implement rules that prohibit local companies from creating generic versions of patented drugs…. the number of studies conducted by multinational drug companies has sharply increased since March. [Link]

There are attractions other than low cost:

“Doctors are easier to recruit for trials because they don’t have to go through the same ethics procedures as their Western colleagues,” Ecks said. “And patients ask fewer questions about what is going on… ” Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are “treatment naïve,” meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have… [Link]

Ethical shenanigans aren’t restricted to just Western pharmas:

In 2004, two India-based pharmaceutical companies, Shantha Biotech in Hyderabad and Biocon in Bangalore, came under scrutiny for conducting illegal clinical trials that led to eight deaths. Shantha Biotech failed to obtain proper consent from patients while testing a drug meant to treat heart attacks. Biocon tested a genetically modified form of insulin without the proper approval from the Drug Controller General of India or the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee. [Link]

The saddest thing is that if the drugs work, the testers are unlikely to even have access to the drugs:

Since many pharmaceutical companies are developing the drugs for markets in industrialized nations, it is unlikely that India’s poor will have access to most of the new medicine. [Link]

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More formulaic movies

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Unlike much of the public I really do listen to what critics say before I go to see a movie. I especially like Kenneth Turan and Joe Morgenstern who lend their critiques to NPR every week. Some of their best reviewed films happen to be ones you’ve never heard of, but will be sorry if you miss. It comes as no surprise that many of these movies don’t make a lot at the box office. As the number of crappy films that do make it to the screen increase every year, resulting in fewer people going out to see movies, studio executives need some sort of crystal ball or…formula to know which films they should greenlight for maximum profitability. Enter Professor Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University. MSNBC reports:

A scientist in the United States says he has come up with a computer program that helps predict whether a film will be a hit or a miss at the box office long before it is even made.

“Our goal is to try to find oil, in a way,” Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University said Wednesday.

“We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on things that are decided before a movie has been made,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Yes. That’s exactly what Hollywood needs. More formulaic movies. It’s even more discouraging when you see the variables that Sharda finds will maximize studio profits. Some of them are things that cause me to shy away from a movie:

Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.

Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from “flop,” meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to “blockbuster,” meaning more than $200 million.

I wonder what would happen if you started entering Bollywood films into the system. I predict the system would crash.

The system cannot take into account the intricacies of the plot, but Sharda says it can nonetheless get the revenue category spot-on 37 per cent of the time, and correct to within one category either side 75 per cent of the time. This is enough to make the system a “powerful decision aid”, Sharda says. [Link]
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Barbershop

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The comedy Barbershop relied on the fact that black-owned barbershops are male watering holes, informal congregations based on gossip and habit. Now New Delhi is hoping the smell of shaving cream and menthol will not only bring in the shearlings, but also help fight AIDS. Barbers have begun handing out prophylactics and pamphlets (thanks, Saurav):

Eighty-five barbers in [Delhi’s] congested southern district of Lajpat Nagar are currently involved in a programme to promote safe sex and spread the message of prevention against HIV/AIDS to their customers…

“… sometimes when I feel awkward, I point them to the posters in the shop. I have also trained others in my shop…”

… sometimes customers say they are aware of the importance of safe sex but find condoms “too expensive”. “But when I told them that they can collect condoms from various government hospitals and my shop free of cost, they readily agreed to use them. Now they even ask for them on their own…”

Eleven thousand packets of condoms have been distributed by the 85 barbers in the past six months in Lajpat Nagar alone. [Link]

Call me crazy, but I don’t like mixing straight razors with the family jewels. Eventually I saw the appeal of it. When you come in, they take a little off the top. When you leave, they give you something to put back on. I’ll never look at a barber pole the same way again.

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The dead zone

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Much of humanity has been working for the past year to rebuild the shattered lives and infrastructure laid waste by last DecemberÂ’s devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean. For the first time however, we are getting a glimpse at the damage suffered by the deep-sea ecosystem at one site near the epicenter of the 9.3 earthquake. Needless to say, the jellyfish and cephalopods were not happy either.

An example of deep-sea life: female anglerfish

A dead zone, devoid of all marine life, has been discovered near the epicentre of last year’s tsunami earthquake, 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.

The first scientific expedition to the epicentre found little or no effect on deep sea fauna except at one site off Sumatra where, five months after the disaster, no evidence was found of large animals.

British scientists taking part in the Census of Marine Life, a worldwide marine survey, made an 11-hour dive with a robot submarine. [Link]

The Census of Marine Life is a group of scientists engaged in an important ten year study:

Through 2010, scientists worldwide will work to quantify what is known, unknown, and what may never be known about the world’s oceans-which comprise more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and more than 90 percent of its biosphere. Their answers will help identify threatened species and important breeding areas, helping authorities develop effective strategies for the sustainable management of marine resources. New pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds are also among the potential uses of the estimated thousands of undescribed species that will be found. And as the secrets of the planet’s last unexplored frontier are revealed, our understanding of elemental processes such as climate, evolution, extinction, and migration will expand.

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Skype’s Sepia Avatars

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Disco DJ Ennis in da virtual hiz-ouse!

Remember “flesh colored” bandaids – the ones that didn’t look anything like your flesh, and which stood out like a pink gash on your arm? This same problem recurs in the virtual world. Cyberspace is oddly eurocentric given the vast number of cyber-coolies who work to maintain and extend it. Despite the years that have elapsed since the end of the flesh-colored crayon, very little of the virtual world is easily extensible to look like me.

One noteworthy exception is a company called Weeworld that specializes in the creation of avatars for use with Skype or other services. Their web application lets you specify settings for 23 variables, each of which can take on multiple values, to create an image of yourself for only 1.5 Euros. Not only can you specify whatever skin, hair and eye color you want, but you can also give your icon facial hair and even a fairly realistic looking turban! It is a profound demonstration of the deep penetration of desis into British cultural life when a British company, producing for a largely European audience, includes a turban as a standard option. [Hat tip to Mr Sikhnet]

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Why isn’t gold farming big in India?

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Maybe get a blister on your little finger,
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it

For some time I’ve been keeping an eye on gold farming, the business of paying kids to build up loot in online games and then selling it for real money to Western marks. Although some entrepreneurs use automated scripts, most use humans: 100,000 kids in China, South Korea and Indonesia supposedly work in the industry. In a recent crossover into real life, someone in Shanghai murdered his buddy for selling a virtual sword he wasn’t supposed to sell.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these “virtual sweatshops…” “They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers.” [Link]

The economist Edward Castranova has calculated that if you took the real dollars spent within EverQuest as an index, its game world… would be the 77th richest nation on the planet, while annual player earnings [per capita] surpass those of citizens of Bulgaria, India or China. [Link]

Most stories I’ve read treat gold farming as a curiosity, which is a bit of a paradox. One, journalists think of valuable property in games as an oxymoron, even though they earn their own living from intellectual property. Two, many journalists are non-technical, even though their work is often published online:

The idea that sums of money are being paid for what appears to be an unproductive economic activity will cheese off traditionalists who believe that unless a job is located in an industrial factory, it serves no good purpose. [Link]
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