Category Archives: Science and Technology

‘The Internet has crashed’

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Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…

“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”

PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.

Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:

Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries – with SingTel acting as its operating agents.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.

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“It’s easy, it’s easy”

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Since I myself am a teaching assistant in the sciences I had to jump on this article in the New York Times. Almost everyone whose ever been to college has had some experience with a TA they just couldn’t understand.

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

“He would just say, ‘It’s easy, it’s easy,’ ” said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it wasn’t easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn’t communicate in English.”

Ms. Serrin’s experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

There are several issues here in addition to the focus of the article. First, I have no doubt that Ms. Serrin deserved a C. Foreign TA’s are tougher because they are used to expecting more from their students and don’t understand that grade inflation is the norm in the U.S. This is especially true in the sciences. I have to inflate grades all the time, even at a top rated University like the one I attend. A friend of mine, who is now a Post-doc, told me that when he first came from India he was a mean and ruthless TA because that is what he thought a TA was supposed to be like. He didn’t understand why the students were so sensitive. Continue reading →

I’d KILL for a body like that!

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sherpa2.jpg

Seven years ago I spent a few days on the island of Capri, off the coast of Italy. At the top of the island was a famous hostel where everyone who visits ends up staying. My friends and I got lost trying to find it. Out of nowhere came a very old man who led us down twisting paths, first to a view of the Italian coast and then on to the hostel. I couldn’t help notice that this man, despite being old and short in height, was incredibly fit. His arms were like tree trunks and he moved with the agility of a mountain goat. I decided right then that this was the musculoskeletal system that I wanted when I became an old man. This feeling overcame me again, years later on the Inca trail where the Quechua porters (some quite old) made us a look like pathetic weaklings. If anyone has seen the Motorcycle Diaries they will recall the scene where Che and his buddy are forced to crash out on the Inca trail, just as a Quechua guide runs by them.

Earlier this week NPR had a fun story (MUST listen) about an article that appeared in the June 17th issue of the Journal Science. The paper is titled, Energetics of Load Carrying in Nepalese Porters, by Bastien et. al. [paid subscription required].

Nepalese porters routinely carry head-supported loads equal to 100 to 200% of their body weight (Mb) for many days up and down steep mountain footpaths at high altitudes. Previous studies have shown that African women carry head-supported loads of up to 60% of their Mb far more economically than army recruits carrying equivalent loads in backpacks. Here we show that Nepalese porters carry heavier loads even more economically than African women. Female Nepalese porters, for example, carry on average loads that are 10% of their Mb heavier than the maximum loads carried by the African women, yet do so at a 25% smaller metabolic cost.

Come on. You can’t possibly read that and not want a body like that!

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Attack of the clones

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Y’all may be familiar with geeksta rap:

Geeksta rappers… bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code… Nerdcore now refers to artists waxing lyrical about topics as disparate as engineering and Lord of the Rings…

“50 Cent has dance clubs and oral sex, we have awesome video cards…”

“If the genre is to succeed, you’re going to need some females…” [Wired News]

You may have heard of the Northbridge-Southbridge rap feud:

“Feuds between Nas and Jay-Z, Biggie and Tupac and 50 Cent and Ja Rule have… [resulted] in more exposure for both artists, so I decided to bring this to the world of CS gangsta rap by starting a feud with MC Plus+,” Monzy explained. [Wired News]

Well, all the trash IMs and dis MP3s have finally claimed their first real-life victim. A desi script kiddie from an Edison high school commanded a botnet to attack a rival online vintage jersey shop. The attack took down an entire desi-owned ISP in upstate New York as well as an Internet backbone in Pennsylvania:

… on one day over the summer it knocked out a “backbone provider” of Internet service in eastern Pennsylvania for 12 hours… [Detroit Free Press]

Jasmine (Jasminder?) Singh infected thousands of PCs with a Trojan horse by spreading a file called ‘Jennifer Lopez’ over file sharing networks. Victims expecting to see J.Lo in BootyVision actually ended up letting Singh control their computers.

Early last July, with control over ~2,000 PCs, he commanded them to take down his victim’s Web site:

Soumen Das, owner of a small Internet provider in Pittsford, N.Y. … realized he was on the receiving end of… a flood of traffic so immense that a site has no option but to shut down. What Das didn’t know at the time, and wouldn’t know until months later, was that the attacker was a 17-year-old high school student from Edison…

Singh’s target? A handful of merchants that sell “retro” or “throwback” sports apparel – replicas of shirts and caps worn by teams of yesteryear… His motivation? A few sneakers and a watch. That was the payment offered by Jason Arabo, an 18-year-old community college student in a Detroit suburb. Arabo had his own retro sports apparel business and was hoping to steal customers from his competitors… [Bergen Record]

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Air bubble (updated)

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A startup Indian airline backed by the former CEO of U.S. Airways startled the industry with a mammoth, $6B order for 100 planes at the Paris Air Show last week:

The order for 100 Airbus aircraft… is the biggest single order from India and the biggest, as well, for a single Airbus model (A320)… [Rahul] Bhatia may have been emboldened to take the plunge, backed by former US Airways head Rakesh Gangwal, who he has known for 20 years…

… the biggest advantage his IndiGo, designed to be a budget carrier, has, is size. With 100 aircraft, it will be able to touch all airports in the country with multiple connections… IndiGo will be able to connect the lucrative metro routes with flights every half-an-hour… “We will connect every possible destination in India.” [Business Standard]

Gangwal apparently took the phrase ‘aviator frames’ literally 🙂 I love the airline name but am skeptical of the cash-rich naïf story. A high-profile team, unproven in a new market, drums up massive startup funding and makes confident proclamations about dominating the sector. Webvan, anyone?

Even before IndiGo’s buy, India had ordered almost half the world’s output of airliners in the last few months:

In the last nine months, India alone has booked 250 aircraft, nearly half of the orders for the entire industry worldwide. [Deccan Herald]

Besides the budget carriers, a new category of premium airlines is arising. In typical desi style, they don’t want an efficient shortcut, they want the whole experience: a high cost structure, bankruptcy and then a belated turn to the budget carrier model 😉

Paramount, from the Coimbatore-based textile company of the same name, will be a different kind of airline. While all the new airlines starting in the country are no-frills, low cost carriers… Its 70-seater aircraft from Brazil’s [Embraer], will be a business class airline — contrary to the all-economy class budget carriers. Paramount, which plans to take to the skies in August next, believes that there is enough premium traffic to be targeted in the country. [Deccan Herald]

I still question the wisdom of painting on airplanes a name which evokes ‘mountain.’ Those are two things which never should meet.

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Sun, sand and surf

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Wiki WiFi: The desi-heavy island of Mauritius is turning into even more of a hot spot. It plans to be the first island with blanket wireless Internet (via Slashdot):

From his office window in Mauritius’ new Cybertower–a sleek blue glass and gray stone tower that is the heart of the country’s first high-tech park–Rahim can point out one of five new radio transmission antennas his company has installed in the last month perched beside a Hindu temple on a nearby green mountainside… The antennas now beam his wireless Internet service over about 60 percent of the island and within range of 70 percent of its population… Getting to every last corner, he said, might take a little longer. “We have so many sugar cane fields,” he lamented, tracing the island’s outline on a map.

An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links… Many of the country’s 1.2 million people–a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants–are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable…

But the government’s telecom monopoly made it reluctant to issue the permits:

Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom’s profits, even though the country’s National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for “positive discrimination” by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.

Mauritius really does sound like India 😉

Related post here.

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Dilli the Haat

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Ahh, the famous Dilli Haat. Everyone who has either lived in or visited India’s capital knows it well. The shopkeepers and artisans that inhabit the Haat are rotated out every few weeks to make room for new talent. It’s basically an outdoor mall that you have to pay a fee just to enter. This keeps the wealthy Delhi-ites and NRIs in, and the “riff-raff” out. I know I’m a hypocrite for sounding scornful since I too shopped there, but the whole paying for admission thing never sat well with me. Sitting inside with my shopping bag containing the goods I just purchased I felt dirty looking out the metal gate at the people outside. Now it seems the Haat is taking its show on the road: to London’s Trafalgar square. The Hindustan Times reports:

London’s Trafalgar Square will wear an Indian look over the weekend with the arrival of Delhi’s famous Dilli Haat, the only difference being Lord Nelson will watch over the celebrations.

Marking its arrival London Mayor Ken Livingstone said at a press conference today: “London is home to the largest Indian community in Europe. We have established a warm relationship with Delhi symbolising the importance of the economic, cultural and social ties, which link our two great cities and our countries.

“We buy each other’s goods and services and invest in each other’s businesses and markets. There is a thriving exchange of tourists between our countries. Dilli Haat will offer Londoners a wonderful display of the vibrancy and diversity of India’s arts and crafts.”

Somehow I just don’t believe that the artisans that make it to London will be very authentic. Then again I’m not sure what “authentic” is anymore. No word yet on how many rupees the pigeons will be charged to enter.

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Saving Simba – the FME Approach

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It’s probably not a surprise that I’m a big fan of Free Market Environmentalism (FME). FME is caricatured by detractors as laissez faire oil refineries sitting on wetlands. But in the real world, it (like much of Libertarianism) should instead be understood as recognition that for many ends – in this case environmental – applying / directing market forces can be a better means of achieving that goal.

FME often stands in stark contrast to prevailing currents in conservation / ecology which attempt to use government & regulation to eliminate markets altogether. FME advocates assert that this approach is a recipe for potentially even more destructive black markets – especially when coupled with rampant public sector corruption as is found in India.

TCS‘s Barun Mitra has a great little article on India’s dwindling tiger population & how FME could be applied –

…in the US trade of live tigers is permitted, tiger numbers are in excess of 15,000, where in India, their numbers have dwindled to around 3,500. The problem is that Indian wildlife is seen as nationalised property and placed outside the discipline of the marketplace. While many call for more stringent action to stop the illegal trade in wildlife and for more prosecutions of poachers, this ignores the fact attempts to stem supply have merely driven up price through illegal trade… Under the present system of prohibition, forest dwellers have no interest in protecting tigers, poachers and traffickers have a field day. Unscrupulous traders profit from selling spurious tiger products. The high profitability attracts the criminal mafia. …The babus wielded the power, smugglers oiled the wheels, blackmarketeers made a killing and the law enforcers took their cut.

Mitra includes the following stat which many, admittedly, might find repulsive –

The tiger, top of the food chain in its ecosystem, would also be at the top of the economic ladder because of its market value. There is a demand for virtually every part of the tiger. The total value of tiger parts from its nose to its tail could easily come to USD 40,000.

Distateful, perhaps, but it may be the best way to save Simba. Continue reading →

Mars comes to India

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In Egypt, near the ancient city of Alexandria, in the year 1911, on a day in late June, an event occurred that you won’t find in most history books. Those who give their lives in the pursuit of science are never as remembered as those who die during the waging of war. Human society may never properly evolve until such wrongs are corrected.

It was approximately 9a.m. in the morning and our forgotten hero had probably just gone out for a walk or finished sniffing some butts. Suddenly, from the morning sky fell 10 kilograms of rock that had broken up into several pieces as it fell through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Scientists later recovered approximately 40 total pieces. One of these rocks struck our hero, the dog, and killed it. To date it is the only mammalian fatality ever recorded at the hands of a meteorite. The dog’s true sacrifice wasn’t fully appreciated until it was discovered that the meteorite was actually a chunk of the planet Mars. The meteorite was named “Naklha”, in honor of the region in which it landed. The dog’s name is a casualty of history. Millions of years earlier the meteorite had been a basaltic rock that had been blown off the surface of Mars at escape velocity, when a larger meteorite had impacted Mars. It was propelled into a heliocentric orbit where it lingered for several millions of years. The irresistible attraction of gravity finally pulled it towards Earth, and its fatal encounter with our dog. Studying the meteorite and comparing it to data streaming back from Mars, beginning with the Viking Mission in 1976, has helped us to unravel many of the secrets of the Red Planet. If you think that I am making all this up and simply suffering from another delusion, then feel free to look it up.

Although the above story has only the most tenuous link to the following one, I just felt it was a story that needed to be told. OutlookIndia.com reports:

…NASA has given Indian names to certain types of rocks on Mars, a senior planetary geologist at the space agency’s Mars Mission said today. “…NASA has given Indian names to a number of rocks. We shall disclose the names soon after NASA gives a clearance to make this classified information public,” NASA planetary geologist Amitabha Ghosh, currently on a three-city tour to India, told PTI today.

Ghosh said the rocks were named in consultation with Indian geophysicists and astrophysicists.

For the first time, a four-member team from NASA, including planetary geologists Ghosh, Dr Michael Wyatt, astrogeologist Dr James Rice and Dr Nicole Schultz are in India to further space science research.

“The idea is to hold talks at scientific organisations and planetaria to create awareness about space science research,” Ghosh, the only Asian on the mission, said.

As members of the Mars Explorer Rover Mission, the four have been witness to the activities of Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars.

Of course this is just a publicity and excitement building stunt. There are countless rocks on Mars. Giving some Indian names isn’t that big a deal. More importantly the team has created a website called Tharsis India to further awareness of Mars exploration in India. The Tharsis region on Mars is known for its supermassive volcanoes.

The visit to India comes at the same time as the Paris Airshow where NASA mentioned that it is shooting for after 2015 to put humans back on the Moon. Continue reading →

Quark CEO out

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The CEO of the dominant page layout software company has suddenly parted ways with his employer after a two-year reign. Kamar Aulakh was a 10-year Quark veteran and former VP of R&D:

“… effective immediately, Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company,” read a statement. Aulakh became Quark’s president in 2003 and ultimately succeeded Quark’s mercurial CEO Fred Ebrahimi in February 2004. [Macworld]

Hailing from Aulakh village in Gurdaspur district in Punjab, he is a product of Punjab Engineering College (PEC) here. Remembering his school days in Shimla, he says with a sense of pride, “I went to Bishop Cotton School, which helped me develop strong foundation. After doing graduation in mechanical engineering from PEC in 1974, I went to the USA where I did Masters in Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois and MBA from Indiana University…” Based in Switzerland, he visits India and Denver regularly. [Chandigarh Tribune]

The unexplained departure could have to do with declining sales. Quark is privately held and doesn’t disclose its financials, but it’s struggled in its move from Mac to Windows. It could be a clash with the emotional chairman, Farhad ‘Fred’ Ebrahimi. Or it could be something else entirely.

QuarkXpress is the #1 page layout program by market share. Aulakh put Quark’s 1,300-person development center in Mohali, a Chandigarh suburb where Dell has also invested. That center is Quark’s main campus, larger than its Denver campus in headcount:

… along with the Chairman, Mr Fred Ebrahimi, a team from the company visited Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon, Delhi and Hyderabad. Since I knew the city, I convinced him to visit Chandigarh as well. To my surprise, he was bowled over by the planned location and cosmopolitan lifestyle of the city and decided to opt for this location. [Chandigarh Tribune]

In India, Ebrahimi will soon start building a dream city in Punjab, spread over 5,000 acres, bringing state-of-the-art construction technology to the country.  Quark City, will boast India’s biggest shopping mall, a host of technology campuses ranging from IT to bio-tech and the works, and housing apartments each worth a crore. To make things happen, the Punjab government has eased archaic building restrictions. It also plans to give the SEZ status to Quark City. [Economic Times]

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